The livelihood of the rural poor in developing countries depends critically on local natural resource-based activities such as crop and livestock production, fishing, hunting, fuel wood and minor forest product collection. Given this dependence, it is natural to ask how these households respond to any perceived degradation of this resource base. Previous studies have documented a number of short term and long term strategies that households adopt in repose to environmental stress. These include changes in consumption patterns (e.g. eating food that requires less cooking when fuel wood becomes scarce), changes in production strategies (e.g. growing crops more adaptive to poor soils), migration, etc. One strategy that has generated a fair amount of controversy is regarding the households’ fertility decision. The question being asked here is the following. How and to what extent does environmental degradation influence households’ desired fertility? Household’s fertility response is controversial on several grounds, both conceptually and methodologically. Here I will just highlight some of the conceptual issues that strike me as important from an economic perspective