Is having a baby pure environmental vandalism?

Is having a child an act of environmental vandalism? Whilst trying to find the answer, Vogue s journalist has been contemplating whether she could get away with it if she kept wearing the same three pairs of jeans for the rest of her life.

WORLD APRIL 30. 2021 12:38

Environmentalists are coming up with a growing number of extreme ideas. Some have suggested that people should not give birth to children, because living an ecologically responsible life while adding another person to the planet would not be possible. This is the basic premise of a recent article in Vouge, whose author wanted to find out whether having a baby in 2021 is tantamount to pure environmental vandalism.

„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?” These are some of the questions Vouge s journalist has addressed.

Nell Frizzell, a mother of one, writes that while gestating her son, and probably every day since, she has wondered about „the strain on the Earth s resources that another Western child would add. The food he ate, the nappies he wore, the electricity he would use; before he d even started sitting up, her child would have already contributed far more to climate change than his counterpart in, say, South Sudan.”

She also worried about the sort of world that she would bring her child into, as soils are getting depleted and we are running out of fresh water. Air pollution is also dangerous, leading to the early deaths of children and adults alike.

As is evident from the article, the writer has a child and goes on to state she would have another if her partner agreed to it. Nell Frizzell eventually came to the conclusion that people will always have children, so the question is more about how parents raise them. She says she wants to raise her child in an environmentally conscious way and also considers it key for people to overturn political systems that reward only a tiny rich minority at the expense of everyone else.

The article published in Vogue went viral and provoked a number of reactions. The Human Progress organisation, for example, refuted Nell Frizzell s claim that children are straining the world s resources. In fact, according to their study, the opposite is true: each new child is correlated with an increase in resource abundance.

According to a journalist at Insider, people representing such an opinion are insane, and the journalist s thoughts reflected in her article are more indicative of the author requiring therapy than appropriate for appearing in a fashion magazine. Political commentator Liz Wheeler also reacted to the article by sharing a tweet, saying:

Others were of the opinion that the article contained an amalgamation of pseudo-scientific facts. Some wrote, ironically, that they were planning to have several children regardless, while others – also ironically – apologised to climate celebrity Greta Thunberg, pledging to starve their children in order to offset their carbon footprint.

WORLD

Tags:

children, climate change, environment, future, pollution, resources