Allies to the Earth: Reframing the Choice Between Children & the Planet
By Molly Jenkins,
Me and you, me and you, me and you. Tug tug tug. You keep on asking, tugging, pulling me out of myself. You keep reminding me that you are so real. Reminding me that there is another horizon beyond my own.
You delight in the world, in the soft touch of grass, the prickle of wildflower greens. Who am I to deny you this? You who are so precious, recognize and name the preciousness in all things. In naming, you heighten the value of the very blades of grass. Who would stand to disparage this meaning-making, in favor of raw consumption? You who do not solely consume, but who name and delight in the naming. You who see, and recall, the loveliness of life.
Every child who is another name, gives a thousand other names. In naming, in knowing, they elevate the seen-ness of things. For every child who consumes, they give back, they touch, they watch, and they give praise. I can think of no greater ally to nature than a child: another voice calling out for the future.
The Utilitarianism Driving Environmentalism
There are those who would disparage children and child-having: more mouths to feed, and not enough in the world to go around. In 1798, British economist Thomas Malthus wrote a treatise on population. He claimed that the population of England was too high, that natural resources could not keep up with the population, and that poor people in particular had too many children and needed to be ‘regulated.’ He wrote, “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race.”
In 1968, entomologist Paul Ehlrich authored a book called The Population Bomb, where he proposed a new model for describing the impact of growing human populations. The very same year, the biologist Garrett Hardin published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” which similarly posits that a limited pool of common resources will be depleted and used up regardless of the scope of technological advances. Hardin very overtly advocated for depopulation and childlessness as the only solution. Hardin also chastised his opponents for taking the easy way out, stating that “to avoid hard decisions many of us are tempted to propagandize for conscience and responsible parenthood. The temptation must be resisted.” Ehlrich and Hardin were in agreement that any other proposed solutions were beating around the bush––depopulation was the only moral and practical solution to the overuse of resources and environmental degradation. Their ideas are some of the most influential theories of the past century.
These ideas most often punish the families in foreign countries: China, India, Nigeria. Well-meaning ethicists suggest birth control, abortion, and even infanticide to help improve overall quality of life even as Western countries greedily vie for more resources per capita. The pressure to depopulate is often put squarely on the shoulders of women in developing nations by Western influences. This power dynamic smacks of the remnants of imperialism. I recently attended a climate talk focused on the efforts of Catholics in the United States, and one of the first questions an audience member had was “What about the Chinese? Isn’t this mostly their fault?” It depends on who you ask––frameworks that account for land use change (e.g., urbanization) and historic patterns of emissions place the US as the number one emitter of carbon. There’s a lot of finger pointing and refusal to assume responsibility in this discourse, especially if it entails material sacrifice.
Confronting the Numbers
Here's the issue––having fewer children, or not having any children, absolutely quantitatively would and does have a bigger result in terms of potential impact that one individual can make. Having children blows meat consumption and fossil fuel use out of the water in terms of sheer CO2 generated, not to mention the additional strain on natural resources. I would be remiss in not addressing the math of it because it really does check out in terms of raw numbers. For an individual, having no children has a greater effect than that individual simply changing their consumption patterns.
The assumption behind the math however, is that people are reducible to their sum total material inputs and outputs, and that changing consumption habits does not have a cascade effect on corporate patterns of extraction, transportation, and the buying and selling of raw materials. By cascade effect, I mean that corporate environmental impacts are not solely the sum of the inputs of individual consumers––market interference, subsidies, and other forces can dramatically alter the relationship between supply and demand, incentivizing greater extraction (and waste) than consumer behavior alone. While some individual responsibility for consumption patterns is warranted, I would like to shift the burden away from an individualistic-utilitarian ethical framework that places undue burden on women not having children; instead, let’s shift the burden onto corporate responsibility.
To my point: an individual person generates approximately 58.6 tonnes of CO2 per year, and a little over 4,000 tonnes in an average lifetime. Between 1854 and 2010, the oil company Chevron generated over 50 billion tonnes of CO2. A corporation systemically shifting its own consumption patterns––or a government imposing emissions caps and regulating those corporations effectively––will have a greater sum effect than if nearly 12 million individual people were never born over two generations.
When people and corporations fail to sacrifice small things, it leads women to assume responsibility in bigger ways. Instead of corporations assuming responsibility for unsustainable manufacturing and resource extraction, individual women assume responsibility and choose to have fewer children––or no children altogether––even if they love children and want to be mothers.
Distributing Accountability
Corporations are legally considered entities and therefore have less contested, nuanced legal standing than a human fetus, which is considered more of a legal ambiguity. Instead of changing consumption patterns and holding these companies responsible, we are pointing fingers and telling other people what to do––often through the narrative that having more children will be the greatest detriment to the planet. Because of this, women are losing hope in children. Women are sighing and taking the burden upon themselves, personally. And it still isn’t going to be enough to address our unsustainable consumption patterns.
Stop putting the burden on mothers to have fewer children.
Stop depriving women of hope.
Stop depriving children of a future.
Start holding corporations accountable.
Start holding the consumption patterns of yourself and others accountable, because these legitimize corporate supply.
Start holding tighter to hope in a better future.
Without hope, we are given to despair. We are given over to believing that a life without modern comforts is not worth living––this is a terrible lie. Life, even life with suffering, is worth living. Suffering can co-occur with gratitude, with beauty, with love, with hope; it is not a one-for-one exchange.
Every moment is not reducible to an outcome of either happiness or sadness, comfort or joy. This is not only reductionist rationale, but it is a deeply dangerous way of thinking. This mentality towards life leads to the kind of cold utilitarianism that weighs the worth of a disabled infant as lower than the worth of an endangered bird––for it is believed by many that the sum total value of that endangered bird is greater than the impaired joy of a child fraught with pain.
This is the ethics behind depopulation. It projects a false choice upon us: the environment or children. It’s important to reject this choice at its foundation, as well as the notion that this utilitarian ethics is somehow foundational to environmentalism.
Life is sacred. All that is imbued with and supporting life––our ecosystems, our grasslands, our forests and great tangled marshes––is sacred because of its own being. Its rights are inherent and shared. The worth of the planet is not mutually exclusive to the worth of a child.
My child knows this. He is too young to anthropomorphize––no, he sees what is there and delights purely in its being. I can only imagine that God relates to all of creation the same way.
Imagine if we, as adults, could relate to life in such a way too.
