The Non-Breeding Option being exercised more and more pervasively of late demonstrates that Mother Nature can be kind. This contemporary system of Hers embraces traditions like:

  • contraception, sterilization;
  • same-sex marriage;
  • abstinence, celibacy, asexuality;
  • other options you can probably think of; and
  • new ones we will invariably think up.

Whatever its manifestation, the system does appear to be New and Improved over traditional adjustments to overpopulation like

  • atrociously high infant morality rates;
  • war and other mass murders;
  • natural disasters;
  • famine;
  • plague/pestilence;

and so forth. Those age-old methods of keeping human numbers manageable, several of which are still in vogue, entail untold

  • suffering,
  • cruelty,

and downright

  • sin

at times.

But the Non-Breeding Option—either as

  • a rational and conscious choice

or as

  • a genetic modification affecting the instincts and/or predisposition of recent and upcoming generations of a too-fertile species (ours)—

may be “just what The Doctor ordered” (the capitalization of which keeps the previous phrase from being a total cliché, I hope you agree). No national prophet could say today “Go forth and multiply” without being readily identified with the aims not of any God, national or otherwise, but of Gods’ nemesis.

Anyway, that’s what Mother Nature tells me every time I meet

  • singles like myself; or
  • Non-Breeding couples,

especially if they have

  • adopted kids;

or have, by design,

  • had only one or two children

so as to fulfill their genetic proclivity to reproduce but not necessarily increase the human population on a planet being strangled and slowly destroyed by same.

She also tells me to come up with a new moniker, not using the negative prefix “non.” “Think up a term conveying that this new system is a positive value in its own right. To say you are ‘Non-anything’ already concedes that the ‘anything’ is the norm, which implies that you are deviating from that supposed norm. But you are not deviant at all. You are considerate.

“What is more, adjusting behavior patterns to altered circumstances is how The Whole Thing has worked since Time began—dynamically, not statically. Otherwise we would still have the dinosaurs, right? What you must try to do is help to make The New Way the new norm—a new norm, at any rate—without resorting to legislation limiting or discouraging over-reproductivity (as China, mid-crisis, tried for awhile), but simply by spreading The Word, that is, common sense and decency.”

Terms like

  • “Planet-Respecting Option” and
  • “Lovers of Nature”

have come to mind as more positive alternatives to

  • “Non-Breeding Option,”

but do not quite nail it, I think, so I am still open to suggestions.

By the way, every time I wonder if I have heard Her correctly, I hear even more clearly: “No, James, you’ve got it right:

  • Love’s great, though you cannot always act upon it.
  • Lust’s natural, though you should not always act upon it.
  • But love The Planet too—and act on that love always.
  • Say it over and over like a seer.
  • Try to get everybody to hear!”

And when I do, like here, I feel not just

  • the approbation of The Divine,

but also, as from hosts in heaven,

  • Their Applause.