In 1969, a young environmentalist named Stephanie Mills stood up at her college graduation to deliver her commencement speech. She told hundreds of her fellow graduates that the most moral thing they could do with their lives was have no children.
That speech went, as we’d say today, viral. Her story was covered worldwide, sparking already growing conversations on population growth, and the threat population growth was impacting the state of the environment.
At the time, Mills urged her fellow graduates to think about population growth as a concern for resource degradation and famine in the world. Fast forward to today, and the urge to slow population growth remains, while the motivation for it has changed slightly, in the form of climate change- literally a hot topic.
As a citizen of the world, especially one of a younger generation, I have been drilled that what I do to fight climate change matters. My personal emissions matter; my carbon footprint matters (on a small scale, I feel guilty when I buy too many stylish clothes online, eat too much red meat, or use too many single-use plastics). I care that brands like Patagonia commit to ethical production practices, and that brands like Canada Goose don’t. And yet, my good intentions don’t begin to approach what Stephanie Mills called for. Her great fear has been realized: humans have still been procreating at an alarming rate for centuries, and— as we’ve seen— it’s caught up to us.
Granted, most people agree that we have a responsibility to limit our negative contributions to climate change, both on an individual level and a large organizational one. After all, it’s a well-known fact that a growing population is a part of the reason that we’re diminishing the Earth’s resources at a rate as we are. Yet, while much of the world agrees that we make environmentally-positive personal choices— like choosing to buy cars that aren’t emissions monsters or taking hour-long showers — most people don’t want to talk about limiting our choice to procreate and raise children.
I got a taste of that at MIT this summer. I was speaking at a presentation on procreative ethics, and a man who was there saw my presentation name and took it upon himself to approach me before I had even begun to speak. He walked up to me just to inform me that nothing I could say would change his mind, and proceeded to talk to me about the laws of human nature for the next ten minutes.
Why is this? Why do we seem to make procreation an exception to our climate duties?
It’s certainly not because the choice to procreate isn’t environmentally significant. In fact, a 2017 study by Lund University found that having one less child in the developed world per family would save about 60 tonnes of CO2 per year (which, the study shows, is about 25 times the amount of CO2 that living with a car produces).
Rather, it seems like the taboo around this topic comes from elsewhere: namely, reproductive freedom. It is hard to put procreation in the same category as something like air travel or eating meat – taking away someone’s reproductive freedom seems different. It is about an individual’s right to make choices about their own body.
On reproductive freedom, a.k.a, a person’s right to bodily autonomy, I am in total agreement. I’m not advocating for population regulation (the world has seen what a one child policy can do to a country). I am, however, arguing for a feminist, societal, and cultural shift towards a lens that combats the current norm promoting the toxic pressure to have children. This will up conversations about environmental, procreative decisions, both on how to raise a child sustainably, and on whether or not a person should have a child at all.
In tackling these difficult conversations with an open-mind, I hope to listen to the rest of the world better with a focus on intersectionality, and in a way that allows me to better care for the Earth.
Recently I have been looking to and learning from the Queer community, who are much more likely to adopt children. They give kids a stable and healthy home and meet the needs for a nuclear family. For those of us who aren’t able to adopt, (because, let’s face it– adoption is an arduous and financially burdensome process) members of the Queer community have advocated for the legislative acceptance of multi-parenting, normalizing families of three to four parents to a child, allowing for more undivided attention to a child’s wellbeing, and relieving the amount of responsibility each parent in a family must take on.
I have also looked to Indigenous communities, who take the phrase, ‘It takes a village.’ literally, fostering a whole community of parents and family— as opposed to just three or four— working together to take care of their children, in a style of parenting that was once a common practice for people globally, and now challenges the norm of a nuclear family in a way that is community based, and outward facing to the world.
These ways of parenting, while unconventional, are changing my perspective on having children, allowing me to help protect the climate without sacrificing the beauty of a parent-child relationship.
In opening up the conversation around procreation as a form of climate change action, I commit to removing the mental separation ‘the personal’ from ‘the environmental’ in myself. I work to discard the need to have individualized, unshared parent-child, in favor of practices that allow for reduced emissions, or practices that help take care of the children who already exist and need homes. And just like Stephanie Mills did all the way back in 1969, I urge you to follow suit.