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The Climate Baby Dilemma (2022 [Full Movie] [Trending]Full EP - Full
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00:06Growing up, I really thought that having kids would be the most important part of my life.
00:13But I don't think about things like that anymore because I don't think that we live in a world
00:17where I can have expectations for my future. When I started to get really involved in climate
00:21activism was when it started to really hit home for me. You can't have a booming fossil fuel
00:26economy and safe and happy families. Those two things cannot exist simultaneously.
00:36We're driving through Haldeman County. My mom used to work at what she calls the
00:41Holy Trinity. So that was a industrial park that had a coal-fire power plant, a steel
00:48mill, and an oil refinery. So the fire right up there, the flame, it's supposed to burn
00:54off excess gas. When I was a kid, I could see it from my bedroom window.
01:01So this bridge goes over these pipelines. In 2019, there was actually a diesel spill.
01:10We're just leaving Selkirk and there's sign leaving town. Just here it says,
01:15Natural gas, our heritage. Children, our future. And I think it's pretty ironic because I'm
01:22from this community and I don't feel like I can have kids. And natural gas did that and
01:28coal did that and oil did that. And those are all of the things that my parents and my grandparents
01:32and all of us were told would build a bright future for their children. And they didn't know
01:37that their children would then have to be grappling with these questions of should I
01:41even have children? Can I even have children? And now we're grappling with these questions.
02:01I'm a science communicator, mainly writing about different things where science and ethics
02:06collide. I was feeling like there was something emerging that I could feel within me and within
02:15friends that we were connecting climate change to our future decisions. And whether or not that means
02:26that they should have kids and how many. Here we're talking about wildfires, floods, droughts,
02:34food security issues, heat waves, things starting to fall apart. Just sizing that up and thinking
02:42about, okay, what does that really look like for a kid is a serious question. It's not just some
02:47kind of sci-fi horror scenario. It becomes an ethical question as to, you know, how comfortable you are
02:55subjecting a child to the changes you can foresee. I'm in a young part of my marriage, first few years
03:06of it,
03:06and we want to have kids. We've talked about that. And considering what that really looks like when you're
03:14following climate science is unnerving. The first time I talked to Sebastian about this was in the context
03:22of writing my next book. And it was inspired by the growing amount of young people who are saying they
03:27don't
03:27know if they feel comfortable having a child because of climate change.
03:31You've been getting a lot of, like, questions about our personal decision to have kids.
03:35When people really want to know, I tell them the whole thing was like, yeah, I had this fear.
03:39Then I did all this work to try and figure it out. Felt that I could close the case.
03:43But then it came back up again and took over my life.
03:46But, like, do you tell them about whether we want to get pregnant or not?
03:49Yeah, definitely. But the thing is that that's changed so much, right?
03:52I mean, that has been this up and down.
03:57I've basically, over the last year and a bit, been doing tons and tons of interviews with folks
04:03and running workshops where I kind of create these spaces that people can come together to unpack their feelings
04:08and their ideas about climate change and how that connects to their reproductive lives.
04:13And they're not at all to express a certain message, but they're just to create a space where we can
04:18better understand the different ways that people are feeling.
04:22The anxiety of taking care of a child that will not be able to enjoy the world as I'm enjoying
04:29it right now
04:31keeps me sleepless.
04:32Because it's an incredibly emotional experience to look at everything that you hold dear,
04:38sort of slipping through your fingertips and feeling powerless to stop it.
04:43People are nerve-wracked. People are feeling really, really stuck in their own decision-making rights.
04:48around whether or not they should have a child.
04:52I do not want to tell anyone what to do around this.
04:56No one has the right to tell me what I should do with this dilemma.
05:02Oh, there's tons of reasons to be scared about having kids, regardless of climate change.
05:10The two main reasons that people kind of align with their concerns about having kids because of climate change
05:15relate to what a new kid does to a planet that's already overburdened with a variety of ecological problems,
05:23and what a changing planet does to a new kid.
05:28I find far more people are concerned with what a warming world will do to a kid
05:33than that kind of guilt factor related to carbon footprint.
05:40I grew up beside a coal power plant, which was the highest polluter in Canada,
05:46and I had horrible asthma.
05:49After seeing, you know, the stress that my mom went through dealing with that,
05:52the, like, long days at the hospital that I spent,
05:55I don't necessarily feel like I want to put somebody else through that.
06:01I know from the research that I've done that in 10 years, shit's going to be unwell.
06:09I would love to have kids. That's not the point.
06:12The point is that if I were to be pregnant in 2030, I don't know what would happen to me.
06:17Would I be able to safely carry a pregnancy to term?
06:20And if it wasn't a miscarriage, would they be healthy moving into their childhood?
06:26And then after that, like, would they be safe to live in a world where there's climate catastrophe?
06:33And so I don't feel comfortable bringing children into a world
06:37if I don't know how I can take care of them in that world,
06:40because that's your main role as a parent.
06:45I have been at TED for the last four months.
06:47I'm doing a residency here, where they've been basically hosting my research process for my book.
06:53Morning.
06:54Hey.
06:57For everything, considering everything, okay.
07:01For everything that's been said about climate change,
07:04we haven't talked enough about the psychological impacts of living in a warming world.
07:08That's punchier.
07:10It was way punchier.
07:11So the main point of my talk is to just generally introduce the idea that climate change has big psychological
07:20impacts on us.
07:21When there have been disasters, we see increased levels of PTSD, suicidality, depression, anxiety.
07:30And then, without being directly impacted by climate change, dealing with all the UN reports that come out,
07:37anticipating what's going to happen, there are things like pre-traumatic stress.
07:42And that's a term that a climate psychiatrist gave us.
07:46Another way of looking at it is anticipatory grief.
07:49There's ecological anxiety.
07:52I just keep meeting people who are saying, okay, my kid is now telling me they don't want to apply
07:58to university
07:59because they can't foresee a future for themselves because of climate change.
08:04A political scientist once said to me that a leading indicator that climate change is starting to hit home psychologically
08:11would be an increase in the rate of informed women deciding to not have children.
08:16Interesting.
08:18And this brings me back to my main point.
08:22The growing concern about having kids in the climate crisis is an urgent indicator of how hard-pressed people are
08:28feeling.
08:29Right now, students around the world are screaming for change through the piercing voice of despair.
08:37In 2019, there was a lot of action happening in Montreal, across Canada and across the world,
08:42on climate strikes and really trying to make a bold push for climate action.
08:48Some of the students who I was organizing with had brought up the fact that we were scared of having
08:53children.
08:53And so the No Future No Children pledge was something that was started by one of my friends at Climate
08:59Strike Canada.
09:00Emma worked on a website and they launched this pledge and they got a ton of people to sign it
09:05and they did press conferences.
09:07As a descendant of survivors of the Holocaust, the idea that my children might again face the worst of what
09:15humanity has to offer scares me more than anything else.
09:18An alarming statement from a young woman terrified about the consequences of climate change.
09:2418-year-old Emma Lim is starting a campaign and pledge to not have children until leaders take climate change
09:30seriously.
09:31I am giving up my dream of having a family because I will only have children if I know they
09:36have something to live for.
09:38So can you tell me the story, first of all, of how you came to start the No Future No
09:44Children pledge?
09:45It was a combination of many things. The sentiment is pretty widespread that we don't want to have children because,
09:51you know,
09:51we ourselves are struggling so much and our future seems so bleak.
09:55Why would we want to bring somebody else into a situation like that?
09:58And so the pledge was just a platform for people to share how they were feeling.
10:06I really wanted to be a mom. You know, that's something that's really important to me.
10:11And so taking those steps was really hard and it wasn't a decision I took lightly.
10:17If I don't have a future, I'm not going to have children. And like without children, there is no future.
10:22As one young person, you know, that's powerful enough.
10:25But then when it becomes thousands and thousands of young people all saying the same thing, that's something that people
10:30are noticing.
10:32I was always really surprised with how far it was spreading.
10:36Like, it really was youth all over the world who were signing it.
10:49This pledge is not like this is a guarantee or this is a contract with anyone.
10:54This is really like, hey, these are my daily thoughts.
10:56Apparently a lot of other kids are having them.
10:58We want the same opportunity. Everyone has to like have kids, raise them in a healthy environment where they can
11:03actually live, learn and grow.
11:05But how we're going, I don't think that's possible.
11:08That's why we're here today, so that we can actually fight for a future for our kids.
11:12Because no adults even take it seriously.
11:14Yeah.
11:14You can't drink oil! Keep it in the soil! You can't drink oil! Keep it in the soil! You can't
11:21drink oil!
11:25Young people like me don't have the option of having safe and happy families.
11:29Irresponsible governments kneeling to the fossil fuel industry took that away from us.
11:33I'm choosing not to have kids, but I want governments to know that this choice is being forced on me
11:38because I can't guarantee a healthy and safe world for my children to live in.
11:47When I first told my parents about the pledge, I had to like try very hard to communicate with them
11:51that like, no, like this isn't, this isn't me being depressed, dramatic or exaggerating my fears in any way.
11:58This is very real.
12:00I could see you being nervous about telling me that because I am very like, I want grandchildren and lots
12:07of them. Like I had these children so I could be a fun girl.
12:12I think it's sad when you have a child that's like, you know what it feels like to be a
12:17mother and you, you know, there's nothing like it.
12:21So it is a loss for us.
12:24I feel like it's a loss for me too.
12:29I've poured like countless hours into doing climate activism and I feel like it's work that I can't do if
12:34I have kids.
12:37Lots of people in my life have been frustrated by this.
12:40It was difficult to really explain to them that, you know, I'm not doing this activism just to shake things
12:45up, just to be a contrarian.
12:47I'm doing these things because I want what they want.
12:50I want to be able to feel safe and secure and to have a happy family.
12:54But I feel like I won't have that opportunity unless I'm able to stop what's happening right now.
13:01We will do everything in our power to stop this crisis from getting worse, even if that means skipping school
13:10or work.
13:11Well over 6.6 million people have joined the week for future, the strikes on this and last Friday.
13:29We took her to the car and let her go but she was like also on the bridge of tears,
13:34you know, just like the rest of us so tired and so exhausted and there's no break because there's no
13:38action.
13:39We're organizing, we're sharing this message that should be shared by our political leaders and isn't.
13:45We have to keep going and it's exhausting.
13:48I know I do 10 hours of work every day for this and I shouldn't have to.
13:56Even though we got so many people out, I can't name a single policy that I think we could attribute
14:02to the climate strikes.
14:03But the one good thing that I do think that the climate strikes brought was it created a sense of
14:08community among people from all over the country who all feel really strongly about this issue.
14:23When I first started questioning what it meant to have a child in an increasingly dire climate crisis scenario, I
14:33felt very deviant for even asking the question.
14:36Then you had celebrities like Miley Cyrus to politicians making statements.
14:42There's scientific consensus and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question.
14:50Is it okay to still have children?
14:53At a certain moment it just took off.
14:55Lots of journalists writing about this.
14:58And this is in a very few short years because I started asking these questions in 2017.
15:03Now here we are in 2021.
15:05My colleagues and I surveyed 10,000 young people in 10 countries around the world and we were alarmed by
15:13what we found.
15:1456% said that they feel humanity is doomed.
15:1939% of those young people said that the climate crisis makes them hesitant to have their own kids.
15:24And we found that these feelings and thoughts were significantly correlated with the sense of being betrayed by governments and
15:33lied to by leaders.
15:34Which introduces us to a very important concept of institutional betrayal.
15:41This sense of betrayal inspired another group called Birth Strike to declare that they won't have children.
15:47The movement came out of the UK and is similar to the No Future No Children pledge.
15:53Their goal is to use reproductive decisions to demand change and to get the attention of those who don't normally
15:58care enough about the climate.
16:01A lot of people are getting a little bit confused about what we're trying to do here.
16:06Some people make sense of this whole conversation as just being about civilizational suicide.
16:12You're basically saying the species is over, it's hopeless, we should in effect as a group ended commit suicide.
16:20And that is not what anyone involved with these concerns is saying from my experience now having spoken with hundreds
16:26of them.
16:27Birth Strike isn't about trying to stop other people from having children.
16:32We feel too afraid.
16:35There's a lot of kind of turbulent reaction to the idea and right-wing conversation too that gets attached to
16:41this and it's this kind of racist discourse about people from developing nations having lots of kids while people in
16:49developed nations aren't having enough.
16:53So Birth Strike was often misunderstood.
16:56They tried to regain control of their message but many people still thought they were promoting population control.
17:03So they shut the group down.
17:08Your work has focused a lot on critiquing this commonly heard idea that overpopulation is the root of our environmental
17:17problems.
17:18And what's happened then in order to put that narrative on the table and become this popular idea that it
17:24is?
17:24Oh, so many things.
17:26This narrative started a really long time ago in the late 18th century with a guy named Malthus.
17:33And then in the mid 20th century, Paul Ehrlich.
17:37He wrote a famous book, The Population Bomb.
17:40He equated population growth to a nuclear bomb, which is frightening language.
17:46And he was featured on the Carson show throughout the 1970s.
17:51Everybody's lives would get better in the long run because there would be more of everything to go around.
17:55But our population size does not correlate to the ways that we consume resources and pollute the planet.
18:02So the United States, we've got about 5% of the global population and put about a quarter of the
18:09world's carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
18:12If you look at sub-Saharan African countries that have the highest rates of population growth, those countries have the
18:20lowest emissions.
18:22So if population is our strategy or our solution, it's not going to work.
18:28If we can move the conversation away from overpopulation, there's still much to discuss around the connections between reproduction, environment,
18:38climate change and a lot of work to be done.
18:40You're now embarking on this investigation of how race shows up in these conversations around environmental emotions and what's rising
18:50to the surface for you.
18:51For youth of color, who I have interviewed, the emotions that they expressed around whether or not they want to
18:58have children were mainly focused on the things they are already experiencing.
19:02So racial discrimination, gender and sexuality discrimination, and just political division and real ugliness, they don't want to experience worsened
19:13climate change either.
19:14But for them, that's a little bit at a remove, whereas racism and other social tensions are right here, right
19:21now.
19:22So I have decided not to have children. My main reasons were, can I bring a child into this deeply
19:29divided society in which racism is still this bad?
19:34No. On top of that, I don't ever want to have to evacuate my home due to wildfire and have
19:42to evacuate with a child.
19:45And fires will be coming any moment now, it feels like. But last year, there were terrible fires that hit
19:52this area.
19:53And the statistically significant number of women who lost their pregnancies during the days of wildfire exposure.
20:01So when we're talking about climate change being a reproductive justice issue in that sense, it's starting to become very
20:08explicit.
20:12Conversations about the climate crisis and our reproductive choices are really personal, but they're also political.
20:19They're about climate justice, racial justice, social justice, and how they're all intertwined.
20:27Partway through researching my book, I developed a deeper understanding of how privilege was fueling my own eco anxiety.
20:34Because as a white middle class Canadian, I mainly dreaded the future.
20:40But people facing systemic threats are being harmed in the present.
20:45How do you feel about the critique that this is a privileged person's preoccupation?
20:52I wouldn't even call it a criticism. That's just a really valid observation to make.
20:56The pledge was intended for the audience of people that is more responsible for climate change, and we wouldn't want
21:02to tell people not to have children ever.
21:05You know, for a lot of people in communities that have been marginalized, having kids and teaching them culture, that's
21:11an act of activism and resistance and resilience in itself, and that's powerful.
21:19My daughter's name is Mamatison, and it's Potawatomi for firefly.
21:26My daughter will grow up on her land, and she will know her language.
21:31Say Ani.
21:32Say Ani. Ani flower, yeah.
21:36So unlike me, who has spent all of my life yearning for that, you know, learning my language, but I
21:44walked alongside my mom as she reclaimed those things.
21:49So I have a responsibility as someone who grew up with that knowledge to pass it on.
21:55I have never met an indigenous person who didn't want to have kids because they thought the world was ending.
22:01Why would we think about not having children when we've already experienced the apocalypse?
22:07When somebody comes to your land, takes all of your resources, kills your ability to survive and have a family,
22:16and then takes your children and separates them from you, and tells you that everything about your whole existence is
22:23shameful and wrong, that's the end of the world.
22:31To lose our very existence, which is our culture, is the end of the world.
22:42And that's why we can't imagine not having babies.
22:46Because if we don't have babies, the colonizers win, and that's what they want.
22:53So I'm not going to give it to them.
22:57Raising children for me is a political act informed by history, because the choice to be a mother, to raise
23:07and protect my child, is the revolution.
23:12I think it's the only way to heal from genocide.
23:16My biggest fear is that we will come to a moment where I won't know if I can keep her
23:20safe.
23:22And in that place, I know why people don't want to bring precious life into this world.
23:30And so there's this, like, real pain about imagining a future.
23:36And I think for so many populations who have had the privilege to live outside of genocide, they've never had
23:44that before.
23:45Futures have been handed to them.
23:47The idea of safety and a roof over their head and having a career, that's all normal.
23:51So this sense of not having hope, this is new.
23:58I think that this motherhood question is kind of that window into so many demographics who live with that same
24:07fear every day because of the world they live in.
24:13A key takeaway for me has been to reframe the pain I feel about the future by listening to the
24:21stories of people who haven't been able to take their security for granted and who know in their bones how
24:27unsafe the world can be.
24:30So given that these emotions might sit in our bodies differently depending on what our racial, cultural, political, economic, class
24:37backgrounds are, there are some similarities rising to the surface around this terror.
24:42So what kind of opportunities might that open up for solidarity?
24:47I think that coming together and expressing emotions outwardly and finding new tools and resources for creating space for other
24:57people's emotions is really important.
25:00And the reason I know that is every single young person who I've interviewed has said I'm so glad that
25:07you're asking these questions because I think about this all the time and I've never had this conversation out loud.
25:17Many people are grieving and scared and don't necessarily know where to go because there's a lack of norms for
25:25how to process this stuff and talk about it and bring it up.
25:28There are journalists calling me every day to ask how one can cope with a sense of eco-anxiety, existential
25:38dread.
25:39So I decided to call my book Generation Dread.
25:42And I also write a newsletter where I share resources for staying sane in the climate crisis.
25:49I'm finding peer led support groups online and in person, climate cafes, climate grief 10 step programs and climate aware
25:59therapy that's becoming more widely available.
26:01When you have a place to talk about your fears with people who validate them, the distress becomes much easier
26:08to live with.
26:09So finding this community is really step one.
26:22When I was struggling with the question of do we have a kid or not in the climate crisis, the
26:28first group I found organizing around this was Conceivable Future.
26:31It's an activist led network that helps people set up informal gatherings to explore these concerns.
26:43A few years ago we ended up having this pledge.
26:47Since then we haven't had much more of a conversation, but it hasn't left my mind.
26:53Which brings me to this idea of the house party and I'm hoping to be a host of one and
26:58I'm kind of wondering how Conceivable Future began.
27:01In 2014 when Megan and I met, we both had been doing climate work for a while and we both
27:07had this feeling that there was a kind of a heart missing from the movement.
27:12The climate crisis has often been illustrated in terms of icebergs calving, polar bears starving.
27:18All of this stuff is like really bad news, but not everybody connects to it on a visceral level.
27:23What we were finding was climate activists, many of them were thinking about it in terms of protecting a child
27:30that they know, a child that they want to have, the right for people to have children.
27:35That's what the Conceivable Future house parties are about, that taking that first step.
27:39Why do I care about this fight? What am I fighting for?
27:42We have a framework. There is this house party how-to.
27:45But really what we do is we give people a couple of ways to consider the question, how is climate
27:50change shaping your reproductive life?
27:54I would recommend starting with everybody introducing themselves and where they're from and maybe how old they are.
27:58And then we have people write for a few minutes to organize their thoughts.
28:03If we describe the situation we're in, that's when we start to be able to shift it.
28:08And after an hour or two, we gather up again and have people share, which sounds pretty simple because it
28:13is.
28:14But it's also, for a lot of people, a real turning point by thinking about these issues.
28:22When I started talking about my fears around parenthood, the goal was always to say,
28:26I want to bring in my personal testimony of just how scared I am.
28:30It's very, very much linked to what the children would have to endure.
28:35And it's very visual, right? So I'm wondering if there's reactions there.
28:38And for you, what's the root of this hesitation?
28:41I work in the climate sector as well. I have access to this information.
28:46And is it more incumbent upon me to use this as a decision-making factor?
28:50But also the flip side, if I'm working to fight for the systems, shouldn't I be more allowed to have
28:57kids at the same time?
28:58It also means, like, raising a child to be prepared, to be adaptable, to, like, be brave.
29:06So that's the part that feels hard. And like, am I ready for that challenge?
29:10So not only is there that responsibility you feel to prepare the child, we don't know how a child's going
29:16to react.
29:17Like, they might be really mad because of this state of the world. And that's something else we have to
29:22bear.
29:23I understand that corporations are responsible for most of the carbon production.
29:28But I pause and hesitate because it's like, there are already so many beings. There's already so much life.
29:37Is it possible just to share that life that's already here?
29:41Like, I feel like if I didn't have a kid, then it's almost like I could say, this is how
29:47serious this is.
29:48I will change my life to show how serious this is. Like, it's the house is on fire.
29:53I agree with everything that you shared. And at the same time, I also think that our systems, and capitalism
30:00in particular, continuously makes us return to ourself.
30:05And I'm at fault or I have to make this decision and I'm alone in it. And it's like, no,
30:10it's about our systems.
30:11How can we as a society begin to really hold accountable the people that are supposed to represent us?
30:19That's the work, I think.
30:21And like, I think that's a very beautiful thing. Like what my decision might be one day might not be
30:27the next, which is probably sort of why I land on the fence all the time.
30:30But yeah, I agree. And there's like other ways to meaningfully raise children, which gives me, calms me down.
30:38I continue to stand firmly on the fence with Tamara. No matter what we choose, it is very much about
30:44asking yourself, like, what are you called to do in this moment?
30:47And so like, if your energy is, I really want to love through my activism, like through my giving to
30:53community, great.
30:55And then if you want to love through building a family, then great.
30:59To be here, I think what I'm taking away is that whatever decision I do make, absolutely, that it would
31:05be an expression of life and a love of life.
31:09And I'm realizing that it would have to happen in a community.
31:15Another way to approach this dilemma involves reimagining what family means and looks like.
31:23Facing the climate crisis requires support systems that go far beyond the traditional nuclear family.
31:29We can all be involved in raising children, whether they're biologically ours or not.
31:36Since I've now gotten to the point that I don't necessarily feel like I will or can have a family,
31:41I do know that I have family members who will have families.
31:44And I want to make sure that I'm doing everything that I can to create a really safe and strong
31:50world for any nieces or nephews that I might have.
31:54It's no longer about mitigating the climate crisis, it's about adapting to it and really making sure that people are
32:01informed and strong and have really deep community bonds so that we can rely on each other because we're going
32:06to need that when we're facing the worst.
32:08So when I imagine my future, I really do see activism as an act of love and an act of
32:15family and a community.
32:18Coming up here today, I am fighting for my future.
32:23Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market.
32:30It's 30 years since Rio and I actually still get people who write to me thinking I'm 12 and I
32:38just gave that speech.
32:39When I think about why people are still talking about it, I just realized the importance and the power of
32:49the voice of youth.
32:50And the reason is our innate sense of love for the younger generation.
32:56The whole speech can be summarized in the last line, which is,
33:00You grown up say you love us.
33:02But I challenge you, please, make your actions reflect your words.
33:08It definitely affects me differently now as an adult.
33:13However, it hasn't really changed how I feel about the power of those words.
33:17It's just deepened it.
33:18And surely, if we can embody that love as a society, I mean, of course we can deal with these
33:25challenges.
33:26I used to go fishing in Vancouver, my home, with my dad, until just a few years ago, we found
33:33the fish full of cancers.
33:36But now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.
33:42When I was very young, my father was starting to get really interested in environmental issues because he was learning
33:50through his science programming.
33:52Hello, I'm David Suzuki. Welcome to The Nature of Things.
33:55Dad wasn't thrilled when I told him I was expecting.
34:00You know, he kind of was like, given what is unfolding right now and the future that we're predicting, why
34:07would you bring a kid into this world?
34:09So that was, that was a bit sobering.
34:13My dad says he was really quite moved by my answer, which was, I'm having a child and that means
34:22I have to do everything I can to ensure that the future is safe.
34:28I'm all in. This is my commitment. And he says that just really blew him away because he realized that
34:34this is why we're here. We're here to provide for the future.
34:41I learned that it's crucial to go beyond thinking in black and white, to really balance hope and fear and
34:49then find ways to act in that gray zone in between.
34:51But the thing is, we can't have a gray zone baby, right? It's binary. We either do it or we
34:58don't.
34:59Even though it's not the case for other people who decide to stay child free, I eventually felt that for
35:05me, not having a child was a commitment to my fear, while having a child was a commitment to joy
35:11and the responsibility to engage in climate action for the rest of my life.
35:17So the questions I'm asking now have changed from, is it okay for me to have a child, to what's
35:24required to parent well in the climate crisis?
35:28I thought, okay, now I've made a decision. But then there were all these other new emotions I had to,
35:33had to grapple with. And so just be prepared for that.
35:36This is going to be a continual relationship with emotions, no matter which decision you make.
35:42I've had several parents say, have I done the wrong thing, putting a kid into this world? But while answering
35:49those kinds of questions, I'm also simultaneously feeling my baby kick inside of me. So it's getting existential.
36:04It's been really emotional for me to see my son also be very sensitive to a lot of the same
36:11issues that I was when I was a kid.
36:13I started to see when my son was about nine years old, starting to really take on the weight of
36:20what we were doing. And it was really, really hard.
36:23I knew what he was going through, but I also saw an even bigger burden that he was carrying. But
36:30it was directly related to him not wanting to be a human because humans were being so terrible to the
36:37planet.
36:38A lot of young people are experiencing a level of trauma when it comes to encountering our current state and
36:48future state and are feeling all the things you'd expect with trauma.
36:53A lot of young people are feeling angry, frustrated, powerless, sad. So therefore, we're in for some rocky times, and
37:03people's distress and anxiety is going way up.
37:05Mm-hmm.
37:06That is not necessarily a unilaterally bad thing. But we have a tendency in our particularly Western society to see
37:16difficult, hard feelings as negative and bad.
37:19And if we look through the lens of psychology and all change pretty much has to happen when we feel
37:25a certain level of discomfort. The key is what do we do with those feelings?
37:29How do we make it transformative?
37:30Because it can be paralyzing.
37:32Yeah.
37:33But it also can be the catalyzer. So it's really not cut and dry. But the X factor is if
37:41we're able to name and talk about our feelings, have our experience be validated and accepted, and know that we're
37:47not alone in it. That's really the secret sauce.
37:51Yeah.
37:53Yeah.
37:53I think the number one thing that we can be doing is having conversations about these issues with everyone that
37:59we come into contact with, but in a way that is emotionally intelligent. It sounds very, very simple, but it's
38:07actually, I think, the hardest thing that we can do.
38:14It is normal and reasonable to be distressed by what is happening. It's not a pathology. It's not a disorder.
38:23And it's certainly not something that a psychiatrist can give you a diagnosis for. We need to support people so
38:29that it doesn't become debilitating. We especially need to support young people so that it doesn't impair their functioning. But
38:35then we need to harness this for transformative change on climate.
38:40So on the micro level, is that effectively what's happened with you?
38:43Very much so. Yeah.
38:48So what started as a private dilemma about whether or not to have a baby has led to a much
38:54deeper sense of purpose in my career.
38:57I now work with mental health experts at a medical school, and we're researching how to better support young people
39:04with climate distress.
39:07There's so much power that we have now over how bad it's going to get. But it's easy to misunderstand
39:13hope. We often think of hope as being this thing somewhere out there that we need to capture in order
39:21to get to work. But you can be totally hope free and start acting. And then hope is what you
39:27create when you work together with others.
39:31The thing that saved me was action. And so when I had my son that was dealing with these really
39:41intense feelings of grief, the first time I really realized it was serious, I just said, let's do a garbage
39:47cleanup.
39:47And then he was just like, thrilled and happy little kid again. So that was my go to. Because that
39:55is the only thing that I think really will alleviate some of the incredible anxiety that is on our youth
40:02shoulders today. It's action.
40:05So people who are deciding to have kids while being very climate aware are coming up with new ideas and
40:13ways to parent in the climate crisis. But essentially, there's no intervention here that's going to take your distress away.
40:20The intervention that's needed is climate justice.
40:23If you're going to be a parent or if you are a parent, you've got to do everything you can
40:28to get us off of fossil fuels. You've got to do this in your personal life and you've got to
40:33get political. The time for grieving is not yet. It's not over.
40:38The IPCC scientists say we still have a window where we can make a difference. And the amazing thing is
40:49we now have the technology, the price of renewables that is absolutely plummeted. And I'm going to spend all of
40:57my energy focused on solutions.
41:00We need young people to be inundated with solutions so they can be a part of the change because I
41:05think the anxiety around climate change comes from the idea that there's nothing we can do. But if you see
41:12the way on the other side, you'll be unstoppable because you're not living in disaster. You're striving for a future.
41:24So the next stop on our pollution tour is the site of the coal power plant. And now you can
41:35see there's just like an ocean of solar panels.
41:45There's imperial oil in the background with wind turbines. It's kind of crazy seeing like the future intermixed with like
41:54the past in terms of energy.
41:58I wanted to talk about this transition because I wanted to show people that there is movement happening and to
42:04keep pushing.
42:05It's proof that when governments put their mind to it, they can make strong action. And I think we need
42:11to keep reminding people of the little winds so that they don't lose hope.
42:18I just handed in the final draft of my book.
42:20So that wraps four years of researching and writing about the mental health impacts of the climate crisis. And in
42:28just shy of three weeks, I will give birth. So yeah, birth month, birth of the book, birth of the
42:36baby. They're all connected.
42:38The book has always been a bit of a challenging thing to wrap up because how do you really conclude
42:45something as messy and complex as our human existential and emotional response to an unfolding collective trauma, which is the
42:54climate crisis, right?
42:56But I found a few things that will help us live more meaningfully with it all, like connecting to a
43:02community that validates tough climate emotions, balancing naive optimism and destructive pessimism, understanding that it is never too late and
43:14placing this moment into the larger context of human experience and history.
43:20All these things can help us take action with others to foster a future for the next generation.
43:52I found a lot of, like knowing that the other's legacy of, the first generation of our communities, the whole
43:55community, the whole community, the whole community, the whole community and the whole community.
43:58I found that I found that I was really excited.
43:58Even though there's a lot of things that I saw in a community of our community.
44:01And so we didn't have to be able to do with this, I'll see you next time.
44:01What we found the most of people all the time I saw in the community of.
44:08You
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