Conceivable Future

LONG-TERM LOVE OVER SHORT-TERM PROFIT

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Conceivable Future

Hi friends! If you've been following us here, thank you! The Conceivable Future, our book/10 year labor of love, is coming out in Feb 2024. You can preorder it, and browse our fresh site, here. You can also find us on IG FB and the other one for the time being.

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My husband and I struggle with the impact having kids would have on the planet.

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Sustainability Director hops off the fence Massachusetts, Age 32

I originally posted a version of the story below to the Reddit's forum, r/fencesitter, for people "on the fence" about having children. A raw, vulnerable discussion followed, then several commenters and I were permanently banned from the sub with no explanation.

Other threads have since raised concerns about climate change, and the comments allowed to remain focus on reassurances and optimism. I'm testifying here out of frustration that we have no better outlet for honest discussion.

For years, I identified as a fencesitter for the common reasons of not wanting to lose freedom, not wanting to compromise my body, not really enjoying spending time with other peoples' kids, not feeling that pull toward motherhood, fearing social isolation, only feeling equipped to raise a neurotypical child, enjoying sleeping in, etc. The negatives are tangible and social media posts about parental exhaustion were very in-my-face. After years of teetering on this fence, I've concluded that these are mostly fear-based aversions that I could work out.

Until recently, I struggled to envision the actual benefits of parenthood. I have a responsible, communicative husband who is incredible with kids, who wants children but could see a fulfilling life either way. Bizarrely, these points have risen to the surface as the most compelling reasons for me to want kids:

We got a pet last year, and watching him learn the basics of gravity/mirrors/water faucets, playing with him, and caring for him with my partner has made home life SO warm and fulfilling and fun. I once heard someone compare watching their toddler develop to watching a dog learn to talk. (Then this dog--who you already love so much--dresses up as a teapot in a play, then learns to converse, tell jokes, write letters, cook creative recipes.) I think the experience of raising a child with my partner (him, specifically!) would bring an intense richness to life.

My family is very small and I don't have a lot of close relationships in my life. I cherish the idea of having years and years of time together, building up inside jokes, building a new close relationship with family that is mine.

Based only on my personal situation, I'd like to have a child. However, my personal situation exists in a broader context.

My career is focused on climate change. I'm drained professionally and personally from dealing with people who don't take it seriously enough. I do not believe we'll see the policy and technological advancements that we need to avoid catastrophic impacts. Every day I encounter reminders that we are not on track to meet publicly touted goals. Energy utilities greenwash their "carbon neutral by 2050" plans reliant on nonexistent technologies on infeasible timelines.

The IPCC report last year called climate change a "code red for humanity" and the next phase of the report concluded that impacts are worse than expected, and happening more quickly. If every country achieves the carbon reductions they promised (spoiler: they won't), we're still on track for too-high emissions. 60% of scientists that contributed to the IPCC reports believe we'll see more than 3 degrees C of warming--this is extinction level shit.

Climate change is not about a few inches of sea level rise and more storms. We're on track for widespread, chronic water and food insecurity, on a scale that is hard to fathom. Among the devastating ecological impacts, our inability to consistently grow enough food or access water will lead to large-scale resource conflicts.

It's been difficult reading misinformed advice on Reddit. Example: "the world needs the next generation to fight climate change" is a fine idea, but by the time any new baby is a teenager, we'll have blown past fast-approaching ecological tipping points.

More comments from this forum: "there have always been bad times" and "you don't know what the future will bring" and "we'll figure it out--you have to have hope" and "make decisions on your personal situation, not based off what the news media tells you."

Climate change is different. Climate change is not "news media" -- it's science, and we need to face the reality that the world that any new human enters today is going to be inconceivably different, even for wealthy babies in western countries.

This poses an ethical question. Do I want to be a parent so badly that I'll knowingly bring life into an increasingly inhospitable planet?

(Another ethical question relates to introducing life that will contribute more greenhouse gas emissions to the planet. I put this point in parentheses only because I'm first trying to work things through from a personal level. And because folks are quick to blame who is at fault, which is irrelevant to this decision.)

While I'm not alone in reaching this conclusion, I'm so sad that climate change is why I think I'm stepping off the fence as childfree. Part of me wants the (blissful? Willful?) ignorance to assume humanity will simply prevail, and have a child. Because it's a "doom and gloom" topic, it's been an isolating experience to worry deeply about climate change in the real world around people who assume life will more or less go on like it has been. When I get the confidence to confide in friends, I'm met with ill-informed counter-arguments and dismissed as pessimistic. Every new baby announcement has me all at once judgmental, grieving, and yearning for hope.

I want to change my mind and have a baby. I will, if we find a magical technological solution to decarbonize in the next five years. I will, if ecology adapts faster than we expected and our oceans and soils can be healthy. I will, if I can find honest hope for the future of life on our home planet.

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Perspective of a Chinese adoptee-Megan Warner, Age 25

As a Chinese adoptee whose life was determined by one policy that violated the reproductive rights of women, I now make parallels to the ethical questions I have to consider as a young woman and a climate educator. My birth mother was forced to give me up because of the One Child Policy and the preference of males in the family over females. For me, this created a loss of culture, loss of family, and loss of identity. But for my birth mother, this created a sacrifice that I can only think of as a radical act of love.

 Now, I can’t imagine that the U.S. would ever enforce a law such as the One Child Policy in China. Yet, the fact that I have to even question my desire to have children is a reflection of something wrong in our society. For some international adoptees too, this can conflict with a desire to have a child that looks like them. Being raised in a white family, I never questioned my difference in appearance. In fact, I often joked that I was whitewashed. My hope is that DNA in one day will reunite me with members of my birth family. But who knows how long that could take? Or if it will ever happen? Climate change is a clock for me. I see my days left on Earth as a 25-year-old as precious, but limited, and the only future I envision for myself is spending the rest of my life fighting for a habitable planet and trying to stay sane in the midst of it. I can only manage to ponder how my love of hiking and being outside is being jeopardized by the threat of climate change. I can barely think about my future children, especially when I work with children on a daily basis and worry for their future. Now that I teach sustainability to K-12 students through the lens of climate emotions, I hear how much hopelessness, anger, and fear that youth have to carry around each day. To pass that emotional toll onto a young mind is my biggest fear of raising children in a climate-changed world. At the same time, the idea of having a child seems to make life worth living. Mostly though, I think I will wait a bit to see if we start acting drastically on climate change. Something in me has already stubbornly accepted that I will likely not have a child. 

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Is climate change worry reducing the desire to have children?

New research is asking whether Australian women consider the world a safe and promising place for children and the next generation to flourish.

More researchers using CF’s testimonies as a dataset!

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For my beloved planet - Linda DeMill, age 70

When I was born, there were about 2.5 billion people on this planet.  In the span of my lifetime (I am  now 70), that number has tripled. That is astounding.  When I entered reproductive age, I made the decision that if I could do nothing else, I could at least not contribute to that astronomical growth.

 In this I succeeded and I have not regretted that decision.  I have found along my way many others who have chosen this path.  We have lived full and productive (if not reproductive) lives.  I feel so fortunate to have been born in a time where I could make this choice, that I could enjoy sex and take precautions to prevent pregnancy.  Rather than feeling selfish, I feel I have contributed to the well being of the world.

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🔊 Listen Now: Deciding whether to have kids in the face of climate change

WBEZ Chicago on NPR One | 4:20

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Testimony: I want to have hope but I am afraid -Anon

Hello,

I am an almost 21 year old non-binary person from the UK. Ever since I was a child I have always known that I wanted to be a parent. In my ideal world, I would have children in about eight to ten years’ time. I desperately want to be a parent and feel a strong urge to care for and raise children but the world seems so hostile towards them and I can’t imagine a future where they would be safe,

between climate change, ever more likely pandemics, escalating military conflicts, the likelihood of food and water scarcity, the rise of fascism, the destruction of state welfare resources and the impossible job and housing markets. I’ve always seen optimism as a verb, not a noun, about believing in a better world because you are out every day taking concrete action to improve it. And I know having children would be the ultimate act of hope. But I am just so afraid that I would have children, we would miss the 1.5 degree target, and they would have lives doomed to ever declining ecological conditions, unable to swim in the oceans or walk through the forests and likely with very low life expectancy and little to no quality of life. Should I wait to see what happens around the point of no return in 2030? I am so afraid and I just want a safe future so I can have children. I wish policymakers would make the world better and stop using fossil fuels. Where is there urgency? My chance to have children is slipping away before my eyes.

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Having Babies Amid Climate Chaos

Two climate activists weigh in on why thinking about your uterus as the site of your political action is problematic.

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To Breed or Not to Breed?

In a world of pandemic chaos, political strife and climate catastrophe, some would-be parents see the future as too dark to procreate.

this NYT Styles article conflates anxiety about  the changing climate's threat to babies with babies' 'threat' to the climate. This is the first distinction we make at Conceivable Future.

It is not the same to feel guilt for resources a child will consume in their lifetime as to feel fear for their prospects in a hotter, more dangerous world. When we don't talk explicitly about these things it's easy for feelings to run together in a paralyzing mess.

The 'carbon footprint' ascribed to western babies is based on the false beliefs that:

1. Their future will resemble our past

and

2. Our homes and families are the only places we can intervene to lower carbon emissions

Maybe we're afraid about what our kids will experience as the climate grows more chaotic, or we're feeling guilty, paralyzed and/or stuck in a system that compels us to burn fossil fuels. Maybe all of the above. The first step forward is to recognize that it's not yr fault.

It's not yr fault for wanting or having kids. It's not yr fault for living in a petro-state. But it is your responsibility to fight like hell now. For a future in which no one has to fear for their children or feel guilt for using the resources we all need to survive.

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Climate anxiety: Feeling hopeless, not wanting to have kids. What can you do about it?

Around the world, members of Generation Z are experiencing climate anxiety. And many people are debating whether to ever have children.

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A World Without Children

A generation facing an intractable problem debates whether to bring a new generation into the world.

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Resources for working with climate emotions

A collaboration between Gen Dread and The All We Can Save Project

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Conceiving the Future

In 1969, a year after Paul and Anne Ehrlich published a book predicting that a “population bomb” would set humankind on a path to widespread famine and

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Hello, I am a 21 year old woman. (Anon)

I have always felt called to motherhood. When I was a child I would cart around my baby dolls and play Mommy. Now I am an adult person, capable of being someone’s Mommy.

I am also truly in love for the first time in my life, and when I envision my future with my partner I imagine us as parents. However, I feel deeply conflicted. Even though I know we would both be ecstatic to become parents, deep down I feel like it would be wrong. The world is going to get hotter, resources are likely to be more scarce, and life will be even more difficult for my hypothetical babies. I know it is possible to adopt, but I don’t know if my finances will allow it. Secretly, I’m afraid that if I never give birth, I will regret it and possibly resent my adopted children. I don’t think that I can be the mother I always dreamed of being and it’s tearing me to pieces

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Testimony-Anon

We would be good parents but we will not have children.

The children who are here on Earth now need our love and our devotion of resources more than any new ones, especially white ones in a privileged country like Australia who will guzzle resources at a grotesque rate, even if they're brought up as eco-consciously as possible. I considered having kids, and I didn't realise how much I had notions of a future with future generations until I really grieved the decision not to have them. It is not easy, but it is not selfish. It is out of self-lessness that we deny our family the joy of children, in order that perhaps another existing life can be saved, and grow old. 

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Trying to come to terms with the impact of our choices - Anon

Tread lightly is a motto I live by and one I am trying to instill in my two young children.

I speak to them often about being gentle to the earth and we try as a family to make choices that do more good than harm - to the environment and to the people around us. So when I sit here considering if we should have a third child, it seems completely unreasonable for us to do so. There is no treading lightly with three kids! Still, it is so badly what I want. Maybe part of it has to do with our journey to becoming parents. It wasn’t easy and came with enormous heartache and loss. We have had no trouble conceiving, but I have experienced loss after loss after loss (and several more losses). But once we got here it has been so incredibly fulfilling. Can we have three kids and truly be good to the earth? How selfish are we to want THREE?! I keep hoping if I raise them well they will create a future better than the one we currently see looming in front of us. Maybe we will raise little environmentalists who steward the earth gently and who care for the people and animals on it. But really, no matter how much we try to offset the impact of our family, or the potential of our children to grow up with a passion for sustainability, having more kids WILL take a toll on the earth and our shared resources. No matter how much my heart and body want to have another child, there is no justifying the impact that will have.