The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth

by Elizabeth Rush

it’s very hard to accept the challenge of contributing to the world with one more person and being responsible for helping this person become someone good.

What if, by having a child, I destroy the possibility of ever truly being alone?

It’s your adventures in life that make you able to come home and share with your children something that maybe they wouldn’t get elsewhere. You have to go so that they can see that it’s possible, so that they will go on to have adventures of their own, whatever they may be.

Should I have a child, their greenhouse gas emissions will cause roughly fifty square meters of sea ice to melt every year that they are alive.

I can celebrate the idea that to have a child means having faith that the world will change, and more importantly, committing to being a part of the change yourself.

Rage at the way carbon calculators suggest all life should be viewed through the warped lens of an extractive economic system where taking is assumed, with no giving, tending, or mending in return; rage that this line of reasoning fails to imagine humans as capable of making radical change, of creating a world where we are no longer defined by what we buy.

Should I or should I not take a long-haul flight? That’s a reasonable question to consider in the context of climate change. Should I or should I not have kids? That’s something else entirely. You’re allowed to have two children, because then you’re keeping the number of people on the planet the same. If you want three, I suppose then we can start arguing about climate change.

There are so many ways in which my journey toward Thwaites taught me how to mother—or, at least, how to invest a whole lot of time and energy into a project without having any idea how things will turn out.