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.