Spencer Rocchi admits that he has trouble keeping his mouth shut when he meets parents. ‘I like kids but I can’t pull the wool over their parents’ eyes,’ he says. ‘They made a terrible mistake. And I think my parents made the same terrible mistake. My parents still haven’t come to terms with it now I explain why to them.’
That parenthood mistake was to have children – and you can hardly blame his parents’s reaction. After all, they belong to a generation for whom having children was, for the majority, the norm – indeed, they belong to a time when to willingly decide not to have children was widely appraised negatively, as selfish, anti-society, avant-garde or just plain odd.
A 2021 global survey of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds found that four in 10 fear having kids because of the climate crisis. They are in a state of what has been dubbed ‘eco grief’
Yet Rocchi insists that we must stop having children for the sake of the environment – and, given what some believe to be the apocalyptic prospects for the environment, for the sake of those unborn children too. The Canada-based founder of the Birthstrike Movement – an activist group that campaigns for no childbirth until there’s definite progress on tackling climate change – is not alone.
A 2021 global survey of 10,000 16 to 25-year-olds – admittedly some years before most will make the actual decision – found that four in 10 fear having kids because of the climate crisis. They are in a state of what has been dubbed ‘eco grief’.
That they feel this way is hardly surprising – they belong to a generation that has only known one narrative about the planet’s future, and have been fed it constantly through social media. And they may well be right: a 2017 study suggests that, way more than a plant-based diet, not flying or living car-free, the single biggest way an individual can limit carbon emissions is by not having a child.
Meanwhile, back in 2009 an Oregon State University study argues that we’re responsible to the carbon emissions of our descendants – a grandparent is responsible for one quarter of each of their grandchildren’s emissions, for example.
Child v Climate?
Roochi concedes that to fully embrace this idea would ‘require a cultural shift in the developed world [where he says the issue needs to be focused]. There’s a revolutionary aspect to this because it means overcoming a tribalistic groupthink,’ he says. ‘We need to stop thinking of children as property [we need to acquire] and start thinking of ourselves more as caretakers of the planet.’
Certainly there is much lost in losing an entire species but that’s true of any species, not just humankind
Les Knight, Founder Voluntary Human Extinction Movement
There are even less forgiving voices pushing this ‘kids vs the climate’ agenda too. Based near Portland, US, one can find the bluntly-named Voluntary Human Extinction Movement. It argues that the only way the biosphere – and its many non-human species – can survive is to allow humanity to die out.
‘Certainly there is much lost in losing an entire species but that’s true of any species, not just humankind,’ says the organisation’s founder Les Knight. ‘Our entire culture is natalist. It advocates for childbearing. But choosing not to procreate would be the best thing for the planet. There is the argument that society needs new people for renewal. But it doesn’t need more kids. It needs to take better care of the ones we already have.’
But is this really about the climate at all? There are socio-economic and lifestyle factors at play too. For all that a large minority of young people may be questioning the validity of having children for the sake of the climate, falling incomes, expensive housing and childcare, and what’s known in sociological circles as ‘delayed adulthood’ – a longer period of both education and a more juvenile mindset, followed by the establishing of both a stable career and relationship later in life – all mitigate against having kids.
According to the Founders Pledge, if changes in policy are accounted for, having one fewer child has roughly twice the environmental saving as switching to an electric car; which is to say, not nothing, but not that much at all.
Some suggest that citing climate change is more a convenient moral justification for the decision not to have kids being applied to what is actually just an increasingly socially acceptable free choice, albeit one constrained – like most choices – by personal circumstances. Remarkably nearly half of all pregnancies are unintended as it is, according to a United Nations study in 2022. That’s around 48 million of them.
Indeed, crucially there is also much scepticism about the idea that not having children is necessarily better for the planet. That might sound self-evident, and it’s broadly the position of activist groups the likes of the UK-based campaign group Population Matters. ‘I think most people do have an intuitive sense that the more people there are, the more the environment is pressured and that having fewer children will reduce that impact,’ says its head of campaigns Alistair Currie.
Yet he concedes that this impact may not be about numbers per se, so much as the consumption levels of those people who are alive; there is the climate capacity for more children if those children (and everyone else) consume less. Certainly the idea that every new person will only pile on the emissions total is also based on the idea that they will emit at current – or even past – levels. But, despite the doom-mongering, per capita emissions are falling all of the time, nudged in part by changes in government policy around the world.
According to the Founders Pledge, if changes in policy are accounted for, having one fewer child has roughly twice the environmental saving as switching to an electric car; which is to say, not nothing, but not that much at all. Rather than not having a child you’d be better off actively donating to environmental charities.
Guilt-tripping teenagers
Of course, it’s worth stressing that this kind of cold cost-benefit analysis might want to consider that children are also emitters of meaning and hope. Indeed, it’s been posited that to reduce the number of children is, statistically, also to reduce the number of potential future geniuses – any one of which might, say, invent a form of cheap and abundant clean energy.
So are younger people just being put on some giant guilt-trip? Certainly that’s the position of Meghan Kallman and Josephine Ferorelli, authors of ‘The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Change’. They want to see the environmental cost of reproduction given more attention – why, for example, is raising a child so carbon-intensive and what social and apolitical changes need to happen to reduce those levels? And, for that matter, why should women’s bodies be the site of climate action at all?
But they argue that environmental and international development organisations have for decades pushed the narrative that fewer children would be better for the environment without much in the way of hard data. Yes, it sounds reasonable. But there’s no data to support it.
‘People are in a state of panic about whether to have children [in relation to the climate] and how to parent the children they have. What we want to do is turn that focus outwards to make the world less scary for everybody’s children, to mobilise that concern for the next generation to make the world better,’ says Kallman.
It’s not that there’s no relation between the number of people on Earth and the resources we consume,’ adds Ferorelli. ‘It’s just that the approach that says that limiting the number of people is the lever [to address change change] has no argument to support it. You shouldn’t feel over-burdened with guilt about having a child.’
