Neil deGrasse Tyson
I think my only push-back on this piece by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is the fact that it's coming from someone at the University Of Chicago, which traditionally, is not exactly a hotbed of progressive thinking on sociological subjects. Color me skeptical.
That said, she's not sounding like the usual conservative dick, trying to tell young people they're overreacting or that liberals are being all squishy or some shit.
She's reporting what she's hearing from the people who're going to decide where we live out our old-age. We should probably listen, and take it to heart.
Opinion Don’t want a baby because of climate fears? You’re not alone.
As a college professor, I’m used to hearing young people’s anxiety and even anger about climate change. One of the most striking trends is the number of students who have told me they feel robbed of the ability to have children, cheated out of parenthood by decades of climate denial and inaction by baby boomers and their own Gen X parents.
My students are not alone. A global survey in 2021 of 10,000 people between the ages of 16 and 25 shows how widespread these sentiments are. Close to 60 percent told researchers they felt “very” or “extremely” worried about climate change. More than half feared the security of their family would be threatened in the near future, and nearly 4 in 10 said they were “hesitant to have children.”
That’s an awful lot of people. But many older Americans argue that this is absurd, even morally suspect — from Fox News hosts suggesting that even questioning whether to have children amounts to “civilizational suicide,” to commentators in the New York Times who have acknowledged the reality of climate change but then dismissed concerns about the future of the environment in favor of the hope children offer. In both instances, parenthood becomes a moral referendum, separating those who affirm the value of human life, or the value of American civilization, from those who don’t.
But the decision not to have children in the face of crisis is nothing new. In fact, the impulse can be traced not only to our human ancestors but also beyond the human species.
The anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has observed that mothers of all kinds, human and otherwise, make choices about how many children they will raise and when, based on ecological and historical circumstances. Primates have been seen to abandon babies born in moments of food shortages or environmental distress, the pressure to survive in their given habitat overriding any reproductive instinct or maternal bond.
Today, we tend to talk about reproductive decisions as though they take place in a vacuum, where all options are available to all people, and the choice you make is determined only by your desire: Do you want to have a child? But for centuries, reproductive decisions have been constrained by people’s economic, material and environmental conditions.
For instance, when Mormon settlers moved into Southern Paiute lands in Utah in the 1850s, bringing violence and disease, births in the tribe plummeted, and not just because women who might have borne children were killed. “My people have been unhappy for so long,” a Paiute woman wrote in 1883; after decades of war, death and loss, “they wish to disincrease, rather than multiply.”
People from marginalized communities have long had to weigh their desire for children against the safety and sustainability of the lives they imagined those children would lead. In the face of slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings and racism, “Black people of the not-too-distant past trembled for every baby born into that world,” Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote in 2019. “Sound familiar?”
In the spring of 1969, a college graduate named Stephanie Mills made the connection between environmental concerns and reproductive choice explicit, when she delivered a dark commencement speech at a small college in Oakland, Calif. “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is have no children at all,” Mills said. “As an ex-potential parent, I have asked myself what kind of world my children would grow up in. And the answer was, ‘Not very pretty, not very clean. Sad, in fact.’”
Mills gave her speech — and, in the next year, dozens of talks like it — at a portentous moment for environmental activism and contraceptive technology. The Food and Drug Administration had approved the first form of hormonal birth control in 1960, and by the end of the decade, millions of women were relying on the pill to put off having children — or, like Mills, to avoid having them.
This was also just as the American environmental movement was gaining steam. The spring after Mills gave her commencement speech, an estimated 20 million Americans would take part in events for the inaugural Earth Day — a victory, however symbolic, for environmental causes. But onstage in 1969, Mills was far more optimistic about contraception than she was about the promise of environmentalism. Her speech was titled “The Future Is a Cruel Hoax.”
To today’s environmentally minded observers, the fact that young people are considering having fewer children might seem like a good thing. Population is a driver of climate change, they might say, and the carbon footprint of a baby born in the United States is gigantic; having one fewer child cuts emissions far more than giving up airplanes, meat or automobiles.
But that kind of thinking — blaming individuals having babies for societal ills — has been used to fuel population control measures with distinctly authoritarian, racist or eugenicist flavors. It also misses the point. My students aren’t talking about the carbon footprints of babies. They’re talking about grief, about a future that has been lost.
If politicians and policymakers want to encourage young people to become parents — and it seems they very much do — history suggests there’s a better path than the one too many of them are pursuing: revoking our right to reproductive autonomy, making birth control harder to access and abortion a crime.
Instead, they should convince us that climate change is being taken seriously as a threat — that the environment we and our children must live in is in good, capable, rational hands.
We have to make better
short-term decisions,
in order to have
a more positive impact
in the long term.
Because those decisions
don't just determine
how our children will live -
they determine how
our children will die.
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