“Children, in a kind of cold way of looking at it, are an externality,” argues professor Travis Rieder of Johns Hopkins University in an NPR article headlined “Should We Be Having Kids In The Age Of Climate Change?”
Millennial Miley Cyrus made a similar argument more pointedly: “We’re getting handed a piece-of-s*** planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child. Until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water, I’m not bringing in another person to deal with that. … We don’t want to reproduce because we know that the earth can’t handle it.”
There are two arguments embedded in Cyrus’s position: First, that the planet will be (or already is) uninhabitable, and so it would be cruel to bring a child into it. Second, the same argument Rieder makes, that humans are destroying the Earth, and so making more humans is an act of planet-destruction.
TWILIGHT OF THE BOOMER PRIESTS
You can read and hear these arguments everywhere as explanations for the other long-term crisis: The baby bust. If you find the argument unconvincing, you’re not alone. Even the people making them aren’t really convinced, it turns out.
American adults who hadn’t had children and had no plans to, in a 2021 Pew Research poll, cited all sorts of reasons for this, including finances, medical reasons, and the lack of a partner. Mostly, they said that they “just don’t want to.” Only 5% cited climate concerns.
Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, authors of What Are Children For, say this data suggests “that while climate change predominates in the public conversation about the choice to have children, it is still rarely the decisive factor in shaping people’s actual reproductive choices.”
“It’s easier and more socially acceptable to say ‘climate’” than to admit ambivalence about having children,” argues parenting consultant Ann Davidman.
The uncharitable interpretation is this: Lazy young folks who don’t want kids use “climate” as a cover story, a way of making their selfish preferences seem philanthropic.
Supporting this reading are the words of Hollywood millionaire Seth Rogen. On Howard Stern’s show, Rogen explained his childlessness with a two-part treatise.
Part One: “Who looks at the planet right now and thinks, ‘You know what we need? More f***ing people’?”
Part Two: “We’re f***ing psyched, all the time. We’re laying in bed on Saturday mornings, smoking weed, watching movies naked, just being like ‘If we had kids we could not be … doing this.’”
But there’s a more charitable read. Perhaps Rogen is not the typical millennial. Perhaps “climate,” rather than a cover story, is a totem of dread. Millions and millennials and Gen Zers, particularly on the secular Left, are in fact crippled by a dread for the future and a worry that they themselves are not good.
That’s a problem that can’t be solved by windmills, solar panels, or any amount of pot-smoking in bed.
