Raising a Daughter
in a Doomed World

I.

My partner Sara woke holding her belly. “What time is it?” she said. “Write down the time.” It was late, well before sunrise, and within a few hours contractions were coming on strong, a full sixty seconds every four minutes, so we called the hospital and texted our doula and grabbed our go bag and drove. The next morning, after twenty-seven hours of labor and five hours of pushing, after nine months of worrying and hoping and looking at ultrasound scans, after years of deliberating and wondering and negotiating between the demands of being on the academic job market and our deeper biological cycles, a new human emerged into the world yowling like something feral: our daughter. Tears spilled from my eyes as I hugged her and Sara together, my chest opening like I’d found the source of all joy in the universe and plugged in, streaming total utopian agape.

First I cried for joy; the second time I cried for sorrow, a few minutes later, holding my daughter, Rosalind, and looking out the window over the hospital parking lot, the rows of cars, the strip mall across the street, the flat, ugly, rust-belt sprawl of northern Indiana, box stores and drive-thrus, drainage ditches and concrete and waste fields that might have once been oak groves, a world in which the landscape had been ravaged and brutalized as a matter of course, and in which any possibility for living in harmony with nature had been evacuated. Birds and bees and frogs were all dying, the seasons were out of joint, and instead of grieving, people were on their phones. My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our child to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future. “I’m sorry,” I told her, weeping, as her tiny fingers gripped mine. “I’m sorry you have to live in this broken world.”

Anyone who pays much attention to climate scientists or to reporting by journalists on climate change knows that the outlook is grim. It’s a tired story by this point, since scientists such as James Hansen have been warning us for thirty years, but it goes like this: Waste carbon dioxide from burned fossil fuels is accumulating in the atmosphere and trapping solar energy, which is warming the planet at an astonishing rate. This global warming is radically transforming environmental conditions all over the planet, leading to a range of second-order effects including rising seas, destabilized crop yields, mass extinction, unpredictable and dangerously intense storms, drought, floods, and heat waves. The stress these effects are putting on human political, economic, social, and agricultural infrastructure, already intense, will eventually be greater than anything we’ve seen since the twentieth century’s two world wars, and will probably outstrip those. It’s not unreasonable to say that the challenge we live with today is the greatest the human species has ever faced.

Anyone who pays much attention to politics can assume that we’re almost certainly going to botch this challenge. In order to stop emitting waste carbon dioxide completely within the next five or ten years, we would need to radically reorient all human economic and social production, a task that is scarcely imaginable, much less feasible. It would demand centralized control of key economic sectors, massive state investment in carbon capture and sequestration, and global coordination on a scale never before seen, at the very moment when the political and economic structures that held the capitalist world order together under American leadership after World War II are splintering, and extremist libertarians are dismantling the United States government from the inside. The very idea of unified national political action toward a single goal seems farcical, and unified action on a global scale mere whimsy. What’s more, significant and dangerous levels of warming are already baked in to the system from all the carbon dioxide we’ve already dumped. There’s a time lag between CO2 increase and subsequent effects, between the wind we sow and the whirlwind we reap. Our lives are lived in that gap. My daughter was born there.

Barring a miracle, the next twenty years are going to see increasingly chaotic systemic transformation in global climate patterns, unpredictable biological adaptation, and a wild range of human political and economic responses. These likely trends pose unanswerable dilemmas: Should I start a college fund for my daughter, or would she be better served by learning to shoot, hunt, and live off the land? Should we raise her where we live now, in a state on the cutting edge of privatization, where public services like school buses and 911 call centers and highways are failing but our middle-class income allows us to own a home, far from the rising ocean? Or should we try to move back to one of the blue-bubble cities on the coast, where we’d struggle just to pay the rent, and where floods, wildfires, and drought threaten even the wealthiest? There are no clear answers. Every choice is a gamble.

The next twenty years will be tough. After that, it gets worse. The middle and later decades of the twenty-first century—my daughter’s adult life—promise a global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror. Recall that World War II, including the Holocaust and other atrocities, saw about 3 percent of the entire global population annihilated. It staggers the soul to imagine what going through a population bottleneck that entailed losing 70 percent of the human species would look like, but that’s what it would take to get us back to population levels circa 1940.

In the almost eighty years since then, the human species has burst the boundary conditions for sustainable life on Earth through what some scientists call the “Great Acceleration,” an unprecedented spike in socioeconomic and earth systems trends—everything from carbon dioxide emissions, surface temperature, and tropical forest loss to fertilizer consumption, water use, and population (from approximately 2.3 billion in 1940 to 7.6 billion today)—a spike which represents “the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the 200,000-year-long history of relations between our species and the biosphere,” in the words of J.R. McNeill and Peter Engleke. And while we might hope that world leaders will correct course and somehow bring this Great Acceleration under control, human history suggests that this bubble will burst like every other, in crisis and chaos. One thing is certain, as McNeill and Engleke testify: “The Great Acceleration in its present form cannot last for long.” On the other side of the inevitable correction, a hundred years from now, whatever Homo sapiens are left on Earth are going to be struggling to adapt to a hot, unstable, and hostile planet.

Why would anyone choose to bring new life into this world? How can I explain my decision to my daughter? And isn’t there anything we can do about it?

It’s true that numerous engineering solutions are available that might help decrease and mitigate carbon emissions, but the social and economic costs of these solutions are so unclear and contentious that widespread agreement on implementation seems practically impossible. Meanwhile, in the US, our political system has been hijacked by thieves seemingly interested only in looting the republic and undermining democratic rule. Faced with such systemic failures, many adopt an individualist approach, arguing that it’s up to each of us to make the personal sacrifices necessary to stop global warming.

According to a widely cited 2017 research letter by geographer Seth Wynes and environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas, the most effective things any of us can do to decrease carbon emissions are to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free, and have one fewer child, with the latter choice having the most significant impact by far. Wynes and Nicholas argue for teaching these values in high school, thus transforming society through education. The real problem with this proposal isn’t with the idea of teaching abstention and thrift, which is all well and good, but rather with the social model their recommendations rely on. Contra Adam Smith and Margaret Thatcher, society is not simply an aggregate of millions or billions of individual choices, but a complex recursive dynamic in which choices are made within institutions and ideologies which then subtly change over time as these choices feed back into the structures that frame what we consider possible, all the while being disrupted and nudged and warped by countless internal and external drivers, including environmental factors such as global warming, material and social innovation, and the occasional widespread panic. Which is just to say that we are not free to decide how we live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from possible options, not ex nihilo.

It’s clear that we should all go vegan for the sake of the planet. It’s a sacrifice I’m reluctant to make, despite the moral and ecological costs of factory farming, because I know, through my years as a vegetarian, that totally forgoing meat leaves me depressed and lethargic. Wynes and Nicholas don’t define what “plant-based” means, though, so if it just means less meat, and especially less beef and pork, then it’s certainly something we could all do without too much hassle. No more steak, no more cheeseburgers, no more pork belly ramen—okay, fine.

And I would love to avoid flying and to live car free. (Truly. I can’t even properly express my loathing for flying.) I lived without a car for several years in my twenties and early thirties, so I know it’s possible, but my world then was largely limited to the range I could walk or bike or get to on public transit, and my work was usually casual and close by. Now, like most Americans, I live and work in a city that was built for cars and has totally inadequate public transit, and which also happens to be thousands of miles away from my extended family and my oldest friends. No car? No job. No flying? No Thanksgiving with the family.

As for not having a child, of course nobody needs to have children. It just happens to be the strongest drive humans have, the fundamental organizing principle of every human culture, and the sine qua non of a meaningful human world, since it alone makes possible the persistence of human meaning through time. My partner and I didn’t need to have a child, but without one, our lives felt like they lacked something important.

To take Wynes and Nicholas’s recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. I know because I’ve lived like that, and I sometimes even daydream about returning to it: everything seemed so pure then, so simple. But like most of us, I can’t or won’t; I’m committed to this world, the world I live in, in all its stupidity and doom, because this world is the one everyone else lives in too: my colleagues and students, my friends and family, my partner and daughter. This world is the only one in which my choices have meaning. And this world, fucked up as it is, is the only one that offers joy. As George Orwell wrote in 1946, in another time of global crisis, in an essay on the mating habits of the common toad, “If we kill all pleasure in the actual processes of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves?”

Furthermore, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.

And I, for one, would salute you. Such self-sacrifice would be admirable, even heroic, but it still won’t save us. Even if millions suddenly went vegan, swore off airplanes, sold their cars, and had themselves sterilized, it wouldn’t significantly slow down global warming. Billions of human beings already live a subsistence existence right now, and most carbon waste is due to a small percentage of people who don’t seem to care much about the consequences. Recalling Thorstein Veblen’s theory of conspicuous consumption, we might even speculate that the freedom to pollute is a kind of status symbol (a point Michel Serres makes in his book Malfeasance). If that’s right, then we can assume that the wealthy parasites killing the planet are never going to give up their privileged and destructive habits, because those very habits are how they maintain their sense of self-worth.

The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly, or whether to have children, but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, a world in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on a kind of ecological grace. There is no utopia, no Planet B, no salvation, no escape. We’re all stuck here in the same shithole together. And living in that world, the only world there is, means giving up any claims to innocence or moral purity, since to live at all means to cause suffering. While you could, if you had the will for it, go off the grid, your subsistence farm would still be a tiny holocaust for the pests who would seek to live off your bounty, your land deed would still need to be recognized by the state, and you would almost certainly need to enslave animals, if not for food and material such as milk, leather, and bone, then at least for labor. Living ethically means understanding that our actions have consequences, taking responsibility for how those consequences ripple out across the web of life in which each of us is irrevocably enmeshed, and working every day to ease what suffering we can. Living ethically means limiting our desires, respecting the deep interdependence of all things in nature, and honoring the fact that our existence on this planet is a gift that comes from nowhere and may be taken back at any time.

I chose to have a child with my partner because I believe in life, because I want the wheel of life to keep turning. I believe in old people dying and new people being born. I believe in the winter’s first snow, and the first pink cherry blossoms bursting and falling in the spring. I believe in squirrels chasing each other through maple branches, toads mating by the river, herons nesting in the bogs, and knobby-kneed fawns bounding through open meadows. Sometimes I think focusing on the horror of our coming civilizational collapse is just a way for me to avoid the grief I feel at losing the natural rhythms that climate change is already beginning to warp. The seasons are confused, the animals are confused, and nothing feels right, not the land, not the weather. But for all my grief and horror, I can’t seem to let go of the dumb hope that we might somehow find the wisdom to live within our planet’s ecological limits.

It’s not really rational. Politically, realistically, making human life sustainable at this point would demand a world socialist revolution, since only a unified world government committed to radical economic redistribution and ecological justice would be able to initiate and manage transitioning the global economy off fossil fuels. Socially, spiritually, we’d need a world religion that worshipped Mother Earth and put harmony with nature over all other values. We’d need to throw away our bedazzling hi-tech toys and turn our gaze back to the land, the air, the water, the rhythms of the natural world, and the other beings who live there. While we’re at it, we should also probably put women in charge, get rid of nuclear weapons, and outlaw racial and ethnic discrimination.

I could spin out the fantasy further, and maybe that’s a fine way to pass the time until we die. But I doubt we’ll see anything like it come to fruition. I’m pretty sure we’re going to keep fumbling along toward our doom, just like we’ve fumbled our way into breaking the planet. Human beings are dependable like that. Nevertheless, the dire and seemingly unsolvable fact of climate change—just like the unsolvable fact of our own mortality—doesn’t signify the end of ethical thought but its beginning, for it’s only in recognizing the fact that our lives are limited, complicit, imperfect, and interdependent that we begin to understand what it means to live together in this world.

When my daughter was born I felt a love and connection I’d never felt before: a surge of tenderness and care harrowing in its intensity. I knew in a moment that I would kill for her, die for her, sacrifice anything for her, and while those feelings have become more bearable since the first delirious days after her birth, they have not abated. And when I think of the future she’s doomed to live out, the future we’ve created, I’m filled with rage and sorrow.

Every day brings new pangs of grief. I’m excited to see the world afresh through my child’s eyes, as any parent would be, but I have also found her every new discovery haunted by death. Reading to her from Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?, I can’t help but marvel at the disconnect between the animal life represented in that book and the planet-wide mass extinction happening right now. When I sing along with Elizabeth Mitchell’s version of “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” I can’t help but feel like I’m betraying Rosalind by filling her brain with fantastic images of a magical non-human world, when the actual non-human world has been exploited and despoiled. How can I read her Winnie the Pooh or The Wind in the Willows, when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever, and has been for decades? How soon do I explain to her what’s happening? In all the most important ways, it’s already too late.

There’s no way to win this game, no way to hack life in a doomed world. I can’t protect my daughter from the future and I can’t even promise her a better life. All I can do is teach her: teach her how to care, how to be kind, and how to live within nature’s grace. I can teach her to be tough but resilient, adaptable and prudent, because she’s going to have to struggle for what she needs, but I also need to teach her to fight for what’s right, because none of us are in this alone. I need to teach her that all things die, even her and me and her mother and the world we know, but that coming to terms with this difficult truth is the beginning of wisdom.

It’s not enough, though, just to teach the next generation how to cope with our failures. Off-loading responsibility for the world onto the future is ethically inexcusable, precisely the kind of short-term selfish behavior that led us to this precipice, and illogical to boot. Our children learn early to distinguish what we do from what we say, and they model their own behaviors on the former, not the latter. So no matter how much we talk about children being the future, if we keep acting like their future is disposable, they’ll take that action for truth, regardless of how convincing we find our own hypocrisy.

But there are even bigger issues with seeing climate change as the future’s problem instead of our own. One is time. A major reason coming to terms with climate change is so difficult is because it takes time, it unfolds in time, and we’re not great at foreseeing trend lines that go against our narratives of how things should be. We tend to rely on two kinds of temporality, which the Ancient Greeks called chronos and kairos, which we might call “day-to-day time” and “event time.” In day-to-day time, we tend to assume everything is going to be much the same as it was yesterday, within the predictable cycles of change to which we have become accustomed. The sun will rise and fall, we’ll wake up and go to work, we’ll get a bunch of emails and take too long to answer them, while football gives way to basketball and we celebrate the various shopping holidays that mark our calendar, and children get older and go to college and have their own children and eventually disappear into retirement homes. The regular unfolding of life as we conceive it is the basis for our sense of normality, the frame that shapes our decisions, and the implicit backdrop against which we judge new information. In event time, on the other hand, day-to-day rhythms are suspended. A carnivalesque mood takes over, our social structures reveal themselves as the willed collective illusions they are, and we see ourselves emerge for a moment into an open clearing of nearly infinite possibility. Event time is precisely the moment of action in crisis, the “now” when everything can change.

These two kinds of temporality constitute a dynamic back-and-forth in which everything is normal until it isn’t, and then there’s a new normal. Unfortunately for us, and somewhat ironically, climate change doesn’t fit this dynamic, because climate change is a gradual process happening year by year, punctuated not by one global event but by an unpredictable series of increasingly damaging local disasters. Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, the monsoon floods in India and Bangladesh that killed more than a thousand people in 2017, the California drought—any one of these catastrophes might have been the event which changed everything, except that each one was in the end no more than a regional phenomenon, swiftly superseded.

There is as yet no “we” who might respond to climate change, no universal political subject, only an abstract “we” comprising billions of individuals who are all going to die in our own individual ways. For most of us, the day-to-day time of global capitalist civilization remains the beating pulse of our lives, even as the world around us changes into something strange and awful. By the time the event we seem to be waiting for happens, we will have already lost too much to be able to do much about it. By the time the moment of decision arrives, our fate will have already been sealed.

Thus, even though we live in the gap between the wind and the whirlwind, taking that gap for a momentary reprieve is a mistake. The catastrophe is now, even if it’s almost impossible for most of us to see that fact through the blinders of day-to-day time. That very dissonance is perhaps the defining truth of our era, the key to its anxious, bipolar character, the red thread that connects #MeToo, the Middle East, Arctic sea ice collapse, Russian hacking, #BlackLivesMatter, Trumpism, the rise of the libertarian political right and the socialist left, the banality of our workaday lives, and the dramatic fever dreams we live out online. I could raise my daughter to be a member of the Post-Apocalyptic Vuvalini Resistance, but we still have to live through the next twenty, fifty, seventy years, and how do we do that?

The other major issue with framing climate change as our children’s problem is that while some degree of warming now appears inevitable, the range of possible outcomes over the next century is wide enough and the worst outcomes extreme enough that there is some narrow hope that revolutionary socio-economic transformation today might save billions of human lives and preserve global civilization as we know it in more or less recognizable form, or at least stave off human extinction. The range of outcomes decreases every day, though, shifting month by month toward the more apocalyptic end of the spectrum, and waiting twenty years—fifteen years—even five years may well see the window for saving humanity slam shut. Our children will not face the choices we face. They won’t have the opportunities we now have for action. They’ll confront a range of outcomes whose limits were determined by the choices we made.

So we’re back to the problem of what to do. It seems clear that if we want to transform the global economy by shifting to renewable and nuclear energy (supplemented with carbon capture and sequestration), then we need to impose some kind of centralized global economic control. We could start by nationalizing energy production and other major industries, expropriating and redistributing the wealth of the 1 percent so that it can be put to work for the rest of us, then joining together with the other nations of the world in a single government that sees the needs of all humans as equal, regardless of race, creed, color, sexual orientation, homeland, or gender. This world government would necessarily have to have the legal power to enforce its decrees however they were legislated, so it would also need a monopoly on force. First dismantle the plutocracy, then dismantle the nation state. If you think this sounds like socialism, you’re not wrong.

Many people are afraid of socialism, and it’s true that there are a range of worthy arguments against it, from the historical atrocities of Stalinist Russia and Maoist China to liberal Western concerns about the sacred integrity of the individual. Such arguments raise legitimate issues, but unfortunately we lack the luxury of having time for such debates. We face a global collective emergency which can only be addressed by a global collective response. Individual choice and market-based solutions are wholly inadequate to the urgency and scale of the problem, which demands dedication and sacrifice from all quarters under a unified central leadership, meaning global leadership.

In a way, Trumpism has done us a great service by driving apart the contradictory poles of individual greed and collective good, which had been uneasily joined under capitalism, and forcing a new articulation of collective political life free from the dead hand of the market. But the challenge of figuring out how we might form a world socialist government is almost as difficult a question as figuring out how to address climate change. Wars are fought over such questions. I just don’t see any other option that offers a real chance for navigating and coping with global warming and its ramifications without risking apocalyptic devastation. Non-binding treaties like the Paris Agreement aren’t going to do it. Carbon markets aren’t going to do it. Broken democracies like are own aren’t going to do it.

To be honest, though, having a child hasn’t really inspired me to acts of self-sacrifice in the service of abstract and doubtful goals. Rather the opposite. I’ve had to start thinking about schools, health care, housing, and investment in whole new ways. I feel a deep obligation to “provide for my child’s future” within the constraints of contemporary American society, which demands making some kind of uneasy peace with America’s brutally hierarchical, racist, and individualist culture. This is how young radicals become middle-aged liberal hypocrites. My love for my daughter is overwhelming and irrational, and consumer capitalism exploits that every day by whispering—screaming—in my ear that if I don’t do everything I can to make sure my child has more than yours, more whatever, the best whatever, then she’s going to fall behind; that if I don’t push her to learn her alphabet before the other kids she’ll never pass the tests to get into the prestige kindergarten which means she’ll never get into college and she’ll wind up wasting her life as a checker in a grocery store; that if I don’t buy her the expensive wooden skill-building puzzle or the organic kale-avocado puree then I’m condemning her to a slippery slope of disappointment, failure, and drug addiction. The immense engines of capital, I have learned, possess a formidable array of forces that only activate once you’ve had children, when they fall on you with the force of a thousand suns.

It takes real effort to remember that my daughter’s fate is not hers alone but shared, inexorably, inevitably, despite the fact that the rich will be able to cope with climate change better than the poor, for a while. Money means you can flee, so you don’t get stuck in the Superdome. Money means access to institutional and governmental resources hidden from the poor behind complex, unwelcoming bureaucracies. Money means you can prep for disasters with insurance, kitted-out go bags, and second homes. Money means you can rebuild. But money won’t stop the seas from rising or the wind from blowing. Money won’t save the Arctic and it won’t save Miami. And once the system falls apart, all those ones and zeros in your bank account will evaporate, and all the gold you’ve carefully hidden for the end times will be revealed for what it is, a not especially useful yellow rock.

The choice we have to make isn’t whether or how to save ourselves, but, as I said before, whether we’re willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on respecting the ecological limits of our planet. Signing up for a world socialist revolution might be a start. But then what? And what else? How do we live with—in—within this crisis? How do we change the world on a human scale? How do we teach our children by example, and not just with words and stories?

I’m too much an individualist to want to tell anyone how to live, too much a child of pioneers, committed a priori to the idea that each of us has to work out our own salvation, and skeptical of the claims of gurus who give you twelve easy rules to follow. But in the spirit of American can-do pragmatism, I will offer a few broad suggestions. First, we should organize locally and aggressively. This will not only connect us to our neighbors, but it’s also the most likely path to world socialist revolution. It’s extremely unlikely that we’ll bring about a revolution from outside the system—as long as it’s “us and them,” they have the guns, the laws, and the money, and will beat us every time. But as Trump has shown, the system itself is far more vulnerable to takeover than anyone had suspected. A socialist revolution from within now seems possible, though it’s going to take dedicated cadres and bold individuals committed to a long-term strategy of dominating state and local governments while building a national and international movement.

Second, and perhaps counter-intuitively, we need to do less. Our daily lives are caught in manic cycles of pointless production and frenzied consumption, desperate bids for connection and whiplash reactions, from your morning coffee to Twitter outrage to the stiff drink or dank bud you need to chill at night, all of it powering a vast cultural machine that feeds on our anger and fear as much as it feeds on coal, oil, and natural gas. One must labor in order to eat, it’s true, and we must work to repair the broken world, but so much of what we do is unnecessary, unconsidered, and reactive that we live out our days distracted and drained and unfocused. Slow down. Do less. Do the one thing that matters, rather than the fifteen that don’t.

Finally, we need to learn to die. It’s not only our thoughts and feelings that are entangled in frenzied cycles of fear and desire, but our very selves, our egos. Yet this self we cling to so fiercely is nothing but an ephemeral moment, a transient emergence of self-conscious matter, a passing cloud of being. We each have our allotted span of years on the planet, some more, some less, and then return to the nothing from which we came. Learning to accept this simple fact is a difficult, lifelong task, but it’s the first step in understanding that the self isn’t a unique, isolated thing at all but a product of generations enmeshed in a world, a transmaterialization of stellar dust, the expression of a vibrant, buzzing universe, a future and a past.

Everything dies, but what we do while we live lives on, in our sons and daughters, in the worlds we make or destroy. We’re all doomed. That’s simply the condition of being born. But it’s also the condition that makes a new future possible. Now what?