Tuesday
Guardian book editor Sian Cain has a fascinating article in which she turns to literature to bolster her climate change decision not to have children. Given the predicted horrors of global warming, she regards bringing more people into the world as irresponsible, but this viewpoint is so fraught that she needs literature to help her sort it out.
Cain gives a stark view of the world the next generation can expect:
If my baby were to be born today, they would be 10 years old when a quarter of the world’s insects could be gone, when 100 million children are expected to be suffering extreme food scarcity. My child would be 23 when 99% of coral reefs are set to experience severe bleaching. They would be 30 – my age now – when 200 million climate refugees will be roaming the world, when half of all species on Earth are predicted to be extinct in the wild. They would be 80 in 2100, when parts of Australia, Africa and the United States could be uninhabitable.
We are in the middle of a mass extinction, the first caused by a single species. There are 7.8 billion of us, on a planet that scientists estimate can support 15 billion humans living as the average US citizen does today. And we know that the biggest contribution any individual living in affluent nations can make is to not have children. According to one study, having one fewer child prevents 58.6 tons of carbon emissions every year; compare that with living car-free (2.4 tons), avoiding a transatlantic return flight (1.6), or eating a plant-based diet (0.82). Another study said it was almost 20 times more important than any other choice an environmentally minded individual could make.
Cain admits this is not the whole story, which is why she turns to literature. At first glance, however, literature seems to come up short:
Few novels have attempted to tell us what to do in the face of climate catastrophe. Amitav Ghosh has called this “a crisis of imagination.” As Richard Powers writes in his 2018 novel The Overstory, “The world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
Nevertheless, Cain mentions some novels that are attempting to grapple with the question. In Lydia Millet’s Children’s Bible (2020), for instance,
kids are contemptuous of adults for their lack of action before the collapse of society. “It was so sudden, they said. They’d all been told there was more time. Way more. It was someone else’s fault for sure.” One of the children, Jack, finds a decaying Bible, and in it, a way of making sense of his disintegrating world. When an apocalyptic storm hits the US, the book tells him what to do: build an ark.
Children play an important emotional role in apocalyptic climate fiction by raising the stakes of survival. Cain says that sometimes they lend significance to the narrative by their presence, sometimes by their absence. A number of her books approach the issue from an adult perspective:
But even when the future seems like no place for a child, there is always room for them in fiction set at the end of the world: they are emotional ammunition, a reminder of bigger stakes to come. In Lauren Beukes’s upcoming Afterland, a global pandemic that kills only men has led to a “global reprohibition”; Cole, a mother on the run with her mysteriously still-living teenage son, thinks: “When there aren’t going to be any more kids, you want to hold on to their childhood for as long as you can. There must be a German word for that. Nostalgenfreude. Kindersucht.”
Perhaps it is kindersucht we feel when we read novels like The Children of Men by PD James, Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich, or JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, in which children are conspicuous by their presence or absence. In Ballard’s 1962 novel, set in a submerged London, “the birth of a child had become a comparative rarity, and only one marriage in 10 yielded any offspring … the genealogical tree of mankind was systematically pruning itself.” In Margaret Atwood’s 1977 short story “When It Happens”, a middle-aged woman makes preparations to flee her family home due to an unnamed threat, and her gaze falls on a family photo: “The children when they were babies. She thinks of her girls now and hopes they will not have babies; it is no longer the right time for it.” In Jenny Offill’s Weather, the narrator watches her son play and recalls a past conversation with an environmentalist friend: “I asked her once what I could do, how I could get him ready. It would be good if he had some skills, she said. And of course, no children.”
Other authors take up the next generation’s point of view:
Children become resigned to not having the future they should have had; in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, when the father says: “You are not the one who has to worry about everything,” his son counters, “I am the one.” And in Season Butler’s Cygnet, a teenager mopes around an island populated only by pensioners waiting out the end as their homes slowly crumble into the sea: “I think about the kids that people my age are having, or will start having soon. Life is going to be so boring for them. Not just because the world will have gone completely to shit by then and there won’t be much of anything left, but because their parents are going to talk constantly about how the world used to be.”
Cain looks at non-fiction as well as fiction, observing as she does so that many of these works are written by parents. She acknowledges that having children gives their climate activism a particular urgency:
[I]t is remarkable how many of these authors suggest that having a child is a hopeful gesture, a sign of one’s investment in the future. [Uninhabitable Earth author David] Wallace-Wells has said having children “is a reason to fight now”. [Notes from an Apocalypse author Mark] O’Connell writes that his son’s birth is a dilemma because “the last thing the world needed, after all, was more people in it, and the last thing my hitherto nonexistent person needed was to be in the world”; by the end, he has a second child, and a “radically increased stake in the future.”
Cain doesn’t so much disagree with these authors as note that it’s a vexed question whether or not go childless. As she herself faces intense pressure for her views, she looks to literature for support:
Ever since my partner and I concluded that we wanted to be child-free, I have looked to books for positive examples of fulfilling and rewarding lives lived without children. The closest I have found have been eccentric spinsters and ambivalent parents, in a long line from Doris Lessing and DH Lawrence, Barbara Pym and Rachel Cusk. There are countless mothers who find their intellectual pursuits strangled by their children and absent husbands (most recently, Fleishmann Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet).
She is reassured, however, that recent works are more likely to feature characters who shrug off the traditional childbearing expectations:
But recently, as millennials are coming of age as both prospective parents and as authors, characters are questioning the status quo. “Fuck all those childbearers and their ‘fulfilling’ lives, never getting to have adventures like mine,” thinks the 38-year-old narrator of Melissa Broder’s The Pisces, for whom the prospect of children is “like something mildly distasteful: a piece of onion I would prefer not to put on my plate.” “Why bother having a kid when the world’s going to hell anyway?” wonders one character in Ottessa Moshfegh’s A Year of Rest and Relaxation. “Why do you want children?” the narrator of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar asks her boyfriend. “He shrugs. ‘So we can be like everybody else.’” In Amina Cain’s Indelicacy, a woman objects to her husband’s expectation that they will someday have children. “Why is it necessary for everyone to think of it, as if there were no other choice?” she rages at a friend.
Cain ultimately finds a silver lining—a very thin one, to be sure—in climate change: it can get us to rethink how to live a meaningful life. Maybe childbearing, important as it is for many, isn’t our only option. In the end, Cain wants us to tolerate those who live another way:
The climate crisis has presented an opportunity to rebrand being child-free, once the greatest taboo, into the ultimate altruistic act. At the same time, parenthood is framed as the ultimate investment in a better future. But choosing to have children is neither inherently good nor selfish, and the same goes for being child-free. We must challenge the orthodoxy that says choosing to live one way is a criticism of another. Just this week comes a new novel by Emma Gannon, Olive, which centers on a woman in her 30s who has chosen to be child-free; Gannon herself has spoken about being made to feel guilty for her choice. What we need instead is a quiet revolution, a complete reappraisal of what we deem to be a meaningful life.
As a Guardian book editor, it makes sense that Cain would replace children with books:
I, for one, will continue to turn to books, where I find reassurance in the strangest of places. In one tiny strand of The Overstory, Ray and Dorothy, a couple who have spent thousands on fertility treatments, finally decided to move on. “In place of children, then, books,” Powers writes. “Ray likes to glimpse the grand project of civilization ascending to its still-obscure destiny. He wants only to read on, late into the night, about the rising quality of life, the steady freeing of humanity by invention, the breakout of know-how that will finally save the race.”
I fully support Cain’s decision not to have children, even though I can’t imagine my own life without my two sons and their five children. But I worry about their future in just the ways the Cain worries. A leap of faith is required but, as we are seeing from far too many of our leaders these days, such leaps can far too easily become magical thinking.
Literature is a great forum for grappling with these issues, however.