I personally cringe when I hear a friend js having a kid. All I can think of is how bad theyre going to have it. Hell id definitely have been better off being born 20 years earlier, but these new kids are REALLY screwed unless they have super rich parents.
“Nothing new under the sun” I suppose!
Very much so. I honestly think it’s at least a little cruel and selfish to have a child in a dying world.
That said, I remain supportive of the parents in my life and I try to keep that feeling to myself–unless the parent brings it up (my cousin has two very young children whom he adores, but he also worries for their futures due to climate change and political instability, and he’ll talk pretty openly with me about it).
Climate change is the number one thing. The past had fascism, tools, slavery - but it didn’t have an Extinction level event looming just cresting over the horizon. I’m not having any kids until there is actual meaningful progress towards fixing that… So it looks like I’m not having kids.
Not to mention that one of the easiest ways to combat climate change is to simply not bring more humans into the world.
Of course it did.
If not for the courage and conviction of Vasily Arkhipov, civilization, and potentially humanity, may have ended in 1964. People had kids for 30 years under the very real threat of nuclear extermination. In the end it turned out pretty well.
People had kids during the black plague.
While a climate crisis is more than just a threat, we don’t know what’s going to happen. We have ideas, and models, and educated guesses… But not knowledge.
I wouldn’t tell anyone to have kids if they don’t want to. But no one should plan their life around sparing a hypothetical person from the hypothetical struggles of a slow moving crisis we don’t fully understand.
The thing is that was the threat of nuclear extermination. It didn’t actually happen. Climate change is not a threat, it is happening, right now and is only going to get progressively worse in the near future.
So far all educated guesses have been overtaken by the speed of events. It is getting worse faster than even the experts had anticipated.
It’s getting worse sure. But we have no idea how bad it will get, or what the total effect will be. We have no idea what role technology will play in the future of this crisis, or if recovery would outpace models in the event we decided to take the problem seriously.
Bear in mind that acid rain was a real crisis that was happening in the 80s and the hole in the Ozone was a real crisis that was happening in the 90s. When we made an honest effort to fix those problems… They got fixed.
Also, we can guess at what species will or won’t fare well, but not how they’ll adapt or what else might thrive in a new environment.
And yeah, it’s possible that temps will spike faster than we could ever imagine or deploy solutions and we’ll all bake to death in a sprawling global desert if we don’t all starve from the sweeping famine. I just have more faith in human ingenuity, and will than that.