Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family
One of the key roots of so many of the challenges and crises we face is remarkably simple to fix, yet for many reasons the solution has evaded us for decades. The root is population, and the simple fix is for every couple around the world to make responsible, informed decisions about family size. Everyone loves their kids and wants them to have a good life. Conceiving a “quiver full” of children in today’s overpopulated world guarantees a life of scarcity, conflict and misery. Choosing to limit the size of your family is the most loving thing you can do for your children. It should be a no-brainer.
We’re counting down to World Population Day on July 11 by sharing our list of Top 10 Reasons to Choose a Small Family. Of course we can easily come up with 20 reasons, but top 20 lists aren’t all the rage. So please follow our daily posts at www.worldpopulationday.org. Here at this blog I’ll also add the newest reason every day, until we have the full list.
You’re welcome to suggest other reasons in the comment section below. Please share these widely, especially with your children and others who are in or approaching family-planning age. You’ll find them on our facebook page, too.
Dave Gardner
Filmmaker & GrowthBuster
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Bill Dowling
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Great idea -but where is your no.1 – it’s late!
And – Can you put these in any sort of a priority order?
They seem to be rather upside down with quite a few missing to me.
Surely depleting water and fish stocks and soil erosion – and cutting down rain forests and pollution of rivers and oceans and land with our waste and loss of other species -should come higher up in a top 10?
YOUR list is certainly not MY top ten!
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Dave Gardner
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Bill, thanks for your comment. We posted them in reverse order since we counted down from #10. And you are right about the omissions. We really needed a top 20. It’s sad there are so many negative impacts of human population growth to list.
And I completely forgot to post #1 here (I posted these at http://www.worldpopulationday.org and then copied them here. Will fix that right now.
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Bill Dowling
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Okay Dave – I agree a top twenty would have been better.
I’m feeling very sorry for you to see so few people comment.
But – please keep up the good work in the USA.
Personally speaking, I’m almost completely committed to this organisation in the UK http://www.populationmatters.org – we are fighting overpopulation more than we are overconsumption, BUT – we recognise that Both are two sides of the same coin, and that to achieve sustainability if we dont do something very big and very serious about them both soon we are definitely F…….d on this planet! – as Prof.Stephen Emmott has put it in his book Ten Billion !
see: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/article3805225.ece
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Dave Gardner
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Bill, sorry I didn’t get this comment approved earlier. Got lost in the shuffle. I appreciate your sentiments. I am puzzled as to why our participation in some of the things we try is so low.
I’m a big fan of Population Matters, and I appreciate the occasional support we get from the organization – by way of publicizing some of our efforts.
Perhaps we can work together on a very well thought-out top 10 or top 20 list. I did this first list pretty casually.
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