Huffington Post has an intriguing post from contributor James Carli, Drug Policy and Sustainability Consultant. It is an interesting read on what bringing a child into the world, which is doomed to suffer from the consequences of the warming of the planet during his or her lifetime.
I’ve never reproduced or felt any desire to do so. But clearly, I am not like regular people when it comes to the decision to start a family. My nephews have all had children and at least one wants many children. I adore my grand nieces and nephews all of whom are under 4 years of age. They are cute as can be, innocent and can bring joy to anyone who meets them. But I worry for their future in a dystopian world that we are careening towards. We know for a certainty that climate impacts from human activities will be devastating, and a growing population will not make the transition to this new world any easier. That is so brutally sad.
James Carll writes:
It’s time for us to have a serious conversation about the ethics of bringing new humans into the world at the end of its relative habitability. I keep seeing in my news feeds celebratory posts from happy young couples getting pregnant and having babies. But I can’t help but feel severe pain for these new children, because of the future that they are going to have to endure.
I worked on climate policy and sustainable development at the United Nations, during the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, then a few years later on prep for UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda. These summits convened the world’s top experts on climate science, economics, human rights, anthropology, defense, and human behavior, and the picture they painted about our future was actually quite bleak. In fact, during one panel of top scientists and economists addressing the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and IMF), they said a quote that is seared into my memory forever: “Now is the time to go to your homes and bring your families close,” because from this point forward, they said, things will only continue to fall apart. This was in 2012. And look how things have gone just since then.
The reality is, by 2050, the UN projects that 66 percent of the world’s 9.3 billion people will be crammed into cities and sprawling megalopolis areas. (For perspective, in 1950, only 30 percent of earth’s 2.5 billion people lived in cities, and only nine years ago, in 2008, when the population was 6.7 billion, did that ratio hit 50 percent.) Not only do these figures pose fundamental questions about how we are going to feed, water, clothe, and power these new urbanites, these challenges are compounded when you consider that climatechangewill makemid-latitudesincreasinglytoo hot to sustain life, resulting in mass migration in the tens of millions, at least, toward the poles, while breadbaskets and aquifers desertify, pollinators – who provide all our fruits, veggies, and natural textiles – die off en masse, and, despite having the technology to have a completely renewable power grid, entrenched interests in certain countries like the United States are using their considerable political influence to block clean power and continue investment and construction of dirty power infrastructure (which looks also to get a major boost in the Republican’s current tax proposal.) This is not a picture of a world where life will be happy, fun, easy, clean, safe, stable, prosperous, or for that matter, free, at least as we have known it and come to take for granted since the end of the Second World War.
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It’s also wise to examine the future viability of the United States as a functioning nation-state under the pressures climate change will subject it to, when we have a Republic with a governing structure who not only refuses to acknowledge it as a security risk, but who is also actively suppressing official discussion about climate change and its effects. (At the American Planning Association’s national conference this spring in New York, we heard from professionals with U.S. government agencies who said they now have to use terms like “projected future needs” and “necessary resilience proposals,” since using terms like “climate change adaptation” will result in research papers and master plans being denied funding.) If this is the situation in 2017, what do you think things will be like in 2030, or 2050, or in 2100? I hazard to guess that America’s emergency climate governance will probably either skew severely fascist, or will break the back of the federal government, resulting in the nationwide devolution of sovereignty to among the many states or yet undetermined new regions (holla Cascadia!) (Solutions to this potential crisis, like the implementation of democratic confederalism in devolved municipalities, is the subject for future articles.)
My own opinion is that humanity will never change when it comes to the socio-economic reasons for reproducing. We are a horny species and we reproduce exponentially to our detriment.Many do not want children for a myriad of reasons, including sparing their offspring suffering from the ravages of climate change. Family planning, access to contraception and gender equality should all be policies that we can get behind to limit and control overpopulation as best we can.
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