In Green Mars, book 2 of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, an interesting child birth licensing program was suggested. Most government led population control or reduction programs either have undesirable side effects (like sex selective abortions and skewed populations) or are unpopular because they are draconian. The suggestion in the book attempted to make child bearing a consciously economic decision. It would have worked thus:
1. Each person would have a license to have 0.75 child.
2. When the person finds a partner, their combined licenses would yield 1.5 children.
3. After having 1 kid, they can either sell their surplus 0.5 child license or buy another couple's 0.5 license so they can have another kid.
I was intrigued by the idea. Of course there is the question of how to enforce the restrictions of the license. It would require universal reversible sterilization at birth or at some point before puberty. Doing that would be nigh impossible, what with religious beliefs about "go forth and multiply", ethnic objectives of domination as a result of larger populations (Israel & Palestine, White Genocide) and so on.
It is also a bit odd on the surface that a book on colonization of space would still be fretting about population. Such a worry is not out of place when one considers the book's fidelity to science. If population growth is a problem, it will not be solved by exporting the surplus to space but by fixing conditions here.
I am a bit of an environmentalist. I think human use of the earth is detrimental to other life. Unfortunately, until the current dominant thinking which holds the meanest human life as worthier than that of other animals' changes, we will keep harming those animals. And bad as it may be, the animals might be better for it. At least when they are dead, they will be spared the privations we visit on them. As for us, even though the world might be poorer for it, most of us will never know. After all, how has the extinction of the dodo or the mammoth made my life worse?
Iron Noder 2020, 15/30