It's Time to Stop Procreating
The last glimmers of hope in Earth's livable future are fast dwindling. Now is the time to start considering the harm of bringing new lives into the coming cataclysm.
To the extent that deliberative processes go into a couple’s decision to procreate, they might consider such moral questions as “Do we have the means to take care of the infant?” and “Are we suffering from any debilitating genetic conditions that might get passed along to our newborn?” Regrettably, there is a new question that potential parents need to ask: “Is the world too irreversibly damaged to bring new life into it in good conscience?”
The anti-natalist philosophical perspective is ancient and arguments against procreation are numerous and varied. These range from concerns about the inability of potential life to consent to be created to “first do no harm” style principles centered around eliminating the individual’s potential future pain, which could never be outweighed by whatever pleasure they would experience. For the purposes of of this argument, we will be generous and assume that these many arguments are insufficient to convince any particular couple that they should abstain, and assume that despite their awareness of the general anti-natalist position they still wish to raise children. This is of course reflective of the reality that the human population continues to grow.
In a previous essay I outlined the dangers of climate optimism and found that a clear-eyed view of ongoing environmental destruction and looming climate disasters is also one of significant pessimism. Arguments for hope are generally tenuous and extrapolate great future accomplishments from existing environmentalist programs, minor victories such as the ongoing repair of the Ozone layer or the cheapening cost of green technology. There is nothing to indicate that any of these piecemeal solutions will avert a disaster of civilization-ending proportions; the much-touted carbon credits program, for example, is already being subverted by greedy corporations:
Daimler trucks, eBay and a US energy company were among the recent buyers of carbon offsets created by projects that involved injecting carbon dioxide underground in order to extract more oil.
Three US-based extraction projects were eligible to generate credits because their processes involved the capture of CO2. But this was used as a way to extract fresh oil that would otherwise have been inaccessible, a procedure known as “enhanced oil recovery” (EOR).
The offsetting rules that the credits were created under ignored the emissions associated with the extracted oil.
Nearly 3mn credits from the three projects, which cannot generate new offsets following a rule change, have been used by buyers to compensate for carbon emissions. Each offset is supposed to represent a tonne of carbon that has been permanently avoided or removed from the atmosphere.
“Offsetting emissions with these credits is complete nonsense,” said Gilles Dufrasne, policy officer at Carbon Market Watch. “If the captured carbon enables an increase in oil extraction, then obviously this must be part of the calculation, and would likely negate any supposed climate benefits.”
The news elsewhere is similarly dire:
While insects may bug people at times, they also are key in pollinating plants to feed people, making soil more fertile and they include beautiful butterflies and fireflies. Scientists have noticed a dramatic drop both in total bug numbers and diversity of insect species, calling it a slow-motion death by 1,000 cuts. Those cuts include pesticides and light pollution.
Big single-crop agriculture that leaves less habitat and leafy food for bugs plus higher temperatures from climate change are huge problems for insects, but a new study in the journal Nature Wednesday based on more than 750,000 samples of 18,000 different species of insects says it’s not just those two threats acting on their own. It’s how habitat loss and climate change interact that really smashes bug populations.
In about half the cases where numbers of insects had plummeted, researchers found climate change and habitat loss from agriculture magnifying each other. In more than a quarter of the cases of biodiversity loss, meaning fewer species, the same dynamic was at work.
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Insect pollinators are responsible for about one-third of the human diet, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And 2 out of 5 species of invertebrate pollinators, such as bees and butterflies, are on the path toward extinction, a 2016 United Nations science report said.
Regarding feedback loops, Alaska’s melting permafrost is set to release a large amount of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere:
Towns across Alaska are facing similar challenges: The statewide threat assessment found that 89 of Alaska’s 336 communities are threatened by permafrost degradation. “The main barriers to addressing these threats include the lack of site-specific data to inform the development of solutions, and the lack of funding to implement repairs and proactive solutions,” Max Neale, senior program manager for the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium, wrote in an email. “We have yet to see significant engagement from state and federal partners to improve the efficacy and equitability of programs for communities facing climate change and environmental threats.”
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There are 1.6 trillion metric tons of carbon currently stored in permafrost — twice what’s now in the atmosphere. New projections suggest that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions from permafrost could equal those emitted from the rest of the United States by the end of the century.
One more example, from the Smithsonian:
Since farmers began tilling the land in the Midwest 160 years ago, 57.6 billion metric tons of topsoil have eroded, according to a study published recently in Earth's Future. The loss has occurred despite conservation efforts implemented in the 1930s after the Dust Bowl, and the erosion rate is estimated to be double what the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) says is sustainable. Future crop production could be severely limited if it continues, reports Rachel Crowell for Science News.
Degraded soil makes growing food more difficult and expensive. Without healthy soil, farmers won't be able to grow nutrient-dense food to feed our growing population. The calculated loss in the region is part of a critical issue; some experts suspect that Earth will run out of usable topsoil within 60 years.
A google search for “climate change news” will provide countless more examples, all of them alarming.
There is nothing to indicate that the feedback loop death spiral of climate-change induced environmental stressors will be averted anytime soon. Biodiversity is already plummeting in the oceans as it is on land and in the air. Extrapolating from the deadly effects of climate change we are already observing (famine, wildfire, season cycle disruptions such as plants flowering earlier, heat waves, storms, crumbling infrastructure, etc.), the future to any informed observer is not only bleak, it is intolerably cruel. To understand both the severity of the coming cataclysm and the inability of our political system to do anything about it (climate change being a collective problem which cannot be solved through individual action alone) and to make the decision to have a child regardless would immediately seem to be the height of selfishness and shortsightedness. If it is correct that the future is bleak and not one any sane observer would willingly choose to experience, do we owe our potential offspring the courtesy of preempting their existence, or is this a choice that is better theirs to make once they experience enough of the world?
Kate Ng recently tackled this question in The Independent:
The question hangs heavy for many young people as topics of sustainability and the future of the planet dominate the news agenda, and overpopulation is often cited as a factor. The first academic study of the issue last year found that an overwhelming number of people who are concerned about the climate crisis are deciding not to have children over fears their next of kin would struggle in the future.
The survey of 600 people aged 27 to 45 found that 96 per cent were very or extremely concerned about the wellbeing of their potential future children in a world ravaged by climate change. It also revealed deeply pessimistic views of the future, with 92.3 per cent of 400 respondents offering a negative vision of the future and only 0.6 per cent were positive.
The scientific consensus is that having children is the highest impact action an individual can do to create a lifetime of carbon emissions. A 2017 study carried out by climate scientists Kimberley Nicholas and Seth Wynes found that a child born into the developed world leaves a 58.6 metric tonne carbon footprint annually.
The study, published in Environmental Research, recommended that individuals reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding air travel and eating a plant-based diet.
The act of procreation is at first a morally neutral one. Historically, human societies have placed various limits on the ability of their inhabitants to procreate, but in general they encourage reproduction to propagate the political system and the society that sustains it. Any governing body that too overzealously polices its subjects’ ability to procreate would quickly find itself extinct, and it therefore has a prurient self interest in fostering the creation of new bodies if not necessarily a moral one, so the question of whether or not to procreate typically falls to the individual. After all, in “advanced” countries such as the US, the same government that disastrously encouraged and excused big polluters would not rightly be considered an authority on what should and not should not be happening to the potential lives which would be suffering the most as a result—an officials’ permission or legal benefits to child rearing do not reflect on the correctness of the decision (forced reproduction and eugenics being the widely recognized atrocity they are). The question is rightfully the domain of two consenting individuals, just as the act of sex is. Social concerns are irrelevant and not rightfully their responsibility to consider.
Stopping life before it starts is inherently morally neutral, far different from stopping one that has already begun. The potential life is unable to suffer from its own non-existence, and while it may not get to experience the various joys of life, nothing is lost if it is unaware of what was missed (it is in fact unaware of anything, because it does not exist). Any particular potential life is not guaranteed to be a good one—a major mistake made by couples is the assumption that any pregnancy they chose not to bring about would have been worth fostering in and of itself. This is untrue on its face, and the declining birthrate in recent years speaks to a growing discontent in the idea that life for its own sake is a moral truism. If this was universal or even widely held, the world would be much more overpopulated than it already is. In actuality, the decision to forego having a child does not create and then destroy a fictionalized life, and any such romantic yearning is the result of hormones and a biological drive which itself is also morally neutral (another biological drive, to fight and kill, is necessarily sublimated in order for us to live among one another amicably). During the sex act, there is no ghostly “Adam” whose potential life is robbed from him if a condom is used or the act is interrupted, and presuming there might be devalues the lives of many already existing human beings.
Should then the right to self-terminate be left to the new individual in question? Assume the couple has reservations about the quality of life their children will have, but decide that their life might well be worth living, and that the decision to continue on or commit suicide in the event of unlivable conditions can be made by their offspring when the time comes. This is an unfair burden to place upon an individual who, once given life and the ability understand and interact with the world, is naturally endowed with certain generally consensual rights and responsibilities and who is now burdened with a Hobson’s choice: either continue to live a life of intolerable cruelty and suffering (many would call this a fate worse than death) or attempt to self-terminate, a messy, often-unsuccessful endeavor made all the more difficult and painful in times of unrest and scarcity, during which drugs and weapons to facilitate a quick exit would be difficult to procure. In addition to this, the right to end one’s life is controversial even in times of relative comfort—physician assisted suicide is not even now universally considered an inalienable right even at the patient’s point of dying. To assume that a potential future world so apocalyptic that suicide is a tempting alternative would treat the suffering with any more kindness and compassion is asinine. It is unfair to bring a being into a world where the question of suicide is so heavily weighted in one direction, akin to placing a mouse in a maze full of deadly traps and arguing that it still has some self-determination. This is also the reason that anyone now alive does not have a responsibility to kill themselves in order to save the environment, though massive waves of suicide would reduce emissions. We are already trapped in the maze.
The responsibility not to procreate is two-pronged: abstaining from reproduction saves a potential life from experiencing a world that will scarcely resemble that of 100 years ago, but it also mitigates the harm of climate change significantly, as ushering in new life produces a gargantuan carbon footprint compared to all other individual actions. Climate change is first and foremost a collective problem which begs for a collective solution, but though an individual’s efforts might be a drop in the bucket, there are still actions one can take to reduce their own contribution to the disaster, and abstaining from procreation is both easy and highly effective. This perspective is not without its detractors, though. Sigal Samuel rights in Vox:
A growing contingent of young people are refusing to have kids — or are considering having fewer kids — because of climate change. Their voices have been growing louder over the past year. UK women set up a movement called BirthStrike, announcing that they won’t procreate until the world gets its act together on climate, and high-profile US figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez amplified the question of whether childbearing is still morally acceptable.
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The problem with most studies on the climate impact of various lifestyle decisions is that they don’t account for likely changes in government policy in the future. But climate policy will almost certainly get much stricter over the course of our children’s and grandchildren’s lifetimes, the Founders Pledge researchers say.
That does seem likely, at least in some countries, as advances in clean tech are easing the transition to green energy and some governments are already jumping on board. For example, the UK is now legally required to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, and the sale of pollution-causing cars will be banned there as of 2035. These sorts of policies limit how much environmental damage our descendants can do.
The argument here is the same one I debunked in my climate optimism essay. Only the assumption that these minor and wholly insufficient (net-zero by 2050, for example, is too little too late) concessions to climate concerns will be both effective and lasting could justify the decision to procreate in spite of the current carbon footprint produced by a new human child. In much the same way a potential future life has no right to existence to consider, it must also be assumed that its fulfilled existence will be a great strain on the planet. While we are exploring wild counterfactuals, it is similarly outlandish to have children in the hopes of producing a savior who will lead the human race to its great utopian destiny. In either case, there is no reason to believe a positive outcome is likely or even possible given the overwhelming wealth of negative data.
One might reply: “If only the worst people have children, then the next generation will only be raised by the worst people.” And what of the freely-birthed humans produced in the last 100 years, who in a few short generations ushered in irreversible planetary destruction, despite warnings from the scientific community dating back even to the start of the 20th century? This view does approximate the darker side of anti-natalism, that the human race as it currently exists is by and large evil, a force for destruction without which the natural world would flourish once again. This is an understandably dangerous conclusion and could be taken further than anti-natalism, into the realm of justifying terrorism or mass killings with an environmentalist modus operandi. The human race is the product of a savage process of evolution in which the strong kill off and outproduce the weak, so our nature might be somewhat inherently violent and avaricious, but our intelligence also affords us with the ability to overcome that nature. This cogent empathy informs our freedom of choice to abstain from one’s base impulses—it is the main attribute that makes us human.
Our race once had the capability to do just that, to come together and avert the tragedy of the commons and attendant climate catastrophe by denying our more primitive, unthinking side and looking to the future as one, not as a collection of individuals and families whose own survival is placed above all (and at the expense of) others but as a true collective, a single entity that protects all its parts with equal fervor because it understands that harm to one is harm to all. That time has long since passed. If the person reading this considers themselves a humanist, then they would know when it is time to throw in the towel and spare future generations the pain and guilt of participation in an irredeemable, crumbling capitalist system.
The increasing silence of nature is already disconcerting—the coming silence will be deafening.