Is there anything to discuss? Does anyone with a scintilla of intelligence really still question the need for a lower population on this planet? Julian Simon is dead (an early death, thankfully), and his ideas are dead too. As David Attenborough said: “Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, maybe we should control the population to ensure the survival of our environment.” And won't people start controlling their numbers automatically when life starts getting more and more difficult? You can take the idiot with 14 kids as an exemplar, but isn't she merely an insignificant outlier? I have one child, and he is determined to have none. These days, large families are becoming relatively rare, unlike my parents generation.

Her 14 children will become an additional 2.1 million people, on an already overcrowded planet, a thousand years from now.
http://www.metamorphosisalpha.com/ias/population.php

Very nice post!

I have read that smaller numbers of children are more likely when a government makes provision to take care of the elderly in their old age. If people have to depend on their children, they are likely to have several to make certain there is at least one who survives them.

If we become a poorer world, it will be more difficult to provide adequate Social Security and Medicare (or the equivalent) for the older generation. Birth control will also become more difficult to obtain. I wonder to what extent these issues will work against declining birth rates.

Somewhere between 1 child and 14 lies an inflection point.

With the current population overshoot, the inflection point might be better between zero and one and for several generations. There should be no tax benefit to procreation. The maxim "it takes a whole village to raise a child" should be accepted more literally. Comprehensive education would help - but this is looking increasingly unaffordable. Education should be a lifelong endeavor with childhood emphasis on developing the skills required to become educated.

A fundamental premise of the law is that life is precious, yet we are daily bombarded with images and sensations that desensitize us. Over 40,000 deaths per annum on USA roads - and life is precious?

If a community of 100 people could only have 10 children, then you would see significant cultural changes in the value of those lives and the investment made in them. As a civilization we would become significantly risk averse - and that would include not taking chances with our planet.

Now we are getting down to it.

It seems to me that either we create a fair and equitable Global Power Down which would require a Global entity to orchestrate.

Or

We go right to the edge and do a forced global power down, not in a nice way, as they say.

The UN could possibly be this entity and there was a period when I was optimistic about this organization, however it seems TPTB (right?) feel threatened by the UN and have done quite a bit to undermine it, and the J6Pers (left?) are afraid that the UN represents "World Government" enslaving everyone. So I don't see bringing everyone together happening anytime soon.

Of course we could take a page out of Shock Doctrine and use the next big WHACK from collapse to convince everyone of what needs to be done but we would have to have the message and plan of action in place and we would have to elbow out the other competitors in exploiting opportunity. Not an impossiblity IMO.

Anyway thanks for the post. This IS what it comes down to.

Does anyone know if the octuplet fertility clinic doctors will be prosecuted? In my opinion it seems to be a case of negligence. Here in Alberta we had a recent fuss about a 60-year-old woman who was refused by our fertility clinics, so she went to India, got implanted, came back to Alberta and had premature twins that will never be well and have cost $50,000 plus on the health care just in the first few weeks of their lives. Albertans are outraged but the Minister of Health said he can do nothing because there was no breach of law.

Hardin's lifeboat ethics appear to be a consequence of Peak Oil. Situations such as the octuplets will probably have to happen a few more times before the sheeple start to become angry enough that something substantial is done. However, I don't think this will happen anytime soon. The octuplets will be a brief controversy, then fade away.

About 30 years from now, the Alberta government will have to seriously start thinking about lifeboat economics, because we will be one of the few places left with stable oil supplies. (Very expensive, granted, but stable.) Conversely, the Rocky Mountain glaciers which supply most of our water will be mostly gone. I'm glad I'll be dead by then.

I'm going to look at this from an American perspective, as I can't really think bigger than that.

My first idea is to amend the tax code. I propose the negative income tax. Combine an $8,000 payment with a 25% rate, with a 50% bubble rate for $1-2MM, and 80% bubble rate over $2MM. Along with this, you eliminate the child tax deduction and any welfare payments for more than 2 kids. I would also exempt the first $12K of income from payroll taxes (both on the employer and employee side).

That should take care of income disparity and tax incentives for reproduction.

There also clearly need to be laws relating to fertility treatment. A doctor should not be allowed to put 8 embryos in a woman with six kids.

I don't think the majority outrage over these children is caused by any sense of a future resource bottleneck. To me, much of the outrage seems to come from nativism. If this had been a dirt poor but white(er), christian married woman there would be fundraisers to build a house and donations of diapers and food.

A year or two there was a story about the couple (white/protestant/married) that had 20-30 kids. Many wrote to my local paper asking about the future resources needed by these kids and their offspring, just as many others wrote the paper saying that every child is gift from jebus.

I would like to the the media refuse to cover her dilemma and pay a single dime to her until she signs the papers to have all her children adopted to responsible parents....I would also like to see the money be first used to pay the babies' expenses for the outrageous hospital bill first before she ever sees any of those dimes. But that won't happen....I can still dream

Cornelius- Nice Post! Ms. Suleman has probably done more to bring population overshoot into the light of day, than all of the articles written put together, even though it has been a regular topic on TOD for years.

Suleman already has her own page on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suleman_octuplets

News of the octuplets caused an international media frenzy. Most public reply has been angry/negative and some even included death threats, which police are investigating. There has been much public discussion about Nadya Suleman's decision to have the octuplets,including a minor protest outside the Suleman home, however Suleman currently lives elsewhere.[73] Many expressed concern that Suleman's decision for more children would burden taxpayers via public support.

Joe

In the far distant past 9 pregnancies was about par for the average fecund female. I recall arguments during the early 50's about how many living children a female should have before before a post-partum sterilization was offered at Jefferson Davis, the Houston charity hospital. I thought 6 was more than sufficient. There were also differences of opinion about the evolving techniques to keep extreme low birth weight preemies alive. Time had a cover story on the 'population explosion' probably sometime during the 60's. A wealthy South American male was featured. If memory serves he had around 57 children with a series of wives. During the 80's one of our OB/Gyn guys presented a program on infertility. He was not pleased with my comment on population but was more oriented toward giving women what they wanted. That trend continues

To continue the lifeboat analogy those who are having more than one or two kids now are setting them adrift to a future without map, compass and enough food. Surely this can't happen in an enlightened society? I think it can.

John Feeney, whose web site, Growth is Madness, has initiated a major effort to get scientists and concerned citizens to speak out on global population issues. This month is GPSO month, which you can read about at http://gpso.wordpress.com/ .

I am one of more than a hundred scientists who have taken a pledge to speak out. And I will have a blog post to that effect before the month is out (Question Everything). An announcement will be posted in the Oil Drum thread.

John is looking for ways to raise this issue to the same level of awareness in the general public as global warming now is. As it is made acute by the advent of peak oil, I see these two issues, population and PO, as tandem factors in a global collapse of civilization, both needing serious public presentation. I would urge anyone who has thought this through and realizes what the implications are to write strongly and often to help raise public awareness and discourse.

I agree, this travesty in California may help trigger a national discussion.

Also, I agree with Plato. A differential of four times in earnings between the lowest and highest has a far more ethical if not moral ring to it.

George

Limiting "salaries" just means a shift by those more able to owning or getting more shares in the companies. The Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, Larry Paige, Sergey Brin path. It won't have to be stock options but out and out stock. Either by owning from the start or by buying or getting stock.

Some people can create value and there will be reward for it. Even if the company were completely private like Lucas Film (George Lucas).

Allowing governments to take and control the wealth will see the exception getting the money. Like Putin in Russia. Perhaps the world's richest man. Did not create value but took it. Enemies dead.

It seems to me that, in the long term, we will need to drastically limit population. It is virtually certain that, 60 years from now, we will not be able to make fertilizer at anywhere near the rates we do today, due to shortages of fossil fuels. And without this fertilizer, the green revolution dies. In 1900 there was less than 25% of today's population, and many were starving. Now, due to fertilizers created wtih fossil fuels, we have many more people being fed, and starvation is rare except in regions where war and natural disasters exist. Seeing the end of abundant fossil fuels, must we make serious cutbacks in the birthrate? It would not be easy. Even at 1 birth per family, it could take 75 years to cut the population to 25% of today's total. So we don't have time to waste. If we need to have a much smaller population 60 years from now, and we would like to do that in a more civilized manner then relying on wars and mass starvation, we might want to consider mandatory limits on family sizes to 1 child per person. How do you enforce that? Short of mandatory sterilization of every parent, it would be difficult. That would be tough legislation to sell in America, let alone worldwide, but it may well be needed. For the sake of anybody who expects their children to be alive 60 years from now, we better earnestly look into what is needed.

Here are the simplified calculations on the birthrate. Assume the poplulation can be divided into 3 equal generations of 25 years each, that everybody dies at 75, and that everybody has their one and only child at 25. 25 years from now, 1 generation will have died, and a new generation of people under 25 will exist at half today's genration size. 50 years from now, 2 of today's generations will have died, and we will have 3 generations with populations of 1, 0.5, and 0.25 times today's generation. 75 years from now we have 3 new generations with 0.5, 0.25, and 0.125 times today's generation, totaling 0.875 times today's generation. But we would need to go from the figure of 3 times a standard generation we have today to 0.75 times a standard generation in order to have 1/4 of the people. Assuming some don't have children, a limit of 1 birth per family could accomplish that in 75 years.

But do we have 75 years to reduce the population to 25% of today's figures? Maybe we only have 60 years. Maybe less.

Unfettered breeding is a terrorist act; we're just - by and large - too thick to realize it, except vaguely when something really messed-up like this makes the news.

Humans in a (hypothetical) sane society would have no more right to push a dozen larvae out of their loins than to park rent-a-trucks full of ANFO in front of office buildings.

China's one-child policy was inspirational precisely because it was difficult and politically incorrect. A magnificent life-saving effort in the face of overshoot. In a finite world stretched to its limit, more births mean more suffering and starvation. This is temporarly obscured by energy wealth in many countries now, but not for long.

The United States can sustain about 150 million people and now has about 300 million people. Both political parties advocate cheap illegal or legal imported labor for the sake of growth. In Texas illegal immigration is far beyond the number counted and should be stopped cold with troops on the border.

I seems to me that all the folks on TOD who scream and gnash their teeth over people having children are the same ones that go ballistic in defense of '''ohhhhh the children'''.

So what we have is a goverment that rewards those who do have more than a few children.

A female once chose a man who had valuable characteristics. Such as an ability to do hard work and thereby provide for their family.

Today the same female,or male, will pick a 'partner'(meaning they don't marry) based on ability to engage with the welfare system in a meaningful and profitable manner. Say different color/race,no skills,no jobs, perhaps some disability...etc.

I know many of these types of people. They mostly live in rundown trailers. They do not wish to work. They life fairly well on the handouts of the modern welfare state. Free Medicaid Card. Free credit card to buy groceries. WIC,,,,there are numerous programs.

The rural outback is rift with these people. I know one who was a school teacher that went on disabilty for having headaches while teaching!. She lives down the road a bit.

In the suburbs you have to go elsewhere to find them. In the country they live amongst us mostly. I see few who are not on some welfare of one kind or another.

The joke is that farmers are buried with one of their hands still outstretched and bent elbows at 90 degrees due to their always asking for government handouts. The morticians are unable to return the hand and arm to normal positions. (a joke but rings somewhat true).

Airdale-so bitch about childbearing but desire more programs for ''ohhhh the children'''.........odd.

I'm bothered by both this post and the enthusiastic response to it. As a long-time conservationist-turned-anthropologist, I am aware of the resource use issue from an ecological standpoint, and I am also a bit of a "doomer" when it comes to peak oil. There are lots of arguments to be made for reducing resource use, maybe even population, from an ecological economics perspective.

That said, there are two things I would point out: First, the original post says "...And extrapolating – if they follow their mothers cultural/genetic fecundity and each have 14 children of their own who in turn each also have 14 children...," but there is nothing supporting the contention that her having 14 children is either cultural or genetic. Among families with children in California the average number of children is 1.92--below the replacement rate, according to the 1990 census (http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/hh-fam.html). The fact that there has been so much discussion of this single family also points to the fact that a 14-child single-parent family is not a cultural norm. The genetic argument is out, since she only had octuplets as the result of fertility drugs. This is a case of individual psychology, and I have seen no indication of a pattern in larger culture.

Which brings me to my second point: The whole post seems to be set up as a straw man for the purpose of rehashing Garret Hardin's views. Hardin's 1968 "Tragedy of the Commons" relies on the assumption--long since disproven--that humans around the world act for their own selfish gain, and that groups of humans will not develop their own institutions for governance of common resources without being forced to do so. Both this and his 1974 "Lifeboat Ethics" take into account limited resources, with the response that 'those people over there' need to use less, have fewer children, etc. so that we can continue to use our automatic dishwashers and drive our gas guzzling monster trucks. The argument is fundamentally racist, or at the very least nationalist. The opposite argument could just as easily be made: the US and Europe should face mandatory restrictions on resource use, so that people can have more children. Either way, we are left with the unresolved question of who gets to make those decisions for other people--a particularly troubling question when reproductive rights are concerned.

If Cornelius wants to make the argument that global overpopulation is a problem vis-a-vis resource use, using an aberrant example is not a good way to go about it. And if anyone wants to cite Hardin to back up their arguments, they need to be prepared to deal with Hardin's unpacked baggage.

Interesting.

Let's put it this way. It wouldn't bother me at all if 90% of the population of the planet (this means YOU) died in a nuclear fireball, pandemic, whatever... As long as my family and friends were fine. We could then expand into the niche vacated by you.

So while I think it is a great thing that you all restrict your breeding. Don't expect me to do the same.

That is the nature of life, and it means that if there are going to be severely restricted resources in the future. There will be wars with the result that the winners can expand wiping out the losers.

gratuitous childbirth.

I think Mother Nature will take care of our population and consumption problems for us - but it won't be pretty, it won't be controllable, and it won't be fair.

Having been employed by municipal, county and state governments, and having seen the trainwreck that is the federal government, I shudder to think of world government. Although, ultimately, if we survive, that will have to take place. It will be the only way to save civilization and equitably share, preserve and sustain our environment.

Oh noes, peak octuplets! What ever will we do?

I didn’t read or don’t remember the 70’s authors on population. Their alarm bells, though, were about the future, no? And not their own present, much like global warming today. Once population became an issue too evident to ignore it was less discussed, and even became partly taboo, or at least very controversial, specially in the US, the most religious Western country, if only on the issue of the sacredness of unregulated procreation, itself, I suppose, a muted reaction to immigration and multiculturalism.

Over-population is both the cause of our present predicament, and the result of progress - notably the Green revolution. A paradigm built on growth either simply stimulates population balooning - children are born, eat, get basic medical services, and survive. Or actually encourages or requires (?) it because more and more cheap labor is needed - to expand, new ‘entrants’ are needed. They may till the ground, or work in factories to make Barbie dolls, or even train to nurse (and get exported to the rich) or study robotics, whatever, the new hands are needed.

In fact one might argue that the looming energy crisis, well understood by many above us, has, since 15 years at least, re-valorised cheap labor.

Therefore immigration, globalization, de-localization, and so on. And discourse about trickle down and lift all boats. Now to be replaced (in part) with new protectionism.

Great News! This morning's paper has an above-the-fold article about how the Obama administration is floating its idea to hold the 2010 budget increase to DOE's weapons activities to a mere 1.5%! They also have made it clear that any work on replacement/new weapons will cease...ANY work, both 'explicit and implicit'. Also, plans to increase weapons manufacturing capacity will be shelved. This does NOT mean the US of A forfeits its 'most precious' weapons, but does mean the end of the Republican-inspired drive to dump boat-loads of our money down that doomsday rat hole.

NOW is the time for each of you to, as I just did, write each of your Congresspeople and President Obama and enthusiastically endorse this course of action.

Go to the this LANL (Los Alamos National Laboratory) blog and read the story from the Albuquerque Journal, then read the comments from the PhDs of doom who are crapping their pants because they may lose their little Dr.Strangelovian jobs and have to do something that actually serves humanity!

http://lanl-the-rest-of-the-story.blogspot.com/2009/02/nuclear-work-in-d...

I got news for you: America's National Labs are chock-a-block full of self-righteous scientists who rationalize that their work on these abominations keep the red hoards at bay! These labs do very little of their total Level-of-Effort (LOE) pursuing renewable energy research, or pursuing energy efficiency....most of their work is pursuing Doomsday!

If these labs survive at all, the government needs to turn their activities away from the oh-so-quaint but still very real 'doomsday' work and put all these 50-pond heads to work solving the real pressing problems facing America and the World!

Write your Congress-people, the President, and your newspapers Now! Stop paying Billions of dollars for mis-guided scientists to craft slick PowerPoint engineering slides advocating making the next generation of weapons. That time is over.

Also check out this Lawrence Livermore Lab unofficial blog:

http://llnlthetruestory.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2009-01-01T00%3A...

Scroll down and read the story about how the administration wants to put Department of Energy (DOE) lab control under Department of Defense (DoD). This is a HORRIBLE idea. Legislation existing since 1954 has codified that weapons are made and 'owned' by DOE, and DoD gets to 'borrow' them to have ready to use in warfare. This is the essence of having CIVILIAN control over these most destructive devices. Putting the labs under the DoD tent is akin to letting the fox run the hen house. Did I mention that the labs, while being 'government', are really managed by private corporations??? Lockheed-Martin manages (runs) Sandia National Laboratory. Does anyone see anything that stinks here? How many of you realize that your money is being wasted on this 'research' and manufacturing the details of which are shielded from your eyes (no accountability to the people whatsoever) by secrecy laws?

Again, get off your duffs, do some research, and write your congresspeople! All this fine talk about TARP and Stimulus packages ruining our economy and you people don't know or care that DoD and DoE (and now DHS-Dept of Homeland Security) and NSA/CIA/EIEIO have been bleeding you dry for sixty-plus years!

So you want a way to quickly kill off 90% of all humans now living. I have long thought that the worst thing that terrorists could do to America would be to set fire to our vast fields of corn and wheat on some hot August night. It wouldn't be all that difficult. A handful of small planes and a few cases of road flares each and fire lines hundreds of miles long would be roaring by day break. It would make the recent firestorms of Oz look like a marshmallow roast. Within months the world would be in the worst famine imaginable which would not end soon because the hungry would eat the seeds also.

Hardin has written externsively concerning control of population. Biologically many living organisms have reached balanced populations presumably through evolution. A good example is a multicelluar organism, such as our own body. There are lots of different types of cells in our body that keep their numbers within the limit that is needed to maintain the proper functioning of the body. That system does break down though, and the result is then referred to as the person suffering from too many cells of one type, a tumor, or if it is growing, cancer. We as a species have something going for us, that these original cells didn't and had to work out by trial and error. That is a brain that can figure out what needs to be done, and hopefully in way that expands the degree of cooperation such that we can exist in our environment without destroying it or ourselves. Environmental Science courses have been covering these ideas at least since "Silent Spring". Energybulletin.net is a composium of articles where these are discussed and groups are forming to deal with these difficulties.

I wonder if one of those 8 little critters will crack nuclear fusion. We would have to eat our words.

This entry's argument is focused on wrong fundamentals unless he is discussing population controls. The population of the United States is 300000000+ and 14 children arent going to make us any less enrgy dependant. The argument should instead be focused on why 2,744 Americans consume the same amount of Oil Italy does.

another way to control population would be a serious attempt at promoting vasectomy for young men, for example in developed countries a wealthy foundation could sponsor college education for those youths who have the procedure. in poor countries a simple cash payment may be sufficient inducement.
if at a later date the person wants to have a child then they should by then have earned the means to pay an endowment into the state for their child. i am not certain but i imagine medical science is capable of extracting sufficient sperm for impregnation of the partner without reversing the vasectomy.

I once made the facetious comment that a regular lottery could be set up for who would become soylent green thereby solving population and food problem in one stroke. Reading Orlov's latest it seems that mad proposals somehow become more acceptable over time until they seem normal.

Obviously if people were willing to go so far as a soylent green lottery they wold accept sterilizaiton and a reduction of consumption before the situation got out of hand. I think war would be preferable to most as it satisfies more the feeling of actively doing the most possible- create an enemy like muslims or whatever and go kill them- side effect is population reduction, actual biological priority in the first place. Otherwise suicide would be very widespread among intellectuals who understand the problem of resurce depletion and overpopulation and act in the most logical way. The only mass action that will ever be fulfilled is that which a majority will approve or be able to rationalize to themselves in worst scenario. It is more acceptable for most people to die fighting than to pick straws to see who dies so war is inevitable. The chinese one child policy has saved a lot of growth however so benevolent dictators give us some hope. However they have probably more than negated the positive effects of that policy by their increase of resource use since the simultaneous implementation of Deng Xiao Ping's capitalism policies. So the Chinese did one right and one wrong balancing out. USA did both things wrong and 3rd world countries do the population thing wrong.

Shoot, there are so many issues associated with this incident, and the "lifeboat" analogy that the discussion becomes much "crosstalk."

There does seem to be some reason to hope that "freak" incidents like mega-multiple births could increase social awareness by a factor, and in an infinite number of ways that are counter intuitive.

For instance, one of those births could result in a child so repulsed by the nature of his/her inception that they eventually write the most compelling piece of literature ever produced condemning society's lack of insight into the need for population control and contraception.

We can always hope.

I think this also relates - locally. Whether a town has kids, or people move in, the local affect is the same in the short term (in the long term one group will have more children than the other).

The immigration dynamic is an interesting one for America. I heard a woman on NPR saying it was a matter of civil rights to let people immigrate to this country. But what is the big picture?

The problem I have with immigration is the source country doesn't have to change. It can continue it's grow rates locally, because the surplus will go somewhere else. It's BAU for them.

In the case of Somalia it caused a lot of friction in some places. In MA, the schools were required to do language classes. This of course costs money. And people who never had running water will certainly be willing to work for less. It's much like internal globalism - someone without much education (high school only) will have a difficult time keeping their parents way of life when confronted with such issues.

And now you have something similar to this woman's situation - angry people sending death threats because they feel they are getting grifted.

I'm a little mystified as to how this post got on to TOD. Its total content seems to consist of "Crazy Octuplet Lady bad. People think her bad. This is good. Here, read Hardin." Very low content level for the Oil Drum.

But while it isn't the worst post I've seen here, it definitely has led to the lowest level of discussion ever (at least I hope). Glad to see the pro-mass murder doomer contingent is right here, celebrating itself.

As for this inspiring a national discussion - if this is the kind of discussion population limitation activists have, I can promise you now that any national conversation attempted will fail miserably as people recoil in horror at the self-parody of an actual discussion that appears here. I really hope the Obama team was busy elsewhere this weekend.

Suleman is the ideal scapegoat, of course. She's a complete nut job, doing something totally irresponsible that no one, on any side of any political discussion thinks is a good idea. She's not white. She's poor. She's a single Mom. She's an idiot. Yes, she'd be the ideal figure to start a national conversation about population - she feeds every stereotype anyone could possibly want to invoke. I'm sure that this would evolve into a useful and productive conversation, just as it has here (sarcanol on, just in case you can't tell).

And to help with the false dichotomies, we have Hardin, master of them. Thus we are given parameters completely unlike most realities -
Die horribly by kindness vs. throw people overboard; unregulated commons in the absence of democracy not managed by anyone but destroyed by everyone vs. privatization; give back all the land or don't give the Indians anything - as though those were the only choices.

Well, nonsense. We don't live in a lifeboat where we know precisely how many people we can feed in the short term. Right now we produce enough food to feed the projected population growth and then decline - yes, we are doing it by depleting natural capital, yes, we are in overshoot, but this is a chronic situation, only just becoming acute - we don't know if we have time for a managed decline or not, but we're ready to start throwing people overboard (or at least some people are).

Historically speaking, real commons, as opposed to Hardin's sort, were managed by the people who used them - that is, people objected to unrestrained degradation, and enforced it - unrestricted use of the commons arises when things are divided into private and public, the public getting the scraps and the rich getting the commons and the old methods of management are undermined, say in the enclosure of public lands. As Vandana Shiva reminds us, someone alwasys gets rich on this "rescuing" of the commons.

I feel very strongly that the population conversation has to happen - and anyone who has read my blog or my books knows that I feel it so strongly that I'm willing to take the fire I get for having too many children. But I also think that population activists often bring the silence on themselves - and this is a good example of the kind of material that leads to that silence. For example, how would we expect someone to look at a list of "resource use problems" that lists crazy lady's unlikely to ever be duplicated children as an example, then goes on to suggest that we shouldn't try to keep them alive, and only then gets to whether the resource use of the rich matters.

Oy.

Sharon

This article definitely reminds me of the writings of Garrett Hardin.

I have long noticed that however intelligent or otherwise rational, most people fail to acknowledge that population size is the common denominator for all ecological and human economic problems. If we could solve the population growth problem, it would positively affect myriad problems such as anthropogenic climate forcing, energy constraints, pollution problems, and so on... Unfortunately, if there were a million Nadya Suleman's, I still don't believe that a majority would recognize this fact. That's my opinion anyway... I would love to find that this view is wrong, to witness a major shift in the way people think about reproductive freedom or 'rights', taking into consideration long term outcomes and the implications of population size in relation to carrying capacity, energy and resource footprints, and quality of life issues. For me, the prudent thing to do appears to be assuming an overshoot scenario and adjusting our behaviors accordingly. Perhaps in this regard, more like minded people should form communities that put into practice relatively sustainable life styles?