Paper short abstract:

This paper, which is based on age-specific focus groups discussions, explores how people of different ages (17–90) discuss and justify their moral and social stance concerning procreation in relation to their knowledge about climate change and overpopulation.

Paper long abstract:

In 2017, researchers Seth Wynes and Kimberly A. Nicholas published an article where they claimed that the most high-impact lifestyle change individuals in developed countries can do to reduce greenhouse emission is to have one fewer child. Since publication, the article has been downloaded more than 600,000 times and shared all over the world, through tweets and newspaper articles. The topic is apparently engaging, but does climate awareness and such recommendations have any impact on how individuals reason around reproduction?

In this paper, which is based on age-specific focus group discussions conducted in Sweden, we explore how people of different ages (17–90) discuss and justify their stance concerning procreation in relation to their knowledge about climate change and overpopulation. Our findings show that awareness of climate issues was high among the participants, and most of them had some level of climate anxiety. Still, the climate crisis did not have a major impact on their reproductive decision-making. Instead, the wish to have children (or not), impacted by social expectations on gender, reproduction and parenthood, was guiding their decisions. The participants found new ways to negotiate around and justify their wish (or not) to reproduce, based partly on misinformation and a Global North-perspective but also feelings of bad conscience and resignation. We will discuss these negotiations and dilemmas further when presenting our paper.

Paper short abstract:

We explore (re)imaginings of reproduction and kinship in relation to climate change. We analyse interviews and textual materials regarding people's reconsiderations about having and raising children in the Anthropocene from Global North organisations such as BirthStrike.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we explore (re)imaginings of reproduction and kinship in relation to climate change. Here, reproduction is centred as both an imaginative act, and one contingent upon particular future imaginaries. This paper draws upon analysis of interviews and textual materials from particular organisations and forums in the Global North such as BirthStrike, Conceivable Future and No Future No Children which gather pledges, declarations and testimonials asserting people's reproductive intentions as statements of concern about climate crisis. Out of this material, urgency, precarity and windows of time - from 'biological clocks' to the time left to save the planet - emerge to generate new reproductive imaginaries. What happens to reproduction when the horizon of a liveable future is seen to be so radically destabilised? How do people imagine family life and their children's futures in relation to their expectations of what climate change will mean? How do these imaginings express concern about future life in the Anthropocene? Participants share a bedrock of common concerns - existential anxiety around an uninhabitable earth, species extinctions, water and food shortages, societal upheaval, conflict and forced migration. However, from these shared worries, a wide range of different responses and reconsiderations appear; from re-thinking the very local decision of whether to have children, through to organising politically and socially to enable more liveable futures. A shared concern for reproduction thus generates new and diverse visions: of the roots of the crisis, its solutions, and what agency and practise might mean in this imagined future.

Paper short abstract:

The climate crisis and COVID-19 pose threats to life (and lifestyles) globally. A just post-COVID world, will require a collective critical unpacking of discourse around these crises that situates certain people in certain places (like India) as problematic because of fears of ‘overpopulation.'

Paper long abstract:

In collectively dealing with COVID -19 and its concomitant climate change, we are seeing increasing conversations in non-scientific spaces about human consumption patterns, extractive economic structures, illnesses, and the environment. As we live through this new challenge to human life (and lifestyles), scholars of South-Asia have a twofold challenge. The first is to identify the places and structures that may have led us to this point while paying particular attention to Asia (and its histories). Second, is to work towards a future that is not replicating these problems and looking for solutions to enable a sustainable life for all. In the recent past, often the spectre of population-control has reared its head, in all its various avatars from ‘family planning,’ ‘empowering women,’ to ‘contraceptive rights.’ Today, in light of COVID-19, conversations on over-population emerge as rhetoric around ‘population-density,’ ‘nation of 1.3 billion,’ ‘largest lockdown in the world,’ ‘migrant crisis,’ etc. This discourse first casts population as the problem causing virus spread, illnesses, environmental degradation, food shortages, and overall scarcity; and in the second instance as the site for ‘management’ to ensure better future(s). With a focus on India, I outline the problematics of populationism and the dangers of locating population as the site for managing the environmental crisis or COVID-19. Aiming for a nuanced reading of the contemporary, this presentation makes suggestions for future-making work that reconfigures if, how, and when we can talk about population in light of climate change and COVID-19 in and from India/South Asia.

Paper short abstract:

The forest began to rapidly disappear when every male of working age left the village to fight in the war fronts during the socialist regime in Ethiopia. The disappearance of males by forced recruitment disrupted the Oromo’s preference for sons and the sex ratio as well as landscape in Arsi.

Paper long abstract:

The forest began to disappear when every male of working age left the village to fight in the war fronts during the socialist regime in Ethiopia from 1974 to 1991. To avoid mandatory conscription, the Oromo people in Arsi hid their sons, sent them to distant areas, or raised them as daughters to save their lives. Because of the separation of couples by war and political economic insecurity, marital fertility declined. Long spacing between children of Arsi Oromo usually suggested prolonged absence of fathers during the civil war. Despite the deep-rooted gender inequality and patriarchal kinship system, compulsory conscription changed the reproductive choices of Arsi Oromo. They began to prefer daughters instead of sons. The disappearance of males by forced recruitment to the socialist army disrupted the Oromo’s preference for sons and the sex ratio of a generation. The forest that once sheltered the sons of the Oromo people is no more. At the peak of forced recruitment, there were no male adults left who could farm their land in the village. Those remaining began to cut trees to make charcoal to eke out their scanty existence. The velocity of deforestation accelerated with the return of soldiers who became landless peasants set fire to the forest to claim land for cultivation. Socialist revolution left indelible scars on the bodies, families, geographies, and imagination of the community for Arsi Oromo. The haunted landscape of deforestation in Arsi is a constant reminder of the loss of sons among the Oromo in Ethiopia.