Finally! Climate activists who don’t believe that having children is bad for the planet. Authors and activists Meghan Elizabeth Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli don’t buy the idea that children are simply a lifestyle choice, like going vegan or biking instead of driving. As they argue in their book, The Conceivable Future, it’s ridiculous to blame “babies who aren’t even born yet for consumption that is enabled—and indeed required—by the economy we live in.” It’s a great point, one that deserves widespread recognition. Unfortunately, it gets buried in the book under layers of insipid climate “solutions.”
Decades of anti-child indoctrination from environmental groups have left many young people burdened by what Kallman and Ferorelli call the Impossible Question: “Should I have a child in the age of climate crisis?” They see this question as a smokescreen for the real culprits of ecological disaster. As they put it: “Why have we found it easier to tell people to stop having babies than to tell corporations to stop polluting? Or to tell our legislators to stop taking fossil-fuel money?” Kallman and Ferorelli do everyone a real service by highlighting the concerns that young people have about bringing another generation into the world. We’ve probably all become jaded by the self-righteous proclamations of the pretentiously environmentally conscious to forgo children (or have just one or two) while living a globe-trotting, rootless, consumptive life. I know a person who, having declared her intent to remain childless for the planet’s sake, embarked on a quest to sample the cuisine of every nation on earth, traveling to neighboring states to hunt down restaurants not locally available. Child-free for the planet or for her palate? Hypocrites aside, many younger people are deeply convinced that climate change is a crisis of unprecedented proportions, that it’s literally the end of the world. In fact, much of The Conceivable Future reads like self-help therapy for dealing with the anger, fear, depression, and rage provoked by climate change. Almost as many pages are devoted to examining and validating climate-induced feelings as to exploring the purported thesis of the book. The authors’ analysis of how reproduction is being influenced by climate change only takes up two of the eight chapters of the book.
Still, those first two chapters are really interesting, despite their awkward and wildly inconsistent genuflecting to the allegedly gender-inclusive zeitgeist. (Enough with “pregnant people.” They’re women!) As Kallman and Ferorelli make clear, people have sincere hesitations about having children, particularly those who worry that their own bodies are too compromised by the endless list of toxins and contaminants that lurk in our living environments. Others feel they have dedicated too much of their lives to the climate fight to raise a child. And plenty of people just aren’t sure about kids. They’re hamstrung by information overload. They know that the diaper bag bursting with bottles, squeeze packs, diapers, toys, and whatever else parents need to raise the modern baby is only the beginning of a lifetime of consumption.
Kallman and Ferorelli recognize this problem. They ask, “why [is] having a baby in the industrialized world so carbon-intensive to begin with?” What a good question! It gets to the heart of the fossil-fuel problem—that we have replaced people with machines. But they never answer their own question, choosing to spend most of the book teaching you how to become a climate activist (which includes everything from open borders and anti-fascism to abortion rights and parental leave). Here’s their “non-negotiable” vision: “The conceivable future has a livable climate, in which risk and harm mitigation is well-planned and funded, and costs and benefits are equitably shared. The conceivable future has an economy that is regenerative and non-extractive. The conceivable future is just. It enshrines accessible, affordable, expansively defined and legally protected healthcare for everyone. It is anti-racist, gender-inclusive, feminist.” Add to this list of vague non-negotiables the chilling section where Kallman and Ferorelli casually suggest that the best way to deal with climate deniers is to deplatform them, and you begin to wonder who else doesn’t get to speak in their conceivable future. But if the “climate crisis” is really exploding around us like a giant fireball, you probably shouldn’t insist that only firefighters who use your preferred pronouns get to help put out the flames.
This is clearly a book intended for a very specific audience. That audience probably appreciates passages like this: “learning to talk about the climate crisis…is a lot like learning to talk about sex: uncomfortable and vulnerable at first, easier with more skills and practice, and crucial for any fulfilled and healthy relationship.” No doubt those readers find the application of the white-fragility framework helpful to explore “carbon privilege” and “carbon guilt” (124) and appreciate being taught the terms nibling and pibling. (That’s to replace niece/nephew and aunt/uncle. Try it at your next family reunion.) Kallman and Ferorelli spend a whole chapter hammering away at that beleaguered institution, the nuclear family, offering up queer, step, and polyamorous relationships as inspiration for the families of the future, unable to recognize that the abolition of gender and the collapse of time-honored family relationships is but another manifestation of the spiritual sickness that undergirds the environmental degradation that they mourn so deeply.
It’s too bad Kallman and Ferorelli don’t take their own question about carbon-intensive child care seriously. They could have spent the remainder of their book unpacking that diaper bag and the ever-multiplying, carbon-intensive army of artificial alloparents that modern families rely on and still not reach the bottom of the bag. Alien as it seems to us machine-world humans, a child does not equal waste. Go somewhere in the less-machined world and this fact beams at you from the bright eyes of every baby snuggled up on its mother’s back, no overflowing diaper bag necessary. Babies do not like the machine world. They instinctively react against it. If you listen to them, if you allow them their place among the rest of us, instead of being isolated in a parallel existence of plastic (which comes from petroleum), you will find yourself living in a different world, one organized around people and Earth, not machines.
Not only would unpacking the diaper bag help the fence-sitters feel good about having children, it would shut up the child-hating climate bots. The Conceivable Future raises incredibly important concerns about the Population-Control paradigm beloved of generations of environmentalists and feminists, recognizing that birth control has been and still is used to control people. One of the most interesting passages of the book is an interview with Professor Jade Sasser. In Madagascar, where Dr. Sasser conducted her research, she found that NGOs use birth control for conservation goals. Says Dr. Sasser, “I discovered that there was a strategic plan in place as to where these services would be prioritized, the reproductive services that were funded by USAID. And it was all around national parks and conservation sites.” She found that even when women and girls came to the clinics for other health reasons, they were consistently steered towards contraceptives.
That’s disgusting. But it’s not really a surprise. Birth control and girls’ education are widely trumpeted solutions for arresting climate change. Kallman and Ferorelli reject this attitude: “access to education and family planning are human rights…By treating access to those rights as a means to carbon reduction—or habitat protection—rather than an end unto itself, climate groups continue to behave toward women as though we are second-class citizens, or simply valves to be turned.” For their analysis, Kallman and Ferorelli refer to the Reproductive Justice framework drawn up by the activist organization SisterSong: everyone has the right “to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and thriving communities.” They recognize that the choice paradigm so beloved of feminists falls short of reflecting many women’s lived experiences.
Most progressives balk at even considering that global family planning data might tell any story other than that of women’s enthusiastic embrace of birth control once it becomes available to them, which makes Kallman and Ferorelli’s willingness to give birth control a hard look all the more refreshing. They go so far as to label abortion, sterilization, and contraception “violent reproductive interventions.” This is not to say that they oppose these procedures when chosen voluntarily, only that they recognize their coercive history. Unfathomable numbers of women around the world have been forced or manipulated into contraception and sterilization procedures, particularly in prisons and reeducation camps. As Kallman and Ferorelli point out, it’s tragic that so much energy is poured into preventing women from having children but so little is given to women when they become mothers: besides the plagues raging in the United States of maternal mortality and low-birth weight and preterm babies, pregnant women and new mothers face a slew of environmental concerns, including pollution, contamination, extreme heat, and catastrophic weather events (which no doubt contribute to the aforementioned birth challenges). As Kallman and Ferorelli put it, “it’s a dangerous world for birthing.”
The list is sobering. It’s a clear indication of how little the machine world cares for life, human or otherwise. But astonishingly, the reproductive challenges that plague women regardless of economic status or ethnic category are missing. No matter how many times you go through the book with your fine-toothed comb, you will find nary a word about medicalized birth or obstetric violence. The only passages that get anywhere close are the price tag for an average hospital delivery and a brief sketch of Serena Williams’s horrible birth experience, which the authors frame in terms of racism instead of recognizing that the gaslighting Ms. Williams endured and almost died from is endemic in labor and delivery wards. What a missed opportunity to advocate for women at their most vulnerable. Medicalized birth and obstetric violence are problems that people like to sweep under the rug; it’s easier to pretend that by nature, birth is just a dangerous, scary thing—a curse, even—than to step back and admit that the terrible challenges so many mothers and babies face are the result of our choices to step away from each other and from the Earth. The fact that these fundamental reproductive issues are missing from a book about the conceivable future is telling.
Kallman and Ferorelli do spend several pages of the book describing a series of bills related to pregnant women and new mothers, known as the Momnibus, introduced into Congress over the past several years, which they call “a stunning glimpse of the world good policy can envision.” The bills address things like the pre- and post-partum needs of veterans, incarcerated women, and Native Americans; the thorny problems of mental health and substance abuse among pregnant women and new mothers; the potential of tech to address maternal mortality through telehealth visits and and other digital tools; the challenges of accessing adequate nutrition, transportation, and housing; the need for more perinatal health workers; and so on. It’s not that these issues aren’t important, (amen to getting rid of shackling female prisoners during labor!); it’s just that they’re working on repairing the third floor of a building with giant cracks in the foundation. Kallman and Ferorelli show good instincts when they say they use reproduction as a “core sample” for getting to the heart of the climate change story—after all, the war the machine world wages on women is the same war it wages on Mama Earth. But by neglecting the fundamental issues of birth, they reveal that they have, at best, given reproduction only a casual glance. The horrendous rates of induced births, C-sections, breastfeeding failure, and postpartum depression in this country are not going to improve by increasing the number of agencies burying pregnant women and new mothers in paperwork or by surveilling them through tech. The collapse of intact food and birthing cultures—manifested by widespread pregnancy, birth, and breastfeeding complications, all of which are now so common as to have become normalized—can hardly be compensated for by more doulas and lactation consultants or by expanding WIC (which gives money to mothers to buy specific types of foods for themselves and their babies, including…cold cereal and juice). Government agencies and NGOs are a pitiful replacement for the generational wisdom of birth that has vanished from among relatives and neighbors. Mothers need people in their lives who don’t show up only at appointments and only as long as they’re getting paid.
Though they miss the mark on birth, Kallman and Ferorelli hit Population Control spot on. In earlier decades, there was a widespread feeling that we were teetering on the edge of population crisis and that without extraordinary measures, we would destabilize the planet, which, as Kallman and Ferorelli mention, is how Paul and Anne Ehrlich of The Population Bomb infamy could call for birth control to be put in the water supply and the Sierra Club could sponsor the book. We might roll our eyes now, but many people were convinced we were just a few babies away from widespread famine and devastation. Much tragedy has been the result of this catastrophe thinking. As the authors point out, “We will never achieve a more just world by curtailing people’s reproduction.”
And yet, even as the authors recognize the cost of previous generations’ reproductive engineering, the “climate crisis” rhetoric of The Conceivable Future reads uncannily similar to their Population-Control predecessors: “To limit global temperature rise to a level that can still sustain human life, we have huge changes to put into motion…seven years to make the most radical transformation to our societies and economies that humans have ever attempted.” A state-of-emergency mindset is a dangerous way to approach long-term problems.
Let me be clear that the fossil-fuel society is a scourge upon us all. The depth and scale of degradation it spews forth sickens both body and spirit. But without more forethought, without a change of heart and culture, many climate solutions end up amplifying the fossil-fuel problems they want to solve. So many people care passionately about the climate (whatever that means) but know nothing of the Earth, and they are increasingly in charge of making policy, with the result that they’re destroying the Earth to save the climate, all while doing little to stop the fossil-fuel economy. One of the organizations that Kallman and Ferorelli encourage readers to join is the Sunrise Movement. On the Sunrise website, you can buy a t-shirt that says “No More Fossil Fuel Money.” The fabric is fifty percent…POLYESTER! Is this some sort of joke? Do they not know that polyester is made from petroleum? Do they not care? Either way, it’s fatal. If people can’t bother to make sure the t-shirts they sell don’t actually prop up the industries they say they want to shut down, then how can we trust that they’ll make wise and careful decisions about complex ecological systems or human societies? Good intentions do not equal good policy.
Take the one-size solution of so-called green energy, which Kallman and Ferorelli push as a replacement for fossil fuels. They highlight Juan-Pablo Velez, who runs a climate-oriented think tank aimed at state-level policy changes. He recently spearheaded climate efforts in his own rural New York community, working to overcome his neighbors’ objections about sacrificing the surrounding farmland for solar farms. As he tells the authors, “[W]e need to say no to neo-pastoral environmentalism. When people treat climate solutions aesthetically, they are not taking the problem seriously. And the reality is, we’re going to need hundreds and hundreds of very large solar farms and windmills everywhere. People have a visceral reaction against that…The point of climate solutions isn’t for you to feel good. They’re to fix the f***ing problem.”
Isn’t this exactly how we dug ourselves into the hole we’re currently in? We let the machine world bulldoze through beauty and harmony in the name of progress, burying our gut instincts under an impermeable layer of concrete and asphalt so that no warning can seep through that the barrenness and sterility that machines require is a sign that we’ve gone dangerously astray from the natural order. Although wind and solar energy have their merits when used wisely, land the world over—good productive farmland and ever shrinking wild land — is being indiscriminately sacrificed by the foolish climate bots: solar panels spreading over hills and plains like permanent burn scars, wind turbines bristling across land and sea like the spears of a modern phalanx, invoking the same sense of foreboding as the oil pumps and the coal pits they’re supposed to replace. Although Kallman and Ferorelli say they want a future with no sacrifice zones, the wind and solar power they advocate for require huge sacrifice zones. My family and I live on the rim of the Great Basin, land most people probably think of as waste land. There’s a solar farm west of town, and even with the baking sun, skin-shriveling wind, and months without rain, tenacious pioneer plants push up through the hard-packed earth around the solar panels. It takes a solid week’s effort for a team of men mowing and weed-whacking all day to destroy the life that threatens to shade those endless rows of unblinking eyes. What powers their tools? Fossil fuels. It’s not the only green energy farm in the area either. Southeast of us is a wind turbine operation. Since there are hefty fines if a turbine kills a bird of prey, they raze the ground around the turbines, destroying all the rodent burrows. It helps keep the raptors away, but what a cost! If that weren’t enough, engineers at the experimental green fracking power plant nearby recently announced that they have successfully generated electricity from steam by injecting millions of gallons of non-potable water pumped onsite into fractured bedrock. They only lost thirty percent of the water in the process and are working to increase efficiency so that in the future, perhaps only ten percent will be lost. This is a regenerative, non-extractive future?
It would seem obvious, as we face the looming consequences of several centuries of machine living, that new technology brings new problems. Whatever the merits of an increasingly electric future, the costs must be counted too, including the much-ignored effects of electromagnetic frequencies on all living creatures. Green energy ends up being a lot like recycling; you get to feel like you’re making better choices, but all that’s really happening is that your connection to the resources you consume and the waste you produce is separated by an extra layer. The final product (solar panels, wind turbines, car batteries) may not use fossil fuels to generate power, but the whole process of mining the raw materials, manufacturing the components, and transporting, installing, and maintaining them is entirely dependent on fossil fuels, and that’s leaving aside the horrific destruction caused by the mining itself. After their useful life is over, wind turbines and solar panels currently pose thorny recycling challenges and mostly just pile up in landfills. The stated goal of The Conceivable Future is to give our children and grandchildren a livable world, but readers will have to look elsewhere for ideas on how to make that happen. No matter what clever solutions engineers come up with to solve the challenges of green energy, they can’t solve the real problem—we are replacing people with machines, starting as we are born.
I would love to see Kallman and Ferorelli highlight the work of people who are actually trying to build a better world built on wiser principles, not just greenwash the world we currently inhabit. The authors showcase a number of organizations, large and small — the Occupy movement, Greta Thunberg, fossil-fuel divestment, fracking bans, fare-free busses, more localized food networks, projects that save perfectly useable materials from the landfill — and urge us to find a cause to join because, as they insist, “politics is what you do, not how you feel.” Lots of interesting projects, lots of good energy, but they’re still based in a doomed, perennially destructive consumer paradigm in which most people live disconnected from the Earth and from each other – the same problems plaguing mothers and babies, it turns out. I would love to see some of this organizing energy directed towards ensuring that simple, amateur-friendly solutions don’t get bogged down by the ignorance of building inspectors, insurance companies, and city officials. Innovations like rocket mass heaters, willow feeders/compost toilets, and mycelium insulation are practical ideas that are earth and people friendly and don’t require armies of experts to implement. The same goes for old traditions revived, such as cob and other natural building techniques. How about embracing home production once again or pushing back on compulsory consumption, like minimum square footage building requirements? These solutions starve the fossil-fuel beast much more effectively than the protests and demonstrations that Kallman and Ferorelli urge us to join, and these solutions encourage something better than collective action; they encourage community—the real sweat-and-dirt kind, which, not coincidentally, is exactly what mothers and babies need too.
It’s ironic that this whole Impossible Question—whether to have children in this age of climate change—springs from the same mentality underpinning the forces tearing the world apart, the idea that humans are in charge. A truly conceivable future requires more humility. This certainly is the end of a world. We’ve recklessly spent the natural and spiritual wealth this modern world was built on, and the consequences loom ever larger for everyone. But this is not really different from the existential threats that countless peoples have faced in their own times (and now). My own people faced the end of their world; they were repeatedly driven from their homes, violently persecuted because of their beliefs. They had an extermination order issued against them in Missouri. Despite the darkness, they held on, and generations later, here I am, the grateful beneficiary of their unshakeable faith. The question is not “should I have kids in these troubled times?” but “how should I raise my kids in these troubled times?” We have all been given the gift of life, and it’s our sacred obligation to pass that along. Thank goodness Kallman and Ferorelli are pushing back against the child-haters and making space for babies. But that’s only the beginning; a truly conceivable future requires that we turn back to each other, eyes lifted toward Heaven, feet rooted in Earth, working hand in hand to sustain ourselves and our children and tend this beautiful garden we’ve been given.
Image via Flickr
