The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

by David Wallace-Wells

I’ve also often been asked whether it’s moral to reproduce in this climate, whether it’s responsible to have children, whether it is fair to the planet or, perhaps more important, to the children. As it happens, in the course of writing this book, I did have a child, Rocca. Part of that choice was climate delusion, that same willful blindness: I know there are horrors to come, some of which will inevitably be visited on my children—that is what it means for warming to be an all-encompassing, all-touching threat. Part of it was climate privilege: knowing the horrors will be less intense for some parts of the world than others. But those horrors are also not yet scripted. We are staging them by inaction, and by action can stop them. Climate change means some bleak prospects for the decades ahead, but I don’t believe the appropriate response to that challenge is withdrawal, is surrender. I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate dignified and flourishing life, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won, and acclimating yourself to a dreary future brought into being by others less concerned about climate pain. The fight is, definitively, not yet lost—in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.