Can we justify having more children?

You can adopt, in the here and now, vegan-organic fruit and vegetable production sufficient for a family of five vegans on an average sized allotment. To me, this is no less than the key to environmental salvation and veganism's most under-rated big idea. Within a vegan organic system you can compost most of your family's outputs. You can vastly reduce reliance on transport to get stuff from retailers. Due to your proximity to nature, it keeps you fit physically and mentally.

Only vegans can attain such a self-contained, environmentally respectful means of subsistence in which a proportionate number of children is a cause of celebration rather than uneasy guilt. We can finally unlink human activity and degradation of the earth. It hardly prejudices other species at all, indeed many vegan-organic methods cause them to flourish. I recognise that the widespread adoption of small scale vegan-organic production is a distant prospect, but may become more popular when the oil-based economy finally implodes.

I wouldn't want to replace God with nature. I think any analysis which does this mistakenly confers earth/nature with a vengeful, godlike quality. Nature just is, it doesn't decide anything. I think humans often put themselves in one place analytically and nature somewhere else: either above or below them. Surely the answer is we ARE nature. The boundary of our skin is arbitrary and cultural (and, anyway, permeable). So if we abuse nature, we degrade ourselves - a direct, non-mystical union.

If we carry on living how we live, burning resources like there's no tomorrow, we're sunk. Any utopian argument based upon everyone living their 'modern lifestyles' will inevitably reach the same conclusion.

The form of vegan living I'm promoting does not require an ever-increasing transport network and foreign travel. If a large family can mostly feed itself from a piece of land about the same size as a tennis court, and in doing so re-use most of its 'waste', the present problems of environmental degradation largely disappear. I accept that housing is an issue, although I suspect a lesser one if the existing housing stock was distributed fairly, and if ecologically friendly design becomes mandatory.

To those who say this is utopian, I simply ask how does conventional living stack up without cheap fossil fuels? Quite simply, it doesn't. Everything we now take as normal will be swept away, probably within our lifetimes. It's already happening. That is the reality we have to address and a reduction in the number of births is a distraction from the main issues. I still think vegans are among the best placed to confer an holistic outlook onto their children. To attempt to deny them the opportunity is tantamount to rolling over in front of the urban industrial machine. Vegan family values may seem puny in the face of conventional ideas of 'freedom', but truth is surely always worth cultivating.