I liked this comment found on another site:
This is why I am angered by those who are supposedly awake to the planetary damage humans are committing. For example, this condensed list is not reassuring:
Charles Eisenstein--b. 1967--4 kids
David Suzuki--b. 1936--5 kids (2 born after overpopulation moved to the front burner)
Edward Abbey--b. 1927--5 kids (4 born after he knew better)
Chris Hedges--b. 1956--4 kids (1 adopted)
Naomi Klein--b. 1970--1 kid fairly recently despite knowing what's coming
Dmitry Orlov--b. 1962--1 kid fairly recently despite knowing what's coming
George Monbiot--b. 1963--2 kids (1 born in 2012)
Sharon Astyk--b. 1972--4 kids
Severn Cullis-Suzuki--b. 1979--2 kids
Paul Beckwith--b. circa 1962--3 kids
Jason Box--b. circa 1972--1 kid born in 2012
Gavin Schmidt--b. circa late '60s-- expecting 1st kid in 2015
Michael Mann--b. 1965--1 kid fairly recently despite knowing what's coming
Paul Kingsnorth--b. 1973--2 kids
Thom Hartmann--b. 1951--3 kids
Chris Martenson--b. 1962--3 kids
Kathryn Hayhoe--b. 1973--1 kid
And I won't bother to analyze a few of these folks' highly consumerist lifestyles. To paraphrase comedian Doug Stanhope (b. 1967, childfree by choice, helped along by his vasectomy), apparently if you can afford Montessori School, then your kids aren't part of the problem.
"I can’t think of anything worse for a mother — or a grandmother — than to feel helpless, as pieces of her child’s world break off and quietly go away.”
See, but that's the thing, Kathleen. It isn't your child's world. The wild spaces and creatures of the world are not something that's here for your amusement, or something that you're only supposed to take care of because "the children" enjoy a tourist experience of seeing things perky and healthy around them. The world actually belongs to other creatures besides humans. The starfish, the polar bears, the tigers, the whales, the rhinoceroses...actually deserve to live in a healthy place for THEIR OWN SAKES, not so they'll be pleasing to the human gaze.
"Mommy environmentalists" are revolting. You've done the one thing that is worse for the starfish than anything else you could have chosen to do: breed more humans. And now you're playing the ol' sad trombone because YOUR GRANDSON might not have starfish to look at someday, in his lifetime. The starfish are actually interested parties here. Maybe we ought to ask them how they feel about your grandson poking them, which probably doesn't help stem the spread of the pathogen.
The implication in strong in this essay, as in many others: it's someone else's job to fight climate change. It's the government's job. It's the big fuel companies' fault. Somebody (but not me) needs to do something! My three-year-old grandson is TEH SADZ! Quick, somebody who's not me do something! All I have to do is flash my maternal badge of immunity and sanctimony, and I'm instantly absolved of my role in making this Earth a toxic one for starfish and other creatures.
No, honey. It was YOUR job. It was your kid's job. It was your job to choose a lifestyle that left a smaller footprint, as it is all of our jobs.
I'm afraid the anthropocentric "we need to save the planet so our children can enjoy exploiting it just the way we did" campaign is really repellent to me, and I make no apologies for that. I looked all over that website--read every word of the Mission page, for example--and found nothing that suggested "we have a moral obligation to put fewer children on this Earth so that other species have a fairer chance of surviving." It's all sentimental, Baby-Boomer glurge about TEH PWESHUS CHILDWUN.
A search for the word "overpopulation" on that site returns no results. Hmm, well, I guess it isn't a problem then.