Less is more

It’s time to lighten up about falling birthrates, says George Monbiot. The world will be a happier and better place with fewer people

There is a group in North America — I am not joking — whose motto is ‘Back to the Pleistocene’. Its followers would like human society to revert not just to a pre-industrial past, but to a pre-agricultural one. Humans would subsist on the untended fruits of nature, hunting the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air, gathering roots and berries from the derelict cityscapes reclaimed by the wild.

It all sounds rather splendid, if you are young, fit, perfectly sighted, and don’t mind dying before you reach 40. But there’s another small problem: that without farming, the earth could support not the six billion people who are alive today, but just a few hundred thousand. The vision of the members of North American EarthFirst (the folk who put the mental into environmentalism) is achievable only with the annihilation of almost all of mankind. One might have expected them, therefore, to volunteer themselves as the first ecological suicide corps. But, like all such people, they picture themselves as the survivors, not the victims, of humanity’s great extinction.

We scoff, and yet …which of us can honestly say that we do not in some measure share this impulse? The middle classes take their holidays as far away from the mass of humanity as they can. The industrialists who make their money by mobilising human labour use it to escape from the people who have enriched them, creating their own private Edens, within which they hunt the beasts of the earth and the fowls of the air. EarthFirst’s scary fantasy scarcely differs from the aristocratic idyll to which all British people aspire.

One of the most popular books ever written — The Lord of the Rings — tells the story of a pre-industrial civilisation taking on an industrial one and winning.