Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A commitment to not having sex (so no children) ultimately led to the decline of the 18-19th century Shakers as a significant religious movement.
Reconsidering having kids because of climate change? You’re not alone
MONDAY 11 FEBRUARY 2019 12:21AM
Jo LauderOne in three women under 30 involved in environmental groups are so worried about climate change and the future of the planet they are reconsidering having kids, according to a new survey.
The survey focused on women’s views on climate change ahead of this year’s federal election, and found nine out of ten of them were “extremely concerned” about the issue.
For women between 30 and 39 years, 22 per cent said they were reconsidering having children or more children because of climate change.
Over 6,500 women were quizzed for the survey, which was conducted by The Australian Conservation Foundation and 1 Million Women.
28-year-old Felicity Lochhead, who studies sustainability at university, says climate change is a major factor in her thinking about the future, and it’s the same for having kids.
“If I don’t take it [climate change] into account for that big decision, but I’m taking it into account for all these little decision in my life… it doesn’t make sense if I ignore it,” she told Hack.
“What I’m concerned about is that it’s beyond an environmental issue… it swells into those spheres of economic issues and social issues as well.”
…
The lesson from the past is inescapable. If a community doesn’t have kids, they eventually die out, and cede the future to groups which do have kids.
But there is a way for such communities to continue, for a while – they have to convince other people’s kids to join their community.
The Shakers took in orphans and homeless people, and probably did a lot of good in their time. Not everyone raised by Shakers remained a member of the Shaker community, the Shakers were very firm on the idea that being a Shaker was voluntary.
Greens differ from Shakers in that they seem to prefer using other people’s money to recruit children to their cause. Their preferred means of recruiting other people’s children seems to be to convince teachers and school boards paid for by parents of the kids they target to provide lessons on “sustainability”, resource scarcity, and other climate catastrophe tropes.
People who leave the green movement, like Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore, in my opinion are not well treated.
Perhaps Greens are not so similar to Shakers after all.
There is still one shaker community left, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village
A benign application of natural selection (The Darwin Award).
How do oxen proliferate? By persuasion.
Oxen don’t proliferate. They are all neutered bulls, trained for uses as draft animals. Oxen are simply a byproduct of cattle breading.
Cattle breading? As in chicken fried steak?
honestly curious; so what’s the difference between an Ox and a Steer?
I always found it interesting that Ox seems to be linked to the word Aurochs.
An Ox is a work animal. A steer is merely fed until it’s big enough to eat.
So… Long hard working life? Short life of ease.
Back in the day when oxen provided a major source of energy on farms, young steers would be trained up fast in draft work and used until ready to eat. That way you got about 18-36 months work from a critter before converting him to tasty beef.
They want everyone dead who doesn’t want everyone dead.
Perfect! No kids, no reproduction, no descendants – no mo’ Greenbeans!!!
Also, no kids means no grandkids, and that means when they die, no one will remember anything about them or what they did.
The followers of islam will not sign on.
Neither will Mormons; game on.
Catholics might go either way.
I have nothing but respect for eco-warriors who opt not to pass on their genes.
Me Too
Perhaps a very Unich belief system is in order
No continuation of those who hate beauty.
Big abandoned Shaker community just south of Bowling Green Kentucky. Nothing left but the curious like myself walking through the empty buildings. The Shakers went to great lengths to keep men and women separated. Despite that there are numerous entries in their journal of daily activities where Sister so-and-so left the community and the line below had the name of a Brother doing the same.
Like the Red/Green ideology defying nature doesn’t work out all that well.
Those that leave the connunity ultimately to have children are known as Movers.
Life couldn’t continue without the Movers and Shakers
The unjustifiably guilt ridden West is aiming at extinction. Bad times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. Weak men create bad times…
Good riddance. Volunteering to clean up the gene pool. Excellent
yes if they really are old enough to make a decision
but this outlook is pushed on kids at school before they really have the wisdom or world view to be making rational choices for later life
once in that group/lifestyle its hard to change
70s ecoloons and eugenics mobs at my school influenced my childless decisions
Id love to get my hands on them now!
Lemme ask you a pertinent question. If you are age 40 or older, how much of the hogwash you were taught in “school” is applicable today? How much of it is relevant? How much of it do you still believe? I was taught I wouldn’t SEE 40 due to Mutually Assured Destruction. The “nature” magazines my mother pushed in my face told me we were killing all the pretty animals and turning their habitats into festering sewers and toxic landfills. I was taught the Population Bomb would mean famines and wars over food in my lifetime, here in these United States. I was also taught that “school” and “grades” were THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in the world, (thereby maintaining educators self-importance), but quite frankly after my very first job interview no one else has EVAH given a shit where I went to school, let alone my grades. It was in another lifetime after all!
Guess what? 40 came and went without a mushroom cloud, 19 years ago. I have more wildlife in my backyard than ever before, including several species of egrets and wild turkeys thought to be “extinct” here when I was in “school.” Rivers in our state that you could once light on fire now have annual shad runs and are stocked with trout. The world population is in danger of CRASHING, so I’d better make sure my “sustainable” career is something I can do till I drop, ’cause there won’t be a lot of Millennials willing to pay for my old-fartdom. And by the way, nearly 100% of what I was taught in “school” in the 70’s, not least the Coming Ice Age, has proven to be 100% codswallop. So I don’t think today’s kids are in any danger, actually . . . my nephews (Gen Z) are more conservative than I am, maybe as a RESULT of the attempted brainwashing. One of them works on an oil tanker!
Let me see….. math taught me to think logically and shop taugh me how to use tools.
Goldrider: Your story is similar to my “schooling” too, much of which has led to lifelong, vain regrets.
A lesson that sticks in my mind is Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island described as a textbook case of doomsday. The prof said there’s no hope, Mauritius was too overpopulated, the environment too degraded, and too remote for people to get off, or for the outside world to come in and help.
As it turned out Mauritius has prospered through a broad mix of modern industries developed by residents, not by corrupt “aid” programs. It’s among the wealthiest countries in “Africa,” despite the isolation.
This was the same prof who assigned “The Population Bomb.”
Couldn’t agree more. Went through the hogwash.
I didn’t need to hit 40 to release most of what I learnt in school was useless.
Actually now I have been in my industry for ‘long enough’ and dealt professionally with Grads I have released that most of what people learn in uni – even in Engineering – is pretty useless as well.
(Most Grads are lovely people and most develop well. But newly minted Grads need constant supervision)
The only thing I do claim as being useful from high school was that I learnt to type. My Mum, in one of her occasional moments of forward thinking wisdom, convinced younger me that the future would be computers, computers would have keyboards and the sooner I learnt to type the better. So, in the mid 80s, I spent a full semester going fffff space FFFFF space jjjjj space JJJJJ on an old school manual machine.
Honestly I believe that was the ONLY thing of use from my high school years.
Another point is that of the ‘Gen Z’ people. There actually has been a lot of claims that conservative is the new counter culture and that Gen Z people are pushing back at the Snowflake Safe Space generation and openly mocking them. I was watching something last night where they were talking about how Snowflake hate TicTok because TicTok is the app all the new young cool kids are using to make 15 second videos of themselves taking the absolute piss out of the Safe Space generation.
“TicTok is bad. It leads to Hate Speech(tm). We must BAN IT”, says the Snowflakes.
“Cool! We are upsetting older people! Let’s make some more!”, reply the Zs.
While I would like to think this move towards a more adult and logical view on life is because this latest generation are more self aware, it is probably really more to do with the fact that teens naturally do whatever you tell them not to. You tell a teen to go out and experiment with drugs and out of spite they will probably turn into a teetotaller who goes to bed at 9pm on Friday and Saturdays.
Lol! I admit that Gen Z gives me some hope. Maybe they will help turn the tide, eventually. We need someone young to help detect the bs.
Moore didn’t leave the Green movement, the Green movement left him.
Specifically it left him when the leaders of that movement decided to use it as a vehicle to push socialism/communism.
Don’t forget about their desire to make money without having to work. Lots and lots of money flowing into the coffers and the bank accounts of the directors in an unending stream.
One of Moore’s best bits is the observation that humans are tropical animals, with no protection against cold. They (we) are not afraid of hot weather. Trying to terrify people about a degree or two makes no sense.
I thought about it and realized the U.S.’s three warmest states — CA, TX & FL — have attracted so many migrants, they’ve risen from 5 million people to 90 million since 1900. They’re now well over 1/4th of Americans. There’s no exodus from Texas to Minnesota, for fear of an overheated future.
It takes a LOT of propaganda to make people overlook those simple facts.
I’m pretty sure Hawaii is warmer than any of those three states.
But, but… they’re doing it for the children!
.
.
Wait… something’s not right here… can’t quite put my finger on it, though.
Seems like they are doing it to the children.
What do you call a Shaker Family Tree…
A Stick
OK, OK, I’ll stick to my day job
What children?
Hmmm… I think I’ve spotted the problem.
The sad thing is that they are partially correct!
These are the types of parents who will rally around AOC’s Green New Deal, where if implemented, the future for their children will indeed be dire.
No one is addressing the looming problem between capitalism and population growth. Constant growth in GDP requires ever-increasing markets/consumers to both produce and consume goods and services. This is what drove the “globalization” of markets/trade that Trump is now trying to correct and the mass movement of industries and capital around the world. Obviously that shift caused as many issues as it solved. The EU tried to offset a dwindling resident population with open borders, and the Democrats in the States ascribe to the same ethos. The socio-political ramifications are already showing up in various ways in various nations.
I haven’t seen much discussion of how this conundrum will be addressed in the future. With technology reducing the number of jobs in many industries, employment will change tremendously, and the need for the flood of “immigrants” will not be needed in short order. What to do with all the “unnecessary” folks? They don’t expand the market if they don’t have income with which to purchase goods and services. This, in turn, results in the ever-widening income gap, and the call for redistribution of wealth. Dividing wealth has never created new wealth.
Socialism has a dismal record in human history. Climate change doesn’t even enter the picture as a major world problem when compared to the impact of the industrial/production/population/social restructuring that is already occurring. Science will eventually figure out the climate issue, but it will play only a minor role in solving the social restructuring that will dominate the human condition in the near future.
Not true. Constant growth in GDP can also be handled by constant growth in consumption, which will happen as capitalism continues to make individuals wealthier.
Capitalism does not require or even need constant growth in the GDP. That’s a lie pushed by those who either don’t understand capitalism or are seeking to undermine it.
Growth in GDP is celebrated because it represents growth in wealth. That’s all.
The shift in production does not need to be addressed. As under developed countries continue to develop, they will both increase their ability to consume, and their ability to produce. Nothing wrong with that at all.
One of the reasons the Democrats are pushing less restrictions on immigration and non-enforcement of existing laws to the point that they actually refuse to admit the current immigration problem and effectively advocate “open borders” is precisely because they know their natural citizen constituency both believes that vast overpopulation exists, necessitating population control through birth control, abortion, and this decision of not having kids (that is my son’s answer – he and his wife don’t want to have kids, a very sad prospect for me and a silly one, in my view). They need more people from outside to come in to support their welfare state policies, so they rely upon this increase in immigrants in an uncontrolled fashion (approximately 11 million to 30 million illegal immigrants/visa overstays since 1986, when the last amnesty was granted).
And we have seen that the U.S. population the last 20 years or so, based upon the birth rate, is starting to decline instead of just leveling off. Young people are not having enough kids to replace the population. The only reason this doesn’t show up in the U.S. population yet is because of the number of immigrants, legal and illegal, that have been added.
Europe is starting to feel the consequences of low birth rates on their welfare states. It is a long term problem for them that will have to be faced in the near future, especially since their admission of refugee populations since 2015 has resulted in increasing unskilled people who turn out to be more of a charge on the state and a burden than a benefit. The U.S. will also have to face the consequences very soon, as well.
The same mentality that spawned the necessity of drinking red kool-aid dipped from a wash tub. Blind obedience is a foundation to the perfect world master
Fewer “progressives”, (latent socialists), is a good thing, by all means they should carry on as planned
Ya spelled it wrong. It’s “a r d e n t”‘ socialists.
Patrick Moore is one prominent eco warrior who refused to give up common sense in his work to get the planet less polluted. That is, less contaminated by what really are life destroying compounds, not the life nurturing CO2.
I recall this from the time of the first whirlybirds, but don’t know about data. The rule is that in times of real crisis reproduction increases.
Who remembers Marshall Applewhite and Heaven’s Gate?
Perhaps the “progressives” should follow their example.
Shakers ideas seem to be congruent with nowadays https://www.google.com/search?client=ms-android-samsung&ei=muFiXOTxPIfMrgSpzqWIBA&q=austrian+kinderhilfe+world+wide&oq=austrian+kinderhilfeworld+wide&gs_l=mobile-gws-wiz-serp.
Simple Kind Of Life – No Doubt
For a long time I was in love
Not only in love, I was obsessed
With a friendship that no one else could touch
It didn’t work out, I’m covered in shells
And all I wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life
And all I needed was a simple man
So I could be a wife
I’m so ashamed, I’ve been so mean
I don’t know how it got to this point
I always was the one with all the love
You came along, I’m hunting you down
Like a sick domestic abuser looking for a fight
And all I wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life
If we met tomorrow for the very first time
Would it start all over again?
Would I try to make you mine?
I always thought I’d be a mom
Sometimes I wish for a mistake
The longer that I wait the more selfish that I get
You seem like you’d be a good dad
Now all those simple things are simply too complicated for my life
How’d I get so faithful to my freedom?
A selfish kind of life
When all I ever wanted was the simple things
A simple kind of life
https://youtu.be/kRpZJ9EgJho
Mostly, saying they won’t have kids (or any more) is just virtue-signaling on the part of “climate warriors”.
Don’t see any of these “climate warriors” boycotting their winter vacation in St. Barth’s or any of their other jettings to “conferences” they could easily Skype. Don’t see any of them declining to eat steaks and lobster in favor of cricket meal and tofurky at said “conferences.” Don’t see any of them failing to fill their houses with whole container loads of tacky crap out of China that absolutely no one needs. They seem to replace their big German cars at less than 5 years old, lest they not keep step with the peerage. And I haven’t noticed their electric-heated 8,500 square foot McMansions with 4-car heated garages going out of style, either. And those Patagonia puffer coats are made out of fossil fuels, just sayin’! 😉
it took monks and nuns >1000years to disappear…
They’ve disappeared?
I thought they all moved to Abbey Road and let their hair grow
Not really the same thing.
Monk and Nuns were more of a career than a culture or society. People from the outside would join because devoting yourself to god and/or hanging out in the mountains learning how to brew the best beer was considered an attractive career. No children? Shrug. I can deal with this.
It was not that they breed themselves out of existence by not breeding, but more society as a whole evolved away from them
The sad truth is, The Climate Faithful are not a part of the Left’s long term plans. Given time many of them will grow up, and see for themselves that Thermageddon is always a decade or more away, without ever getting closer.
They are merely Useful Idiots, and temporarily useful at that. The Left only needs them long enough to push through their agenda. The Green New Deal inadvertently showed who the Left really consider their future power base. Those who don’t WANT to work, but still expect to be handed all the benefits of a wealthy western lifestyle.
The Left will continue to pander to the Climate Faithful, without ever doing anything that might actually slow CO2 production. But if the Greens ever do manage to give the Left the power to buy votes with endless bread and circuses, they will be dumped in a New York Minute. In fact, if they end up being seen as a impediment to the ‘wealth transfer’ of the new welfare state, they might find out what always happens to those that the Left declare counter revolutionary.
~¿~
If they voluntarily don’t reproduce, more power to them.
I suspect, however, that they won’t be satisfied with simply living their OWN lives that way.
YOU have to, also.
And I’ll bet they consider it the moral high-ground.
It’s good to see that they’re eschewing child abuse by not having children.
A better historical comparison would be the Cathars. They believed that the material world was evil, and that reproduction was a moral evil to be avoided, as it continued the chain of reincarnation and suffering in the material world.
They were not however, allowed to die out. The Catholic church declared them to be heretics and conducted the Albigensian crusade against them. In 1204 Pope Innocent III commissioned Arnaud (or Arnau) Amalric (died 1225), a Cistercian abbot, as papal legate and inquisitor; and tasked Amalric with the Albigensian Crusade. Cistercian friar, Caesar of Heisterbach wrote that, Amalric, when asked by a Crusader how to distinguish the Cathars from the Catholics, answered:
“Caedite eos! Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”
“Kill everybody! Surely the Lord knows who are his”.
Curiously, it turns out that there are still practising Cathars in southern France. Despite the most disgusting persecution some survived and apparently their descendents live on by keeping their heads down.
“They believed that the material world was evil, and that reproduction was a moral evil to be avoided, as it continued the chain of reincarnation and suffering in the material world.”
In a very real sense, gnostic dualism lies at the heart of leftist identity ideations. If you exchange Western materialism or Western affluence for material world, then on an epistemological level there’s very little difference between the self-righteous, self-hating, nihilism of both.
It’s the ugly women who renounce sex.
I think you’ll find it’s the ugly women who get the most sex.
There is being physically ugly and there is being an ugly person. Sometimes people can be both, sometimes people can have one without the other.
There is also sex and being willing to raise children. Having sex is ‘relatively’ easy… so they tell me… cough…, but raising children – and here we are talking about planning deliberately to have children as opposed to ‘Hey Mum, you know how you always wanted to have grandchildren? Well… SURPRISE!!! Yeah, it was shock to me too!’ – requires some degree of TRADITIONAL relationships.
Hard truth people, having a baby is hard physical work. Pre-Global Warming (when the climate was perfect of course) it was EXTEMELY common for women to die in childbirth. Unfortunately the evil Western Culture advanced medicine and removed the cultural heritage of dying in childbirth from millions but we digress. The point is no matter how many glass ceilings you smash the mother is going to need some time both before and after the birth. This is where the man comes in.
Now this is actually exactly why men live by Toxic Masculinity evolved in the first place. Generations of evolution taught man that women are important and must be protected. Why? Cause men don’t lactate. Dead mother equals dead infant equals death of entire family line. Dead father equals mother and infant still alive and with a chance to survive. Men could NOT raise an infant solo prior to modern science.
So what am I getting at? To raise a family you need a woman willing to do the baby thing and a man willing to stand alongside and provide for her needs during the early stages. Then, unless you are so cashed up you can just throw money at the problems, you can also do well by having a supporting partner willing to not only love the mother and child, but also commit to supporting until that happy moment about 20 years later when the ungrateful little sod finally leaves home.
So family requires relationship and relationship requires one to not be an ugly person and actually have social skills more advanced than screaming at people who disagree with you.
So, are Lefties unwilling to raise children, or unable to raise children?
Open question.
Junk weight for the 97% trash pile so often quoted by helium headed politicians
They’re also freeloaders.
Having children is a huge financial burden. But government retirement pension plans are set up like a Ponzi scheme where citizens who have children pay for raising the next generation to working age, and those workers then support current retirees. Responsible citizens pay the financial cost of raising children for the benefit of society. The ultimate freeloaders are those who fail to carry the financial burden of having children.
If the woke crowd believes we should have fewer children, then maybe they should propose reducing retirement benefits, as it does not make sense to advocate for fewer children while the government enacts a financial plan for retirees that relies on an increasing population.
So, how many Democrats in the US are on board with telling their representatives they should reduce Social Security? How many Democrats in office are willing to propose it?
Steve, you should know that nothing proposed by the left is allowed to make sense. Good intentions alone are enough to capture the useful souls.
Or at least the pretense of good intentions.
Yes
Yes. Pyramid scheme is a better fit, not unlike the existing SSI known from the beginning that there would be an unfunded implosion in about 1960(FDR himself via the radio lure)
Yes
0
Just another form of survival of the fittest. Nowadays stupid folks are less likely to have their genes removed from the pool by stumbling into a predator, unarmed. So, buying into the green scam and purposely not having children as a result, is another way to eliminate stupid genes from the pool. This could help to reduce the urban population which prove their lack of intelligence every election cycle. One can only hope that more sign on to this movement.
But I also notice that lots of eco libs have lots of kids, then complain about over population, the hypocrites.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, sex is banned:
If they’re giving up children because of global warming/climate change, that would seem to indicate that they really do want to have kids, but they’re willing to make a personal sacrifice for the “good of the planet”.
How sad. In 30 or 40 years, in their lonely old age, they will weep for the children and grandchildren the could have had, for the loss they endured.
And mostly that sadness will be accompanied by anger, because by that time, with emissions having continued to rise unchecked through those decades and the promised Armageddon not having occurred, they will realize how they’d been duped.
At least they’ll have their cats to talk to.
Dodo Dynasty is a choice. That said, it depends on how they remain childless, and if they seek to normalize their orientation.
….. too many people in the USA smoke the wrong stuff, but it is a big country.
The WSJ’s James Taranto made the case for “The Roe Effect” in 2003.
Related idea to this post — you can search, if you care.
Where’s the evidence for any of this, it sounds like Trump’s rampaging caravans of invaders coming to kill all Americans.
Millions of people are justifiably worried about the future because of the multiple impacts human activity has on the natural world. The latest extremely troubling data is that many insect populations are in freefall calling into question biological integrity across vast areas of the Earth.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636
Sustainability isn’t some clever catchphrase by the “Greens’ to steal other people’s children as this truly bizarre piece posits. Sustainability is a recognition of just how interconnect the natural systems are that create the conditions that allow complex life on Earth. That includes the oxygen many organisms need to breath, the food that is produced and much of the fresh water.
Life makes life possible on Earth, kill enough of it off and the entire system implodes.
Many people are choosing to not have children because all the data says that we are heading for some extremely unpleasant to life times if we don’t make radical changes.
Not because there is some modern version of the blood libel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
The good news keeps on coming. It the Greenies follow the Shakers in not having children, then in a generation of two there will be no more of these deluded souls. Unlike the Shakers, however, they will not be leaving behind a positive heritage and artistic endeavour, but one of greed, ignorance and malice.
Don’t forget the Hatred towards anything that resembles Life or Living Requirements or their fellow human
This site is such a fraud, you make libelous claims against millions of people who support sustainable policy and claim “Green” are trying to steal other people’s children.
Then refuse to post comments that tie this back to some of the most scurrilous attacks made in history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_libel
I’d say shame on you but you clearly lack any conscious.
Idiot.
maybe I am unconscious Doug, because I didn’t see any reference to stealing children. The only instance of the word “steal” (before my post) is found in your two unhinged posts. Don’t you have any conscience? It’s not ethical to lie like that.
“If a community doesn’t have kids, they eventually die out” So, because of their extra ordinary fear of over population and its affect on the environment, these women are missing out on what is the most important part of a normal women’s life- bring life into the world. The best that can be said about this situation is at least they are not bring in more people into the world who will be indoctrinated with the sad view of life.
Wow, perfect, there is a cure for stupidity after all! Hey Griff!