Next season: "Who dat?! No seriously, who dat at quarterback for the New Orleans Saints? I have no idea who dat is."
Does "having too many kids" play a part in your views on how we as humans affect the environment? Carbon footprint, and what not.
That is an essay prompt question. To try and keep it short: we as humans, yes. Individuals like Rivers, less so. Humans in situations with high infant and child mortality tend to have more kids, and those in situations of low mortality tend to have less. This is not coincidental. As child mortality decreases, having large families means having to spread resources more thinly amongst the children, unless there are feedbacks that make having more children increase the security of the parents. Thus, culturally on a population level we tend to slant towards an optimum balance between number of kids and resources and security-- though there can be a lag of a generation or two. So it isn't really about Rivers or other individuals who can adequately support those kids, it is about building communities and societies where we optimize for sustainable families through low mortality, elder security, etc. With a healthy society and adequate resource allocation, natural human behavior will balance out between couples that only want one or two kids and more financial freedom, and couples who want 6 kids because they loooove kids or whatever. "Having kids" isn't really something I would put in a carbon footprint inventory. Those kids each have their own associated footprints, so that would be double-counting. I also don't think there is some malthusian limit, as the more people on Earth, the more small changes in collective behavior dramatically affect the overall footprint and technology constantly responds to these things. In conclusion, shit's complicated, what is more important than number of kids is outcome, sustainability and quality of life.
I also don't think we are in the population crisis that we might have thought we would be in 30 or 50 years ago. As countries become more prosperous and better healthcare is available, people have a tendency to have fewer and fewer kids. I think we are going to stabilize and actually contract our population in the next 100 years. Look at places like Italy that are begging people to move there. Japan is going to be in that same boat.
