Outside Magazine - I Got A Vasectory Because Of Climate Change

[hatrack]

EDIT

When I got engaged, my fiancée, Virginia, and I started planning for the future. It wasn’t just my dog Wiley and me against the world anymore. All of a sudden, I started thinking ten to 20 or more years ahead. Children are an obvious thing to plan. With a sudden focus on responsible decision-making, it no longer made sense to leave hypothetical future offspring up to chance. When should we have them? What did our careers look like on that timeline? Who’d be responsible for staying home and raising them? Couldn’t we just have one of the dogs do that?

We got engaged in June 2018, a couple months before a wildfire destroyed an entire town in California and another one wiped out sections of Malibu. Shortly after that, most of the Mississippi River basin flooded, something that might be the new normal, virtually eliminating the future for industrial agriculture throughout a region that produces much of this nation’s food. And, of course, the whole Donald Trump thing has been going on. Is this a world we want to bring kids into? Is this a world it’s responsible to bring kids into?

It looks like the pace of climate change is speeding ahead of science’s ability to understand or forecast it. Thinking about hypothetical Wes Jr.’s life as far into the future as I’ve already lived—38 years—it’s tempting to try to forecast stuff like so many feet of sea-level rise or the extinction of some keystone species. But that may not be possible. The future might be worse than any of us currently fear.

Then Virginia and I started talking about something we could do—for ourselves and to make a meaningful impact on the bigger problem. We could just forego the whole kid thing altogether. The image of personal climate change action doesn’t really match the reality. If I gave up my 15 mpg pickup truck—basically the mascot for climate inaction—and rode my bicycle everywhere, I’d save the planet 2.4 tons of carbon emissions a year. That’d be a massive sacrifice, but it’s nowhere near the carbon emissions I’ll save by skipping becoming a daddy, which comes in at around 58 tons annually, per kid. Any other action we could take, even all the actions we could ever possibly add up together, pale in comparison.

EDIT

https://www.outsideonline.com/2405491/vasectomy-climate-change

[eppur_se_muova]

1. Is that the little room just off the rectory ? nt

[Boomer]

2. This is meangingful action

Anyone who claims to support action against climate change without addressing population control is just paying lip service. We are literally eating our way through the planet's ecosystem, and reducing one's footprint isn't enough when there are simply too many feet.

I'm childless, which is a decision I reached for entirely personal reasons several decades ago, but given what is happening now, some 40 years later, I can look back at that choice with relief rather than regret.

It's a message that no one wants to hear. My co-workers are having babies -- several a year in our small office alone. Friends of mine are becoming grandparents. I can acknowledge the joy they're experiencing for a very personal milestone, but part of me is just appalled. "Forgive them for they know not what they do." But I have to confess it's getting harder and harder to forgive them such willful ignorance.

[IndyOp]

3. Take care of the kids who are already here. (nt)

[The_jackalope]

4. Mine was the result of reading "The Population Bomb" and "Limits to Growth"

When climate change loomed over the horizon, I was all set.

IMHO, children are a luxury the world simply can't afford. 7.5 billion little miracles is way more than enough - especially on a planet that can safely sustain no more than 1% of that number over the long term.