A New Dad's Lament

 

Aaron Regunburg captured the angst of bringing a child into the Anthropocene Epoch.

I feel lucky, in a guilty way, that my two children have not given me grandkids. My nieces, however, have four toddlers.  I went through the ritual congratulations but I wondered what they were thinking. 

My baby is 4 months old today, as I write these words. He’s been smiling for weeks already, but it has just started feeling like his smiles really mean something. When you enter his field of vision, it’s like his face splits in half—he crinkles up his eyes in a way that makes them sparkle and throws his mouth open in a grin so forceful it pulls his tongue up. It’s hard to describe how it feels when he smiles, without falling back on clichés (it lights up your heart) or pedantry (it triggers an evolutionary dopamine hit). He’s been making more sounds, too. Coos and bwahs and gurgles that feel increasingly intentional. I can hear him straining to find the right way to shape the air passing through his mouth, trying to unlock the mysteries of deliberate communication—a riddle his brain isn’t quite ready to grasp.

I know that the closer this child comes to thinking and understanding and communicating complex ideas, the faster he approaches the Moment when he will discover something that I wish with all my heart he never had to know: that his mother and I brought him into existence on a world that is dying.

What a birthright that is. What a lesson to have to learn. Surely any lesson like that must divide a young life into a Before and an After: Before, when thoughts of the future can exist without an asterisk, and After, when they cannot. Before, when it is possible to have lunch and take a vacation and watch a movie and laugh and plan and go for a hike without a shadow hovering there, ready to flood outward at any instant. And After, when it isn’t.

My own Moment didn’t hit me fully until I was 24, though I’d known about climate change at an earlier age. I remember feeling fury when George W. Bush announced the United States would not sign onto the Kyoto Protocol in 2001. I remember my nightly prayers throughout elementary school, which had to go in decreasing order of importance and so always began with “please stop global warming” before they could proceed to world peace, wishes for my family, an A on tomorrow’s test, the girl I liked liking me back.

But it was also an issue that I didn’t want to fully absorb. “Existential threat” and “societal breakdown” were just words, without much meaning behind them—and wouldn’t it be easier if they stayed that way? Even when I started engaging in political organizing as a teenager, I mostly avoided climate activism. We’re all taught as children not to stare into the sun. The reality of climate change felt similarly blinding—something to glance at out of the corners of your eyes.

I finally had my Moment after being elected to the state legislature, when I felt I could no longer put off studying and grappling with the full scientific reality of our ecological position. And it was, as feared, just like staring at the sun. So much so that, since that Moment, I have often felt resentment toward older people in my life. They got to enjoy so many more years of Before (many are still enjoying them, in fact). Recently, though, resentment of my elders has been replaced by sadness for those younger than me—the brilliant, daring, prematurely hardened members of Gen Z who resent me for the luxury of waiting till my twenties, who had their Moments crushed into them as children by the staccato rhythm of droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, heat waves, and floods; the new normal of tragedy and loss.

...I remember asking older friends—smart, wise, compassionate mentors of mine—for advice. But they never had the answers I was looking for. One assurance I heard often: “You’re not the first generation to fear for the future. We asked the same questions—how can we bring children into a world that could face nuclear holocaust at any moment? Remember the Cuban missile crisis? Duck and cover drills? Still, we raised families. And we taught our children to work for peace.”

There are lessons there, certainly. But the analogy is fundamentally inaccurate. Knowledge of a real but small chance of apocalypse at any time is dreadful, but it’s not comparable to knowledge that the apocalypse is coming, is certain, has in many ways already begun. While the climate apocalypse exists on a spectrum—a world of difference separates three degrees Celsius of warming from four degrees, and four degrees from five, and the policy choices we make today and next year will save or condemn countless lives—there is something unique about knowing that some substantial amount of Armageddon is already baked into the ecological cycles of our planet.

So it was with much hand-wringing but without answers, in the midst of unprecedented wildfires, during the hottest summer ever recorded (until this one), that my wife and I chose to have a child.

I still don’t quite know how to justify our decision. Other questionable choices I’ve made in my life have been ones I made for myself—I alone suffered the consequences. But my wife and I made the choice to bring our son into existence for him. Without him. And I have no idea what he will think about that decision once he understands its significance, here at the ignition of the Anthropocene.

Denial would rob us of the opportunity to provide, in his Moment, whatever information we might have that could ease his transition from Before to After. I want him to hear that none of this is his fault. That this is the work of monsters. Oil and gas executive monsters and politician monsters who have consciously chosen to sacrifice everything we love and cherish so that they can lead momentary lives of opulence. Monsters who are very powerful, but not all-powerful—monsters we can still choose to fight, and even defeat, at least in some sense of the word.