
Birthstrike – contraception for the environment?!

Climate change and its effects are reason enough for many people to think about their everyday consumer behavior. This sometimes has interesting results: more and more young people are going into what is known as birthstrike, which means they refuse to have children in order to save the environment.
Birthstrike – Climate change is without a doubt one of the greatest challenges of the young century and could become a Herculean task for humanity.
In Australia, huge bushfires are destroying entire areas of land and shrouding the metropolis of Sydney in black smoke, in Germany massive crop failures are expected due to ongoing drought and the cultural city of Venice is in danger of sinking due to rising sea levels.
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The trigger for climate change is easy to find: people present themselves as climate sinners and display impressive stubbornness when it comes to changing their everyday behavior and consumption.
What is Birthstrike?
The young generation, which grew up with the challenges of climate change and sees it as the greatest threat to human civilization, has a simple but radical proposal for solving this problem. If the environmental impact is to be reduced, this is done by reducing the earth's population.
Based on the fact that the population on earth is constantly growing - the UN estimates that by 2050 there will be 9.7 billion people living on our planet - the way out of the environmental catastrophe could be to stop births.
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The movement gained momentum when British singer Blythe Pepino stated in an interview that she no longer wanted to have children in the current situation and that she did not want to expose them to the impending climate catastrophe.
Under the hashtag #Birthstrike, the idea spread across the Internet and the globe and more and more women and men stated that they could no longer reconcile their desire to have children with their conscience.
But does this approach really help?
On paper, the calculation is simple: a person produces countless tons of CO2 over the course of their life, be it through air travel, buying a car or consuming food. If the Earth's population were reduced by half in one fell swoop, the environmental impact (on a theoretical level) would actually be massively reduced.
But does this approach work in practice?
Whether a reduction in the population will solve the climate crisis remains to be seen.
On the one hand, (hypothetically speaking), even if a large proportion of the world's population were lost (although this would only be conceivable on a purely theoretical level, since too large a loss would lead to the collapse of the system), climate change would not be stopped if the remaining part consumer behavior would not change. It is more to be feared that the remaining part of the world's population would treat the planet all the more recklessly, with the ulterior motive that a large part of the burden would have disappeared. This would not stop climate change, but would at most prolong it.
The problem of climate change actually lies not only in the number of people. If you compare the average CO2 consumption per year of an Australian or American (this is 15.63 tons in Australia and 14.61 tons in the USA) with that of an Indian (where consumption is 1.61 tons), it falls It quickly became clear that a reduction in population would not be the solution to the problem, but rather the consumption of individual countries, especially industrialized nations (for comparison, the leader Qatar has an annual consumption of 30.36 tons per capita).
So when you talk about Birthstrike, you also have to object that there are basically enough resources and food on the planet, but they distributed unequally and, above all, unfairly and are used wastefully.
So is Birthstrike a solution or are the problems more related to the reckless consumption of resources and unequal distribution?
A resulting solution could also be that every new child brought into the world could be an opportunity to enrich the world with new ideas and visions that could avert climate change. A focus here might be more education and more social justice on a global level.
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Author: Alexander Herberstein, article image by Arthimedes / Shutterstock.com
Notes:
1) This content reflects the current state of affairs at the time of publication
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The reproduction of individual images, screenshots, embeds or video sequences serves to discuss the topic. 2) Individual articles (not fact checks) were created using machine help and
were carefully checked by the Mimikama editorial team before publication. ( Reason )
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