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Comment by alvarosm | Hacker News Reader

It's funny how everyone has solutions for our eating up the planet. But it's never the obvious: stop having children like there's no tomorrow. If you think you have the right to have 90 children if you feel so inclined, then you'll have to acknowledge the planet must turn into a massive farm.

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Do you mean to imply that the only thing we need to do is "stop having children like there's no tomorrow?" michaelochurch didn't say that outlawing factory farming was the only thing we should do like you seem to imply.

Also it's been done.

Western fertility rates are on average ~2. Development and education in poorer nations - especially for women - also results in declining birthrates.

Interesting side point though: reduced birthrates don't result in any benefits to drug-resistant bacteria though, since a small population can still run high density feedlots which promote them!

>Interesting side point though: reduced birthrates don't result in any benefits to drug-resistant bacteria though, since a small population can still run high density feedlots which promote them!

Side-note is incorrect. It's a probability game. Going from (hypothetically) 1000 CAFOs to 10 would drop the rate of production by 100x.

Which doesn't matter, because it only has to happen once.

Literally nothing about reducing the population density of an area addresses the horrific practices of the meat industry. They would still be a bad idea if there was exactly 1 next to a town of 1000 people, because that town would still be wiped out by drug-resistant bacteria.

We don't need current meat production practices - they're about corporate profit, not long-term efficiency.

No, you're incorrect. Reducing the human population density would decrease meat consumption, which would decrease cattle population density, which would decrease anti-bacterial consumption.

There's a known method to get reproductive rates down currently being applied across the globe: affluence. There's no need to mandate it, people are getting there on their own.

Of course, affluence is where most of the problem lies. The difference in environmental impact between a rich human and a poor human is much greater than between a poor human and no human.

Which leads to a more accurate description of the problem: how do you make not destroying the planet more appealing than destroying the planet on an individual level?

Who exactly is having children like there's no tomorrow? If not for immigration, the US population would be declining already. Educate people (esp women) and suddenly your major western nation can't maintain population replacement levels of births.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/0...

You know those people still have children regardless of which country they're in, right?

No, actually I didn't.

In my experience, "those people" are indistinguishable from "people who have the same skin colour as me" after a generation or two.

Oh, and here a some studies with, you know, numbers and statistics that bear that out:

Migrant birthrates falling in Germany, study finds -- http://www.thelocal.de/society/20100811-29073.html

"Fertility rates among foreign-born women start to decline relatively soon after they arrive in Canada, and eventually reach those of women who were born in Canada" --http://www.statcan.gc.ca/daily-quotidien/031222/dq031222c-en...

Citation needed. Even if true, once they're here, their children are likely to be better educated and have access to birth control.

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