Why I do't have a child: my climate crisis anxiety

My partner and I live in a one-bedroom apartment in Toronto. We both work in creative industries in an increasingly unaffordable city, but we get by.

So far, we’ve been insulated from the harsher effects of our warming planet. We’re victims of neither floods nor fires. Basement flooding has been a problem in other parts of Toronto, but not in our area. We knock on wood, comment on the weird weather and go about our day – which, due to Covid-19-related lockdowns, now takes place almost entirely in our modest home.

Related: Why I don't have a child: I cherish my freedom

The climate crisis and how it will impact our lives has played an increasing role in many of our conversations about the future. We don’t know what the world will look like 30 years from now. Will it look like New South Wales did last January, engulfed in smoke under Tatooine-red skies? Or the diminishing coastline of Bangladesh, or slowly sinking Miami? It will almost certainly look much worse than it does now, with untold droughts, floods, blazing summers, a devastated food system and the continued collapse of our natural ecosystems.

All this uncertainty shapes our discussions about whether or not to have kids. Now firmly in our 30s, the question looms larger in our minds.

When my parents were my age, they had $1,000 in the bank, a baby on the way and boundless optimism for the future. My grandmother keeps photo albums of these earlier years on a shelf in her guest room in the condo she shares with my parents: there are photos of me as a baby bouncing on my dad’s knees; my brother wearing comically big sunglasses; the road trip we took to Disney World.

These albums stretch further back, to bell bottoms and demure closed-mouth smiles under poofy hair. Further back: my long-deceased grandfather’s stern expression as he chomps on a cigar in Taipei, where my mother was born. Postage stamp-sized photos of my grandmother as a teenager, beautiful in her cheongsam.

This is when the Earth was ticking along in its normal, lazy fashion and there was no reason to believe that eventually everything would stop.

We haven’t added any new photos in a long time; our memories are stored on hard drives and smartphones now. My brother and I have spun off into different directions. He has no desire to have kids; I am a climate alarmist, collecting and internalizing world events, clinging to my zero-waste kit while steeped in anxiety about the future. Neither of us will likely have children. Ours is the last generation that will leaf through these albums and trace our eye shapes, crinkly at the corners, along those of our forebears.

If this were 1989, the year that I was born, I wouldn’t think twice about trying for a baby, and welcoming that transformative kind of bond that comes with raising a child. Sometimes, I do worry I will be missing out on the greatest kind of love there is. I watch my partner of six years play with other peoples’ kids and allow myself a brief moment to fantasize about what kind of father he would be.

I wonder, too, about who our child would turn out to be; which qualities they would take from us, and which they would form independently. Would they be kind and introspective, quietly biding their time like my partner is, or impulsive, like me? And how would society, with its endless screens and the menacing churn of capitalism, shape their life? In 1989, the world still had space for me and my dreams. But now it’s 2020 and the I think an apocalypse is under way.

Since I love my unborn child already, I can’t risk their livelihood in a world that neither needs them nor can provide for them. Because I love my child already, the only way I can protect them is by not having them.

Later, later, we always said. At one point – sometime between the mass coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in 2016 and the peak deforestation of the Amazon rainforest reported last August, each event a sign of the planet’s organs beginning to fail – later became I just can’t think about it.

If I don’t turn on the news and just observe from my window the neighborhood kids biking gleefully outside of my apartment, I can imagine a future that exists in a continuum with the past. My child would be able to experience all the same things that I did: birthday cakes, and lucky red packets on Chinese New Year, and jumping on a motel bed, all of these images that mirror my own childhood and those of my parents.

I just was not as lucky as my parents were, and my child will never be as comfortable or as hopeful as I have been. My ovaries can’t wait for the next election, or for countries around the world to get on track to fulfill their net-zero emissions targets. It’s hard to stay optimistic when our global leaders refuse to acknowledge the urgency of the climate crisis, when local governments can’t provide the basic necessary infrastructure to mitigate its impact on everyday people, and when corporations continue to get obscenely rich exploiting Earth’s natural resources. As I sit here, confined to my living room during a devastating pandemic and under the looming threat of a rapidly heating planet, I feel as if my own future is slowly disappearing from this world. How would any child of mine fare?

In a generation or two, in the blink of an eye, nobody will recognize the people in the albums sitting on my grandmother’s shelf. We’ll be treated with curiosity, as artifacts of our formerly stable world. No one will recognize the old furniture or our crinkly-eyed smiles. As it turns out, the future doesn’t exist in a continuum with the past. There’s only a straight line that leads to an end point. For my family, that end point may have to be me.