Do We Need To Continue to Have Children?

“Why would anyone have kids?” my boyfriend muttered, looking down at his phone screen, smouldering tangerine with footage of flames tearing through our state, razing hundreds of homes.

We were lying face-to-face with a fan, learning about the destruction just as we do for all modern disasters. We pulled down to refresh our feeds incrementally while news outlets pushed articles onto home screens.

Months before the coronavirus virus outbreak hit Australia, we were already acclimatizing to a dystopia in that face masks were selling fast as people scrambled to protect their lungs and lungs from the smoke that was billowing across much of the country. The bushfire season, which claimed nine lives and destroyed more than 3000 houses, was deemed longer and more deadly by emergency and fire chiefs.

Samuel McPaul, a volunteer firefighter and volunteer firefighter, died on 30 December 2019 when extreme winds swept the truck he was riding in off the road. It was engulfed in a tornado of flames. His wife was pregnant with their first baby. Two days later, a couple of hours into the new decade, Dr Steve Robson drove through Australia’s capital city, Canberra, as it recorded its worst air quality on record. The air quality index reading peaked that morning at 7700 — more than 23 times the hazardous AQI of 300. As he made his way towards the hospital to deliver a child, his headlights blazed through the smoke. He noticed that the beam of light he was using to examine his patient was also clouded by smog when he switched on his spotlight. “This baby was born into bushfire smoke,” he told me afterwards.

Photo Credit: Brett Hemmings/Getty Images

Robson reflects on the births two decades ago, when he felt an unadulterated joy in bringing new life into the world. It was a different time when parents believed their children had plenty and that nothing was impossible. He laughs that he had just survived the Y2K virus. “There was a sense that people could solve big problems but that sense seems to be very ephemeral, it has evaporated,” he said. “Every single mother-to-be and every single dad-to-be I’ve seen today has expressed to me anxiety about what the future holds for the child they’re carrying.”

“This baby was born into bushfire smoke,” he told me afterwards.

Dr Nisha Khot from Melbourne was interviewed by me. She said that pregnant women nearing delivery were asking whether they should induce labor due to bushfire smoke. This, unbeknownst, would cause the worst air quality in the entire world a week later. “They’re asking, ‘Is my baby safer inside or outside of me right now?’, they’re asking, ‘What does this mean for my baby’s growth?’ and ‘Do I need extra ultrasounds?’ and I have to say, ‘I can ultrasound scan but it won’t pick up any effect of the bushfire smoke that may or may not occur because there isn’t a test that picks that up’…Those are the difficult conversations.”

People have a tendency to start families in times of war, recession, and ecological destruction. However, millennials are statistically less likely than their predecessors to be worried about climate change. Perhaps because we cannot deny it, or because they are more likely not to get married. A survey of thousands of millennials across 13 countries at the end of 2020 showed even a global health and economic crisis couldn’t shift climate change and protecting the environment as their top concern, above unemployment, healthcare and disease prevention, and income inequality.

“Maybe it’s the case that every generation has felt themselves at the end of the earth, on the brink of disaster, though I suspect never with as much evidence as we have now,” Léa Antigny writes. She describes a “fundamentally physical, bordering on erotic desire to feel pregnant”, to sense new life growing inside of her even at a time when rising temperatures will affect the timing and seasons of our natural world.

“I want to be reduced by love to just bodies and to grow a family from it. But what comes after that?” Antigny realises that she might be “rich enough to shield her descendants”, as the New York TimesIt is the incoming effects of climate change. “Is the fact of my privilege reason enough to forge on? I want to be able to answer why beyond simply saying, I want to, and I can.”

I am still deciding. But if the answer was yes, would I be able to find and hold my why, or would it be overshadowed by a who? How the hell is that possible? How can this earth be so beautiful?

Photo Credit: Unsplash

Alex, my friend, says that although he has always pictured himself as a father, climate change has played a major role in deciding whether or otherwise he and his wife will have children. “Some days I’m really hopeful, like at the start of spring I sit in the backyard with Mary and we’re surrounded by flowers in bloom in a garden that cannot be stopped and the bees are thriving and everything smells glorious and hopeful and I think we are going to have a dream life,” he says. “And then the bushfire season starts.”

Their deepest worry boils down always to whether existence is a blessing. “Are we leaving behind a world that is better or are we kind of cursing someone to deal with the impacts of whatever it is we have done, or if not done, been mildly complicit in?”

Friedrich Nietzsche described how Silenus, a friend of the god Dionysus, declared the best thing for men is “not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing”. At a picnic, my friend with a toddler says to me “no one regrets being born”.

“How do you prepare? How do you prepare for having children and then how do you prepare children for whatever the world is going to be next?”

This tension, along with guilt, hangs above me, and other people I know who are undecided about having babies. Although I feel it in waves it is hard for my heart to accept the deep-throated antinatalism of many of my peers. Even in my darkest moments, I can’t bring myself to accept the period between birth and death is so perpetually painful and sparingly joyous that I’d never have jumped aboard. It is difficult to predict exactly how the climate changes will affect the next generation. So Alex and his wife feel ill-equipped when they try to imagine a life with children. “How do you prepare? How do you prepare for having children and then how do you prepare children for whatever the world is going to be next?”

I want to know how to temper the atmosphere of climate dread. I want to be able to evaluate whether I was willing to place another carbon footprint on the earth. And, more importantly, if I would wish to impose these increasingly dangerous conditions on another human.

If I make the decision not to have children and the environment becomes the main feature of my decision, I will need to be able explain to myself why the prospect was too daunting. This is even if I don’t care about blanketing smoke and rising tides. I must have a reason why I want to have children. It must feel less fragile than the foetus inside me. So I searched for people who were forced into looking at the future of the climate crisis. They were swinging between fear and hope, just like me.

Joëlle Gergis is an award-winning climate scientist. She is the lead author of the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that evaluates the scientific basis for climate change so that governments around the globe can develop climate policies.

“I’m watching the things we talk about theoretically actually unfold on a planetary scale, that is the stuff that freaks me out,” she says. “There is no analogue in the geologic record for where we are. We are kind of off the map…We have never had 7.6 billion people on the planet altering the earth’s surface and the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean on this scale.”

When we speak, Joëlle has just worked through the weekend to meet an IPCC deadline and she’s knackered. The workload is grueling but Joëlle wants to know that at this “important juncture” for turning emissions around, she did what she could. Joëlle is an expert in Southern Hemisphere climate variability and, I soon notice, an expert in loss — the potential, the inevitable and the irretrievable. “Kids that are alive today are going to see the Great Barrier Reef deteriorate and die, and kids that come after that are going to learn about it in the same way we watched grainy archival footage to learn about [extinct] Tasmanian Tigers,” she says.

As a young child, I was with my father to the Great Barrier Reef. It was surreal and borderline unreal. The tiny, striped clownfish weaving through translucent anemones, giant manta rays soaring up steep coral shelves, and the dopey green sea Turtles, most of whom were at minimum twice my age, drifted past me as I swam into my snorkel. At that age, my understanding of environmental catastrophe was a series of disjointed incidents in which criminal corporations or careless citizens harmed innocent animals — dolphins starving to death, their noses caught in plastic bottle rings, harpooned whales bleeding out on the deck of a ship, sea birds black and greasy from petroleum oil spills.

These individual battles for the survival of distinct species were difficult but possible. I didn’t understand how changes in the ocean temperature, runoff and pollution and overexposure to sunlight would stress, bleach and eventually kill this dreamlike ecosystem. There have been. Five global mass bleaching eventsSince my birth, I have been a part of the Great Barrier Reef. I know that if I had children, they would not be able to experience the beauty of what should be protected as a national treasure. But the loss is greater than the reef itself. Even though coral hosts only a quarter of all marine species, it still provides a great opportunity for many generations to enjoy the reef’s beauty. It feels like defeat. We didn’t preserve this UNESCO World Heritage site from rising sea temperatures, we didn’t guard a 46,000-year-old sacred Indigenous site from mining companies, we didn’t protect the 250 hectares of tropical rainforest (previously thought to be non-flammable) from the flames. There is so much at stake and not enough political will to save it. Joëlle uses the word “planetary” eight times in our conversation to describe the scale of the climate crisis. Each time, I feel my stomach drop.

“We have never had 7.6 billion people on the planet altering the earth’s surface and the chemistry of the atmosphere and the ocean on this scale.”

As Joëlle watched flames destroy more than 20 percent of Australia’s forests in a single bushfire season, she felt as she had when her father died — a deep awareness that something so loved was now gone. Grief. “The planet has always been able to cope with us, hasn’t it?” Joëlle ponders. “Climate change is taking the worst, most extreme aspects of Australian climate variability and just amplifying it.”

Joëlle says that the 2019-2020 bushfire season will be average by 2040 and cool by 2060. “This will absolutely barrel through everyone’s life, whether you’re holed up in your home from regular 50-degree summer temperatures or your property becomes flood-prone and uninsurable because you live on the eastern seaboard or you’re paying $13 a kilo for bananas because the farmers who grow our food keep having crops devastated.”

Joëlle does not have children but she does not judge anyone making this decision and says self-flagellation is unproductive. “I’m not sure if it is helpful for people to feel even worse about something that is already a very fraught and deeply personal question because then the issue becomes very heavy. I think if you are bringing kids into the world, you just have to go into it eyes wide open knowing that they are not going to have the life you had,” she says. “I think it needs to be really firmly grounded in the reality that it’s going to be a more dangerous world, particularly if we don’t turn things around.”

Rebecca, a local GP, noticed that babies born to patients who had been pregnant during the previous bushfire season were arriving early and underweight as the summer approached in 2020. The placenta is usually pink and healthy, and it comes out easily during birth. However, these babies were grey and grainy due to pack-a-day smokers. This meant that they would need to be removed.

“One patient brought in photos and I know what placentas look like, I’ve seen a lot of births during my obstetrics training, and this one was just horrifying,” Rebecca tells me. “The placenta is a magic filter that feeds our next generation and we have these smoke particles lodging in there.”

Rebecca still lives on the land she grew-up on. The dam that had supplied water to the farm for 60+ years is now completely dry. The summer berries now arrive in spring. The farm was destroyed by fires a few years ago. She had to evacuate twice with her children and dogs, while her husband remained to protect it from the flames. “I have been in that position holding a six-week-old baby and racing out of the house while a bushfire comes over the hill,” she says. “For three months of the year, actually now six months of the year, we have generators ready, we have fuel ready, we have bags packed ready to go at any moment.”

Rebecca is passionate about preventative health — she speaks in factories and at pubs to men in lower socioeconomic demographics about reducing alcohol, smoking, and blood pressure. “Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and think what is the point of doing all this work every day to save people from having heart attacks if we’re all going to be living in a world that is two degrees hotter by 2050?”

Low birthrates, premature birth, miscarriage, and the presence of air pollutants have all been linked to low birth rates. A friend and I sit at a café, estimating the ideal month someone would conceive to avoid smoke damage to a foetus. “I guess in like March, so the baby comes during summer and you’re inhaling the smoke when it is most developed and almost ready to be born?” It is disorienting to imagine the dangers of climate change reaching a baby when they are yet to feel the safety of their parents’ touch.

Chris, an evolutionary and conservation scientist, was a complete loser when I asked him about his deep desire for a family, despite the fact that he sees so much biodiversity loss each day. There is an urgency to his work — mapping the consequences of rapid environmental change for native animals — but he logs it on a timescale that makes most species, including humans, look like an imperceptible last-minute arrival on earth.

“What is the point of doing all this work every day to save people from having heart attacks if we’re all going to be living in a world that is two degrees hotter by 2050?”

“Do I think about climate change? Constantly, because I study any rapid changes or novel scenarios that shift the playing field and totally disrupt species,” he tells me. Chris is currently helping to develop a model that can better calculate what proportion of animals die under different fire scenarios, a project that came about when scientists realised they didn’t have a way to accurately guess the animal death toll in that 2019-2020 bushfire season.

The latest imperfect estimate is that three billion animals were present within the areas that were affected by the fires. These animals long ago learned to burrow lower or climb higher when they sense fire, then a carefully managed phenomenon, but scientists are wondering how native species will cope with the increased severity and frequency of Australia’s new fire regime. Any significant environmental change can be a trigger for extinction or adaptation. “Extinction will win if the change is too quick, and the problem is changes are happening at a rate that is unprecedented,” Chris says, before correcting himself. “Well, there have been multiple global extinctions across the planet.”

As we talk, I fleetingly group humans in with our treasured marsupials and reptiles for their ingenuity and resilience — a comforting comparison — until I remember that we, settlers, are both the perpetrator and the victim, the invading and the endangered species; we are lighting the match and then fleeing the fire. Over the past 20 years, Indigenous community-based landowner groups in Australia’s very fire-prone north have used traditional fire management practices — burning early in the dry season instead of suppressing fires that ignite late in the dry season, which is a post-colonial practice that creates bigger and more severe fires. I wonder how these practices can be sustained in extreme heat and drought.

Photo Credit: Jo-Anne McArthur/Unsplash

Chris doesn’t think people should deny themselves a family because of climate change.

“It is like when people can’t really appreciate evolutionary change because it happens on a scale that is incomprehensible to us,” he says. “This problem is incomprehensibly big and it is more than any individual can take on and while I think people should live responsibly, I don’t think they should be racked with guilt for choosing to have a child which is a totally natural decision to make.”

His desire to become a father feels more than biological. “I can’t really describe it but there is an innate desire in me to have [fatherhood] as an experience and I don’t know how I know this or why I feel this way but I feel like I could make a child’s life happy and fulfilled and good,” he says, his voice changing in a way I can’t understand in the moment. “This is ridiculous but you’re the first person that’s going to hear this…this has become much more, ah, practical than theoretical because we just found out that [my wife’s] pregnant.”

Chris struggles to explain the enormity of evolutionary timeframes. I struggle to describe the joyous feeling of celebration that echoed through the phone line. In between his peals of laughter and my blaring exclamations and repeated congratulations, I later hear him on the tape in stoked disbelief say quietly, almost to himself, “Yeah so…I am going to be a father.” Hope itself needed to become more practical than theoretical. “My feeling is even when things are difficult, it is better to be alive than not to be.”

“I don’t think they should be racked with guilt for choosing to have a child which is a totally natural decision to make.”

Writer Mark O’Connell wonders whether he has selfishly acquired a new sense of optimism about the world at the expense of his son. “Given the world, given the situation, the question that remains is whether having children is a statement of hope, an insistence on the beauty and meaningfulness and basic worth of being here, or an act of human sacrifice. Or is it perhaps some convoluted entanglement of both, a sacrifice of the child — by means of incurring its birth — to the ideal of hope?” he writes. “You want to believe that it is you who have done your children a favour by “giving” them life, but the reverse is at least as true, and probably more so.”

Although it is hard to admit, I find myself drawn to the joy of early motherhood. It is self-interest — I’m reaching back to a time before I could see any rottenness in the world, before I was aware of my own fallibility, before I lay awake at night obsessing over my collisions with all that I found painful in the universe and in myself, pressing my fingers into these bruises, mauve with shame and fear.

A proximity to children tugs your gaze beyond your own navel and into the present moment — following their eye line and experiencing with them the novelty of things you take for granted, answering the disarmingly specific questions about how things work, lunging to prevent bumps and falls, and the sheer relentlessness of cleaning and feeding. I can’t hear my own neuroses above the noisy nowness of children.

Jenny Odell believes that our culture places novelty and unchecked, cancerous growth ahead of all that is cyclical. “Our very idea of productivity is premised on the idea of producing something new, whereas we do not tend to see maintenance and care as productive in the same way,” she writes.

Is it fair that I produce, primarily for me, a human being of hope to live on an Earth I have done little to care for?

Is it fair that I produce a human being of hope to live on a world I have done little to maintain and care for? Are they not only appealing to their presentness, but also the spark of their newness? This urge to be present with children is often accompanied by anxiety about the future. I understand that having a child means you are extending your mind into a hypothetical future where they will need to survive in a world that is not yours.

Millions of children across the globe went on strike in September 2019 to demand action on climate change as the Australian fires erupted. ‘There is no planet B’ their signs, replete with wonky crayon globes, reminded us. The yelling and chanting, laughter, and uncompromising belief in the most fundamental human rights were all part of the scene. I let myself believe that these tiny marchers would save me, even though it was our fear and not our hope they were asking for.

“Adults keep saying, ‘We owe it to the young people to give them hope.’ But I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want to panic. I want you to feel the fear I feel every day,” Greta Thunberg told those gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2019. “And then I want you to act. I want you to behave in a crisis. I want you act as if your house is on fire. Because it is.”

Thomas Whyman pointed out that Thunberg was speaking to the Swiss Alps’ business and political elite, not us. “Their hope, she is suggesting, is toxic — like bad air, choking out the stuff that we can breathe,” he writes. “We need, as Thunberg points out, to found an almost entirely new world — just in order to survive. But they, who benefit from the existing order of things in such disproportionate magnitude that they might realistically expect to survive a massive crisis in the provision of basic resources, have a vested interest in our never doing so.”

Whyman insists that the potential to transform our world is the root of our hope. The possibility that we will not be able to is the foundation of the hope of the elite.

This is an extract from Gina Rushton’s book, The Most Important Job in The WorldPan Macmillian Australia now has the book.