A decision as old as life itself.

The question of whether or not to have children is carrying added weight as the devastating effects of climate change are hitting harder and closer to home.

Can the planet sustain exponential growth?

Can societies function with declining birthrates?

What do we owe the future generations?

We’ll explore all these questions and more.

I'm Jasmin Singer and this is Environmental Connections.

Joining us today are thought leaders and environmental advocates and parents who have navigated this complex terrain.

In the studio with me today, we have Marilla Gonzalez, the woman behind Maryland Mindful Supplies, a low waste refill store that offers plastic free and ethically produced products for a sustainable life.

Welcome, Marilla.

Thank you for having me.

I get many, many of my products at your store and so excited that you are here.

We've got E. Turpin, the community development specialist at Rochester Ecology Partners, where she works to connect people to environmental resources in the community.

Thank you for being here, E. Thanks so much for having me, Jasmin.

I'm so grateful to be here and to hear the different perspectives on the panel.

And Neely Kelley, an experienced campaign director renowned for her impactful work in the renewables and environmental industry.

Her expertise spans strategic campaign planning, community engagement and equity and inclusion, making her a formidable force in advocating for sustainable change.

Thanks so much for having me, Jasmine.

And joining me virtually today is attorney and advocate Carter Dillard.

Carter is the co-founder of the organization Fair Start Movement, a human rights based, child centric and quote zero baseline family planning model.

Welcome, Carter.

Thank you so very much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me.

Before I jump into questions, I want to read a few stats regarding the environmental implications of having kids.

Global fertility rate dropped from 5 to 2.5 children per woman since 1955.

And is projected to reach 1.8 by 2100.

But global population will continue growing peaking at 10.4 billion around 2086. underscores the gravity of our discussion on parenting in an age of ecological uncertainty.

As we unravel the complexities of this deeply personal but universally significant decision, let's also seek some rays of hope, some pathways of action.

So again, thank you all so much for being here.

So Mirella, I would love to start with you.

Could you share with us what motivates your environmental activism, especially in the context of owning your low waste store?

Something that motivates me is the ability to enact change on an individual level.

I think for a lot of people that can be an intimidating thing or even discouraging.

But for me it feels very empowering to be able to look around and walk down the street and pick up a few pieces of litter.

And then you have a cleaner street.

And you know, the more people we can get on that bandwagon, the cleaner our streets become.

that's the individual power really motivates me.

thank you.

So many more questions for you.

But let's turn to E. A community engagement specialist with Rochester Ecology Partners.

What drives your passion for helping people access nature in their lives?

Because I know that's a big focus of the work that you do Yeah, absolutely.

And so at Rochester Ecology Partners in particular, I'm focusing a lot on connecting individuals and groups to each other and to nature so that we can drive collective action around connection to nature, around reducing the impacts of environmental injustice and around climate change in particular My friends, today, does anybody know what we are doing?

Raise your hand if you know.

We are looking for living things.

We are looking for living things.

I think.

So this spring, we brought over 400 students from Anna-Marie Douglas Academy School number 12 outside to identify as much biodiversity that lives here in our urban setting.

Do you guys remember what this was from?

Violets?

Yeah, and what’s this one?

Dandelion.

Good job.

Let's go join up.

My name is Timber Tammy, Tammy Okung, and I'm a program manager for Rochester Ecology Partners.

A lot of our goal is to help city kids touch grass.

That's what it boils down to, because that's what's necessary and that's what helps them grow and helps them appreciate the world around them.

There’s tadpoles!

They’re small.

Oh, my god, I see a bug!

It looks like it came from the sea but it didn’t.

You know what this is called?

Lichen.

I'm a former attendee of AMDA 12.

I'm also a proud RCSD graduate.

I love being outdoors.

I love being black and being outdoors.

I think there is something very important about me being a black, queer educator especially at a city school district that is predominant black and brown.

I hope that I can inspire the next generation to know that they can be these educators, that they can make a difference in the world and you can look like me and do it.

I found two new things!

I love nature.

It is relaxing and it's just hearing nature itself like the birds chirping right now is relaxing.

Some of the best feedback we have gotten from educators that are doing our Nature Based Learning program is joy and engagement from our kids.

They are seeing their kids smile and excited to learn.

They're asking questions.

They're making connections, and teachers are saying the same thing.

We've had a teacher that said this has brought joy back into my teaching because we get to see kids excited and happy.

And when the kids are excited and happy, we're excited and happy to be here.

With every lesson where every time we're coming outside, that's potential for a new environmental story.

And even if it doesn't go as far as becoming a nature based educator such as myself, or maybe they won't work for Rochester Ecology Partners one day, I know that that's still impacting our future because that's one more person willing to take their children outside in the future.

That's one more piece of plastic that's getting picked up on a walk, and that makes me so hopeful for the future because every time we're outside, we're connecting with our environment, we're connecting with each other, and we're building our communities.

Yes, it does make me very hopeful for the future.

Every time I see anybody outside, not just the students.

As an environmentalist and a parent, tell me about your relationship with your environmentalism and with climate change or just where do you stand?

Well, I always have to start that, until I was in my early twenties, I was a denier.

I don't like to use that term, actually.

It's more like just didn't understand the science of climate change and what sort of moved me.

I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Central Africa and witnessed firsthand the scale of ecological devastation that was happening as the forests were being logged.

But it was, you know, I was young and I came home, I got married, we had two children.

And at the time, climate change, environmental was not a consideration in our decision to start our family at all.

But I saw An Inconvenient Truth and thought, huh, things aren't great, but we've got about a hundred years, so we'll be fine.

We'll be all right.

We've got time.

Humanity is like, resilient and we'll, you know, I don't have to worry about that right now.

I have two very young children, very close together.

And then we were living in New Haven, Connecticut, and Hurricane Irene And then a year later, we were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and it was Superstorm Sandy.

And those two superstorms like mega storms back to back were an eye opener for me.

And I had these two, they were preschoolers at the time and I was like, I have to do something.

I had done nothing.

And I got involved in the climate movement and very actively engaged for a number of years, seven, I think, and was really, you know, working with mothers to push for clean energy policies, stop fossil fuel infrastructure and investment and left that career.

And I'm now working in the renewables industry, and I'm just really deeply committed to ensuring we live.

We leave a habitable planet for all future generations.

Carter, let's turn to you.

your white paper, states that the prevalent family planning model right now, it focuses on parental choice without consideration for the rights and well-being of prospective children and the community, and that this lacks a human rights perspective and contributes to unsustainable population growth.

Wow.

I would love if you could speak about that a little bit more.

Sure.

I mean, I think we think about legitimate political systems.

They normally we would just assume that they have to comply with some list of human rights, the right to speak freely, to hold elections, maybe rights based on gender or even rights to emigrate or immigrate.

But the reality is that the people who would that list of rights would refer to, they don't fall from the sky.

They are born and develop and ideally they have to be born and developed in certain ways that creates a group of people who can have human rights.

That means that the first rights are actually children's rights.

And so if you want to talk about legitimate political systems, you would have systems that first ensure every child their rights, things like the list of rights you see in the Children's Rights Convention.

And you couldn't do that if you didn't have family planning systems that were meant to ensure that you would just have children in conditions that violated their rights and then try to do the best you can what we do today.

So I think one thought about changing the way we planned families is to a more collective system where we are sharing resources and making decisions around what would be best for children.

That's really the core of it.

In order to have legitimate political systems, because what good is a list of human rights in a super heating world where people are dying by the tens of millions?

It's like we ignored the context and that's exactly what happened.

I'd love to turn to you as sort of our resident young person on the panel.

Can you tell us your thinking around having children or not having children and what the path was to your decision?

Yeah, I hope my mom listens to this.

I'm definitely going to send it to her because for I'd say probably more than a decade, I've been saying I'm not going to have kids.

And there have been many people in my life, family members, you know, other people that I meet that are older than me, that are like, Oh, you'll change your mind someday, or Oh, who's going to take care of you when you're older?

You know who's going to share the joy of life with you as you age?

I've kind of always thought that I didn't really want children or maybe one day might adopt one.

But ultimately, that's a decision that I want to make for myself and not feel obligated to.

And I think especially as I started to learn more about climate change and ecological disaster and about late stage capitalism I started to think more about that obligation that people like to put on me as a woman, I would love to turn to you.

You have a slightly different take on the possibility of having children.

You don't have them currently, right?

Only a four legged.

Okay.

I don't have any children right now.

We may, though.

We definitely are considering that.

Who's to know what's in the cards?

And my hope is in thinking about the impact of that decision is to raise more people that care about taking care of the planet and can adapt to the situations and can give people hope.

so I think if you're coming at it with a level of responsibility for the kind of person that you're going to bring into the world, I think that counts for something.

And that's kind of where our headspace is around that.

And I think that your perspective on that mirrors a lot of people, So, Neely, how has your perspective changed since 16 years ago or 18 years ago when you first had a child?

If you and I know it goes without saying that you would love them very much.

Is this a choice you would make now?

It's a tough question.

Yes.

Five years ago, when I was asked this question, my immediate answer was, no, I would not.

I would choose not to have children.

And it was largely due to just the gloom and doom I felt in that eco anxiety about, you know, making the conscious decision to bring a new life into this world that was rapidly collapsing.

And here we are, you know, five, six years later, and things are much worse and getting much worse.

And I would not be so quick to say no now, because I think there is hope.

I think I mean, there is hope.

There has to be hope.

Otherwise it just can't live under a rock, you know, I've talked to friends like children are joy and hope, like, why would we not want to continue that if we're not having kids?

We have no hope for the future.

Then what are we doing?

You know, so anyway, all of this is to say, As a parent, it does weigh heavily on my mind what my children will be inheriting.

And I do not know what I would do if I were in the position to make the decision today.

we're going to bring Robert on the line.

Robert from Fairport is with us.

Robert, welcome to Environmental Connections.

Are you there?

Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

At the beginning of the segment, you mentioned population growth and, you know, worries about this.

And it's ironic because just two weeks ago, The Wall Street Journal published a story about China's collapsing fertility rate, the current population in China.

And that's one of two countries in the world that have over a billion people is 1.4 billion people right now.

By the end of the century, they're predicting that the Chinese population will be 525 million people.

That's a decline of 875 million people.

It's like losing two and a half entire United States of America countries and that's happening right now.

So population decline is a much bigger issue than population growth.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much for that.

Carter, would you like to respond, Robert?

I mean, I think it depends what you value.

The Wall Street Journal would consider population decline a problem because those are cheap workers, hungry consumers, and a system where they can build factories and make a lot of money.

So if that's what you value, that's a problem.

But the United Nations intervened in family planning systems in order to reduce growth.

So the idea was that growth would arc and then come down to avoid catastrophic problems and things that other people would value, like nature, equity, community, happy children.

That's the world that the United Nations, because of human rights that we should deserve.

And yet the problem is not some absolute set of numbers, about 11 or eight or four.

The problem is that we are over atmospheric carrying capacities and other carrying capacities.

So we're in a catastrophic situation because we cross those thresholds even though we're going to come back down, it's too late.

The harm has been done.

And so I think the real question for Wall Street Journal is all the money you made on that growth by not paying and externalizing your costs, how do you plan to pay it to future generations not to exploit them, but to pay them back?

That's the real question for The Wall Street Journal.

David from Auburn is also on the line.

David, I believe you also have a question regarding population.

Thanks for calling into Environmental Yeah, I'm concerned.

The last figure I heard, I don't know, that includes decrease in China, but the increase in population of the planet is about 89 million persons a year.

89 million persons.

The best thing we could do is cut that to zero.

It's insane.

And how can you support that and expect them to have developed democratic governments and all this when you have an overpopulated world?

If we had 1 billion instead of 8 billion, nearly 8 billion people, it would be a lot easier to deal with the issues we are now dealing with.

Thank you for calling in and for that insightful comment.

Neely, understand it's a bit of a difficult, touchy subject, especially because people who have children often feel like they're being judged.

And I mean, how do you feel about that?

Do you feel like you're being judged by, you know, people like harder, people like who don't have children or is it something that you have peace with?

I have peace with it.

Do your friends who have kids?

I, I think so, yes.

But there was a time when I didn't.

And I also judged.

Right.

And really, I think I have just come away from we just have to be in humanity and in community with one another in compassionate, thoughtful ways, because we will only get through this together like we cannot be blaming, shaming, finger pointing, Like we have to drop that.

Yeah, for sure.

I'll turn to you.

Any final words for our listeners today?

Yeah, you know, in getting ready for this this chat today, I was thinking a lot about the kind of like climate doom I was feeling a few years ago especially and I still feel it some days now, but I've tried really hard to turn that anxiety into like action and ways of I mean, the whole thing I've been talking about today is, is building community and, being in community and just finding ways to to connect with people and with the earth in ways that we can respect and live in.

Reciprocity, I think is just something that I would encourage all people, even with children without children, to continue considering.

Yeah.

It's a big decision.

A lot to think about.

What do we owe future generations?

Well, that's not for me to decide for you.

It's for everyone to decide for themselves.

The questions are big ones, but I'm so glad that you're here to discuss them with us on Environmental Connections.