CHILDREN ARE GREEN TOO

[Denise]

CHILDREN ARE GREEN TOO
Be Fruitful & Multiply

May 1994
By Will Hoyt

Will Hoyt is a Berkeley carpenter, and farms a six­teenth of an acre in his backyard.

The world is a strange place, and nowhere, it seems, is this better on view than in the positions various groups have adopted regarding what once was called population control but now is called population stabilization. The Sierra Club, for example, recently filed papers with the U.S. Supreme Court in order to bolster support for abortion. This occurred in 1992, when Roe v. Wade was under at­tack in Pennsylvania, and it got quite a lot of press. Unremarked incidents can be no less eye-opening, however. About a year after the Sierra Club took its stand, the small West Coast environmentalist publi­cation Terrain could be seen running a cover story on the dangers of overpopulation and the consequent need for the widespread availability of condoms ("even if you're expecting a child, pledge to make her your last child"), and then blithely, just two issues later, printing another cover story on the importance of Pacific salmon runs and the consequent need to oppose other de facto contraceptive measures like hydroelectric dams. Or take the spectacle now looming large in the midwifery community. One would think that midwives, long known for their wariness of tech­nological and pharmacological intrusion, would avoid dispensing any drug for which the book on as­sociated side effects is as thick as a fetal monitor tape is long. But there it is: Midwives regularly prescribe the pill!

Until recently, I confess, news items like these probably would not have caught my eye. Their contradictory aspects would in all likelihood have gone unnoticed. But now? Now such items positively glint with inconsistency.

About a year ago, right as my wife and I were expecting our fourth child, our mailbox began to fill up with all kinds of letters, broadsides, and even tele­grams about how the world was getting overpopulated. Thanks to a recent fit of good will (not to speak of a desire to honor the great John Muir) we had joined the Sierra Club, and so we had evidently got on some kind of master list. Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, Negative Population Growth, the National Audubon Society -- everybody was suddenly writing to tell us that birth control was a pressing issue, and, needless to say, I found the no­tices relevant. When organizations spoke of human fertility as "the single most important issue of our time," I tended to agree. Hence I started collecting these communiqués, just as (earlier) I had collected the disapproving glances of ecologically correct neighbors. When the pile was high enough, I sat down and thought it all through. The result? I was surprised. I became firmly convinced that the raising of large families (like the raising of small ones) is un­qualifiedly and in every instance good.

Don't misunderstand. I do not scoff at warnings of ecological collapse or discount the various human impact graphs environmental groups use as naviga­tional aids. On the contrary, I respect them both. How could I not? The historical record alone shows us humans to be a frighteningly territorial species with a seemingly limitless propensity to wreak havoc. Thus, if our population increases as in all likelihood it will (it is supposed to double over the next 50 years -- to 11 billion by 2040), it seems a safe bet that our destructive impact will increase proportionately. Old growth forests will be cut, which means topsoil will erode, which means rivers will silt up and run warmer, which means salmon runs will die, which means -- the list could go on and on. In general, the middle will drop out and we'll be left with the poles: drought and flood, sand and sea, fire and ice. As Den­nis and Donella Meadows put it, the world of elk and warblers will give way to a world of "house cats and coyotes, chickens and pigeons, wheat and thistles, cattle, fleas, viruses." And I fear that. I do not share the confidence of fellow apologists for large families who base their arguments on the notion that earth is expendable or in some way destined to give way to "interiority" and a kind of spiritual as opposed to bio­logical diversity. Indeed, that view -- be it of the vul­gar or the more sophisticated, Teilhardian variety -- strikes me as perverse. Whoever looks on a tree snail or a frog as expendable has never noted that the crea­ture is of infinite worth merely because it is; nor has he marveled at the organization on display there, both in the creature itself and in the role that the crea­ture plays for the ecosystem that supports it. But enough. The chief point is simply that 100 million more people every year is cause for alarm. All around the world, hydrologic and nutrient and fire cycles are in danger of being seriously impaired. And if a good number of those 100 million additional souls should turn out to be Americans or Japanese or western Europeans? Why, then the destructive impact will be staggering. No wonder people are calling for a halt.

What, then, is the problem? The problem is that people are not just calling for a halt to growth-oriented economies. They are calling for a halt to people. And that we just cannot do.

It's not that the call for population stabilization is based on an iffy premise -- namely, that 10 billion people exceeds the carrying capacity of the planet. That 10 billion people living wrongly might exceed the carrying capacity of the earth is a reasonable proposition. But 10 billion people eating lower on the food chain, making do without cars, and farming in such a way as to build up rather than deplete topsoil? Far from proving a strain, that many people living rightly might be good. Who knows? The moment our numbers hit 10 billion could go down in history as the point at which humanity reached a kind of criti­cal mass and turned the whole earth green. Which is to say, our population level is not necessarily bad in and of itself. Rather, it just amplifies the good or evil that is already in place. Yet people consistently mis­take amplification for cause.

It may actually be more than a mistake. Some­times it seems as if the real reason environmentalists advocate birth control is either to avoid the real prob­lem (reducing numbers is a lot easier than changing systems), or, worse, to use the whole family-planning cause as a kind of cover for the achievement of em­barrassingly selfish ends. "Think about life as you know it," advises Paul Ehrlich, "and then imagine yourself crowded out of it." Be all that as it may, how­ever, it is not on this kind of ground that I propose to build my argument. My objection is different. It is that "population stabilization" is itself a prime agent in the destruction of nature -- an aspect of that very evil it claims to fight. Carbon dioxide emissions, clearcuts, contraceptive technologies -- these are all of a piece.

Nature, it is well to remember, is not just "out there." We tend to think of it as "out there" because that is where it seems to be on view. Thus the syn­onym "environment." But the only foolproof definition of what most of us mean by nature is "the place where God's will, as opposed to man's will, gets done." Whatever we call nature ("wildness" is a popu­lar choice), it is clearly "in here" as well as "out there," and it follows that any and all efforts to protect nature must work to ensure its survival both outside and among ourselves, where it appears in the form of, well, families. Practice the wild, Gary Snyder advises in a wonderful book by the same title, and by this he means: Walk, leave the earth in better shape than you found it, care for the needy, name the animals, give thanks. Hard labor in small fields! Brushwood to heat the bath! There is a sturdy kind of monastic cheer about Snyder's idea of "practicing the wild," and I am always inclined to give assent. Nevertheless, some­thing is missing, and when I get to the last essay in the book, the one in which Snyder talks about how women should limit their offspring to two, I remem­ber what it is. How does the psalmist phrase it? "Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine within your house, your children like olive plants around your table." To me, that word-cluster functions like a lodestar. It is something to steer by, an emblem of rightness and plenitude -- indeed, a sign of nature in fullest health -- and therefore when I see someone in the process of turning away from it, I am unsettled. Can people really believe it to be no longer affordable, this notion? Children and the fertility from which they come are not burdens, but blessings -- perhaps for the very rea­son that they so thoroughly mess up our plans and upset our days! Chronic promiscuity? That is a bur­den. Peddling sex for money? Also a burden. But the arrival of a child? Here is the one creature who can focus a destitute parent's love and so heal the world. Of that arrival we must always say, with Homer, set chairs and firewood in readiness, and fetch bright water.

Most of us are so enmeshed in this contraceptive culture of ours that we can't see it for what it is. That we don't even raise an eyebrow at the decision to go ahead and use IUDs and oral contraceptives when the list of possible harmful side effects is as long as it is only confirms the point. Hence it takes something of a shock, a deliberate change in perspective, if we want to be able to see the culture afresh. For me, a strategy that works well is to picture a farmer working a field in the spring with horses. Plow, harrow, plant. Jingle of the tag lines, dark humus smell of the newly opened furrows, sound of roots popping as the plow slits the sod. Then the harrow, several passes worth: Soils mellow, the horses moving quicker now, the freshly black field turning smooth and even. And lastly, the drilling of seed into the still moist earth. It is a satisfactory business, planting, and as he makes his way up and down his field the farmer can't help but reflect on how under normal conditions it would take almost a miracle for the seed not to sprout. He's not worried though. Prior to plowing, this farmer sprayed the earth with enough poison to kill any and all seeds. Upon entering the soft earth the seeds will die, and therefore the farmer is certain not to have the job of cultivating them.

Now for the hard part. What, exactly, is wrong with this picture?

One approach would be to argue that the farmer was dishonest (because his actions said something different from his intent). Or, if one was more emo­tional about it, one could just start with the assumption that the whole scenario was depraved. But per­haps the best approach is simply to note that by poi­soning the field the farmer has rendered the acts of plowing and harrowing and planting meaningless. My point is not that the farmer is in the wrong be­cause he did not get the seed germinated and so de­faulted on some impersonal duty to "transmit life." (To argue along that line is to adopt a puritanical, which is to say most unsacramental, view --namely, that planting is just an instrument to an end.) Rather, my point is that the farmer is in the wrong because he has impoverished the good but (to the extent that it is meaningful) potentially glorious business of plowing and planting. He has demeaned it. Drilling seed, though in one sense still pleasurable, no longer points beyond itself. Whereas it used to mean germination and by extension spring and rebirth, now it just means itself -- seed going to a hole in the ground. Sacramentality has been lost.

Tree branches, tributaries, dendrites -- one pat­tern, three spatially differentiated aspects. Spirit mov­ing over the waters, Helen Keller realizing that w-a-t-­e-r meant the liquid pouring over her hand, Baptism. Electrons, planets, galaxies! Patterns within patterns, wheels within wheels -- everything signifies some­thing else and to that very extent is joined to everything else. And look at what happens when you throw in that other differentiating dimension called time. First the flower, then the fruit: sexual climax, then birth. Not just is the event of birth like the rip­ening of fruit, but birth is related to sexual climax in the same way that the coming of fruit is related to flowers! Back-forth, back-forth: With each push the unborn child massages the vaginal walls and so moves a little farther down the canal, thereby rous­ing both itself and its mother to the climax of birth. Birth, in other words, points to sex. And vice versa. Indeed, birth and sex are in fact two aspects of a single whole called passion. Just as a circle is what a sphere looks like as it passes through two-dimen­sional space, so too the experience of sexual climax is what birth looks like before it passes through the dimension of labor and death. Truly, J.S. Bach got it right! Creation is not so much a matter of evolu­tionary ascendancy, where the present is built on the ruins of the past, as it is a matter of something surfacing or welling up, something that has always been here, is here now, and yet -- confoundedly -- is still to come. Creation, in other words, is whole. All really is in all, and woe therefore to the person who would presume to split the parts asunder. Marriage, sex, conception, birth -- these things belong to­gether.

In light of all this, why aren't more people stand­ing up and opposing contraception? More to the point, why aren't conservation biologists, literary critics, and ecologists standing up? After all, these people are actually trained to see wholes. Why aren't they telling us the emperor isn't wearing clothes?

One clue may be size, the sheer enormity of what we are dealing with here. For it is not just that sex has been sundered from conception and thereby turned into entertainment (or "self-fulfillment"). Other, related developments include in vitro fertiliza­tion, through which conception occurs outside of sex, and surrogate motherhood, through which ba­bies are carried and born apart from their "mother." It used to be said that so-and-so was "born out of wed­lock," which meant that the child was in some sense dispossessed or unhoused. Now, however, it can be said that so-and-so was born triply "out," for surely making love, like marriage, is but a wider dimension of that one body in whom all babies, properly speak­ing, come to be. So it is far-reaching, this contracep­tive business. Indeed, it is so extensive that some­times it seems as if our whole contraceptive culture is in fact engaged in the construction of a kind of alter­native kingdom -- one built not on incarnational principles but on disincarnational ones, a kingdom founded quite literally on disembodiment, on the radical and systematized separation of flesh from spirit -- a kingdom, in short, in which the body fig­ures not as a revelatory and meaning-full ground to spirit but, rather, as a substance to be manipulated, overcome, sterilized, and in general exploited. The Negative Population Growth lobbyist who looks on childbearing as a "biological urge" which ought, for altruistic purposes, to be overcome or perhaps even bought ("federal income tax credits only to those par­ents who have no more than two children"); the con­sumer who looks on his body as a pleasure machine and uses contraceptives in order to keep that machine in good repair; the scientist who de­signs ways to diminish incarnate motherhood and, at the same time (thanks to the sudden availability of surplus fetal tissue), to repair aging bodies and ad­vance yet another step toward somatic immortality -- each in his own way looks on the body as a mere mechanism. And the subjects themselves? No question about it. They are above, looking down.

But let us drop that hot potato, for the truth of the matter is that, theoretically, "population stabilization" could be achieved via abstinence alone. Indeed, on a case-by-case basis, abstinence is the surest of all contraceptive measures. What, then, would the world be like if everybody abstained from sex during fertile periods after having two children? Surely there is nothing wrong with that? By way of answer, let us revert once gain to the farming analogy. This time picture a field of plants sprayed with growth retardant to keep the plants from reaching maturity. The farmer thinks he is doing good, spraying in this fash­ion, because his resources are finite and he wants to protect them. He imagines that if he lets those plants come to full flower, the nutrients in his soil will be depleted. The farmer does not know that, if he would only let those plants come to maturity before they got plowed under, they would in fact build his soil up, not wear it down. Moreover, given that these plants do not just fix nitrogen in the ground when they are mature but also filter air, convert yet more solar en­ergy into biomass, and even provide habitat for wild­life, it is hard to imagine how letting these plants grow could not help replenish his entire farm. As I say though, this farmer does not think about such things. Though his real problem is not his plants' size but, instead, the fact that he has cleared too much forest relative to his farm's total acreage (thereby crippling his ability to build power reserves and hold onto wa­ter), this farmer persists in thinking that if only he can keep all his cover plants half grown he will be able to hold onto the farm.

Needless to say, this farmer is doomed.

Whether or not this kind of cartoon hits home, of course, will depend entirely on whether readers can assent to the premise that families are themselves plants. If one thinks only in quantitative terms, for example, the cartoon will go over very well. If, on the other hand, one thinks in qualitative as well as quantitative terms, then it is a good bet that further discussion is possible. I hereby bank on this latter notion and assume that most readers think families are more than the sum of their parts and are therefore to at least some degree like plants.

That established, how can the goal of keeping all families small be tenable? True, in many instances two children is undoubtedly the point at which a fam­ily reaches full bloom and finds its "end." Other fami­lies reach maturity with just one child. But all? Surely at least some families are destined to be larger, and on that account alone it would be well to let them grow. In other words, perhaps it is time to stop spraying growth retardant. Indeed, perhaps it is time to stop spraying altogether. Chemical fertilizers, like eroticized images, don't accomplish anything con­structive; they just produce teenage pregnancies on soil that would be a lot richer if it was supporting full families. Away with the sprays, then! Convert to sus­tainable farming practices and manage for plenty! Quit using chemicals, put a stop to all further efforts to convert wilderness into human habitat, and let families grow as best they can given the soil, water, and sunlight available to them! Certainly some fami­lies will die prematurely owing to current problems like poor growing conditions. The health of the whole farm, however, will be vastly improved.

Wait a minute, I can hear certain readers saying. Surely we cannot just stand by and allow millions of yet unborn children to enter lives of "abject squalor" and "pointless suffering." Ought we not take whatever means are necessary to avert that kind of tragedy?

It is hard to know how to answer objections like that. Should one just point out that the way to avert the tragedy is to eliminate poverty? I prefer to ask where anybody got the idea we were supposed to avoid death in the first place. Jokes aside, I really do wonder if the typical destitute herdsman gracing the pages of National Geographic is really as miserable as the captions suggest. I do not deny that the man may be hungry or in real pain. But are we really so sure that his life is for that reason meaningless? Or that he wishes his children had never been born? I think not. Accordingly, I vote to reserve words like "abject" and "pointless" for actions or situations that are indeed abject and pointless -- events like suicide, for ex­ample, or perhaps even the business of intentionally stunting a family's growth. In the end, of course, the debate over whether suffering is an absolute evil or not could well turn out to be -- in this particular con­nection anyway -- a somewhat academic exercise. For it is entirely possible that things would not be quite so bad as we think if people just let families grow. Scary? Yes. But catastrophic? Not necessarily. No more so, at least, than walking on water without looking down.

By way of explanation, I put before you two pic­tures -- two competing ideas, really, of what a truly cleansed and revitalized world might look like. In the first, where wildness means polar bears, and sexual responsibility means birth control, most of the world's bioregions are vibrant with life. The spotted owl, it is true, is long gone, but -- owing to the ban­ning of fossil fuels and dramatic reductions in human population levels and the consumption of raw mate­rials -- many other species which were endangered at the same time as the spotted owl have recovered and are now flourishing. For example, vast regions in northern New York, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine now comprise an unbroken wilderness corridor through which "umbrella" species like panthers and grizzlies can migrate at will. Perhaps more sig­nificantly still, cities are now livable again. Human population -- worldwide -- is now 500 million, about what it was when Shakespeare was alive, and this drop in numbers has helped to raise health and education standards to unprecedented highs. All told, a new kind of quiet is abroad in the world. Waters are everywhere clear and church bells are once again the means by which people measure their day. They ring every day at five to remind women to take their birth control pills.

So that is one picture.

In the other, the picture where wildness means obedience and sexual responsibility means respect for fertility, the spotted owl is also extinct. However, in this picture the spotted owl has more company, for though a consensus emerged that the preservation of biodiversity was of paramount importance, the people here-- owing to an unwillingness to make use of family planning services -- had to depend on a change in living habits to achieve this end, rather than a quick and immediate reduction in numbers, and for many species the change came too late. Nevertheless, rivers are now clear and salmon are return­ing. Despite great odds (and at great cost), whole communities have been moved and are still being moved in order to make room for wilderness corridors. And though the demand for arable land is high, thanks to the switch to sustainable agriculture, deser­tification has not only been arrested but reversed. As for the cities, they are crowded and poor. World popu­lation is now at 10 billion! However, demographers have recently confirmed an interesting trend: Though families tend as a rule to be large, overall the population level has stabilized. The reason? People like to point to the fact that teenage (premarital) pregnancies have become all but nonexistent, but the real reason is that monastic families have been growing faster than biological ones. Apparently the entire world has reached the same kind of equilibrium Ladakh (or "Little Tibet") achieved before it came to be ruled by norms of monetary, as opposed to cul­tural, wealth. In some countries, one out of every two children becomes a monk.

And there you have it. In the first scenario, puri­fication through elimination. In the second, purifica­tion through suffering. Look on it, if you like, as the difference between the world of Noah and the world of Christ.