Raising kids who will inherit climate chaos
In the midst of a winter that hasn’t felt much like one, as the coldest temperatures retreated to the highest latitudes, Jedediah Britton-Purdy carried his 5-month-old son, James, outside their home in New York City to bask in the unseasonable warmth.
As a professor of environmental law at Columbia University, Britton-Purdy was acutely aware of the ominous implications of the city’s record highs. As a new father, what was there to do but revel in his child’s first true sense of springtime?
“These are the first beautiful days he is feeling: We walk out in the warm sun, we laugh together, we look at a tree,” Britton-Purdy says. “Yet the experience is infused with all of this harm, all of this damage that has made this beautiful, beautiful day that I’m having with him.” He sighs. “We really haven’t figured out, he and I, what to do with that yet.”
What to do with that — a world that is breaking down and a child who is growing up?
Parents are meant to be guardians and guides, the ones to help their offspring make sense of the present and envision a future. Philosophically, and practically, this is a daunting task in the best of times — and these are not the best of times, particularly if one happens to be a climate scientist or an environmental justice activist or anyone whose profession demands a constant, cleareyed acknowledgment of the damage wrought by the climate crisis.
But this clarity can also be a gift, one that forces a sincere engagement with the problem. When Britton-Purdy became a father, his perception of the world and the threats against it shifted; the crisis, he says, took on a new immediacy.
“My own temperament is that I’ve always been able to go on, even with a sense of loss, and have kind of a cheerful attitude toward the future as a practical matter,” he says. “But now that I feel personally and intimately anchored in the future in a different way, I feel a different kind of fear. The fear is right up against my heart in a way that makes it harder to think about what comes next.”
After the birth of her son four years ago, climate scientist Kate Marvel experienced what she calls “a very profound revelation.” Marvel’s work for NASA and Columbia University involves projecting the future — not predicting, she emphasizes, but presenting possibilities of what could happen. Those projections once felt abstract. “But then I’m realizing, ‘Oh my God, somebody I love is going to be 35 in 2050,’ ” she says. “And that was just a very visceral thing for me.”
One day last year, Marvel and her son stepped aboard the shuttle that runs between Grand
Central Terminal and Times Square in New York City, and found themselves surrounded by a brilliant, bustling coral reef; the subway car was wrapped in an ad for David Attenborough’s Our Planet series. Her little boy was awestruck.
“And I remember thinking, suddenly: This may be the closest thing he ever sees to an actual coral reef,” she says. “I felt a jolt at that.”
But Marvel does not dwell on those sorts of thoughts, and when people ask her, as they often do, whether she is filled with existential dread as a climate scientist and a mother, she tells them emphatically that she is not. Her work has taught her that what matters is what we do right now, and the urgency of that edict leaves no room, no time for despondence.
“I think, when a lot of people talk about climate change and having kids, they’re looking to the future and despairing,” she says. “For me, it makes me look at the present and be incredibly resolved.”
In the face of potential climate catastrophe, some have questioned whether it’s moral to become a parent — is such a burden fair to the broken planet or to the child who would inherit it?
But Sarah Myhre, a climate scientist in Seattle and the mother of a 6-year-old son, rejects this line of thinking. You can’t save humanity by abandoning it, she says, and these sorts of messages are harmful to the children who are already here.
“Kids are listening to that, and what they hear is that their presence in this world is a violation of the world itself,” she says. “It’s really important to let kids know that they were born into a changing world, that they did not betray the world by being born, and that they are born into a time where they can do profound good and have really transcendent, powerful impacts on the world.”
That is what she’ll tell her son, when he’s old enough to ask about his future; for now, Myhre is focused on helping her son become the strongest, kindest person he can be.
“I believe that the through line for us, as communities, as individuals, is the humanity that we bring to solving problems,” she says. “Our ethic of care, our empathy, our stewardship of one another. And so I think that stewarding that particular aspect of my son’s internal life is really important to me, so that he is coming to the world with a robust, empathetic, integrated sense of self.”
This means that her family prioritizes quality time together, she says. “I have made a large pivot in my life, as a parent, toward the cultivation of joy on a daily basis,” she says. “It’s easy to say and a lot harder to do — because joy requires us to be vulnerable, it requires us to be in the moment.”