Does making babies ruin the planet and kill animals? Another view of Mother’s Day

You recycle religiously, carpool to work, eat low on the food chain, and donate some bucks now and then to conservation groups. You care deeply about the planet and its animals, and do what you can to protect them.

Meanwhile, you’re planning to have a kid or two, or maybe you’ve already had them.

If so, your efforts toward an eco-correct and animal-friendly life can be nullified, in the view of some prominent thinkers.

Your carbon legacy

However, the authors continued, “there has been relatively little emphasis on the environmental consequences of the reproductive choices of an individual person.”

In the journal Global Environmental Change, Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax reported their findings that “under current conditions in the United States, for example, each child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions.”

That’s not even counting the grandchildren of that female, or her great-grandchildren and beyond.

“A person’s reproductive choices must be considered along with his day-to-day activities when assessing his ultimate impact on the global environment,” cautioned Murtaugh and Schlax.

Difficult personal choice

“At 32, I met the beautiful man who is now my husband, Ian,” wrote actress Alexandra Paul in her Huffington Post blog "Married, Without Children." “Just before we married, he and I went to counseling to resolve the one issue upon which we didn't agree: if we had kids, he wanted a child of his own flesh and blood and I wanted to adopt.”

Paul, who starred on the hit TV show Baywatch, was commended by the United Nations for her environmental activism, given the International Green Cross Award, and was recently selected as one of the "19 Greatest Ocean Heroes of All Time" by The Daily Green.

“I had produced a film about overpopulation and spoken to over 6,000 Los Angeles students on the overpopulation crisis,” she wrote. “What began as an instinct as a child was now backed by solid statistics. The world population had doubled in my lifetime. How could I be part of the problem by adding more people to the planet?”

Human overpopulation deemed to be the top danger to animals

On her About.com page, biologist and animal rights attorney Doris Lin called human overpopulation “the #1 threat to animals worldwide… Human activities, including mining, transportation, pollution, agriculture, development, and logging, take habitat away from wild animals as well as kill animals directly. These activities also contribute to climate change, which threatens even the most remote wild habitats on this planet and our own survival.”

“Americans constitute only five percent of the world’s population, but consume 26% of the world’s energy,” wrote Lin. “Because we consume so much more than most people around the world, we can have the most impact when we choose to have fewer children or no children.”

Various animal protection groups blame the expanding human consumption of space and resources for the 30 percent decrease in populations of species ranging from fish to mammals between 1970 and 2003.

“The more people you have out there, the more demand for wildlife, food and habitat for wildlife,” said Stephen Sautner of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), as reported by Michelle Zenarosa on PopulationConnection.org. “It’s definitely all driven by population numbers. The more people you have, the less space there is and more mouths you have to feed.”

A no-kids environmental ethic?

In her blog on Grist, Lisa Hymas identified a new species of humans. “I call myself a GINK,” she wrote, “green inclinations, no kids.”

“Here's a simple truth,” she explained. “For an average person like me—someone who doesn't have the ability of an Al Gore to reach millions, or of a Nancy Pelosi to advance (if not actually enact) landmark environmental legislation, or of a Van Jones to inspire (and p**s off) whole new audiences—the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children.”

Are you a GINK or a proud parent? How do you feel about the eco-impact of biological parenthood? Animal Beat invites your opinions.