Categories: comments
Join 2,263 other subscribers
Search Rapid Ecology Posts
@RapidEcology
Tags
academia academic life alternative reproductive traits anxiety bees biodiversity bioindicators Career classics climate change community engagement conservation conservation biology cover letters discussion classes diversity early career researchers ecology ecology revisited ecosystem ecology evolutionary ecology fieldwork fish fungi grad school grad student Grad students graduate education graduate school graduate students How I work interdisciplinary research interviews journal journal articles kelp forests labor learning manuscript submission marine biology mentoring mentorship New Zealand of a grad student Organization ornithology peer review PhD PhD life phd students population ecology postdoc R reflections rejection research research community scholarships SciComm Science science communication science policy scientist profile sexual harassment skill development statistics students teaching time-management undergraduate institutions warming wetlands women in science women in STEM Work-life balance
Rapid Ecology 
Regarding Casey terHosts post on the “The Avengers: Infinity War has an important ecological lesson”:
I enjoyed reading the post about how overpopulation at the root of many modern/future ecological problems links to the motivation of the movie’s villain.
I also agree with a good part of the conclusions drawn by the author and while I hope that a general discussion on the issue will start sooner than later I feel rather pessimistic about its potential success. Be it socio-cultural, economical, religious, historical, political, personal, etc. – about any other dimension of the question is quite literally a bee’s nest when advocating for a conscious decision to have fewer children. This proposed (drastic) solution requires a certain degree of abstraction and retraction of personal interests (weighing of options on a long-term scale with little to no personal gain whatsoever (many may consider it even a loss)) that links probability of consideration tightly with how close to K we come.
I have very little insight as to how much of this bigger question of overpopulation is being discussed and investigated in other fields with regards to possible alternatives or implementation attempts of the fewer children-solutions, aside from China’s one-child policy (which had strong effects on the sex-ratio of newborn children). If anything this post spurred me to look more into it.
Thank you for the post.
All of this is very much linked to my personal feelings and impressions and I mean no offense to anyone’s life decisions about children.
As a quick follow-up: I did not mean to endorse China’s One-Child Policy as a good solution. The misery it brought to many children who happened to be born outside of the politically enforced quota and live without official registration as a citizen and all of the connected problems (involving human trafficking among other terrible consequences) sets a strong example for how very much of a flawed attempt to tackle the problem, this policy was.
see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heihaizi