Should I Become A Mom? I'm Honestly Asking — And I Need You To Consider The Following Before You Answer.

Should I become a mother?

If I have children, will they live on a dying planet?

These are the questions I see in the fine print of every climate agreement and hearwhispered in late-night conversations with friends. I feel simultaneously responsible for the climate crisis, entirely helpless and cynical about the current system’s willingness or ability to deal with it.

These are structural questions and reproductive ones — existential and ordinary. I have metabolized responsibility for climate change since witnessing a presentation on recycling in kindergarten. I am anxious about the “climate footprint” of my imagined, consumerist children, but they will not tip the scales measurably further toward climate catastrophe. I know I am not individually liable for the vast majority of warming. ExxonMobil is more responsible than I am. But we are all burning.

I swanned about my teens and 20s and told everyone I met that I was never, ever having children. Or moving back to the suburbs. Yet the lifecycle of an idealist often includes sheltering in high-carbon ease. I want more. I want stability. I want the nice, shiny things I have been taught to want.

I see how children animate a particular moral selfishness. Having them justifies focusing on securing one’s economic conditions, paying heed to one child and then others. The lifestyle marketed to care for me and my siblings borrows directly from the comfort of my children’s children. It is honorable and deeply human to want the best for your children. But this impulse for consumption has pushed us precipitously closer to disaster.

My father’s father taught him to ski at a resort nestled in the Rocky Mountains, lush with snow. My father taught me to ski on a pockmarked mountain. I