The “Don’t Have Kids” Argument Has Been Wrong for 1,800 Years

Around the year 200, a lawyer turned theologian in Roman Carthage looked at the world and declared it full.Human beings had become a burden to the Earth, Tertullian wrote; nature could scarcely sustain us, and he counted plague, famine and war as a merciful pruning of overgrown nations. When he wrote that, the entire human species numbered about two hundred million. Indonesia holds more people than that today, on one archipelago, eating better and living longer than any citizen of Carthage ever managed.Tertullian’s complaint is the oldest surviving version of the argument you’re hearing on every degrowth podcast and in every doomer-laden comment section: the planet is at capacity, its future already spent, so the most irresponsible thing you could add to it is a child.Every few generations someone makes the argument all over again - theology first, then political economy, then ecology, and now carbon accounting. Every generation updates the numbers but they keep the same, flawed…