Why To Bring A Baby Into A Changing Climate

How Do You Decide to Have a Baby When Climate Change Is Remaking Life on Earth? Any child born now could, by midlife, see massive storms inundate coastal cities and the Great Plains turn to dust. Could I have one, knowing I might not be able to keep her safe?

Madeline Ostrander, March 23, 2016 (The Nation)

Editor’s Note: This a long and profound think piece. Click thru and give it it’s due.

“…[M]y friends of childbearing age tended to be writers and activists, scientists and scholars. When considering kids, they weighed not only their desires and finances but the state of the world. Many of them had read grim prognoses of what climate change would do to life on Earth. Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me…By 2050, when still in her 30s, [my child] could witness global wars waged over food and land…Sometimes when I considered the question [of having a child], the sadness nearly suffocated me… Throughout the winter, I sank deeper into my grief. I slept fitfully and clenched my teeth as I dreamed. I still worked, but barely, as if in a kind of daze. Then I awoke one morning in February to the opening of plum-tree blossoms in my backyard and walked among the decayed remains of last year’s leaves. In the woods nearby, the salmonberries had begun to open their green buds. Last year, spring came early and warm, followed by a summer of record-breaking heat that lit the Pacific Northwest’s forests on fire. Now that it was spring again, I wondered if I would try once more to conceive…” click here for more

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