The world's first course on eco-reproductive concerns

A professor in Singapore teaches "Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change"

Image taken with permission from “Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change” course materials

Hey there!

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I’m very excited to share with you a conversation I had recently with Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an interdisciplinary scholar and professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore who researches and teaches on climate justice, climate fiction, and what he calls “eco-repro”. Matthew has published two fascinating papers about how climate-aware people regard the question of having kids or not in these times. You may have already caught the first one, called Eco-reproductive concerns in the age of climate change written up in The Guardian and other media last year. His more recent eco-repro paper, The environmental politics of reproductive choices in the age of climate change gets into the various arguments people use when making family planning decisions amidst climate breakdown. In addition to these papers, he is writing a book on the topic, and even taught an undergraduate course at Yale-NUS last year that dove into its complexities. That’s the world we’re in now — a world where undergrads can elect to take a course that focuses on the dilemma of whether to have kids of not in the climate and wider eco-crisis. It sure is a fascinating time to be alive and think about what it means to create more human life. Hope you enjoy the conversation. Let us know what you think in the comments below!

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BW: So can you break down what that course was all about -- what’s the synopsis of what it entailed?

MSM: The course is called “Reproduction in the Age of Climate Change,” and I believe it was the first course of its kind in the world. I put it together because I’ve been interested in this topic for a long time now, and many young people around the world are talking and thinking about this. That’s a real change. I can remember back in 2010, speaking with a former partner about whether we might have kids at some point and mentioning climate change as something that might influence that choice. At that time it seemed like a crazy idea -- the kind of thing someone says when they don’t want to have kids for other reasons. As the issue has gained a lot more public attention over the last five years, particularly in North America and the United Kingdom, I began writing a book on the topic.

I also began having conversations with my students who have expressed these concerns. I teach at a small liberal arts college and I come to know many of the students in our Environmental Studies program pretty well, and this is one of the things they talk about with each other. My sense is that among a set of educated and environmentally concerned people in the West, there’s now a common sense notion that the worst thing that you can do for the environment is have children. The truth is that it’s far more complicated than that, as we discussed in this class.

We started off with an introduction to likely and plausible climate futures by reading some different texts that offered detailed projections. We dug into the history of the environment-population nexus and how Malthusian thinking has led to some problematic ideas as well as coercive and racist policies. We covered literature and film and cultural studies, looking at the ways these issues and concerns are being represented in popular mediums. We looked at quantitative social science, in terms of the actual calculation of the carbon legacy of having children, and the misleading way that’s been portrayed in the media. We looked at the political dynamics of this question. We looked at environmental psychology and sociology -- whether individual choices actually matter -- and we read a fair amount of philosophy. The goal was to dig into a specific issue that’s of growing importance in wealthy countries from a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary lens.

BW: You mentioned how in the predominantly Western world, there’s this focus on the environmental footprint of a child. People have published on this and the idea has been spread widely, but it’s also been hotly debated as to whether equating individual humans with a carbon footprint is valid. Plus, as you touched on, that kind of equating can lead to a focus on overpopulation which has caused a lot of harm in the past when justified through an environmental lens. That said, you taught this course in Singapore and I’m just wondering how the cultural context of engaging with these ideas in Singapore is perhaps different from what it would have been like in Canada, the United States, the UK or Australia when it comes to the carbon footprint or the carbon intensiveness of having children.

MSM: My students had slightly different perspectives on this issue, especially on the ethical considerations. Half of the students at Yale-NUS College are from Singapore, half are from elsewhere, and we have an intensive common curriculum in which students are exposed to classic literary, philosophical, and political texts. But as opposed to North America or the UK, it’s not just the Western philosophical traditions, it's also the Indian and Chinese traditions. So the students are as well versed in Mencius as they are in John Stuart Mill. As we were exploring environmental ethics on this question, a lot of it is essentially utilitarianism, looking at each individual as an isolated actor and thinking how each choice can maximize overall utility, or good. That’s the way that I’m accustomed to thinking about ethics, especially from an environmental perspective, and that’s the logic behind what I call footprintism. But it’s very different when you examine this issue from a Confucian perspective, in which familial relations are an important part of ethics. From that perspective, discussing the ethics of reproduction as if it concerned only an isolated individual is a bit odd. A number of students fundamentally objected to the individualism that is kind of inherent in a lot of Western philosophy and writing on this subject, and that was really refreshing. That was something that we probably wouldn’t have talked about as much if I had been teaching the class in North America.

Image from Pixabay

BW: At the same time, you did read about possible futures that I imagine were grim and dire, based on science that’s been published in the last few years about what this climate changed world looks like that we’re marching into. Which really then calls upon the existential fears and the sentiments of despair and hopelessness and helplessness and eco-anxiety that a lot of people are struggling with when it comes to thinking about whether or not they’re going to have a child in these times. And that is from my observation the growing sentiment now in the West that is heavier than the ecological footprint concern, even though that piece is still there. And I’m wondering how this element was taken up by your students and if this set into their hearts in a way that maybe felt a bit more true than the individualistic thinking of footprintism?

MSM: For sure. The sense of anxiety, fear, and dread about what will happen was very present, especially at the start of the semester. But we tried to complicate that a bit, in different ways. First, we tried to separate the activist rhetoric from the actual likelihood of things happening. For example, there’s no question that a certain amount of change is baked into the system and that more bad things will occur over the next few decades regardless of what we do right now. But sometimes when activists say that if we don’t do X right now, the future will be apocalyptic and disastrous and not worth living in, to some extent that’s rhetoric, right? It’s intended to mobilize people, it’s intended to put pressure on policy makers and politicians, and that’s valuable and necessary. I do that myself sometimes. But we might have a problem if we start thinking that the activist rhetoric is the most likely future scenario, and we base our life choices on that conflation.

Second, we examined this question of whether a climate-changed future is likely to be so bad that children born today will not want to be alive, which is a fear that some people have -- many people in my survey had this concern. There are a lot of studies on hedonic adaptation, and what’s interesting is that there’s not that strong of a relationship between happiness and objective circumstances, to the extent that this can be measured. Take people who win the lottery. You would imagine that they’d be happier and have an easier life afterward, but research has found that they return to the baseline level of happiness after a year. What this suggests to me is that even if climate change leads to a future that is more difficult for more people, it doesn’t mean that people are likely to see their lives as bad, or not worth living.

What I noticed in my survey is that as some people consider whether to have children because of climate change, they’re putting themselves in their potential children's bodies and seeing their children’s futures through their own eyes. That makes sense, since that’s the only perspective they have direct access to. But that’s not how their children will experience things. This is related to what ecologists call shifting baseline syndrome -- each of us is accustomed to a certain baseline so we don’t really take note of changes in an ecosystem, or a way of life, that happen gradually over a long period of time. People in 2054 probably won’t be comparing their lives to what life was like in 2024, since so many changes happen too slowly to really register as such.

Writer Reagan Pearce explains shifting baseline syndrome at earth.org this way:

“what we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’.”

To be clear, this is not to say that we shouldn’t do absolutely everything we can to mitigate climate change and to transition to a better and more just future right now -- we should, and most of my research is about that. It’s just to say that when it comes to evaluating the life experiences of people who aren’t born yet, it’s more complicated than saying that more climatic change will automatically lead to a bad life, and therefore it’s unethical to have children. I don’t find that compelling, personally.

BW: As this debate proliferates, it feels like a lot of it is tied to anguish that stems from feeling unprepared for the future. A considerable portion of it is rooted in the expectations that many privileged people were raised with in countries like the ones that we’ve been talking about -- countries that have deep histories of colonialism and extraction (United States, Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, etc). Given what previous generations in these countries experienced in terms of economic growth or certain degrees of material and social comforts, many of them set their children up to expect similar things in their lifetimes, and now those kids are grown up and grappling with the fact that the vision they were raised with is what does not align with what science paints of our reality going forward. Society at large, our institutions, and older generations of parents generally haven’t equipped the generations that are now in their reproductive years to deal with a totally different kind of world. And that gap -- that feeling of not being prepared and also not being able to trust leaders to take action towards ensuring a safe climate in the future -- creates this expression of dread and anguish and fear. Whereas if the base-layer expectations that many people making reproductive decisions today were raised with were altogether different in many of these countries (and again I’m largely talking about privileged populations that have a certain kind of what we might call “middle class parenting philosophy” baked into them), then perhaps there’d be a very different way of relating to the potential children they are thinking about bringing into the world.

It’s kind of like we’re at a peak and everyone’s talking about collapse. They’re very worried about everything crumbling because we’ve been up on the upward train in terms of a certain definition of “progress”, which has actually been incredibly violent and unjust. And as we teeter on that peak before we start seeing the worst of climate catastrophe, if we can also learn to have children differently, by figuring out what it means to parent them with new (and old) approaches that are fit for protecting their wellbeing amidst our shifting environmental baseline, even if it’s “on the way down” from one particular standard, it could very much be “on the way up” when seen from a different perspective. I’m trying to get at something that I’m noticing in my own work a lot. It’s about asking: how do we parent differently, courageously, and helpfully in these times, rather than simply say that it’s not safe to have kids or “too late” to be able to justify bringing them into the world? And what does that require? What new imaginings and new standards and expectations fit into that? What old ancestral ways of parenting might we like to reclaim and mix in? We sure aren’t getting those messages from society itself or even (for most of us) from our families yet. So I’m just wondering, have you had any encounters in your own research that get at what a new ethos for parenting can look like?

MSM: That’s a great question. People in the US have had this background expectation of progress and in that context part of good parenting has been giving your children a better life than you had, and that often means a life of more material comfort and security. But we’re potentially at a different moment now. Part of the question becomes, what do parents owe their children?

Do they owe their children the bare minimum in terms of shelter and food and warmth, or do they owe them a lot more -- a good life, a secure life, a comfortable life? It’s a really tricky question, and an interesting philosophical question. There’s some interesting scholarship in bioethics on this, but we thought about this question a lot through the concept of kinship, which became an important part of our class, and something my students were very excited about. Part of the weight of the question of parenting in the context of climate change, for some people, is the idea that there’s only one way to have a family -- you need to have a biological child, or perhaps adopt -- which is what puts so much weight on this decision. If I have a child then I’ll be dedicating all of my spare resources, including financial resources, psychological resources, and time, to that child, for at least two decades. If I don’t I’ll be a lonely spinster -- that’s what the dominant conception of family in the West conveys, though perhaps it’s changing a bit.

This is an extremely specific conception of kinship and it’s so binary, impoverished, and isolating. In my class, we contextualized it by exploring Eastern family structures, Indigenous kinship, queer chosen families, and conceptions of multispecies kinship. Different ways of doing family. In an era of climate destabilization, community will become even more important and we need to move away from this emaciated version of kinship towards one that is more equally distributed, with broader networks of care and support. One of the biggest takeaways from teaching this course was that this heavy existential question of whether to have a child or not have a child in the context of climate change is important, but it should be altered. We should all be engaged in raising children whether or not there’s a child with our DNA. To me that is likely to be a more healthy, more just, and also more joyful world.

BW: I think that’s a beautiful note to leave off on for today. Thank you Matthew!

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Thoughts? Retorts? Reflections?

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