The interaction of population and environmental quality is of great interest to policy makersworldwide. While many studies emphasize the effect of population growth on environmentalquality, few examine how environmental quality affects population growth. This paper usesrecently collected cross-sectional data from Nepal to test whether variation in firewood and water scarcity affects the demand for children by altering the relative value of children in resourcecollection activities. Our results indicate increasing environmental scarcity lowers the demand forchildren implying Nepalese households perceive resource scarcity as increasing the net cost of children. Apparently increasing firewood and water scarcity apparently does not have a strong enough effect on the relative productivity of child labor to induce higher demand for childrengiven the effects that work in the opposite direction. For these resource collection activities itwould appear environmental scarcity acts as a check on population growth.