Scrooges trying to stamp out humanity

BEFORE they built the houses, it seems that my biodiverse garden was a tiny bit of unadventurous pasture land where someone kept sheep. Its multi-species variety is a result of somebody living in the house next to it. Want some cuttings? This paradise for a million micro-species, the worm and, alas, the slug, has been created by that two-legged beast that the commentators accuse of leaving that nasty negative thing, a “carbon footprint”. The very language of that accusation, with its tonnes of carbon being left because I do this or do that, has a common theme running through it. It is exactly the spirit of lockdown, if you like – if it’s fun, stop doing it; if you do it, we’ll punish it by law.

Not difficult to see where this worse than censorious spirit comes from. It’s got nothing to do with botany.

A commentator is asked, “Should we be having another child?”

No-one, it seems, objects to this question being asked. Scrooge suddenly invades the privacy and the dignity of the individual. Should any pundit anywhere be telling us not to have another child? Particularly the well-heeled ivory-tower dwellers of the Western populationist academies? After all, the human beings we have at present are going to die off – all of them. If couples don’t have two children or more (those who can manage it, perhaps three) then not only will the carbon footprint be diminished, but the planet will die. Parts of the world with the biggest censoriousness – Europe, North America, Japan perhaps – are dying already demographically, relying desperately for fresh people from parts of the world where they still believe in human autonomy – and in fun – and don’t inhibit it by law.

UK public policy appears to regard a Down syndrome pregnancy as a disaster. Keith Mason, father of a Down syndrome girl, says: “When my daughter Maria wakes up in the morning, her smile could illuminate the world. Without fail, she melts even the hardest of hearts.”

Innocence, fun, the harum-scarum of family, the very possibilities of mixed and biodiverse humanity are to be despised because of our big “carbon footprints” all over the place – like a happily playing child’s garden mud over the kitchen floor of some super-pernickety homemaker.

Has it really come to this – that the commentators can’t see the human child being happy, but can only see the mud? (Mud is good stuff, by the way. Put some on your beans.)

Joseph Biddulph

Pontypridd