Bear No Children - Stolen Future, Broken Present: The Human Significance of Climate Change - page 164

our own lives may go a couple decades from now. We demonstrate that
we think our lives are really about us and are indifferent to the ruins of
the future. Most of us would not choose to live that way—but we may
not really wish to cast of that atitude entirely, either. Climate change
forces us to choose; its potential severity has the power to concentrate
our minds. When it does so, it may inspire us to rethink entire areas of
our culture, reexamine what family means, imagine a new relationship to
place, reinvent our jobs and communities, and sustain a new relation to
the biosphere. But how could it be otherwise? If the very context of our
lives is at stake, to do it justice demands that we consider reinventing it
all, from top to botom. If we are to begin the task of owning the disaster
we are already causing and make reparation to the biosphere as a result,
we can do nothing less.
Notes
135. Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax, “Reproduction and the Carbon
Legacies of Individuals,” Global Environmental Change volume 19, issue 1
(February 2009): 14-20, available as a pdf document online. The quoted
statement appears on page 18. The authors argue that working through
lineages including both men and women is “computationally prohibitive,”
but that because “the number of genetic units (of both sexes) atributable to
an ancestral female is, on average, simply the number of females comprising
an unbroken lineage of females descending from the ancestor,” their focus on
female lineages will allow them to “obtain an estimate of the total number of
person years, male and female, that are traceable to the ancestral female” (16).
136. A key exception is Bill McKibben, who discusses the ecological consequences
of reproduction in Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families (New York: Penguin,
1998). As the topic's title suggests, McKibben gently suggests that parents
should consider having one child; he does not seriously discuss the possibility
of having none.
137. Genesis 1:28. The Holy Bible: Revised Standard Edition (New York: homas
Nelson & Sons, Old Testament portions copyright 1952).
138. Flightplan , directed by Robert Schwentke, 2005; John Q , directed by John
Cassavetes, 2002. John Q goes out of its way to play fair: the father removes
all bullets from his weapon in advance, ends up winning the support of all
his “hostages,” shows he is willing to kill himself if need be to supply the
heart for his child, becomes a heroic figure for the crowd—and television
audience—witnessing the ordeal, and is ultimately sentenced to serve time