I just watched the documentary “The Climate Baby Dilemma” and loved it. Unfortunately, I don’t see that it’s accessible outside Canada, so I’m sharing the quotes that resonated with me.
Here are my favorite quotes, roughly arranged by theme [Disclaimer: I wrote down the source for most, but not all, of the quotes. Also, please forgive any typos]:
Privilege and the baby dilemma
Britt Wray: As a white middle-class Canadian, I was mainly dreading the future, but people facing systemic threats are being harmed in the present.
Sarain Fox: For a lot of people in communities that have been marginalized, having kids and teaching them culture is an active act of resistance. I have never met an indigenous person who didn’t want to have kids because they thought the world was ending. Why would we think about not having children when we’ve already experienced the apocalypse? When somebody comes to your land, takes all of your resources, kills your ability to survive and have a family, and then takes your children and separates them from you, and then tells you that everything about your whole existence is shameful and wrong. To lose our whole existence is the end of the world. And that’s why we can’t image not having babies. Because if we don’t have babies, the colonizers win, and that’s what they want. So I’m not going to give it to them. Raising children for me is a political act…I think it’s the only way to heal from genocide.
There’s this real pain about imagining a future. I think that for so many populations that have had the priveledge to live outside of genocide, they’ve never had that before. Futures have been handed to them…
We need young people to be inundated with solutions so that they can be part of the change, because I think the anxiety around climate change comes from the idea that there’s nothing we can do. But if you see a way on the other side, you’ll be unstoppable, because you’re not living in disaster, you’re striving for a future.
Having a baby, or not, is a personal choice of how you want to express your love
If your energy is “I really want to love through my activism…then great.” If it is “I really want to live through my family…then great.”
It’s no longer about mitigating the climate crisis, it’s about adapting to it.
Severn Cullis-Suzuki: My Dad (the environmentalist David Suzuki) asked me “Why are you bringing a kid into this world?” Dad was quite moved by my answer. And it was: “I’m having a child, and that means, I have to do everything I can to ensure that the future is safe.” If you’re gonna be a parent or if you are a parent, you gotta do everything you can to get us off fossil fuels. You gotta do it in your personal life and you gotta get political.
The importance of expansive questions, emotional intelligence, community, activism
Britt Wray: The question has changed from: Is it OK for me to have a child to what’s required to parent well in the climate crisis?
Renee Lertzman: The X factor is if we’re able to name and talk about our feelings, have our feelings validated, and know that we’re not alone in it. That’s really the secret sauce.
Britt Wray: It is normal and reasonable to be distressed by what is happening. We need to support people so that it doesn’t become debilitating…but we need to harness this for transformative change on climate.
It’s easy to misunderstand hope…you can be totally hope-free and start acting. Hope is what you can create together with others.
There is no intervention needed that will take your distress away. The intervention that’s needed is climate justice.