Meehan Crist has published a deeply thought provoking article in the London Review of Books. It seems timely, considering the news is so apocalyptic every day that it’s pretty demotivating and at some point, shikata ga nai steps in and one can only shrug and get on with it.
In it, she deftly and methodically explores reproduction in the context of climate change, our number one long term issue.
One evening last year, the Democratic member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was chopping vegetables in her kitchen while speaking to her millions of Instagram followers via livestream: ‘Our planet is going to hit disaster if we don’t turn this ship around,’ she said, looking up from a chopping-board littered with squash peel. ‘There’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult.’ Her hands fluttered to the hem of her sweater, then to the waistband of her trousers, which she absentmindedly adjusted. ‘And it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, should ...’ she took a moment to get the wording right: ‘Is it OK to still have children?’ Her comment spawned a flurry of pieces on why you should or should not procreate. But the thorny question of whether it is OK to have children – a question about what we owe one another and what we owe the unborn – remains. As Ocasio-Cortez put it, there’s ‘just this basic moral question: like, what do we do?’
The article is far too long for me to blockquote it, so it’s worth you taking the time to read it.
I’ve never had the parental urge. There were a variety of reasons why: environmental, political, expense, but as I approach 40 the reason seems to be I just plumb don’t want to and anything else I’d come up with is just an excuse I’m telling myself. It’s okay to just not want to be a dad. This is not what that essay is about.
There are currently about 7.8 billion people on the planet, and demographers predict that number will rise to roughly 10.9 billion by the end of the century. In Staying with the Trouble, the radical feminist icon Donna Haraway suggests the increase in global population expected over the 21st century will ‘make demands that cannot be borne without immense damage to human and nonhuman beings,’ and argues for ‘personal, intimate decisions to make flourishing and generous lives ... without making more babies’. Here, and in a collection co-edited with Adele E. Clarke called Making Kin Not Population (2018), Haraway imagines an ecotopia of collective, non-racist, non-coercive ‘kinnovation’. ‘Maybe,’ she writes, ‘the human people of this planet can again be numbered two or three billion or so ... over a couple of hundred years from now.’ The most generous reading of Haraway is that she values life above all else, that she envisions a world in which thriving and interconnected ecosystems are valued above any single species. But this utopia is hard to imagine without also thinking about the bloody path that would lead to it. ‘I was horrified,’ Jenny Turner wrote in the LRB (31 May 2017). ‘How can a planet lose seven or eight billion humans “over a couple of hundred years” without events of indiscriminate devastation? When people start thinking about getting rid of other people, which sorts of people does history suggest are usually got rid of first?’
This same arithmetic feeds the ecofascist fantasies that course through the online Deep Green right and helped incite mass shooters in Texas and New Zealand. In these darker visions of the future, racial purity will save the planet. Closed borders. Veganism. Drastically reduced technology. Ecofascist death squads. This is an ideology of death that claims to be on the side of life. ‘What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and there is only one lifeboat?’ Pentti Linkola, a Finnish polemicist of ecofascism, asks. ‘When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship’s axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides.’ Who is seen as ‘extra’ is decided by those holding the axe. Having children is to be tightly restricted. ‘Birthgiving must be licensed,’ he writes. ‘To enhance population quality, genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring, so that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality.’ Deep ecology and the Third Reich serve as inspiration.
Overpopulation comes up as a topic here a lot, and I’m not sure many consider the implications. Crist does. In her essay she describes two people from opposite sides of the political spectrum but both have the same goal: reduce the human population to about a billion or two within 200 years. One, a person from Finland, is a fascist. In their ideal world, everyone they dislike (in this case, everyone not white and whatever other criteria they decide) gets sterilized. Another, a feminist writer, described a utopia where people lived in harmony in a sustainable environment---something human civilization simply does not do at present, anywhere on Earth. But the unfortunate implication of both is getting from 8 billion to 1 billion, even in two centuries, requires a level of mass death that not even the latest coronavirus outbreak could provide (but a well oiled human machine of evil could...), and if they don’t, then they’d still require significant controls on peoples’ reproduction. I’m not sure people even here consider that, and how unworkable that’d be in a democratic system, and I’m increasingly uncomfortable with the arguments, especially with the rise of the Deep Green eco-right. Those people, if they aren’t already genocidal, will be that way pretty quickly. I will never be okay with taking away anyone’s choice—pro choice for me doesn’t just mean pro-abortion (which, I am.)
For one thing, Crist does note that hundreds of millions are hungry, and millions starve to death, but she also notes that currently, today, all 8 billion people on Earth could eat if our system didn’t throw away so much food (up to 40% in the US). But, climate change. It’s pretty delusional at this point to think any part of the Paris Accords are going to work. Modeling indicates that our arable land, which is not infinite, will change and perhaps contract. Certain countries will benefit for a time, like Russia (and they sure do know it) , but many others (like us) will not. One of the latest denier tactics is to point out there are bigger short-term environmental crises than climate change as ecological limits are very real. Sure, but all of our short-term crises are due to the long-term climate change threat, due to our civilization running on carbon. it needs to decarbonize. The article explains this at length.
Much of our framing about decarbonizing shifts everything to the individual. Like Crist, I dislike this argument. Whatever huge efforts I may take out in my life will be overdone by corporations not doing a thing. We’ve told people that having kids is a consumer choice when it isn’t.
I think I agree with Crist, “is it ok to have a child” is the wrong question. Click through and read. It’s a good one.