We live in a weird world where anti-human sentiment is becoming the norm among certain elite circles.
In fact, we can see here from The New Yorker that this anti-human sentiment is so common that they have decided to review TWO books about the wrongs and evils of making new people in a world bound for climate failure.
Yes, they want to consider the ethics of procreation in the world of man-made climate change.
The planet is burning up, so why don't we just stop making new people?
There's really no better way to frame the struggle of our time than how Elon Musk has framed it:
You're either pro-human or anti-human.
Let's dive into this article from writer Jessica Winter. She starts by saying Europe was really hot and dry when she lived in London in 2003, which is obviously proof that life is coming to an end and the apocalypse is upon us. She got really angry and wrote an article about never having kids, but then had kids and is wrestling with the guilt, I suppose.
Not long before the heat finally broke, I read an apocalyptic fifty-year climate forecast in a U.K. newspaper while sitting on a beach in Essex. When I was finished with the article, I handed the paper to my then boyfriend and declared, "I am never having children." I really meant it. My kids are now nine and six.
OH NO! YOU MADE TWO BEAUTIFUL HUMAN BEINGS! HOW EVIL!
This is often how it goes. There is the crystalline uncertainty of the structure and dynamics of the climate system, as limpid as an aquamarine sea: a wave is coming, even if we can't yet say how high or how fast it will be. But then the plates shift beneath the ocean floor — this can take years, a decade or more — and something murky and unanswerable rears up, just under the surface of your consciousness, unknown and yet profoundly certain, humming at a low and dizzying frequency.
What a religious nutjob, eh?
Seriously, read that last quote again. The climate god's wrath is "as limpid as an aquamarine sea." You don't know where or when xe/xer will strike. A wave is coming. Doom is upon us all!
She then gets into a book called "The Quickening" about melting Antarctic ice:
The central paradox of "The Quickening" is the private urge toward the creation of human life coexisting with intimations of its imminent destruction. "Should I have a child, their greenhouse gas emissions will cause roughly fifty square meters of sea ice to melt every year that they are alive," Rush writes. "Just by existing, they will make the world a little less livable for everyone, themselves included."
Fun! By that logic, let's kill all the babies to save the planet!
Do y'all think that by sterilizing the world of humanity, anything will be better? There are two paths here:
- There isn't a God and everything on this planet is random. Nature is savage and cruel and selfish. In a few billion years, the sun will burn our planet to a crisp, along with everything on it, as it expands and then dies.
- There is a God and He made us in His image, full of authority, creativity, laughter, and a mind for eternity. He has commanded us to "be fruitful and multiply" so that we can wisely rule this garden world He created. Each human being is "worth more than many sparrows"; in fact, the value of a single human (YOU) exceeds that of the rest of life on this planet.
In either scenario, how does suiciding our species help anything? We, somehow, are self-aware and amazingly intelligent, but also have a conscience. If we kill ourselves off, the planet will still die, but it won't have anyone to protect it in the meantime. Have you ever considered that we are the only creatures that 1) care and 2) have the ability to do anything about it? You think the humpback whales are going to stop an asteroid?
If we use our abilities, we could help our planet, spread consciousness to the stars, and make gardens where there are deserts. This is Elon's proposal.
That doesn't sound half-bad, but it gets even better if you accept the second proposition that people are made in God's image and there's hope for us to be raised from death for eternity!
She encourages herself, and by extension her reader, to view Antarctica "not as an inhospitable island at the bottom of the earth but as a mother, a being powerful enough to bring new life into the world." She draws an implicit parallel between putting off having children and humankind's delayed reckoning with climate change.
Again, the religious imagery. Mother Earth is the god, and she demands you stop having babies.
Jessica Winter then quotes a 2020 article from Columbia University writer Meehan Crist and good ol' AOC:
That essay, "Is It OK to Have a Child?" — the title paraphrases a question posed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the congresswoman from New York, in an Instagram live stream — is the lodestar of a growing body of commentary that debates the morality and ethics of procreation in this burning, drowning world. "It seems increasingly clear," Crist continues, "that we are living in a time of radical destabilisation of life on Earth which complicates the act of bearing children in ways that society has yet to grapple with."
Earth is not being radically destabilized. The Earth is greening. The weather is weathering. Anyone who says "the science is settled" on humanity's contribution to climate change is an authoritarian jackboot, and anyone who thinks humanity can't invent new tech (by having lots of smart new babies) to deal with emissions and weather is an ignoramus at best but likely evil to the core.
The women of the short-lived BirthStrike movement, which garnered attention at the end of the twenty-tens, renounced having children on account of the ecological emergency
Yeah, well, anything involving "don't have kids" will be short-lived, because those who have kids decide the future.
Guys, I'm only halfway through this article and you've probably had enough.
The short and quick of it is that they wanna save the world even if there are no more people left to enjoy it.
Many greenies really want to save the planet, they're naive. But those at the top? If you offered to switch completely to nuclear energy, a zero-emissions solution, they'd throw you out the window.
Why? Well, they don't care about the planet, really.
If you ask me, they think humans are a blight and need to go extinct.
Don't choose the death cult. You want to save the planet? Defy them all. Let your children's children laugh when they read the stupidity of the past embodied in the New Yorker.
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