Vote Democrat in the next and every other election. Tell your friends and family to do the same. The Democratic Party is the party of climate science, which the Republicans are deniers and liars. That's really our best hope.
32
The Trump-Putin axis alone intends to produce enough petroleum to burn over the next 50 years to double the total emitted since 1800.
10
Maybe my whining threshold is too low, but the words, and therefore thoughts, that might have been part of this repetitive and predictable piece of writing are : blessings, thankful, friends, etc. This is a pretty cold analytical piece of prose, especially coming out of Notre Dame. Grow up, poor Daddy ... You too can whistle a tune to your daughter and let her know the promises of God are many...and joyful and strong.
8
This may be the most ridiculously overwrought thing I have ever read.
43
my father used to say: "people will always find a way out of the messes they get themselves into." i now wonder whether, deep inside, man[un]kind really wants to live forever. at the rate they're going, it rather looks like leave forever. [maybe that's why some, who probably don't believe in life after death, think they must amass AMAP in the here & now.] what saddens me tremendously is that our wasteful and colonial northern lifestyle has led to living hells for peoples in the global south. are humans meant to share, be empathetic? or are they just like any other predator? social democracy is quickly losing its charm - to the right. or are we ready to put up a fierce fight to save it? my nephews and nieces don't share my gloom. maybe they sense that they'll figure out how to fix what we broke ...
3
A Midrash teaches that all people are limited, and that the difference between Heaven and Hell is that in Heaven people help each other overcome their limitations.
Our children may be condemned or redeemed - it will depend on us. Don't despair. Act well, and the next generation will get to live a bit of heaven on earth.
This is the faith with which we bring children into the world. From generation to generation the challenges are different, but the answer is the same.
8
Wait, did I really just read that vegetarians who take staycations, don't own a car, and have a single child would be better off just killing themselves?
14
Maybe go to church?
4
Wow you have too much time on his hands. Stop thinking so much and enjoy the moment. With your attitude we might as well all give up the ghost right now.
10
You had a child because deep down inside you really do have hope.
8
One of the best things to do is educate yourself.
Youtube Guy McPherson
Dystopian much?
4
This sort of doomsaying is irrational and speaks more to your own internal workings that to the predictions related to AGW. Do not pass this defeatest attitude to your daughter, I suggest.
10
No arguments just psychotic ideations born of grandiosity and depressive projection.
How sad
7
Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we fry.
5
Get a grip! Don't just lay down and take it. DO SOMETHING to help change things. Maybe your daughter will be the catalyst for phenomenal positive changes. Start teaching your daughter now what a difference she can make. Get up and stop wallowing. That sort of attitude will be our demise. Just GET UP and figure out what you want to DO to HELP.
3
How pathetic this kind of 'oh woe is me ' reads. It seems like it's all about the end of world, but it's really about the author's anxiety in losing his little version of how the way things ought to be.
10
An article or opinion piece bereft of facts is meaningless. Likewise, generally, is one specific person’s uninformed, unsubstantiated view of the world. To wit: the thesis of this piece is, “As Maggie Astor reported, more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change.” Maggie Astor reported nothing of the sort. She reported: “And while few, if any, studies have examined how large a role climate change plays in people’s childbearing decisions, it loomed large in interviews with more than a dozen people ages 18 to 43.” To summarize, Maggie Astor spoke to approximately 12-15 people (on a planet with 7.6 billion people) and concluded that “people” are choosing “more and more” not to have children because of climate change. To which I say, both to that and to this piece, “C’mon.” If you are going to be hysterical and hyperbolic, have some facts to back it up.
11
Procreation after Nov 9th 2016 is a sign of "not wanting to know" on a historical scale - these parents will cheerfully attempt to raise their children in abeyance of the reality around themselves
6
Stop whining! You are lucky to be a citizen of relatively safe and rich country where you and your kid have access to warer, food, housing and medical care. There are billions of people living way worse than you are, people who do not know if they will get access to water and food tomorrow, people who risk being killed every single day because of war in their countries. You could live in the times of the black death, you could be born a slave, you could be born as Black or Indian person 150 years ago! How come people don't appreciate their lives?! If someone feels depressed a suicidal because of political situation, they should stop being self-concentrated and go to a hospice to help, travel to a Thirld world country as volunteer to help poor people. It is in everyone's hands to make his/hers life meaningful and help people.
9
Hey guy - life is short so try to enjoy what you have. A baby is a precious thing. Having lots of babies would be foolish but one little girl? You might want to think about enjoying her while you've got her. Before you know it she will be going out with boys in cars. Electric cars.
2
You really think that deciding not to have children is "cutting oneself off from modern life"? I guess some of us aren't blessed with your impressive blend of virtue and guilt.
9
To conceive of the world's end in one's child's lifetime is unbearable, so hope thrives as the world dies.
5
You teach at Notre Dame. Where is the Catholic Church in all this? Maybe they should sell off their Vatican treasures and use the money to fund alternative fuel sources and diet awareness. Maybe finding another planet to destroy.
And God, what is an all powerful god doing in the face of this destruction? Haven't humans proven themselves to be unworthy of self determination?
I'm sorry. Your daughter will not have the clean air and abundant flora/fauna that you know. But she'll adjust to it like people always do, and tell herself that her generation is doing just fine.
1
The single most destructive thing you can do to the planet is having children.
10
You know what is a better idea? You having more children. Lots of them. Why? Because you are aware of and share that awareness with your children who give this world a fighting chance.
“It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted?”
How ridiculous!
There once was a man who galvanized his country to round up 6 million innocents and murder them in concentration camps. He had much bigger plans until the world pushed back.
Throughout most of the history of “civilization,” armies invaded each other’s countries, murdering, pillaging, and raping at will.
The 1918 flu pandemic infected 500 million people around the world, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million (three to five percent of the world's population).
The black plague killed about 25% to 60% of the European population.
Climate change is a serious problem, possibly even one of the more important ones for us to be worried about today. But it’s not exactly the end of the world. Get your head out of the sand, and read a history book once in a while.
5
We must stand united against the 5th column’s calls to institute socialism in this country. This will spell the end of outbound Republic as we know it.
If you are really worried about climate change, don't add to it by having kids.
10
This is why Trump is going to get re-elected. It is so far out of mainstream thought and makes liberals so easy to caricature. Don't have kids if you are feeling so guilty about it.
3
I would worry more about raising a child and telling them the world is doomed. It sounds like the worldview of a religious fanatic.
4
Mr. Scranton, get a grip. While climate change is clearly real, predictions of global doom are clearly overwrought. Yes, deserts will expand, seas may rise, and the breadbasket of North America will move from the US into Canada. But we have it so much better than the 1960s, where prophets of doom like you forecasted INSTANT nuclear annihilation.
3
Dont forget: every day oil burns an extra thousand barrels than yesterday. Every single day you have been alive. The is true no matter who is in office, and no mater how much rich people recycle in their vulgar and grotesque consumption of the world. Shalom.
1
In the beginning,
there was faith, which is childish;
trust, which is vain;
and illusion, which is dangerous.
Elie Wiesel "Night"
#NeverAgain2018
#StopFascism2018
#VoteBlue2018
November 6, 2018
8
Thank you. That's lovely.
2
It's TOUGH being a female. You're doubted by both MEN & WOMEN. Men are skeptical what you can achieve and women don't want you to succeed. If I ever get pregnant with a female I won't bring her into this vicious, unstable and on-the-verge-of-destruction world. For a female it will always be proving yourself to be relevant and fending for yourself so you don't get physically hurt. It's all about fight, fight, fight. Fight to have enough time to meet obligations. Fight to be treated like an equal. You fight till the day you die.
Teach the kid how to care? Are you kidding me? He should be teaching his kid how to fight (literally) and campaigning for women to be armed.
5
Dystopian world? The world's residents never had it so good, especially in third world countries where the rise out of poverty has been staggering. China alone has pulled half a billion people out of poverty.
People today live with conveniences, like air travel, the internet, smart phones, vaccines and cures for most diseases, air conditioning, etc. that were not available to the world's wealthiest families less than 100 years ago.
Please, get a grip.
14
I agree with everything in this piece. My youngest son (I have two boys) came home from middle school after a long unit spent studying earth science. He said to me "You are the last generation that got to have an unspoiled planet." He is absolutely correct.
I believe that our current political and economic systems are unsustainable and will inevitably collapse, probably sooner rather than later. Humans won't change their ways until we are nearly extinct. I don't feel bad for us. If we're too weak and stupid to make the hard choices required to survive, then homo sapiens deserves to pass away. I only hope that the earth is not damaged too much in the process.
13
Please do not use the words "broken world".
That will get more religious zealots out of the woodwork!
Eight billion (going on twelve) folks is just too much. Let us hope that the rebalancing, though long, will not be fatal.
Mankind is on the verge of a big lesson to be learned.
Hopefully, its cerebral cortex will grow and adapt.
6
I started reading this and I stopped myself. Really? In the '60s we were told not to have children as the world was going to end. Seriously. End. A doomed world.
Fast forward 50 years and I have four wonderful, accomplished children who are all having a positve impact on the world. I have eight wonderful grandchildren - a mix of three races. My children live on three continents, teach, research and create.
It is a pathetic thought to bring a child into the world and taint it with your prejudice that the world is doomed. Shame on you.
20
Overpopulation. For tens of thousands of years, humans numbered under 1 billion. Since the Industrial Revolution, over the past 200 years, we've swelled to over 7.5 billion. We are choosing to reduce our numbers in the industrialized world, but you can do something! Population growth is highest in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Get women birth control there, and we have hope.
This is what Melinda Gates is doing. She went to Africa with malaria drugs. The women wanted injectable birth control so their husbands wouldn't find out. Birth control. It's a women's rights issue.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/01/health/melinda-gates-birth-control-po...
31
“Little feral being”? Your child? How can a just-born baby be feral?
The best thing people can do for our dying earth is to forgo reproduction and instead adopt one (or more) of the many children who are already in the world and without parents. The most stridently “eco” people I know are adamant that they must produce multiple children, because they think those children will be of a better sort than what’s out there. Such vanity! They don’t see the disconnect. Or, more likely, they refuse to see it.
5
....I worry more about the debt we are leaving for our children - just the interest on our $21 trillion of debt will be approaching $500 billion - with unfunded pension liability estimates running anywhere from $128 trillion to $210 trillion, it makes climate change look inviting. Our country goings bankrupt and all we talk about are the Russians......
1
Have humans ever done anything to stave off disaster? We will cut down every tree, kill every animal, eat every fish, burn every drop of oil, kill as many of "those other people" as possible -- it's just what we do. Except this time there won't be a new island to sail to, a new slave population to exploit, new resources to plunder -- human societies and economic systems will be forever changed and diminished.
12
you have some influence left. a little . what you haven't yet squandered. why not help help save the future?
4
I remember these same crazy arguments from the left growing up in academic circles in Chicago in the 1960's: overpopulation would be the scourge of Earth and would leave us all fighting over diminishing resources; nuclear holocaust was imminent and inevitable; and racial violence would make any world unlivable anyway. None of that happened, of course, and things actually got much better. So I'd advise Mr. Scranton to look beyond his narrow and Hobbesian perspective. And bring up his beautiful daughter in an increasingly beautiful world.
15
Nice words but not stirring.
How will you change yourself and when will you start?
Let us know.
5
It would help it we stopped bearing children that we can t care for.
The great rock that weighs us down is the Rock of Saint Peter! The absolute inanity of all religions which oppose birth control is unbelievable! There is no rationale for it except the fear of men that if women are not tied down they will take over. This blind selfishness is at the root of all our problems, and it is tragic that institutions, such as the churches, back it to the hilt.
14
The world is doomed - said every generation. Typical short sighted perspective lacking historical perspective.
6
Cheer up climate change isn't the only thing your kid has to worry about. There's the rise of the robots which may make most people obsolete. Who knows in the very near future a Chinese robotic army could be digging a tunnel thru the earths core to invade us. If it's not automated warfare your worried about what about disease, famine, volcanoes, earthquakes, asteriods, the ninth planet, holy wars and communism. Why focus your fears on climate change? It's a hobgoblin created to gain control over you. Even if it's true.
Life is still life no matter short or tragic. It's her life. Help her enjoy it. What would you think of religious types preaching the end to their children? Your doom might be different but your certainty isn't.
17
Without that modern hospital and it’s asphalt parking lot and drainage ditches - all the things that you hold in such contempt - your new daughter would have only a pitiful chance of surviving her first year. We live in a truly wonderful world, my dear professor, and I rejoice every day at the opportunities it presents to me, my children, and my grandchildren. Your “despair” would be ridiculous if it weren’t so pathetic and comical. I hope you live long enough so that your daughter can tell you how wrong and foolish you are.
8
I once saw Kurt Vonnegut on TV and heard him describe the human species as a weed choking the planet and that mother earth was trying to rid itself of that weed. Through climate change we are producing the means for our own destruction.
20
This is pathetic--I'm sorry. We should be glad parents during the Depression didn't whine like this, given the far, far, far greater challenges children faced then. Or parents in the 50s fearful of nuclear war. Or parents in the 1800s, when the life expectancy of a child was closer to days that ti was to 80 years. For hundreds of generations mankind has produced children who have toughed it out, survived, grew up and had children. In just the two World Wars, alone, tens of millions died. One could go on all day... But today we should weep for the doom of our children based on climate change? I get it--it's not good and will take work to overcome, but stuff like this is just sad. Dry your tears, be brave, and raise your child to get after it and keep us going. Now here's a Kleenex...
9
Mr. Scranton needs to learn some history. Or maybe he just needs to live as long as I have (77 years) to see the incredible pace of change for good that is the real story of the evolution of our species. When I was a young fellow there were still lynchings in the South. I went to a segregated school in Maryland. Any suspicion you were gay would ruin your career. Women rarely held positions of major responsibility. All of the ills addressed by the #metoo movement were on full display. We were just over one shooting war and headed into another (Korea). The Potomac River was too polluted to live near. Animals could be abused with impunity. And so could my friend who lived in a Catholic orphanage. And Let us not forget that the Russians were expected to nuke us at any moment.
Sure, climate change is a major problem, but only one of many that we have faced and overcome. A longer view, please, Mr. Scranton. “The arc of history bends toward justice.” No truer words were ever spoken.
37
As long as we put selfish greed, power and ego above values such as wisdom, justice and love, we will continue down this road. Hypercapitalism is killing us.
13
If all you have to whine about is climate change, and it's not even now it's in the future, consider yourself blessed. We live in the best times for humans that can be discerned using recorded history. There has never been more evenly distributed wealth, more human rights, less disease, or less violence. If you are given to live as a paranoiac by concerning yourself with a change in weather or loss of beachfront property I suggest you move to anyplace over 3000 ft in elevation, as those places will thrive as temps increase.
It seem that because things are so much better and Americans are so less put upon to sacrifice in war or work, that certain types are driven to wail over what their imagination drums up as the next force of doom. Such solipsism is pitiful. Ironically this is about having kids and nowhere does a concern over the irresponsible population growth in Africa and South Asia get a mention.
4
To whom was this addressed? The target audience will get far more penetration of this message from the movie 'Idiocracy'. I'm on your side, and appreciate your prose, but I'm not the one who needs to be convinced.
1
"To stop emitting waste carbon completely within the next five or 10 years"
We heard this same thing 40 years ago. Is it actually true this time?
1
Thank you. What a brave and forensic description of what awaits. But your willingness to harbor the sentiments that have on occasion made humans wonderful is, well, wonderful. We'd best shut our eyes with visions of nature's wonders, than just asphyxiate. And even though hope is hard come by, your claim for an equal and level humanity is lovely.
4
Up tp 2-300 years ago the average life span was ~35 years .You had a 20 % chance of dying in conflict and having 2 or so children die in child birth or with disease was the norm for most families. . Life was almost always short and brutal and is always going to be a lottery.The last 100 years maybe just an aberration We have an obligation to humanity as well as an apology to our children for the life we bring them into. Unfortunately if decent human beings stop having and raising children then humanity will indeed be lost.
However that apology needs to new a big one.
1
I never had the drive to have children. I have always believed women more than men experienced social pressure to have children. On the cusp of Medicare, having grown up in the bountiful 50's, the social upheaval 60's, by the time I was in my late 20's it was clear to me I didn't want to bring children into this world. The environment had already degraded significantly since my childhood, and there seemed no urgency to improve conditions. Now with the population in the US doubled since my birth, it's clear we are overpopulating this planet. I made the right choice for me. Our society is heading for Wall-E conditions. We aren't recycling, 2-3 million plastic water bottles that hit the waste stream every day, and there has been no change since China stopped accepting our plastic waste. The landfills are growing. I don't believe technology is going to get us out of this one. if w stop emitting CO@ today, it will get worse for decades, before it gets better. It won't get better if we keep electing climate denial creeps.
6
Helping children who need it, but not having any, almost seems to be a blessing now; that is if one really opens their eyes to climate, capitalism and the greed of a powerful few.
2
This difficult piece wrote itself actually. The author sees so blatantly clear how mans existence is now. Sure ,life itself has always been a pretty futile chase after happiness. The undeniable fact of physics that multi-trillions of atoms are constantly banging into one another thus continuing the unstoppable chaos of existence. It’s a miracle there is ever any nanosecond of happiness in chaos.
I find the unhappiness completely unbearable that parents now have to even debate having offspring.
There is much to agree with in this article, but its tone bothers me. It is written by someone from the reaches of the <1% of humanity. I have spent my career dealing with climate change issues and lately have focussed on the so called adaptation strategies being put forward to tackle human induced climate change. All are doomed for so many obvious political & societal dysfunctions. More than 70 years ago human induced climate change fundamentals were well understood and taught; we just didn't have the details. But like many tough issues it is always easier to deny the existence of rather than accept responsibility for. In the 60s my parents muttered - how could anybody bring a child into the world "these days" with famine, raging civil wars, not to mention The Cold War, Strontium 90, DDT, Agent Orange, PCBs, etc. This the opinion of a couple, one who had just fought in the jungles of Burma and the other survived the Blitz in London. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, I guess.
The point is that all species have alway had checks and balances - we humans are no different. But the writer's daughter will be just as resilient as countless other humans on the face of this planet. She will just not be living in an American utopia. We haven't created this mess overnight. It has been building slowly for a long time. It is just that many isolated and privileged people are now waking up to what has been a reality for most of humanity for eons. But onward and upward!
4
It is interesting that Scranton worries about a dystopian world where climate and environmental degradation are already occurring and will only get worse over the next 30-100 years at the same time teaching at a Catholic university who's religious policies add to the danger by being against artificial family planning (birth control) and other medical means of controlling our out of control population growth over the last 100 years. This is a typical hypocritical views of many educated individuals in our society who fear the future but at the same time buy into an anachronistic set of views of how we may address the impending disaster. Why not, for example, institute a one child policy in all nations to bring the world's population down to a manageable number. This would quickly result in the need for less food, fuel, etc. and would help stabilize the environment and allow for actions to clean up our air, water, food chain, etc. over the coming centuries. This may sound ridiculous to many who read this but failure to take any action is a receipt for disaster. In our current political and social environment anyone with innovative thinking is considered "a liberal air head" if not worse,. The ability to have an intellectual discourse with those who are more interested in gun rights, religion, illegal immigrants, etc. will find some day soon that these are trivial to the matter of saving the planet and in due course the human race.
3
Without Commiting suicide , if you want to see through this ordeal , you have to go and read scientific books or papers.( I am not rude, crass or arroganat)
As you environment aware people know very well , 250 million years ago a kind of mass extinction wiped out almost 90% of life from this planet. Incidents most important factor was Co2 emissions but some other factors were also played role to this great dying.
Our human centric world view concludes that we must live and survive. But why we must Survive? Becasue we can think and we are intelligent.
Dinosaurs were mighty animals, they should survive too, they didn't.
It is not doom, but we must accept a concept that one of the gretatest 20th century evoltuionary biologist : Stephen Jay Gould stated: This world is created for unicellular organisms particularly viruses and bacteria everything else accessory , not essential, easily dispensible.
If you do not see life in this perspective, you are destined to be doomed.
3
Trump and the republicans - and politicians in general - are in the equation of why I am not pushing my brilliant and beautiful daughter not to worry about "finding" someone. Find a passion. Be happy, do good work, have fun. I will always be there for her as long as I can. This is all I can tell her without lying. So she got a puppy. She is so happy!
1
There should be an article analogous to this one written from the perspective of an organism from one of the other ~8 million species on this planet, many of which are our ancestors. A seabird might say I want to reproduce but I don't want my daughter to get plastic lodged in her stomach or become smothered in oil. A gorilla or chimpanzee doesn't want their daughter to suffer from habitat loss and so that cows can graze and crops can grow. It's hard to comprehend the suffering of all these other species from no fault of their own. Incredibly, the one species causing all these problems is only concerned about its own fate.
4
Such doom and gloom isn't going to help your daughter.
While Climate Change is a real threat and we're not doing enough now to mitigate it - for those old enough to remember, it really wasn't that long ago a sizeable percentage of earth's inhabitants were worried about nuclear war and the 'nuclear winter' that would follow (freezing or starving to death anything that escaped incineration or radiation poisoning). Years before that experts predicted the human population would outgrow the food supply and mass starvation and war would be rampant.
But humans are an exceedingly innovative species. Besides developing multiple capacities for self-annihilation, we've also gotten pretty good at feeding ourselves and changing our environment to suit our needs. Considering where we were even a couple hundred years ago - a mere 'fraction of a second' in terms of human history - we've actually done quite well in spite of periodic wars and having a deranged president for instance https://youtu.be/iOu_8yoqZoQ?t=14m49s Geoengineering, which isn't without risks but is under investigation could serve as at least a partial solution to climate change for example https://climate.nasa.gov/news/1066/just-5-questions-hacking-the-planet/
Like it or not, human have already had an out-sized impact on the planet. And we also have the capacity to learn from our mistakes and have a long history of 'frustrating' the prophets of doom.
3
My aunt said the same after WWII. She then regretted never having children and said nothing is guaranteed and she should have stopped whining about the world and made a kid who might have made a difference.
6
In the 1970's I read The Population Bomb and decided that I would do my part and not have any children. I stuck by that decision. It is not a decision I expected others to follow as I have found I am usually an outlier in my beliefs and convictions. As I look at the world now, I am stunned at my hopelessness about the future. I do not act on that hopelessness. I pick up trash everywhere I go, recycle mercilessly, reduce meat and fish consumption, and donate copiously to environmental groups and candidates who support environmental safeguards. But some days I hope for a plague that attacks only humans and leaves the planet without us to perhaps recover. Sad.
6
Everyone having one fewer child might be good for the environment, but it would not be good for the species. And I have just one thing to say to anyone who says that human beings are the problem: after you, sir or madam.
1
What a depressing article with nothing but negative thoughts.
The world is a better place than it was in the past. Merely think of all the advances in medicine since the 1800's. Perhaps their seas weren't rising, but their lives were made unhappy because they had diseases which we no longer are subject to because of vaccines.
4
"- - - since to live at all means to cause suffering."
Yes, to everything that's consumed.
1
People who are concerned about the environment should procreate because they will teach their children to be people who care about the environment and to vote! Also, every single one of us is going to die. But that has never been a reason to not have children. And, yes, perhaps humanity itself, like so many other species, will one day soon even be extinct. But, in the meantime, we must persist and do the best we can. There is still so much beauty in this world and so many opportunities to experience it
5
There's never been a better day than today and tomorrow will be the same.
1
What a depressing point of view.
A newborn is faith in the future and potentialities.
4
"This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States’ record-low birthrate"
I'm sorry but nonsense. A claim like this needs to be substantiated and isn't even remotely so. Many developed countries in the world have seen declining birth rates for quite some time.
1
I think you have missed the biggest problem facing humanity, the combination of male homo sapien ego and the advent of nuclear weapons. One U.S. nuclear submarine can deliver 96 nuclear weapons (16 missiles with 5 bombs mirved on each missile.) That alone is enough to create a nuclear winter, and perhaps destroy the ozone layer. Of all the species that have lived on earth, 99.9% of them are extinct. It has only been about 70 yrs. since nuclear weapons have been developed. I'm 74, and I question whether I will die a natural death, but I am fairly certain that my species will not survive another 100 yrs.
2
I don't know if my husband's grandparents, in Europe in the 30's, had similar thoughts as the Nazi doom approached. Their children survived, had children and now grandchildren.
Every parent since the advent of birth control has had to grapple with bringing children into the world who will someday die, whether young due to catastrophe or comfortably and peacefully after a long and happy life.
The essence of my religious faith is that God, who commanded all life to be fruitful and multiply, did not do so only that we would someday be blown about the desert dust or sealed within the iron hills, THE END. (
2
Lighten up! I am old enough to remember in the 70's the sky was falling because overpopulation was going to fill up the planet and in the '80s we were all going to die in a nuclear war with Russia.
Our lives are significantly better than our grandparents who were child laborers on farms or factories with dangerous machinery or pesticides and our waterways were polluted. We have never lived longer or lived better minus a subset of uneducated people who are obese from poor health habits.
4
It is oddly comforting to know that I'm not the only person on the planet panicking.
10
Boy.....I think this Guy needs a Hug.....
Compare the standard of living and average life expectancy of an American born in 1900 to one born in 2000. Do this, now all (most) of you take a deep breath.
The Free Market Capitalist System combined with Cheap Abundant Fossil Fuel Energy allow the least advantaged among us to lead a more comfortable and healthy life than Kings and Queens were afforded the previous Century.
After taking that deep breath,take a moment and reflect upon the fact that that air you have just breathed in is significantly cleaner that a similar gulp would have been in 1970! Happy?
12
"In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation".
(To Be a Human Being (1989–90); the philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe in his 90th
5
Two daughters, four grandchildren—two more before Christmas. The author should be so lucky. We live in a time when world poverty is decreasing, life-expectancy is increasing, and the most dire productions about the climate are off the mark. The earth has been “hot” it has been “cold.” Choose which one you prefer.
2
Roy,
Let's say there were only 451 humans on a pristine, nature dominated earth. A large meteor could still strike the earth and wipe most stuff out. So, why spend your time thinking about the earth as a dystopia and why not just live a positive, happy life?? Be happy to have been born into a country where the use of fossil fuels currently makes feeding ourselves trivial and life easy. Will it always be like this? No, everything always changes with time. But, that is not depressing. That is just the way time evolves....change happens. Be happy with your daughter. She will want to be happy with you. And, delete this dark, forboding article before she runs across it as a teenager and decides heroin addiction is better than being happy since her Dad thinks the world is coming to an end.
6
There have been numerous "extinction events" in the geologic history of earth. (Look up "snowball earth" for an example.)
This first and biggest "extinction event" was caused by the first green algae caused the CO2 and CH4 to drop so low the planet literally froze.
Others have been induced by too much CO2 and CH4 causing heat, and too much SO2 causing brief, but sharp, cooling.
Humanity did buy itself some time in the 70's with the changes needed to close the "ozone hole" by removing Freon from the upper atmosphere by changing to a different refrigerating fluid. Chloroflorocarbons (Freon) are far more efficient greenhouse gases (molecule for molecule) than CO2 or even CH4 (methane). Global warming can be stopped.
Today's conservatives are actually "invisible hand-ists", believing money is the sole measure of value, and that it correctly and fairly prices in everything.
This belief has stopped all recent attempts at public action in this country.
As was true in the 70's, we can save ourselves from the worst impacts. We can also engineer solutions that could protect cities like New York for many decades, possibly centuries. If we do not try, the outcome is clear--and disastrous for most of us and bad for all. Moving to renewable energy would likely generate more jobs than our current power solution. Planting trees and otherwise sequestering carbon can potentially reverse some of the damage.
It is not the threat of climate change, it is the refusal to address it.
I agree with you in every way. I too had a child with my partner. He is a wonderful young boy who is growing into a thoughtful young man and will try to work to improve our World. Perhaps our two children and the thousand of other thoughtful smart children will find a way to correct our stupidity.
I started when he was 10 We went door to door hand in hand for Obama. Yes Obama did not turn into the president we wanted but he began what is happening now. Yes My son was rejected at several doors but that taught him that the world is not always kind and will not always agree with him. Still we did this same exercise every weekend.
We met wonderful people most who would help us change the world. Yes Climate change is here and we as a country have not done what is necessary but I have a few rules I have taught my son.
1. Always show up (try)
2. Work hard
3. Try and do good in every thing you do.
4. Never quit, be patient and quiet, preserver.
Chuck from Ohio
2
Even if I agree we should do everything we can to slow down climate change, I look at all this, what is written here, and think, « this is hysteria ».
2
This is ridiculous. Another view...
"The environmental doomsayers don’t just extrapolate blindly from current trends. They extrapolate only from the trends that fit their apocalyptic vision while ignoring trends that don’t fit. They project forward the current rate at which we’re using up our resources, but ignore the history of our ability to innovate and create. They get all excited by 20 years of rising temperature or rising oil prices—but ignore two centuries of rising wealth and longevity."
http://thefederalist.com/2015/04/24/seven-big-failed-environmentalist-pr...
1
Look on the bright side.
When the water wars come, the nuclear winter from the global apocalypse will lower the Earth's temperature, and the polar ice caps will freeze right back up.
Of course the acidified oceans will still be inhospitable to life, but of the vastly reduced world population, Americans are statistically much more likely to be alive, right?
1
The lemmings are rushing toward the cliff and those of us who see the abyss find ourselves screaming into a wilderness of denial.
Religion teaches these people that there is someone watching out for us but there isn't. The universe in all its immensity and grandeur cares very little if we exist. We are specks on a speck. We had a great chance and greed and ignorance is winning.
I have gone through similar doubts as the author and feel his pain. My child is twenty and I am glad he has had this chance. I hope that his end is not as I fear, mine does not matter that much.
2
Absolutely brilliant and eloquent. As a parent of two daughters, I am struggling with the creeping realization that the comforts we provide them are but a temporary distraction from a dark future that is not far away. The polluted planet and our cancerous national divide are ushering us into the dystopia we have created; the fruits of capitalism’s selfish onslaught are coming to bear, and being a parent has never been more difficult.
The problem is the disparity of understanding; there are those who truly don’t understand in the same way Trent Lott was captured on camera by Sasha Cohen recently advocating giving children guns, for example. It is not unrelated. There is no common ethical ground between us; those who don’t get it really don’t get it. The dystopia is here.
7
We may not have the luxury of time. It is well known that global warming increases the prevalence and incidence of infectious disease. Germs like to grow in warm places. It is basic. The National Academy of Sciences issued a warning about the possibility of a dangerous reemergence of disease trapped in melting permafrost, but which politician listened? Thawing frozen soil may increase the risk of exposure to common bacteria such as Anthrax. Other deadly viruses (like the Spanish Flu) may be frozen in these polar regions waiting to emerge. We already know that Zika, Lyme, West Nile and a host of other mosquito borne disease have become increasingly common as the planet has warmed. Does the medical profession advise patients about these risks? Who is responsible for telling the public? We have not even discussed the numerous negative effects of exposure to petroleum products on the developing fetus. Talk about a right to life issue, but don't talk to conservative clergy! How many children will be born with preventable health problems due to their magical thinking about science? Everyone is affected, even the wealthy who thwart our efforts to mitigate climate change.
3
It's a bit hyperbolic to say that the recommendations to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car-free and have one less child "would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. Indeed, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide."
One can take full advantage of the amenities of modern life eating vegetarian and using public transit. One can easily live in a city and use public transportation for daily life, and use trains and buses for longer distance travel, or rent a car for those occasions. It can actually be more economical to live this way and lower stress. And how does having one less child cut oneself off from modern life? Having less children allows a person to enjoy the best of modern life AND life in general.
There is no question that we are moving towards greater use of renewable energy and more flexible and energy efficient transportation.
Part of the answer can be changes in how we organize work life. By providing people with more time off, even just say 4 weeks vacation rather than 2 weeks, it makes traveling long distance by train a more viable and actually more enjoyable possibility than flying.
5
As a childless-by-choice person I find it inexplicable--and laughable--for someone to claim that the childless lack a "deep connection to the future". My connection to the future is expressed in many ways--through the students I teach, the books I have written, the money I have donated to groups working to help the environment--and does not in any way depend on whether or not my genes continue to another generation.
I am baffled as to how any thinking, rational person could choose to beget a child in this world. If you are determined to be a parent, adopt. The best thing anyone concerned about climate change and the future can do is commit to NOT having children. And to choose to fling another sentient being into this maelstrom is, no other word for it, cruel. Choosing to reproduce (when you are fortunate enough to live in a society that allows you to have the choice not to), under these circumstances, is indefensible.
As the idea that the logical extension of not having children is suicide, that's just silly. Those of us who are already here are sentient, aware, alive beings. We are not morally obligated to kill ourselves. Choosing to conceive a child creates a new sentient being, where one did not exist before; choosing NOT NOT to conceive that child harms no-one. There is no comparison with suicide.
11
@me But the population of western countries is not increasing, it is shrinking. Overpopulation stems from the birthrates in Africa and southern Asia. Not to mention the future refugee waves that may wreak havoc to the already fragile political system. By choosing to remain childless, one does exactly nothing to solve the aforementioned issues. And if the progressive civilization voluntarily goes extinct, there'll be no one to come up with technology that actually solves the problems, no one to teach the rest of the world about rationalism.
I'm not diminishing white-people guilt that many love to feel - I'm still stunned by the amount of garbage generated solely by our presence in USA - just looking at all those high-quality paper catalogs that so many companies are spamming us with. Or - like someone already mentioned, the vacation policy that essentially forces people to fly to save some precious hours. But the population explosion - no, that's not directly white people fault (indirectly, maybe, e.g. helping Africa, resulting in higher population growth there). Why should a responsible person resign to adopting to pay for someone else's irresponsible procreation? Because addressing birthrates of non-white, non-western people in any other way would be too much controversy? As for American consumerism, there are other ways to address that than not having children.
2
It is very commendable of Mr. Scranton, but not very illustrative of human nature in general, I fear, that he fails to mention the most natural parental response to this grim scenario: millions will die, but MY child must not be among them. Make sure he/she has the resources, culture, tribe, economic security, education, to not be washed away by the rising seas, or starved by the drying crops, or killed in the inevitable wars.
5
What a brilliant essay. I wish I could write like the author and I also wish I could refute his thoughts, but my own melancholy regarding the grim future of this beautiful planet and all its magnificent creatures that are doomed by the colossal insensitivity and hubris of man.
God help your daughter and mine growing up in an uncertain future that forebodes of cataclysmic event from an overheating planet and an exponentially expanding human population that exponentially increasing.
I am not too sure invocations to God will amount to much as he/she has been rather apathetic during the most fraught times on this planet.
4
Well I, for one, am not so fearful as the good Professor. Perhaps he needs to get out of the city and see what the real world looks like. I live on a large organic farm started by my wife and I and now supporting 3 of our five children and their families. I am not the least pessimistic about their future and I only wish we had not stopped at 5.
They are all good, kind, sensible people and they are raising their children to be the same. We have been on our home farm for over 40 years and I see the world around me only becoming more beautiful and productive. For me and mine, we will not fear the future. We will embrace it in all it's wonder and possibility.
I feel for the author. He lives in a very dark place of his own making. Come west Prof and visit us and you'll, perhaps, see things a little different. Walk through my fields, eat a fresh picked peach or some ripe blueberries. Sit in the evening on my porch and enjoy the cool while you drink a glass of my wife's fine wine. You'll feel better and your daughter might actually find a little of the hope you have lost.
8
@Steve W. How I wish you were right! As a scientist I know the probabilities when 97% of scientists agree on a complex topic. Your post is beautiful and hopeful, but displays a stunning lack of scientific understanding. If your daughter had a malignant tumor and 19 expert oncologists recommended a particular treatment to save her life and one oncologist said no treatment was needed, what would you do? The oncologist who recommended no treatment might be right, but the probability is overwhelmingly in favor of the 19.
6
@Steve W, sorry but you're the one who needs to get out and look around. You have a micro view and the professor has a macro view. Unfortunately, although organic farms and the use of non-fossil fuel are the right approach, at this point it's (way) too little, too late. It might even have been too late when Reagan tore off Carter's solar panels from the White House. Here's hoping for a miracle solution to this frightening relatively near future, but don't hold your breath.
9
"That very dissonance is perhaps the defining truth of our era. " Well written.
However, do not make the mistake of thinking that even radical national change would help. Even if the U.S. stopped producing carbon emissions immediately, homo sapiens will still extinguish itself within 200 years based on what other countries are producing and what is already in the atmosphere.
This is not a national problem. It is not a Trump problem. It is a global problem. And nature does not care about politics, or even what the U.S. does or does not do.
Barring a miracle, the human race will be extinct in a few hundred years, and then the world will go on to regenerate species more amenable to the world we have left them. Starting with ferns.
6
What year did you have your child? We had our daughters in 1998 and 2000. Before 9/11. I often feel guilty, not knowing what they will have to live through, although they reassure me that I couldn't have known what was to come. They were raised in an educational environment that pushed climate change into their awareness at age 9, and it scared them. Now 20 and 18, they ask if having a child one day is irresponsible. I tell them, who knows, maybe your child will be the one who discovers the answer to the world's problems. At age 62, I remember college speakers in the early 80s driving home the coming problems of the "population explosion". We don't hear so much about that anymore. I firmly believe that exigency will bring the best and the brightest to find solutions to our world's problems, as it always has. You can't know what the future holds.
2
Our daily dose of doom and gloom is only the establishment's all out attempt to deprive us of this opportunity for change. Through misinformation they would impede our recognition of what this transformation is really all about, which is our opportunity to escape their selfish grasp on our lives. Death is transformation, not doom and gloom, it is merely the prelude to a new beginning.
1
The world is not doomed. But the problem is that human society as a whole will come to much more strongly resemble a "palace built upon a dung heap." In other words, how rich people live in Haiti or the Philippines will become the global standard. This development is almost unavoidable given growing resource scarcity with population growth and the proliferation of members of what Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari coldly but aptly called the "global useless class."
4
Mr. Scranton, I'd argue that reproduction is NOT, for many people, "the single strongest drive." There are quite a few on this planet who are happy and serene in their decision (for whatever their reasons) to not have children.
Personally, I would not want to bring a child into this world now, given the uncertainty that even with a good education, that child may never have a good job or a decent income. But that is just my opinion, and no reflection on those who are brave enough to have children!
10
We must commit to doing our most to help the most.
This essay could explain the appeal of opioids and alcohol.
3
I deal with these same thoughts and dreads everyday when doing many of the same activities with my child you describe doing with yours. I hope one day they can forgive us for what we brought them into through no fault of their own.
4
I have a 14 year old daughter.
I cheer for her, and I provide a safety net, but I can't give her a purposeful, fulfilling life. She has to decide for herself what to make of her life.
It has brought me great joy to watch her explore all the opportunities she has had so far. It is because of her generation that I am optimistic about the future.
I hope your daughter will bring you the same joy as she grows up.
4
I grieve for what we will lose to warming and I'm deeply saddened by the venal stupidity that is despoiling our planet.
But human extinction? Come on.
If we become extinct, it will be through some idiocy like nuclear war, not global warming.
Yes, there will be extinctions, storms, famines, even war. But that is not the end of the world. We will survive it, as we've survived everything from the black death to the second world war.
And you are discounting the ingenuity that we will apply to the problem, as its effects become so dire that even the most clueless warming denier realizes he has to take action.
I suspect, for example, that geoengineering will be part of our future -- not because it is the best solution, but because if the worst predictions pan out, it will be the only solution.
7
What we can do. Limit the number of children we have to one or at most, two. We can press for comprehensive, sex education, reproductive health care (through Planned Parenthood and other healthcare orgs), providing birth control such as IUDs to high school students as Colorado did and dropped teen pregnancies by 40%, living simply, recycling, and insisting that our political leaders start addressing climate change (Trump has us helping the polluters).
Some 50% of pregnancies in the USA are unplanned. It's higher and lower in other nations. Do we know which countries have the highest birth rates? Few of us do and few of us care to find out, let along do something about it. Time for a critical mass of us to take action.
3
@Tulipano
I agree, but you can't talk population reduction without talking religion and you can't talk religion without sounding racist. I'm a white grad school educated atheist. My category of person isn't having too many babies.
I really wish that Trump would use his seemingly bottomless blundering insensitivity to decorum and social decency to broach the unsavory (yet important) topic of overpopulation due to mindless religiosity. Imagine a world in which only atheists could have children.
This thoughtful column demonstrates why we scientists need the humanities. Scientists can tell you that climate change represents an existential crisis for humanity, but it takes an English professor to put it in words that present the crisis in truly human terms. As Neil Postman said, "One can have a great deal of knowledge about the world but entirely lack wisdom."
Philip Hansten
5
Her child won life's lottery. She was born into a the wealthiest most gifted society in terms of resource and economic wealth in the world.
Her life won't be a nice as yours but she will probably do alright. The true losers in climate changed ravaged earth are pretty much everyone who lives in a 3rd world country, which is about 4 Billion people.
They did not destroy the planet, we did and we are not going to fix it anytime soon.
Sadly the pretty much universal response has been and is going to be "where there is no solution there is no problem"
8
The techno-utopian position is that humanity will continue to innovate its way past the constraints imposed by climate change, water scarcity, pandemics, etc; that we'll step up and learn to control the climate and assume control of the biosphere. Good or bad, this is the way forward.
Some look at the challenges ahead and are overwhelmed. Others see the potential to make the Earth an Eden, better than it ever was.
3
After decades of reading environmental and climate change literature, I feel that this is the best essay I have ever read that accurately and meaningfully relates the current crisis to our individual lives.
But I do not like the idea that Wind in the Willows and other treasured children's books should be mentally relegated to the fairy tale genre. Instead, I think that beautifully written and illustrated books that reflect and celebrate the beauty of what we are losing are absolutely necessary.
American education is just as weak and misleading in History (and Deep History) as well as in Science. Losing History is like losing a vision of what has been and may again be possible.
2
It's not just global warming but the specter of the technical AI world that would make me reluctant to bring children into this world now--thank goodness I had my children decades ago.
1
Uncommonly precise.
The 2000 election was crucial, but that’s in the past.
The revenue neutral carbon tax proposal seems doable and promising.
This paragraph bears repeating:
“Society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices but a complex, recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies that change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible. All the while, those structures are being disrupted and nudged and warped and shaken by countless internal and external drivers, including environmental factors such as global warming, material and social innovation, and the occasional widespread panic. Which is just to say that we are not free to choose how we live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from possible options, not ex nihilo.”
For some people, "living ethically" and with an understanding that "our actions have consequences" means precisely that they opt out of biological children. This decision deserves greater respect and appreciation from the author.
Mr. Scranton has devalued this choice as counter to "the fundamental organizing principle of every human society". But this argument does not establish or justify his assertion that having children (and making no effort to follow Wynes and Nicholas' exhortation to constrain the number of biological children one has) is a net-positive endeavor for society.
One could argue that discrimination against darker-skinned individuals and women are also "fundamental organizing principle[s] of every human society", but that does not make them inherently worthwhile. It would serve the author to reconsider the pedestal on which he has placed procreation in light of the proven fallibility of many assumptions that have been made on how to organize society.
3
In my job I often drive deep into the woods and to mountaintops in California, and I'm often surprised that while I think I'm well away from civilization and maybe experiencing nature as people did hundreds of years ago, I can usually still hear it--the freeway five miles away, an airplane overhead.
I find it staggering that in only a 150 years people have claimed, filled in, stripped and polluted all this land that had been sustainably lived in and managed by low population groups for over ten thousand years. I often think of the crying Indian commercial from the 70s.
My wife and I are not having children. There needs to be a future, and children, but there needs to be less of us too.
14
I think Mr Scranton needs to calm down. When it comes to raising and caring for children and interacting with them a positive mood and attitude is most important. Focusing on impending disaster is not helpful to children. The child can become fearful and neurotic as happened during the 1960's as children were taught to be terrified of nuclear war.
The earth is not going to be destroyed. Whatever happens, humans and other species will adapt. Change is an unavoidable part of life. Time spent with children should be pleasant and enjoyable. It's a chance to take a break from adult worries and enjoy life and enjoy the children, who are charming and fun to be with. I hope that Mr Scranton will calm down and find joy in raising his child and maintain a cheerful and positive attitude in his interactions with her.
8
Wow, this is the most negative writing I have read in a long time. Mr. Scranton is hardly alone in his doom and gloom prognosis though. I see it all over the comments.
I m a child of the 1950s when we really had things to worry about. The Korean war was going; we expected the Russians would nuke us any minute. Women had few rights. There were still occasional lynchings in the South, for crying out loud. And yet the mood of the country was optimistic. We were sure a shining future was just over the horizon.
Now we are here in the future we envisioned. We didn’t think much about pollution back then because it was just an expected part of life. The air, the rivers were horrible. Today, in every way I can think of, cleaning up the environment, advances in rights—women, civil and LGBT—medical advances, on and on, the world is a much better place and yet pessimism rules.
Seems to me optimism-pessimism is only a mindset that tends to be divorced from reality. You can look around you at everything that is happening and choose either one. My long experience at life has taught me to choose the former.
18
@Jagadeesan
It's called facing reality, armed with knowledge and awareness of what is to come. Those who don't delude themselves with upbeat platitudes about optimism cannot help but confront these prospects. It's not about choosing a mindset. If only it were.
7
The feed back loops that steadily increase warming are growing exponentially now, such as methane coming out of once frozen lakes and lands- adding more carbon than mankind will ever be able to remove, and less surface ice thus more dark water on this planet. More dark water, the planet is a growing solar collector. Another feed back loop is the trillions spent to heal from more numerous extreme weather events. The US, alone, spent over $300B on severe weather events in 2017. That loop diverts resources from what would be investments for the future.
The science has been remarkably accurate, but has consistently been too conservative with timelines. Fifteen to twenty years from now is actually now.
3
The world was doomed when I was born, 1942. WWII was still going badly for us, and there have been plenty of issues to shake our world since then. Pollution, loss of habitat, global warming, and the fool we have in the White House. Nevertheless children often are an unalloyed joy and a blessing. My sons, now well grown up, are wonderful men. My grandchildren grace our lives with great blessings. Most parents and grandparents do the same for their children. To miss all this because of fear is too timid an excuse not to have children.
17
Yes, you perfectly articulate the pain that wrenches my soul every single day since I birthed my two children. I thought hard about having them, but ultimately my desire for them won over my concerns. I love them more than I ever imagined possible and want so much for them to enjoy a fulfilling existence. I know that the cascading effects of climate change (not just environmental, but economic, political, and social) will pick up pace as they grow into adulthood. (Unless a miracle!) So I am left with the love and life we enjoy right now, and teaching them to value it for each moment we're given.
6
I have two kids. I'm also devoting my professional life to building space vehicles. Earth isn't the only planet in the universe. Think outside the box.
@Ohana True, but earth is the only earth.
1
@Ohana Why is it desirable that humans follow their "divine" commandments and exterminate any sentient beings on other planets?
Thank you.
This column is perhaps the most important thing I have read in a newspaper in quite some time. It succinctly summarizes the looping thoughts and fears-- and HOPES-- that run in the background of my own mind nearly every moment I am awake, but which are more often at the forefront these days, and those nights when my dreams tend towards nightmares.
Many people will turn away from such clear-headed and honest understanding in despair. They will throw up their hands, ask what's the use?, and double or triple down on their own carbon use ("eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die"). Many others, smugly, are already pointing in these comments to the fact that they have not had children. Does it follow therefore that they are neither at fault nor have they any responsibility to change the way they consume in order to reduce the amount of concrete (10% of human CO2 emissions globally) poured, plastic pushed down the drain-- figuratively and literally, most of the latter in the form of poly fibers from laundry and microbeads from skin care, or cast into the garbage after being torn from the Amazon box, or vacationing/travelling by car, train, jet, cruise ship, which along with lodgings and other assorted consumption activities by TOURISTS accounts for ANOTHER 10% of our carbon emissions?
There are many, many things we can be doing to reduce the damage. Watch 'The Century of the Self' on Youtube. Subscribe to https://phys.org/physics-news/
Contemplate, then act!
This is the best article on climate change that I have read in a long time. I agree with everything he says. I have been to many lectures by experts on climate change and the message is the same as this author's with one notable difference: The experts, after delivering one well documented doomsday scenario after another, generally end their talks with by saying there is hope for future generations because the world knows what to do about climate change before it is too late. Professor Scranton convincingly explains why that optimism is misplaced.
7
Wow.
Lighten up, Francis.
18
Every seen the movie "Idiocracy?" it is prescient on the current situation. Intelligent people need to have kids or the idiots will take over.
................Oops.... Too late!!!
10
@Joe Rockbottom: Why is that preferable to adopting, fostering, or mentoring the children who are already here and in need of care?
3
Wait, the world of The Wind in the Willows still exists. I live along a beautiful creek like the one in that story. Come visit me in rural Tennessee. We could walk around in The Hundred Acre Wood. There are even some bears around here, people say. Every day I see a wild animal: today it was deer.
But everything else you say is true.
1
Children are the hope of the world. My older brother was born just before Pearl Harbor. I was born almost five years later after VE day, and my younger brother 19 months after. We express our optimism for the future through our children, and I can promise you, my wife and I were equally concerned about the direction of our world when we had our children. They gave us hope, love, laughs, wisdom, and optimism, as their children do for them now.
Your daughter is your emissary to the future. Her youth, energy and the wisdom you convey to her can be forces for good after you're gone. Do what you can for the future, and don't waste a minute second-guessing that decision.
6
@Randomonium - Re-reading my hopefully positive post, I feel compelled to add that you have an important choice to make:
You can put your own doubts aside and share in the joy and positivity of a young child discovering the world, and by doing so, find more joy and hope in your own life. Or, you can impose your overwhelming pessimism on her, dooming her to a life of fear and anxiety.
Anyone who would contemplate self-immolation as a rational, moral expression of concern for earth's future needs professional help. Do you believe your mother who endured the pain of childbirth and nurtured you so well would accept that violent end for you? Is that how you would want your daughter's life to end? I very much doubt it.
1
Sure, we'll adapt, but be clear on who the we is: Those rich enough to afford what real food costs and cozy with the ruling class who controls security. The rest of us will suffer and ultimately end up eating each other, Soylent Green is going to look Utopian in comparison...
6
I take climate change very seriously, however, the graver situation here seems to be the author's way of introducing his daughter to the world. What will childhood be like for this precious baby whose father urges her to see how awful the world is literally before her eyes open? How will she have hope, which is necessary to human life, when her father tells her that he was wrong (selfish) to want to have her? Does she exist only to please him? I think not. If she chooses some career other than any of the multiple paths open to eco-warriors, will he disapprove? In that case, what will happen to their relationship when his adult daughter demonstrates to him, by her own actions, that she does indeed have a free will and will choose her own path in life, as is her right?
This is the age old problem of laying excessive and egotistical expectations on one's child. Addressing climate change does indeed require thorough rethinking of how we live and our universal alignment with mutually agreed ethical principles for preserving our glorious planet. It requires self-discipline, self-sacrifice and a life long effort to convince ourselves that it is not ourselves, but others, who must be the focus of our efforts.
The same is completely true for raising a child.
Give this poor kid a break!
7
@Cathy Earle
What did our Stone Age ancestors do to their children when they told them horror stories around the fire about the teeth and claws of the cave bear and the saber-toothed cat? Or of the slashing tusks of the wooly mammoth, the horn of the wooly rhinoceros, the fangs of the viper, the poison of the fruits and berries they could not eat versus the life-giving nourishment of the ones they could?
They saved their lives.
Your way of life is a very recent one. I happen to have grown up reading Mother Goose Grimm's fairy tales, Aesop's fables-- almost all of which were CAUTIONARY tales handed down from generation to generation-- from a time not too far removed from ours-- not to lull us to sleep but to keep us awake from the dangers in the world around us but more importantly to the follies of our own blind arrogance. No one reads these stories to their children anymore, yet hardly a day goes by that I don't find myself in a situation that all that collective folk wisdom I consumed as a child equipped me to better understand.
We no longer have folk ways. We have opium for the masses-- whether it comes from actual opiates, Disney, the purveyors of the Prosperity Gospel, or those preaching optimism to their children in the face of ongoing, global, mass extinction-- and not just for all the animal species and ancient environments we have been destroying for centuries, but this time, for ourselves as well.
3
Solar panels work and are available for sale today, and for the price of a toyota camry you can buy a system to power your whole house and a battery to store the excess power and route it to your car - just saying. Glad you understand the situation we all find ourselves in Prof., and that you're getting people to focus on it. However, I'd encourage all of us to cut down on the melodrama and make better choices, including investing in some birth control and showing up to the voting booth.
3
We know more about killing than living. We know more about strategies of war than strategies for peace. And now we know more about changing the world than maintaining it.
This has always been the way. We would have to fundamentally change human nature to have it any other way.
1
This is a very strong message that should spur people into actions they can take to reduce their carbon footprint. This must include having fewer children as total consumption is a function of population and resource use. And we already exceed the carrying capacity of the planet as calculated before the recent spate of high energy use gadgets.
Since scale is everything in this matter I would counsel Ernest Callenbach's (author of "Ecotopia.") advice that not all individuals must make all the aforementioned sacrifices but that everybody must do something.
Lastly, the author insults many people when he suggests that one must have offspring to experience meaning. This is manifestly incorrect and a rationalization of his particular choice. It converts what might otherwise be a clarion call to action by all into self-indulgent hand-wringing and a muddy message.
Do not worry. Plenty of others will have children even if many do not. And it will take many years to spool down the population. Probably too many.
11
While I very much in agreement that climate change is a enormous threat, I did find... forgive me for my bluntness... an unpleasant negativism in this piece. Perhaps the most important single thing that an individual can do is to maintain and express strength and determination. That produces action beyond the minimal actions that resignation produces. On my own I have convinced our local bus system to ensure that bus drivers turn off their buses at the end of their routes (at train stations, for example). I have ensured that our light rail agency keeps unnecessary lighting off during the day. I have spoken with many people about the seriousness of climate change. Hopelessness would greatly blunt my motivation for such things. Obviously the enemy is inaction. But this can spring from pessimism just as well as from denial and misinformation. Now is the time to act. And we must act well beyond the confines imposed by hopelessness!
5
If I were 25 or 30 years younger and still childless, I too would be questioning bringing children into this mess. If my take was similar to Mr. Scranton's, I would have my answer.
1
My parents' generation sacrificed, and saved the world from Fascism. I have several children, and I am raising each one to know that their mission is to save our world. They are happy warriors and I am proud of them.
4
The world is not doomed, at least in the short term. It has a couple billion years left till the Sun expands and roasts Mother Earth to a cinder. On the other hand, I strongly suspect that humanity will drive itself to extinction in the more immediate future by its own efforts rather than manage its population in a sustainable manner. But in that regard, we will be little different than all the other species that have come and gone on the planet since the first bugs came into existence almost four billion years ago. Our problem is that we are sentient, and can see ourselves put the metaphorical gun to our collective head and we can't keep the finger off the trigger. Sentience does not mean wisdom. Just look at the last presidential election.
Well, if we put down that metaphorical gun, there is always the next big asteroid...
2
Wow. Allow me to cut to the chase. Mr.Scranton's best option may be to teach his daughter survival skills based on his forecast. Cormac McCarthy is an optimist compared to Mr. Scranton.
2
Anyone who thinks this is paranoid fantasy or overblown rhetoric should sign up for a climate change news feed such as Inside Climate News, winner of a Pulitzer for investigative reporting. Just spend a few months learning about what’s going on now—and the hard science showing that every computer model prediction so far has been shown to have hugely under-estimated future sea level rise, temperature rise, glacial ice melt etc.
3
Mr. Scranton says that perhaps the most ethical thing is to commit suicide, as to lower your carbon footprint. By that logic, killing as many people before you commit suicide, that might be even more ethical. There is a better answer, have our governments and other forces of power on our planet acknowledge the problem of climate change and work to fix it.
Simple, but not easy.
Simple, but not likely.
Simple.
1
Professor, you might begin taking steps toward a better life for your daughter by persuading your colleagues at Notre Dame of the merits of flooding municipal water systems throughout the world with contraceptives and subsidizing abortion on demand until population levels return to more sustainable levels. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
4
I migrated to Australia years ago. I have real bad dreams of waking up in America. Why stay? It is never going to get any better. Make a change, leave. What is holding you back in life? Each day I wake up in paradise, Queensland Australia. I have national health care, aged pension, no guns and no worries.
5
Yes, the world is a hot mess, and it seems like everything is breaking down at once. We're certainly in for some turbulence.
But, wasn't Y2K supposed to destroy us all? It didn't. Humanity has faced down fiercer foes: HIV, Spanish flu, the Black Death, and any number of other calamities. Many people died, but others lived.
We're here on this earth to solve problems. Humans are tough and adaptable. (Ask the people of the Netherlands whose country is below sea level and who have held back the waters for centuries with fantastic feats of engineering.)
With regard to that question, to spawn or not to spawn...
The elites sow despair and panic among liberals to keep our numbers in check. Make us afraid so we won't reproduce, and pay for our birth control on Obamacare. (Meanwhile all the non-liberals breed with abandon.)
It's all a plot.
They steal our identities in the public schools, then pacify us with weed, trendy alcohol, and opiates. (Soma, anyone?)
They mamstring our aspirations (college or bust) and then indenture us with student loans.
Finally, they just choke us with their red tape.
Behind the scenes, Putin and others driven by greed salivate at the potential riches of a warming world: virgin lands of Siberia and northern Canada ripe for the taking, Arctic shipping lanes open for business, and of course fewer polar bears to attack all the humans who will soon be streaming north.
Well, count me, my husband, and our daughter among the optimists.
1
Whatever formal religion you may or may not follow, we all need to "worship" life. That means facing the realities of what this demands long-term on this still-beautiful blue- splotched and finite rock.
Thanks to the author and NYT for this caring message.
2
Sadly, I have to concur with Mr. Scranton's assessment of what the future holds. I applaud him for having the courage to procreate, something I will not be joining in on.
Even though this opinion paints a grim picture, in reality it does not come close to expressing just how harsh a future existence will be. Virtually ever measurement of signs of climate change made just 20 years ago, are now escalating at a more rapid pace. We are in uncharted waters with changes to the environment that have occurred over a very brief period of time. Mr. Scranton's hopeful solution of a bonding of humanity, unfortunately is unattainable.
6
30 years ago i could have told this world was no place to raise a child. I had a vasectomy 20 years ago to make sure. It will not be an easy old age but I have comfort in the fact that I will not be responsible for any future problems.
7
"...transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction."
Given what you have to say just preceding that sentence, I would ask "Why bother?" Better to say that an ethical life would mean minimizing the damage we do to everyone else before we go.
This is a compelling piece. Humans have always made a mess of things but our resilience as a species is astounding. We need to be kind to each other and to the planet. Of course. And we can't read too many calls to action. But I was distressed that you used David Buckel to make your point. No one knows what was in his head or what his demons were. No one can presume to know a person's true motives for suicide or what his underlying wounds were. His survivors deserve our deepest sympathy and compassion and his memory deserves our respect. But his suicide was nothing but tragic and one assumption I will make is that he could have served us better alive than not.
2
@CP: We don't know what was in Mr. Buckel's head? There are several articles about him right here in the Times, quoting his friends and family members and his suicide note. While he "could have" served us better by staying alive, he lost the will to serve in that way. After a long and honorable career winning rights for gay and transgender people, his second career in urban composting and mentoring young environmentalists had also come to an end. After he did two of the most honorable "tours of duty" a person could do, it's shameful that a stranger say that he should have sacrificed to do a third when his heart was no longer in it.
2
Thank you Roy for your exquisitely written article. I have no children but not by choice. I hope your daughter's future is not as fearful as you foresee, but I tend to agree with you and worry much about my young great-nephews.
Of course, it doesn't help to have a "useful tool" as our president, who doesn't even perceive climate change as he doesn't have the intellectual capacity to see anything but himself.
1
You are one crazy mom, stop worrying about this and enjoy you child.
9
The left pokes fun at the religious right for not believing in evolution. But the left doesn't seem to believe that we could possibly evolve and adapt to changes in the environment - instead, all we get is doom and gloom about how we are just going to curl up and die. To me that seems as much religious nonsense as the right's belief that some of us are going to hell. Insofar as statements that planet earth "can't handle" more humans - what kind of colossal conceit is that? How the heck do you personally know what the planet can and cannot handle? Historically speaking, the planet has seen worse and humans have seem worse. Both my husband and I have serious medical conditions that would have quite literally killed us 50 years ago. We're grateful to live in 2018.
8
@wbelm It is a myth that the religious right has any conflict with science. Christian fundamentalists voted Democrat until they were evicted for refusing to accept that abortion is a sacrament. Republicans are mainstream, better educated than Democrats and accepting of people who do not agree on every item, particularly things like evolution that are of no consequence for purposes of public policy decisions.
It would become possible for a rational policy discussion to take place if Democrats were not as close minded as they appear.
1
@wbelm Exactly! Whenever people wax on about how wonderful it was in the good ole' days I remind them of the medical conditions that would have killed them already.
What utter rubbish. Today’s children will play the most important roles in human history. The stakes are not just the fate of peoples and places, but of the planet and our race as a whole. It is the moral duty of everyone alive to arm them for this mighty task.
There is a moment (many moments, actually) in The Lord of the Rings, where the odds seem insuperable, but the swords are drawn and battle joined, and courage in the end wins through. Yes, it’s a movie, but Tolkien the writer was also Tolkien the historian, and human history is full of moments where everything seemed lost and somehow turned out not to be, because, well, we all know the rest...
The writer of this pathetic article is billed as a Professor of English. Time he screwed his courage to the sticking point and got on with the job.
5
"The planet will be fine.....humans are screwed".....George Carlin
5
Whether you (or anyone) had a child despite an awareness of the conditions you were bringing her into, or whether that awareness only dawned after her arrival, the premise is the same: selfishness. Procreation is counted as either the driver or the proof of the meaning of our existence, and that logic is pure narcissism. For all of revolutions in thought and technology humanity loves to congratulate itself for, we have nevertheless failed to outsmart ourselves; after all, here we are.
The suggestion that those of us choosing to remain childless (and choosing to eat plant-based diets, to bike instead of drive, to avoid flying) are "giving up any deep connection to the future" is further evidence of the author's folly. Actually, making such changes on an individual basis provides the only hope there is to change the outlook for human survival (assuming this outcome is desirable). Trends begin with a departure - without a departure, there's nothing to notice; if nothing is noticed, business as usual continues and no trend emerges. This rebellion, this acting as an individual with the intent to influence the future for the better despite not having a direct interest in that future is, is unknown to parents, meat-eaters, and jet-setters.
9
Global warming may be real, but it is not caused by the West. It is caused by the oxygen factories of the world such as Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia, etc cutting down hundreds of billions of trees that would otherwise thrive off of the carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.
5
But, my friend, do you know why these countries cut down their forests? Do you understand the economic drivers that pushed locals to subsist or sell that land for farming and ranching? Much of it can be linked to the pressures and forces of global trade, and the hunger by the West for more. More meat, more imported fruit, more palm oil, etc etc.
3
Exactly.
One's actions have consequences.
Time to stop being so greedy.
1
@Brianna E. Excuse those in the West for existing and enjoying fruit. Each country controls its own destiny. Most of the destruction of the Amazon is done in pursuit of gold. Farms that are set up in the Amazon last two years before the soil is exhausted, as rain forests have only a small layer of top soil. This is not the fault of the West, but is due to corruption and ignorance, but mainly corruption, in these countries. Ironically, the native nuts and fruits of the Amazon, if exported, would be a much better source of income for Brazil than the hunt for gold. Ecotourism in Indonesia would bring in more money than palm oil. And the Philippines is just badly mismanaged with too many people.
We have had a very clear understanding of the existential threat of climate change and fossil fuels for at least three decades. We have had ample opportunity to incrementally improve our economic incentives, our energy generation, and our impact on the planet. We could have done this at the same time that we improve the economy, because renewable energy and conservation are more labor-intensive than extraction-based energy sources.
Why have we not done so?
Because a tiny handful of greedy, rent-seeking fossil fuel billionaires have manipulated our economy and our politics to fill their coffers. David and Charles Koch graduated from MIT -- they are smart guys who understand exactly what their avarice will do to the planet. Like Croesus, these old men will soon die atop a massive pile of gold, on a rotting earth.
4
@NFC
Why does Al Gore have a carbon footprint 50 times that of the average American family? Why didn't Democrats pass carbon cap and trade when they had a majority in the House and 60 Senators?
If your theory is true, it is the Democrats and their rent seekers who are responsible.
1
What a depressing article that only looks at one side of the equation. As Bill Gates recently said, there has never been a better time in the history of earth to live than now.
Sure we have our problems. One hundred years ago, my wife would have likely died from complications in pregnancy. Or my children would have died.
Again, for almost all citizens of the world, there has never been a better time to live than today.
13
When the problems of the world come up, I always tell my daughter "your generation has the opportunity to fix that!"
MACRO, I agree with you that too many people are causing too many problems for the earth and each other. MICRO, I don't have much patience for people who have children and then can't seem to manage them and then shrug and say "what can you do?" as they ravage, screaming, through Target or the Library.
Well, parents can do something. Encourage their children to be the solution and not the problem.
Someone's kid invented the cure to Small Pox and someone's kid wrote Moby Dick. Humans have the capacity to make positive changes in the world, not just negative.
3
This op-ed obviously is an American point of view, a grim one at that, and perhaps one that seems justified given things in the U.S. Climate change and its consequences are here and we know they will only get worse in the coming years. It's not a question of if it will happen, but rather how much, how fast, what can we do and can we survive? To believe the U.S. in its current state can play any constructive role in leading the charge here is folly. We are the unravelling, anarchic, never-ending reality show where big money can be made and lost in a minute, and foreign dictators have become our heroes if not our puppet masters. All we can do is hope other intelligent nations and people of the world take the lead and somehow, someway convince, coerce or beg the United States to go along, despite itself.
4
@Peter Murray the opinions expressed are not those of the overwhelming majority of Americans. It is the viewpoint of someone who is mentally ill.
"I cried two times when my daughter was born. First for joy...and the second for sorrow, holding the earth’s newest human and looking out the window with her at the rows of cars in the hospital parking lot...."
If only everybody was thoughtful enough to bicycle to the maternity ward Roy Scranton might have been spared the bitter, agonizing tears provoked by that malignant parking lot, and maybe Global Warming itself would be on the run...
4
People have been saying the world is doomed since our ancestors climbed down from the trees. Life goes on.
12
Its really clear that the current trajectory leads to disaster. Life will go on, it just will not include most mammals. And why let this happen if we can act collectively for a softer landing? Not time to be passive.
6
You could adopt a child instead of producing one. That is the most ethical option. Why do you need to replicate your own genes when orphans are left alone?
7
Because we don't all automatically love children of other people, but most of us automatically love those that are part of us - the whole blood is thicker than water thing. It's biology, dude. Take a look at the rest of the animal kingdom -other animals have no concerns for the babies that are not their own.
1
@wbelm
Sorry "dude," but that's not true about the rest of the animal kingdom, there's even inter-species adoption. And guess what, human animals don't always automatically love their own children either.
1
It is not the collective "we" that must decide it is the individual "I" that must make the choice to live sustainably. The world, correctly defined as the 7 billion+ living on Earth, may be doomed but it is not because of changing climates. The pollution from the 7+ billion, lack of clean water, and food shortages will kill us long before the climate does.
Humans are doomed because they are selfish arrogant, and hateful. Earth is not doomed for a billion years or so when the enlarging Sun starts to swallow it up.
So I hope the author is raising his daughter to live sustainably, instead of showering her with everything possible. I also hope they are not planning on having any other children as the Earth is carrying about 4 billion too many as it is. And while the author, and all the Millennials are at it, create a sustainable economy and economic models as this "growth" model is a failure. Best wishes to the little girl and all the other young children. I pray every day that you turn out smarter than your parents if for no other reason than to just spite them.
4
On the flip side, we need as many intelligent people born into this world as possible if we want to have any hope of fixing things.
5
A few years back the 13 y.o. daughter of a climate scientist came home to fine her scientist Mom weeping at the kitchen table. The daughter said "You have to tell me there's hope."
There is, but barely.
I know this feeling. It is the same I felt after the arctic sea-ice disappearance data really started to sink in.
It's that feeling I had when I was renewing my daughter's subscription to Ranger Rick and thinking "I'm such a liar."
2
I agree with the author about climate change, but there are other changes in our world that could wipe us all out more quickly. The turn to fascism led by Trump could lead to a civil war, or Trump could start a war with any number of the countries he has threatened, i.e. North Korea, etc. And with Trump's hands on the nuclear buttons anything is possible. But you don't need to wait for our lives to get worse - the quality of life of most Americans has been declining as the rich get richer and the rest of us struggle to survive while being fed a constant diet of lies designed to convince us the opposite is true. Climate change is a definite risk, but having Trump at the helm of the American government poses a more immediate risk to all of us.
2
I agree that we individually need to make choices that lessen our impact on climate change. We also need to have government intervention for large companies to limit their impact. Helping these companies to do better, and holding them accountable to strict standards, would do much more to limit climate change than our individual actions. A recent study reported in another highly respected publication states that just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions.
2
@suzaries to add a bit more info - capitalism run amock has created this scenario with these top 100 companies. Short term profits are placed over public good. As a result, innovation and research into cleaner forms of energy are ignored or blocked by these giants.
1
This choice was known by the 1950s. Those who grew up in the 60s and 70s weighed the options. In my family's case, we limited the child production to one. We invested into the success of that one, in a World that was already in a down spiral. He grew up, and made the same decisions. Were my wife and I of child bearing age at this very time, we would not have even one child. Yes, we would feel a certain and well earned guilt by making another human, in a World that surpassed sustenance perhaps a century ago.
10
Global warming is systemic, rooted in economic decisions of multinational banks and corporations and by politicians in the dominant countries for a century. Personal life-style decisions can improve your family’s life, but will have no impact on the earth’s atmosphere, oceans, and environment. Americans have individual moral responsibility hard-wired into us, blinding us to potential for collective political action from the other 7.5 billion who share this ark earth. Only a global environmental movement that forces the neo-liberal capitalist system to raise our interests and the environment above profit can win. Think globally, act locally. Build environmental demonstrations, grass-roots organizations, and vote.
1
I remember, crouched under my desk in 1957 at the age of ten, how unlucky we were to have been born into a generation that was doomed to die of radiation poisoning along with the rest of the world. None of us thought that duck and cover would do much good. And even if we managed to survive the radiation, hordes of Red Chinese would be swimming across the Pacific to conquer us by their sheer numbers. And if that didn't get us, we'd all die of Malthusian overpopulation.
Sure, things are bad, but, there have been times when things were just as bad, or worse. And when things aren't bad, we manage to have angst anyway. A person has an ethical obligation to make things better, but not to agonize over a human history that is beyond the control of any individual.
The author asks: How can I read her “Winnie the Pooh” or “The Wind in the Willows” when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever, and has been for decades?
I'm sorry to tell you, Mr. Scranton, that places of such pastoral harmony rarely if ever existed in human history. It's fiction. So please do not deprive your children of this wonderful fantasy, read on.
8
@ShenBowen Frankly, Winnie the Pooh is all about being an Edwardian gentleman (not woman!) with enough inherited income to spend all day boating and strolling around instead of working.
1
I am a left-leaning academic, concerned about climate change, and I just had my own baby daughter three months ago -- so you would think this piece would resonate with me.
But it doesn't.
Instead, I'm annoyed to read yet another confused op-ed claiming "individual choices aren't enough" and the solution is simply to "be kind to one another and fight for the future".
One the one hand, “[t]he main problem […] isn’t with the ideas of teaching thrift, flying less or going vegetarian, [...] but rather with the [...] idea that we can save the world through individual consumer choices. We cannot.”
But, on the other hand, "all I can do is teach her [...] how to be kind and how to live within the limits of nature’s grace. [...] But I also need to teach her to fight for what’s right, because none of us is in this alone."
Roy, your daughter (and my daughter!) will need to be revolutionaries, not kind, ascetic liberals who love nature and hike on weekends and "fight" by donating to the Sierra Club.
They will need to vote, to be scientists, entrepreneurs, and politicians, to conspire and write and shape the public discourse, to impel others to action, and to cross cultural divides, if there is any hope of reversing what will surely be decades more climate change by the time they are adults.
Roy, we must do much more than just "teach her how to care." I really hope your book has more to say about how you plan to teach her to "fight for what's right."
3
First of all, congratulations to you and your partner on the birth of your child!
Now, welcome to the other side. As a wise friend of mine said after we had our baby, you'll never draw an easy breath again.
Most of us are worrying about the very same things as you. It's the thinking parents' lot, I'm afraid. As you work out the fundamentals of becoming a family, go ahead and plant a tree or two. Stop buying single use anything. Stop mowing a lawn- plant a garden instead. Don't take what you don't need. Do concrete things to improve your neighborhood.
Ultimately, you will do the best you can, that's what the rest of us are doing. Scale back the macro-worries for the myriad of micro- worries of being a dad-- like your baby's reactions to vaccines or when she won't let you sleep through the night and all the world's woes balloon in your mind and drive you mad.
1
I agree with this post, but I'm not surprised it was written by a man. In particular, I take issue with the statement that life is essentially meaningless without a child -- men are quick to state this because they don't truly have to struggle with the decision whether to have one, or whether they CAN have one. As a woman who's tried to conceive for three years (on and off and endlessly grappling with the moral dilemma posed here), and having been told I'll need to pay $30,000 or either IVF or to adopt (which I cannot afford), I struggle with such commentary from thoughtless folks every day. And I often feel suicidal as a result. Instead, as as noted here, I should be receiving accolades for my contribution to society. I'm just sick of hearing I'm worthless. And I know this goes a bit off topic, but I feel as a society we need to stop defining ourselves in this way -- as it isolates a lot of worthy people.
5
My goodness, crying (because you 'doomed your daughter to life on a dystopian planet') is bit dramatic even for climate change grimsters. Please note and comfort yourself in human ingenuity to solve problems (perhaps not at the pace you desire or in the order of importance on your top ten list). We will survive and thrive, and so will your daughter (congrats on her wonderful birth)!
6
"...more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change. This concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States’ record-low birthrate."
----------------
A more apt name for climate change would be environmental degradation for which the world's rising population has been a major contributing factor.
This article blames climate change for people choosing not to have children while ignoring the devastating effects wreaked upon the planet by its surging population growth.
I wish the NYT would write about population growth even a tenth as often as they do about greenhouse gas.
And BTW - the U.S. population grew by more than 2 million in 2017.
We need fewer people, not more.
5
This article reads like an apocalyptic "end of the world" Hollywood blockbuster. Glad it's ony fiction.
Hope is a blessed thing.
4
Yes. I recently saw a picture of my friend and his newborn granddaughter and, for the first time, thought, "For what?" We should be waging a World War on climate change. Instead, we will relitigate abortion, manufacture more SUVs and less sedans, and continue to blather endlessly about the World Cup.
4
I am so glad I subscribe to both the New York Times and the National Review. David French provides a witty and fact-filled rebuttal that suggests, based on modern scientific progress, now is the best time to be born and tomorrow we will successfully adapt to whatever challenges we humans face. As Winston Churchill is reported to have said, "Courage".
2
I committed to never having kids in 1985 after the country re-elected reagan. I was 16.
10
Too bad tens of millions of children the same age as you in 1985 didn't make the same decision in South Asia, the Arab world, and sub-Saharan Africa. Unsustainable population growth has taken place in mostly those 3 places on earth. The Americas, Europe, East and Southeast Asia and Oceania have seen populations grow much more slowly or basically not at all (e.g. Germany, Japan, Italy).
2
@AR Correct. We should not feel guilty about having one child when there is such unsustainable reproduction happening elsewhere, and they are already migrating.
"Have one fewer child,"--or, if you really want to be a parent, adopt. You'll decrease carbon emissions, increase love, and immediately give someone a better life. The world's population of humans is in no imminent danger despite U.S. birthrates.
3
At the height of the U.S. - Soviet nuclear arms race during the early 1980's Reagan era, my wife and I decided to postpone children out of fear of nuclear war. The fear also motivated us to take action and help organize the National Nuclear Freeze Campaign to end the arms race. Millions of Americans joined in and the result was it changed President Reagan's bellicose rhetoric and led to a historic agreement by the two superpowers to major reductions of their nuclear stockpiles, lessening the danger of a nuclear exchange.
We can and should do the same for climate change - organize on a mass scale for government, corporate and individual action to alter our current path.
1
@Steve The nuclear threat is FAR greater today than at the height of the Cold War.
1
The "world" is not "doomed". It really won't have that much of a change even if the worst predictions come. Surely nobody who thinks we a doomed should make it worse by having a child nor in using things that make it more likely. Your child will likely not be here in 100 years either.
Individual action is useless. Collective action is essential. That means politics. It means seizing control from the people (and companies) that benefit from the present economy and forcing civilization to adopt a carbon-neutral economy, obviously including renewable power. It means forcing vehicles to switch to carbon-neutral power immediately, maybe over 5 years but starting now. It means subsidizing solar power on a massive scale. It means closing coal mines and coal-fired power plants. (Talking to Australia, India, China, ....) All this is political. What the chances of its happening are, I hate to say, but I guess 0.1%. Those are the chances civilization will survive.
1
Technology has solved many problems and things have improved over time. Just look the environmental history of the US and Europe. The problem comes when people think that since things are clean and good that they need to breed beyond what our resources can support.
We are at the limit right now of what the Earth and its resources can support. We can see that population in many areas is decreasing and fertility rates are decreasing and in many instances, not by choice. High school biology teaches the Population Curve. Population increases as long as there is an excess of resources. It falls quickly when those resources decline. High population densities like cities are unsustainable too. The nations of the mega cities in ancient Central America did not just disappear, they abandoned their huge cities for a more sustainable life in much smaller, more mobile groups.
@skramsv So said Thomas Malthus.
There have always been folks predicting doom in the future for our bad behavior today. That’s how religious clerics have made their living for millennia and how our contemporary secular equivalents (Al Gore, et al) do very well indeed.
Yet, we humans have always persevered.
Every generation seems to think their time is uniquely perilous, but that’s just not so. Consider that 14,000 years ago much of the northern hemisphere was under a mile of ice. Our human ancestors had a real climate catastrophe on their hands. But, with only stone-age technology they handled the catastrophe by adapting - they walked away from the ice.
The society the author’s daughter will inhabit will be richer, more knowledgeable and far more technologically capable than we are today. Our descendants will adapt too.
By the end of this century the descendents of today’s impoverished people in sub-Saharan Africa and northern India will enjoy a standard of living similar to today’s western Europeans. The earth’s population will stabilize at about 11 billion and stay there indefinitely. (These are UN predictions.) A century from now fusion electricity generation will have made fossil fuel-fired power plants a distant memory.
Our descendents will look back curiously at this anguish and regard our hand-wringers in the very same way we would regard folks of the 19th century had they conserved whale oil so there would be enough for our lamps.
10
@Son of Liberty Yes. Let's not forget how bleak things looked in the middle of the second world war, concentration camps, Stalin and Mao where hundreds of millions were killed. They would have yearned for our problems today.
I recall a documentary made in late 70s or early 80s talking about the future if we didn't do something about the big hole in the atmosphere and do it immediately. There were future views, in the form of television commercials that would surely be shown in 2020. The commercial I remember best had 2 adults, presumed to be the parents of the two children in the back seat of the car. The children appeared to be a girl about 8 years old and a boy about 5 years old. The parents were driving into the night. The car stopped. The parents got out. They helped their children out of the car. They got back in their car. They drove away, leaving the children in the middle of nowhere, in the deepest of dark, with only their favorite toy to cling to, dressed in very nice bed clothes and fuzzy slippers.
That's what we have done.
If one believes in the grace, command, and goodness of any sort of god then I believe we have failed our charge of dominion and care.
I don't believe that.
If there is a god, we simply assumed it was talking about us. By now, it is obvious it was not.
1
Thank you for a lovely and important meditation on the beginning of the most important job you will ever undertake.
The despair reflected in this eloquent statement is not an exaggeration. Years ago, my wife and I were disappointed when neither of our children decided to become parents; in more recent times, I've become not only reconciled, but pleased that they chose not to bring my grandchildren into the world to face the terrible times to come.
4
It is quite an admirable point of view to share with the people who made a choice to have children, regardless of not having the power to be omnipotent.
Before the world has become as bad as it seemingly is, I decided at 12 years old not to have children. Now is certainly seems that my intuitive sense (something we are born with, according to Malcolm Blackwell) has been the right choice for me.
3
I cannot say for certain, but it seems to me that beginning at the dawn of time, EVERY child is born to die. Do your best, and try to teach her to do her best, but she's unlikely to get out of her life alive.
Also, it may not be comforting, but even the future you describe as likely (which may turn out more pessimistic than the actual future) is better than what many generations of our ancestors experienced. And many of those generations made real progress for us people.
3
Allow me to offer a different view. We are making profound progress toward a better world, and there is no reason not to bring children into it, allowing their energy to keep the progress moving. To be sure, the world is a mess, and the environment is terrifying. But to suggest the world today is worse than in the past is foolishness. Just yesterday women were legally second class citizens, there were drinking fountains for African Americans (who were routinely referred to with different language), and don't suggest for even one second that life isn't better in the LGBTQ workd. Would anyone really prefer to live in the 1950s or 1960s? Is any armed conflict of the past quarter century remotely close to Vietnam, let alone the world wars or the Korean conflict? Yes, we have work to do. But we always have work to do as we strive forward. We need children to love, we need children's love, and we need them here to continue the very messy but very real progress of our society.
6
"The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, a world in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on a kind of ecological grace."
Mr. Scranton is correct that, fundamentally, society's willingness to act on climate is an ethical and existential consideration. Still, I'm afraid I don't share his dismissal of individual market-based strategies. It's true that, alone, they aren't enough. But they are something. It's easy for somebody to don an appropriate ethical demeanor about climate change, but continue to act selfishly and wastefully. So many of us do it every day. Getting people to start caring by taking small actions--recycle, turn water off when brushing your teeth, bike to work--can cultivate a deeper transformation in the way one looks at, and interacts with, the world. Next they might ditch their car, or stop flying, or have fewer kids. They might start voting with climate in mind, and even running for office. Talking about how we're all in it together, as Mr. Scranton does here, gives off some lovely kumbaya fuzzies, yet it only amounts to talk. When it comes to climate, I'd prefer a little action over a lot of talk.
2
"more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change."
Please. This is laughable and doesn't even come close to being among the top real reasons that people choose not to have children.
Our relationships with screens are more detrimental to our children's health than a changing climate will ever be.
6
@Jessica, it's the reason I don't have any and it's very much a deliberate choice
4
The facts are not malevolent but right wing climate-change denialist politics are.
Science told us pretty conclusively what we needed to know in the 1980s.
We simply need to re-engineer our planetary energy, transport and agricultural systems.
Let’s vote for people who understand science, respect facts and act rationally and get on with the job.
10
I can't believe what a bunch of whiners NYTimes commenters are. Diseases continue to be conquered. Many are alive today who would have already been dead in earlier times. More and more people are lifted out of poverty. Consider how rapidly hundreds of millions of Chinese have escaped fears of starvation and are enjoying comfortable lives. Opportunities for human knowledge are increasing with so many having access to the internet. Life is in part what you make of it.
9
"Nasty, brutish and short."
3
I was born during the Cuban Missile Crisis. My Uncle was born during WW2.
Stop whining and have babies.
6
@Thomas Brickman. While you're "having babies" you might want to take a break and check the air in slc out. While you're at it, you're running out of clean water to.
1
Couldn't something in this gloomy vein have been written at almost any time in the past? 2008: Double-digit unemployment and financial catastrophe will doom us! 1998: Y2K will shut everything down! 1988: Reagan's national debt will bankrupt the nation! 1978: Jimmy Carter??? 1968: Vietnam war and student rebellion. 1958: Russian nuclear missiles. 1948: The Iron Curtain closes off Eastern Europe forever. 1938: War will engulf us unless we appease Hitler [well, sometimes the pessimists are right].
I am not saying we shouldn't be worried about Trump and climate and all. The worrying may help us deal with it. But foregoing the pleasures of normal human lifetimes--children, travel, pleasant living--does not seem warranted when one contemplates history.
10
What I would worry about re: bringing a child into this world would be the extreme cruelty and stupidity of mankind itself; as you read this, someone is having sex with an infant and someone else is setting an animal on fire, as has been true every moment every one of us has been alive.
And ask yourself, too - is my child going to be someone brilliant, someone who changes the course of history, or just another boob going to the mall, watching the game, clogging the highways and polluting the atmosphere? I would bet on the former.
3
Given the tenor of your comment, didn't you mean to say the latter?
3
"I can’t protect my daughter from the future ... All I can do is teach her:"
Given your evident conflation of half-baked philosophy and a narcissistic psychology, Roy, I hope you consider an alternative: Don't "teach" her anything.
4
This article could be written at any time in history. We can always view the future as bleak, thus deeming this article completely irrelevant.
8
@Paul: The first 15 feet of sea level rise is already baked into the system. Of that, 6 feet will happen this century. While this is not the end of the World, just Bangladesh and Southern Florida, it is something that could never have been written at any time in history. Its not a bleak future unless you happen to be a coral reef, or a fish or human who lives off its abundance, in which case it is.
9
"The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, a world in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on a kind of ecological grace."
Faulty reasoning, Mr. Scranton. Certainly human beings must commit to living ethically in a broken world. And that means, forcing our political system, largely in the pocket of vested industry interests, to act.
But such commitment does not excuse bringing children into the world at this moment in time. The US is the largest producer of greenhouse emissions per capita on the planet. That means each new American will help to destroy the planet by a thousand cuts.
5
@JJ In 1970, when I was 14, I saw a leaflet by Zero Population Growth that pointed out how huge a proportion of the world's assets the US gobbles up, and said "Choosing to create another American is a very serious matter." I took that very much to heart, and it is one of the main reasons I have no children.
3
Then do you support ending immigration?
Before you get too depressed, please read "Enlightenment Now" by Steven Pinker. Bill Gates thinks it's the most important book of the year.
Malthus was not right, even though he seemingly had logic on his side. Same here with global warming--it will not spell the end of us because of humanity's ability to adapt technology for purposes of survival. The biggest threat to our species is a nuclear terrorism disaster.
In fact, for humans this is the BEST time to be born in the history of the world-...and the longer term trends are getting exponentially better (extreme poverty, death from war and disease are plummeting, life expectancy is going up globally and has been for over a century, etc.). Take the long term view and you will see that the reality is stunningly positive.
10
@Elizabeth
Malthus has always been right. Disaster was delayed by the Old World's discovery of a New World ripe for exploitation, a release of the population pressure valve, and then again in the 20th century by the Green Revolution that allowed us to feed more people with the same acreage. But eventually you run out of rabbits to pull out of your hat. Nature always wins in the end.
2
@Elizabeth. where do you guys get this stuff?? In Africa alone, 5500 kids die from preventable causes every day. Almost half the worlds population barely get by on 3$/day. If you're a self absorbed westerner who can't see past the latte they're slurping I guess it's all good, but for the majority of humanity (and many other species we share the planet with) it ain't going all that well.
1
I have had similar thoughts when I think about the futures my two daughters face. As a biologist I see the threats of climate change and environmental degradation on a tangible level as I do my research. I also understand, however, that humanity will not go extinct, but will adapt as it always has to a changing world. I have written each of my now teen-age daughters long letters with my best advice on how to adapt to the changes they are likely to see in their lives. Stability is an illusion, and I wonder whether there has ever been a time when parents didn't fear for their childrens' future well-being. When I was a child in the 1950s and 60s, my parents had to face the threat of nuclear annihilation. Their parents faced anti-Semitic pogroms in eastern Europe, 20 year forced service in various emperor's armies, and emigrated to the US by themselves as teen-agers. Compared with the threats these previous generations faced, those faced by my daughters come into a less catastrophic perspective. The biologist in me believes that the ultimate purpose of life is to reproduce itself. We need to continue having a reasonable number of kids to maintain society. Teach them to be decent people, equip them with knowledge and what resources you can afford, and help prepare them for the lives they have ahead of them.
5
Prof. Scranton and readers of this article have the choice and the means to have a child or not. However, the majority of the 8 B people of Earth do not, and that is a large part of the problem.
4
It's not often a piece makes me cry, but this did. Breathtaking both in its writing and its truths.
1
As a spiritual person deep into Native American teachings, also having studied the Gaia hypothesis, and embarked on shamanic journeying, I wish I had hope for the human race. While it’s easy to be negative and bitter, I will not. Further, I did not have any children because of this very issue. Also having studied human anthropology, we talk about the “carrying capacity” of an ecosystem or habitat. Of course, the Earth Mother has her carrying capacity too. My fear is what will happen to us in the near term. Experts have the earth changes all wrong. Don’t be surprised if you wake up one morning (say in the next ten years) and the Atlantic Ocean has risen four to five feet. This is how the planet works. We are now lulled into this gradual phase of change and that’s when the planet will pounce. If you want to do something now, show respect for all living things great and small. Stop destroying. Stop the violence. And stop being so human-centric. Begin humbling yourself to all living things. See if they will provide you with the answers. This problem goes beyond human comprehension.
6
What doom and gloom. I can remember my grandfather talking like, that in 1942? I've had a wonderful life, two kids, two grown grandkids, traveled to different countries, and now live in a small house on a lake, beautiful yard with 200 year old trees, and herons, ducks, geese, swans nearby.
Your daughter will see new and great things along with the not so good, and maybe some day, she'll make you a grandfather.
4
The total world population in 1942 was less than one-third of what it is in 2018. More people today live in India and China alone than lived on all of planet earth 76 years ago.
Also, the vast majority of Indians literally lived in the dark in 1942, i.e. without power. Total electricity usage in India in 1942 was equal to what it was that year in the lone U.S. state of South Carolina. In other words, 390 million people in the crown jewel of the British Empire consumed as much electricity as 2 million Americans living in a largely agricultural Southern state.
I'm guessing world war in 1942 was what caused your grandfather to feel gloom and doom. I don't think he could have foreseen what kinds of problems would arise when all of the people in India and China (understandably) decided they wanted to live just like profligate, energy-draining Americans. Indeed, Americans themselves were a far more austere bunch in 1942 and were not yet being ceaselessly urged by their government and private businesses to spend, spend, spend.
FYI, in 2016 total electricity usage in South Carolina amounted to 79,578,000,000 kilowatt hours. In India, the number was 1,408,624,400,000 kilowatt hours. That's 17 times as much, and third in the world among nations behind China and the United States. Electricity usage will only soar upwards in India in the years ahead.
So unfortunately, we're in uncharted territory as humans and people have reason to worry.
8
O M G. (Sometimes a cliche is right as rain.)
Mr. Scranton you do not know the future. The future of planet earth is comprised of seven billion plus human futures. These futures are a complex matrix that combine in ways we cannot imagine. Could it be bleak? Yes. A virus could wipe out human kind. There could be a nuclear exchange that effectively ends us all. A meteorite could land that infamous knock out blow to life on earth. The unanticipated effect of climate change could be devastating to most of us. Aliens could land with a recipe book.
But it could also be a beautiful future. Technological advances will certainly provide solutions to many problems; through bioengineering, we could reconstruct whole eco systems, including ocean ones; advances in medicine will no doubt eliminate a lot of health suffering; drones employed planting trees across the globe; successful, innovative education goes global; the greening of cities; renewables bring free and unlimited energy for all forever; technology frees more and more people to immersed themselves in the arts, higher learning and community activism. Engineering reverses the worst of climate change.
The fact is what we call humanity keeps getting smarter and better--so let's imagine we outwit the bad guys and claim a brighter future for your beautiful daughter.
3
@JJ Flowers. I get that numbers and facts don't have much effect on people because it's easier to just ignore them or hope for th best in spite of the evidence, but you've got to be kidding. Example. Plastics were invented ~ 100 years ago. It is now estimated that by 2050 the oceans will contain more plastics than fish by weight. The current downward spiral of life and the systems it depends on is not just a blip on the radar. It is the wholesale turning upside of the forces that make the planet livable. It can't be wished away.
14
A problem of checking out of the human race-(pardon the pun) is that the people who don't reproduce are thus giving an edge in reproctive rights to the people causing more dmage. The facts are that we need smart people-not more stupid ones who will take advantage of the absence of children of the intelligent to breed uncontrollably and spread ruin ever more widely. There are numorous stories in Sci-Fi about this-one I recall the most is a short story-"The Little Black Bag", one where the smart people have allowed themselves to be bread into near minority status and must constantly undo the damage the morons are doing ; the last thing said is "one day we will have to seriously think about doing something "about these idiots"
If you don't have your own-(the genetic race is run and nobody wins by having more of the same kids)-adopt someone else's kid and raise him or her to be responsible and upsright-they're here, already, right?
Give those sad and unhappy children who can do little themselves a hand by helping to care for them and teach them how to try and do the right things.
I cannot have kids if I wanted to-so that is what I am doing-instead of taking jets to Thailand or driving a truck to Mexico.
All mine will be given away-maybe before the rest of the economic system collapses.
But giving up-because you're too old to care anymore is the worst sort of irresponsibility-whatever you think of George Soros-he ain't thrown in the towel!
2
It's interesting to read the comments. They range from we've had it, to, don't worry, be happy. Given the fact that the first time in all of history the population hit 1 billion was ~1800 and by 1974 we had4 billion and will hit 8 within the next 5 years it might be time to worry. One of the great extinctions is going on now and we are causing it by our numbers and lifestyle. The planet will survive. We and certainly most of the other inhabitants may very well not. If we are only interested in quantity over quality as to human existence, we are on the correct path.
20
Bringing a child into the world is an insane and selfish act. That's why God created horniness, a temporary suspension of reason so you don't think too hard about what you're about to do...
8
The world is not doomed as this person feels. Our democracy will survive too. It was built to accommodate boobs now in charge, and will adjust over the next few election cycles.
1
When people tell me about "reducing your carbon footprint," by everything from not using dryer sheets to going vegan, I think (and sometimes say), "the only way to effectively reduce my carbon footprint is to put on clothing made of cotton, linen, or some other natural material, and to walk out in a field or woods area and shoot myself, preferably with a wooden bullet so the critters who eat my body won't get lead poisoning."
But I see this article writer has already covered that option.
Of course, even that won't help. There are simply too many humans on the planet. You can blame it, if you will, on modern medical science, which has largely wiped out the super-plagues like the Black Death in the middle ages or AIDS in modern times.
In the face of the world going inevitably to hell, as it has a hundred times before, I can think of nothing more hopeful and meaningful than to tenderly raise and nourish a child for a world she may yet help to save.
1
Since you brings up David Buckel, there is a certain irony he chose immolation with gasoline, when pollution was the reason of his suicide.
Immolation is not new. The Buddhist monks in the NAM did that. But the air was filled with the smell of napalm anyway and one of the maxims [understood or not is up for debate] is "if I [buddhist] don't dare to march in hell, who'd?" But I have digressed.
I do degree interdependency is the key but I think there is a danger of getting into the pigeon's hole. Pragmatism and basic decency are the foundation for all of us to make sense of this crazy life. Extreme ecology is counterproductive at times. Besides, Trump can end this world just fine!
Case in point, while I consume meat, I have not purposely killed a single insect for the past 20 or so years. It is not an easy lifestyle and I don't want to force it on others. If you push things to the extreme, we may all end up to become the Jains.
@Bos: You know that Mr. Buckel used gasoline to make that point, right? No irony at all.
If you can appreciate the validity of an ant's life, why not end the suffering you cause with meat?
1
I respect and agree with 99% of what the author writes, but I disagree strongly with the idea that children are THE necessary condition for a meaningful world, and that to not have children is to live a hermetic, isolated existence cut off from modern life without any deep connection to the future. That may be how the author feels for himself, but it is NOT universal truth.
I am childless by choice--and yes, part of that choice was ecological--yet somehow I and many who have made similar choices live deeply meaningful lives highly cognizant of and connected to both current and future society. In fact I've dedicated my entire career to improving ecological health for the benefit of current and future generations because I care about ALL living beings, not just humans.
If living ethically means understanding actions have consequences and working every day to ease what suffering we can, then our choices about what to buy, how to travel, and whether to have kids DO matter. For those of us in capitalist societies, our purchasing power often has greater impact than our political power. There is no electoral college to distort or erase my voice when I vote with my dollar, or with my body.
Reproducing is not the key to a meaningful existence. Remaining childless--or adopting--are perfectly valid alternatives. So professor, you are entitled to your personal reasons for having a child, but spare us the justification that it was somehow the *only* rational choice.
40
This author exemplifies what the problem with having kids is--that she can through nurture and education prepare her child for her future and that she can make better choices, etc. That's never going to happen. Yes, her child might, as an individual, make good choices but we, as a species, make horrible ones.
I am a firm believer that given our current condition--environmental and political--it is very selfish to bring a child into this world. Human history has shown that things do not get better with time--we are dealing with the same inequalities of wealth, same issues of poverty and hunger, sickness, etc. that societies throughout the ages have always dealt with. Humans cause our own problems--we think we can outsmart nature and we simply cannot, we keep thinking that technology will solve the problems we have created, they cannot.
We shouldn't be giving tax incentives to people with kids, we should be giving tax incentives to people without kids (or maybe people with 1 kid).
31
A powerful article, but I strongly disagree with the word “doomed”. I agree that climate change is happening, and that serious problems are in store for the mid-late 21st century, but “doomed” is too strong a word. Climate change means a warmer world, but certain regions are likely to suffer harsher effects than others. For instance, low-lying, densely populated Bangladesh may indeed be “doomed”, but that does not mean that human life or the planet as a whole are in existential danger.
To be sure, massive loss of life in “developing” countries is a hellish horror, and spells huge risks for neighboring regions. But in less densely populated areas in higher latitudes, away from sea, life might continue much as before. The cruel paradox is that those who are least responsible for climate change are most likely to be seriously affected.
Since this is “The Stone”, I think the question at hand is not ruminating on Doomsday, but how our children (and ourselves) can live ethically and responsibly when many of us reading this article are those who will be least affected by climate change. The world of tomorrow is not going to be doomsday for all, but business as usual for a few, a bit of a challenge for many, an enormous burden for a great number, and downright hell for more than we might assume.
If a child is going to be born into such a world, what does he/she owe those who are less fortunate, and what can they do? These are age old questions, and not limited to climate change.
3
This is the best comment of the day. THANK YOU!
1
If you kill for your daughter, you will be killed. She may be killed as well. What a stupid thing to declare. You seem to understand the dire straits the world is in...but not that ‘eye for an eye’ component.
2
Global warming?
What a foolish reason not to have children.
David Morrison, senior scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California stated that the Andromeda galaxy is going to crash into the Milky Way in two billion years.
“We’ll just have twice as many stars. The end of the world is a really silly concept. It’s been here for four billion years. I can imagine us blowing ourselves up as a civilization, but the planet wouldn’t care.”
When asked “How can you be sure?”
“I have a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard,” he replied.
Hubris and ego.
Everyone has it.
Heaven protect us from these fools.
3
@Thom McCann the planet will actually be torched by the time the merger happens because the sun will be dead
The assertion made here: "... the idea that we can save the world through individual consumer choices. We cannot." is likely false. There is a high correlation between woman's rights, woman's education and falling birth rates. That is evidence of "consumer choice" making regional and global differences.
10
I totally agree. My concern is that the people most likely to take the 'don't have children' argument seriously are part of the group that aught to be having children. It takes a certain level of education to appreciate the situation we find ourselves in. Telling anyone conscious enough to notice the problem not to add more people to the world encourages those most equipped to raise more intelligent and conscientious people not to do so.
The easy counter-argument for this is adoption but raising children requires sacrifice and I don't think most people (especially comfortable ones) are willing to give up their autonomy to raise someone else's child.
If it's any consolation, while you can't prevent the world from falling apart, you can use your intellect and ingenuity to prepare your child for the world they're stepping into. Teaching them basic survival skills, moving away from coastal areas likely to flood, and encouraging them to pursue careers that will make them less expendable as automation overtakes the organic labor market over the next century are all ways to minimize the probability of catastrophe for them.
The most important thing you can teach to a child in this trying time is awareness. In extreme situations people survive by being the first to see the writing on the wall and acting decisively to solve whatever problems arise. If you can teach attentiveness to your child you will have given them one of the greatest gifts a parent can offer.
5
The world is not doomed, and neither is humanity. Climate change is real---no doubt about that---but humans, like the vast majority of living organisms, will almost certainly adapt to changing conditions. Humans are subject to the same evolutionary processes that have allowed species to successfully adapt to new environmental challenges. Human evolution is not over. It never ended.
Despite the mayhem in Syria and Ukraine, the human world is in one of its most peaceful eras ever. Violent crime in the US is actually significantly lower than it was in the 1970s.
Turn off the news, step outside, admire the natural world, take a deep breath, and relax. And don't buy any coastal property in Florida.
13
@Alex. Evolution works over countless generations and vast stretches of time. The most horrific consequences of climate change will be upon us within about 4 decades. There is no time for us to evolve.
2
Don’t be so pessimistic. There are hardworking engineer like me who are trying to solve these problems one step at a time.
5
I tell people that we have three choices. We can sit in our rooms wringing our hands ... until the lights go out. Or we can cynically party ... until the lights go out. Or we can work, joyfully, and sometimes angrily, to make the future at least a little better than it would otherwise be. This last choice is the only one that a person of conscience can choose.
5
Apex guilt. Yep. I, too, am wracked with the same dread, guilt and despair. Professor Scranton, you are not alone, by a long shot. For those who need a lighter, sort of "gallows humor" angle to our climate angst, I'd suggest Andrew Boyd's writing(s) and comedy. My daughter saw him speak at NYU, where she is a student, and I think his coping "mechanisms" are pretty hilarious.
Um, there's a huge difference between "doom" and "change for the worse", between struggling to make things better and selfishly ignoring the obvious forecasts.
2
You could also teach her to become a physicist so she can develop fusion energy. Then we can all be done with this business of burning stuff in the ground for energy and polluting our atmosphere.
4
I read and I wept.
4
Few who really think will disagree with your theme and conclusions. I have 3-sons in their 30's, and young grandchildren.
Sadly, those who do not agree are either in perpetual denial, or, just as currently rampant, living in oblivion and recklessness foolishness.
Your concerns and prioritization re: your daughter also reflect another egregious telling sign of the times- your decision to not marry, and to make the ultimate historic commitment, both to one another and to subsequently producing and parenting another. This glaring and telling omission, another sign of these "everything is OK" times, and the "new normal's" they herald, are no less troubling- and dangerous.
1
Roy, your dark and depressed outlook is so bleak. I am sitting in Vermont on a Lake and enjoying watching the loons fish with their new born chicks. Life is great and having children is the best part of it. The wildlife is thriving here and in many places around the world.
I just turned 60 and I am greatly looking forward to having many grandchildren.
There is much joy in life. Technologies will help us solve the population pressure problems. Look how we are no longer denuding the forests to print newspaper!
Enjoy your daughter. She needs you to be happier!
14
Yes - feel joy with your daughter! And Please - don't lecture her and make her fearful of the world while she's growing up. All that comes later in life all to soon.
Peace!
4
I agree in general but was taken aback by the sudden, illogical swerve to embrace procreation as imperative! A person's choice not to have a child, like any position, can be attacked by reductio ad absurdum; but the extreme alternative should be mass murder, not suicide. And it's nonsense, of course. More people really should choose to have fewer children.
7
Well, this was all very dystopian...
So, it's a socialist fantasy to think that all nations of the world can come together to change their societies to reduce overall carbon emissions with the eye towards stopping and turning around climate change. Does anyone really think China (producer of 27% of all carbon emissions) will curtail their economic growth for the betterment of the world? Even in the US (producer of 14% of all carbon emissions) we can't agree on how to do it.
My suggestion would be to invest in technology to make low emission alternatives attractive and let free market forces implement the changes. Develop technology for coal-fired power plants to increase efficiency (and thus reduce emissions) of coal use. Develop low cost, high reliability battery technology to make hybrid or electric cars more economically attractive (I think Elon Musk is working on this). Outlawing meat and gasoline and air conditioning is Orwellian in scope and will not happen at the scale necessary.
Must come up with economically advantageous solutions to have even a shot at implementing change.
3
I decided to have a child at age 40 after reading Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Years of questions about the wisdom of bringing children into a doomed world were answered suddenly and clearly by the portrayal of determination of the character of the father to survive with his son in spite of the lack of much of anything to live for. I was suddenly struck with a new understanding of how miraculous what we still have is and what a bizarre, inexplicable gift any kind of life is. Humanity is in decline and my daughter may suffer, toil and perish in the devastation to come. But she is alive. There is nothing else to choose from. Her 6, short, miraculous years lived and any to come are all that there is. One cannot be better off having never been born. Sometimes death is preferable to suffering, but opting to withhold the gift of life simply out of fear of the pain to come or as symbolic, fruitless gesture of non-participation in a problem (one that is not really due to the quantity of human lives but to the destructive ways those lives are lived, thanks to capitalism) seems to be missing the point entirely.
6
Wow. Roy Scranton has said out loud what I am thinking much of the time. How can we continue our daily lives of joy and pain when we have very good evidence that it will all be lost, sooner rather than later.
11
Well, we might be the dinosaurs just before the meteorite hit, but even they are not fully extinct - one of the dinosaur lineages survived and thrived. Today, they are the birds and the sky is theirs. And many other animals survived that impact, grew and changed, and if they hadn't none of us would be here.
We definitely need to get our act together. There is no question that too many people are damaging the planet. And yet, even now may not be the time for despair. The planet has seen some bad times before, and so has mankind. This is not the first time we're looking some catastrophe in the face, and not even the first time that the catastrophe is man-made.
7
"...to live at all means to cause suffering."
While I also want to do as much as possible to make the world safer for future generations,
1- I do not see how my living causes suffering.
2- I do not see how bringing children into the world now is any different or any more laden with burdens that bringing in future generations after the devastation of World Wars 1 and 2, for example.
3-We have a responsibility to create children- and children who are trained to take on responsibility to assure human survival and betterment.
4.The world is not doomed to ecological destruction if we take on the work, each person at a time.
5. Human efforts go through cycles of 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, and I see no reason for the doom and gloom of the article.
15
Dude, get out of the office a little more! Go on a jog, hike a mountain, swim in a river- the world is bigger, and more resilient, than our imaginations permit us to understand. Who knows, in 5,000 years your descendants could be hiking through verdant forests on Greenland, with whales and brown bears in a the largest nature preserve on the planet.
33
Agreed. Get out of the city, people. There is a huge amount of big beautiful world in that distasteful "fly-over" area. My children are fabulous citizens of the world and they will do better than I could ever hope to.
1
Wow, Professor Scranton thinks mass extinction is imminent and inevitable and self-immolation is an inspired moral and political act. What a joy he must be to be around. He makes writers like Schopenhauer, Dostoyevsky, and Cormac McCarthy seem absolutely gleeful.
20
I'd like to say to this guy - Get A Grip !. But he seems to have lost it completely already.
I'm just glad that I don't have to live in the apocalyptic hellscape that he has chosen to inhabit.
22
The best chance for the planet is for scientifically-literate individuals to have and rear more scientifically-literate children. There is no alternative other than surrender.
6
@Nic Apostoleris: Why would that be better for the planet than adopting children and rearing them to be scientifically literate? You're not saying there's a shortage of humans, are you?
3
@heliotrophic - Full agreement that having an adoptive child and rearing her as a scientifically-literate citizen of Earth is a wonderful, pro-social choice.
@Nic Apostoleris
Or maybe we could work to improve public education so that ALL of our children grow up to be scientifically literate.
1
Good oped: reminds me of the mood of the early 60's and Fellini's movie, la Dolce Vita where the characters debate the merits of having kids in a world perhaps soon to be blown up by hydrogen bombs. Somehow we escaped that fate which looked imminent at the time, but we can't keep expecting luck to save us from our own foolishness. We block awareness of the deterioration and even end of our world as we block awareness of our individual deaths. Our global warming problem, the speed of it ,was recently brought home to me by a relative who had returned from a ten day tour in
Alaska. He was shocked at the absence of glaciers and ice which had melted into the ocean!
9
If anyone is making decisions on childbearing based on climate change prognosis, he/she/it need to contact their psychological professional at once. Dixi.
18
You will have your answer when your daughter reaches adulthood and curses you for bringing her into this horrible world. I guess you could sympathetically counsel her into not having kids of her own.
8
I worry for my son, too. In his 20s, he is inheriting a world vastly different from the one I inherited from my parents. I worry about his job security, and if he will be able to thrive on his own in a world where the wealthy are trying to suck up every last dollar from everybody. Greed is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. To me, that is the most pressing issue. Climate change, although potentially catastrophic for humans, means little to the earth over the long term. Like a dog with fleas, the earth will simply "shake us off" and that will be the end of mankind. The earth will protect itself. It is we who must learn to be better stewards. From where I stand, it doesn't look good.
4
Recently celebrating the arrival of our new granddaughter, I find myself concurring with this excellent writing. How did we arrive in this place? It is hard for me to believe that the voters in United States are so ignorantly ignoring climate change. Trumps elimination of factual data and dismissal of the scientists findings show just how ignorant he is. The United Staes has fallen far, and we indeed are no longer respected in the world. Wake up America.
2
Every old generation experiences doom and gloom at the dusk of it’s demise. Don’t project your regrets upon the young, kind Sir.
Since the Supreme Court granted corporations the same equivalency as human beings, money via capitalism has become our new God, and the Trump administration's main goal is to reject all climate science and policy, the future of our planet has been virtually removed. The Trump Administration has attempted to delete decades of scientific studies and remove all science from environmental decisions. We already are seeing the results of removing safety regulations from air and water and can witness the changing climate. Unless people take immediate action, they are dooming their children and all future generations to Hell on Earth.
10
What a gloomy article! While climate change is a serious concern, it's not at all clear that life in 2050 will be worse than it is now. As described in a number of recent books, life in the U.S. has steadily and remarkably improved right up to the present. To expect things to suddenly get worse fights against all historical and moral intuition. We will undoubtedly need to make adjustments because of climate change, but we are a long way away from anything so serious as to think we are doomed. And recent trends such as the boom in alternative energy are helping. And new technologies are giving us incredible new capabilities, including ways to prevent or mitigate climate change. Our country has faced much worse, and still thrived. Some countries that aren't so rich, or have weaker governments and cultures, may suffer more greatly, but we should be able to help them a lot. Remember back in the 1970s, when we thought we were doomed because of the population explosion and the expected depletion of natural resources? We have always figured out how to adapt and thrive.
14
Very eloquent.
In the end, one only and forever has had the choice to do one's best or not, which remains unknown in the absence of a willingness to suffer voluntarily; to love one's neighbor in the act of seeing and being seen, and to act in accord with such awareness.
The opportunity to be morally responsible may be all that remains to us. Let us live accordingly. And not regret our lives, but be grateful.
2
This was written for someone concerned about the future of a child. Nevertheless it speaks to a feeling I experience most every day. And I am two thirds through this "mortal coil."
The ending is a bit tired. Yet it's true.
What else can one do but hope knowing that others are having the same nightmares, as well as, daydreams.
"Our children... won’t have the opportunities we now have for action." My general historical observation is that when you cut taxes on the rich, the rich get richer and the poor get religion. Since Reagan cut taxes there's been a huge increase in the most politically active kinds of churches, with climate inaction and Donald Trump being two results. This is all thanks to a right-wing media effort that, enriched by the Reagan tax cuts, teaches these newly 'saved' people to believe in things that, 'just coincidentally', happen to further enrich the already rich, like more tax cuts and fossil fuel promotion (and renewable energy? That's dreaded 'communism'). I know people who lost their homes to the 2008 GOP-caused global recession, who still vote Republican because Donald Trump somehow figures into the Second Coming. I don't mean to get down on organized religion, but when it develops political aspirations, the results are typically the 'coincidental' further enrichment of the rich in this life, and further consolation of the 'after-death enrichment' of the poor. And the commons (once known as 'Gods creation')? It can fend for itself.
Having said that: go ahead and have children. Thanks to modern engineering, we'll pull this rabbit out of the hat (although moderate climate and sea-level consequences are now unavoidable).
8
"The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically"
There is a disconnect there. What to buy and whether to fly are the very choices we can make in order to "live ethically," as is the choice of whether to have children and how many. Choosing not to have children and reducing one's carbon footprint does not mean one is "cut off from modern society" or "giving up any deep connection to the future." Not only is that offensive to people who do choose to live that way, but it is really nothing more than a justification for making lifestyle choices that do not help address the monumental environmental crisis we are facing. In fact, those of us who choose not to have children and make lifestyle choices to seriously reduce our carbon footprints are arguably showing more concern for children and their future than their parents who justify wasteful lifestyles in order to have a connection with the future.
11
Exactly. What does "living ethically" look like when you don't pay any attention whatsoever to, say, the labor practices of a company from which you buy a product, or the environmental impact of your travel plans? Does "living ethically" just mean "saying nice things while doing whatever you want?"
8
The comments here, well the feel good denial ones, belie a real lack of critical thinking skills. They compare things like WW II, despots, the Cold War, nukes etc to the problems cited in the Op Ed. The facts are 1) When I was in college in 1976 world population was 3 billion and is now 7.2 billion. Growth continues in a closed and limited ecosystem. With all striving for the "developed" life. 2) Human pressure has destroyed whole species, wiped out major fisheries and ecosystems. Species extinction is preceding at an increasing rate. 3) Climate change is a slow process until you reach a tipping point after which major shifts will occur. Strangely the most prescient apocalyptic vision was the movie "Mad Max".
13
7.6 billion
1
“To eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free.” The article’s assumption that these are consumer choices is an incredible blindness to the low income, everywhere. Approximately 40 million Americans are food insecure. There are billions of people in the developing world who dream of meat that they can’t afford. Flying regularly on planes (or owning a car, for that matter) is not an option for most of the world’s citizens. Mr. Scranton gets to experience all of these things yet expresses gratitude for none of them. There is something in between enjoying the fruits of first world living and suicidal despair. Mr. Scranton skips the in-between entirely.
8
There have always been tyrannies of the powerful, underlain by those darker spiritual forces which afflict human nature, which seek to deprive us of our optimism and hope. To tempt us to feel powerless in the face of something which appears too large to resist. "It's too late, too strong, too ingrained"...
Yes, climate change, unrestrained land development, and a thousand other toxic evils beset us, and it must surely be tempting for the author, who appears to be an astute and sensitive person, to grieve a perceived lack of agency over such powers. Yet, what will that newest generation of scholars, philosophers, and workers one day think of us if we simply fold and capitulate, when history so clearly demonstrates that even the darkest nights may be successfully fought against until the dawn?
5
Upon reaching the summit of a high peak in eastern Nevada, I surveyed the landscape off to the horizon, 360 degrees. I could see almost no evidence of humans. It brought the realization that it would all work beautifully without us. The seasons would come and go. Creeks would flow. Animals would move about without being flattened by cars. No billions of miles of roads or train tracks. No concrete stadiums. Planes would not streak the skies. No sewage treatment plants. Not even one tiny piece of plastic.
“Climate change” is a lower priority issue, the temperature of the earth has been changing for millions of years, well before humans. The species Homo sapiens is a cancer on Earth.
5
I am a scientist, and I think these same thoughts almost every day. Sometimes it brings me to tears when I look at my 13-year-old son and I want to beg his forgiveness. Every time I get in my car to go to work, every minute I spend in my too-big house is with guilt. In the near future, I will have to sell because I can't live anymore with being part of the problem.
But you can't give in to the futility, because it dooms us sooner rather than dooms us later. The only way we can live with this is move forward and advocate as much as you can, change your life as much as you can, even when you think you can't. And allow yourselves to grieve that their lives will be so, so much harder. Because I cannot regret my son's life. That he exists in this world is my ray of hope, and I pray that he doesn't live in a world where he regrets that he was born.
17
To the author: Congratulations, you've doomed the planet by adding to the population.
To the rest of the readership: Please cite by name and date an actual physical experiment complete with controls that clearly, reliably, and reproducibly demonstrates that adding 100ppm CO2 to the atmosphere melts Antarctic or Greenland glaciers. If there is no such experiment - and I'm certain the NYT would have shouted it on its front pages for months, if one existed - then author's predictions of a "doomed world" are based only on climate computer models, which have never correctly predicted the future since Hansen first revealed climate computer predictions back in 1988.
8
"Congratulations, you've doomed the planet by adding to the population."
Nice thing to say to a new father. Remind me not to invite you to my baby shower.
In the long run, we're all dead.
12
Wealthy liberals from New York may not want to hear this: but if your worry is climate change, you are privileged.
.
You can worry about climate change because your personal health is ensured. You have insurance - and you don’t need to worry.
.
You can worry about climate change because your child attends a private school where there have yet to be any shootings.
.
You can worry about climate change because your job is safe.
.
I know you will scoff at what I wrote here. Nobody wants to admit they are privileged. But deep down you know it’s true.
12
It is possible to have multiple worries at once, you know. I am worried about climate change but, for instance, I also worry about my health because I, like scores of other Americans, do not have health insurance. I also worry about school shootings; in fact, one of my nephews graduated from Stoneman Douglass just a year before the shooting there. He could easily have still been there if he had gotten left back or needed to pick up some paperwork or belongings, etc.
7
I'm struggling to understand this point of view. I'm personally related to several people who worry every year that their suburb of Houston will flood again,and I can say with absolute certainty that they would laugh at the idea that they are "wealthy liberals" living a life of privilege. But I would also call habitual flooding a symptom of climate change.
I would actually say that the opposite is true. If you are wealthy and privileged, you are probably better prepared to deal with the effects of climate change, where as those that have fewer options and resources are left dealing with flood waters, wildfires, drought, and heat waves.
6
And if you're dirt poor and living in Tacloban, Philippines, in 7 Nov 2013, you don't have to worry about climate change. Oh... wait...
Syrian immigrants cause European nationalist resentment. Immigrants from Central America do the same in America. And what causes Syrian and Central American immigrants? Climate change, in part. Their farms are drying up, as has been long predicted. No: this is not a concern of the rich. It is primarily a concern of the poor.
2
Me, as an idealist: take heart a bartender just took the reigns to become most likely the youngest congresswoman; let there be more of her in us all
Me, (also) as an idealist: I had concrete broken up on my own patio, newer townhome, so the rain could lead out directed to tree roots and down into creekbeds
And take heart: the world has taken notice (not of my patio break up or the small attempts we can all do)
1
I agree with the author that most humans are doomed, but I disagree about the reasons. As many have argued for decades, genetically, humans are the nature's fire. We are programmed to reset the ecosystems in which we exist. Even worse, we are creative. This means that our lives are unending searches for the repeated kicks of dopamine and the pleasure we derive from these kicks. We will not listen to reason and logical arguments if they do not increase dopamine levels in our bodies. Thus doomsayers are always ignored.
In summary, the grim picture the author paints is inconsistent with our thirst for creative pleasure. The social reality of the global downward spiral is far, far worse than what the author posits, but why dwell on in in vain?
1
When will the church(es), whose bible says to be fruitful and multiply and to subdue the earth and have dominion over the fishes of the sea, and which provides the author's job, revise or delete those authorizations (and a lot more archaic content) in recognition of the resulting harms?
2
I can't remember what the process is for amending the Bible. Is it a two-thirds majority of Congress and half of the state legislatures? Does the Supreme Court decide? Or can it be put to a national referendum? Or perhaps such an important decision is best left to Oprah.
1
This is naked, painful, and yet so full of Truth that with courage
one can make it through and say in the end....as George
Washington said, "If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I would still plant my cherry tree today". Who knows....miracles
do occur and I believe in them, so yes it looks pretty dark in the
moment, but some of these beings incarnating are remarkable
and may pull the Earth through the eye of the needle. Pray
high, meditate and be as positive as possible. With one broom
sweep at a time the whole boulevard will be swept eventually.
Mankind will evolve in spite of himself, but we may have to get composted first, and rise up out of the ashes, and try again.
1
Every generation faces challenges and, for the most part, we overcome them. Given your generally negative outlook on the world I would have to say you probably did make a mistake. I certainly would not want to grow up in a household with a negative, defeatist attitude and, fortunately, I didn’t have to.
4
There are many good reasons not to have a child. This one is just as good as any of them. I do find it charming that he thinks that having a child can be balanced by his amazing ability to teach them all the positive attributes they will require and that they will absorb them and act upon them. If parents-to-be didn't have this amazing self-confidence I guess there wouldn't be any kids on the face of the earth. Experience shows, unfortunately, that confidence is usually misplaced.
6
The author of this piece and the many commenters here should see the movie "Idiocracy."
3
I'm 50. I decided not to have children mainly because of impending climate catastrophe. I did not want to:
1) Increase the catastrophe by adding yet another human to a planet that already has way too many humans. We are stealing habitats from other species with our sprawl and waste.
2) Consign another human to live in a dystopian world.
I'm sorry, but when I see parents with young children, I always wonder, "what were you thinking?" or even just "were you thinking?" The author is clearly thinking, but is unwilling to acknowledge the paradox at the basis of his own thought process. It's kind of infuriating. Just admit you had children for your own selfish reasons!
12
A) “…or going vegetarian..."
Sigh. Why does the media always do this? Plant-based diet= vegan, not vegetarian. Cheese is not a plant. Eggs are not a plant. Has all MSM in this country been bought by Big Ag, or what?
B) “…To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future…”
Really? Going vegan, flying less often and having just ONE fewer child than you want to, mean you have to be a hermit? I think not.
Given both A and B, I can’t help but think the author is just desperately trying to alleviate his own guilty feelings about having a child. I can’t believe that he or anyone else honestly believes that it is impossible to be part of a coherent, functional society unless you eat meat, have as many children as possible and fly “regularly,” whatever that would even mean.
People use arguments like this to avoid making any difficult lifestyle changes all of the time (“Well, you’re not vegan if you use a computer because [insert item or process involved in computer-making that hurts animals], so why should I stop eating burgers?”). The perfect is the enemy of the good!
8
Unfortunately many of the responders have missed the point of Mr. Scranton’s essay.
Only if one reads his essay from an egocentric viewpoint can one reach the conclusion that the future might be ok for our children.
Human nature is such that the suffering of other humans and many other species will increase due to individual greed and cruelty. We are set apart by our intelligence but also by our ability to kill and maim for sport, power, avarice...
If "we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world", homo sapiens must stop the exponential increase of the human population. The rate of human reproduction across the world must be less than 2.2 offspring per woman. Birth control and family planning for all!!!!
9
While a strata of society might consider climate change a reason for not having children, I doubt that most Americans & other people even subconsciously decide against children on this basis. The author's daughter's birth is an unmitigated blessing, nothing less. The future of the world is in her hands like it was once in ours.
We come into life learning a few things: life is short; the human (& all species) will be long gone before Earth itself is eaten by the Sun; & our Sun will collapse as will our solar system & the universe. All things in the universe are temporary. These events are inevitable, climate change or not.
Even considering human events, these are perhaps close to the best of times. Ask anyone alive between 1900 & 1950 (worldwide wars interspersed with worldwide economic & political collapse) about how bad things were. Every fifth woman died in child birth; every child had a 50:50 chance of making it to 5-y/o; the vast majority of people were serfs, vassals or slaves; the most minor of infections were deadly; etc. Consider how many people died from dirty water, dirty air, dirty living conditions or dirty food in the past.
You are not bringing a daughter into this world. She is the world. She might make a difference with regard to climate change, political crises & social upheavals. If she fails, oh well! We knew upfront that that our life & that of the planet is a struggle. In the end, we're all dead. At least, let's give it our best effort while we're here.
10
Beautifully written. Thank you!
1
Two points one physical and one ethical:
As someone who taught an evolutionary biology course, the possibility that we are facing extinction from climate change (as mentioned in the article, and many comments), is extremely unlikely. A full nuclear exchange, or a bio terrorist action could end our species, global warming (by itself) could not.
Since climate change happens slowly, Humans will adapt.
Civilization, however is much more fragile than our species, and, in worst case warming scenarios, would likely collapse.
This is sufficiently bad to justify the most urgent action , the devastation could involve the death of a sizable fraction of the worlds population. There is nothing more important to fight against.
ethics: Not having a child and having one are both ethical actions. Not having one eases pressure on vanishing resources, having one is the gift of life, the continuance of a species
capable (sometimes) of having ethical thoughts to begin with. The tone of this article leads one to believe the author feels guilty for living. This is not ethics it is self pity. Since the author has had a child, he has the ethical duty to bring her up to feel glad for the gift of life. If he raises her to feel guilty for having been born , because she has a carbon footprint, ( the modern version of original sin) this would be deeply immoral.
If she takes an active part in helping to correct societal mistakes. that’s all that can be, and should
be, asked of her.
11
I used to tell people the world is not doomed. It will go on as it always has, ever changing. Creatures who want a foothold in the new world need to adapt, or die. Why people would think humans somehow have an inalienable right to survive is what's crazy. Nature doesn't love you. Nature doesn't hate you. Nature simply fills the vacuum with creatures and plants that can survive where others have perished.
The new world will be a pale shade of it's former beauty and diversity. It's with sorrow that I see it slip away but nothing will put the carbon genie back in the lamp. What was sequestered for millions of years in coal, oil and natural gas has belched forth in the span of a couple of centuries giving the current generations of developed economies this incredible lifestyle that will be difficult for our great-grandchildren to experience; virtually impossible for their children.
I struggle with this thought, the notion that there is nothing individually or collectively we can do to reverse the damage we have done. We simply have to play the hand we've dealt.
"We don't inherit the earth. We borrow it from our children"
What sorry stewards we have demonstrated ourselves to be...
4
What is particularly irksome is that these are the best of times and we have the technology to make the next twenty years the beginning of a renaissance in human development. The world belongs to Davos and when the power of the corporations is diminished by an understanding that our economic system is anti-human I must share the pessimism.
2
I share Mr Scranton's pessimism and guilt.
Anybody in the US older than 50, including me, has given my millennial child's generation and those younger endless wars, ever-growing wealth disparities, broken healthcare, unaffordable college, crumbling infrastructure, the violence of unregulated guns. And just in case all that doesn't create enough misery, we've piled on catastrophic climate change we seem indifferent to.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have failed us, because both parties have as their first obligation the preservation of big corporation capitalism, not the well being of the poor, the working and middle classes. Unbridled capitalism has given us catastrophic climate change.
I'm looking at political alternatives, like the Green Party and the Democratic Socialists. I owe my child and young people that.
Mr Scranton gets one thing wrong. We're not all in this climate change mess together. The less-than-rich will suffer disproportionately in the US and around the world. The poor can't get out of the way of the devastation. The rich will build their gated and guarded spaces in places less affected and equip them with climate change resistant shelters.
This will not end well. We need to change our political and economic structures, and seek out political parties and organizations willing to do that.
4
I worry about the same myself. I have an adopted daughter and a biological one and I love them both dearly. I am now a grandma to a little girl and I worry about the world she is growing in. If I had to make the same decisions again, I probably would have adopted a few children vs. having my own.
5
Life is suffering. In more ways than just what is happening to the planet. The extinction of humankind is not a bad thing. The problem for our beautiful earth is that it will not come soon enough.
5
As the author states, the problem with climate change is that the grief it promises is intolerable, making the age old paradox of living a meaningful life nearly unbearable as well as unfathomable. Thus we turn away, we deny, simply as a means to go on.
And we will go on, in some fashion, until we don't.
In the meantime, however, how we live our lives does matter. The causes we support, the candidates we vote for, the organizations we belong to, the names we give our children, and the love we give each other does matter. Death has always stalked us and obviously it always will,
and just because we can look to the future and see death with a capital D it's still childish and petulant to give up hope.
No! No one one is coming to save us, that existential reality will not change, but still, we could be grown up about it and vote Democrat.
3
For crying out loud, the world isn't doomed by global warming!! It's not going to be easy for some people in the world, especially the poor, and that's the tragedy and the ethical failure. But advanced countries with their energy technologies and agricultural technologies are certainly not "doomed." Humans are an intelligent and extremely adaptive species. There are certainly going to be problems, perhaps big problems, but there are also solutions. The real problem is thinking we are "doomed" in the first place.
8
A "world of extinction and catastrophe..." Wow, this guy must be the life of the party. No one knows if the world is "doomed," not enough this self absorbed, purveyor of gloom. Mankind is remarkably adaptive and resilient. I for one believe in our collective strength and in a future worth living.
9
You still would have been better not to have a kid.
But I love the multi-paragraph attempt at justification.
:/
10
Ridiculous worries!
Not because of the challenges forthcoming, be what they may (but I submit that the things we worry about are never the Things That Turned Out To Be The Actual Problem).
Life has always had to adapt, or die. What did we expect time on earth to be like? Utopian? Pain-free? No despots? If it wasn't resource-scarcity, war, and climate change, there would be some other equally malevolent and insurmountable issue to occupy our worries.
We will adapt, overcome, or die. And if you don 't choose to reproduce, then you picked by default.
See you later, suckers!
Sincerely,
Evolution
6
Let me guess: if Hillary had been elected the world would not have been doomed.
10
It's always been a complicated world... and even the ancient Greeks yearned for Arcadia; Jews, a land of milk and honey; Christians, paradise after the Apocalypse!! War, famine, volcanoes, asteroids, whose nose!
Some people think all old and/or sick people should commit suicide.. but imagine what that would do to the economy?!! OTOH I hope we can curb reproduction amongst humans and steady population growth. You're right: I have no regard for the GDP whatsoever. (nor do I think war and famine are great ways to control population.)
It's time a for a little reality check. There is something you can to insulate your kids from this future. It's called money. The wealthy will be able to avoid the consequences and still live great lives.
1
A) “…or going vegetarian..."
Sigh. Why does the media always do this? Plant-based diet= vegan, not vegetarian. Cheese is not a plant. Eggs are not a plant. Has all MSM in this country been bought by Big Ag, or what?
B) “…To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future…”
Really? Going vegan, flying less often and having just ONE fewer child than you want to, mean you have to be a hermit? I think not.
Given both A and B, I can’t help but think the author is just desperately trying to alleviate his own guilty feelings about having a child. I can’t believe that he or anyone else honestly believes that it is impossible to be part of a coherent, functional society unless you eat meat, have as many children as possible and fly “regularly,” whatever that would even mean.
4
Well corn is vegan and the corn dome is not cool at all.
I went ahead and had a daughter, almost 25 years ago, with much of the same knowledge (yes, we knew all this in 1992, and most of it in 1972) and with the same conflicted emotional outcome -- I love her more than my life, and yet I brought her knowingly into this situation. Being a parent isn't just providing food, shelter, and clothing anymore; it's an active commitment to changing the future on behalf of the children we bring into the world. This is why I made the movie How to Boil a Frog (and made it a comedy, because the subject matter is so despair-inducing) - it examines the big picture of what we face and suggests what real solutions are. It's on Youtube, free. Watch it -- its even kid-friendly. Use it as a tool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKMuf1dhMMA
1
Before we get too soggy with self-pity, we should remember how we got this far.
We survived the risks of ideologically induced nuclear apocalypse between superpowers, acute environmental toxification, and internal division by race, class, and sex -- not by voting or finding middling compromise -- but by taking concerted action to demand justice for ourselves and our descendants.
Generations before fought off kings, emperors, dictators, and demagogues to build space for freedom, liberty, and opportunity for everyday people. And we must maintain this struggle against oppression -- by non-violent means whenever possible.
For that fight, some of us chose not to have children. But we're under no illusion that individual sacrifice suffices to deter disaster. I realize that too few are willing to accept childlessness as a solution.
Instead, I implore those with children to raise them with compassion for all living things and the devotion to improving life for all, not just humans, on our tiny blue marble.
So today's toddlers and their parents shouldn't despair. Their parents should teach them to fight the good and necessary fight. And if the parents aren't up to the task, then they might introduce their young loved ones to the global villagers who are.
5
My husband and I made a conscious decision in 1986 to not bring any children into this world.
Why? Because it was obvious then, as now, that by the time that child dies, this world will be hell on earth.
We knew that it would be too painful to leave that child in this hell.
9
Since the time of Malthus people have been calling for the end of the world, as recently as the 1970s the "Population Bomb" echoed the same.
Forecasting into the future without knowledge of the changes in technology that we cannot foresee is impossible (the green revoloution and changes in population growth slayed the last two "end of the world" scenarios). What is certain is that the we will find a way. As an English professor, the author should not despair -- perhaps time spent on poetry such as "Some say the world will end with fire....etc. etc." is your best answer -- leave the tech up to the scientists and problem solvers.
5
Helen and Scott Nearing anticipated the collapse of society because of the predatory nature of capitalism (climate change 100 years ago). Scott's views were not exactly mainstream for an economics professor; he was against child labor and unearned income. He found employment increasingly difficult. Pushing 50, he and his student Helen moved to Vermont from New Jersey to live The Good Life around the time of the Depression. They worked the land, built stone structures, planted their garden and waited for society to collapse. They became insufferable vegetarians (the preachy kind) and wrote books about their philosophy and experience. They did everything in their power not to make more money than they needed. And they waited alone, without kids. Vermont eventually became too crowded so they sold out and moved to Maine and did the same thing all over, building stone structures and digging in the dirt, and waiting for the collapse. At the age of 100, Scott became tired of waiting. Society had not collapsed. The government simply printed some money to keep the capitalists happy, predatory and unearned.
My friend's daughter and boy friend just moved to Vermont to work a retired farm and plan their life. With their new daughter, they don't have time to wait for the collapse. I will give them my collection of the Nearing's books for their shelf of friends and advisors.
1
It's true, there is a very good chance there will be another world war. Probably not for another 20 years, but certainly within the next 50, and if there is one it will probably involve nuclear weapons. Entire countries (including our own) might be wiped out.
Climate change will have catastrophic effects, and the problem is only going to get worse: as incomes rise in the global south, so will the use of air conditioning, which will precipitate a feedback loop that will compound the problem. The heating up of the planet will go into overdrive.
As temperatures rise, so will the competition for water and arable land. The wars in the parched and becoming-parched parts of the world will probably reach a fever pitch.
Our only hope to stave off such a disastrous future to engineer a society that can transition away from fossil fuels, and fast. Fast enough to supply power to the air conditioners without burning more coal, oil, and gas.
We need a herculean investment in science and technology in order to meet these challenges, but it has to be the right kind of science and technology. Also, I know many scientists and engineers and they are, to say the least, very politically naive. Our entire education system needs a complete overhaul.
Also, and this is sadly also true, if the conscientious people stop having children the world will run out of conscientious people, and then it really will be a mad-max style free-for-all.
@Purity of: If people are truly conscientious, won't they adopt or foster or mentor children who need them?
2
Thank you, Prof. Roy Scranton for your deeply eloquent written dialogue that articulately describes exactly what I face every day of my existence..Thank you, I feel less alone in this...
2
Scranton's dismissal of Wynnes and Nicholas is peremptory and unjustified. We could indeed make a difference through consumer choices and, more important, political choices. Scranton ends with an empty commitment to ethical values, but without policy the commitment provides perhaps a measure of psychological, but no social or physical, relief. Tax benefits for children should be abolished and a tax surcharge for more than two children instituted. Those who elect to impose additional burdens on our common resources should pay for it. But that is the easy part. Significant population reduction would entail rethinking very fundamental social and economic habits of thought, a very complicated matter. I say "would entail" because I am skeptical, though not hopeless, that we, we the people, are up to it.
7
A tax surcharge for more than two children would be an absolute disaster for poor families. Many poor parents are unable to provide for their children adequately, even with tax breaks and welfare benefits. If a single mother with three kids is forced to pay higher taxes than someone with no kids, not only is it disgustingly unfair, but the kids will be the ones who suffer. Your proposal is so heartless it would make Congressional Republicans blush, yet you call it "the easy part." I'm amazed how out of touch some liberal thinkers can be.
1
Given the carbon footprint and destruction of the earth from each human born, NO ONE should have three or more children, whether they are wealthy or poor or single parents. I would argue in fact it IS heartless to selfishly continue to have more and more children when the earth (as well as your own resources) cannot sustain them.
If taxes force someone who is selfish to have fewer children, then so be it. Free universal birth control should also become the norm. History has shown that many (but not all) humans think only of their immediate desire without consequence. This is why we have laws. This is why we have policy. Given how most humans continue to wreck the earth with no thought beyond their own desire, some limits need to be set, as clearly most people refuse to set their own.
1
I am grateful for this piece because I am tormented b these thoughts almost every day of my life. I'm 69, I've two children: did I do wrong to bring them into such a world? My daughter is happily married but would like a child but thinks it wrong for these same reasons, yet I know what joy she is missing and I know what a wonderful mother she would be.
I also feel this - that at the deepest level, all we have is the limitless wonder of life. Of life loving life, life creating life. Otherwise, just the vastness of a dead Universe. To turn our back on life, abandon procreation seems like embracing death
1
I came to the conclusion in 1973 not to have any children, after watching a National Geographic program on world wide famine and disease. I would not be complicit in destroying our planet by contributing to the destruction of plant and animal life, and the earth, water and air. I was 10 years old in 1973. Too bad I'm still one of only a few million humans on earth who believes this, even today.
16
"living in the world means giving up any claims to innocence or moral purity". whoa little dude you are getting your metaphysical states confused; the only innocent or morally pure being is God; you and I have no claim to innocence or purity. the best we can hope for is to take care of our families and help the less fortunate that cross our path. everybody do that and see what happens.
2
"...or going vegetarian..."
Why does the media always do this? Plant-based diet= vegan, not vegetarian. Cheese is not a plant. Eggs are not a plant. Has all MSM in this country been bought by Big Ag, or what?
1
A) “…or going vegetarian..."
Sigh. Why does the media always do this? Plant-based diet= vegan, not vegetarian. Cheese is not a plant. Eggs are not a plant. Has all MSM in this country been bought by Big Ag, or what?
B) “…To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future…”
Really? Going vegan, flying less often and having just ONE fewer child than you want to, mean you have to be a hermit? I think not.
Given both A and B, I can’t help but think the author is just desperately trying to alleviate his own guilty feelings about having a child. I can’t believe that he or anyone else honestly believes that it is impossible to be part of a coherent, functional society unless you eat meat, have as many children as possible and fly “regularly,” whatever that would even mean.
This is statistically the safest time in world history, ever, period. The last 20 years has seen a drastic reduction in world poverty and a drastic increase in world literacy, longevity, and health. I am citing facts, not opinions.This is not to say there isn't misery nor that there isn't room to grow. But to imagine this is a 'doomed' time shows historical ignorance at best, self-loathing and obtuse privilege at worst.
Saying it is a 'mistake' to have a baby is perverse on multiple levels. First and foremost, your daughter will grow up and read this. I realize that you probably don't think of her as an autonomous human being, but that is what she is. I can't imagine how I'd feel reading this article written by my parents. Second, if you didn't want to bring children in the world, then don't. I think your view of the world is not supported by reason and facts (we are not 'doomed' or at least we're not more doomed than we were before) and it's also very very self-indulgent. Only someone who is upper class and privileged would beat their breast and say how 'bad' the world is while getting money to do so and publicizing their book as well. But of course, you're entitled to your opinion and beliefs. Just don't bewail our 'doomed' earth and then bring a child in the world and then earn a profit off of your indecision by potentially scarring your child for life. I'm sorry I'm harsh here but this really upsets me.
26
Best comment of them all. Thank you.
It reminds me of The Kingsman or even the latest Avengers movie, we are overpopulated. Eventually we'll have to take drastic measures to preserve this planet.
3
I appreciate the fear that we will not leave the world in better shape for our children and their children.
Yet, by this logic, our ancestors should not have procreated or they should have taken their own lives. On the whole, their lives were far more miserable and their futures far bleaker than ours: short life expectancies, no medical treatments for conditions we now consider trivial, education and economic opportunities available to a very small number of people, and violence without end. Why would they have raised more children to become the perpetrators and victims of such awful circumstances?
And yet they did. I am thankful they did, so that we could all be here to make our own moral choices and ethical decisions.
3
My daughter is eight, and leading a revolution for keeping water systems clean and turning human waste into fuel and electricity.
What's the problem here? Teach faster, that's all you can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8etBdvPR0_o
1
Would-be parents should be limited to those who deeply want children. There's nothing shameful about that. The rest of us, though, from the ambivalent to the certain, should make a point not to. As indicated by Mr. Scranton, we should limit our driving and flying to the extent feasible, limit our meat (particularly beef) consumption, greatly reduce our use of plastics, et cetera. The best mitigation, however, is to simply not reproduce if the drive to do so isn't especially strong or if circumstances discourage it.
Homo sapiens has always been a disturbance species prone to burning things. When our numbers were comparably few, we arguably helped to diversify the landscape. But there are so many of us now that the biosphere has gone severely off-balance, magnitudes worse than the most nightmarish scenario of gypsy moths devouring every tree on Earth. There are limits to how much we can change our proclivities toward disturbance, but we can limit how many of us are damaging things in the years to come.
2
The main conclusion I draw from this essay is that Mr. Scranton should hustle down to the campus clinic for a hefty dose of medication. Yes, climate change is an issue, but the hyperventilating and drama he writes of should lead to a mental health diagnosis for him.
12
O twaddle. Maybe the Professor should review the history of apocalyptic forecasts, in all their ludicrous diversity - but with the common element of always being wrong. We keep coming back to these fantasies, no matter what century we are in, not because they are probable but because of a quirk in our thinking. We are fascinated by scenarios like The Walking Dead. But that doesn't make a zombie apocalypse likely. And a climate apocalypse is not any more likely. Global warming - yes. End of the road for lions and tigers and the rest - sure. But people will be fine. End of Days is for suckers.
5
I'm a development worker who travels frequently to India, Kenya, Uganda , Colombia, Nicaragua and Haiti.
If you want a glimpse into the future, go to a slum in one of these capital cities, or spend some time with the rural population living in absolute poverty trying to eke out a living from dead soils, or petty trading on the street.
Just outside of the airport in Nairobi, Managua, Kolkata, or Port-au-Prince you will see where humanity is headed. Living in shacks on dirt floors with hungry and sick children. Go to Northern Uganda where the soil is still very fertile but farmers sell their crops for next to nothing to middle-men who control the economy. Their kids experience some of the highest levels of malnutrition and hunger — eating one meal a day is the norm. It doesn't take much imagination or a dystopian novel to fathom our children's world. These parallel universes already exist.
The rich will always live protected in highly fortified castles and gorge themselves with greed. Wars, water scarcity, dwindling agricultural output, pollution, deforestation and disease will weed out the week and powerless. It's all right in front of us.
24
The world belongs to those who show up, not to those who willfully commit generational suicide. I will happily have my 3 kids, so they may take the space you forfeit.
4
My son just turned nine, and so far, planet earth is looking great in comparison with non-existence. As one proud father to another: get a grip on yourself. Consider changing jobs to something more physical that doesn't allow you to sit around all day, rationalizing interwoven anxieties into thought. My father was 15 when he came within inches of being nabbed by the Gestapo for carrying illegal money to help the family flee Germany. He fought against the Japanese in WWII. While he pushed on, as best he could, tens of millions died, and he was none too happy about that. But he didn't once bellyache about the kind of world he lived in. Now get out there, buck up--hire a good nanny and start scouting for preschools.
11
Ironically, it is this type of thinking (thank you Mr. Scranton) that will doom us!
We might as well just throw in the towel now and commit hara-kiri.
The reality is that there have been some massive shifts in the right direction that get little or no press. Here in Europe, for instance, renewable energy and large capacity energy storage is maturing must faster than ever anticipated even 5 years ago. Germany this year produced their entire electricity demands for 80 million people earlier entirely from renewables. The UK are installing the world's largest offshore wind-farm in the world with each turbine capable of 9.5MW.
Of course, nobody would argue that we should sit on our laurels and wait for technology to save us, there is a lot of work to be done in population control and moving the economies that matter (US. China, India) to renewables. But it is absolutely the case that there is "Hope".
And really, there is no point to living without Hope. So, Mr. Scranton - pick yourself up out of your misery and instead ask yourself what you can do to contribute to be the change we need to make happen. Then if your prophecy comes true, you can at least say you gave it your "best shot"!
4
In addition to climate change, there's hunger, homelessness, disease, poverty, unemployment, crime, etc... and they all get worse with overpopulation in the setting of limited resources. Any couple who has more than 2 children is arguably short-sighted, selfish, and doing the world (their children included) a disservice.
14
I have to push back on this drastic and myopic idea that not having children is "cutting oneself off from modern life...choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future."
We are giving up any deep connection to the future by forging ahead into the dystopia that we have created. What future will there be when our planet is too hot to grow food? What future will there be when there is constant warfare trying to lock out the masses of climate refugees demanding aid?
Further, not one of the childless people that I know, across the world, live in an isolated existence. Quite the opposite - our lives are full of connection to our neighbors, our communities, to our world. One could argue that we are even more connected because we are not isolated into the bubble of our nuclear family. To say that childless people lack human connection is akin to Christians saying that atheists lack morals.
Lastly, it's time to move beyond the excuse that reproduction is the strongest human drive. I'm not arguing that it isn't, but it's time to evolve beyond our simple instincts. Adhering blindly to human instincts means endless war (Israel-Palestine, for example), slavery, discrimination, and the destruction of our planet. What sets humans apart is our brain. If we can't use it to reason above the hormonal tendencies, then we truly have no future to connect with.
5
It used to be when you brought a child into the world, you worried that it would die of cholera or get eaten by a wild animal. You worried that your beloved wife would die during the delivery, that you would look on, sobbing helplessly as she lay bleeding uncontrollably on the forest floor of one of those oak groves that were lamentably knocked down to create the hospital parking lot. Now your biggest worry, as you stare down at the ugly sprawl from the miraculous sterility of your state of the art hospital room, at the awful car you drove there in rather than hauling your pregnant wife on a buggy over rutted dirt roads, is that some day your kid will have to move from South Beach to Denver to get away from the rising seas. You wonder if she will have access to Trader Joe's and pilates studios where she ends up. Yes, truly we live in the darkest days mankind has ever seen.
10
#
"Hence the veil of melancholy that is stretched out over all of nature, the deep, indestructible melancholy of all life."
Schelling
It is imperative the child-free movement grows among women. The environmental benefits are one reason but there are many more including but not limited to:
-a more equitable formula for taxation.
-less dependence on men, especially abusive ones.
-reduction, if not elimination, of the wage gap between the sexes.
-Fewer health care issues for women.
Smart women know that whole biological clock thing is something Madison Avenue invented decades ago and that going child free will promote the furtherance of female primacy.
11
If those of us who fear the threats future generations will face don't have children, and raise them to be compassionate, empathic, curious, vigilant, and fierce, then what hope is there for humanity? Our children--the children of those of us who understand and care--are the only ones who have a chance to confront these problems with an eye toward finding the best possible course forward. If we concede defeat now we leave the world to the children of the deniers, then we will condemn the world to certain doom.
Plus, life is worth living in the meantime. We can work on these problems and fight for what's right, and even fear what's to come, and still find profound joy, laughter, love and purpose in the every day. Teach your kids that.
3
Human nature is vested in power, which serves the self-interests of those that achieve it. It is an innate survival instinct, which is also the detriment of others less successful in achieving power and thus sufficient resources.
Under these conditions there will always be those who seek the advantage, and will secure and use the ever-dwindling resources. Is it possible that those in power will, before it is too late, see that it is their own best interests to take action on climate change, lest they be voted or booted out of office, or recognize that reform is needed for their own survival too?
We need look no further than dictatorships AND democratic societies like our own, to plainly see that those in power have their own self-interests in mind. In this regard, these two radically different governing methods are no different. Sadly, but perhaps inevitably, our elected officials are currently fighting to do not what is best for the nation, but to achieve power and thus do what is best for them. Those who deny climate change do so, in my opinion, largely on the belief that it will upset their own comfortable world in the short term.
In my own self-interest, I have gathered resources, and hope that everything doesn't crash before I pass away.
It is difficult to be optimistic.
1
How your words brought me right back to the way I was feeling when my daughter was born, 30 years ago. It was 1988 and Americans seemed to be more concerned about building personal wealth than anything they were doing that was harming the natural world. I crusaded to get grocery stores to give away reusable cloth bags instead of offering paper or plastic and they laughed at me saying no one was going to bring a cloth bag to the grocery store. I spoke to young mothers about the dangers of using disposable diapers, campaigned against tuna fisheries that were killing dolphins, started a recycling program for business owners in my hometown, manufactured a line of recycled toys made from plastic film canisters that were going to the dumps by the billions, made a line of recycled clothing, gave up eating meat, did everything I could to try to get people to be more aware of what was happening to the planet we depend on to sustain us. Still, more money and energy are spent on things like The World Cup than lowering our carbon footprint. To top it off, we elected a reality show star with no experience to make the most important decisions regarding our future. I agree, Mr. Scranton. These are extremely dark times for a supposedly evolved society in 2018, so I don't think readers should compare it to former generations having children. With all we've learned and the technology we have, the future should look much brighter than it does.
4
We are part of Evolution, life striving for survival in a changing ecosystem. An ideal ecosystem results in overpopulation, which results in a hostile ecosystem, and increases Evolutionary pressure, which is the failure of unfit individuals to reproduce.
We are cursed with living in an interesting period.
I am very unsympathetic with this essay.
If humanity won’t make it, Evolution will take a different direction.
I am not an advocate of surrendering as an option.
Talk about fear mongering, our lives now are infinitely better than the lives lived by our ancestors just a hundred years ago and there is no reason to believe that the trend won't continue, with or without climate change.
8
I can only say watch some movies that were made in the eighties and see what they thought the future would look like in 2018. Doom and gloom and a catastrophic dystopian outlook. And wait, look at how it really is. Hmm, other than a crazy social media presence and some diseases eradicated, is it really that different for the average person? I live in Los Angeles and I have lived here my whole 67 years. I can tell you we have better air quality now than in my youth. People live lots longer. Change and death are the only things we can count on. There's lots of things that are better and lots that are worse now. Unless I am missing something, its always been this way. Sometimes change is good, sometimes its bad. That's life. We all do what we can to try and make the world a better place. But there are so many times that well intentioned causes turn into something quite ugly. I happen to agree with lots of people that it seems we are headed in a bad way right now. But, amazingly life goes on. There is still much wonder and beauty in the world. Give your child a chance to see the beauty!
3
I could only get through part of this
I feel so bad for this little girl. Being brought into this world, a great world full of so many things both wonderful and challenging. Only to be stuck with someone with no positive attributes, nothing to offer than thoughts of horror and pain to raise her
Perhaps for his daughter Mr. Scranton will change. But I doubt it. Seems he is addicted to gloom and despair
5
Calling this a "doomed world" seems a bit of hyperbole. It's impossible to know the exact challenges that future generations will face. Certainly, it's true that over the course of human history, life has gotten easier. I'd rather have my children face climate change than the bubonic plague - which killed up to 60% of the population.
Also, can't you argue that if you are committed to fighting climate change, you owe the world children. You are in a much better position to educate your children and equip them for meaningful social change. Leading scientists are more likely to emerge from developed counties given the resources. Finally, I thought the piece flowed very well, so I wasn't surprised the author was an English professor.
3
If life's goal is a good life and the primary determiner of a good life is length, ease, and the a wide range of choices to be used to pursue individual happiness, then it is true that our children have less chance of a "good" life than we do.
On the other hand, if the goal of life it to learn how to love and help others, then our children might come into a world that is better suited for that than ours was. As we realize that we have used up our environmental grace and begin addressing problems that can no longer be ignored, there may be a re-evaluation of our basic ways of living that leads away from extreme individualism and greed and towards cooperation and caring for others.
Yes, this might be a little optimistic. Whether it will play out like this or in a Mad Max fashion is something that people, working together, will decide. Having more people who are here to help rather than working fanatically for their own self-interest will be good for everybody. Yes it's harder than it used to be and that is sad.
I don't want to minimize the challenges people will face in the future, but poor people have already been coming into a world of suffering where things are stacked against them, for a long time. People are already dying from cancer due to pollution. Yes, it will get worse and more violent. The only way to turn the corner is to get to work and re-focus on the good of the community rather than the good of the individual.
1
My father, who lived to be 93 and died in 1998, said he had lived through the best of times that America was going to know. Considering events since 2001, I'm afraid he was right.
6
A Great Depression, and two World Wars? I expect the best of times for America lies in the future, not the past.
1
In 1985 I had to persuade my husband into having one child--as an environmentalist and from a family of 6, he was a proponent of zero population growth to mitigate the rampant destruction of the planet especially animal habitat and extinction.
We are no longer together, but his foresight continues to haunt me. My daughter is the joy of my life, but clearly my choice was selfish in the context of what was best for the earth. Responsible humans should think of the needs of the commons rather than our own personal needs when making decisions such as this. The earth cannot sustain the growing number of humans, not only due to climate change but due to many factors such as habitat destruction and pollution.
At 31, our daughter has decided not to have children for these reasons, and I while it saddens me that she will never experience the joy of having her own child (she will consider adoption) I support and am inspired by her choice.
We need widespread birth control and education about the impact each of us are making when we choose to have children.
10
If every single person on the planet agreed to have "one or fewer children"....and chose the "fewer", humans would unquestionably die off in less than 100 years.
And Ms. Astor's article involved only anecdotes not data and thus was absolutely NOT a report that 'more and more people are deciding not to have children because of climate change."
Or the global population would be reduced significantly, in a peaceful way, which would be a good thing for life and the planet. It seems that we aren't sble as a species to voluntarily reduce our quality of life by dramatically reducing energy use- but if the world population were, say, one tenth of what it is today, those future humans could all live well without despoiling the planet.
7
An important question for any prospective parent to ask is Can I provide for my child?
A climate system spiraling out of control makes that an impossible question to answer. When I see young people starting families I think that they have perhaps not been paying attention to what is happening, and going to happen, to our climate.
9
I'm an economist who works in the climate change sphere. Although climate change is alarming, this author has succumbed to the "world is ending" misinterpretation of the situation. Climate change will bring problems that will be costly to deal with, but that is a far cry from the world-wide catastrophies implied by the author. Over the course of history, humans have proved themselves capable of adapting to tremendous stressors. We will survive, even thrive, in the face of climate change. It's just that doing so will require enormous expense in some respects--for example, enormous investments to deal with water management, as we will see an increase in drought spells as well as an increase in extreme rain events, and those increases will be borne differently in different locations. We will lose some beloved coastlines, and also spend enormous resources relocating or protecting some coastal communities. But we will do it.
15
But what about declining crop yields from extreme and unpredictable weather? I don't know if scientific and technological advances will really be able to adjust to that reality. And the unpredictability will continue to increase over time. We could also be taken by surprise if the collapse of insect populations, the acidification of the oceans, the depletion of fish, and so many other human-induced changes lead to some major tipping point in the production of food crops.
4
That's all doomsday conjecture. Yes, I can't prove that those things absolutely won't happen. But that doesn't mean they are probable. Human ingenuity is amazing. And the thing is, there is a lot of open land and a lot of water on this world. The issue is one of resource allocation--making food, water, etc. are available where they are needed, when they are needed--rather than an overall lack of "enough." And resource allocation is a problem to solve. We are constantly finding new ways to clean and recycle water, to obtain nutrients from food that previously wasn't considered food, and to use resources more and more efficiently. Certainly things will be different in the future, but different doesn't mean terrible.
This lament overlooks the facts that infectious diseases are in deep decline since the nineteenth century, food has never been more available because of production and distribution, and living standards throughout the world are higher than they have ever been before.
4
Lots of truth here though the author's defense of his and his partner's decision to have a child largely fails. He also incorrectly contends that cutting way down on fossil fuels consumption would require centralized control of economies. It would not. All that is needed is a very high and ever-increasing fossil fuels tax.
4
So depressing, and yet if you look at the rapid rate at which electric cars and solar are being adopted in San Diego CA, it may not be as bad as one thinks. Most of my close friends now drive electric cars. There are seas of solar panels everywhere. There are rapid changes in other places, such as China or Germany. Given that electric cars are just better that gasoline cars (lightning acceleration, no trips to the gas station, fewer moving parts, no drips, better smell, no noise, greater comfort) I can see that they will soon take over even in places that are politically resistant, even with our current administration. In addition, while I admit to living in an affluent area, prices will drop and I expect the habits of my neighbors will be adopted by those with less, in much the same way that the iphone was quickly adopted by all. Young people will lead the way. I read that 50% of young people want and electric car, and I can see the admiring glances that my electric car gets from the under 30 crowd.
When I was growing up in the 70s we had our own scares, and then things changed and it turned out to not be as bad as we had thought.
2
This essay begins with a patent falsehood. It states that 'Anyone who pays much attention to climate change knows the outlook is grim. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we face today is the greatest the human species has ever confronted.' It is absolutely unreasonable to say that because 70,000 years ago the human species underwent suffered from a different kind of climate change, global cooling caused by a volcanic super-eruption, which nearly killed us all off and which altered our species' genetic history in a way that is still visible today in our genome.
Unfortunately this column doesn't leave hyperbole and histrionics there. It essentially paints a picture of doom which is not justifiable. Science-based economically feasible scenarios for global CO2 abatement consistent with a 2 degree future (the largely non-scientific line in the sand beyond which climate change becomes catastrophic) do exist and are being pursued globally with surprising urgency.
Don't tell your daughter she was born to a doomed world. Save the non-scientific hysteria for climate change deniers. Instead tell her that as long as her parent, grandparents and their demographic cohorts take actions that are easily within their power the human race has no need for a second climate driven population bottleneck.
5
Pope Francis wrote the Laudato Si (“Praised Be”) encyclical saying that climate change is the greatest threat to human life the Earth has ever seen – and that it is caused by humans.
3
The earth will just kill us all off and start over .. our bodies to be burned for fuel in a billion years.
The cycle continues
4
Overpopulation is the crux of it. The selfishness of deliberately choosing to make a kid. The rest is rationalization.
7
Of course, we should not stop having children. “To do that would mean, not merely to be defeated, but to acknowledge defeat—and the difference between these two things is what keeps the world going.” (Upton Sinclar, The Jungle).
My solution to the moral conundrum is very simple: We fight! I have decided to spend the rest of my days fighting for my children and with my children. Unfortunately, many people seem to have given up already, believing there is nothing they can do. This is wrong! If enough of us stop shopping and stop flying, this would lead to a drop in global GDP and energy consumption, bursting both the carbon and the debt bubbles. A reduction of global GDP by 5% would be sufficient to break the financial system, making room for something new. The solution is simple: Consumer Strike (www.consumer-strike.org).
6
As an engineer, I feel guiltless in the environmental mess we made. You wanted it: we gave it to you. If man meets his end it is because he has a pitiless heart. He can doom his neighbor's children to starve while enjoying his gluttony. He would rather kill his neighbor than fight a fire that will engulf everyone.
We, engineers, built this world, for good or bad. We can repair it if given the direction and power to do so. Forget about planting trees until doomsday: it's eco-nut nonsense. What is needed is industrial environmental reversal. And, there isn't much time left, perhaps 10 years. So go ahead and fight; rage about the world we created but for heaven sake don't ever look in the mirror.
5
No one knows the future - not even scientists. A meteor could fall out of the sky tomorrow and annihilate the planet. A super-virus could wreak havoc and kill all but a select few. We could be thrust in to a nuclear holocaust with only the cockroaches left to witness our end. Climate change could produce superstorm hurricanes that we cannot contain or survive. Of course, on a long enough time frame, our sun will supernova in a huge fireball, destroying everything in our galaxy.
In that sense, we've always been doomed.
But having children is about hope - hope that they will learn to love their neighbors and not use violence to get their way - hope that they will find better ways to extract energy in ways that do not damage the air - hope that they will be better than us. Hope has sustained humans throughout our existence and will be the only thing that will get us through the challenges of the future.
2
I favor vasectomies coincident with all male births.
Philip Larkin:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
4
There is a small philosophical movement called antinatalism supporting the conclusion that existence is a bad thing. Google it, or look into David Benatar's book "Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence", Oxford: Clarendon Press. He makes a cogent if disturbing case for it.
Or, as in poet Thomas Hardy's complaint to God:
"Yea, Sire; why shaped you us, ‘who in
This tabernacle groan'—
If ever a joy be found herein,
Such joy no man had wished to win
If he had never known!"
Could it be that we need this [i.e. life] like the proverbial hole in the head?
1
The juxtaposition of trying to live a 'normal' life against the backdrop of a dismantled democracy and the increasing weather events/extinctions is almost more than I can bear.
At least we are no longer mindlessly bleating ideas about 'saving' the planet. I despise the word save. It implies a control and redemption that don't exist. Adaptation is the new option.
1
This is astonishing to read. It is completely true and at the root of all this seems to be population control (we live on a finite planet, right? Therefore people should limit themselves...) and the kapitalists have indeed pumped tons of carbon into the atmosphere over the last century.
I am nearly 70 and will not live (I am a victim of cancer) to see the revolution that won't matter. Getting out of here and being part of the solution, not the problem, is what it's all about. The future is indeed bleak and I am sorry for those who will have to reap what's been sown. It was nice while it lasted but humans have destroyed it.
4
I truly feel your pain and do not judge you. My husband and I chose not to have children in large part due to the issues you raise. We believe that the most environmentally conscious thing each human can do is not reproduce. (Sorry, but self-immolation is not in my skill set.) In this way, one could argue that we are flawed specimens of our species. I wonder.
7
Do you think you child would be safer if born during the middle ages ? What is you were a Native American family as the Spanish arrived, that should go well. Come down from your uber sensitive ivory tower, show some courage and work to make it better.
9
We all have a right to hope. Even in far darker times, people have continued their lives, had families, planted crops, gone to work and stepped toward the future. We don't know what will happen and the sanest thing we can do is maintain mundane normalcy in our private lives and value our daily joy in these small but universal things.
2
Oh man I face this same agony when thinking about my own daughter and the future she faces almost daily. Thanks to Dr Scranton for articulating it so beautifully. It's hard not to be depressed, especially by the sheer size of the population that is still in complete denial.
5
All organisms struggle to procreate and thrive, for the instinctual betterment of the species. It is not as though we are unique. Beavers will cut trees, locust will devour acres, and pathogens of all types will remain coldly lethal in their quest to make more pathogens.
The instinct to procreate, however, also dooms those organisms which are simply too good at procreating. A disease that is too virile, that kills off the host too quickly, finds itself without a home.
Hence, it is not survival of those who make the most babies. It is survival of the fittest.
The fitness of humanity is profound. Our ability to reason and problem solve allowed us to conquer the harsh, unforgiving world known as Earth.
And like any good species, we instinctively taxed our resources to their limit for our betterment. Now, our struggle to survive has itself created a situation where our survival is questionable.
Never before has a species been confronted with a threat to its resources while also having the mental acuity to recognize the danger and - hopefully - remedy the problem. We have no examples, nothing to rely on but the skills that got us into this mess in the first place.
Yet, that is what keeps hope alive for our children
We survived the horrors of an untamed planet. In our struggle to now survive the horrors of our own making, our will to exist is unweakened.
To remedy the harm to our world is a daunting and seemingly futile task, yes. But survival always is.
3
Little doubt a titanic reckoning with living for today is already here. That the winnowing gauntlet is upon us. And that the philosophical and ethical transformation required to underpin living like there is a tomorrow, by the masses, is likely 50 years too late in the making. Our last chance of making the critical turn was about the time we were occupied with fighting the Cold War, losing 58,000 in Viet Nam, and proving the superiority of capitalism over communism to rapidly grow the human enterprise.
Empires of capitalism would always be deaf and blind to any teachings of "the eye of the needle" (Jesus) or "the earth can provide for every man's needs but not every man's greed" (Gandhi). Pope Francis' encyclical had about zero chance of catching in a world catering to individual wants and to glories of the GDP. And Al Gore was castigated as a radical environmentalist for offering the wisdom that saving the earth from the heavy tip of the balance to man needed to be the central organizing principle of civilization.
The bottleneck is here. What survives this great flush is anyone's guess. One thing for sure -- all the arms and armaments built up across the world are not going to make our passage thru the gauntlet any easier. And few are talking of converting all those weapons of mass destruction into tools of mass stewardship.
4
Raising a Child in a Doomed World
Some would say our mistake was having our daughter in the first place.
[ Awful, ridiculously discouraging headline. Love your child, show your child love, and always assume that will be enough, there is no other moral choice. ]
3
Mr Scranton is a professor at a Catholic university, and the church has a growing movement to follow Creation Care theology. Caring for the earth is a requirement of faith as we are all called to be stewards of God’s creation.
Mr Scranton begins with the question - should people raise children in a doomed world? He then poses a choice - are we willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world? He describes our existence as some kind of ecological grace.
Even before the industrial revolution, humans have lived in a broken world. We have only survived by grace. In turn, we are called to be stewards of creation.
I’m glad he connects his despair with a broken world to a sense of grace, a strong determination to live ethically, and a drive to seek wisdom.
3
Yup, I'm part of the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEM). Even got the T-shirt.
Voluntarily sterilized and glad to make sure that no kid of mine suffers on this doomed planet... My own suffering has been bad enough....
On the other hand, I support the kids who are here who will have to stand and fight for their rights and their lives. It's going to get even uglier and more brutal than it already is...
19
So, according to this piece, we are to believe that not having children "...would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future." There are literally millions of childfree men and women living happy, fulfilled lives. I am childfree by choice and my life is far from isolated or hermetic. And I am so deeply connected to and concerned about the future that I have eschewed air travel for over a decade and meat for nearly three decades. Apparently, Mr. Scranton, you are aware of the burden placed on the earth by reproducing (especially as an American) but you wanted a child for your own selfish reasons, and now you have one. Are we supposed to feel sorry for you because now you are facing up to the reality that your daughter will likely not live a full lifespan due to climate change, exacerbated by people just like yourself who have chosen to reproduce? Telling those of us who choose not to burden the planet with more Americans that we might as well commit suicide is illogical. Killing alive humans is not the same as not conceiving more. And I really think you know that.
9
It is now too late (at least thirty years too late) to do anything about climate change. Still well-educated people have children mostly because of social pressures to conform and fear of dying alone. These wrong reasons plus waiting until your forties and having just one is just selfish, as the kid is just starting to establish themselves and will have to be taking care of their elderly parents while dealing with scarce resources.
5
"This is the choice David Buckel made one crisp April morning, when he walked from his Brooklyn apartment to Prospect Park, doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire. He was in good health."
"He was in good health"
"...doused himself in gasoline and lit himself on fire."
"While some might be inclined to ascribe his suicide to mental illness..."
"...mental illness..."
Yea, I think I'd ascribe it to that. Well adjusted people don't set themselves on fire last time I checked.
5
There is very little an individual can do to thwart the inevitability of climate change, so while I appreciate the efforts of groups dedicated to effecting meaningful policy changes, I am nothing but a free rider. I can’t afford to join or contribute to every one. Don’t fly much—can’t afford that either. So, here’s my deal: I’m a vegetarian. It’s about the animals and about the Earth. It’s something I can do. Does anybody notice? Hardly. Does anybody care? Nope. It’s what I can do. It’s easy and, trust me, I don’t starve. But when I see a truckload of cattle packed tight and battling for air in an 18-wheeler being transported to a slaughterhouse; when I see a filthy chickenhouse and smell the polluted air; when I read of hog houses and gestation crates; when I think of animals robbed of every natural instinct and forced to live in misery until they die a horrific death, my only defense against debilitating grief and depression is this: Not because of me.
5
This is a lot of defensive blather. I don't begrudge your having a kid, but knowing what we know today, it is a selfish act. Lives can have joy and meaning without children (you can even satisfy your single strongest drive without producing them), and there are plenty of children in need of good homes.. You prioritized your genes. I suppose that's natural, just as human suffering is natural, and perhaps human extinction.
6
"The Earth is a beautiful place, but it has a pox called man." -- Nietzsche
Sooner, it appears, rather than later, the pox will kill its host. However, at the other end of the tunnel -- maybe 200 years from now -- there will be three guaranteed survivors: humans, rats and cockroaches. They will deserve each other.
1
Wow, what a downer. Mr. Scranton, enjoy your daughter. And, since you are worried about our world under assault, teach her about voting and volunteering. But, the 3 of you need to maintain a positive attitude. Choosing to be otherwise is of no help to anyone. Once the current president is defeated in 2020, things will look up. The human spirit is something to be admired and to be hopeful about.
2
I didn't realize the dark hole of despair that I had stumbled upon when I opened this article up. Talk about dystopian...the world isn't ending people. Not even close.
5
Hard to believe new science and the resulting technology has made possible much more rapid replacement of fossil fuels.
Existing engines, both stationary and in any type of vehicle, can be easily and inexpensively modified to run on water, fresh or salt. See Moving Beyond Oil at aesopinstitute.org to learn more.
Engines have been invented that need no fuel. They are designed to run on ambient heat, a huge untapped reservoir of solar energy larger than earth's fossil fuel reserves. A Ford engine was converted and a Kia engine will soon be converted & certified at a State lab in Alaska.
See the same website.
Other "impossible" technologies are undergoing evaluation. At the moment they appear equally important.
Trolls are certain none of this is possible and rant at length with lies and distortions to discourage support.
Sophisticated hackers attack our computers.
Imagine the impact of cheap green renewable energy and self-powered, refrigerant free, air conditioners in an abruptly warming world.
1
Can't read Wind in the Willows? My grandaughter's have no problem seeing the world in a grain of sand... lost for hours at a time whether in Yosemite or in an urban neighborhood walk, looking at the smallest details, connecting to nature wherever they find it. Yes, the future doesn't look promising. Give up? Tell that to the dandelion poking through a crack in the concrete.
2
Intelligent and kind people are precisely the ones we need having and rearing kids.
But as for the future? I'm grim. I thank myself regularly for not bringing more lives into this sorry world of ours.
3
I grew up in the 60s and when I read this article I felt as if I was time warped back to that decade. Environmental apocalypse was predicted then, and with some reason. Look at pictures of downtown LA, the Cuyahoga River on fire, and the industrial smoke pall over every major manufacturing city. I just watched a ballgame in Pittsburgh where people were pleasure boating on the Allegheny River and actually swimming in it. This would have been unimaginable even 25 years ago. Unleaded gas, clean burning jet engines, and strict environmental regulation have wrought huge changes for the better in this country. The same feelings of guilt at having kids, doomed to a life of surviving on soylent green, were prominently expressed in the media. What is of acute concern is that the perpetually "developing" world appears exempt from critique in this area. I travel quite a bit, both for work and leisure, and in most parts of the globe foul air and water, coupled with atrocious land and agricultural management, are the norm. Burgeoning populations and appalling government corruption only exacerbate the problem. Hence, we witness the great south to north migration now in progress. I do believe that man can influence climate change to some extent, keeping in mind that over millions of years the earth has experienced countless seismic climactic shifts Man's efforts need to be focused on the parts of the world where the worst problems are.
Many of the comments to this article are of the "shoot the messenger" type. Or the denial type. Oh, pshaw, humans have been threatened by other possible catastrophes, big deal.
Well, it is a big deal. And comparing where we are now to disease, famine, and other natural disasters from the past is a false equivalency. Wake up and smell the ozone, folks, mass extinction is on the way.
3
Humans overran the earths carrying capacity for them about 1,000 years ago. I imagine people in every generation think theirs was the last of the "good times." It just keeps going.
2
In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus famously predicted that short-term gains in living standards would inevitably be undermined as human population growth outstripped food production, and thereby drive living standards back toward subsistence. Human history is littered with these doom and gloom predictions which all proved to be wrong. Humans have continued to be better fed, healthier and living in cleaner conditions than ever before. We have also gotten better at predicting and managing bad weather. On the other hand, the doom and gloom predictions have been the basis of a few religions and several cults the latest of which seems to be the cult of climate change.
1
We have been blessed in our country with not having experienced war on our own soil. When you see the damage caused by the wars and plagues of the past (forget the moment for now), you will see how fortunate we have been. Now is not the time to live in despair.
Our goal should be to continue to labor for peace and justice and equality in the world, not for more wealth and automibiles and extravagant entertainment. We will need our children to continue that work.
3
While there is no doubt that the universe has much to contend with of late, this notion of perpetual gloom and doom has been augmented and perpetuated by our 24/7 news cycle, and where formerly 'local news' has spread to include news from the entire globe. It's far too much for us humans to process and not be affected by it.
But we also need to consider that...the world has had the Ice Age, famines, world wars, outbreaks of disease the decimated populations.
'Dystopian' has become the new buzz word, but let's not just throw in the towel. Your new daughter may just be the one destined to save the planet. ;-)
1
I live in a 55+ community where the number one topic of conversation (beyond taxes and "early bird specials") is grandchildren. My son and his wife are in their early 30's--each with superb educations, jobs and prospects for continued future success. Yet if they asked me my opinion about having children, I admit I'd look away. I can not face their asking the question to which my husband and I answered with such confidence and excitement. World without end...amen?
2
Yes. I get this issue and I agree with the conclusion the author takes. The sliver of hope that is raising your children "well"- to be kind, resilient, considerate (locally and globally) and hardworking. Hey and why not throw in the hope that your child will be a great leader or scientist who will help shift the planet's course away from disaster?
But, I do not relate to the special unique problem the author (or any other environmentally conscious) person has to make in these particular times.
I wouldn't be here, had my grandmothers not "chosen" to have babies in the midst of atrocities and the worst unspeakable doom. My grandmother was tortured, starved, sexually abused and enslaved and nearly her/our entire family murdered in the Armenian genocide. She went on to find beauty and generate so much love to her children, family and community. She was not alone. So many people have had babies while face to face with the worst of humanity, with their village/home literally in rubble or burning. It is more engrained in human history to grapple with this than to have whatever sense of safety and privilege Americans seem to have now. For my ancestors, many might say, "their mistake was having children," given how they suffered.
3
Mr. Scranton writes "[Having a child] just happens to be the single strongest drive humans have." I don't get this (unless he's talking about sexual desire). Can someone explain it to me? I love kids but have never desired to have a biological child. Maybe a childhood filled with bullying and other assorted unpleasantness is part of the reason. But taking into account the very real issues raised in this article -- as well as all of the suffering and loss one encounters in life -- why, why would anyone want to subject another being to modern life is beyond me.
18
The problem statement is simple. We are too many for the planet. There are various solutions. Working against nature is not one of them. We are not that clever. Securing peoples future is the only way to keep them from having babies to care for them in their old age. How to secure their future. That is a different problem statement , but at some point a living wage and retirement security are the ones that come to my mind.
1
Western Civilization was built on reason and deliberation, wasn't it? Only a society conceived in abundance could even entertain such doubt and soul searching as the author expresses - our little experiment is about to derail, it's true. My daughter will be born in two month and I feel no so such angst. It would be too much.
1
This article really gets to the heart of it all. Catastrophic climate change is coming in the next 10-15 years unless we simply stop pouring billions of pounds of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere everyday. To deny this truth is living in denial. And truly there is nothing any of us can do to solve this other than stop driving cars, flying planes, and using electricity generated from CO2 emitting sources. Human extinction is coming up fast. The evidence is there staring at us plainly. It's utterly depressing, made even more so because most people simply don't think this is really going to happen due to not being that smart.
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/full.html
https://www.dw.com/en/how-climate-change-is-increasing-forest-fires-arou...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/10/earths-sixth-mass-ex...
9
Wow. To the author - consider moving to New Mexico. With that aside - yes - the future will face major challenges due to disruptions in the food chain, pollution, and environmental degradation. In fact, we already are for those of us who have lived for awhile. And in fact, we may have passed the pinnacle of our overall civilization sans technological advances. Not all of that is based on the environment though. In the end, I do think a balanced day of reckoning will occur over the next century, as arable land, food supply, and overall human health and fertility go backwards; but our decisions as a world will go forward in my belief. And thus we teach our children in a way that perhaps we were not taught by our own parents - out of sheer necessity and hopefully some forward looking thinking. In the meantime, stay on the happy side of life when possible - trite as though it sounds.
2
Throughout human history we have had challenges. Climate change will be just one more. I doubt it will be anything like what man did to himself through most of the last century. We have become very good at shaping the world to what we need. The danger is when we can't control our worst urges and go after one another.
1
If you think it will be remotely like what we did to ourselves last century, you should learn more of the science of what three degrees of warming likely means. Over two degrees, we're going to have to start evaluating whether industrial scale agriculture is viable. It might the Holodomor look quaint.
9
Really? over 80% of fish are gone, wildlife populations have crashed by over 50% globally, and we're on track to have all species larger than cows go extinct in the next twenty years. If you think that nature is still out there, you haven't been paying attention to what is actually happening in the world.
12
Just as it's a luxury to skip along blindly without taking climate change as a genuine threat, giving in to apocalyptic despair is also a luxury. Who do you think you are, to be guaranteed a safe future for your children? There have been global threats, from nuclear war to the Black Death since the dawn of time.
It's only in the fat, comfortable West that we can be so blithe about how much better off the world will be without us. It's virtue signaling of the worse kind. We need to be devoted to improving our world, wherever and however we can. And one way to do that is to raise a generation of people who can light a way through the darkness ahead. It's not just the couch potatoes that make our society worse; it's the people who cheer for oblivion. In both cases, they do nothing to make the world we have better.
5
Everyone thinks their children's generation will "light a way through the darkness ahead." Talk about solipsism and fat Western comfort. To date, everyone has been wrong.
Also, it's unclear why the radical reduction of the global population is Western "virtue signaling" instead of just true.
9
There was everything to admire about how David Buckel lived his life and nothing to admire about how he ended it. There's no suicide without mental illness.
2
Back when man lived in 'harmony' with nature, your daughter would have had a roughly 50% chance of making it to adulthood when she could expect to live to the ripe old age of 34. Whoopee-do! And the amazing thing about human history is that these statistics don't get much better, from Neolithic man to the 19th century life expectancy remained stubbornly low. If you made to adulthood at all you barely had time to raise a family of your own before you were turned into worm food.
So standing there sobbing in a modern 20th century hospital, looking at the plethora of technology and opportunity that the world will afford your daughter is, quite frankly, pathetic. The non-human world is still there, the only struggle appears to be getting off the couch or out from behind the computer to find it.
2
I think you're missing the point. The author is saying that human conduct is creating a looming environmental disaster that will, by the late 21st century, quite possibly return humans to a situation where only 50% of the population makes it to adulthood and then dies by 34, if not worse. In other words, our modern medicine and technology is a bubble that's about to burst.
6
Alan, I think you need to read the literature being produced by scientists about what they expect will happen as a result of global warming. It's not going to be something that we can simply fix with technology, and even if we can, it is likely to be so disruptive to human society that neither you nor I would want to live in that world.
4
That's rather absurd. You can't un-invent the wheel.
This column shows how cults, violent political movements and the like can be so effective and inculcate even very smart people. The author seems pretty intelligent but has bought into some dystopian fantasy. If some dictatorial fanatic got in position to take over the world with force to “save the planet,” the author would support him.
I do think non-human life is in big trouble the next 100 years but human beings will be okay. We have proven to be quite ingenious at dealing with problems and will certainly be able to take actions in response to climate change which will enable humans to surivive quite nicely. This concept that humanity is doomed is quite foolish.
3
Cart before horse. The problem is and has been since the 1960s: out of control human reproduction. At 7.6 billion, this is nearly DOUBLE from the 1960s. Males must begin using condoms or get a vasectomy. Even that is probably too late a fix for this crisis created by man.
12
Women have a role to play too.
This is a crisis created by people.
1
Intelligent, well educated people need to reproduce too. Otherwise the USA and the world will just be overpopulated with those who are not. What would the chances for the future be then?
4
Somehow, in the late 1960s when I was 13 I had the overwhelming knowledge that if I had a child, it would not be able to live out a normal lifespan. I sensed that the world was not going to be anything more than a brutal monstrosity full of the Four Horsemen. I have no idea how I sensed that at such a tender age, but it cemented in me the idea that I would never have children -- I could not in good conscience bring children into what I knew would be a horror show.
I was right, and I have no regrets. Mother Nature is doing her damndest to get rid of us, and she's bigger than we are. Anyone who brings a child into this world today is damning them, if they are not the 1%, if a life full of starvation, filthy water, complete Big Brother surveillance an us-v-them mentality and climate chaos that will be unstoppable.
24
I'm an archaeologist by training, though not by profession. Much of my studies focused on past civilizations that were brought to heel or even wiped out by climate change. I also took a number of geology courses, and the foundation of these is the carbon cycle (i.e. Earth's great recycling system). Sometimes the overall themes depressed my fellow students. Even a professor once commented that nobody but an archaeologist can understand just how bad climate change will be. To him, life was like watching a horrific car crash in slow motion.
My feeling is this - Humanity has lived, humanity has suffered, and humanity has carried on. Climate change (or any number of things) may wipe out 90%, or 99%, of the population. It will be terrible to suffer through that. But it is very probable that humans will survive as a species and eventually overcome and thrive again. And that's the pessimistic view.
By profession I work in technology, and I haven't given up on human ingenuity to engineer solutions to avoid or stave off catastrophe. That's the optimistic view, although terribly unfashionable amongst certain disciplines.
You can choose to stop reproducing and give up on the hope of your children or genes continuing into the future. To me, that's the equivalent of committing suicide during a low point in your life. Or you can have children (if you are lucky) and you can raise them in as happy an environment as possible. It's not all strip malls and parking lots out there.
7
I have come to appreciate that climate change is as much an evolutionary problem as it is atmospheric. We simply aren't geared to respond appropriately to climate change. It's too nebulous, seemingly too far away and too complex to trigger the alarm it deserves.
And we are also enormous hypocrites that expect to sacrifice nothing. I have many highly educated liberal friends who think believing in climate change and hating Trump is doing something. They still eat loads of meat, procreate according to their personal desires and jet off to the far corners of the world for vacation.
I sympathize with the author to an extent. She weeps for the child that she still decided to have for her own admittedly selfish fulfillment. If things do go as bad as is likely then one hopes her child will forgive her.
42
@Frank: Did you actually pay attention to who *wrote* this essay. The author's name is Roy, and per the bio at the end, the proper pronoun is "he".
2
It is impossible not to eye roll. It should be noted that, irrespective of what happens with the world, you have brought someone into the trials and tribulations of the terminal condition known as "life". But seriously, life is precarious and the universe fickle. It has never been safe to be alive!
26
At least to me, there is a disconnect in logic in this coulmn and it's underlying philosophy. My criticism is that If everything is as hopeless as the author says, then I all might as well just cheer up and enjoy the ride. However I get the feeling that the author in an unstated way is holding out hope for the future. That somebody will actually save him. But if that is the case then the author would actually be responsible for his own behavior. If the world is saving why would he even consider flying? This is the largest flaw with the modern Liberal movement. Lack of personal responsibility and new ideas. I suggest the author join a strong environmental movement and live by it's principles. Maybe this will cure his malaise, and as a small side effect, decrease the damage he is doing to the planet.
3
Well, here we all are, and what are we going to do about it? Action is essential, and we have to do what we can.
Sniping from the sidelines is even more useless.
6
I wish our lives as wholly owned subsidiaries of marketing and ecological / biological / climate mayhem were not so.
This article should be on the front page, and everyone should ask themselves some serious questions about whether we need all this stuff, and whether the stuff is good for us. We, earth's apex predator, are headed towards disaster and we become more and more addicted to the 2D world and all those shiny objects and hair and makeup.
Here are a range of informative presentations: https://storyofstuff.org/
And the circular economy: https://www.ellenmacarthurfoundation.org/circular-economy/overview/concept
16
I share the author's heartbreak and anguish, as well has his guilt for the part we all are playing in our own demise. The only ease I can find these days comes from reading about physics and cosmology, from understanding our place as the merest dot on an unfathomable scale of time. For me, the ultimate lesson is one of humility: the world will heal after humans are gone. Trees will grow, animals will flourish, the seas of plastic will eventually be reclaimed by the creatures which inhabit it. We won't survive as a species, but life and the act of creation don't depend on us and never have. Life is a process, and that process will go on without us. Small comfort, perhaps, but it's what we have.
28
This is exactly why my husband and I adopted a child rather than creating another one.
31
The single greatest thing anyone can do in this age is NOT to have children. In many ways this decision separates the developed from the undeveloped world. It should no longer be necessary to procreate to perpetuate the species. We've done enough to ensure long life so that we don't need as many offspring to survive, and as several have commented, adoption is always an alternative. But by continuing to recklessly breed we've created an overpopulation crisis which is at the root cause of most of the issues facing the planet: climate change, lack of resources, crowd-driven political instability. The Times recently published an article suggesting that white middle class Americans are having fewer children. While the article seemed to suggest this was a problem, I applaud it as an example of the kind of responsibility that used to set an example for other cultures but is now dismissed. I'm 64 years old. I consider myself blessed to have seen the great achievements of the 20th century, but if I had the guts I'd end it now. I see nothing on the horizon worth waiting for.
13
Bravo.
5
We're been sitting at the table of a massive banquet lasting for around 200 years now, inviting more and more people to the table, convinced the food will never run out.
We will leave the same way we've arrived. A stable climate and plently of arable land allowed for a sedentary civilisation 10 thousand years ago, and fossil fuels allowed for unprecedented growth; climate chaos and resource depletion promise to swiftly take it away from us. A 2C (and more, we'll get there) rise in global average temperature doesn't impact temperature uniformly throughout the year; heat stress in the peak weeks of summer will devastate the crops we rely on. Dead crops = dead humans.
Don't have kids.
36
I am thankful every day that I took my mother's advice - "don't have children."
36
Mankind has used every weapon he has created. I would be more worried about nuclear war in the next 100 yrs.
3
Wow, what a pessimistic outlook on the world. Never underestimate the power of human ingenuity. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-44396781
5
I came across an old copy of National Geographic from 1938 featuring a section on the Jewish community of Prague. The photos captured images of everyday life, shopping, Hasidic children playing in the streets. The text spoke to the anxiety of the community over the Nazi menace to the west.
Looking at those photos, I was suddenly struck by the horror of it all. The Nazis completely destroyed Prague's 1,000 year old Jewish community, and ruthlessly murdered almost all of its inhabitants. The faces I was looking at were the faces of men, women and children all of whom would be dead within four years. Here were photos of people living their lives in that space between an uncertain, anxious future and eventual catastrophe.
They could not know the extent of the oncoming whirlwind. Had they known, would they have consigned their children to such a fate?
I do not share Dr. Scranton's effusive praise for procreation. It is not the 'fundamental organizing principle' of 'every' society. One need only look at the public sums lavished on the elderly relative to that of children to know that political power is - and children have none.
It seems to me that the greatest act of sacrifice is to forgo contributing one's DNA to human progeny, not only for the sake of one's own offspring, but for the sake of those who are or will be born. Climate change forces us to re-evaluate the sources of social meaning. It is society that confers meaning procreation, not the biological process.
35
Since World War II, many Jewish communities have realized the importance of keeping their numbers strong, so they will have a stronger voice and never again face the specter of genocide. Many Jews today choose to have lots of children to keep their communities thriving and growing. But you seem to be saying that the Jews of Prague shouldn't have had children, becuase of the dangers they faced. I suppose in your view they should have simply given up all hope.
@Samuel Russell No, that was not what I was saying. My remarks pertain to Mr. Scranton's essay only. For the pre-war Prague Jewish community, the future was uncertain, but life went on as normal because they had hope that although "it" might be bad, it would still be endurable and wouldn't last forever. They could not have known that "it" was the apocalyptic destruction of their lives and community - that their situation was indeed hopeless.
In contrast, we are faced with an apocalypse that we actually know is coming. We have already crossed the threshold of a global extinction event. Our situation is likely as hopeless as that of Prague's Jews in 1938. Let's face it: it is only the uncertainty of what that apocalypse will look like that gives us "hope."
My objection to Dr. Scranton is that he uses the false premise that the substance of human "meaning" is found in procreation and child rearing to justify bringing a child into a world he knows is doomed. I could say he's just dressing up paternal sentimentalism as anthropological insight. I think it would be more honest just to say "I wanted a kid so I had one" and leave it at that. The desire to have children needs no justification, although if you are really concerned about our doomed planet, I might suggest getting a dog.
1
According to past doomsday descriptions (e.g. Club of Rome report from 1972) our planet already collapsed due to
[ ] overpopulation
[ ] exhaustion of natural resources
[ ] widespread hunger
not sure how Mr. Scranton is around then! But it looks like the doomsday scenarios only could happen if everybody committed suicide. It is the ultimate and most radical collision between facts/science and ideology. How ironic.
1
The Club of Rome in 1972 made no explicit predictions or forecasts, but rather extrapolations from trend-lines, of which the point was that exponential growth is unstable.
They generally "predicted" exponential growth at the 1970's rate would lead to instability and collapse in the middle part of this century, which is to say somewhere between now and 30 or 50 years from now.
They certainly didn't say anything like what you wrongly portray.
The math of exponential growth is not intuitive for people, but it is extremely simple and powerful if you listen to it.
6
I've been raging for many years now at the role religion—especially that of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition—has and is playing in disarming the human ability to recognize the real cause of our doom: ourselves not as beings stained by the patriarch's (aka the misogynist's) assertion of Eve-derived original sin, but as beings stained by the arrogance, greed, and cowardice of those same patriarchs, aka patriarchy, as coded into the texts of those religions. Obviously, no human culture has been able to free itself from their subtle but devastating memetic poisons, and now, as the author states so evocatively, it is far too late. The patriarchs have won a quintessentially useless victory: the demeaning, torture, and eventual extinction of their flock, aka their descendants.
So in light of this, as the author states, the only recourse is to fully exercise our practical abilities as social beings: kindness, forbearance, and charity towards all life, and all as a symbolic gesture to the truth the patriarchs have long worked to eclipse: that we are not separate from or superior to all the other life forms of the planet: A gesture made by open-eyed members of a doomed species in defiance of the pervasive, socially destructive stupidity that has car company ads feature macho drivers who max out their engines and do donuts out in devastated desert biomes.
As Juan Matus once said: "Knowledge without kindness, and wisdom without sobriety, are useless." A fitting epitaph for sapiens.
10
I have done battle with a close friend (a highly educated and intelligent doctor) over whether politics per se are so ruined that the only meaningful action left is effectively 'individual' - outside the political realm. I agree that individual and communal actions - ranging from recycling to health cooperatives - are worthy and ethically meaningful. The problem, though, is that so much power has been committed to the political process - to the office-holders and poobahs in charge - that all other efforts and initiatives are swallowed up, a drop in the bucket when it comes to the directions our country and humanity take. So I continue to advocate for a very basic reform of the political process: insist that our votes be counted observably, in public. Perhaps the people - if their votes were counted as cast, and not as programmers, paid-by-the-win operatives and their corporate masters decide they should be - would not seem so blind and stupid as they have. Perhaps they would begin to translate collective wisdom into the kind of ethical and inspired leadership that could begin repairing our world and making it fit for our children.
7
Recycling efforts thwart mass or over consumption. It's ok to buy lots of plastics, electronics, etc. if it's going to be recycled, right?
4
Global warming is nature's response to human overpopulation. People will always selfishly be fruitful and multiply, and that has consequences. But we have epidemic death, famine, and war to cure the problem.
20
It's easy to say that since you live in Canada. I would argue that life isn't much better for poor people, nor for African-Americans. They were getting lynched 100 years ago, today they are getting shot. What's the difference?
1
The reason people are not having children today is not based on environmental factors alone, it's also an economic one. And thank you for pointing out that we can not save the world through individual consumer choices. That said, excellent essay. Overpopulation issues are rarely addressed, as urgent as they've become. Most of our problems in the world are directly related to too many people, everywhere.
24
Good Lord, man. Take a vacation to the upper peninsula in Michigan. Better yet, move there. It's about as unspoiled as nature gets in this country. You'll be next to all the fresh water you could want, and there are so few people up there that carbon footprints are more like carbon fingerprints. You can raise your daughter in all the fresh air and nature you could want.
4
BRRRRR. Too cold. Maybe later it will be warmer?
4
One thing we can do now is to curtail immigration into the US.
We cannot save the world- we can save our children by stopping the endless growth of people in the US.
14
He's nuts. The world is doing just fine, and will continue to do so. Some things change---the mean temperature goes up a degree or two, the air and water in developed countries is much cleaner than it used to be and developing countries will soon follow after a few decades of Dickensian air pollution, farmers may plant different crops and some wild species will flourish while others disappear. Change isn't necessarily bad, unless you are living in a fantasy world of pre-historic Teutonic forest tribes and pagan gods.
Stick to philosophy. You don't know anything about science.
5
Mr. Scranton, you need to calm down. You have a daughter to think of; you're no longer free to run around preaching doom and twisting your mind with anxieties that a) you can't really do anything about, and b) are based on assumptions that are not nearly as certain as you've been told, and c) can and will be dealt with by other people, who will come after you and I.
If you keep chewing your heart out you'll wind up raising an emotional wreck. So, for her sake, stand up straight, put a brave face on and act act like a Dad. She's watching.
14
You're wasting your breath! Nobody really cares. At least not enough to change their lifestyles. They just give lip service. I try to do my part in any way I can, but I feel like a drop in the bucket. I also feel sad for my grandchildren, one of whom is still not born. But that said, we should love our family and friends and live each day as though it were our last. This is just part of the evolution of our planet and of the human animal and we too will become extinct, just like the majority of species that have populated this world of ours in the past history of the planet. It's just too bad that some of us are aware of what we have done as a species and where we are going. We are just another failed experiment!
12
After I gave birth to my first daughter nearly 30 years ago, I had to give up my daily habit of reading the newspaper for several months because I was so viscerally afraid of what might happen to her in the mad world depicted there that I couldn't bear to hear about it. Ronald Reagan was president, and no one was talking about climate change. Now--? I'm reading the paper again (for my sins), and when I think of my daughters' future, how they will live in the new world of a changed climate is *all* I think about. I don't know what the answer is. I agree that individual action won't save us, but I wish I could stop feeling guilty every time I let the water run a moment too long or put a little too much toothpaste on my brush. When I think about how seriously behind we are in taking the collective action that represents our only hope, and how captive we are to those who refuse to act, like Roy Scranton I want to cry.
4
Raising a Child in a Doomed World - it is heartbreaking for all parents but the anguish from the "selfishness" of procreating is somewhat lessened when you adopt. If raising the child and parenting is the point (not passing on genes), it's a wonderful option and millions of children await.
10
I would suggest that the author read Steven Pinker's newest book 'Enlightenment Now". The world is a much better place than it was 100 years ago and if one were to live a century ago there is no way to claim that the present is not the greatest time in history.
Yes there are problems, even big problems that one has to worry about. But to take every bit of of progress for granted while typing on their Ipad and sipping clean water in an air conditioned room with the lights on, really takes some hutzpah.
23
Think about it this way.
World prosperity is a bell curve. We are at the apex. Our future is not a straight line or more increases. Our future is a sharp, dramatic decline.
If you cannot see that, it’s because you don’t want to.
19
I will tell you what I do see. I see that in the last 20 years a billion people have moved out of extreme poverty. I'll take cold hard facts over chicken little predictions all day long.
1
There is an arcane treatise called "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes. It's hard to get past the title never mind the content.
But his basic treatise is that people were essentially automatons, hardly thinking for themselves, until some natural catastrophe occurred that forced them to do so.
This may happen again, pushing us to a higher level of consciousness and getting us off the couch and away from the TV.
We will survive this, but it may not be pretty. The best thing that could happen is we run out of fossil fuels, which we will eventually. That has been the source of our many problems.
3
Nature is self-regulating. The problem of over-population, pollution, mindless consumption, "growth" at all costs, humanity-accelerated climate change, etc. eventually takes care of itself.
"The world" will be fine. Humanity, maybe not so much.
44
I thought this was a really good article. I want to read more articles by scientists, philosophers,--the best minds period-- discussing the problem of life forms in relationship to energy needs period.
For example, it appears for life to exist not to mention develop to higher forms of complexity, intelligence and consciousness life must be pitted against life, that life strangely for its nutrition, sustenance, must depend on other life forms.
It's as if the organic is rather brutally separated from the inorganic, that for the organic to develop to higher complexity/intelligence/consciousness it must prey on other life forms which presumably aim toward the same end of complexity/intelligence/consciousness.
Furthermore, life forms as they prey on each other to develop to higher complexity/intelligence/consciousness use especially as they become more intelligent various inorganic forms of energy for their needs, and do so crudely, resulting in an ugly spectacle of crude use of both the organic and inorganic to develop to higher complexity/intelligence/consciousness.
Therefore one of the major goals of higher life forms is to somehow solve the energy problem period, to have higher life process energy in such a way that life is not so ruthlessly pitted against life and exploiting the inorganic in crude fashion. What would higher life be like if it could have extremely clean and efficient energy processing, direct inorganic to organic/consciousness link?
2
This article seems unduly negative. We don’t know what is going to happen with climate change.
Yes, it would be a good idea if the world population didn’t continue on an upward trajectory forever. But I don’t think it will (South Korea — which is both crowded and has educated women — has a fertility rate of 1.05 or so; I think we’re all headed there). We have also seen so many positives on a worldwide stage over the past 20 years — a huge lessoning of poverty for instance.
The American Dream (perhaps really the “Western Dream”) is over. Yes, my life has been materially harder than my baby boomer parents’ lives — I live in a smaller, older house; I have had a car for a smaller proportion of my life; I have had to contend with both financial insecurity and the misery of being around friends and neighbors who cope badly (react with anger) to downward mobility. At the same time, I believe my life has been more purposeful and meaningful — more spiritually fulfilling.
This is not the worst crisis humanity has faced. I would nominate the Blackdeath, the fall of the Roman Empire, or the climate change the prehistoric people of the last ice age experienced. And those are just the events we know of.
8
Good, accurate article. I knew this, as do most rational people with access to education. I'm not sure I needed to be any more depressed than I already was, but maybe that's just the Id talking.
32
Given the current domestic and worldwide political and economic situation, it’s increasingly difficult to view the demise of humanity as a particular tragedy. What galls me is that those most responsible will probably be the ones that survive in hermetically sealed domes, space stations, or missile silos converted to luxury condos though that sounds like a bleak existence. With their superior intellects and entrepreneurial skills it never occurred to them to preserve the perfectly livable planet we started out with (with which we started)?
21
Richard, don't feel so bad; they won't survive for long.
4
Global warming is scary, but it's not coming for a long time, and nobody really knows what will happen. As of today, we've never had it so good. The global standard of living is far higher than it's ever been, and life expectancy keeps increasing. Your child born today has more advantages and protections than any baby born at any time before. In fact usually what we hear in the news is that the American and European birth rates are too low, which threatens social security, medicare and other programs. And while I'm glad this seemingly paranoid author is not actually advocating suicide, the fact that it's even taken seriously as a possible option is simply beyond the pale for me.
14
Current World Population
7,636,292,735
http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Sam...7.6 billion and counting will not end well for this invasive species.
24
There were 2.5 billion people in 1951. Now we have 3 times (7 billion) that many people. Based on that, I doubt the Earth can survive 20-30 billion people by end of this century. I agree with the author that my grandchildren will not enjoy seeing the natural beauty that I've experienced in my life time. It's a shame with people who don't accept the nature of climate change and issue with the population growth.
20
Not coming for a long time? It's already happening. I can see it in the changing climate of my own region, and it's far worse in low-lying parts of Bangladesh, Florida and the Gulf states, to name just a few. WVhole islands are being abandoned to rising seas.
21
You are just scratching the surface of the problem.
We are living on the cusp of the possibility of a sixth planetary extinction. It could have the totality of the Permian Triassic.
Even if we can avoid that totality, our legacy to future generations as a result of rising temperatures will be the death and suffering of billions
Why are so many so blinded to this coming planetary/cosmic reality? Could it be that we evolutionarily have a cranial imperfection? And if we have, how deeply implanted is it in our DNA eukaryotic chromosomic brains? Then the big question: Do we psychologically neurologically have the ability to overcome this imperfection and replace it with a new form of synchronous thought and behavior that establishes for Homo sapiens coexistent unity and inter active equilibrium with all life and nonlife on the planet?
www.InquiryAbraham.com
8
I was involved in faculty governance sometime back. I served on a committee with the climate scientist Stephen Schneider and shared lunch with him a couple of times. Generally he was positive about our ability to moderate the effects of warming. He was a positive spokesman. One day at lunch I pushed him to tell me what he thought the worst case could be. He said we could go extinct or in 2100 have a few million survivors living in precivilization conditions. I fear his worst case may turn out to be correct. I feel bad because as individuals we really seem to have little or no impact on the scale needed to impact climate change. There is no doubt it is real and that our children and grandchildren are headed for disaster. Politics and the mass media (hear that NY Times) are our only hope. NY Times editorial board everyday you need to headline a climate scientist and a climate change story. It is why we must elect new politicians that can tackle this problem. NY Times you need to start tomorrow. Individuals cannot do this alone. It will take governments and we are in a real fight for the future of our children and grandchildren. One child families for 5 or so generations is something individuals can do.
69
Well, you won't be the first parent to raise a child in an imperfect world. There are no guarantees. Just do the best you can.
5
Imperfect is one thing, we are talking about inhospitable, which is quite another.
16
I think about this every day when I look into my 5-year old's eyes.
10
Children are the answer to our future on this planet. Adults can help them understand about their natural environment while very young.
Check out a beautiful new book by Liam Heneghan called “Beasts at Bedtime: Revealing the Environmental Wisdom in Children’s Literature”.
Heneghan discusses many of these issues in his book and argues that the messages and knowledge are already woven into classic children’s stories. We just need to recognize them.
1
In reading this I see a deeply depressed writer, and one literally swimming in what is wrong rather than what is right. (Interestingly, he only barely mentions his partner, the woman who bore him the child he feels they "doomed" to life on our planet.) It's wise to feel alarm -- even extreme alarm -- at the possible/probable outcomes for our climate, and for people of this world. But I wonder: Did Mr. Scranton choose to only e-publish his book(s) rather than use paper? Were they delivered on foot to stores and homes? Did he walk to all the cities on his book tour? If not, the author might do well to focus on being *grateful* for the food on his family's table and to try to feel joy from that abundance, thanks to the earth's tolerance so far. He could perhaps focus also on the good feeling of knowing he and his family are doing their best to improve things and learn to *live life* among the rest of us flawed mortals -- if not for his own sake, then for that of the people around him -- and go from there. Live and let live.
6
For me, evidence of human history tells me we are on the non-stop path to the abyss. The hierarchy of needs starts with my survival, then my immediate family unit, and then my tribe.
The idea of a global community has escaped us.
If the current condition of the world, and its dismal prospects for the future, haven't motivated us to significant change, then nothing will.
I don't think the human family is capable of of anything more than what we see around us. And look around; wars in the cause of selfish interests, famine, environmental degradation, oppression, the ever widening gap between the haves and the have nots.
I believe as things get more desperate, the defensiveness, and need for self preservation will get more acute.
Pretty depressing. But to think we will suddenly be enlightened is naive.
The United States is a case in point. One would think of all the places in the world, one with our history, we would be the leaders of the world in bringing about change.
Instead, we can't even consider ourselves part of the "advanced industrialized" world anymore. In all the current measures, wages, (i.e. health, infant mortality, poverty, to name a few), we have dropped to maybe a more advances third world country.
And I hasten to add, while Trump has made things worse, it didn't start with him.
So here we are. Hard to see a positive end game.
43
My, but what a deep-dive into the navel seeking justifications -- for a diet that includes meat, for not having committed suicide … for having a daughter.
Prof. Scranton is either a writer in search of a lucrative audience … or sometime setting up a narrative to excuse walking into Congress with C-4 wrapped around him and setting it off; or both.
Global climate change will adjust the conditions of human survival; and we'll need to conform. A smaller global population, social destabilization in the southern hemisphere until some accommodation is made to millions (billions?) fleeing land that no longer can support human life. It's not like this hasn't happened before. But this time we're not clothed in bearskins fleeing a minor ice age or in filthy rags seeking to avoid infection by the Bubonic Plague.
And your daughter, recently born, would need to benefit from dramatic life-prolongation discoveries for all this to greatly impact her.
In the end, we will adapt, and as it gets truly bad we might even attempt immense engineering feats that will artificially strip our atmosphere of dangerous levels of carbon, eventually moderating the influence of global climate change.
None of us can protect our children against ANYTHING the future brings -- we can only TRY to arm them with the intellectual and emotional tools to make their ways in a world that ALWAYS has changed significantly from generation to generation.
There are a lot of people who need to consider anti-depressants.
6
Yeah, that's our problem. Not enough people on antidepressants.
3
Clare:
That's EXACTLY our problem.
Unfortunately, real science looked into this and found that it isn't the case.
5
Thank you for your thoughtful contribution.
3
The one thing on that list of most important steps that everyone can take is switching to a more plant-based diet. Start with Meatless Mondays, or Vegan-Before-Six Tuesdays, or whatever works for you. Take subsequent steps when you are ready. It can be quite easy. It is vitally important.
14
First, David Buckell was ravaged by the doom of severe mental illness.
Second, my goodness, show that child the sun and the stars and the moon - and the glory of the planet. Instill hope! - at every turn.
It is YOUR JOB to produce a person who will go forth with hope and vision and action - and pushing back against doom at every opportunity. Now, more than ever before we must raise positive human beings, with all life's potentials in front of them; they are not victims - they are victors - and lift their eyes up to the sun and greet a new normal, as they seek to go about protecting the planet - and bringing their own new generation to it.
Don't let your child see you sad all the time. That would be the biggest doom...
37
Thank you!
1
@Nancy Thomas
The voice of reason. THANK YOU !
Certainly denial and remaining positive will end this catastrophe. I would be willing to believe this if there was just some evidence to the contrary, but atmospheric carbon has simply shot straight up since 1950, the heat trapping nature of carbon dioxide has been well known for over a hundred years, the planet's average surface temperature has risen 1.62 degrees Fahrenheit in the last hundred years, the five warmest years ever have occurred since 2010, the warmest year ever recorded was 2016, the rate of Antartica ice mass loss has tripled in the last few years. What do you need to hear to get your attention? I'm glad to hear you are having a good time.
13
RE: "Some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place."
Unless humans die out and the Earth is allowed the time it takes to wash over the remains of our civilizations and heal itself it will most likely be people that solve the problems of the people who came before (likely generating new ones of their own to be solved in turn). Thus we need people. And maybe it is your child or mine that will contribute to the solving the problems that our future selves will face.
5
How unusual, total and accurate honesty! THANK YOU! What you do not know is that population density stress is killing us right now through all of our "diseases of civilization", NONE of which are encountered in our contemporary traditional clan -living hunter-gatherer neighbors. In 1932, British physician C.P. Donnison and his colleagues examined 238, 865 rural Africans and could not find a single case of heart disease, which is our number one killer. We all have nearly the same geneset (99.9% identical), so it must be the environment. Today we are 2,865 times more populated than at the beginning of the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago. So, committing to a one-child family is the single most important thing any of us can do to save the planet and the biosphere. Otherwise our species may be swept away into the trash-bin of extinct species, 200 of which vanish daily now due to our short-sighted greed. Want more children? Share some, your neighbors will be thrilled! Stress R Us
10
Many of us are childfree by choice. I do believe that anyone who consciously wants to be a parent will have a child or children regardless of environmental considerations. Many of us out here just don't wanna. Do not want to be a parent. Period. No need for a one-child limit!
3
So the rural Africans don't have heart disease. But they have plenty of other ailments and face many risks that we don't. What is their life expectancy compared with Americans? That's what matters.
"To stop emitting waste carbon completely..." we would need to stop breathing. You first.
4
And what if your daughter is the one who discovers the critical technology that means our planet and/or species are not doomed?
6
It is possible that David Buckel killed himself because of both mental health issues and politics. Suicide is complicated.
14
“Society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices but a complex, recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies that change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible.”
Huh? What kind of a sentence is that? Reminds me of something I read in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:
‘I quite agree with you,’ said the Duchess; ‘and the moral of that is — “Be what you would seem to be”— or if you’d like it put more simply — “Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”’
‘I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said very politely, ‘if I had it written down: but I can’t quite follow it as you say it.’
‘That’s nothing to what I could say if I chose,’ the Duchess replied, in a pleased tone.
‘Pray don’t trouble yourself to say it any longer than that,’ said Alice.
No wonder Scranton thinks the world is doomed. Maybe his daughter will be as wise as the pragmatic Alice.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Wisehouse Classics - Original 1865 Edition with the Complete Illustrations by Sir John Tenniel) (pp. 35-6). Wisehouse. Kindle Edition.
2
Mr. Scranton is talking to the wrong people. The West is already having children at below replacement rate. Most of the rest of the world, especially Africa, fertility is, on average, about seven children per woman. These people don't know and don't care about Mr. Scranton and what he says.
The slower we procreate, the quicker the world will be dominated by very poor people whose main goal is to consume at much, much higher levels.
Let Mr. Scranton deal with that paradox.
8
'Dominated by poor people' Would you care to explain what you mean? Firstly the figure you cite is incorrect. Fertility rates are approx 4.8 and are declining in every single country in Sub-Saharan Africa. Women are finally getting access to education and health care which is having a direct effect on fertility rates. Fertility rates generally decrease as a country becomes more prosperous. The carbon emissions in Africa are a minuscule fraction of what they are in the united states. Please base your arguments on facts not on prejudices about the continent.
10
Wow - having a go at Africa for global warming. Perhaps a New Yorker should consider that in Nigeria emissions are 0.1 tonne of Co2 per year per capita. The equivalent figure for the United States? 16.22! You are responsible for a 162 times more carbon than the average Nigerian. Let's have a little perspective.
11
Haim,
Please read Factfulness, by Hans Rosling.
1
Now I feel all better and ready to start another Monday.
But seriously, so far I have two grandchildren. My lovely and brilliant daughter and her brilliant husband wanted kids just as my wife and I did. Our family is easily the most important and joyful part of our lives. She wanted the same for herself. How can I oppose that? How can I I oppose my darling grandchildren?
But my view of the future hews closely to Roy Scranton's. Mr. Trump is depressing enough alone, but what's truly sad is to think millions of my fellow citizens embrace his ignorance, his indifference to facts, to science, to the grim future into which we are rushing.
We had to be dragged as a people into defending the world against Hitler at the eleventh hour, and it looks as if we will cut the coming crisis yet more close.
I can only hope those who see people like myself as representing just another round of gloom and doom are correct, but somehow I don't think they'e right this time. The tragedy will be that we had the chance and blew it.
29
Wow, good thing for the planet that you, your husband, your daughter, her husband and their children are all brilliant and beautiful and darling. Can you just double check to see if there isn't a single dull, plain and unloved person anywhere in your family line?
3
It is easy to get swept away by the tyranny of facts. We long for “plain honest facts” (scientific ones, to be precise) to provide the same truth-grounding role in the new world that God supplied in the old one. That is what makes us so indignant about the fact-challenged present administration. But all facts spell doomsday. Even the most mundane “fact” is impregnated with a mindset that closes off the future and all its possibilities. Let’s stop confusing facts with truth. The truth is beyond our powers of comprehension and anticipation, and defies “possible worlds” hypothesizing. A so-called “possible world” is just an artifact of the present, constructed with cloned variations of our precious “facts.” Unlike facts, which are inert, the truth lives on hope. Should we see the declining birthrates evident in some developed countries as a sign of hope or despair? This is a question of truth, not “facts.”
Good Lord, I too worry about the fate of my grandchildren, and your article brought me to knee-falling despair. Commenters, if you want your spirits lifted, read the poignant obituary of a very wise 5-year-old boy, Garrett Matthias, in today's NYT. And I thought about the lyrics from a well-known song by Peggy Lee, "If that's all there is, my friends, then let's keep dancing, let's break out the booze and have a ball." Replace with, "If that's all there is, my friends, bring out the bouncing houses, Batman, and snow cones." And yes, have a ball.
5
As an old man watching the environmental crisis grow daily worse, I sometimes feel like Roderick Usher - when I die the house will crumble into the "bleak, miasmic tarn," and that will be the end of us. However, as a student of history I know that the inevitable isn't inevitable until it has actually happened. In other words we can only assign inevitability in retrospect. Our world today is organized and run largely on models developed in the 19th Century, when the common understanding in the "developed" nations was that the world and all it contains was "given" to us to exploit entirely for our own aggrandizment. This remains the thinking of most of those who run the world today - the "1%." Their perceived immediate self-interest is wedded to this concept and it is unlikely to change. They are supported in this by a very large number of ignorant fools who are neither rich nor powerful but who have been conned into a philosophy that is in fact destructive of their own self-interest. Unless we can put a strong leadership in power that will overturn this lunacy, the house will certainly crumble. The present leadership is actually pulling bricks out of the foundation as fast as it can. The gravestone of humanity may read "But Trump said it was fake news!"
26
I had the same thought. I've greatly reduced my car use by using a bicycle and walking most places I need to go. I got the idea from someone who was already doing that successfully. I also try to be a smarter consumer and avoid purchasing the disposable and rehome those things that I no longer need or use. Another not especially original choice but it seemed a more responsible one. I do these things and more aware that my actions can contribute to a whole, and have on occasion been examples that some people around me have chosen to emulate.
4
Do you plan to teach your daughter that there is no hope? That she was born to be doomed?
She is the future.
Teach her to survive, to create hope, to take control of her own life and inspire others not to give up.
I assume you want her to have a life with meaning and purpose.
21
As I like to refer to it, children these days need to prepare for both the Jetsons future and the Flinstones future, because reality could be a mix of both.
1
We all look at the same glass, and each of us decides whether it’s half full or it’s half empty. The author’s glass is always half empty. The End.
5
As a young person studying economics I recall the revulsion I felt the first time I heard financial terms being applied to humans. The degradation of spirt in the use of the term Human Resources, Human Capital etc. From my evangelical upbringing it simply felt wrong. I was nieve enough to believe that the economy existed to serve people, not the other way around. I was nieve enough to believe that in caring for people, and this included the stranger, we would also care for the natural world and all creatures. Alas, the economist and finance wizards world view infected us all. It’s all about GDP, the and ROI, and we’re all Stranded Assests now. A world were those with capital privatize profits and socialize costs it can not end well. A monster has been build that will consume us all.
It pains me to see the way we have decided to treat refugees. As I know that in the not very distant future many of us will be on the other side of that fence. I was nieve as a child, I think too many of are nieve regarding what we face now.
Love your children.
9
If or when our glorious planet succumbs to the greed of Exxon,
et al.....our human species will solve this dilemma by mutating into another life form to deal with what is left.
2
Have one child. Don't have 3 like Prince William and Princess Kate...that is not a good model. Then get involved politically to make sure we join the Paris Protocol, join 350.org, elect politicians that have an understanding of science and will work for a better society for us all, resist the grotesque worldview of Trumpists, and locally support initiatives that make a difference. It is only through individual and more importantly, collective actions that we will get through the difficult times ahead. Join Wildlands Network for a rewilding of our planet so more species will make it through the devastating times ahead
15
We have never been in a time when chicken little didn't say the sky is falling. We are in the time when there is the lowest incidence of war, poverty, disease and premature death (read Enlightenment Now for the details). 70 years ago, the pessimists said don't have children as they will all die in a nuclear fire. Instead, no atomic weapon has been used since Nagasaki. Is climate change real? Yes. Does it doom us? History says we will solve our problems. Not having children is analogous to committing suicide because you know you will die. Children give us hope, and the means to advance mankind.
17
Could’ve sworn I read this before.........I think it was 1973.
So your daughter is now 45 years old.
Since then air & water is cleaner.
You should be a grandparent by now.
15
Raising a child in today's world?
I don't know what could possibly be meant by "raising" today. A child today can expect to be controlled and little more. The basic fact in America, and by extension worldwide, is exploding population and power in society doing all it can to just satisfy basic, lowest common denominator needs. One would have hoped that with increased population and education the world would be seeing feat of genius after genius, that extraordinary figure after figure in the political world would be manifest, that the obvious and high goal, say in America, would be President after President of Lincoln, Jefferson--our very best--caliber.
But instead civilization is barely hanging on. The public sphere is entirely devoid of anything resembling high culture. All we have on the right or the left is an "everybody is equal" lowest common denominator crowd control, a world of good intentions at best but in actuality just the breeding and low instinctual satisfaction of more people. I don't see how one can speak of a child being raised today when the public sphere is kept at an I.Q. level which is at best average. Rather the better minds can only be compromised at best and debased at worst and the average minds run riot.
Things are so preposterous I no longer believe in any kind of religious solace or that nature is merely indifferent as scientists say. It appears a malignant intelligence behind things sports with us, has us pitted against each other to finality.
5
I see what happened to the family phone. It went individual.
I see what happened to the family breakfast and the family dinner, lots of people eating alone.
I see what happened to family chores, hired out.
I fear what will happen is that the Jetsons will become true. Even 8 year olds will get their individual delivery pod. Parents will lock them in, program departure, arrival, load with foodstuffs and maybe remember to kiss them goodbye if there is time and they don‘t feel embarassed in front of the machine. Even with one child, there will be three vehicles from early on.
I saw my sister‘s grandkids go To sleep with a screen device at the age of 2 while being depressed that my grandkid did that at age 10. It is close to 30 years since we set up our PC in a bedroom. Did I think technology and the need to feed the capitalistic hunger would bring us to this individualistic Usage? I was part of the problem. Thats where I was blind. Not in having kids, but in feeding the monster that feeds them.
Now do not get me started on server farms to run those three vehicles. I would rather be growing mustards and crucifers in cool climates .
8
Yet if I tell someone to take away their kid's phone -- kids who misbehave, who use the phone obsessively (even sleeping with it!), who engage in things like sexting or ordering streaming movies and games without permission -- the PARENTS come down on ME like I was a barbarian trying to destroy their kid's "future as a tech worker" and that I am a "Luddite".
My kids -- who are grown adults, with children of their own today -- all have Amazon Prime, and can order any doodad without paying shipping. The other day, visiting my stepdaughter, the delivery man showed up with 4 package -- 4 individual good-sized cartons -- from Amazon. One entire carton held (under yards of bubble wrap) a tube of toothpaste. My stepdaughter laughed and said they had gotten accustomed to ordering even trivial items -- things they could get at the corner drug store or supermarket which is 5 minutes away -- online, so easy with a "click". I asked if it was cheaper this way, and she said no, but its so EASY.
So folks: any lectures to ME about how I have to give up my car, or live in a yurt, or not eat meat, or pay carbon taxes....are fallin' on deaf ears.
2
I think I could be the witch in the woods for living so meagerly and with much hardwork. On the otherhand, every step I have taken off the grid, or greatly reduced, the animals have sensed.
And I have been rewarded with their conversation. I used to think all these old Chippewa tales, gypsy tales, even japanese and greek animal fables were just that. But when a wild animal looks you in the eye from five feet away and you are not holding a weapon, they communicate something awesome. So I keep on doing what doesn’t make a drop in the Bucket to the ecology and economy of the people
No personal car
No Airconditioning
No personal wifi
Not even a personal sofa
And once a month, I usually have some kind of glimmer of transcendence in the forest. It is hardly a equilibrium yet. May never be, but mometarily I have no other choice Monetarily.
And my grandkids seem further and further away.
The most astonishing idea regarding climate change comes from the religious right who believe the greatest good is to be gained by the destruction of the planet. This insanity has been birthed from a theology that promises "a new heaven and a new earth" following the destruction of this one through global (nuclear) war. In this twisted theology, the most direct route to utopia is the destruction of the biosphere entrusted to mankind in Genesis.
This is what these people—reasonably sane in other compartments of life—have been brainwashed into believing. Further, since the destruction of our mother planet is at the heart of their hope for utopia (dystopia=utopia!), the economic and political systems that have developed to insure such destruction are held to be both evil and good. Selfishness, greed and irresponsibility are bad, yes. And bad is this precursor to good.
So these poor misguided folks can have their poison and eat it, too. When sane people object to this nonsense, we can expect the contemptuous response: "Let then eat carbon."
And further, these folk can have as many children as they like, since that will mean more happy souls on the other side of Armeggedon.
Crazy.
9
with all respect to the ny times,you really need
to reconsider publishing these prophets of gloom
and doom ,FOREVER.how does he know that his
daughter will grow up in the dystopian world that
he imagines.yes,global warming is real and very
scary.but humanity will find a way to deal with it
with scientific advances we can scarcely imagine.enjoy your daughter, sir.they are only young for a short while. let her enjoy it as well.
18
to Frank from Brooklyn
I read your post with despair in my heart.Are we already sliding backwards into the primeval ooze?
"Abandon all hope,capitalization,and punctuation ye who enter here!"
2
Frank: these essays of doom and gloom are hardly new. I remember reading them when I was a kid MYSELF -- in the 60s -- they were always about the future nuclear apocalypse, so why have kids? the world was going to end any minute.
My objection is that the author here, Professor Scranton, is going to pass on this Debby Downer attitude to his child and his spouse. It can't be very pleasant to live with someone this depressed, morose and negative. If you really feel this way....why save for retirement? why pay taxes? why cut the lawn?
It's even worse the author uses "doom" as an EXCUSE for the horrifying public suicide -- by immolation -- of a very depressed and mentally ill man. No normal person sets themselves ON FIRE -- the most agonizing death imaginable -- to "make a point" about global warming. And by glamorizing a horrible suicide, the Professor opens the path for OTHER depressed people to make a similar choice.
2
You correctly state that we cannot save ourselves or an acceptable climate by our individual choices but you take that thought no further.
Our only hope is through science based collective action. I offer the Swedish (Nordic) example and then point to American individual unawareness.
I am leaving one city, Gothenburg headed for another, Linköping, almost entirely heated by incineration of solid waste afer recycling. Linköping in addition transforms food and human waste to bio gas. Parallel with this renewable energy system is extensive use of ground-source geothermal heat pump (GSG) and other heat pump systems 100% renewable.
I spent 25 days in VT + Albany N.Y. area. What did I see? Giant coal fired generating systems, monster landfills (Springfield MA), fossil fuel home heating, rarely heat pumps.
Neither collective nor individual action. Governor Cuomo bans proposed incineration. N.Y. Times Editors show no interest in the Nordic approach.
Only one political figure displays knowledge and conviction - Bernie Sanders!
And you Roy Scranton, how do you heat/cool your home? Will you support advanced Nordic systems as ONE US city, West Palm Beach FL has?
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
37
Although I too find myself filled with despair on occasion when I think of the world my two little grandchildren are growing up in, I refuse to live my life consumed by negativity and pessimism. I refuse to discount all the beautiful things in my life and in the world. If you are unfailingly miserable, your child will be too.
19
This extraordinary essay came at exactly the right time for me as my heart has been breaking and my fury rising at children being separated from their refugee parents; the World Health Organization being bullied by the current US administration on its generations-old policy of promoting breast feeding, so important especially in countries where water supplies are contaminated; and the dying and/or sickening of animals and insects in all parts of the world. In a symbolic way these things are all connected. But they are al of connected concretely. Way back in the 1970's one of my public health professors who taught ecological anthropology warned his class of the wars that would arise in the 21st century from increasing temperatures and lack of resources like water and arable land, and that the world would see mass migrations because of our inability to control our populations and our blind use of resources. And yet, still, and despite my own deep pessimism, I would love to be a grandmother some day, and feel the same loving passion for my now adult daughter that the author feels for his little one. May God help us all, and may we all help each other!
14
Although I understand Mr. Scranton's ethical angst, I'm here to assure him that his daughter growing up in the developed world will suffer far less than those living in the developing world.
According to the current data: "The countries affected most in 2016 were Haiti, Zimbabwe as well as Fiji. For the period from 1997 to 2016 Honduras, Haiti and Myanmar rank highest. " (Source: Germanwatch.org). The most devastating droughts and high-temperatures are currently torturing human beings in South Asia (e.g. India, Pakistan), Africa, and Central America; rising seas are already effecting inhabitants of Oceania such as Fiji, Vanuatu, etc.
Unless you currently live in the Midwest to Western states, you are not seeing the brunt of climate change effects.
And that therein is the problem: until people in the developed world see their lives upended continually by climate changed fueled events such as those in the developing world, nothing will change.
28
Supporting women's leadership in my opinion is the single most important thing we can do. After all, patriarchy caused the exploitation of our environment, and with more women in charge they will lead the way to healing our planet.
4
Women arguably cause more harm to the environment than men do. They buy more material things, produce more packaging waste, use far more cosmetics. In my anecdotal experience, men are generally more ready to return to a simpler, more austere lifestyle, while women are more hard pressed to give up modern comforts, including lots of heat in the winter and AC in the summer.
1
One sees a vast divide opening up between the fundamentalist self-identifying Christians of Indiana, for example, and the hyperaware denizens of Prospect Psrk. One set will cling to the 1956-Ikenhower style of living with its big cars, big houses and big consumption, coupled with a small to nonexistent tolerance for people unlike oneself. The other may not be doomed to die in direct consequence of the immediate changes to environment. Instead she or he may adapt to its ever-harshening worse-and-worse spiral like those people Frank Herbert portrayed in his "Dune" novels. Will our unsustainable way of life collapse like a bad souffle? Without a doubt. Apparently it won't go without a whimper.
3
Oh for heaven's sake, the doomsday scenario all over again. I remember ZPG, zero population growth, a generation ago. I produced 4 daughters who have given me 10 grandchildren who will soon give me great-grandchildren, and the world keeps spinning, and we're having a good time, mostly, and we're giving our energies to make the world a better place for everyone, within our limitations. I am sorry your daughter is causing you such anxiety, which no doubt you are transferring to her. Celebrate her life! Embrace joy!
20
The electric utilities, which have been working overtime to kill clean energy, bear much responsibility. These institutions, worth hundreds of billions of dollars, like Edison Electric Institute, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Berkshire Hathaway, AZ Public Service, Salt River Project -- have all pushed coal and tried very hard to kill both energy efficiency and solar. What they have done -- and CONTINUE to do -- is really criminal. Our children, as they bake on a hotter planet, and try to find enough food to eat and water to drink, will understand just how deeply criminal this is. Of course, "regulators" like FERC and state level public utilities commissioners play an outsized role, looking the other way as they take favors from industry and enter the revolving door of high-paying jobs with the natural gas and utility industries. Mark my words, these people will scatter like cockroaches when the light shines eventually. CEOs like Lynn Good with Duke Energy, or Donald Brandt with APS, who make $10 million per year OR MORE, will be ashamed of themselves, and once they are gone, their children will bear that shame.
16
I believe that conservatives have more children than liberals, adjusting for race, and this kind of doom-mongering explains why. Life is a lot better than it was a hundred years ago, and I'd encourage married couples who can afford to to have more ambassadors to the future.
3
Oh boy did you hit the scariest scenario nail on the head! The fundamentalist evangelicals, Mormans, Orthodox Jews, etc. are reproducing at a fast clip, whilst the non-conformist, science-technology types, liberally-educated kids are barely reproducing themselves.
The newest divide is between humanist and fatalist, between those who focus on this world and those who only think of the imagined next one.
2
“concern, conscious or unconscious, is no doubt contributing to the United States’ record-low birthrate”
What is sad is that someone with all the time in the world to write a long piece like this, as only academics have, can’t muster the courage to deal with reality while having the gall to assert that they are dealing with reality.
The concern shouldn’t be about low birthrates because of a fear of climate change and its consequences, climate change is all about overpopulation. To acknowledge that however would be to cross the politically correct line which makes discussing overpopulation taboo, especially in privileged academia.
If tomorrow problems with climate change were to disappear the existence of most living things other than humans would still be under threat because of human overpopulation.
It is every other living thing that stands threatened as the US population surges past 300 million in a race to 450 million.
For example, 1900 Ethiopia had a population of 5 million people, in 1950 it had 18 million, in 2000 it had 65.5 million, in 2010 it had 85 million and is expected to reach 170 million by 2050. Today there are 440 mountain gorillas left in the wild.
The top 5 countries in order of the expected increase in population between 2010 and 2050 are:
(1) India 467 million
(2) Nigeria 231 million
(3) Pakistan 101 million
(4) Tanzania 93 million
(5) United States 93 million
The growth in population in the US will be the most destructive of all.
18
I wish this was on the front page of every newspaper, every social media outlet and read on every news show.
It's "crunch time" and we need to collectively accept it and work toward the minimization of disaster.
Any "leader" who doesn't embrace this reality isn't fit to lead.
69
The author just said it is pointless and futile to change at this point -- we've passed the "point of no return" anyways -- so dude, you might as party hearty til the end. Buy a Hummer and take a lot of trips overseas.
1
What a cop-out! Living on a mostly plant-based diet, going car-free, not flying (or drastically limiting flying to when absolutely necessary) and having fewer children does not doom anyone to cutting him/herself off from modern life, hermetically sealing oneself to an isolated existence, etc. If everyone made these changes, the author does not think the effect would be as substantial as other forms of what she considers ethical living? It's all ethical living. The most important step is reaching the uneducated vast majority of the planet who do not understand that overpopulation is killing us all.
19
RE: one can only hope that liberal Democrats run on that platform -- banning the personal automobile! -- banning all meat eating and meat production -- a strict Chinese-type one child policy (*which even the CHINESE have dropped!) -- and banning all non-essential air travel for vacations or pleasure.
Yeah, that will work out very nicely.
TRUMP 2020!
2
I remember thinking much the same back in Britain in the 80's, only then we were convinced a global nuclear holocaust was what made a childless future the moral alternative. Now I am the proud father of a fine adult son and I worry about his future and struggle to address climate change, but I don't worry about the bomb any more.
13
I have often wished I could visit the earth before so much of it was despoiled. Did you know there used to be parrots in the Midwest state where I live? They were hunted to extinction. As I look around, I see land being constantly despoiled, and people calling it “economic progress”.
Climate change is real, and I actively mentally try to deny what my two children’s future will look like, because I think it could potentially be horrendous. I will actively counsel them to have 1 or no children.
My heart breaks for the world.
7
I was a drunk who lost his license. A funny thing happened to me on the way back to the rat-race: I gave it up. No license, no car, no possessions other than what I can carry. My minimal carbon footprint became almost non-existent. So? Other than sobriety, I have gained what I have always longed for: simplicity and peace of mind. I am not going back.
25
What a depressing article. The worst thing that can happen to your daughter is not climate change but that she will inherit your extreme negativity. In the last century the world experienced two major wars, economic depressions, disease epidemics and much more. But we survived and prospered because people evolve. In the 1930s there was a localized climate change in parts of several western states which created a huge " dust bowl" Those affected moved on to more hospitable locations. Humans are not helpless as long as they stay positive.
28
What will happen when more and more people "move on" to more hospitable locations (already occupied), especially as more and more locations become inhospitable? War.
No amount of positivity is going to prevent that.
12
I just spent a week camping on a desolate island in northern Canada on a 6 mile lake, not a single other human was seen while I was there. Just the moose, bears, mosquitos, fish, eagles and other birds. I was kept company by ants, spiders, leeches and some huge beavers. I enjoyed a windy sunset with a pair of toads. The company was some of the best I've ever had.
A great lightning storm lit the entire northern sky followed by thunder and rain from the northeast woke me at 2 am as the Great Spirit of the planet made her awesome power felt.
I'm back to 'civilization' now, a home in an elite 'liberal' city, traffic jams, used needles, unhealthy food and air, uncaring, non voting and unresponsive neighbors, tenants with ivy league degrees who can't understand 'no canadian quarters in machine', idolatry of fake hair, fake muscles, fake brains and fake clothes.
I, too, am bringing a new boy into this world. There will be no TV, no video games, no coca cola. We will spend time on that island. I will introduce him to our planetary neighbors and we will invite his friends to share the experience so that someday maybe we can Make the Earth Great Again.
10
Mankind reaps all of the benefits of science in subverting the natural laws. We live comfortable lives fueled by fossil matter, genetically modify food to increase yield, change our DNA to cure diseases. Our lifespan has increased dramatically, as has our quality of life. If nature provides a limitation, we seek to overcome it. The only part of nature we choose to follow is the urge to procreate to the limits of our environment.
If we want all the benefits of overriding nature, we also must have the responsibility to procreate within nature's limits. We can manipulate atoms and put men on the moon, but we cannot figure out that we need to control our population. Technology will not bail us out of this predicament.
I share Mr. Scranton's concern.
10
Mr Scranton, your child IS doomed if you rear her to look at the world in such a negative way and to believe her world is doomed! Of course, there are problems, but there is still great beauty in the world in many, many places. It should be embraced.
When one is diagnosed with a terminal disease, one can choose to live each day thinking about ones doom, or one can decide to enjoy each day as a blessing. My late husband did the later and it was a far better way to spend his final 2 1/2 years on earth.
I would strongly urge you to lose the highly negative attitude with your child. Sure, go ahead and try to do your part and encourage others to improve (or at least quit harming), the world, but for heaven's sake, don't bring up your precious child with all this doom and gloom. A child needs to be surrounded by joy and happiness.
9
As distasteful as we find their authoritarian politics, Europe should work closely with China on tackling climate change (as well as blue states and cities). At the Federal level the United States will continue to be an unreliable partner for the foreseeable future.
On a personal level neither my sister nor I have children for precisely this reason. It may sound cruel but I find it astonishing that anyone can even consider having children knowing there is a chance that they will live and die in misery.
And if you do have children - how can you think about anything else? How can you happily argue about NATO spending commitments and not give a second thought to a possible apocalypse that we are doing very little to address. If you knew with 70% certainty that an Asteroid was going to hit the earth in 50 years - would you have a child? It would certainly sharpen your thinking.
4
This essay is prophecy. Prophecy went out even in ancient Palestine some two thousand years ago, where the classic Hebrew Prophets had written and spoken for centuries, and made their way into the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. But a prophet can still attract an audience of the the gullible--it's human nature.
2
What needs to be done is not changing the behavior or carbon footprint of the average person, but finding and fixing the people who use more than their fair share. Jeff Bezos and his Amazon behemoth would be a good start; getting them to carbon neutrality would probably do more for the environment than a million people switching to electric cars. Maybe he should team up with Elon Musk and create electric delivery trucks.
8
I get really tired of seeing comments about the world we're leaving to our kids and grand kids. Our kids? Our grand kids? We won't have to wait that long. It is happening to us, and by that I mean boomers, right now, and it will get really, really bad during our lifetimes.
I'm 68, female, and in excellent health. My mother died at 95. Her mother, my grandmother, died at 101. I could live another 30 years. I fully expect to experience that dystopian future brought about by climate change for myself. It's a terrifying prospect.
In a Mad Max scenario, young people might have a fighting chance. Me and others my age? We'll be roadkill.
64
@GreenGene
Love your new label for us - roadkill. Though 67, I too am genetically programmed to live another thirty years. It don't look pretty.
1
If this essay reflects the thought process university students are expected to develop, then I see no reason for higher education.
19
I work on adaptation and climate change resilience around the world. The author has written about the start reality of the challenge we face. Few people have the courage to face this and speak about it so clearly. I appreciate his honesty and clarity. Our children will inherit what we have wrought. We owe it to them to at least be honest, do everything in our power now to mitigate what is to come, and prepare them in every way possible to survive.
16
Over the years, historians and philosophers have argued whether there is historical free will or whether historical events are determined by large implacable forces like climate change or a large asteroid hitting the earth. The philosopher, Isaiah Berlin wrote a clotted essay in 1954 attacking the idea of "historical inevitability". The great historian, H.R. Trevor-Roper agreed with him, arguing that "the irresistible is often merely that which has not been resisted."
Today, the role of the individual in shaping the course of events, for good or ill, seems diminished in the face of climate change. The only way of combating that and other, existential threats, such as nuclear war, seems to be to have a world government with a dictator at its head. And that would lead to much worse outcomes than any good it might do.
Prayer is a bridge between man and God. Perhaps we should pray in the hope that He might be listening.
2
ONE is Enough. We made that choice nearly forty years ago. And for the young adults today, having NO children is a perfectly reasonable and valid choice. I’d do the same. Seriously.
141
I share many of these concerns and it is clear that we are running out of time. But I still take hope from the fact that we are on the cusp of a new age of inexpensive clean energy and electric cars that could radically transform our economies over the next 10-20 years. Case in point - alternative energy sources are dropping so far so fast in price that even natural gas plants will not be economic to build shortly because they will be stranded assets down the road. The cost of commodities seesaw up and down but the the cost of technology does only one thing - get cheaper and better. Already solar in many markets is lower in price than any other competing source. The key will be the cost of storage which is still not economic. But battery prices have already fallen so far so quickly that it appears that solar + storage will become the cheapest source in another 3 years.
Given the power of economics and rising awareness of the threat of climate change there will be a massive shift in most economies in the next 10 years. This does not solve the problems of carbon already in the atmosphere but I continue to hope that human ingenuity will find a way to mitigate this problem if not solve it.
If you want to feel more hopeful I recommend reading this excellent article: https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/7/13/17551878/natural-ga...
11
While I agree with much of what Mr. Scranton says regarding the bleak future of our planet, some of his piece is surely written to justify the decision to have a child. He implies that those who do not have children live meaningless lives--- "cutting oneself off from modern life," and "choosing a hermetic and isolated existence." I have chosen to live my 68 years on this Earth without offspring, and so have many of my friends and acquaintances. I assure you Mr. Scranton, that my life has been far from meaningless, and far from isolated. There are other ways to connect with life and to find meaning, besides having children.
355
Thank you Robert. Though I agree with everything else the writer has to say, as a childless person myself, I am proud of my decision, and do manage to live a rich and meaningful life despite that choice. The sad thing to me is that some people are unable to envision such a life, and this column only serves to reinforce that point of view.
3
Very well-written and thoughtful, thank you. It echoes the modern confusions of man in a beautiful way.
15
This is, of course, why my wife and I chose to adopt rather than to create a child of our own; we figured we could do the family thing with someone who was already here and needed what we could offer. It's an ethical choice that I highly recommend to those with the parenting urge, as there are so many needful kids out there.
But I do wonder what kind of middle age my now 20 year old son will have in a world that does already seemed doomed, or at least subject to a massive population die off and correction due to toxicity, lack of resources, war, or some combination of the three.
I suppose if Tom Lehrer is right and we will all go together when we go, we can still choose whether to go fighting the good fight or whimpering under the couch treated with toxic fire retardants . . .
51
Thank you for choosing to adopt; there are enough children in this world without parents who need parents; there is no valid reason to procreate. If a person actually wants to be a parent - to me the true test is that that person is willing to adopt. A child is a child is a child.
10
@Rande - naive at best. We are programmed to love our own offsprings first and foremost; not all of us are able to fall in love with a child born to other parents. If you personally can, great, but most of us cannot and that is totally ok. This is biology, not some moral failing.
2
While I cannot disagree with much of anything the author puts forth, I also can imagine homo sapiens as the cerebral dinosaurs of our current age. Our out-sized brains have allowed us to dominate the earth, rampaging most every ecosystem and undermining the diversity that earth requires to flourish.
At the same time: art, music, literature, dance, dialogue, philosophy, religion, friendship, love-making, along with the admittedly less charming elements that co-exist.
Soon -- ten years or a few millennia -- we'll also be wiped off the planet (hopefully not relocated to the moon or Mars), having done our minuscule part. To me, that makes our current lives, our babies, our elders, all that much more important. Let's not make ourselves so terribly important that we think every choice, every conception, every can recycled is a cataclysmic decision. I'm not saying it's not important -- merely that we cannot give in to despair (though Trumpism tests every neuron in our bodies). Perhaps the best alternative is, while living with reasonable conscience, to live with far greater joy and a sense that ultimately, we are not, in the grand scheme of things, all that significant.
30
Scientists, whether they be climate scientists, ecologists, biologists, etc, make conservative forecasts, lest they be accused of fearmongering. In truth, changes are occurring with far greater speed and intensity than they foretell. Tragically, our reckless indifference to the only home we have has sealed our fate and that of all life on this beleaguered planet. I knash my teeth whenever I hear someone espouse the words “family values,” and proclaim their love for their children and grandchildren. One needs only to look around and behold what we have wrought with absolutely no regard for future generations. At the age of 18, in the early1970s, I learned the world population was 4 billion. I was shocked and I decided then that I would never have children. More than 40 years on, we are hurtling toward 8 billion. When I come upon a young pregnant woman today, I wonder to myself, ‘what are you thinking?’ I simply do not understand how any young adult today could willfully bring a child into this world and consign them to the world that is to come. It is frightening to contemplate.
145
When was the world a better place? When you were a European at the time of The Black Death? When you were a Roman slave? A black African being hunted as a commodity for foreign interests? There has never been a time when things didn’t look dire for the human race.
14
When was the world a better place? Never. But you name eras before antibiotics, before the Enlightenment, before the Renaissance, before the Industrial Age. We face 3 threats today: climate change, antibiotic resistance, and our inertia, all of which are terrifying.
1
I too came to the same conclusion at the same time and decided I would not be responsible for bringing children into this world. It was a hard choice. But I don’t regret it one bit.
3
What beautiful prose. Everyone, especially our "leaders", ought to reflect on the sentence, "Society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices but a complex, recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies that change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible." Our individual and collective choices would improve if we were to truly grasp this.
On Wednesday, I will address a model U.N. delegation consisting of eighteen thirteen-year-old girls. Their task: address climate change. I have been fretting about how to approach my job, to convey the harsh reality we have created for ourselves while empowering rather than depressing. Professor Scranton's focus on finding our humanity has nudged me in a productive direction.
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@Brian Stewart
It seems to me that the prose you admire is a distillation of complexity theory, a group of mathematical models that describe the behavior of any complex adaptive system co-evolving with an environment. I doubt that a delegation of thirteen-year-old girls would understand the science of it, but a beautiful rhapsody about the relation of purchasing decisions, group dynamics, and advertising to targeted markets with the overall health of the natural world might empower the younger generation to see how all the dots connect. It may take a poet laureate to find the words, but the connectedness of all things is becoming more apparent over time and easy to perceive; perhaps the young people will see the big picture and be amenable to social engineering solutions on a global scale, which is the remedy called for, in my opinion. Carbon tax coupled with Universal Basic Income for guaranteeing survival with a low-carbon footprint, for example.
2
Something that could make an impact? If every couple, or family, that owns two cars would make one of them an ELECTRIC CAR, it would help a lot. We bought an American brand electric car with a 200+ mile range for our day-to-day driving. We figured that 90+% of our driving is within a 15 to 20 mile radius of our house - we never come close to running out of energy. We plug it in our regular, 110 volt plug in the garage; although you can get a faster charger if you want it. We only plug it in two or three times a week and, so far, it hasn't made an impact on our electric bill. For a long range trip we still have our hybrid SUV. I haven't visited a gas station for so long, I'm afraid I may forget how to fill up the SUV!!
The electric car is one arrow in the quiver of weapons we need to fight climate change. Consider it the next time you need a second car.
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Recently switched to a hybrid SUV for my day-to-day and the difference has been remarkable!
$30 fills up the tank, even with rising gas prices, and only requires a trip to the station every 2.5 weeks or so.
It's not economically feasible for everyone (I am solidly ensconced in the middle class and this vehicle was still on the upper end of what I could afford) but prices are coming down.
How about only one car? Or if you live near public transportation, no car at all?
1
Have you ever looked into the total environmental impact of an electric car vs a conventional car? I didn't think so. Your electric car won't help one bit. Move to a place with public transport and use a shared car service. And build a house that's up to European building code (6 inch insulation, triple glazing etc). Americans are just so clueless when it comes to their environmental footprints. Even the ones reading the NYT. The world is truly doomed!
To view the stranglehold that the oil and gas industry holds on my state of Colorado is to despair for the future and see the futility in any realistic action to prevent catastrophe.
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I live at 8400 ft. outside of Boulder. It used to cool off at night because of low relative humidity and elevation, this is no longer the case. Carbon dioxide is the the new variable.
3
As my daughter often says: "We are living in the bad science-fiction timeline!"
30
The Earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. Modern humans have been around for maybe 125,000 years. We're akin to an invasive species that quickly got out of control and is now running amok. Our big brains have become a self-defeating adaptation, an evolutionary development that will, if we don't act incredibly rapidly, do us in, like the giant antlers of the extinct Irish elk. If we continue on this self-destructive path, we will most assuredly go extinct, while the Earth herself will go on, adapt, and create new forms of life. The planet today looks completely different in terms of geology, plant and animal life, and climate than it did during previous epochs, and no doubt it will look completely different in another billion years. The Earth is playing the long game.
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All species eventually die. Our premature self-destruction at our own hands is probably best for the health of the overall planet, and for all the other species, including future ones.
We're never going to be space travelers. We can't even survive our self-imposed destruction on our own perfect planet.
10
I often wonder what some future big-brained species will think of the thin layer of plastics and soot they find wrapped around the planet. Will they take it as a warning? Or will their big brains repeat our tragedy?
4
@Nancy
So why should humans care? If you subscribe to evolutionary biology, humans are just one more invasive species that overpopulates the natural resources and dies off. Not unlike the fox and rabbit population. The earth will continue, a few humans will survive, natural resources will rebound and humans will rebound. It's the story of evolution. Why is there any moral judgement to this?
Mr. Scranton cries about the inevitable change of a society that destroys its environment by its short-term drive to materially better life. As far as bringing children into this world, procreation of all living beings is a law of nature. But, the more people there are in the world, the greater is the chaos.
11
I'm old enough to remember a version of this essay from the 70's, only it was over-population that was going to doom our children.
Like fretting over the newest electronic craze (cell phones now, TV, and radio before), it seems there is no great forthcoming harm that will "doom" the world for "our children."
Climate Change is real. But forgive me if I think that like all the other "sky is falling" pronouncements of the past, we will, as we've done before (remember acid rain or the global cooling crisis of the 70's?) confront it, and find something else to worry about.
So have kids, give the world to them, and watch them solve our problems while creating new ones for their kids.
159
Perhaps you should think about my favourite quote from Derrida:
One may still die after having spent one's life recognizing, as a lucid historian, to what extent all that was not new, telling oneself that the inventors of the nuclear age or of nuclear criticism did not invent the wheel, or, as we say in French, "invent gunpowder." That's the way one always dies, moreover, and the death of what is still now and then called humanity might well not escape the rule.
2
Remember when government acknowledged acid rain and the shrinking ozone layer and helped do something about it? Good times...
8
You got it wrong, over population was never going to doom people - by definition thats an abundance of people - what it dooms is every other living thing on the planet -
whether it be the hellish conditions of factory farms and the tortured treatment of animals on the farms -in which creatures are raised only to see the sun when they are finally led to the slaughter house -
the carpet vacuuming of ocean floors with nets 15 miles wide; the merciless hunting down of any living thing which doesn't serve human beings -
if you are totally self absorbed and have little empathy then yes - there is no population problem and it was all a big hoax
9
If everyone has ONE child, the number of human beings on the planet will decline. This will help matters. Remember the IPAT equation. Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology.
65
All the classical religions provide the answers to your questions. The stories should be read as metaphors and understood as the efforts of people in search of their humanity and to build community in a world they could only imperfectly understand.
Cain asked God, "Am I my brother's keeper? The answer we give is the life we will live.
Even physics uses metaphors. No one knows what a photon is. A metaphor is a working model imperfect in itself until we understand more. It is built on trust and hope.
Marilyn Austin
7
For your non-metaphorical infomation, here is what a photon is:
A particle representing a quantum of light or other electromagnetic radiation. A photon carries energy proportional to the radiation frequency but has zero rest mass.
6
Write a piece about the thought process you shared with the mother of this child prior to making her pregnant. Was it something like this?
You: Honey, the earth is doomed to imminent environmental destruction, it will be unfit for human life, and I know this because I am a professional writer and researcher on the topic. So, should we bring a child into this world?
Her: Yes, I want a baby.
You: OK. I'll write a column about it.
8
I am compelled by my observations of the world around us to agree with the author of this article. The disaster is already upon us. I remember feeling vaguely guilty when my daughter was born. I look back and see where and when I attempted to instill those environmental values and concerns into my daughter's education, exposing her to the outdoors, the earth's mountains, it's beaches, it's innocence and it's wonderful purity.
I have seen that education refuted and reviled by a significant portion of her peers and the media. I have argued using facts, logic and the 'do-the-right-thing mentality. I have experienced the heartbreak of my daughter renouncing the worldview I had attempted to instill into her and flatly denying climate change is happening.
Unfortunately, it seems we are doomed to this constant denial of climate change. I find it similar to the denial of our own personal mortality; we blithely sail along in the sea of life until it is too late to notice the reefs of death.
This is human nature. The level of our denial of our own global mortality will facilitate the rapidity of our extinction to just that degree.
Kiss your loved ones often and
Good luck everyone.
197
@Jeff R. I don't know if this helps, but the older I get, the more I appreciate the things I learned from my parents when I was much younger. It takes a while to develop those critical thinking skills and be able to question your peers and the media, particularly if they're all delivering the same message. Just keep encouraging her to be the best person she can be :)
2
What bothers me most when babysitting for my grandchildren, is really how smart they are. For me, it almost a miracle to see them learn how to read and write, and my oldest in middle school, offer a rather sophisticated analysis of his student council membership---he has already figured out that student council's are merely puppet regimes or in his words, "student gophers." While I watch them grow socially, emotionally, and intellectually, and then confront the reality each morning of reading about an adult world run by minds less sophisticated than my grandchildren.
114
This is a moving essay, and I agree with many of the things you say. But I'm not sure what "living ethically" would really mean in America. Our society is structured around private automobiles, not shared transportation. Our economy is built not only on waste, but on increasing waste. Our technologies aim for shorter life spans, not longer. None of these things could be changed except by political action, and our political system has surrendered democratic decision making to bribery and markets. We are all part of this self-destructive machine, equally guilty and equally powerless. The only people who could change it, the people who pay for the political system, are driven by personal profit, and they are rich enough to buy the "research" & propaganda that tells them that their personal profit is precisely the thing that will save us all. My only hope comes from the fact that history is full of surprises.
235
There IS something we can do. We can choose to purchase food from farmers who farm regeneratively. This is the old way using animal manure and compost with one big difference. NO-TILL. This allows for the soil to become fertile and in so doing, sequesters carbon. Managing cows, sheep and chickens holistically very rapidly sequesters carbon so that if all rangelands used this method, an entire year's emissions would be sequestered. Reference: Allan Savory, Joel Salatin and many organizations such as Kiss the Ground. There is hope for your daughter and mine.
58
You can go one step farther and be the farmer. Just about everyone can start a garden, if only by keeping a few basil pots on the kitchen windowsill. For fertilizer, you can use all that natural compost you can easily produce at home from kitchen scraps! During the days of WWII, this nation produced prodigious amounts of fresh food from their backyards or other unused spaces. If we cut back on Facebook and Twitter and used that time to hoe, weed, and harvest instead, we can do the same and make major process towards improving both our personal health and the planet’s.
Anytime the climate news or President Mango Menace depresses me, I go outside in the lovely fresh air and start digging in a new planting bed. I’m at 2,500 square feet and counting.
2
You can still be a parent without bringing another human into the world! Look into becoming a foster parent with the option to adopt. We decided to not have kids due to climate change but still wanted to parent. We now have 2 wonderful boys who we are teaching to love the natural world and understand the consequence of their actions (re: climate, consumption, etc).
331
But you can only be a parent if *someone* brings another human into the world.
Americans adopting a child claiming they would never produce a baby is a nice way of framing themselves as superior.
Dystopian indeed, where privileged westerners think they can fix the environment by adopting poor children from others. How about supporting the systems that support family reunification/?
And you do not "have 2 wonderful boys". You care for two people- they will have a range of personality traits like all humans.
-Former foster care child.
5
Yes to this. I adopted. That’s not without its own injustices and it doesn’t alleviate the guilt, but it does seem like we could do a better job caring for those who are already here before we bring too many more along for the ride.
3
@Machka this is really lovely. Good for you.
2
There is one thing we can do as individuals.
We can vote for people who subscribe to scientific facts, reason and those who recognize that manmade environmental catastrophe is real....and not a hoax.
We can vote for people who know that solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, biomass, alternative energies are the answer and that it's time for fossil fuels to drop dead.
Mother Earth is all we've really got, and she should be respected, loved and cherished like one's own birth mother.
Those who reject the scientific facts about our manmade fossil fuel catastrophe should be treated as the sociopaths and climate-killers they truly are.
November 6 2018.
Vote for Mother Earth, not for Gas Oil Pollution.
599
Well said, but the problem lies in the fact that half of the nation's voters don't know the meaning of your pseudonym and certainly don't read the NY Times. The bubble in which they reside is not made of a flimsy soap film. It has been molded and shaped over decades from very dense granite.
11
@ Socrates - Exactly, and in my late-comment I point to the need for collective action, something Scranton names, and then abandons, and give the Nordic countries as a model and what I saw in New England + Albany NY as the with the rarest of exceptions, the failed example.
The political figure who now has a website on the subject is, of course, Bernie Sanders, the only politician who actually knows the science and whose Little State gives those rarest of exceptions.
Will the Democratic Party present a renewable energy program that will justify our commitment on November 6. No one I know of even seems aware of Sanders major efforts starting at least in 2013.
Only-NeverInSweden.blogspot.com
Citizen US SE
2
Confronting Trump supporters and climate change deniers on this is like casting pearls before swine.
3