What is the most important discussion you could have with your children or a young person dear to you? Don’t do drugs? No means no? Practice safe sex? Take care of your mental health? Stop using plastic? How about: should you have’ children?
It s not a question about population control. While we’re heading for 9.7 billion people (by 2050) on the planet, population experts tell us we ’ ll reach a peak of 11 billion in 2100 and then begin to decline. Left to our own devices, we will naturally start to reduce population levels.
Rather, the question is one of how messed up a place the world is. Do our youth want to bring children into the kind of world that awaits them?
While many generations before this one considered their times to be the most terrible yet faced — think slavery, think plague, think emerging from the ruins of World War 2 — this may just be the first generation that will witness humanity falling off the edge of cliff — a cliff of our own making.
In his opening remarks to the United Nations’ 25th Conference of Parties (COP 25) on climate change in the first week of December, secretary-general António Guterres was clear: “At current trends, we are looking at global heating of between 3.4 and 3.9ºC by the end of the century”.
Referring to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest reports, Guterres didn’t pull any punches: “We are knowingly destroying the very support systems keeping us alive”.
This is what we know. Global average levels of carbon dioxide have now reached the same levels of CO² concentration last seen on the planet 3 to 5 million years ago. The last five years have been the hottest ever recorded, Antarctica is melting three times as fast as a decade ago, permafrost in the Artic is thawing 70 years ahead of projections and our ocean levels are rising quicker than expected.
Add to this the pollution of everything, the decimation of other living organisms to the extent it’s been dubbed the world’s “sixth extinction event”, the destruction of natural forests and habitats to feed our insatiable desire for meat — is there any doubt that the world is pretty much a messed up place? And by 2050, what then?
Unfortunately, this isn ’ t a 21st Century movie write-up of the Grinch who stole Christmas.
Even though it may feel that way, it’s simply what we can reliably expect — greater weather extremes, drought, water scarcity and rising sea levels. And we’re heading off this cliff knowingly.
And if by some kindness the Christmas Fairy grants us a wish that allows us to ignore the global reality, the SA picture doesn’t get better. Statistics SA have released a number of recent reports that bring no Christmas cheer. It is the unholy trinity of social challenges: poverty, unemployment and inequality.
By example, 30.4 million South Africans (our current population is close to 59 million) live on the equivalent of R992 a month or less. Out of our estimated working population of 38.6 million, only 16.4 million are employed.
And we are by many estimates the most unequal country in the world. To illustrate the point, 53% of all household expenditure is spent by the richest 10% of the population. If we thought we could leave it to the next generation to solve this, of those currently between the ages of 15 to 34, an estimated 14.5 million are adjudged to either be unemployed or economically inactive.
Assume the Christmas Fairy allows us a second wish that enables us to only see our city, to ignore the world, to ignore the state of SA, then the Grinch will have truly arrived. Our mayor’s response to being publicly told by the Business Chamber that the city is dysfunctional, is to deflect to race — he’s reported to have said it is whites who have stolen the water. Not the drought, not the collapsing infrastructure, not the lack of a municipal Day Zero-type strategy, but people who appear different to himself.
It ’ s at this point that a column of this nature is meant to leave the door slightly ajar to allow Father Christmas to sneak in with the gift of hope. But there is no hope, just as there is no Christmas Fairy offering us three wishes. The only gift left in the bag is choice.
But what kind of choice? When my generation still qualified as youth, we wanted to go forth, we had seen the Christmas lights, apartheid was over, the world beckoned, there was no Grinch in sight. But that’s not how it is seen today. As a young person said to me recently, the ship is going down so either we do nothing or we party hard on the deck until we sink below the waves.
The UN ’ s Guterres has a different view. According to him we stand at a critical juncture faced with two paths. One is the “path of surrender”, whereby we sleepwalk past the point of no return, jeopardising the wellbeing of future generations. Or we choose a “path of resolve”, a path of sustainable solutions whereby fossil fuel stays in the ground and we achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.
But that, according to Guterres, requires a transformational approach, not an incremental one, a “rapid and deep change in the way we do business, how we generate power, how we build cities, how we move, and how we feed the world.”
And therein lies the second part of the conversation with our youth. If their choice is to bring more lives into being on this planet, there is a precondition.
We must by then have learnt to see our place in the world differently — that it’s not about how much we can extract to optimise our pleasure, but about how we collectively ensure that every creature on the planet has clean air to breathe, non-toxic water to drink or swim in and sufficient food that doesn’t poison us.