Climate Hysteria and the End of Hope
We are a civilization embracing suicide.
Recently the reliably Left-wing rag The Los Angeles Times published an opinion piece that wrestled with a question no one in history ever thought to ask themselves until our own time, when it has become a common refrain among young generations: Is it morally right to bring children into a world so fraught with dangerous uncertainty?
“Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question” is an excerpt from a new book by Jade S. Sasser, an associate professor in the – wait for it – Department of Gender & Sexuality Studies at UC Riverside. The book is called Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question: Deciding Whether to Have Children in an Uncertain Future.
Yes, climate anxiety is a thing. Psychotherapist Natacha Duke describes it thusly: “Also known as ‘eco-anxiety,’ ‘eco-guilt’ and ‘eco-grief,’ climate anxiety is characterized by a chronic fear of environmental doom that’s often paralyzing and debilitating.” It is one of the most effective and widespread psyops of our time, having traumatized an entire couple of generations into believing that we must take immediate, radical action to completely dismantle the capitalist, systemically racist, heteronormative, fossil-fueled power structures and exploitative mentality that purportedly have driven us to the brink of planetary annihilation.
The Times excerpt centers on a series of interviews Sasser conducted in 2021 and 2022 with millennials and members of Generation Z, “all of them people of color. Some of them identify as queer… which shapes their sensitivity to discrimination against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people.” All were college-educated, most having taken environmental studies classes. At least two of them have degrees in sustainability, whatever that means.
“American society feels more socially and politically polarized than ever,” Sasser begins, and it’s hard to argue with her. She wonders, “Is it right to bring another person into that?”
Among her interview subjects is Bobby, 22, whose degree in sustainability studies scored him a job in a restaurant where he is “unhappily employed.” He is open to adopting an already existing kid but not having one of his own. “The environment is really the deciding factor for me,” he tells Sasser.
Victoria, who also got a degree in sustainability, has “always questioned bringing people into an environment [where] so much is going on politically, socially, health-wise, all of that.” She worries about the future of healthcare access and “wealth inequality.”
A 22-year-old named Elena declares, “Me being interested in environmental policy cemented my decision to not have kids.” Her environmental studies classes prompted her to feel that “having kids is definitely not a sustainable thing to do… I don’t want them to grow up and have to leave their home because of sea level rise. Or be worried because of really weird weather patterns.”
She continues: “I know that things aren’t going to get better. So why would I want to put a child through that? Even when my sister gave birth to my nephew, I was like, Why? They’re gonna go through so much.”
Mexican American Juliana, 23, just graduated from art school. She and her friends – “mainly composed of queer and transgender, anti-establishment artists” – don’t want children. Again, environmental concerns are at the heart of their rejection of kids.
A Native American woman named Melanie, 26, wants children but “with all of the things we see going on in the world, it seems unfair to bring someone into all of this against their will.” She adds, “With climate change, we’re the driving force of things breaking down, but then also, the planet’s going to do what the planet’s going to do… So… it almost feels, like, kind of shameful to want to have children.”
A significant part of the damage done by the environmental hysteria cranked up in college classes and in our cultural messaging is this hopelessness, guilt, and anxiety it engenders in young people who have little real-world experience and who are especially susceptible to the gas-lighting of virtue-signaling celebrities and far-Left activists posing as educators. Climate-change fear-mongers like Al “The electricity to heat my Olympic-size swimming pool would power six homes for a year” Gore have been predicting imminent apocalypse for more than half a century.
This hysteria is part of a toxic “safetyism” infecting our culture. Safetyism, as defined in Lukianoff and Haidt’s book The Coddling of the American Mind, is “the cult of safety–an obsession with eliminating threats (both real and imagined) to the point at which people become unwilling to make reasonable trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.” Add to that the guilt that we are hurtling toward an environmental doom which we believe we brought on ourselves, and the tragic result is the end of hope, the loss of an optimism that the future will be better for our children, and the self-loathing sense that the planet can only be saved if our destructive species commits suicide.
Yes, the world is fraught with danger of innumerable kinds – but it always has been. People have always been at the mercy of natural disasters and harsh weather conditions, not to mention disease, famine, conquering armies, and just plain poverty, which was the dominant condition for humankind for all of history until our own time. In short, there has never been a time when things didn’t look bad.
Why did anyone bring children into those circumstances? Because prior to our own time, even if you were born into royalty, everyone accepted the reality that life was hard and dangerous and unfair and always would be. At the risk of romanticizing it too much: hope and faith made life worth living, and children generally were seen as a blessing; people didn’t agonize over whether their offspring would be bad for the planet or whether they might have to deal with “really weird weather patterns.” Life today is still hard and dangerous and unfair, but not nearly so much as even in the recent past. Thanks to technological and medical advances, as well as civilizational stability in the West, there has never been a safer time in history to have children than today.
No, today is different! panicked young people with sustainability degrees would argue. Things aren’t just normal-bad; they’re super-bad, and not in the James Brown way! We’re facing the manmade end of the world! Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg say we have less than ten years left! Or is that “fewer” than ten years…? The point is, we don’t have much time! Bringing more children into that doomsday scenario is cruel to them and will only increase our carbon footprint and hasten the end!
This kind of panic is mushrooming into a human tragedy of enormous proportions in terms of the number of young people who will never become mothers and fathers. It is not just a personal tragedy, but a civilizational one, as the Western world – America included – is already suffering an unprecedented drop in the birth rate.
I firmly believe people who don’t want children shouldn’t have them, even though I also believe many of those people will end up regretting that choice. I was childless until unusually late in life; prior to that I was largely just thoughtlessly indifferent to the idea of kids and family. But I wised up just at the time I fortuitously met the woman who would become my wife, and realized that if I never had children I would regret it deeply. We now have five kids and it’s impossible to express what a joyful transformation they have wrought on my life, a transformation I could not have imagined beforehand. I believe also that in their small way, over the course of their lives my children will carry that joyful transformation to others and out into the world at large.
Do I worry about their future in this uncertain world? Of course. As the saying goes, having children is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. But if you want to make the world a better place, you cannot do better in the long run than to give birth to the next generation and raise it to be and to do better than yours.
Environmental alarmism is stealing that hope and optimism and joy from an entire generation.