Having Kids is Good For the Environment
Yes you read the title right. GOOD for it. Am I crazy?
Stop Having Children
The world is ending, the world is ending!
Sea levels are rising, 6th mass extinction, nuclear war. Humanity is a scourge on the planet and we’ve just been pummeling it into submission. Abandon all hope!
Maybe you’ve heard people say something like this to you. Maybe you believe it (heck I think I did for a while). And you’re right in some sense.
The planet has finite resources; if one species is winning, others are definitely losing. And we’ve got an ingenuity to get to resources that no blue whale has ever dreamed of.
But if you truly believe humanity is this terrible thing, why even read this article? Why sit on a computer, why have a job, why continue to be part of the system? Because it’s convenient? Well then you are believing one thing but doing another, now aren’t you. 🫰
Humanity isn’t a scourge on the planet, humanity is more like a…
Very Self Aware Asteroid
People reformed Pangea pretty recently, like the last few hundred years. Species that have never seen each other can now have a weekly meeting thanks to cargo ships, or a daily visit thanks to passenger planes.
Humanity is very quickly pumping a whole bunch of CO2 into the atmosphere, at a rate that definitely is affecting global temperatures and ocean acidification. We also drastically affect ecosystems with deforestation, rerouting rivers, pollution, etc.
These things (pollution and pangea-ification) are kind of like an asteroid smacking into the earth: in terms of radical change, we are it.
But many people are aware and have been aware for a while now that we’re having a heavy effect on our planet. Yet the doomsayers don’t all live out in the woods, they sail across the ocean to make a point, or chain themselves to trees, trying to fight for the future. They are rightfully concerned but maybe their methods are… questionable.
All this is to say that we are causing massive, dare I say, destructive changes to our planet, but we’re aware of it. Even the biggest denier of climate change etc. can’t deny the fact that the Amazon (not the website) is being burned for cow pasture, or that Americans have created the largest monocrop of corn ever seen. (90 million acres, 140,000 square miles, the size of Germany!) You just have to drive through Iowa to see it.
But WHY are we doing this to our planet?
Because we get cold.
We get hungry.
We can’t run very fast or very far for too long.
We’ve created societies so complex that running around on foot and talking to each other would descend us back to tribal systems.
If you’ve never read Guns, Germs and Steel, I highly recommend it. Jared Diamond lays things out so well, but the take away from it for this discussion is that societies trend towards a centralized power system, from tribes to chiefdoms, to kingdoms (and I guess countries but they’re basically kingdoms).
These societies have an increasing need for more advanced technology to support things like standing armies, accountants, bureaucrats, etc. People like me who are on a computer all day instead of on a farm producing some of that sweet, sweet corn.
And with the industrial revolution, we throw gasoline on the fire (hehe, gasoline is a bit on the nose). Now our kings and queens fly around in super powered jets that circle the planet, talking to each other so we don’t launch supersonic nuclear weapons at each other (oh yeah I forgot to mention that part in my don’t-have-kids-doom-and-gloom-section).
I don’t believe we live unsustainably by choice; I believe we have created systems that are rooted in unsustainable things, like a highly intensive energy industry, or an environmentally destructive semiconductor/rare earth industry.
And more sustainable folks, like hunter gatherer peoples, get wiped out by the Guns, Germs and Steel™️ that come their way.
We built a crazy train and now we’re riding in it.
A Child is a Bet on the Future
Children are many things to many people, but to me, you’re betting that there’s a future when you have children. You think there will be a world worth living and fighting for when you have children.
If we all stopped having children and couldn’t have any more (OK this is a movie premise), what would be the point of “saving the environment.” For the deer? For the rats? The geese? I mean it’s got to be for the polar bears right?
Those creatures matter, but you’re an animal just like them; you most likely want to live well and reproduce. If you don’t want kids, no one is forcing you to have kids. But what kind of skin do you have in the game if you don’t have kids?
Raising Children is Hard, But Children Are Great On Their Own Terms
You won’t sleep for a while. Lots of poop to clean up. And crying and screaming. Welcome to Parenthood!
But there are these moments.
Where your child copies you, or desperately wants to be around you. You see reflections of yourself, like a laugh, or a look in their eyes that’s like a literal mirror.
You have recreated the pattern set for millions of years, of one creature creating another. And it fills you with a weird kind of wonder. It’s not an experience you can emulate with a pet or a game. It’s —
🎶THE CIRCLE OF LIFE 🦁🎶
OK but seriously…
And in this pattern is a concern, a deep concern about the future.
Will they have problems in school? Will they still like me when they’re older? Will the planet still be around? (See what I did there) Seriously, how many teeth are going to come in (ew gross)?
And in your kid you find something else. This wild spirit, a total lack of caring about social norms. No real understanding of the crazy train that you’re going to put them on. You see that…
You are the environment, at least a part of it. And so are they.
What we’re doing is to ourselves, not to some external, divine thing. It’s to every adult human and child. We’re creating a planet that will be harder for us and them to live on. And we’re doing it because we want to be warm and have food… but the way we’re doing it is unsustainable. We have to change some things… many things.
But I don’t believe the situation is hopeless. I have skin in the game.
And the more people that have children that they want a future for, the better chance the human animal will have. We might be able to steer away this self aware asteroid.
