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.
You are both oversimplifying the reality and overcomplicating it at the same time. There are thousands of different aspects to sustainability, including many that we simply haven’t identified yet. Modern farming methods that provide us such great yields are simultaneously robbing us of important nutrients that aren’t being replenished in the soil. This has a knock on effect to meat and dairy as well. We are running out of fresh water for farming, residential, and industrial use. Forever chemicals are building up in the oceans, aquafers, soil, and air. Oceans and rivers are running out of fish. Noise pollution, light pollution, heat pollution, and just ordinary misplaced trash don’t seem likely to abate any time soon. Good luck getting cooperation on any of these issues, when we can’t even get people to wear masks in the middle of a plague.
Every one of these aspects of sustainability will relate differently to your scenarios. In the end, we are left with the simple truth that every effort to address every one of these issues will be aided by a reduced population. Either reduced from where it is today, or reduced from whatever future predictions you want to work from. (I’ve been ignoring the fact that humanity has generally been pretty shit about accurately predicting the future, because those predictions are entirely irrelevant to my point).
I’m not talking about culling the population, ethnic cleansing, forced sterilization, etc. People should be absolutely free to make their own family planning choices. But there are lots of ways to promote having fewer children without being coercive. Child free lifestyles should be more respected. Birth control should be more widely available. People should be more aware of the fragility of this planet, and the impact we have on it. Having one less kid than one would otherwise have is always going to blow away the impact of whatever other things we do to promote sustainability.
But there are lots of ways to promote having fewer children without being coercive
i don’t believe you can do that without artificially selecting one part of the populace, but not another, or just having disproportionate impacts. even this comment was written in english, and even if it’s well-intentioned, everyone who doesn’t read english is not subject to the propaganda in it. by posting it on lemmy, you are also targeting lemmy and the broader fediverse as a demographic. so everyone who’s not online is already immune to this propaganda.
Your pushing the boundaries of “propaganda” pretty extensively there. Sure, technically it could apply, but then it applies to any political opinion communicated in any way by anyone, including you.
Of course it won’t be communicated equally. Neither will messages encouraging more children, something far more common from current governments. The right wing in this country (and others) explicitly encourages more “white Christian” children because of “replacement theory”. That’s far more sinister than suggesting that people in general should consider the impact before having more children.
Nothing in reality is ever totally fair, just like no society is ever totally sustainable. A perpetual motion machine is only possible in an ideal world, and so is a sustainable society. We will only ever be able to approximate sustainability, and that will require contributions systemic and cultural changes. That means “propaganda”, and it means that some demographics will cooperate more than others, meaning it won’t be “fair” regardless of the approach.
but you see how this is exactly what eugenicists would do, right? create propaganda to discourage undesirables from procreating and create ineffective propaganda for their preferred demographic group. the intention doesn’t matter, to me. it’s all eugenicist propaganda as far as I’m concerned.
