you take the high road
Here’s something to ponder. What’s the best way to counter climate-change and override the fear that we’re all off to hell in a handcart? Increase your recycling efficiency and strip away the film from cartons? Go green and buy a Tesla or eschew meat on weekdays? Holiday at home, through choice? No, the largest contribution anyone living in an affluent developed economy can make to the climate is not to have children.
There are almost eight billion of us on a planet that science estimates can support exactly one-and-a-half billion living as the average American does today. Not having a child apparently prevents 58.6 tonnes of carbon emissions every year, compared with living car-free and taking to two pedalled-wheels (2.4T), declining the return transatlantic flight to shop in Macy’s (1.6T) or going the whole hog and becoming vegan (0.8T). All of these figures are obviously hotly contested, especially by the oil & gas behemoths, along with the question of whether a parent should actually bear the burden of their offspring’s emissions (the answer’s yes, of course they should), but the one thing that is clearly not up for debate is that we all know we are living in ways that can’t continue. And, deep down we knew this way before Greta kindly pointed it out.
Notwithstanding Xi Jinping’s announcement yesterday for forty years hence, predictions forecast that, if born today, in ten years the child would witness the passing of a quarter of the world’s insects and a hundred million of their peers suffering extreme food scarcity. Ten years further down the line, 99% of the ocean’s coral has vanished. At thirty, two hundred million climate-change refugees will be roaming the world accompanied by only half the world’s current species. It should therefore come as no surprise that as millennials come-of-age as prospective parents they are questioning the logic of bringing a child into this world.
The climate crisis has brought about the growth of a ‘birth-strikers’ movement which is comprised of those who refuse to procreate in the face of this existential threat. In the process they have created the term ‘child-free’ which refers to those who have voluntarily decided to not have children and, hence, are not ‘child-less’. However, attempting to brand their act as the most altruistic is incorrect and wrong. Choosing to have children is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, and the same logic applies to those who proactively choose to be child-free. It is a choice, pure and simple, and depends upon the appraisal of what an individual, or couple, determine as both a meaningful life and the right course of action for themselves and those directly impacted. It is also neither unnatural nor cold to choose to do so.
Having intentionally limited my own progeny to a single figure, this is thankfully not a question I need to answer directly and I’ll gladly leave it for future generations to wrestle with. However, I do consider (hope?) there to be alternate paths to the same goal as evidenced by the fact that, according to Oxfam, the richest 1% of the world’s population are responsible for twice the carbon emissions of the three billion who make up the poorest 50%. Read those figures again, let it hit home and tackling this first may go some way to ease the hand-wringing of the Millennial generation.
There’s a telling exchange in Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic novel ‘The Road’ where the father chastises his son with “You are not the one who has to worry about everything” only to be countered with “No, I am the one.” Out of the mouths of babes.
