ON THIN ICE
WHEN A 39-YEAROLD SCIENTIST RELEASED A STUDY ABOUT HOW HAVING CHILDREN IMPACTS CLIMATE CHANGE, SHE FOUND HERSELF UNDER THE MICROSCOPE, WITH EVERYONE ASKING: SO, ARE YOU HAVING KIDS?
Having babies in an age of global warming – discuss.
IS CLIMATE CHANGE MAKING YOU RETHINK HAVING CHILDREN? You’re not alone. A study from the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) found 78 per cent of women aged under 30, or their friends and family, have experienced worry or anxiety about climate change and the future. When US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-cortez, who’s 29, questioned whether we should still be having children in the face of it, Australian women felt similarly – 33.4 per cent of those surveyed by the ACF are having second thoughts about having children because they will face an “unsafe future from climate change”.
Kimberly Nicholas, who grew up in Northern California, is one of these women, too. But her story caused an outcry that revealed a lot about social expectations of women. She remembers in the 1990s listening to the conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh (the American Alan Jones) complain about tax breaks and flag burnings on her mum’s car radio. Since then, she’s left her parents’ politics far behind, becoming a climate scientist and decamping to Sweden, where she’s an associate professor at Lund University. But it still felt surreal when she got a message from a friend informing her that the conservative talkshow host had been railing on-air – about Nicholas herself.
“She’s trying to decide whether to have children because of climate change!” Limbaugh said into his mic. “Why even get married? What’s her name here? Kimberly. Kimberly, why get married? What is the point if you’re not gonna have kids?”
What prompted Limbaugh’s tirade was a study that Nicholas, now 41, co-authored with her former graduate student Seth Wynes, which concluded that the number one thing a person living in an industrialised country can do to curb climate change is to have fewer children. Basing their calculations on the premise that each person is responsible for a measure of the carbon emissions of their children and grandchildren, they estimated that not having a baby saves as much carbon annually as 73 people going vegetarian or 24 people not driving a car for a year. And Limbaugh’s outrage at the idea that one might consider the climate when thinking about having kids (as Nicholas had admitted she’d done in a radio interview) turned out to be pretty common. More than 1,000 emails flooded the inbox of Lund University’s vice-chancellor, demanding that he retract the study. (He refused.) The right-wing National Review magazine labelled Nicholas and Wynes “child-averse”, proposing that a better way to save the planet would be to commission “a study on the climate impact of a liberalenvironmentalist suicide pact”. Some liberal feminists cringed at the research, too. “Oh gosh, it made me so angry,” says Meghan Kallman, co-founder of Conceivable Future, a group that aims to raise awareness about how climate change is impacting people’s childbearing decisions. “It’s wagging a finger at individuals who choose to exercise their human right to have a child,” she says, instead of demanding that companies and governments quit polluting.
Nicholas and Wynes had originally set out simply to quantify how different lifestyle choices impact carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions, but their conclusions thrust Nicholas into the centre of a debate she wanted no part in. “I don’t think people should feel guilty for having children,” says Nicholas. Neither would she want women to feel pressured about motherhood. The irony, of course, was that she was the one feeling pressured – from all sides.
Nicholas’s fiancé, Simon Rose, a mathematician, had to call up his mother in Canada to explain why Nicholas was telling the press about their procreative plans. In the radio interview Limbaugh had picked up on, Nicholas had tried to highlight other findings published in the study, but the only part of the conversation that was broadcast focused on whether one should have a baby, and, in particular, whether Nicholas herself planned to do so.
“May I ask you a personal question?” US morning radioshow host Steve Inskeep asked, leaving Nicholas sure that no matter what answer she gave, it would carry an unintended weight. It felt, she says, “like, are we so screwed that even this climate scientist is not going to have children?”
The study had actually suggested three additional lifestyle choices to lower your carbon footprint, albeit not as much as being child-free: avoiding flying, ditching car travel and not eating meat. Wynes, who mostly spoke to the international media, was asked a lot about these other points. But for Nicholas, who fielded the American press, babies were “all anyone wanted to talk to me about”, she says.
When Nicholas answers these types of questions, her responses are hardly unique. Climate change is only one of the factors – and not even the primary one – that she and her fiancé are considering. Like many other potential parents deciding whether or not to jump in, they’ve also been thinking about what a child would mean for their relationship and their careers and, most of all, whether a child would make for a more meaningful life. “If I had a burning hole in my heart to have a child and I knew that it would also be the biggest contribution to climate change that I would make, I think that I would do it anyway,” she says.
In that case, the next step would be to minimise the carbon impact of that choice by, say, walking instead of driving her child to preschool and feeding her beans instead of beef. According to the World Bank, Americans produce almost 10 times more greenhouse gas emissions than the average Indian does, and more than 165 times more than the average Malawian. (Australia is guilty, too: by some measures, our emissions outstrip even the US’S.) Which is why lowering our fossil fuel consumption, in Nicholas’s mind, is more important than forgoing childbirth. “It’s not so much about whether you choose to have a child,” she says. “It’s about what kind of lifestyle you choose to raise that child in.”
Nicholas and Rose are still yet to make a decision around children of their own. In the meantime, they took a weddingthemed train trip across the US and Canada, where they stopped to see friends and family in different cities to celebrate instead of asking them to burn fossil fuels flying to Sweden.
“There are lots of people who make the decision not to have kids, and they are really happy with it,” says Nicholas. “Who knows – I might end up being one of them.” Or not. “As one woman told me, ‘If not for our kids, whom are we saving the climate for?’”
“It’s not SO MUCH about WHETHER YOU CHOOSE to HAVE A CHILD. It’s about WHAT KIND OF LIFESTYLE YOU CHOOSE to RAISE THAT CHILD in”