Babies and Water

Babies and water are two words that have been in the news a lot lately. It seems that we don’t have enough of either, and so there is a great push to get more of both. If you drill down a little deeper, however, you find that the issue is not so much that we don’t have enough babies or water; it’s that we don’t have enough of them in the places we need want them.

Water

“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Let’s start with water. The Los Angeles wildfires, which to date have burned tens of thousands of acres, caused almost $50 billion in damage, and killed 29 people, were the result of a lethal combination of extremely dry conditions and powerful winds. The fires spurred a presidential demand to bring in water from northern California, immediately and in huge quantities. This is not a new concept. Humans have been moving water around for millennia, and we have learned along the way that it’s not quite as simple as opening valves in a couple of reservoirs and declaring “victory.” The billions of gallons that spewed out from those Central Valley dams cannot flow uphill and over mountains. Consequently, the water will never reach Los Angeles. It is now, however, unavailable to the farmers who will need it later in the year.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will be hearing a great deal about the notion that a river is little more than a pipe, whose function is to transport water wherever and whenever we want it – and that any drop of a river’s water that makes it to the ocean is wasted. This is dangerous nonsense. If it were true, the Colorado River, whose polluted dregs trickle into the sand several miles before short of the Gulf of California, would be the most successful river in America. Unfortunately, it is dying, and this kind of thinking is one more nail in its coffin. Ironically, the Colorado provides Los Angeles about half its fresh water. It would be far better for the future of the city if we spent more effort protecting this majestic river and less engaging in political stunts.

Babies

“When she says she’s a pronatalist, she’s putting her life on the line in service of her belief system.” Malcolm Collins

As for babies, there is growing concern about falling birth rates worldwide, from five live births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 today – and projected to be 2.1 by 2050. Not all that long ago, this would have been considered a good thing. As global population more than doubled to 8.2 billion after 1970, the world focused on the impact of such growth on the world’s resources. Now, thanks in no small part to rising living standards and female autonomy, birth rates plummeting. Countries are worried about sustaining their populations and providing enough young people to take care of their old people. The fear of “population collapse” has spawned a new pronatalist movement.

But as with water, there is more to the story of babies. Right now, it is the rich nations – from the U.S. to Europe to China – that are experiencing the greatest declines in birth rates. On the other hand, more than half of the world’s babies will soon be born in sub-Saharan Africa. Neither at our own southern border nor in our inner cities do I hear many people complaining about a shortage of young children. In fact, even as migration is projected to be the sole driver of their population growth, rich nations are locking their doors against those who might actually be able to help.

We might want to rethink these two matters. For each of them asks us is to re-imagine ourselves, not as exploiters of the planet, but as co-inhabitants, living peacefully with our neighbors and in harmony with the earth.