Notre Dame professor Roy Scranton bemoans birth of his daughter due to global warming, ‘I cried two times’
A Notre Dame English professor bemoaned the birth of his daughter in the New York Times due his belief in global warming and how it was a mistake furthering climate change “doom[ing]” the planet.
“I cried two times when my daughter was born,” Roy Scranton opens his column, adapted from his new book We’re Doomed. Now What? Essays on War and Climate Change. “First for joy, when after 27 hours of labor the little feral being we’d made came yowling into the world, and the second for sorrow, because “[m]y partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.”
Scranton tapped into the global warming hysterics, suggesting that a solution cannot be addressed without “radically reorient[ing] almost all human economic and social production,” including “centralized control of key economic sectors,” something he admits is “scarcely imaginable, much less feasible.” As a result, he predicts the 21st century will see a “global catastrophe whose full implications any reasonable person must turn away from in horror.”
None of the conflicting data mattered as Scranton persisted: “Some people might say the mistake was having a child in the first place,” he says, citing reports that climate change is causing increasing numbers of people to decide against having children. “[S]truggling with the ethics of living in a carbon-fueled consumer society, [they] consider having children selfish and environmentally destructive.”
Scranton adds that while procreation is “the single strongest drive humans have” and the “fundamental organizing principle of every human society,” the fact remains that “nobody really needs to have children.”
After a discussion about the futility of trying to live a more carbon-friendly personal lifestyle and those who have carried such logic to suicidal extremes, Scranton explains that he is “committed to life in this world” because this world “is the only one that offers joy.”
earth fireball destruction photo/ Bela Geletneky aka photoshopper24 via pixabay.com
“Every day brings new pangs of grief. Seeing the world afresh through my daughter’s eyes fills me with delight, but every new discovery is haunted by death,” he writes.
“How can I read her ‘Winnie the Pooh’ or ‘The Wind in the Willows’ when I know the pastoral harmony they evoke is lost to us forever, and has been for decades? How soon do I explain to her what’s happening? In all the most important ways, it’s already too late.”
In the end, Scranton suggests it’s not a mistake to have children, but not because their blessings outweigh or potentially solve the world’s problems; merely because it’s too late to make a difference.
“There is no utopia, no Planet B, no salvation, no escape,” he laments. “We’re all stuck here together. And living in that world, the only world there is, means giving up any claims to innocence or moral purity, since to live at all means to cause suffering.” In his telling, the only thing left is to impart on his daughter the importance of “living ethically.”
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