Go green: have fewer kids, says environmentalist

The environmentalist Jonathon Porritt must be horrified at the behaviour of Nadya Suleman, who has just had octuplets to go with the six children she had already. Porritt, who chairs the government's Sustainable Development Commission, has told the Times that couples who have more than two children are being "irresponsible" by creating an unbearable burden on the environment. He argues that political leaders and green campaigners can no longer duck the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

"I am unapologetic about asking people to connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint and how they decide to procreate and how many children they think are appropriate," Porritt said. "I think we will work our way towards a position that says that having more than two children is irresponsible. It is the ghost at the table. We have all these big issues that everybody is looking at and then you don't really hear anyone say the 'p' word."

Porritt is fully aware that he is treading on dangerous ground. Environmental groups have shied away from linking population growth and its possible impact on the environment because it is such an explosive issue.

"Many organisations think it is not part of their business. My mission with the Friends of the Earth and the Greenpeaces of this world is to say: You are betraying the interests of your members by refusing to address population issues and you are doing it for the wrong reasons because you think it is too controversial," he said.

The arguments over the impact of population growth go back to Thomas Malthus, the English economist. In his 1798 work An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus argued that increases in population would eventually diminish the ability of the world to feed itself, and based this conclusion on the thesis that populations expand in such a way as to overtake the development of sufficient land for crops. Porritt has added an environmental twist to the Malthusian thesis.

Some have already forcefully rejected the link between population and environment. Frank Furedi, the author of Population and Development, dismisses such arguments as a counsel of despair.

By calling into question the special quality of the human, the population-control lobby seeks to corrode people's confidence in their ability to tackle the problems of the future. Human life should always be treated as precious and special. How can there possibly be too many of us?

For Dominic Lawson, a columnist for the Independent, any government interference on the highly personal decision to have children would amount to an intolerable erosion of personal freedom.

For the state to intervene in any way in the most personal and precious decision of our private lives would be a reduction of freedom dwarfing in significance all the minor infringements which have already occurred over such apparently unacceptable activities as the hunting of foxes while wearing red coats or smoking in private clubs.

Lawson points to some of the nasty consequences of China's one-child policy, a male-female birth rate of between 115 and 118 males to 100 women, rape, abduction (of females for brides) and female infanticide.

Porritt has clearly touched on a controversial topic. Does he have the right?