Jonah Goldberg had a guest on his podcast this week discussing demography, and one point they brought up was that a larger family can actually reduce your “carbon footprint,” because you stay home a lot more.
Just the travel habits of well-off people with one or two children use more ... atoms, or something ... than my whole family for years.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/remnant-jonah-goldberg/like-a-lyman-stone/
The notion of limiting number of children is a side effect of the industrial revolution.
People in crowded housing, in crowded cities, must compete for limited number of jobs, and their pay is in meager coins. They’re separated from their food & must buy it.
Too many mouths to feed/ not enough coins = poverty.
In agrarian society, more children were an asset, not a liability.
Land + children = wealth.
Since families depended DIRECTLY on the land for their food,
more kids= more little farmhands!
More tilling, more planting & harvesting, more canning, drying, “putting up” for next season, more cows could be milked, tended, etc.