PURE ENVIRONMENTAL VANDALISM.
Plug your nose because we're gonna go through this trash heap line by line:
Is having a child an act of environmental vandalism or an investment in the future? Is it possible to live an ecologically responsible life while adding yet another person to our overstretched planet? Can I get away with it if I just never learn to drive, never get a dog and keep wearing the same three pairs of jeans for the rest of my life?
She's talking about having a baby. Reproducing. If you didn't catch that. And she's questioning whether it would be morally acceptable to do so if she never learns to drive. Or never buys more jeans.
This is, presumably, an adult human writing this.
For the scientifically-engaged person, there are few questions more troubling when looking at the current climate emergency than that of having a baby. Whether your body throbs to reproduce, you passively believe that it is on the cards for you one day, or you actively seek to remain child-free, the declining health of the planet cannot help but factor in your thinking.
"The scientifically-[sic]engaged person" ROFLLLLLLLLLL
Before I got pregnant, I worried feverishly about the strain on the earth's resources that another Western child would add.
FEVERISHLY.
WESTERN.
Onward:
The food he ate, the nappies he wore, the electricity he would use; before he'd even started sitting up, my child would have already contributed far more to climate change than his counterpart in, say, Kerala or South Sudan.
Read that sentence again.
I started this article with good intentions but at this point I am honestly not sure how much further I can go.
But I also worried about the sort of world that I would bring my child into – where we have perhaps just another 60 harvests left before our overworked soil gives out and we are running out of fresh water. Could I really have a baby, knowing that by the time he was my father's age, he may be living on a dry and barren earth?
Spoiler alert: He won't be.
This is getting harder.
While gestating my son, and probably every day since, I have wondered whether having children is, in itself, an ecologically sound or unsound decision. Well, spoiler! Like so much in this life, it's not a simple binary. The question of resources is more realistically one of consumption rather than population. A new report from the University of Sussex has shown that the wealthiest 10 per cent were responsible for nearly half of climate emissions growth from 1990 to 2015. The lifestyle of the rich and super-rich is destroying the planet at a rate unimaginable just a hundred years ago. Take flying; according to a Forbes article from last year, based on research from Sweden's Linnaeus University, the wealthiest 1 per cent generate half of the world's global aviation emissions.
So, I take it she's saying that the global temp kicked up a degree or two this week when all the far-left uber-rich celebs who love to lecture everyone about climate change flew in to L.A. on their private jets for the Oscars?
But even just people living regular lives in economically developed countries like me are having a disproportionately high impact on the world. The way our food is farmed, the amount we buy, the way we dispose of our waste – all are far worse for the planet than those living in less consumerist and less economically developed societies.
K. We should be less economically developed before having children I guess.
Or this lady could just move to, I dunno, Nigeria, and have her kids there?
You don't have to look into the future or to other continents to see that the world as it is organised now is dangerous for children.
I have to agree with her there. Raising our kids in this current world of braindead wokeism is indeed dangerous. It gives me pause. It makes me scared. That so many of our fellow humans would campaign for wholesale collectivism, despite the unfathomable tragedies of the 20th Century, shakes me to the core.
...
I tried to continue on with Ms. (or Mr.? Or Mx.?) Frizzell's article but can take no more.
Goodnight.
