Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores how care practices of climate-concerned individuals reshape the future by developing alternative forms of parenting. The child figure is not only a symbol used by environmental movements, but it materializes into new ways to parent and disrupts the nuclear family.

Paper Abstract:

Eco-reproductive anxieties have been emerging during these past years and have marked the appearance of environmental crises in reproductive decisions and imaginaries of care. As people refuse to give birth to protect non-humans and parents create new imaginaries of “desirable parenthood”, care is reshaped by environmental futures.

Shifting this focus, this paper explores how practices of care may, in turn, transform the future. It is based on an ethnography conducted in a rural area in France where many climate-concerned individuals move to build alternative lifestyles based on community living, food autonomy, and sustainability. Some migrate especially to raise children in what they imagine are “good conditions” and to live their parenthood peacefully despite their concerns about environmental and social collapse. It usually goes with particular attention to care, education and transmission.

To capture the close relationship between care and future making, this paper asks to what extent my interlocutors’ parenting highlights the emergence of new forms of care and how they participate in shaping new futures. It argues that the child figure – and care for future generations more generally – produces not only symbolic figures instrumentalized by discourses on the environmental crises but also materializes new ways to parent. In a simultaneous movement, these parenting practices disrupt the nuclear family. While these practices may reinforce a gendered division of care, they also breach the nuclear family by opening its entrenched borders.