This ecological despair was a big part of why I resisted having kids until my late thirties. For years I joked about giving birth to a Mad Maxian climate warrior, battling alongside her friends for food and fuel. And I was also fully aware that if we were to avoid that future, we would all have to cut down on the number of super-consumers we were producing. It was around the time that I began work on this book that my attitude started to shift. Some of it, no doubt, was standard-issue denial (what does one more kid matter . . . ). But part of it was also that immersing myself in the
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