Bear No Children - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 163

up living through a whole array of odd demographic realities that we
would need to consider carefully in advance. For many people, it would
be hard to explain what all the effort is for—all that hard work—if they
can't come home to their kids. The children are the whole point; they,
and the home of which they are a part, constitute a relief from profes-
sional stresses, a refuge from the rat race, a haven in a heartless world, and
a hope for something more. If that is the case, they already help us endure
what we see as unendurable or at least as not terribly delightful. But is it
really impossible to think otherwise, to stop spliting our lives between
the difficulty of labor and the joy of family? Can't we reimagine our work-
ing day so that it, too, can become a source of pleasure and joy? Must the
experience of family be private, enclosed, aloof ? Or can it be found in
collaboration with other adults, in less private setings, and in common
endeavors that also speak of a hope for something more?
Similar questions arise around our atitudes toward the communities
in which we live. If you ask people why they live where they do, in many
cases they'll explain that their town isn't all that interesting or thriving,
but it's a nice place to raise kids. This answer says a lot: it suggests that
people are capable of puting up with the absence of urban pleasures they
might desire so they can raise their children in peace. But if they did not
have kids and thus had to face the reality of life in the town more squarely,
what might they ask it to become? What kinds of events and activities
might they create? How might the entire community be transformed?
Some of our basic atitudes suggest that we merely tolerate our work-
places and communities and give our real love to our partners and chil-
dren. What would happen if we stopped segregating our lives in this way
and expanded the range of our affections? What if we treated all the are-
nas in which we live with love and care, seeing those domains as the car-
riers of our future, the embodiment of our hopes? What if we extended
this care to our local ecosystems, and beyond that to the biosphere itself ?
Why don't we already do so today?
Taking the climate crisis seriously forces us to rethink our most fun-
damental atitudes. It asks us to contemplate what might seem impos-
sible—to question the core loyalties by which we live. If we hesitate to
go that far, to question that deeply, we show that we finally do not care
all that much about the future of the biosphere or indeed about how