Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question

Funding for “To the Contrary ” provided by Coming up on To the Contrary, we are often told that, climate change is something that is being is overwhelming is the long term is something that either, hey, we have no choice or control over it, or b, that all of the choices and control we have come down to everyday individual decisions, and I don't think that either.

One is true.

Intro Music Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbé.

Welcome to “To the Contrary, ” a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives.

This week, the connection between climate change and the falling American birthrate are couples choosing to go childfree because of fear and uncertainty about the future, particularly the climate crisis?

And is earlier population growth one of the root causes of this and other environmental emergencies?

Our guest today is the University of California Associate Professor Jade Sasser, who has dedicated her research to exploring eco climate guilt and fear.

Sasser just released her second book on how environmental health impacts the decision to become a parent.

It's titled Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question decide whether to have children in an uncertain future.

Welcome, Professor Sasser.

Thank you for having me.

A pleasure to have you.

So I was, I let me put my credentials out there.

I'm childfree by choice.

and came up with that phrase 30 years ago, and I made climate and all kinds of environmental issues were on my mind at the time, but it wasn't the main reason.

The main reason was I just didn't want children.

And I had a career that was taking off, and I didn't want to give it up for 5 or 10 years of devoting most of my life to somebody else.

So how often do you think it's a factor in terms of climate change and all these predictions about an end of an inhabitable planet have to do with people having fewer children.

It's really important that we now have the language to discuss being childfree by choice and having that language, having role models, having that framework, is really important in destigmatizing women being able to choose other pathways in life.

What I'm finding, however, with very young adults, so generation Z and the youngest millennials is not that they are necessarily childfree.

rather, what I'm finding through my research is that many young people feel so anxious, so depressed, so worried, so guilt ridden, about the current state of the climate and the earth and the future state of where we are headed, that they feel that morally and ethically, they can't have the families that they otherwise want.

So I would say this is not about being childfree.

This is about wanting to be parents, but feeling that it is morally and ethically not available given the state of the climate.

Would you say that's more prevalent among couples, or perhaps among women who increasingly are having children on their own in in this society, with or without a man or a female partner in their lives?

It's not something that I have studied in my own research and my own research.

I have looked at, people, whether they are individuals or couples, and looked at, the difference around issues of race.

so the amount of research that is being done on how climate change or climate emotions impact reproductive decisions, that research is very, very rapidly growing and has started growing just in the past 5 to 10 years.

However, what I noticed every time I read those studies is that overwhelming people of color were simply missing from the study population, as if either A: we have no thoughts or feelings on the subject, or B: our thoughts and feelings are simply the same, as those who identify as white.

And I had a sense that that may not be true.

Communities of color are hit harder by climate impacts and have a harder time recovering from them.

And so I thought, if that is the case, perhaps there might be some different impacts on climate, emotions and reproductive feelings among communities of color.

Now, why do you think people are more anxious about the climate these days than, say, 2 or 3 decades ago?

Earth day was started back in the 1960s or 70s, I think by then Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, there were concerns about dying species and not so much climate change back then, but all kinds of environmental, problems.

And nobody even thought about it, really, as a factor in whether to have children or not.

In fact, the prevailing attitude then was, of course, you got married, and then of course you had children.

However, at that time there were already people, young people in particular, that were involved in the XPG or zero population growth movement that were saying we shouldn't have children, for the sake of the environment.

Their ideas were spurred by ideas around population control, which is very different from where a lot of young people are today.

So what has happened in the last 50 or so years is that we know a lot more about climate change.

Young people are reading the climate science.

They're taking environmental studies classes.

they're learning about scientific projections and they're scientifically literate.

The people that I spoke to and interviewed for the book are reading reports from the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in part, some of those reports are really making their feelings of anxiety worse.

In fact, in the book, I interviewed the leaders of two campaigns, two campaigns to go on a strike and to not have children until government leaders address climate change effectively.

And what spurred on the initiation of both of those strikes were reports that were put out by the IPCC on how rapidly climate change is advancing and how we are not making the appropriate, changes to our everyday lives and to our laws and policies accordingly.

And so for those young people who read those reports, they said, how could I bring a child into that?

Knowing what the predictions, the projections are, how things will be 20, 30 years from now.

And what advice would you give to young people, couples, going through the decision making process right now?

we are often told that, climate change is something that is big, is overwhelming, is long term, is something that either A: we have no choice or control over, or B: that all of the choices and control we have come down to everyday individual decisions.

And I don't think that either one is true.

When we think that it all comes down to our own individual decisions, then that's when it gets harder to make these decisions around whether to have a child or not, because people are wracked with guilt.

when we understand that climate change is the result of these long term practices, among corporations, oil corporations, companies that are extracting natural resources, and our elected officials that are not creating and enforcing the appropriate laws, then we can understand this is a broader societal systemic issue, not a personal individual one.

And if we understand it that way, then, we can seek out resources to grapple with these decisions.

And there are more and more of these resources available.

there are organizations like the Climate and Mental Health Network that have created guides for parents, to talk to children about climate change.

There are climate aware therapists, psychologists who are poised and ready to help people grapple with the very real and very specific, emotional and mental health, outcomes associated with climate impacts.

All of which is to say, I don't have specific advice in terms of telling people what to do, whether to have children or not.

However, for people who feel isolated, who feel overwhelmed, who feel deeply anxious, or like they cannot make this decision, there are resources that are being created to help you, not only grapple with it, but also to feel a bit more confident and comfortable becoming a parent in the midst of the climate crisis.

Do you have any idea, percentages.

Numbers, of people who have, or who are in the midst of deciding whether or not to become parents who really want children saying to themselves, jeez, I would except for climate change.

I think it's too soon to have numbers.

I think that right now generation Z, who are the youngest adults, they're the first generation that is really grappling with this issue in this way, in a widespread way, and many of them have not necessarily had children yet or gotten to the age where they're really making the final decision.

as we know, more and more people are putting off that decision until later years.

more women are having children in their early 40s than at any other time in history.

So I think it's a little too soon, to know about people in their early 20s.

What I can say is that I conducted a research study back in 2021, and one of, outcomes of that study was that we found that a very, very small percentage of the number of people who we surveyed, indicated that they were planning to have fewer children than what they actually want and that the reason was climate change.

Now, again, that was a small number, but it was there.

It was a statistic really significant, which is, in research terms, very important, finding.

And I wouldn't be surprised if those numbers start to grow.

But again, I think it's too soon to actually see.

Now, you mentioned earlier that that climate change has more to do with the policies of, oil companies and major polluters than it does with individual choices about whether to have children.

Do you see a link there between population growth or what some used to call way back in the 60s?

overpopulation and climate change?

No.

And what I mean by that is if we look at the history of the United States, for example, and in terms of population growth numbers, we are at the lowest end of that trend.

compared to the last 80 years.

And we are consistent in pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

If we look at that 80 year span, fertility rates are going down at the exact same time that greenhouse gas emissions are going up.

So there is not a 1 to 1 corollary, excuse me, between the number of people on the planet.

and the amount of greenhouse gas emissions being emitted.

If we look further into that, we look at some of the poorest countries on Earth, which are in sub-Saharan Africa.

Many of those countries have the highest population growth rates on Earth and the lowest greenhouse gas emissions.

And so the two are not directly related at all when it comes to population growth.

Unfortunately, those who have the most children tend to have the fewest resources.

And yet there are a lot of ideas and discourses that blame them for environmental problems.

That blame is misplaced.

I would argue that the environmental toll problems that we face on a large scale really do come from, corporations, militaries and government policy.

And we need to focus there to solve these widespread problems.

You're saying that the the people with the largest families, or the largest number of children are held to blame for, for climate change.

Tell me about this.

How who's doing the blaming?

is that getting through to the people themselves, or is it a conversation that's among, for example, highly educated people and not, and kept from, less educated people who are particularly among women?

Certainly.

because there have been there were at least a while back studies showing women who are more educated have fewer children.

If you have the ability to have a good paying job and you want kids, you'll have 1 or 2 enough to, maybe three.

Who knows?

But enough to so that you have the family size you want, but not so many, that, you know, you're getting to the numbers of, in the average number of children born by women in impoverished, less educated countries.

We know from decades of research that there are two factors that are directly related to a decline, in the number of children that a woman will have over the course of her lifetime.

Number one, access to formal education.

And number two, access to earning an income outside of the household.

And those two factors combined are directly associated, with a decrease in the number of children, a woman will have, on average over the course of her lifetime.

Now, we also know that the ability to access those resources is very uneven throughout the world and even within countries, too.

Right.

So we I don't want to make any blanket statements, about what's going on across the entire continent of sub-Saharan Africa, across all of Southeast Asia, because we know there are inequalities within nations, too.

However, that research, has demonstrated over and over again it's access, access to education, access to, income generation that bring down birth rates.

So when I say blame, I'm referring largely to international development organizations.

so for my first book was called On Infertile Ground: Population Control and Women's Rights in the Era of Climate Change.

And it looked at the history of how environmental, activists and environmental program managers in international development organizations, how they have addressed issues of reproduction, family planning, population, etc..

So in that book, I make the argument that behind closed doors, when it comes to advocacy around international family planning policy, a lot of that advocacy is framed through this lens of problematic or dangerous population growth in the global South.

And those narratives are used, to blame, the population growth of poor or low income communities in sub-Saharan Africa, in South Asia, in the Middle East, etc.

for environmental problems.

And that kind of blame in policy advocacy, unfortunately, is in expedient means of getting certain policies passed, including some policies that increase access to contraception in those countries.

And a very, very common way of framing these issues among environmentalists is to say that population growth is a direct cause of environmental problems, be it environmental degradation, resource consumption or climate change and those kinds of discourses, those ideas and narratives in the environmental community, I would argue, really need to change, because research has shown over and over and over again that you can't make generalizations on a broad scale between the number of people on the planet, in a region, in a community, and large scale environmental problems.

You actually have to be very clear and specific about local conditions.

And we also know that those narratives have been very damaging.

There is a long history of population control.

that has been facilitated through international development and policies in the United States in which the lowest income communities, that have the highest number of children has been coercively induced, to have fewer children.

And I am a strong advocate against population control.

When you say control, what kind of control do these organizations, put on the poor women and the women of color, etc.?

Population control seems to me to have been something that happened back in the days of eugenics and, for example, forced sterilization of black women in the post-Civil War South, by segregationists and segregationist medical communities.

But is it is it going on now?

Population control is largely a thing of the past.

However, it does continue today.

So, today, mostly in prisons and detention centers, are where you find examples of population control and the kind of population control, that has been uncovered in these spaces has been coercive sterilization, of prisoners, of women of color who have been detained.

it's like.

That's news to me.

That's fascinating.

Well, in 2013, 2014, in California prisons, it was discovered that doctors were systematically, performing sterilizations on women inmates without full consent from those inmates.

and then more recently in, I believe it was 2019, in Georgia, and in immigration detention center, a whistleblower by the name of Don Wooten exposed a doctor who was performing coerced sterilizations on immigrant women, not all of whom were fully fluent in English or who fully understood the procedures, that were being, implemented.

And as a result, the fact that we now know as a society that women of color are subject to all kinds of discrimination, not visited so much on white women, and white women are subject to all kinds of discrimination, not visited as much on white men, or at all on white men for the most part.

How does that make people of color versus white people see the relationship between having large families and, climate change differently as a result of that?

In my book, I focus on two different areas of research.

One is a survey that I conducted across the United States, with 2500 people included.

And that was a general survey just to see, okay, are there different emotions that people of color versus white people are expressing when it comes to, thinking about having children in the era of climate change and what we found was that the main racial difference was that people of color overwhelmingly reported feeling traumatized, when thinking about having children, in the midst of climate change and climate disaster.

What was also interesting was that, on the other hand, people of color were more likely to report positive feelings of motivation, determination, even excitement.

And one of the questions that we have around that is whether that is associated with, being religious, religious faith, and that's a possible association.

But we need to do more research to follow up on that.

Separately from that, I conducted a series of interviews with women of color, as well as with white women and what women of color expressed overwhelmingly across the board is that climate change feels like one more burden on top of all of the other existing challenges and social burdens, that people are taking on.

People are worried about whether they can actually provide for children or whether they will have long term, stable jobs, whether they'll ever be able to afford to purchase a home.

but also, people of color are worried about things like racial inequality and racial violence in the United States.

And those that I interviewed were aware, very aware, that communities of color fare differently after natural disasters, that resources that are distributed to help communities recover from disasters are not fairly or evenly distributed.

And so, one of the ongoing concerns among the people that I interviewed was if these disasters or these impacts are going to happen more and more often, how will we be impacted in the long term?

Will it be harder to safely and healthfully raise children in that context?

And because there's so much uncertainty around it, it was giving them pause.

Looking forward, what kinds of policies would you like to see put into effect?

to even out environmental angst, if you will.

I think in terms of environmental angst, thats eco-anxiety, climate, depression, climate grief, all of those things, we need more climate aware therapies.

But they can't just be private therapists.

And so there is a lot more training of mental health professionals on climate-aware therapy, which I think is a wonderful thing.

But even within the mental health community, the distribution of those resources is not equal or even, so communities of color don't have equal access to psychiatric or psychological care and resources.

And I think we need much more even distribution of mental health care and specifically in climate aware therapy.

I think that that should also be integrated into climate justice policies, policies that are aiming to, create more of a sense of evenness and justice between, how communities of color fare, on climate change and climate outcomes.

And so I think further, even beyond that, we need to be having these discussions in public.

A lot of people who are grappling with this issue are doing so in private.

They're taking it on.

They're feeling overwhelmed by it, and are feeling very guilty and a lot of stigma because they think that they are the only ones feeling this way.

But I know through my research and other research, I've seen so many young people feel this way, and it's time to bring this issue out of the shadows and have broader conversations and get our policymakers involved.

All right.

Thank you so much, professor Jade Sasser, for your work in this area and for sharing it with us.

And good luck with your book.

Thank you so much.

Keep the conversation going on all of our social media platforms and visit our website, pbs.org.

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