China is considering allowing couples to have more than one child, due to demographic panic over an aging population and labor shortages – as well as wanting more consumers. This would result in 9.5 million additional births in an already very overpopulated
and polluted country. It will be an environmental disaster, considering that the country is already plundering other continents for resources (Australia and Africa being some).
As soon as a country’s birth rate goes into decline, its government seems to go into panic mode and do everything to encourage more births, no matter how this may negatively impact them in the future (see Iran). Those from a baby boom will one day be old too, and the cycle repeats itself.
Humanity as a species just can’t seem to commit to sustained long-term planning for the future – looking decades or even hundreds of years ahead. The type of society that is dominant now – a capitalist consumer economy – seems to preclude this. All that is heard as a policy in Australia’s upcoming Federal election is the mindless mantra of growth, growth and more growth. Any other way of thinking is heretical.
