Stephanie Wakefield on Anthropocene Hubris

 

In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism marked by climate change, environmental degradation, and social-political unraveling—calls to rethink human life abound. In response, a powerful subframe of Anthropocene theory—what we might name “precarious entanglement” or “dwelling in the ruins” thinking—forwards one way of doing so. For proponents of this perspective, the infrastructures, promises, and aspirations of modernity are seen as ruins themselves. To think otherwise would be to miss the lessons the Anthropocene holds for us: modern humanism and attendant ideas of progress, hubris, and freedom were an error, and now drive current devastation. Humanity must, this narrative insists powerfully, be humble.

“No more agents of history. We all agree on that,” argues sociologist Bruno Latour, whose work perhaps most fully fleshes out this narrative. Reversing the modern story of human freedom as a matter of rising above, separating from, or hubristically trying to transform the world, this line of Anthropocene thinking argues its inverse: that subjection to volatile earth forces and entanglement amidst ruins are the real nature of human existence. This entanglement in social-ecological-technological relations, once elided by modern thinking, is not to be escaped but to be embraced, argues philosopher Timothy Morton; such loops, he maintains, are our “fate” and “destiny.” Seeing ourselves within complex systems to which we are bound reveals that rather than makers of worlds, we are defined by precarity. Instead of holding on to hope or dreams of a “happy ending,” we must now learn to survive, to use anthropologist Anna Tsing’s terminology, “in capitalist ruins.” The perfect image of our new earthbound existence, Latour says, is the brutal ending to Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse:

    In the final tempest of the last days of Earth, father and daughter decide to flee their miserable shack isolated in the middle of a desperately parched landscape. With a sigh of relief, the spectator sees them finally going away, expecting that they have at least a chance of escaping their diet of one potato a day. But then, through a reversal that is the most damning sign of our time, a reversal that I don’t think any other film has dared show, instead of moving forward to another land, one of opportunity, full of great expectations, full of hopes (remember America America), we see with horror that they come back, exhausted, despondent, bound to their shack, resuming their old even more miserable life until eventually darkness envelops them in its shroud.

This reading of the Anthropocene, political theorist David Chandler argues, is itself “increasingly affirmed as a positive and enabling opportunity” to overcome modernist frameworks and embrace the actual nature of life: precarious survival amidst entangled ruins. What is affirmed is the apocalypse that is capitalism at present, the very conditions that define the Anthropocene. In making explicit what is often implicit in neoliberal governance approaches—forwarding images of life as insecure, apolitical, and hostage to volatile systems—precarity-entanglement theory limits itself to thinking through what exists rather than exploring ways to refuse or change it. Works in this vein frequently deploy a universalizing “we” whose sins and pride have brought on the Anthropocene.The wreck of the good life, the postwar period of high consumption and wages in the West, is normativized and deployed as an effigy of excess, rather than what it was: a brief postwar apparatus, which resulted from pitched workers’ struggles in the twentieth century, and that was ultimately tenuous and uneven. Described in dramatic prose is a new “we” of the Anthropocene that will wander in the wastelands, embracing its precarious and diminished existence, much akin to the life many of us are already living in the early twenty-first century. In a conservative move, this narrative is abdicating human agency, experimentation, and radical challenges to the social order in the name of accepting “our” fate. But, as systems technology analyst Venkatesh Rao recently stated:

    It’s funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes. No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.

Constraining human being to the is—precarious survival amidst entangled ruins—rather than the possible contributes, intentionally or not, to the already-omnipresent sense that what is, is all that is possible, and renounces hubris and audacity at a moment when poor and working-class people seriously need these qualities.

Disentanglement and Delinking

Ultimately, this particular version of Anthropocene thinking fails to capture many of the characteristics and possibilities of the present. By this I do not mean that the current moment is not marked by entanglement. On the contrary, defining and administering life cybernetically in terms of information, feedback, and non-equilibrium interconnection—dismantling the modern subject—has been central to western neoliberal governance for decades. Post-September 11, securing interconnected critical networks came to be seen as especially paramount, with American military analysts like Thomas Barnett dividing the world into a “functioning core” and a “non-integrating gap,” the latter defined as “disconnected from the global economy and the rule sets that define its stability.” “Eradicating disconnectedness,” argued Barnett in his much-discussed The Pentagon’s New Map, “therefore becomes the defining security task of our age’’ with failure or refusal to integrate into the global economy and its rule sets enforceable by military action.

From Lagos to New York, urban planners and governments have more recently emphasized connectedness as key to building resilience to climate change and its effects. Originating in cybernetics and ecology in the 1970s, resilience is both an ontology and design practice based in systems thinking, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of the social, ecological, and technological. Whereas modern forms of administration were based in city/nature binaries and sought to eliminate volatility and risk, resilience is a governance paradigm that welcomes entanglements, understands instability as inevitable, and views cities as coupled social-ecological-technical infrastructural systems that must develop their capacity for absorbing turbulence. In resilience approaches, entanglement is thus viewed not only as politically mandatory (as for early 2000s geopolitics) but also ontologically natural: a corrective to erroneous modern ways of thinking.

However, while entanglement is increasingly celebrated, we are also witness to some of its opposite. In the United States, one might observe that there seems to be growing tendency toward “delinking” or “islandization” in response to Anthropocene conditions and events. For example, politicians promote ever-more securitized borders and walls as a manipulative solution to the suffering of working-class people. The very wealthy detach their stacks and supply chains, shore up urban networks against climate change, or disconnect from the same social media they own, while also preparing infrastructure for bigger moves in the future to secure themselves and their forms of life. This may be seen as the Anthropocenization of what historian Nils Gilman calls the plutocratic insurgency that has been underway for decades; a revolt by capitalist elites against the confines of modern postwar territorial power configurations. In this insurgency, the rich seek to detach themselves legally and infrastructurally from what Gilman terms “social modernism”: an ideological and institutional formation centered around the nation state as a provider of welfare and economic growth.

Along with off-shore tax havens, Fourth Industrial Revolution modes of labor management, and gutting the West’s working-class and welfarist structures, a key component of the plutocratic insurgency is the creation of enclaves like those documented by Mike Davis. “These islands of elitism,” explains Gilman, “are designed to be largely self-sufficient in their ability to deliver health care, food, security, education, entertainment, etc. to their residents, even as they sit amid seas of social misery…From the point of view of the denizens of such communities, the primary function of the wider society is to serve as a source of cheap, servile labor, and as a well of resources to be looted.” But gated communities, Gilman further argues, “are merely an example of a broader pattern, in which economic, social, or political enclaves are carved out of a national state and enabled to play by a fundamentally different set of rules from the surrounding territory.” Taking this forward, Kanye West recently floated “building a fireproof community” after he and Kim Kardashian hired private firefighters to save their $60 million California mansion during the 2018 California wildfires. Meanwhile, the Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson and originally funded by Peter Thiel, is exploring how to set off a “Cambrian explosion” of autonomous artificial floating cities starting in the Pacific Ocean. In the Institute’s eyes, seasteads are a solution to sea rise as well as what they see as the domineering overreach (read: taxation) of existing governments—a way to “liberate humanity from politicians.”

These earth governance efforts exist alongside private space colonization projects couched as an escape hatch from an increasingly degraded earth. Elon Musk has built and successfully tested rockets on which SpaceX intends to send humans to Mars by the mid-2020s (NASA plans to land astronauts there by 2033) and predicts beginning colonization as early as 2025. Most Left commentators cynically scorn such space ventures. However, it is understandable how others might see in them a worthy human venture, one that current and future generations might find actually desirable, not least because it might offer escape from the social carnage of neoliberalism’s cataclysmic continuation on earth. There is nothing necessarily wrong with imagining oneself in the shoes of the first humans to see Mars’s surface with their own eyes, descending from a rocket doorway to touch the planet’s rocky red crust with their own feet. Just like the writings of science fiction author Steven Erikson, commercial space ventures contain their own poetics: the desire to go where no human has gone before; find other life; or sink into the stars at warp speed.

In the more pragmatic vision of the world’s on-and-off wealthiest person and Star Trek fanatic Jeff Bezos, the only way for poor and working-class people to get to space will probably be as free labor in one form or another. As Bezos recently described, with resources on Earth running out, “space is the only way to go.” Rather than colonizing Mars, though, Bezos plans to build artificial worlds—O’Neill cylinders rotating to create artificial gravity—orbiting Earth and able to support one million people each. Some of the cylinders will be agricultural areas irrigated by drones, while some will be cities and others more recreational.

“What does architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary purpose of shelter?” asks Fred Scharmen. Like “Maui on its best day, all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes,” Bezos responds. Earth, he envisions, will be rezoned as a residential and light industrial zone. “We send things up into space but they are all made on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to Earth, so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution generating industries that make those things now on Earth.” And as to the question of “who is going to do this work?” Bezos concluded: “not me,” and gestured to a group of school children in the audience wearing shirts from the children’s club of his space company, Blue Origin. “You guys are going to do this, and your children are going to do this.”

Human Agency: A slender air-bridge to the possible

It is increasingly important to refute assertions—both those of governments and some critical theory narratives—that nothing else is possible. Both literally and figuratively, “this” world is actually not the only world there is. Much is actually possible. The first grunt labor force sent to Mars could blow up the return Starship™—gone Croatan, albeit on the red planet. Still, beyond contributing to the present shredding of the social fabric or desperately flinging oneself against it in vain, it can be extremely difficult to imagine what liberation in the Anthropocene might look like, especially for the poor and working-class. To say anyone knows the answers to the unbelievably complex problem of contemporary neoliberal capitalist society would be disingenuous. To say that a preidentified system would provide a better world seems even more off, especially considering the outcomes of such projects throughout the twentieth century. We cannot imagine what we cannot imagine. If the emergence of the Anthropocene tells us anything it is that we need a break with existing structures and institutions and ways of thinking, perhaps including ones that have risen so recently to hegemony in the epoch’s name.

This need for a break is felt widely. Eco-cybernetic entanglement, precarity, and lack of agency are circumstances in which much of the population lives and not by choice. Rather than celebrating Anthropocene conditions, it is worth considering seriously that an equally descriptive image of the present is that of the current order’s structures on fire. This zeitgeist was well-summarized in political scientists Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux’s recent survey, covered by the New York Times with alarm, which reported highly affirmative responses to statements such as: “When I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’” (40% agreed); “We cannot fix the problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start over” (40% agreed).

This sentiment is part of the attraction many Americans have to apocalyptic movies and TV: the end promises an escape from the present order. Take, for example, the once extremely popular TV series The Walking Dead, which during its golden age—season 4 (2014)—was the most popular show for Americans aged 18–49 (15.7 million people watched the season finale). Episode “Still” opens with a survival skills montage of characters Daryl Dixon (grizzled crossbow-toting fan favorite whose face is featured on “Don’t Mess with Daryl Dixon” t-shirts sold at Walmart) and Beth Greene (blonde, Christian, suburban) collecting tools, trapping animals, and roasting snake. Devastated by the recent murder of Beth’s father and loss of their band of companions, the pair wander a zombie-ravaged landscape. Inside an abandoned country club where they search for bottles of liquor, Daryl discovers piles of money. Falling to his knees, he shovels the bills into a duffel bag, frantically acting on old impulses. Later, they hole up in an abandoned rural house. Car parts and old tires litter the yard. Inside, cigarette butts overflow plates atop a junk store kitchen table. On the porch they drink their found moonshine and share stories from their pasts (while Beth’s sheltered upbringing is known, Daryl’s “before” story has until this episode remained unknown).

“Home sweet home,” says Daryl, reminiscing to Beth how he grew up in a house just like this. He recounts how his abusive racist father would place jumbo, plastic, bra-shaped ashtrays on the TV and use them for target practice, sitting in his underwear drinking in a dumpstered camouflage La-Z-Boy. “You want to know what I was before?” he asks Beth. “I was nobody. Nothing. Some redneck asshole.” “I'm just used to it, things being ugly. Growing up in a place like this.” “We should burn it down,” Beth suggests. Beth too has experienced great pain and loss and is ready to leave the past behind in her own ways. They gather the money they’d hoarded—valueless now as money anyway—and the alcohol with which they’d tried to drown their pain and use them as tinder and fuel to burn the house down. In an extraordinarily beautiful scene—which reverses Latour’s Turin Horse-inspired vision—Beth and Daryl, their faces lit up by flames, point their middle fingers at the ruined house, turn their backs and walk into the night.

It’s not that a better world awaits ahead, and the scene is not triumphant. But to paraphrase Beth, at least you’re not living how you used to, not anymore. This version of the apocalyptic is powerful and popular because it offers a way out of the crushing hopelessness and the impossibility of becoming something or someone else that many poor and working-class people in America feel. Or at bare minimum, a proper response to the structures that create these conditions.

Daryl’s past—represented by the dilapidated manufactured home—offers an image of the rural poverty across the American hinterlands, where unemployment and debt are extraordinarily high and “deaths of despair” (suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism) common. Far from the spaces of academic theorizing, such “ruined” places represent the much broader death of the so-called American dream, the sum of the post-1970s decades of revanchism and counterrevolution waged via deindustrialization, wage cuts, urban crackdowns, hyperincarceration; all strategies flanked by a massively increased wealth gap and soaring profits for the very wealthy, now augmented by ecosystemic collapse. Daryl and Beth embody a fictional response to a certain experience of this. But such imaginaries only echo larger scale, real world responses to other, differently situated experiences which have been launched in recent years from America’s impoverished cities and suburbs—such as Ferguson, Missouri—by humans sick of being dehumanized by the never-ending police shootings of African Americans, ghettoization, and economic precarity.

In spite of theoretical prescriptions to the contrary, we need ways to pry open the walls closing in around us (walls around the imagination, walls between the now and the future, between peoples). Toward this end, Alfredo Bonanno once described insurrection as an air-bridge to the unknown, a non-rational breaking through the structures of the present—wage work, for instance—to a space of the possible in which we might see in new ways. “A slender air-bridge between the tools of the past and the dimensions of the future.” Rather than celebrating the ruins or qualities of entanglement and precarity imposed by governments and companies, perhaps building these air-bridges might have something to do with delinking. This can mean detaching, as theorist Eva Haifa Giraud suggests, from structures and situations which strangle us, to reweave others, according to other priorities.Perhaps delinking as a liberatory—not resentful or conservative—political matter will also  involve both reconsidering what building power today means and working towards freedom as a serious and urgent goal, even (and especially) as the old orders shred themselves apart.

Here we might note, in America at least, the growing normalization of once-outlier activities amongst growing numbers of working-class individuals and families. Examples of this include learning survival skills, building local infrastructures (wireless mesh networks, food production, whether farming or engineering protein bars, etc.), and taking up physical fitness regimes. Such activities are representative of an increasingly widespread desire to decrease dependency and take back some degree of power over one’s life and abilities—to reappropriate one’s means of existence, even if the only time to do so is found during lunch breaks. Yet placed alongside the scale, vision, and material means of delinking activities of the world’s very wealthy and the force they mobilize, these scattered efforts too often seem to reflect a powerlessness—an inability to build real power or autonomy—rather than the opposite.

Life exigencies and lack of resources often mean that, at best, such practices result in an increased preparedness to survive the next Coronavirus or hurricane (no minor feat itself of course), in a time where the definition and horizon of life has become “normalizing survival.” Still, even prepping is often animated by important questions such as how to help oneself and others and how to not be hostage to relief agencies, FEMA camps, or governments that disdain whole populations. How to save your family from sleeping on a gym floor, like the Kims in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite? How not to allow oneself to be reduced to scrounging for the last can of beans at the panic-ravaged grocery store? How to take care of oneself and one’s own communities—the things and beings you love? Such questions are a pragmatic and existential matter of refusing to be dependent on corporations and algorithms. Addressing them also opens up much broader horizons.

As the Anthropocene progresses, will emancipatory trajectories of delinking take shape at a comparative scale and depth of power to those of the planet’s ruling classes? Will the epoch be marked by a widespread movement of peoples delinking from dehumanizing structures to create other, rich, unbounded territories, ones infrastructurally and subjectively capable of deciding how to live on their own terms? Using recent work by geographers on the concept, “territory” here might be thought of less in terms of a two-dimensional bounded area and instead as heterogenous, emergent assemblages on land or sea; powerful “volumina” made of their own technologies of living, ways of moving, geopowers, and relations with humans and nonhumans. Although it is an antagonistic concept, “territory,” philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, is also “artistic, the consequence of love not war, of seduction not defense.”

It’s impossible to know in advance whether this would lead to more livable futures. But surely exploring the possibility offers a more promising direction than affirming precarious entanglement and abdicating human hubris to the rich. Delinking and relinking on one’s own terms are not techniques that conservative forces monopolize. However difficult it may be to explore this direction, given that most lack a financial or territorial base to begin from, it seems crucial to build material power. But then again, maybe some zoomer will say this is an antiquarian modality; that more power can be found enmeshed in ethereal flows accessible alone in one’s bedroom on a laptop (whether using Google or Tor). For some this might be unacceptable or at least not enough, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Precarity-entanglement thinking recognizes something important about the Anthropocene: we require new ways of thinking and living. But the task of thought should never be to instruct others in how to live, to provide universals to define life, or to flank governmental assertions that “nothing else is possible” other than the resilient continuation of existing structures while the world burns and floods. Taking the claim that old world is ending seriously opens up much broader horizons. The end of the “one world world”—or what I call the Anthropocene’s “back loop”—is not the time for reasserting new universal definitions for what life should be, but for reaching out into the infinite range of what we and others might make it. Just as scholars such as Clive Barnett and Stephen Collier have argued against reductive or ontologizing critiques of government, so too is there a need for critical Anthropocene thinking to resist this approach.

Acknowledging that the world is not there “for us,” that the earth has its own intractable forces and autonomy, need not require as its corollary to sink into self-hatred or disavowal of human capacities. Surely there are other possibilities beyond this false binary that some versions of Anthropocene thinking tether human being to. As Chandler suggests “perhaps it is a false and forced choice to choose between ‘the human’ and ‘the world’? Perhaps rethinking modernity does not necessarily involve the refutation of any possibility of political alternatives other than those based on accepting our newfound fragility and vulnerability?”

At a time when human power and hubris have become objects of disdain for some, it is important to insist on its critical importance in the Anthropocene. One could look back to a vast and varied range of hubristic human efforts, with some dominating nature or oppressing populations and others embodying collective struggles for freedom. But emancipatory struggle is not an object of remembrance. Rather, it is a basic human need elaborated in ever-new ways. Thus, it is fitting and appropriate that the 2010s opened and closed with global waves of anti-government uprisings (although resistance at the decade’s close was notably subdued in the US). What’s needed now is a hubris proper to both the Anthropocene and the subjects trying to escape from it. Without such a hubris, without the embrace of profound experimentation with existence, we cede the future and our lives to the billionaires and petty warlords, technocrats and politicians.

 Anthropocene Hubris. By Stephanie Wakefield.    e-flux, September 4, 2020.

I. I feel it coming

Gleaming blue translucent condos and whitewash stucco. Construction cranes and flood barriers. Mirrored sunglasses and bikini rollerbladers. Architecture that gathers the edge of the world, at least the American world.

This past December I got married in New Orleans, where my husband grew up, moving after Hurricane Katrina—first into Best Westerns in Houston, next to Seattle on a Red Cross voucher, and finally to work in New York, where we met nine years ago. Thank god for Katrina!, we joke. Last month we went to Miami Beach for our honeymoon, half for the sun and half—as you might also do now in Louisiana—“to see it before it’s gone.” A joke but not a joke, because Miami Beach is “ground zero” for sea level rise. As one of the most low-lying cities in the lower forty-eight states, Miami Beach is already flooding and will likely be the first American city submerged by rising seas. According to University of Miami geologist Harold Wanless, Miami will see 2 feet of sea rise by 2048, 3 feet by 2064; 4, 6, or 15 feet by the end of century, and one foot per decade after that.

Scientists base projections of sea level rise like these on data gathered from microwave and GPS sensors installed on land and ice, in the oceans and in space. This data shows that sea levels have been rising over the 20th century at a rate that has increased in recent decades, with 2014’s level 2.6 inches higher than 1993’s average, which was previously the highest annual average on satellite measurement record. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), sea levels are rising now at one-eighth of an inch per year, a rate expected to accelerate in tandem with global warming in coming decades. It was by studying ice samples drilled from melting glaciers themselves that scientists first detected and measured global warming. These glaciers are the archives of our earth, the memory of its worlds, of past climates and of breaths released. During past ice ages, glaciers formed as water evaporated from the oceans, snow accumulated and compressed, layer built upon layer. Under the weight of accumulating seasons, the lower snow became ice, formations became glaciers, and ancient air was preserved, trapped as bubbles within the ice.Today ice cores, such as those studied at the National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, tell scientists what earth’s climate was like in the past, providing a benchmark against which to compare today’s temperatures and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, as well as a basis for prediction of how the climate will change in the future. For the last 12,000 years, the atmosphere trapped just enough of the sun’s energy, giving us the Holocene “golden age,” the “safe operating space” in which human civilization was born, in which we grew up, and which we are now leaving. As increased concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane trap more of the sun’s heat, earth’s average surface temperature is rising, with the ocean absorbing the bulk of the warming. So now glaciers in Montana and Iceland, but primarily Antarctica and Greenland, are melting, sending their water into earth’s swelling seas. All the water on earth is all the water there’s ever been. In the Anthropocene, everything is connected.

Wanless says that all of our predictions of gradually rising seas might be wrong, because none of them acknowledge the fact that we know previous ice melt and sea level rise didn’t happen steadily but rather in nonlinear, erratic pulses. The question remains, just how quickly do pulses happen? Over the course of a day? A year? A decade? The Holocene mind assumes sea levels are steady and the earth is an eternal, stable background to our human dramas, but the Anthropocene mind learns otherwise. Even with our radars, satellites, and ice core labs we can’t predict when or how quickly much of this will occur. Already, sea level is not rising uniformly across the planet, spatially or temporally (New York, for example, is considered a hot spot). The less ice, the less reflective surface able to deflect—the more dark, sun-absorbing ocean, the more heat absorbed, creating a chain effect, accelerating ice melt, sea level rise, and coastal inundation.

The ice of memory becomes a deluge! It’s waiting for us! Just as we can’t predict these processes, we do not know how the melting of the glaciers, rising of the seas, or global warming will intersect in coming decades with the long list of other Anthropocene transformations, including mass extinction, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, fresh water usage, or ever-increasing wealth inequality and existential freakout in humans. Homo sapiens have never lived at 400 parts per million (ppm) CO2 concentration. We’re already in a new world. And at 1500 ppm? Into the unknown!

If we can’t accurately predict the rate of melt or rise, we can still foresee some consequences. With 3 feet of sea level rise around south Florida, Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station, located on Biscayne Bay just south of Miami and already exposed to the sea, will be cut off from the mainland, reachable only by plane or boat; with more rise it will be completely submerged, perhaps leading to catastrophic meltdown. With 6 feet of sea-level rise, downtown Miami’s waterfront and the Florida Keys will be gone, and the city’s cruise ship port—the world’s largest—will be under water. But that doesn’t even matter, Wanless says: just one foot of sea level rise—expected by around 2040—will cause salt water intrusion into the city’s water systems, rendering tap water undrinkable, sewage systems nonfunctional, and sending Miami residents fleeing en masse like 21st-century Dust Bowl refugees. Wanless sums up the future of his beloved home Miami by saying, “I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but it’s over.”

But is it? Is this just the end?
 
II. Resilience 1.0

One night in Miami Beach we take a walk up to the posh Sunset Harbor neighborhood. We cross through a cluster of towering condos, where we overhear wealthy condo dwellers debate which duck dish to order, which would be normal except they’re seated 2 and a half feet under the recently raised street. The elevated roadways that now loom above the cafes and doorways in Miami Beach are part of an effort to build resilience to the regular flooding, with the city having already spent $400 million to elevate streets and install a huge pumping system to push flood water into Biscayne Bay. This is the Miami iteration of climate resilience: maintaining a (static yet ever-receding) pastel and neon art deco fantasy while the oceans rise around the city, with new infrastructures like these streets alongside a delirious building boom, with $2.7 billion spent on new luxury high rise construction in 2014 alone. The speakers at the condo cafe are playing that Chainsmokers song we all love, We ain’t ever getting older…

Miami’s efforts to build climate resilience are part of more widespread transformation in urban infrastructure and design. Coastal cities like New York where I live are being hailed as experimental laboratories for real-time testing of new designs to make cities resilient to climate change, rising seas, and natural disasters. I have been researching these resiliency efforts for many years, and one thing is clear. Unlike urban design in the past, which promised a “better” future, these resiliency designs work by managing and adapting to changing conditions of catastrophe in order to secure the functionality of our existing social and political urban order. These resilience designs don’t replace modern infrastructures, but are necessitated by them, and complement them. That is, despite their “green” characteristics—oysters, swales, reefs, and marshes—resilience infrastructures sit perfectly well alongside the proliferation of pipes, cables, wires and roads that underwrite modern life and project it into the future. Implicitly or explicitly, these designs tell us that there is little left but surviving in a landscape strewn with corpses and debris, disasters and debt. In Miami Beach’s case, Bvlgari bags will float on the rising seas as they churn outside the city’s preserved art deco hotels: a frozen, yet ever-receding past of luxury, glamour, exuberant faith in social and technological progress. The possibility of imagining or creating other worlds disappears.

Listening to the Chainsmokers waft out of the Sunset Harbor restaurant, I’m thinking that there really is a will to survival at the heart of these new resilient modes of administering coastal urban environments. Rather than promising the future, these resilience measures function to ward the future off. Adapting to changing conditions so as to keep all other things the same. In the novel I’m reading on the trip, part of Steven Erikson’s “Malazan Book of the Fallen” series, immortality is a curse. A people called the T’lan Imass undertake a collective ritual to live forever in order to wage eternal war on their enemies who had once enslaved them. Thousands of years after the ritual, they still wander the continents, haggard, skeletons with pieces of skin falling off, dreaming of nothing, contemplating their own futility, remembering little of what it is to live: love, sex, tastes, everyday commonplaces like the smell of cooking food, children laughing, leaves rustling, birth and death.

III. Letting go: the back loop

We’re at Lummus Park, an outdoor workout spot in South Beach. I’m watching an amazing woman in her late forties as she climbs to the top of a 12-foot pole. She raises her body into a star-shaped human flag, turns upside-down, and holds herself aloft with a single leg wrapped around the pole. Slowly, she lowers herself several feet, holding herself taut and gracefully dismounting from the pole. Afterward she doesn’t speak to anyone. She’s there to teach her teenage pupils, signaling their drills to them: hanging sit-ups, bar flips, handstands. I am amazed by this woman; I’m thinking, we really know little of the human body’s potential! Part of the reason we came to Miami was to visit this world-famous beach gym, well-known as a place where elite calisthenics and street workout practitioners train their human flags, planches, and parallel bar handstands under sun-soaked palms. Street workout, a relatively new culture of choreographed movements on free outdoor parks or infrastructures, is just a physical fitness component of a wave of experimentation with new ways of transforming bodies, minds, lives, and the world around them: from hacking, making, modding, prepping, and lifting to citizen science, eco-design, solar energy grids, wireless mesh networks and crossfit boxes. People everywhere are searching their souls, scouring the earth for tools, and trying in a million ways to reinvent what it means to be human and to dwell on earth. Most of these practices in no way see themselves as solutions to climate change, the impending nuclear catastrophe of a submerged power plant, or large-scale political structures. What then, one asks, is their status? Who could honestly say? What’s clear is that these practices treat our time not as “The End,” but rather a beginning, a transitional time in which every aspect of life is now open to reworking, here and now. As such it can’t be pinned down yet. Seeds need time to grow, adaptation doesn’t (usually) happen overnight, and Rome wasn’t built in a day.

Speaking of which, plants and animals are doing this too. As global warming has decreased the number of days below freezing, mangroves’ habitable range has increased and the trees are taking root in salt marshes farther north. Alligators are adapting to live in residential areas with lakes or canals and use south Florida’s waterways as a “network of highways to get from one place to another.” The Everglades are also inhabited by a large population of Burmese pythons—brought to the area as exotic pets and discarded. Despite a state-organized “Python Challenge” that awards cash prizes to freelance citizen groups who catch the most pythons, the release of an iPhone app for crowdsourcing python sightings, and the state’s importing of snake-catching specialist Irula tribesmen, the pythons continue to thrive and multiply in their new environment. Seasons are shifting: spring is coming earlier in many places, while winters as we know them in New York have grown more erratic and 60 – 70 degree temperatures increasingly frequent. “Insects are emerging earlier; birds are nesting earlier; plants are flowering and leafing out earlier. The latest of such natural events studies, out last month, shows that climate change has stretched out the wildflower bloom season in Colorado by 35 days.”So what I mean is, it’s not just us. Nature is experimenting too, and we create our worlds in the worlds it creates, and vice versa.

To paraphrase writer Gretel Ehrlich, is this a world coming apart, or piecing itself back together?

Father of resilience theory C.S. Holling has a useful way of thinking about a time like this. He calls it a “back loop.” This concept refers to the adaptive cycle, the main heuristic used by resilience ecologists to describe the four phases of life experienced by all natural systems–a human being, a city, a society, a civilization, a swamp, a forest, a company. On one hand, the adaptive cycle contains a “front loop” of early rapid “growth,” leading to a “persistence” or “stability” phase dominated by a few species and characterized by rigidity and the capture of earlier energies. Those “stable” states are not permanent. Gradual or sharp disturbance can cause systems to slip into a “back loop,” marked by a “release” phase where energies and elements previously captured in conservation phases are set free, unexpected new combinations emerge, and wild, exuberant experimentation becomes the modus operandi. The most understudied aspect of ecological systems, back loops are also one of the most exciting. As observed in ecological systems, the back loop is the phase of life in which individual organisms or small groups of individual organisms interact across previously unbridgeable divides and in doing create something fundamentally original. In contrast to life in the regimes we are leaving behind, where innovation was stifled and influence limited to a few actors with the greatest power—the stability “trap”—in the back loop beings and things are released and open to new potentials. Although most back loops studied by ecologists have been regional in character, in 2004 Holling penned an essay suggesting that “we are at the time of a large-scale back loop,” a global situation in which “each of us must become aware that he or she is a participant.” I think Holling’s challenge is important; but it is also an apt description of a phenomenon already underway.

If we accept being in a back loop, the question becomes, how do we respond? Do we try desperately to maintain the old “safe operating space,” freeze a process already in motion? Or could we let go, allow a time of exploration and experimentation, see what becomes of the pieces of us and the world?

IV. Prometheus 2.0

Back on the beach, we finish our workouts, and watch some guys compete for ridiculous numbers of reps and sets. I text my friend back in New York who owns the CrossFit gym where I work out, “Let’s move here. This could be life,” with a photo of the sun and park. He is a Five Percenter of the Nation of Gods and Earths, a 1960s nonreligious offshoot of the Nation of Islam (NOI) that believes god is neither separate nor exterior from humans, and not a mystery entity to wait for to bring you food or change your world. Instead, god is something that humans can cultivate and develop through meditation, training in mental, spiritual and physical fitness. We are gods. Even though the wealthy elite of the world withhold this truth from the majority, through living it and knowing our selves, we prove it true. While some Five Percenters see godliness as reserved for black men only, my friend, who’s Puerto Rican, has his own wisdom. He teaches his daughter to know she’s a god, and teaches his friends (who are many colors) the same, that divinity is your true power—which is also our true power, which is the power of the universe, which is the power of creation of our universe and reality. When my friend first mentioned all this in the car one morning as we groggily made our way through Brooklyn to run a 5K in Sheepshead Bay, I was surprised not only because I’d known him for a long time without hearing about it, but also because much of my life has also been inspired by the subterranean, often repressed but constantly reemerging, messianic tradition. The 15th-century Hussite rebellion in Bohemia, when the Taborites defeated the Holy Roman Empire, proclaimed their own Kingdom of Heaven on Earth and declared there would be no more servants nor masters; the 16th-century rise of Lurianic Kabbalah in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain; the heretical ideas of 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who denied the existence of a transcendent God and said everything is one divine substance; Nietzsche’s Zarathustra; and so on. Across place and time, from a Taborite beating a drum made of their slain leader’s skin, to us who meet today in gyms on the terrain of the Anthropocene back loop, there is a single truth surviving across centuries and continents: the true power of transformation belongs to the people. We revise maps, we invent new practices, new movements, new ways of living, in and with and sometimes despite each other’s unpredictable paths. “A timeless reality,” as one Five Percenter puts it.

Another unexpected tale from the fabulous/insane new world offered by the Anthropocene. My friend the god grew up in Bushwick; I’m from Kansas. He lifts more than twice his bodyweight; I can only do a few pullups. Two very different beings who, via unique paths, landed on the same planet. New starting point: the old world is over, a revolution has begun. In and by people like each other, through love and building, is born a new sense of the possible. Anyway, now I’m learning supreme math, and he’s learning how the spirit became a camel, the camel a lion, and the lion at last a child. New values, new tables!

Speaking of gods, lately I’ve been thinking about “Prometheanism,” that supposedly horrible word so often used to describe humanity’s reaching the apex of its insanity as the most powerful geological agent on earth, imagining itself a force on par with a super volcano or an asteroid, all possible because this human species raised itself up as the rational orderer and center of reality. Welcome to the Epoch of Promethean Man, cue the Accelerationists, the Breakthrough Institute, the Singularity, the space colonies, and, on the other end of the spectrum, cue the critical world’s almost univocal condemnation of human hubris as an outdated relic of the catastrophic 20th century.

But isn’t that story getting old? If we creep back to the Caucasus Mountain where Zeus chained Prometheus and listen again to the imprisoned god’s story, what we actually hear is how Prometheus had gone out among the humans and found them destitute, lacking all knowledge of the means of production, the forms that make life more than bare life, and now “living in caves and in holes of the earth, shivering with the cold because there was no fire, dying of starvation, hunted by wild beasts and by one another.” In hopes of liberating the humans, Prometheus went to Zeus and asked him to give the people fire. Zeus refused to share even a spark with them, as one tale tells it, “for if men had fire they might become strong and wise like us, and after a while they would drive us out of our kingdom. Besides, fire is a dangerous tool and they are too poor and ignorant to be trusted with it. It is better that we on Mount Olympus rule the world without threat so all can be happy.”

In response, not only did Prometheus expropriate fire from the selfish gods and give it to humans, he also shared with them many other tools: architecture, writing, mathematics, astrology, sailing, navigation, medicine, divination, music—arts necessary not only to human survival but to the infinite ways we elaborate the happy, good life. A god who would not bow to the gods, the myth of Prometheus is about human hubris but also about the tools we use to wield our hubris. These arts, practices, knowledges, and forms give us the means to transform not only ourselves but also our very modes of existence. For millennia, humans have experimented with tools, designing new ways to stay warm, better ways to feed themselves, how to move without being detected, how to prepare food, how to absorb and attenuate a variety of stressors from cold to combat injuries, how to hack, how to express beauty and meaning. Song. Tools are the myriad, infinite bridges that attach us to the world, that allow us to make use of it, and to give shape to and be shaped by it. By giving the mortal humans these forms, Prometheus therefore gave them the capacity to create their own worlds. And through this gift a second one was given to us: the possibility of another future, one not determined in advance but a future that was an open question.

V. New land, new questions

“An age was dead. The new age belonged to generations still to come.”

– Steven Erikson

I grew up in the Midwest in the late ’90s working in gas stations that played Nirvana and Snoop Dogg at a time when it seemed like the only thing we knew for sure was that there was no future and that nothing would ever change. Now it seems like the only thing we know for sure is that everything is changing. As many resilience theorists argue, we are unprepared to face the new world we find ourselves in because we are still using tools from the front loop. Outdated ideologies, infrastructures, design practices, and change models are not going to cut it. We’re in the back loop, and we need new tools.

So far it seems actual agency—powers of imagination, hubris, and tools for their translation into reality—is hoarded in the hands of those who want to preserve and profit from the present social system as the water rises. Take note: faced with a society in the back loop—understanding we are leaving western civilization’s “safe operating space”—the powerful are experimenting: think Elon Musk’s SpaceX “Mars I” dreams of another space; experiments in de-extinction of the passenger pigeon or mammoths, dreams of bringing the past back to the present; New York City resilience practitioners engineering “living infrastructures” and retractable sea walls outfitted with skate ramps, etc. These experimenters are daring, often so much so that they believe they can transform the very cities we live in and the solar system around us into large-scale laboratories for their trials. They are maniacally trying to make a future in the images of their desire. What about the rest of us, how are we to have any efficacy or agency?

“Resilience 1.0”—the resilience “regime” I spoke of earlier—tells us we have no agency, no imagination, and no dreams apart from what’s needed to envision or endure disasters. The human flag pole: an image to remind us what a massive fiction this is. Resilience 2.0: we have and have always had immense power to transform our selves and our worlds, as evidenced by the proliferation of techniques developed and tested out today as people have already begun inhabiting the back loop in diverse ways. Recognizing this as our capacity and our right, we can reclaim something we never truly lost.

Instead of looking for final answers, what if we accept that we are living in a transitional time, where things are in disarray, where the future’s uncertain, but where more is now possible and authorized than ever before? From this perspective our time is a time for audacity, experiments on the same playing field where our future is already being written for us. In short, living in the back loop. This new orientation and way of life entails finding new modes of nourishing ourselves, designing and raising buildings, staying warm or cool, and accessing clean water as it is does learning to face the unknown and learning to look into ourselves and ask what kind of life we want to make live, what kind of life is worth living, and really asking previously unaskable questions. What on earth could being be? By “we” I don’t just mean designers, city governments, planners, or resilience theorists who have already become back loop participants, as testified by the existence and growth of the resilience paradigm. By “we” I mean everyone: common people where they are, how they are, people who will bear the brunt of climate change, people who already needed the world to end yesterday so they could finally get a chance to live.

VI. An image

Like a Shell futurologist, one can imagine multiple disastrous futures for Miami. Will it become a southern Super Venice, a la Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York of 2140, a watery playground for the rich and capital speculation: Zaha Hadid-designed high-rise condominiums retrofitted so as to actually function with permanently elevated sea levels; floating tourist traps on Ocean Boulevard hocking $35 margaritas for what remains of the world’s non-inundated middle classes; a motley and still surviving working class that ferries in from the overstuffed, substandard housing complexes where they live a kind of managerial socialism of long lines, board meetings, and just-in-time and rarely adequate dinners? Perhaps the hard realism of Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is more apt. The “haves” live in a series of Amillarah Private Island arcologies, closed-loop glass-domed living systems with luxury malls, fine eateries, and augmented reality advertisements in their centers and ringed by air-conditioned penthouses whose waste water is filtered into the loop, while the “have-nots” are clustered in camps along the new coast lines where they have the new Dust Bowl refugees (the “Floridians”) gathering around pay-to-drink Red Cross water dispensers as they try to fend off the latest Chikungunya or Zika. Or imagine a super Katrina resulting in something a little more Odds Against Tomorrow: Miami a post-flood “dead zone” abandoned by government and left to rewild, reclaimed by pythons and alligators and scores of individualists with camping packs on their backs starting from scratch, spending their days transforming soggy banks into their dream apartments and building ramshackle boat homes amidst growing marshland. Meanwhile, more refugee camps in the background. Each of these visions undoubtedly carries an element of truth, but only if we allow it.

For quite some time, governments deployed a powerful narrative of progress: development, growth, and endless improvement. Now, many resilience advocates substitute our ability to shape the future with an “oops, we actually can’t” survivalism that is hidden behind pristine architectural renderings. We may live in a world that increasingly tells us there’s no more dreaming (except about space), but I don’t live like that. Miami lit my imagination on fire. Ever since I visited, I dream of it often. My dreams aren’t about the future or the end; they are about the possibilities opened right now. Taking up the challenge of the back loop is fundamentally a wager of the present, and it will only be met through a combination of adaption, reinvigoration, and a radical shedding of obsolete technical, social, and mental systems. To accomplish this, we’ll need to make the unlikeliest of combinations between the practitioners of Prometheus’s gifts. Perhaps the hard hats need to meet the hackers, and the engineers the ecologists, and the nurses need to meet the artists, bus drivers, teachers, and mechanics. We are already all here.

It’s May 6, 2017, and I am in Biscayne Bay. The sun is radiating on my skin, rough with salt and sunscreen and sweat. I’m watching a family on a dock hosing down a delighted manatee. I’m wondering about the place Miami Beach could become after the housing bubble bursts. A serene image of life is growing within me, the possibility of a Miami-turned-new-Florida Keys-archipelago, a “ride it out” salt life that accepts the reality of constantly rebuilding, building higher, and living differently. It won’t be without its perils, hardship, heartache, or tragedy. Can humans live in water? Of course we can.

Field Notes from the Anthropocene: Living in the Back Loop. By Stephanie Wakefield. The Brooklyn Rail, June 2017.

Is it Still OK to Have Children?

Given what we know about the future of the planet, is having children a matter of consumer choice, of political conviction, or something an authority will eventually decide for us? Meehan Crist explores the debate about the ethics of childbearing in the age of climate crisis. She addresses the relationship between BP and the British Museum, the implications of culture-washing, and the logic of cultural divestment initiative. Lecture, February 26, 2020.

Is it OK to have children?  By Meehan Crist. London Review of Books,  March 5, 2020. 

Also on YouTube

On a bleak winter’s day in early 1975 — just after my 32nd birthday — I made the most radical and feminist decision of my life. I arranged to have an operation that would leave me sterilized. To get my “tubes tied.” While I shared this with a few close friends at the time I soon learned to avoid discussing it because it was so defiant of social expectations. Unnatural in a world that defined giving birth and motherhood as the most natural act. After all, I was raised during an era of patriarchal culture that saw little value in women until they became mothers and ergo assumed every woman wanted babies. Even my fellow radical feminist collaborators were shocked. I never told my mother.

So, it is with great curiosity and concern that I have learned about the decisions of increasing numbers of young women and couples of child-bearing age to forego having kids. Even in southern Mexico, my young local Spanish teacher explains that his friends are discussing this question.

The driving factor today in this conversation and decision is the climate crisis.

This spring (2019) there was hardly a webzine or publication that did not publish a thoughtful article on the subject of whether to have kids given the catastrophe that looms in the very immediate future triggered by the climate and toxicity crisis. Whether it’s the species collapse, glacier meltdowns, extreme temperatures and storms, catastrophic floods and forest fires, or the prediction that modern agriculture will not be sustainable within a few decades, all of the doomsday scenarios seem to be speeding up. Added to this are concerns about the rising tide of plastic contamination of our oceans, landfills and bloodstreams along with increasing chemical poisons leaching into our food and water.

The crisis of consciousness for women of child-bearing age was ratcheted to panic level by the UN report released in November 2018 (referred to as the IPCC report — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — made famous by Greta Thunberg) that predicted serious threats to civilization caused by ecological collapse within the next two decades unless we can reduce carbon emissions enough to restrict global warming to less than 1.5 degrees Celsius. Achieving this goal will require a revolution in behavior — political, economic and personal. Otherwise, a child born in 2019 could, given climate crisis predictions, be faced with an untenable planet by the time they reach their twenties.

Although the environmentally conscious have been thinking about this issue for a few years, it was Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who catapulted the question in February, 2019, when she live-streamed on her Instagram account to her 2.5 million followers that “There’s scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult. And it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: Is it OK to still have children?” (my emphasis)

Predictably, the backlash from the Christian Republican Right was immediate. Utah Senator Mike Lee spoke on the Senate floor that the solution to climate change was to “fall in love, get married and have some kids.”

But, for increasing numbers of young adults from over-developed countries, the answer to AOC’s question is torturous. Organizations have formed to pursue the ethical conversations surrounding decisions to forego giving birth to children. In the UK, BirthStrike was founded by a 31 year-old musician and environmental activist, Blythe Pepino. In a poignant portrait of Pepino in Buzz Feed (July 2019), reporter Ash Sanders learns that after Pepino volunteered with Syrian refugees in Calais France — “refugees fleeing failed harvests in Syria” — and attended meetings of a new radical climate group, Extinction Rebellion, she began to torment over her desire to have a child.

Acknowledging that this ecological disaster is “altering the way our generation is imagining the future…” BirthStrike’s manifesto reads:

“We, the undersigned, declare our decision not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis and the current inaction of governing forces in the face if this existential threat. “

Birthstrike emphasizes that they are not making judgements about people who decide to have children. Instead, they “stand in compassionate solidarity with all parents,” honoring the difficult choice to have children at our historical moment.

In the U.S. Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli founded Conceivable Future as a forum for women and couples to discuss the ethics of child-bearing while looking down the dark tunnel of this existential threat. The organization promotes “house parties,” where those without children as well as those who are expecting or already have kids can come together to tell their stories. Their website contains testimonials from women who have decided against giving birth. Meghan Hoskins, a 23-year-old who wants kids reveals her fears:

“I am afraid that they will eventually have to live in a world where there is no fresh water and that is increasingly full of dangerous and toxic chemicals.”

Younger kids, still in high school or college are pledging publicly to forego having children until leaders take action. Like Canadian teen, Emma Lim, who told CBS News on September 19, 2019, the day before the big worldwide high school climate crisis strike, that she made the decision not to have children because of the ecological dangers ahead. Lim and a friend created a website — No Future, No Children — where others can also take the pledge of childlessness.

As of November 9, 2019, No Future, No Children had 5337 pledges.

Despite all this organizing around the excruciating dilemma of whether to give birth, contemporary environmental organizations shy away from “population control” as a critical solution to our planetary predicament. This is a revolutionary change from their early roots.

Population Control and a Modern Movement

“Population control” was a passionate argument during the 1960s and early 70s when the modern ecology movement erupted. I know this as more than a reporter. I was a convert to this new movement by 1967 when the full impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, aroused the hearts and minds of a generation already agitated by the Vietnam War and expanded by psilocybin.

Carson warned of the dangers of synthetic pesticides, especially DDT, on bird life and insects. Hence her evocative image of a silent spring when all the birds and insects are gone. Humans were not spared the cancer-causing effects of these chemicals either. Her 1962 book angered the chemical companies, while igniting a grass roots environmental movement that eventually led to the forming of the Environmental Protection Agency and legislation banning DDT.

If Carson’s best seller cracked our skulls about the toxicity of our chemical universe another book arrived like a hand grenade. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb sold even more copies than Silent Spring. Ehrlich then founded Zero Population Growth, an organization which, like the book, argued that at current population growth levels there would be a world famine by the 1970s and drastic action was needed.

Many early editions of The Population Bomb began:

The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now…

Like the 18th Century theorist, Thomas Malthus, Ehrlich argued that population growth would outpace agricultural growth. Since 1930 the population of the world had doubled within one generation from 2 billion to nearly 4 billion. Ehrlich warned that it was about to double again. Unlike Malthus, who didn’t propose extreme solutions, Ehrlich saw a crisis looming that required radical action. He proposed cutting off aid, especially food, to countries that refused to implement population control, or forcing sterilization on men and women who had more than three children. He was particularly focused on India.

Preservationists and conservationists, like The Sierra Club, that had been around since the late 1800s, along with Planned Parenthood, jumped onto Ehrlich’s bandwagon warning about the dangers ahead without population control.

In 1969 Stephanie Mills delivered a graduation speech at Mills College in California, entitled “The Future is a Cruel Hoax,” that brought her to national attention. Mills had absorbed the warnings of Ehrlich “I am terribly saddened by the fact that the most humane thing for me to do is to have no children at all.” Did her pronouncement seep into my consciousness? I don’t have recollections about this, although I do remember many other factors influencing my choice.

By the late sixties, however, the environmental movement was already divided into two rivers of thought. While one strong current championed “population control” as vital to creating a sustainable planet, another branch espoused a different flow of ideas labelled New Leftist. We New Lefty environmentalists critiqued population control theories as severely tainted by forced sterilization campaigns against poor Puerto Rican, Native American and African American women smacking of class and race prejudices. Beginning in the 1930s, the U.S had enthusiastically conducted “eugenical sterilizations” in most states targeting the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill, criminals, but most rigorously people of color. The Nazis were inspired by the program in California in particular.

New Leftist environmentalists, more influenced by Rachel Carson’s emphasis on toxicity and ecology, insisted that the redistribution of wealth was essential while tackling problems of polluted rivers and air and toxic pesticides. In 1969, while attending university in St Louis, I worked for Environment Magazine whose Executive Editor was Barry Commoner, another pillar in the birth of the modern environmental movement. Commoner, a cellular biologist, ran the Center for the study of Biological Systems at Washington University. His image was on Time Magazine in February,1970.

Commoner argued that poverty was the main cause of the population boom, that population declines with development. Until that point poor people saw children as an economic buffer. India, Ehrlich’s obsession, was an example of where family planning failed to reduce the birth rate. Commoner reasoned that if wealthy nations helped poorer ones develop, declining birthrates would follow.

On the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, when twenty million mostly young people rallied for teach-ins across the country, I was on campus handing out leaflets about the polluted Great Lakes. But my passions were divided. April and May, 1970 were some of the most explosive months in the anti-Vietnam War movement across the country in response to the news that the U.S. had been secretly bombing Cambodia. After four student protesters at Kent State were killed by National Guardsmen, on May 4, 1970, I watched as the ROTC building at Washington University was burnt down. More were torched on campuses across the country.

Ten days later two African American students were killed by police on the campus of Jackson State College in Mississippi, as part of a conflict between some local whites and this primarily black college. Campuses across the country erupted and a nationwide student strike followed. Several strains of our activist lives wove together at this historical moment.

After that first Earth Day, the New Leftist perspective failed to influence organizations then poised to dominate the environmental movement. Population control was central to their agenda. And this position reached well beyond the U.S. In 1972, the UK’s leading environmental journal, The Ecologist, published the Blueprint for Survival, supported by distinguished biologists, ecologists, and economists. With regard to population, the Blueprint stated:

“First, governments must acknowledge the problem and declare their commitment to ending population growth; this commitment should also include an end to immigration.” (my emphasis)

How did immigration become a focus? The answer lies in the dropping fertility rates in the U.S. and in other developed countries. The birth control pill along with increased availability of abortion fueled the growing women’s liberation movement of the 60s and 70s. More women were pursuing higher education and joining the workforce, which often meant delaying marriage and childbirth. By 1976 the fertility rate had reached an all-time low of (1.7). Zero population growth!

Yet, U.S. population was expanding rapidly. In 1965, immigration laws had changed leading to a surge of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. U.S. population soared by nearly 70 million between 1970 and 1998. Zero Population Growth launched a nationwide campaign to generate public support for “sharp curbs on both legal and illegal immigration to the U.S.”

By 1998, however, nobody in the environmental movement was talking about “population control” anymore. Why? The attack on immigration by Zero Population Growth didn’t survive accusations of racism and xenophobia.

What had been a grass roots movement, by the 1990s was now led by lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, D.C. Furthermore, the environmental movement — so dominated by the preservationists, conservationists and population control folks — was increasingly criticized for being largely white and elite.

While radical confrontational environmentalists co-existed, like tree-sitters in the West and Green Peace on the seas, along with counter-movements like deep ecology, social ecology and feminist ecology camped in academia, these groups were still dominated by whites.

Investigative journalist, Mark Dowie, in his 1996 book, Losing Ground, argued that the U.S. environmental movement had turned its energies to expensive litigation and legislation, links with corporations and foundations that were too focused on compromise and now dependent upon experts. In contrast, Dowie called for “environmental justice” that would embrace everyone’s landscape — in cities, in the home and on the job. The environmental movement that re-ignited in the 2000s began emphasizing health and justice. Population control has rarely been mentioned.

International gatherings on population now emphasize “women’s empowerment,” not “population control,” picking up on both theories of the feminist and New Left movements, that with development and opportunity, women would have fewer babies.

Where does this history connect with the current debate about whether to have kids midst our existential crisis? By the 2000s scientists and environmentalists turned their focus to the catastrophe mounting with global warming caused by carbon emissions and our carbon producing way of life rooted in fossil fuels. Carbon emissions had been measured since the late fifties, but not until the 2000s did the dramatic increase in those measurements trigger alarms. Lisa Hymans, in a 2010 article, linked her decision to be childless to concerns about carbon emissions for a child born in the U.S. Today, the sirens warning of destruction are deafening.

How to Act Morally in a Crisis?

The current arguments for why not to have a child, or another child, revolve around two beliefs and concerns. One is that potential parents cannot guarantee the safety or health for a child born now given the uncertainty looming. They fear for a child in a toxic world where violence, even wars, could break out over shrinking resources.

Secondly, they believe that the greatest action, the most ethical action, to help mitigate the catastrophe ahead is to not deliver another carbon producing, resource guzzling person into that world. Another child will make the climate crisis worse. They are talking about the rich over-developed world here.

Even though the fertility rates are falling, the U.S. per-capita carbon footprint is one of the highest in the world. A 2017 study found that one fewer child in a developed country can save 58.6 tonnes (metric tonne = 1,000 kilograms) of greenhouse gases a year. Compared to giving up a car for a year (2.4 tonnes) or giving up one jet transatlantic jet flight (1.6).

Niger, on the other hand, has the world’s highest birth rate, with an average of seven children born to every woman in 2016. But the country also has some of the lowest carbon emissions per person, almost at zero.

Calculations are made differently in different studies, but this focus on measuring carbon footprint will be an area of increasing scrutiny in the years ahead.

Given the imbalance in carbon footprints between rich and poor countries, is it morally wrong to have a child in a rich country?

That’s the conclusion of philosopher, Gerald K. Harrison writing in a 2019 issue of the journal, Essays in Philosophy where the issue is clustered under the question “Is Procreation Immoral?” Each philosopher links our duties and obligations regarding carbon emission reduction to limiting procreation. One article is entitled “Obligation to Abort” while another explores the ideas of co-parenting and multi-parenting.

For Sarah Conly, who edited this essay collection, the issue of the ethics of procreation is “the most pressing question of our time.”

In her 2016 book, One Child: Do We Have a Right to More? Conly argues that population control may be needed to enforce a one-child policy:

“I’m going to argue here that we don’t have a right to more than one biological child…Given the numbers we have now, it’s just not an acceptable option. We are threatened with more population than the planet can bear…”

Remember Western reactions to China’s One Child Policy? That program was initiated in 1979 as part of Deng Xiao Peng’s economic development program to lift China out of years of a stagnant economy and rationed resources. China’s population had almost doubled in two decades since the 1949 CCP victory. With the opening to the West in the late 70s, Chinese scholars now had access to Western scholarship and policy papers like the UK’s 1972 Blueprint for Survival. Population control, the Chinese Communist Party experts argued, would foster economic development and put less strain on agricultural resources. Toxicity of the environment was not a burning consideration.

China’s One Child Policy along with the economic boom of the 90s and 2000s, dependent upon fossil fuels, included an explosive rise in urban populations and rising consumer demands which led to frightening levels of pollution and toxicity. And a steadily increasing per-capita carbon footprint. But, by 2016 China reached zero population growth. Contradictions.

Grief vs. Hope

It is unbearably depressing to make a decision about whether to have a child based on per-capita carbon footprints. But grief is everywhere in the contemporary environmental movement. Mother Jones recently published an article outlining the grief experienced by scientists who study the planetary meltdown while witnessing climate change denial and lethargic action by governments. There are counseling groups especially designed for climate scientists.

And how about young activists? Grief and rage were palpable in the barely controlled voice of Greta Thunberg when she confronted the U.N. and U.S. Congress this fall. One friend told me that her teenage daughter came home and spent the night sobbing over the predictions of imminent environmental collapse. One of my physicians, a 30-year-old, admitted she felt such profound despair and anxiety that she, too, was considering not having children.

According to the founders of BirthStrike and Conceivable Future even parents who decide to have kids feel desperate.

For some, however, having a child is a form of hope.

Gracy Olmstead’s opinion piece in the New York Times appeared on September 20, 2019, the day of world-wide protest by high school kids demanding action by governments on the planetary crisis. She outlines two key reasons why having kids at this time is hopeful. Both involve activism.

One reason to justify having a kid is that parents will work harder as activists to try to change the future — to protect their children. Secondly, their new born children carry the hope that they too will tackle the challenges of the climate crisis through political activism or inventing technological solutions. Those who make this claim point to the recent mass protests by high school students.

Mothers Out Front, an activist organization beamed at the climate crisis, sprung from Boston and has spread across the country. Comprised of mothers, grannies and caregivers, it touts itself as an inclusive organization that focuses on local and national actions to address the looming ecological catastrophe. They have demonstrated against gas pipeline extensions, gas fueled school buses and powerplants while promoting ideas about environmentally sustainable life-style changes.

Founders of these organizations, (BirthStrike, Conceivable Future, Mothers Out Front) acknowledge that ending our reliance on fossil fuels is the first priority. Pepino, of BirthStrike, tells Elle Hunt in The Guardian (May 2019) “Even with drastic, draconian, eugenic policies of population reduction — which are completely immoral — we wouldn’t save ourselves. We have to change the way we live.” (my emphasis)

Changing the Way We Live — the Personal vs. the Political

Framing the argument as a tension between grief vs hope, might also be posed as individual life-style changes and choices vs. public political protest aimed at government policy change. The personal vs. the political. But even this isn’t so clear.

Birth strikers have been referred to as nihilists. Yet, they seem to be driven by a powerful sense of meaning and purpose. Potential birth strikers might ask if they are making a negative choice on child-bearing for themselves or positive decision for children already among us, or for society at large. On the other hand, you can’t assume just because a couple is having a baby that they’re optimists.

Nor, I might add, can we assume that grass roots efforts will be successful in changing the economic development model based on fossil fuels, that has largely created our unsustainable world. Neither parents nor the new fierce environmental movement represented by Extinction Rebellion, 350.org and dozens of other international, community and indigenous organizations. This will be a tough battle. The resistance against change is enormous if suicidal.

Falling Birth Rates and Existential Threat

Meanwhile, birthrates in the over-developed countries keep falling. One in five women who reach the end of their fertile years is childless in the U.S. Business Insider reports that 57% of U.S. households are childless. The climate crisis is only one factor in this reality. Toxicity and stress have contributed to fertility problems among couples who desperately want to conceive. Job and relationship instability, along with lack of child care and health concerns have taken their toll on marriages and families. Women for whom educational and career aspirations have expanded since the 1960s, often direct their energies to long working hours and age out of the relationship-finding, baby-having time of their lives. Social arrangements and gender fluidity have complicated the mix.

Domestic  violence and sexual abuse can also leave their mark on women’s desires and attitudes. A stack of new books reveals that some women simply do not want to have a baby.

The environmental crisis is also not the first existential threat to confront fertile women and parents with decisions about whether to bring a child into the world. Childbirth rates dropped during the Great Depression and during the two world wars. After WWII, during the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation led to young people’s anxieties about the future for a child and — as Mary Annaise Heglar argues in Medium, black people in the United States, especially in the Southern states, have struggled with the profound ethical decision of whether to deliver children into a brutal and violent society.

“I’ll grant that we’ve never seen an existential threat to all of humankind before. It’s true that the planet itself has never become hostile to our collective existence. But history is littered with targeted — but no less deadly — existential threats for specific populations.”

I am reminded of the powerful true story that inspired Toni Morrison’s Beloved. A run-away slave, when she was caught, decided to kill her baby and infant children rather than have them grow up in slavery. It is a horrifying moment of human decision-making for us to reflect upon. To remember.

Heglar, who works with the Natural Resources Defense Council, reminds us of the “crippling fear of humiliation, rape, torture and murder — in a word terrorism” that continued after slavery into the 20th century. She also emphasizes how much we have to learn in the climate crisis movement from the survivors of Jim Crow. They brilliantly and courageously built a movement to challenge this “deadly machine.” Seeking hope through activism.

Evaporating Activism, Losing Hope, My Choice

While it is difficult to reconstruct my mind and soul, reasoning and emotions leading to my decision forty-five years ago to have a “tubal ligation,” I have the benefit of letters I wrote to an ex-lover that year which have helped spark memories of my mental torpor at that bleak moment. Many concerns rattled my soul in 1975, leading to an overriding feeling of despair.

To begin with, my love relationship prospects looked dismal. I couldn’t see a horizon. Then, I was grieving profoundly for the loss of activism in the anti-war, feminist, and New Left movements — shared values, ideals, a communal enterprise, dreams of Utopia. When the Vietnam War ended and the women’s liberation movement headed to academia, my focus stumbled.

The economic recession that erupted in 1973 meant I — and many of my activist friends — couldn’t find paid work. Fresh aspirations sparked by ideals of collectivism, skills honed in alternative structures, were no longer sustaining. Then there was the issue of contraceptives. Huh? Read on.

Activism and community

From the late 60s through to the early 70s, I was a foot soldier in the anti-war movement, landing in jail twice for civil disobedience. Besides being a convert to the new environmental consciousness, I was also an enthusiastic disciple in the socialist-feminist wing of the new Women’s Movement — who took seriously the critique of patriarchy and its unfair discrimination, expectations, sacrifices, burdens and dangers for all women, regardless of class, race or sexual identity.

We white radicals were also re-acting to the voices of Black Power and reeling with horror in a decade when leaders of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements were killed along with a President and Presidential contender. Then there was Kent State and Jackson State. We felt like the country would explode again like it did after Martin Luther King was assassinated. It is difficult to describe that era of disgust, anger and trauma. For me it unleashed righteous anger and energy to learn totally new skills — how to organize meetings and demonstrations, speak publicly, make flyers, write feisty articles in the alternative press and learn radio production skills at a community radio station.

With an exaltation of feminists, in 1970, I produced a radical feminist soap opera for a community radio station in St Louis, dealing with class differences and racial frictions in this conservative mid-western city. At about the same time, I also co-taught the first women’s studies class with two other students at Washington University.

Off campus, I participated in all kinds of women’s movement activities, including leading a posse to demonstrate in Missouri’s state capitol for legal abortion. On weekends I cleaned lead paint out of apartments housing poor single moms. I wrote for and helped layout our local underground newspaper — the St Louis Outlaw. Then on Friday nights I delivered it to bookstores up the Mississippi River. Back on campus I watched the ROTC building burn to the ground.

Working Class Roots and The Pill

It was all a far cry from my conservative working-class roots in 1950s Victoria, Canada. Despite scholarships I dropped out of university after my first year and left my mother’s house. I suppose it had a lot to do with sexual desire.

I moved to Vancouver on the mainland, it was 1962. In the typing pool at a huge pulp and paper company, I learned about the New Pill. Taking these little pills every day for a monthly cycle was spurring a revolution in sexual behavior and offered up a world where women could make sexual choices for themselves. It is difficult now to conjure the terror by which teenage girls like me lived during the 1950s — the fear and shame of pregnancy under the tyranny of virginity. Boys played by different rules. With “the pill’ came a new promiscuous after-work life in cities. I was energized by it all. Who wouldn’t be on the volume of estrogen that was pulsing through our bloodstreams? We didn’t understand this yet.

Whether it was my restlessness and curiosity or all those hormones in 1964, after dropping out of university again, I was bouncing toward San Francisco on a Grey Hound bus. I immediately landed a job as a secretary. My secretarial skills would continue to keep me afloat for the rest of the sixties even after I returned to university.

The Bay Area was home to multiple revolutions — from the political to the cultural, from the spiritual to the chemical — and I was absorbing them all. From Human Be-Ins to the United Farmworkers’ Grape Boycott, from Peace marches to Black Power. After meeting a radical professor at a Black Panther Party fundraiser in Oakland, I was soon following him to his first teaching gig at Washington University in St Louis. 1968. That’s when I returned to university and became a rebel.

Dreams of Utopia

In St Louis, our lives feverish with activism, we were convinced we could jumpstart a different future. Peaceful. Egalitarian. Non-racist. Feminist. Environmentally toxic free. Communal. And joyful. Our process — participatory democracy. Intellectually we knew it was magical thinking to believe in such a Utopia. It was the process of striving for those ideals that counted. Still, our dreams were always about that idealistic future.

By 1972 I had been on the pill for almost a decade and had developed a breast lump — fortunately benign — and had it removed. That same year, Barbara Seaman’s book, The Pill, appeared warning of the dangers of the high dosages of estrogen in that first decade of pills. Women were developing alarming levels of breast and uterine cancer. I began to question the pill, went off of it, and immediately got pregnant.

My boyfriend, Carl, and I were too engaged in work, study and activism which included dodging FBI agents and informants who had infiltrated St Louis organizations, to consider having a child. In the Bay Area that summer where abortion was legal sometime between working with a posse of women on the first feminist news program (all volunteer) at KPFA (Pacifica radio) and researching the effects of pesticides on California peaches for Environment magazine, I had an abortion.

There was hardly time or space to reflect upon that decision, although I remember a generalized sadness. In addition, after four intense years, my relationship with Carl was unraveling. It was not an atmosphere for a child to enter our lives. Shortly after that abortion, I moved out.

I may have gone back on the pill but unhappily. Yet the alternative forms of contraception were no more attractive. The serious health issues caused by IUDs, the awkwardness of the diaphragm. None of it appealed to me. And I didn’t trust men to take the lead in contraception. This too contributed to my decision.

The War Ends with Economic Recession

In 1973 with an MA in Sociology, I moved to Boston to teach “Creating a Feminist Media” at an alternative graduate school, Cambridge-Godard, and to work with The Red Tape Collective at a commercial progressive FM station. We produced the first feminist radio hour broadcast on a commercial station in the U.S. I earned about $2,000 that year teaching and an occasional $45 co-producing an hour of radio every week on feminist issues like child care and secretaries organizing. I rustled up extra dollars by typing dissertations for Iranian PhD students at MIT.

The drawn out ending of the Vietnam war — from Peace Treaties to official departure — created a huge vacuum for so many of us who had defined much of our lives in opposition to it. The sense of communal purpose, of shared values, of belonging to something that was so much larger than our individual selves, the risk-taking, the simple output of energy, all that was collapsing.

Adding to that period of the war ending, the country sank into a serious economic recession that scourged on through the 70s. Heavy government spending on the War, sky-rocketing gas prices caused by the “Arab oil boycott” that sparked an energy crisis, along with a Wall Street stock crash in 1973 — all contributed to the downturn.

Suddenly, our non-careerist collective sensibilities were being eroded by the need to scramble for paid work in a collapsing economy. Since I bailed on a PhD program, I now didn’t have the qualifications to teach at a university. I knew what I didn’t want — to return to the secretarial pool. My imagination and aspirations had been charged by learning how to produce radio documentaries, by experimenting with the New Journalism, by learning photography and a new technology — video — that had been developed during the Vietnam War. When I went to high school and started university I had no idea these were skills I could learn. Writers. Producers. Photographers. That was the world of men. In fact, white men pretty much dominated and controlled everything in those days — from universities to the press, from radio stations to businesses including restaurants where I now sought jobs.

By the end of 1974 my mental health was stressed by poverty. I was a woman in a world not yet ready to offer me an equal place at the table. Since I had spent so much time critiquing the “corporate owned, male defined media” I was largely uninterested in jobs there. I had been shaped by a profoundly moral and idealistic movement. I had built an identity around creatively produced radio documentaries that revealed a world under-reported or untouched by mainstream media. Giving voice to the voiceless, we used to chant. Only alternative settings would share that ethos. But those institutions expected us to work for nothing.

I had also helped start the first women’s public affairs TV show at a local Boston station — for free — continuing a centuries long tradition of women’s volunteer work! Meanwhile, the male deciders at the commercial radio station cancelled our Women’s Hour. All of these layers of the political and economic substrata fostered my decision.

It was also a despairing winter — exacerbated by living in a basement room of a row house with a shared bathroom and hotplate. Columbus Avenue in those days was considered part of “the ghetto” in Boston, now all gentrified. There was a funeral parlor next door and I watched them bring the bodies in the back door unceremoniously, stiff lumps on a gurney. And then looked on as expensive coffins emerged from the front door. Ominous five-gallon glass bottles, emptied of their embalming fluid, stacked up in the back alley. In that basement with that view, I made my decision.

It was a brutal winter. Sirens wailed at night as fires erupted in the rooming houses on our frozen street. Without heat, poor tenants were using electric or gas heaters that could ignite a curtain. I watched one night as an elderly woman and her infant grandchild jumped to their deaths. That winter, in that bone-chilling, impoverished reality, I made my decision.

Living on Columbus Avenue, I sometimes popped into a tiny jazz club at the end of my block late at night. For the price of a beer I could listen to jazz students from the Berkeley School of Music practice. There I met black hookers warming up before heading out into the frigid winds. They explained that they ended up on the streets because of the racism in the girlie clubs downtown. I began interviewing them, following them to court and meeting the judge. I turned it into a radio documentary about de-criminalizing prostitution. It took me a month to produce. The station agreed to air it. I earned something like $50.

With the wolf at my door, I kept pushing away the sorry prospect of the subservience of secretarial work or smiling for tips, as a waitress. Not sure I could even find that work in this economic malaise.

People familiar with this period could ask, why didn’t you live in a collective like many others? In Boston I initially lived with two other women, but one of them began to consume my identity and life, even dating the same men I did. I couldn’t wait to escape. Besides, as an only child, I had always been fiercely independent with a strong sense of privacy. Collective work, yes. Collective living. Tough for me.

I couldn’t qualify for unemployment. I had no medical insurance. I applied for welfare benefits — $80 a month with food stamps. Although I learned a great deal about how that system treated people, I felt guilty collecting and stopped after a few months when I landed a waitress job. While on welfare, with access to Medicaid, I made my decision.

What’s Love Got to Do with It?

My decision finally came from a deep imaginative failure to envision a future in a long-lasting love relationship so that a father would be around for child rearing. My thoughts were shaped by my mother’s experience. She left a psychologically abusive relationship with my father when I was two. I watched her struggle as a single working mom, yet I was thrilled to live with my grandparents and uncles. She wasn’t. She wanted a guy to make sure we could afford to live in a neighborhood with good schools. She remarried someone who wasn’t kind to me, and who, much to my relief, died when I was fifteen. Although my mum always worked whether single or married, I did not want to be alone raising a child or feel that I had to marry an iffy prospect in order to launch a child into the world. I didn’t have the heart for it. I didn’t crave an identity as mother. I was too depressed.

I felt like the bottom had fallen out. That’s when I made that decision. I don’t remember environmental concerns being part of it.

Why History Matters?

“History…does not refer principally to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in everything we do.” James Baldwin

What I learned from reflecting upon my personal and political history related here is that my grief over the loss of political or community engagement — and love — over the failure to imagine either in my future, can be debilitating, and lead to feeling lost, isolated and hopeless. It can also lead to individual decisions about bringing a child into the world.

Today, given our existential threat, whether young people decide to limit the number of children they have or have none at all, it is the commitment to work with others to confront government policy and change the way we live, that will bring hope.

In her article Heglar insists that African Americans have much to teach us all about building such a movement, about courage, about survival:

“You don’t fight something like that because you think you will win. You fight it because you have to. Because surrendering dooms so much more than yourself, but everything that comes after you. Acquiescence, in this case, is what James Baldwin called “the sickness unto death.”

Is it OK to Have Kids? By Gail Pellett. Medium ,  November 13, 2019.

Gail Pellett is a director, producer of documentary films for PBS, features for NPR, author "Forbidden Fruit - 1980 Beijing," articles for Washington Post, Mother Jones, & more

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, freshman congresswoman and social media sensation, has taken time out from baiting Donald Trump and establishment members of her own party to raise a profound moral question for us all: in light of the escalating climate emergency, should we still be having children?

During a recent Q&A live-streamed on Instagram, apparently shot while she was pottering in her kitchen, the rising star of the Democratic party – and one of the few frontline politicians to get the scale of the environmental emergency – pulled no punches in telling viewers that unless we take urgent, radical action on emissions, there is no hope for the future. “It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?”

With this one question put to her 2.5 million Instagram followers, Ocasio-Cortez has stumbled into a highly contentious area. Population has long been a controversial factor in the climate change debate; one recent study said the most effective thing individuals can do to address the crisis was to have one less child.

However, critics insist we should focus instead on overconsumption, and that putting the onus on individuals to address climate change obscures the systematic nature of the crisis. Crucially, they say, it lets the real culprits – fossil fuel corporations and successive global governments’ inaction – off the hook.

And even if you accept the premise that having fewer children will tackle climate change, there is also the thorny question of exactly who should be having fewer kids: an American is responsible for 40 times the emissions produced by a Bangladeshi, but often those who advocate population reduction focus on women in the developing world.

Ocasio-Cortez is not encouraging people stop having children. And as the leading advocate of the Green New Deal plan – which aims to radically transform the US economy by 2030 – she is one of the few politicians to be working on a plan that might just offer a way to avoid the worst impacts of this crisis.

But perhaps she is raising a more profound issue. Faced with a future of social and political breakdown, flooding, deadly heatwaves and food shortages – and a world full of politicians in various states of denial – why shouldn’t young people question whether bringing children in the world is a good idea?

The answer is one we must all grapple with. But it is worth remembering that throughout history – even in the most horrific circumstances – people have continued to have children. It is a profoundly human act.

And the thousands of young people who took to the streets to voice their concern around the climate crisis in recent months are a reminder that often – far from being the problem – children embody a profound hope for the future.

Is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez right to ask if the climate means we should have fewer children? By Matthew Taylor.  The Guardian , February  27, 2019. 

Having kids is bad for the environment.

Or is it the deficit? Or wait, no, it’s selfish because the world has gone to hell. Whichever one you choose, the important thing to remember is that, according to a growing number of liberals, reproducing the species is the equivalent of buying a McMansion and running the A/C with all the windows open.

Or maybe having babies is more like, say, pouring the concrete on an illegal Israeli settlement? “The egoism of child-bearing is like the egoism of colonizing a country,” says the narrator of Sheila Heti’s critically acclaimed novel Motherhood. “How assaulted I feel when I hear that a person has had three children, four, five, more. . . . It feels greedy, overbearing, rude.”

In the Guardian alone, the past two years have seen headlines such as “Would you give up having children to save the planet? Meet the couples who have”; “Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children”; “‘It’s the breaking of a taboo’: the parents who regret having children,” “Want to save your marriage? Don’t have kids.” In the New York Times, “No Children Because of Climate Change? Some People Are Considering It.” At Business Insider, “7 reasons people shouldn’t have children, according to science.” And this new logic is quickly making its way through liberal culture writ large: “Feminist funnywoman Caitlin Moran says the planet doesn’t need your babies.”

It’s hard not to get the message. Yet it seems to be falling on deaf ears.

According to a recent CDC study, the gap between the number of children American women want to have and the number they’re likely to have “has risen to the highest level in forty years.” The number of women who want a child in the future has only increased since 2002. And the only age group that’s seen a slight uptick in fertility rates are women between forty and forty-four.

“Americans are improving their ability to avoid unwanted pregnancies far faster than they are improving the ability to achieve desired pregnancy,” as the New York Times put it. With the most expensive health care in the world (and tens of millions still uninsured), decades of stagnant wages, and skyrocketing education and housing costs, having kids has never been so expensive. The Department of Agriculture estimates that it’ll cost an average of $233,000 to raise a child born in 2015 through her seventeenth birthday — and that doesn’t even include college tuition, another uniquely American exorbitance. More and more, bringing a child into the world is a dream many simply can’t afford.

It’s here in this misanthropic anti-natalism that liberalism finds an ally in conservatism. The Brookings Institute put deferring parenthood as one of their “Three Simple Rules Poor Teens Should Follow to Join the Middle Class.” It’s a line no different than what we’ve heard from conservatives like George Will for decades now: you’re poor because of the immoral choices you’ve made.

It recalls the unabashedly racist mid-1990s campaign when both Republicans and the Clinton administration joined together to denounce the scourge of “unwed teen mothers” as a mortal threat to children’s health and family values — “a bedrock issue of character and personal responsibility,” as Clinton’s own 1994 proposal put it. At the time, another set of Democrats went even further and attempted to include a provision that denied all food stamp benefits and Aid to Families with Dependent Children to unwed mothers (and their children) under age twenty-one.

Despite the fearmongering over these supposedly shameful and selfish young mothers, these women were in fact making the best decisions for their families. Dr Arline T. Geronimus has argued that, contra both conservative and liberal shaming of “poor teen moms,” the choice of low-income women to have children at a young age represents a logical decision when faced with the constraints of being poor in America:

          ‘If she finds employment, the wages and benefits she can command may not offset the costs of being a working mother. She cannot expect maternity leave; nor is accessible or affordable day care available that would free her from reliance on kin for childcare once she does return to work . . . her greatest chance of long-term labor force attachment will be if her children’s pre-school years coincide with her years of peak access to social and practical support provided by relatively healthy kin.’

With this enormous gap between the desires of women and the grueling realities of being a working-class mother in America, what could possibly explain so many liberals’ strange new anti-natalism?

Even in France, long known for their generous natalist welfare state, their new thirty-five-year-old minister for gender equality is signaling a willingness to rewrite commitments to mothers down to threadbare American levels. “I always notice the energy and the volunteerism that exist in America,” France’s Marlène Schiappa recently told the New Yorker. “Regarding the place of women, the reflex in France is to say, ‘What’s the state going to do for me?’” Quelle horreur!

Diminished horizons, lowered expectations, and doing more with less — this is the twenty-first-century liberal program for the toiling masses. In other words, it’s a continuation of liberalism’s forty-year program of austerity, a result of its total abandonment of the trade union movement. A decent living, a home of your own, and a comfy retirement — a meager share in our society’s immense collective wealth — are all long-abandoned promises. Now, apparently, so is having kids.

More and more, liberalism finds itself unable to imagine any way out of the hell of life on the margins in 2018. Instead, they’ve begun to see their role as something like moral sentinels: piously observing and managing the collapse. It’s a liberal-left that no longer believes it can change the world and instead, in the words of Adolph Reed, finds its most important mission in simply “bearing witness to suffering.” They either believe a mass political challenge to capital and climate collapse is impossible, or simply undesirable. Either way, their answer is the same — not a revived labor movement but a new moralism of austerity and self-sacrifice.

That inevitably means asking women to adapt to the logic of raising children under the dictates of the market instead of challenging those strictures. “Lean In” and call it victory.

It’s an attitude that would have bewildered men and women alike in East Germany. Women in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) had both a robust welfare state to help them raise children — free daycare started just weeks after a child’s birth and included breakfast and lunch — as well as a much higher workforce participation rate. Abortion was legalized in 1972, years before West Germany. For women in the East, divorce too was quick, easy, and cost nothing. They were also more likely to feel confident in their physical appearance and reported higher rates of sexual satisfaction than their cousins in the West. For all its political authoritarianism, the ability to raise kids in the GDR didn’t hinge on the ability to keep a nuclear family together.

Now, in a unified Germany, daycare openings are expensive and competitive, with a national shortage of 120,000 nursery workers — all low-paid work, of course. In the East, birth rates plunged immediately after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Yet today, women in the eastern half of the country still have children significantly younger than their western sisters and boast a smaller pay gap between men — in the western half of the country, that gap is comparable to ours in the United States.

Today, the only nations that come close to East Germany’s commitment to providing women this kind of freedom are the countries where the organized working classes have made successful incursions against capitalism’s imperatives. Dutch women — not “Lean In” American women — are, according to studies, the happiest in the world. And hardly any of them work full time. Thanks to trade union mobilization, their working class won the ability to prioritize their freedom over any “duty” to the job market or husbands.

Here, then, we have the root of liberalism’s newfound anti-natalism — the very logic of capital. Capitalism needs new workers and consumers; it just doesn’t want to pay for their upbringing. Those costs, in the logic of capital, should be passed off onto the individual and the household.

Which is why today in the United States, the FBI and ICE are called in to prevent baby formula theft — locking it behind glass cases in the grocery store is preferable to simply socializing it and distributing it for free. Instead of the state providing collectively for the upbringing of children, our police literally chase down biological fathers to collect child support. In this view, it’s better to coerce a nuclear family into staying together than for the state to collectively provide childcare, education, and health care services to parents and their children. It’s shotgun marriage as public policy.

We’ve gone from the conservative postwar view of women as dutiful baby-factories, to telling them that they should delay pregnancy as long as it takes for them to get a career off the ground and build their brand — possibly forever. While reproductive medicine is currently making enormous strides, in vitro fertilization (IVF), ovulation-enhancing medicines, egg storage, and artificial insemination are prohibitively expensive. Without a truly universal health care system, these scientific advances will always be reserved for the affluent.

Asking women to wait to have kids until they have launched a career and saved up enough money is just the obverse of commanding women to stay at home and make babies for their husbands. Both ask women to defer not to their desires, but to an all-powerful abstraction: the market, the environment, patriarchy, or even a twisted faux feminism.

It’s important for those of us in the professional classes to remember that, for the vast majority of working people, the labor market is not a potential site of self-realization and never will be. Instead, it’s a brutal arena where you’re forced to trade a third of your life in order to survive. In 2018, a “do what you love” career is far out of reach for all but the affluent. What the professional classes will never understand — both conservatives who shame young single mothers or liberals who demand that women defer parenthood until they can afford Baby Bjorn — is just how rewarding child-rearing is for those who are under no delusions that capitalism will ever provide validation.

How can we ever win a program that socializes the costs of bringing children into the world if so many liberals still see the desire to have kids as something like a timeshare in Vegas — a costly, foolish, and tacky investment mostly for the rubes? Instead of parroting this gross and misanthropic politics, we should demand that capital stop shirking off the costs of childhood onto workers and instead socialize them — free Finnish baby boxes and a Medicare for All program that covers not only all prenatal and pediatric care, but that makes IVF a right and not a luxury. A program that hires and trains hundreds of thousands to work in high-quality state day cares. The only way we’re going to get any of this is through a revived labor movement — not creepy (and inevitably racist) “population control” thinkpieces.

Why shouldn’t a twenty-something be able to have a kid and still have the freedom to embark on a career? Why shouldn’t a young single mother be able to go to college while leaving her child safely in the care of the state? And why should she need to find or “keep” a relationship with a man just to be able to provide for her kids?

A true freedom for women would mean the ability to walk away from the false choice of “babies, education, or career?” altogether. Right now, however, only the affluent can truly have it all.

That’s anything but just.

It’s Okay to Have Children. By Connor Kilpatrick.  Jacobin Magazine , August 22, 2018.

The greatest impact individuals can have in fighting climate change is to have one fewer child, according to a new study that identifies the most effective ways people can cut their carbon emissions.

The next best actions are selling your car, avoiding long flights, and eating a vegetarian diet. These reduce emissions many times more than common green activities, such as recycling, using low energy light bulbs or drying washing on a line. However, the high impact actions are rarely mentioned in government advice and school textbooks, researchers found.

Carbon emissions must fall to two tonnes of CO2 per person by 2050 to avoid severe global warming, but in the US and Australia emissions are currently 16 tonnes per person and in the UK seven tonnes. “That’s obviously a really big change and we wanted to show that individuals have an opportunity to be a part of that,” said Kimberly Nicholas, at Lund University in Sweden and one of the research team.

The new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, sets out the impact of different actions on a comparable basis. By far the biggest ultimate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.

The figure was calculated by totting up the emissions of the child and all their descendants, then dividing this total by the parent’s lifespan. Each parent was ascribed 50% of the child’s emissions, 25% of their grandchildren’s emissions and so on.

“We recognise these are deeply personal choices. But we can’t ignore the climate effect our lifestyle actually has,” said Nicholas. “It is our job as scientists to honestly report the data. Like a doctor who sees the patient is in poor health and might not like the message ‘smoking is bad for you’, we are forced to confront the fact that current emission levels are really bad for the planet and human society.”

“In life, there are many values on which people make decisions and carbon is only one of them,” she added. “I don’t have children, but it is a choice I am considering and discussing with my fiance. Because we care so much about climate change that will certainly be one factor we consider in the decision, but it won’t be the only one.”

Overpopulation has been a controversial factor in the climate change debate, with some pointing out that an American is responsible for 40 times the emissions produced by a Bangladeshi and that overconsumption is the crucial issue. The new research comes a day after researchers blamed overpopulation and overconsumption on the “biological annihilation” of wildlife which has started a mass extinction of species on the planet.

Nicholas said that many of the choices had positive effects as well, such as a healthier diet, as meat consumption in developed countries is about five times higher than recommended by health authorities. Cleaner transport also cuts air pollution, and walking and cycling can reduce obesity. “It is not a sacrifice message,” she said. “It is trying to find ways to live a good life in a way that leaves a good atmosphere for the planet. I’ve found it really positive to make many of these changes.”

The researchers analysed dozens of sources from Europe, North America and Japan to calculate the carbon savings individuals in richer nations can make. They found getting rid of a car saved 2.4 tonnes a year, avoiding a return transatlantic flight saved 1.6 tonnes and becoming vegetarian saved 0.8 tonnes a year.

These actions saved the same carbon whichever country an individual lived in, but others varied. The savings from switching to an electric car depend on how green electricity generation is, meaning big savings can be made in Australia but the savings in Belgium are six times lower. Switching your home energy supplier to a green energy company also varied, depending on whether the green energy displaces fossil fuel energy or not.

Nicholas said the low-impact actions, such as recycling, were still worth doing: “All of those are good things to do. But they are more of a beginning than an end. They are certainly not sufficient to tackle the scale of the climate challenge that we face.”

The researchers found that government advice in the US, Canada, EU and Australia rarely mentioned the high impact actions, with only the EU citing eating less meat and only Australia citing living without a car. None mentioned having one fewer child. In an analysis of school textbooks on Canada only 4% of the recommendations were high impact.

Chris Goodall, an author on low carbon living and energy, said: “The paper usefully reminds us what matters in the fight against global warming. But in some ways it will just reinforce the suspicion of the political right that the threat of climate change is simply a cover for reducing people’s freedom to live as they want.

“Population reduction would probably reduce carbon emissions but we have many other tools for getting global warming under control,” he said. “Perhaps more importantly, cutting the number of people on the planet will take hundreds of years. Emissions reduction needs to start now.”

Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children. By Damian Carrington. The Guardian , July 12, 2017.