Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging Russians to have more children.
"Large families must become the norm," Putin said in a speech Tuesday.
Russian birth rates are falling amid war in Ukraine and a deepening economic crisis.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is urging women to have as many as eight children as the number of dead Russian soldiers continues to rise in his war with Ukraine, worsening the country’s population crisis.
Addressing the World Russian People’s Council in Moscow on Tuesday, Putin said the country must return to a time when large families were the norm.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers, had seven, eight, or even more children,” Putin said.
Nonsense.
Close to one third of total agricultural production is wasted yearly, with almost half of that never even leaving the fields.
Fertilizers are another scarecrow but there is a never ending source of nitrogen and phosphor right at hand going to waste in many countries with no second thought: waste water treatment muds.
And there are more fields laying fallow today than there were 50 years ago in many countries.
More forest is cut down to be replaced by palm tree for oil than for conventional agriculture and the clearing for cattle is just bad manegement of lands.
Reducing our agricultural output by 1/3 wouldn’t come close to making it sustainable, though it would certainly be an improvement. Fertilizer costs have been a big problem worldwide, so if using waste products were practical we would be doing it already. Shifting weather patterns from climate change are why a lot of those fields are fallow, and that’s only going to get worse.
Countries that use less than average resources are working far harder to use more resources than rich countries are working to use less, and I don’t see a plan to make that change. As individual choices go, no choice a person can make will reduce their impact more than having one less child than they otherwise would. We just don’t need 10 billion people on this planet.
Adoption of new alternatives is not easy nor fast.
Try and give a call to your local waste water treatment plant and ask for a tour. Tell them you want to understand better what they are doing and how, what destination they give to muds, etc. You’ll be surprised to know most countries sent those nutrient rich by-products to landfills for decades and only very recently the muds started to be valued.
And are you sure about that? Because I’d quicker point to population exodus from rural to city areas.
The discussion about cutting back on agricultural production is just starting. Too much goes to waste, when too many go without. The point is that by reducing production, resource management will be a forced point of action. Debateable but it is as valid as any other idea.
But like it or not, the human population will peak and stabilize at the 10 billion and we can sustain ourselves without burning the house down.
Name one society that has ever managed significant decreases in production of anything to help the environment. We’ve found ways to lower the impact of increasing production, and we’ve even found ways to reduce the impact of current production. I can’t think of a single instance of a society broadly adopting a reduction of goods and services for the environment.
The fact is that, while there are many improvements to be made, every one of those improvements would work better with a lower population. There are also no realistic projections of humanity reaching a reasonable level of long term sustainability. We also have a long history of badly failing to reach projected sustainability targets. Ignoring a multiplicative factor that impacts sustainability in every area is just foolish.
Yeah, we are projected to peak around 10b. 9b would be better though, or even 9.9b. 1b would have been fantastic, though probably still too high. But what happens when you get all the lifestyle and efficiency increases you dream of? How do you know that population trends won’t shift? It doesn’t take much. Just a +/-0.2 difference in children per family can have a profound impact in one direction or the other. You are gambling everything on an assumption that trends won’t change. Trends always change.
