One green baby

Cuthbertson believes this is an issue that is being strangely overlooked by many environmentalists. Though she has many friends in the movement, she knows of no-one like herself who has made the decision to go childfree for the sake of the planet.

"I talk to a lot of green people," she says, "and many of them agree with the theory, but there's always a but'. They'll say something like but I'd like a little one of me running around'." In reality, Cuthbertson is not entirely alone in her view. The idea that one of the major contributors to climate change is sheer human numbers has been lurking around on the fringes of green thought for some time. Indeed, there are a few high-profile exponents of it, among them Prince Charles's environmental advisor Jonathan Porritt and Sir Crispin Tickell. And yet, according to Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the British Antarctic Survey and now director of the Science Museum, this remains the Cinderella issue of the climate-change debate. Even the major environmental organisations are barely touching it. As Porritt has said: "I can't recall any environmental or climate-change organisation ever suggesting that births averted' is probably the single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using."

Of course, population control has been around for some time, ever since Thomas Malthus first put forward his theory on how human population growth might exceed the capacities of the Earth to sustain it. Yet, despite its Malthusian origins, population control remains strangely marginalised by the 21st-century green agenda. Perhaps that is because the very idea became tainted with far-right politics during the last century. It acquired a bad name through its associations with attempts not only to control just the size of population, but also who had children and who didn't. As a result, today it comes loaded with a baggage of eugenics, racism and demographic manipulation.

I first came across the population issue, in its climate change-related form, as a small side issue in a lecture by Professor Rapley at this year's Edinburgh International Science Festival. At the time my son was almost a year old and I began to wonder if I should be considering such matters when thinking about whether to have another child. I certainly hadn't entertained them in any decision-making about this first one. Was what I had already done in having my first child my biggest environmental crime? Was it far more considerable than any of the flights that had sent me into spasms of guilt over the past few years?

In spite of the fact that this remains a Cinderella subject, an examination of online discussions reveals that interest in the topic is growing. Momentum is building in the wake of the oil-powered juggernaut of climate change. Population is an issue for those concerned about it, not just because of rising CO levels, but because of a growing re-engagement with the idea of peak oil, recent food crises, and a renewed sense that the planet's resources are not infinite. Yet, for all that this argument is out there, discussed on many internet forums (mainly by men), it is incredibly hard to find anyone with the commitment to live by it. Many of the advocates of the idea were in their 50s or older and had already made their contribution to the next generation of world population. Rapley and Porritt, for instance, have two children each. Was there anyone of my own generation, particularly any woman, who was making decisions based on this?

In the end I tracked down Cuthbertson through Friends of the Earth. Even she, however, isn't so great a purist that she sacrificed a personal dream. Like the only other woman I could find who said she had chosen not to have children for the sake of the environment, she also admitted that she did not want them anyway. She claims she has "no maternal instinct", by which she means "no desire to bring children into my family, my house or my life". Indeed, she would rather "have an arm lopped off" than go through pregnancy, which she finds horrifying. She hasn't always felt like this, though, and recalls how in her early 20s, while at university, she wanted "a child for every day of the week". But time, life experience, and a husband who didn't like the idea of having children helped to change her mind. It is only in recent years that her decision has acquired its environmental dimension. Her commitment to the green cause, however, is unquestionable. I believe her when she says that if her feelings about having a child did change in the coming years, she would adopt rather than have her own. Her current behaviour bears this out. A calculation of her carbon footprint came out as 4.5 tonnes, less than half the national average of 9.8 tonnes.

One of the reasons it is so difficult to find child-abstinent environmentalists, it seems, is that there is a tendency among greens to reproduce. As one person I interviewed told me, on the whole, environmentalists tend also to be family-makers. Does this mean that they currently experience some conflict between their desires to produce a low carbon footprint and the urge to produce the pitter-patter of tiny footprints? On the whole it seems not. The population debate, after all, is one that is relatively muted even within the green movement.

Karen Sellers is 42 years old, has five children, and lives near Tain, in Ross-shire, where she moved six years ago to escape the materialism of London. She came from a family with a strong green sensibility and has been reducing, reusing and recycling since long before many of the rest of us ever knew of these three Rs. When she was seven years old her mother went along to her primary school and insisted they instal recycling bins for paper. Her own personal carbon contribution is well below the average at around seven tonnes. In her home bedrooms go unheated, lights are religiously switched off, and clothes, almost always second-hand, go two days before washing.

I put to her the argument that the best thing one can do for the environment is not to have children, or at least to have fewer children. "That's utter rubbish," she says. "People tend to spend the most money on their first child and subsequently, through financial restraints, move on to second-hand and hand-me-downs." For this reason, she considers, many people with big families are less wasteful and have, per person, a smaller footprint. She also believes her children will be less consumer-oriented than the average child. Indeed, one of her daughters recently stuck a Post-it note on her brother's light switch saying, "Turn the lights off. You are killing polar bears."

Even Cuthbertson agrees there is an argument to say that someone like Sellers or herself ought to have children, "because I'd be educating them to be the next generation of green thinkers".

In the UK, the loudest voice arguing for population concern is an organisation called the Optimum Population Trust, whose frightening predictions regularly surface in the press. Their concern on the whole is not so much climate change, but what the human "carrying capacity" of the planet is, and their current plea is for parents to "stop at two".

One of the patrons of the trust is Aubrey Manning, a distinguished biologist and broadcaster based at the University of Edinburgh. In 1966, when few gave much of a thought about the environment, Manning joined a group, called the Conservation Society, which later dissolved. Its slogan at the time was "population, resources and environment". For him that "rang a bell". It seemed self-evident to Manning, as a biologist used to dealing with concepts of habitat, niche and population density, that this was an issue. He recalls being perplexed by the emphasis there was in our culture on human population growth.

"I remember newspaper articles in which it would say that some politician sees prosperity ahead in growing communities." He noted too, how the growth in population, was termed often termed "natural growth", as if it was the natural state of affairs for numbers to keep on increasing. "Any biologist," he says, "could tell you that growth is most unnatural. It never lasts for long. Populations may grow, but eventually they will pull back."

Manning did not abstain from having children, though one could say he stuck to the trust's slogan of stopping at two. With his first wife, he had two children. One died, and they went on to adopt another. Later, after his first wife died, he married again and his second wife pushed to have a child, making his end biological tally two. "Of course," he says now, "having that child from my second marriage is the best thing that ever happened. I became besotted with him immediately. But I cannot see that I would have added anything more to my life by having yet another child."

Critics of population control often point out that in 1968, when Paul Ehrlich published his Malthusian book The Population Bomb, people were saying the world's resources were running out, and yet we have gone on growing. They cite Ehrlich's predictions that "by 1985 enough millions will have died to reduce the Earth's population to some acceptable level, like 1.5 billion people." Manning points out that this does not mean the basic theory was wrong. "Over the years, we have managed, if you like, to push the wall back. But we're getting closer to the wall at the end of the cul-de-sac. In fact, Malthus was absolutely right, but he hadn't taken into account fossil fuels and modern medicine. In the end we will reach the limit."

There are good reasons, of course, why population has remained, as one proponent put it, "the elephant in the room". As Matthew Connelly describes in his book, Fatal Misconception, the population-control movement does not have a good record in terms of human rights. Globally, many people have been sterilised in its name. In China, where the one-child policy is believed to have restricted its population growth, a situation has resulted where there are 115 boys to every 100 girls, female infanticide is not uncommon, and those born outside the one-child policy are not recognised as citizens. But, at the same time, there are less obvious and overt population policies that affect us in a less threatening way, shaping the way we plan our families. Governments are constantly trying to influence population, whether that be through family-friendly tax credits or calls for increased immigration.

Manning, as an advocate of population control, says he has been attacked over the years by many people, including "the conventional left, the old-fashioned left and, to some extent, by feminists". Often people accuse of him of being anti-human. "I've been called a fascist and a racist. I could certainly answer the racism thing. I believe that western Europe is grossly overpopulated. The strain on the environment is population x resource consumption' and Britain outstrips Bangladesh, which has three times the population, because of our consumption."

No-one I talked to advocated anything so draconian as China's one-child policy, yet still, the mere phrase "population control" is like a lighted fuse. It's not just that it could threaten rights and freedoms, it's also that it offends a core value. People, on the whole, love babies. We think of them as a gift. They bring joy to our days. I feel this myself. It has been the most wonderful thing in my life to have a child, and the idea that his presence in the world might somehow be an environmental negative is hard to contemplate.

There are other issues, too, that weigh against the argument for having fewer children. Who will look after us in our old age? What will happen to our housing market when we start to need fewer houses rather than more? Few serious answers are ever provided to these questions, principally because the issues are rarely debated. Because population is such a hot potato, it has remained relatively absent from all the talk about climate change. As a result, the green orthodoxy of "sustainable development" remains the classic economist's one: that growth is good, and decline is bad. As Manning puts it: "Population growth is linked with economic growth. People talk about sustainable development all the time. What they usually mean is sustainable growth, which is by definition not sustainable."