A fifth of female climate scientists who responded to Guardian survey said they had opted to have no or fewer children
Ihad the hormonal urges,” said Prof Camille Parmesan, a leading climate scientist based in France. “Oh my gosh, it was very strong. But it was: ‘Do I really want to bring a child into this world that we’re creating?’ Even 30 years ago, it was very clear the world was going to hell in a handbasket. I’m 62 now and I’m actually really glad I did not have children.”
Parmesan is not alone. An exclusive Guardian survey has found that almost a fifth of the female climate experts who responded have chosen to have no children, or fewer children, due to the environmental crises afflicting the world.
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An Indian scientist who chose to be anonymous decided to adopt rather than have children of her own. “There are too many children in India who do not get a fair chance and we can offer that to someone who is already born,” she said. “We are not so special that our genes need to be transmitted: values matter more.”
The population is actually tipped to massively reduce on the next 100 years due to a large portion of people not have babies simply due to crappy economic conditions, inflation, war the lying flat movement in china and the ever increasing destruction of the middle class into the homeless poor. Aside from rich people destroying peoples ability to have happy lives, there’s also the plastic problem that’s quite literally made every male living thing have a reduced sperm count and it continues to drop as plastic is in the air, our clothes carpet and oceans. Endocrine disruptors in our bodies are being effected by chemicals found in vinyl products, thermal receipts and Tupperware releasing chemicals when heated in microwaves. These things are so small they enter the bloodstream and pass through the blood brain barrier… Fuuuck
So if you want to save the future start by sniping off rich oligarchs and ban plastic completely
i agree with your general idea, but not with all the reasons. war, crappy economic conditions and inflation have all happened multiple times before (and much worse that the current situation), but I’ve never heard that there were large portion of people choosing not to have kids before (please, correct me if I am wrong)
i think that the current mental health crisis (which is caused by all those problems + the housing crisis, destruction of middle class, climate change concerns + social media) makes it different this time
And they’ve all been paired with downturns in new births. The Thirty Years War, the Bengali Famine, and the Great Depression all resulted in sharp declines in birth rates.
I don’t think its limited to mental health. Two big changes from historical periods have been the sharp decline in dying kids and introduction of effective contraception. Historically, the only thing that countered a human’s innate horniness was malnutrition, massacre, and high rates of infant mortality. With vaccines and contraception, the idea of family planning isn’t “Have five kids and hope two live” but “Have two kids and hope you can pay for their college”.
A big contribution to the 40s-era Baby Boom was the fertilizer revolution, which dramatically boosted crop yields. This, combined with early vaccine technology, saw a drop in maternal deaths and infant deaths, leading to parents with enormous family sizes who all lived to adulthood. These adults arrived just in time to start taking The Pill. Consequently, the Millennial second-tier Boom was much smaller than the first. And now Millennials are having even fewer kids, because contraception is trivial to obtain and large families are stigmatized against.
But as to mental health? I think that’s tangential and hardly unique to the modern moment. If we didn’t have fertilizer and contraception and vaccination, we’d have just as many mentally ill people running around and making babies who died before they turned three years old. And the population downturn would look the same as any other 18th or 19th century trend line.