Having a child is the worst thing you can do for the environment

[saveourtrees]

I disagree with this wholeheartedly. My family of 7 (I will not apologise for my children's lives) create less waste than my brother and his girlfriend. In fact we take in their pet waste and food waste for composting.
Virtually all of our clothes, toys, boardgames, furniture is secondhand. A couple of white goods (does oven count as white goods?)
we grow our some of own food, process and preserve, batchcook and freeze, hardly ever use the heating (hot water bottles and blankets), bake, make dinners from scratch etc.
I knit (using wool from the charity shop), sew badly to fix holes in clothes.
we don't buy cards or wrapping paper, we do absolutely everything we can.

We still make about 1.5 black bags full of rubbish a week though, solely from food packaging. We just don't have enough to stretch to a zero waste bulk shop in the city center. But one day, when I go back to work I think we could probably manage it.

So why am I feeling guilty for having children? If it wasn't for my children I probably wouldn't have even cared as much about the environment and the state of the world. A big drive for me changing from a typical consumer to a more conscious one was the birth of my first child. Suddenly when people asked 'what world are we leaving for our children?' they were talking about my children.

I think the eco conscious people not reproducing to ''save the planet'' is stupid. If the people who care, who would teach their children to mend and say no to fast fashion, eat less meat, don't holiday abroad, etc. .. if they don't have children but the avid consumers do then isn't that worse? There will be less eco friendly grownups in 20/ 30 years but just as many grown-ups who weren't taught by their parents how to be eco friendly

I don't know, but don't come onto mumsnet and tell mums they shouldn't have had their children. That really is horrible.

QI claims that having a dog is the worst thing you can do for the environment. And that is easier to solve than kids.

@KeflavikAirport

QI claims that having a dog is the worst thing you can do for the environment. And that is easier to solve than kids.

What's the reasoning behind that?

Here's the link: Banning cats and dogs would be an easy way to cut carbon emissions. But it would go down like a bucket of cold sick.

@NadiaVulvokov

But it does sound like you feel guilty though?

Probably Catholic. (I'm Catholic, before anyone starts)

Laboratory grown meat is the future I reckon. We also need to heavily invest in alternative arable farming methods like vertical farming to free up space for carbon reducing trees etc. It’s only half a solution to concentrate on reducing carbon emissions, we’ve actively got to make the effort to capture what we can’t avoid producing.

Again, humans are allowed to exist just as much as any other species.

I would change this to any other species are allowed to exist just as much as humans, but most humans don't seem to feel this way unfortunately. Our greed is wiping out the rest of the world.

@KeflavikAirport

QI claims that having a dog is the worst thing you can do for the environment. And that is easier to solve than kids.

This is definitely the case for my dog, he drives a Maserati.

Having a sibling contributes to social sustainability in that onlies are more likely to become lonelies which translates to poorer outcomes

Is there any actual scientific proof for this or just your own biases

Why would I have less dc when so many people don't give a shit about the planet. I'm not going to change my life choices to offset their carbon footprint.

Flip this around. 'Why would I give up my one shorthaul holiday holiday a year/car/buying new underwear/all these other things you bemoan other people for, when other people go on having so many children and don't give a shit about that effect on the planet. After all every child produces the same carbon emissions by age 5 as over 70 return flights to Florida. I'm not going to change my life choices to offset their carbon footprint'

You've admitted multiple times you've had all these children because you want them, you want the big family who are there an pop in all the time. You've attempted to offset this by living greener. Why should other people who've chosen to live greener by having no/less children give up one thing that gives them joy (holiday/car etc) when they've chosen to live greener in other ways and overall their carbon footprint is still less than yours. You're a hypocrite OP, you can have what you want because you 'offset' it in other ways, why can't other people?

@KeflavikAirport

QI claims that having a dog is the worst thing you can do for the environment. And that is easier to solve than kids.

It is not a good thing to have pet dogs. Working cats and dogs at least have a purpose. But here is a fact sheet that also says how to reduce your pet’s carbon pawprint (if you have a cat or dog). www.ovoenergy.com/blog/lifestyle/carbon-pawprints-the-environmental-impact-of-pets

“Average-size cat – 310kg of CO2e per year
Average-size dog – 770 kg of CO2e per year
Large dog – 2,500kg of CO2e per year”

your average canine’s carbon footprint is twice that of a 4x4 car. Crazy but true

So instead of eyerolling at Range Rover drivers for blithely driving CO3 emitting monsters, we should be double eye rolling at every dog walker.....

*CO2.

@Cornettoninja
We also need to heavily invest in alternative arable farming methods like vertical farming to free up space for carbon reducing trees etc.

And floating farms. There are already a few floating farms in existence. The first was in Rotterdam and has 1 human, 3 robots and 35 dairy cows.

@Cornettoninja

Laboratory grown meat is the future I reckon. We also need to heavily invest in alternative arable farming methods like vertical farming to free up space for carbon reducing trees etc. It’s only half a solution to concentrate on reducing carbon emissions, we’ve actively got to make the effort to capture what we can’t avoid producing.

Lab-grown meat will never be economical to mass produce.

@DdraigGoch
I agree about the lab grown “meat” and although I haven’t researched it, I find it hard to believe it would have carbon foot print low enough to justify a concrete monstrosity of a lab in place of a field of grass with all the biodiversity of small mammals, birds and insects if supports as well as the grazing livestock themselves.

It is not a good thing to have pet dogs. Working cats and dogs at least have a purpose. But here is a fact sheet that also says how to reduce your pet’s carbon pawprint (if you have a cat or dog)

So a run-down hoarder house has a way bigger carbon footprint than a large family 😂😂😂😂

Can we stop pointing fingers at each other now? Literally it doesn’t matter does it?

The core selfishness of having lots of children is that it is the children who have to deal with the consequences. People like the OP tend to believe that they are so wonderful that their offspring will be a gift to the planet. The planet can’t handle many more gifts like that. And our children’s generation will have to suffer the climate change we have created for them.

@goawaystormy
There are reams of evidence. Look up pillars of sustainability. Explore the social strand. It blows me away how little so many people know about sustainability. It's about so much more than quitting plastic bags and switching to EVs

The core selfishness of having lots of children is that it is the children who have to deal with the consequences

Always has been.

But actually the world at present is the best it’s literally ever been for the vast majority of people.

Less than 100 years ago, a sizable minority of children did not make it to adulthood. That used to be an everyday tragedy. Women routinely died in childbirth. Natural and manmade disasters killed tens of thousands, no one blinked an eye.

I recall many thousands dying in floods in China as recently as the 90s. Now it’s in the mere hundreds.

How are we this myopic to think climate change is going to be worse? This is some doomsday thinking, must be something embedded in the human psyche to crave an apocalypse like this.

The planet will be fine and people will be able to adjust, as long as we don’t trash our economies due to ‘green’ ideology.

I’m personally supportive of environmental initiatives: clean water, clean air, clean soil. Properly dispose and control industrial waste. Urbanise and re-wild where it makes sense. Convert to EV backed by nuclear power (not so much renewables, land usage is crazy bad)

Why are we hyper-focussing on carbon emissions?

women still die in the hundreds of thousands in childbirth every year. Thousands still die in floods worldwide. 6,000 in India in 2013 for instance.

@KeflavikAirport

women still die in the hundreds of thousands in childbirth every year. Thousands still die in floods worldwide. 6,000 in India in 2013 for instance.

China is more developed than India now so they have experienced that benefit faster.

For example, a 1970 cyclone in Bangladesh killed a half million people! Recent ones have been far less, in the lower thousands or even just hundreds. It’s an achievement that gets so little press because it doesn’t fit into narratives of poor ‘third worlders’ at the mercy of nature.

You can read about how that was accomplished here: floodlist.com/asia/bangladesh-cyclone-amphan-evacuations

There’s of course still work to be done, but we should acknowledge how much better it is than in the past.

Oh yeah, I know one of these retrospectively self-styled hippies who just happens to have a few kids. She must have selectively forgotten her eco-credentials this week though if her socials are anything to go by and the mountains of single use Poundland plastic in evidence for just one birthday. I’m sure child free people are a problem too though, somehow, so don’t worry.

Incidentally do people genuinely have kids and think they can tell them that they shouldn’t holiday abroad? I don’t believe it.

@whippetwoman

Anti-natalism can be perceived as yet another way to attack women. Boris Johnson is seen as 'amusing' and a bit of a rogue for the amount of children he has fathered but heaven forfend a women has more than two, or one, or not enough or, or or.....

It's also a very Western way of thinking about the world whereas in other areas the amount of children you have depends on your religion, culture or sometimes survival. Not that it should, but it does.

Other areas of the world don’t expect anybody else to take care of children but the parents. And children are resources.

In the West other people are expected to pay for children if the parents can’t and ensure they all grow up ‘happy healthy’ blah blah blah. That’s why. Children in the West are more expensive.

*by resources I mean that they have obligations to the family. Like taking care of their parents or joining the family business.
The more like individualistic and Westernised cultures become the less children they have because raising children is more of a sacrifice without much personal benefit.

@TractorAndHeadphones

Only parents raise children? That's total rubbish. Quite the opposite. We have a Nigerian family who live opposite us. Their nephew is living with them, sent there by his parents to get a good education. It's considered a totally normal thing to do and the aunt and uncle take on the responsibility to help the extended family as they are doing well. This is true throughout many societies where extended families are front and centre. It's absolutely not just the parents.

And the fact that children become net users of family resources than net contributers is not to do with being westernised and inidivualised. It's a natural facet of development. If children are not working in the fields or factories or doing housework/childcare all day, if children are going to school then children will be a net cost. Some of the least westernised but most developed countries in the world, like China, Korea, Japan, Singapore have the lowest fertility in the world.

@StrychnineInTheSandwiches

It doesn't matter how green your day-to-day life is in terms of weaving your own pants and making your own yogurt. You've had 5 kids and they will most likely go on to have at least one kid each. You've created a lot of people who will all go on to have a huge carbon footprint for decades to come.

I'm not being aggro, just factual. A person who doesn't give two hoots about recycling or plastic waste or flying around the globe three times a year etc will still have a far smaller impact than you if they never have kids.

this

Although I didn't consider the environment when having children and don't suppose many others did u til recently tbh so don't let anyone make you feel guilty or like you should apologise or justify your family x