In the phrase,”…fill the earth…” (Genesis 1:28), “fill” means, “to satisfy.”
I remember the scares of the “population explosion,” predicted by Paul Ehrlich in The Population Bomb (1968). There would be mass starvation in the 1970′s, where “hundreds of millions of people” would starve to death in global famine.

Not only did this famine not occur, but actually, the population rate of the world has been declining since 1970, and the prediction (UN reports) is sometime around 2070 the world will reach zero population growth.

Ironically, most countries in the MDC (more developed country) category are trying to implement a pronatal policy.

I’ll let you debate “carbon footprints” and the rest. It takes 2.1 children to sustain a level population rate, and we have 3 and so we did our part to “fill” the earth, and we find our children very “satisfying.”