People rarely link sex to global warming. But any activity that occurs 215 million times a day is bound to affect global health. And it’s high time we started talking about it, according to environmentalist and author Robert Engleman, who has a new book called More: Population, Nature, and What Women Want.

In an interview with Reuters, Engleman discussed the delicacy of bringing this issue into mainstream dialogue: “[E]ven to bring it up, as an issue, it sounds as though you are telling other people how many children to have, and that is unforgivable as reproduction and having children is so sensitive and so personal.” He explained that racial sensitivity makes the issue even more volatile: in general, Northern Caucasians have fewer babies than other demographics.

But Engleman is not afraid to (gently) name the problem: “[W]e wouldn’t be facing a potentially catastrophically changing climate if we hadn’t had to feed and care for an unprecedentedly large human population." Although homo sapiens have now succeeded in dominating every “nook and cranny” of the globe, we must keep in mind that the planet has its own ways of dealing with overpopulation. Hopefully, we can slow population growth enough on our own to prevent tragedies like famine or disease.

Engleman believes that the way to do this is to give women reproductive freedom. He points out that women tend to have more children when their environment is healthy, and fewer children when their environment is, say, heating up at an alarming yearly rate.

For this reason, Engleman doesn’t believe that governments should tell women what to do or should take any measures to encourage or discourage procreation. Rather, he feels that if women have access to quality reproductive healthcare, they naturally make the right decisions for themselves and the planet.

Photo: Reuters