Who wants to have kids in a burning world? In a recent study of young people around the world, over a quarter said that climate change makes them not want to have children. It makes sense if we take seriously the predictions about climate change: staying on our current ‘business as usual’ path of fossil-fuel consumption will make the earth inhospitable. In a world where we can no longer count on clean air and water, healthy food, safety, the freedom to move or stay put, and the ability to enjoy nature, it feels all too frightening to raise a family.
Add to the prospect of a hostile planet the daily anxieties of economic instability, authoritarianism, racial injustice, the resurgence of Christian nationalism, polarization, AI, anti-queer policies, and patriarchy, and you have a terrifying combination that is often called the “polycrisis”. What does it take to have kids in apocalyptic times? In a nation that is more and more calling on women to reproduce (a phenomenon called “pronatalism”), while eliminating reproductive rights and structural support for working families, what are the politics of reproductive refusal?
In this conversation with Dr. Jade Sasser, an expert on climate change and reproductive justice, we explore why women of color in particular are worried about having kids. She discusses the role of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and geography in the decision to have kids in a climate-changed world. The punchline is that we should build a world where having kids is easier, yes, and a planet where children can grow up healthily, yes. But we should also ask, which kinship models are best for women, children, and the earth?
Shownotes
- Jade’s website: https://jadesasserphd.com/about/
- Jade’s book, Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question
- Britt Wray’s film, The Climate Baby Dilemma
- Britt Wray’s book, Generation Dread
- “When Climate Anxiety Leans Right” Panel with Drs. Ray and Sasser on Buffalo shootings, Roe overturned, and eco-fascism
- Dr. Sarah Jaquette Ray’s essays on “Unnaming Climate” and “The Weaponization of Youth Climate Anxiety”, which were both published after this recording, but relate to two major points in the conversation
- Michael Rothberg’s book, Implicated Subjects
- Resources for using Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s climate action Venn diagram
- More on Caroline Hickman’s “Internal Activism”
TRANSCRIPT:
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ANNCR: This is Climate Magic.
SASSER: If having children is important and meaningful to you, you absolutely cannot abdicate your role in responding to climate crisis.
RAY: Welcome to our show, where we explore the emotional life of climate politics. I'm your host, Dr. Sarah Ray, chair of the environmental studies department at Cal Poly Humboldt in Arcata, California.
Today I'm talking with Dr. Jade Sasser. Jade is a writer and educator whose work focuses on gender, climate justice, and reproductive politics. Her first book was the award winning On Infertile Ground Population Control and Women's Rights in the ERA of Climate Change. Her most recent book, Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question Deciding Whether to have Children and an Uncertain Future, examines the role of climate change on reproductive choices. She's an associate professor at the University of California, Riverside. In the show, Jade and I cover a lot of ground. I wish we could have talked for five more hours, but we dive into how climate anxiety shapes people's reproductive choices, and her research of about 2500 young people and their thoughts on climate change and reproduction.
Jade is a font of wisdom and expertise on these topics. Are you ready to learn more about climate change and reproductive anxiety? Let's dive in.
Welcome to the show, Jade.
SASSER: Oh. Thank you. Thank you for having me.
RAY: Can you just share a little bit about the journey that you took to caring about this question of reproductive anxiety and climate change, people not wanting to have kids because of climate change? What made you even want to study that or look at that?
SASSER: Yeah, so I do want to start just by saying it's not necessarily that people don't want to have kids because of climate change, it's just that climate change presents lots of new worries, concerns, anxieties and hesitations. So when I think about the people who I am interested in and talking to and have written about, many of them in fact do want to have kids.
It's just a question of can they do so well? You know, living in the midst of this climate crisis and the polycrisis more broadly. But to your question, how did I come to this subject? How did I get interested in it and start working on it? I've been interested in reproductive issues, reproductive politics, reproductive rights, and reproductive justice for a long time.
I was first, sort of wedded to the subject when I first started grad school in 2005. So 20 years ago. And at the time, I was thinking in a completely different vein. I was thinking about this subject that I wrote about in my first book were, which were about how people in the environmental space have really shaped thinking and the agenda on access to sexual and reproductive health and rights in a global context through old population control narratives. So I was most interested in that. And I thought that coming out of that first book, which was about politics and policy on a global scale, I thought I'd bring it down to size and start interviewing American climate activists on how they felt about having children, about pregnancy, about these big sort of narratives and dialogs and questions and how they landed in their own lives and bodies.
And then I had an interview with someone who was a researcher in this field, specifically the field of climate, emotions, and mental health. And she provided a completely different perspective on these reproductive questions that I had not considered before. So that sent me to delving as deeply as I could into interviews and online posts, and looking at a couple of the activist movements that were led by women climate activists, specifically, movements led by a British group called Birth Strike and a Canadian group called No Future, No Children.
And what I found there was that these were campaigns led by young women who were claiming publicly, we will not have children until our government leaders take effective action to address climate change. But what I found when I delved into their writings and later on when I interviewed the leaders of these movements, they very much wanted to have children, but they were driven by deep climate anxiety.
And that's when I knew that the climate anxiety approach was something that I really needed to explore a lot further.
RAY: I'm curious what the researcher you talked to made you think about climate and mental health in a new way. You mentioned you interviewed somebody and they kind of shifted your lens on it. Can you say more about that?
SASSER: I think it's because, and the person was Britt Wray, who has written a book on this subject, Generation Dread. And she also, was in a documentary called The Climate Baby Dilemma. She personalized it. She talked about her own experience of intense climate anxiety, to the point where her climate anxiety was disrupting her mental health. It was impeding her ability to function on a basic level every day. She found herself spontaneously crying in public on the subway or walking down the street. She would see children and be unhappy, about sort of what she imagined to be their future prospects when she had friends who would announce pregnancies, she would become deeply unhappy and worried and concerned for them because of what she assumed to be the life prospects of their future children.
And she came to a point where she and her partner were considering becoming parents themselves, and that set of decisions that they were discussing plunged her into such a deep sense of grief and sadness and stress and pain, that it inspired her to do this work, this research on climate, mental health. And it informed our conversation and a lot of the ways that I sort of thought about my project moving forward.
RAY: Great. I'm glad I asked further, because that's such a powerful story, and I'll be sure to link that film in the show notes, too. So you dove into this research question about climate anxiety, reproductive anxiety. You surveyed over 2500 young people. Yes. For your book. What did you find?
SASSER: Well, the things that were unsurprising and things that were very deeply surprising. The unsurprising thing was that we found widespread anxiety, worry, sadness, fear and concern. Those were the main pressing emotional responses that people in our survey reported experiencing at the same time, though, we were very clear in this survey, we wanted to look at the role of race.
We felt that people of color were underrepresented in the media accounts. The dominant narratives of who experiences climate anxiety, and for whom. These are questions that are also reproductive questions. So in that survey, we intentionally surveyed half of the people who responded, identified as white. When they reached a certain number, we stopped inviting them to participate, and we made sure that half of the people, who were surveyed, identified as people of color, and that group of people was roughly split between African-American or black participants and Latinx or Hispanic participants.
What was surprising to me was the statistically significant differences in how people of different racial backgrounds responded to particular questions. And what I mean by that is women of color were likelier than any other group to be actively planning to have fewer children than what they actually want because of their feelings about climate change.
Now, that does not mean that they were not concerned with other issues– economic issues, political issues, their own physical or mental health issues. Simply not feeling ready. All of those things, of course, play a significant role. Economic concerns are always the primary role in these surveys on whether and when people want to have kids. However, it became quite clear that above and beyond these other concerns, climate change alone, played a role in people's reproductive anxiety for no one more than women of color.
That was shocking to me. I was not expecting that result. And it it made me feel really, quite sad.
RAY: Yeah, yeah. And that's because the mainstream media is talking about this being something that's really only something white women are experiencing. Is that why it was so shocking?
SASSER: It was so shocking for that reason. The research really just wasn't there, which is why I wanted to do research of my own. I was seeing a number of polls and surveys coming out. None of them were specifically focusing on the role of race or focusing on people of color. The larger polls and surveys were actually undercounting or underrepresented people of color, particularly those that focused on climate, emotions and reproduction.
They were undercounting or underrepresented people of color. And honestly, I found that really irritating and frustrating. And I thought, oh, this is such a clear example of how the research landscape shapes our ideas and narratives about who cares about certain issues and who is impacted by them.
RAY: Yeah. And you say some can actually say some more about that because I think that's really important.
SASSER: Yeah. So first I do want to say there has not been a lot of academic research around the relationships between climate anxiety or distressing climate emotions and reproductive desires, plans and behaviors. We're still kind of at the beginning, of that body of research and almost all of the research that is out there is being done through these larger scale surveys.
So I read everything that I could, these surveys and they were all done in either Canada, the US or Europe. And in each instance, the numbers of people of color, the proportions of people of color were vanishingly small. And I, I thought, okay, I know how research is done. It can be hard to recruit people to participate. It can be determined by where you are recruiting people to participate. But who participates in research is largely driven by the concerns of the researcher, and it's built into the research design.
So if, for example, you are trying to do a large survey of people who care about environmental issues, are concerned about climate change, and perhaps have some reproductive anxieties about it, if you seek people to participate in that research or in those studies only from, let's say, the big five mainstream environmental organizations in the United States, which have long histories of being critiqued for being white led, white dominated, and not reflecting their desires, priorities, and concerns of communities of color. You're not going to get representative numbers of communities of color participating in your research. That's just, it's not going to happen.
RAY: Yeah. And and to me, what what your research drew out for me was if you take as a general survey, this is what 75% of Americans or young people think or feel about climate change without disaggregating for different identities or demographics, you're missing huge stories, and you can make generalizations about a whole group of people that, in fact, may be erasing or dismissive or even ignoring their existence. And so there's real life implications for not disaggregating.
SASSER: There are life implications for not disaggregating, but the only way to disaggregate and be able to tell representative stories is to actually build an awareness of the importance of race into the study design from the very beginning. And one of the things that I argue in the book is that researchers who have been addressing this topic have not been doing that.
RAY: I love it. I was going to ask you, how did your research show that race and gender shaped reproductive anxiety? You answered a little bit about that, but do you want to share a little bit more about what came out, what shook out from that tree?
SASSER: Another thing that I suppose was not surprising, but was quite stark, was that there was some polarization in terms of who reported certain kinds of emotions in response to climate change and in response to parenting in the midst of climate change. There was one group that singularly was, likely to respond that they were numb, checked out, or had no feelings at all. And that was white men. And on the other side, anyone who identified as a person of color was typically significantly more likely to indicate feeling traumatized, about their emotions, about climate change and parenting and children in the midst of climate change. The other thing that was surprising to me, although it probably should not have been, was that one group emerged as more likely than any other to express what we think of as, positivity, emotions, in response to climate change and specifically to being parents in the midst of climate change.
So those were emotions like, joy, happiness, determination, etc. and those were black women. But it wasn't all black women. It was black women who have a faith practice who are specific, aligned with a particular religious view or viewpoint and who practice their faith. And for those in this survey, that faith was Christianity. Now, that could be because even though we sampled people from every region in the country, most of their responses came from people living in the South. So that would be a Bible Belt states. But what was interesting about that is you might think that people in Bible Belt states would express less climate anxiety, and that wasn't the case at all. But it was the case that in the midst of also feeling deep climate anxiety, they also felt this sense of positivity or joy in determining about raising children in the midst of this crisis.
And when I really think about it and really study the literature on the history of existential crises, racial violence, the history of motherhood and parenting for black women in the United States, it actually isn't so much of a surprise to me. The church has always been a space of refuge, resilience, protection, and a space where black women and black communities have come together to figure out how we're going to survive and thrive, even in the midst of deep existential threats that have always been.
RAY: Which leads me to a sort of another question, which is how much do you feel climate change is uniquely a source of this anxiety, or is it layering on to others? Or how are these respondents, especially the communities of color who responded, saying that climate change relates to these other stressors, economic, you mentioned in particular, but certainly racial and others.
SASSER: Well, I think this is where it's more helpful for me to get into the interviews that I did do. So I didn't do 2500 interviews, but I did do dozens of interviews and what I found there was that climate change very much layers onto preexisting, concerns that young people of color in their reproductive years have. As I said a few moments ago, economic and financial concerns are always the number one concerns that people in their reproductive years express around whether to have children, when to have children and under what conditions.
And that was absolutely the case for people of color. But their concerns about economic stressors were really dark and intense. They were saying things like, we don't know whether we will have stable careers in the future. We don't know whether we will ever be able to afford to purchase homes. We feel like the path, the linear path of completing higher education, getting a good job, purchasing a home then starting a family.
We feel that that path is not available to us in the ways that it has been available to previous generations, even though we are still being told to pursue it anyway. So there was quite a bit of, sort of cognitive dissonance between what the messages that young people are getting about what they should be striving toward, especially at universities.
And what they feel is actually available to them post graduation. But back to your question. In terms of, does climate change sort of layer on top of other preexisting concerns? Yes. Concerns about everyday racism, racial violence, deep political and social polarization. When I did the interviews for this book before the election in 2024, and at that time, I would say that the polarization was not quite as intensely stark as it is right now, but it was still quite stark.
And many of the people I interviewed were really concerned about whether social justice, racial justice, and other aspects of their identity, and how they live in the world, whether it would get better or worse in the future. And most of them did not believe it would get better. Many of the people I identified, if they weren't queer themselves, they had queer or trans family members and close friends.
They were worried about, raising queer children in the United States in the future. Given that we seem to be rapidly moving backward on queer and trans rights and policies, they were worried about ongoing racial violence and racial disenfranchisement. And that was before November of 2024, certainly before what we are experiencing now. So climate change was a compounding stressor then.
If I were to do those interviews today, I think it would be even more so. But the other stressors would also really be top of mind too.
RAY: Thanks. This leads me to another question, which is sort of similar along these veins. How much is climate change playing a role in this? In the past, environmentalists have thought that not reproducing is a really important environmental action to take. Can you share a little bit about why reproductive refusal in the context of climate anxiety is perhaps a different thing than then, or what do they have in common and where it's different?
SASSER: Well, I think that the basic narrative within environmental studies and ecological studies and sort of how, how population has been talked about for a very long time with respect to environmental issues, is that human population growth is bad for environmental sustainability and that the growth of human numbers outstrips the Earth's ability to provide the resources that we need to survive, that we overconsume, and that there is sort of a direct linear relationship between the two, which in fact, researchers of population and population and environment have been demonstrating for many years that that is, in fact not the case.
What has shifted, though, and I found this quite surprising, is that many Gen Zers and young millennials have shifted the ways that they think about that relationship between human numbers and the environment. So a lot of the concerns now about human beings having children, the environment, etc. are more so. How will this planet and the environment that I raise them in, how will it harm my children, rather than how will my children cause harm simply by existing and consuming resources?
RAY: That's such an important distinction. It's radically different. Yeah.
SASSER: It's quite different. I myself am surprised by the things I'm hearing young people say, because I for so long was deeply steeped in the other narrative. And it's, I think I can say clearly it's a generational shift. But at the same time, I do want to say that those broader concerns about toxic exposures to chemicals, for example, or being vulnerable to disasters, those are also quite top of mind for many young people.
It doesn't help that here in Southern California, we had two major fires just 70 miles away from where I am now from Riverside. And those fires wiped entire communities off the map. In Los Angeles, thousands, thousands of homes and other structures were burned to the ground. And so many of my students and people I know know people who lost their homes, I myself know at least a dozen people, who do not have their homes anymore, because of the Eaton and Palisades fires.
And I think if we look at other regions of the country, if we look at Northern California, if we look at the South, if we look at, Florida, if we look at North Carolina, even if we look at Detroit, Michigan, which you don't think of necessarily as a region that is heavily impacted by climate change, but they experienced smoke drift from Canadian wildfires, within the past couple of years. That was so toxic that it really shaped daily life and daily exposure for a period of time. There is no region of the country that is not experiencing climate impact. And I would argue that there is no region of the country in which people are not having emotional responses to what they're experiencing, even if they don't label them climate emotions or mental health responses.
So I think we need ways of really responding to what is going on and with what people are experiencing, even if those folks reject the labels that we apply.
RAY: Yeah, I'd love to dive down this hole a little bit with you because we've had a few chats in the past about this, and I'm really chewing on these thoughts myself. You know, I had a guest on the show a while back who said, you know, really all of these worries about what's happening in the environment, the strategies that we need to respond to them, you could arguably say they have nothing to do with climate change. I mean, you don't even have to use the word climate change in thinking about it. And given where we are politically about climate change, maybe there's some utility in putting climate change as a frame to the side, not rejecting the reality of it, but putting it as a frame for working together, for having imperfect solidarities, for getting things done politically, and even maybe even mental health as a frame, you know.
So both sort of both those prongs. You know, I know you're having some experience with this in your own life, in activism around pollution near you. And I know that we've talked about how farmers and really red places are experiencing climate distress. It's evident, there's articles out on it. There's really great research on this, but maybe the language is different and maybe some possibility here about rethinking the language and the frames for getting more cross. You know, a cross political bipartisan movement happening because I think they're pretty, I think right now people who care about the climate are feeling pretty despairing about that. Can you speak to this?
SASSER: I feel despairing about it. I want to be able to talk about climate change. I don't want to feel that I can't use those words in order to get a message across. But I'm also very realistic, and I'm also in the classroom. I have two classes where, this quarter I am teaching and talking to students about climate change.
One is just the senior research methods class, but students are doing their final project, Ethnographic Project on Climate Change. And when I say ethnographic, I mean they're doing participant observation in communities, that they are members of or where they, you know, interact with these communities on a regular basis. And they are also interviewing people, and they are each taking climate change as kind of the central or focal point of their ethnography.
And one of the things that I'm finding when we go around and do updates every week, tracking and checking in on how it's going, what they're finding, what they're hearing, how people are responding to them. It is not uncommon among my students in 2025, to be talking to people who are saying, I'm not sure climate change is happening.
I don't know if all of these really hot days that I'm worried about are the result of climate change. I don't know if that wildfire that displaced members of my community was driven by climate change or was just a fire, and there have been many fires in the past, and there will be fires in the future. So the thing is, we can be shocked by that questioning of the basic science.
Or we can simply say, okay, but what are people saying about their response? This to heatwaves and wildfires and hurricanes and displacement. And what they are seeing is that they are deeply distressed about it. And so I have had to have these conversations with my students who sort of went into their project thinking, this is all about climate change.
And if I meet with resistance, to that phrasing, I just need to educate people about why it is climate change. And we've really had to have conversations about how sometimes we have to simply meet people where they are and the experience of climate impact is not determined by the words that we use to make sense of what is causing the experience. Because we are still having the experience. And the question is, what will we do about that to resource people, and to help people, ourselves included, navigate these really challenging emotional responses that we're having and in some places, mental health outcomes.
The other class that I am teaching right now is explicitly focused on intersectionality, which is the relationships between race, gender, class and other aspects of identity with experiences in the world. So the relationship between those two aspects of identity and emotions and mental health responses to climate change.
RAY: Your sweet spot.
SASSER: Like exactly. I have to say, I'm quite happy about teaching this class. And the thing about it is that everyone in that class is there because they accept that climate change is real and it's happening and is having these kinds of impacts on people. But we're having really interesting conversations around whether it matters or not at all, that anyone identifying their experience as an experience with climate change, and specifically one of the things that sparked some of this conversation is the documentary film Katrina Babies. It's so important because from what I have seen to date, it is the only full length documentary. It's an hour and 20 minutes long that is entirely about intersectionality and climate emotion, and it is done by a filmmaker who was displaced from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and noticed his own lingering emotional reaction was turning into, disordered mental health reactions because he had never, ever practiced or spoken to anyone about what he experienced during that storm as a child.
So as an adult and a filmmaker, he decided to interview other people who were children during that storm about their experiences. Not just during the storm, but their experiences over time since the storm. So he begins the interviews ten years out after Katrina, and for the vast majority, if not all, of the people he interviews in this film, they have never talked about their emotions.
In response to that storm, most of them were displaced. Most had to evacuate to other cities. Most have since returned to New Orleans, although not all. Some remained in their homes with their families. Many of them thought they were going to die, and the emotions were as raw and as fresh ten years later, as if those folks who were interviewed in that film were reliving something that had happened yesterday or last week.
And they're all young adults, but their experiences as children that they were never able to process or gain any kind of resources or support around, are very much lingering in their lives. What was also interesting, I found, was that he interviewed a number of adults, specifically parents of children, who had gone through this storm, and in several cases, the parents felt that they had checked in with their children and that their children were just fine, or that their children had not experienced any impacts at all, and that they just came through it and relocated to a new city and got into sport and, didn't have any moving on.
And I think it's clear, though, from the film that their parents didn't have the resources or the language to process their own emotions, much less create space for children to do so. And so the film is also very much about race and class and how black communities in New Orleans were disenfranchised and experiencing climate injustice in so many ways, and how that also directly connects to the experience of climate, emotions and mental health.
Anyway, I can't recommend that film enough. It has sparked lingering conversations in that class, a number of students wanted to write papers and op-eds about that film. They connected it to their own experiences with their own families. Even though we're in Southern California, they really resonated with it. So I recommend it highly, especially if you want to have conversations about climate justice and climate emotion.
RAY: Yeah. And that raises this question, that sort of circling back, it suggests the importance of continuing to bring the frame of climate change into the conversation, because it's another kind of trauma. The word that's sort of hovering behind everything you've just said is trauma. And I know you know it. But this kind of like, adverse childhood experiences, climate is kind of a new concept for that research.
And, and certainly around fire, hurricanes, displacement, all the things you described, but also maybe less discussed and maybe more in the environmental justice camp, the kind of exposures to pollution in general that are more structural or infrastructural, that you that is also been discussed so much in the environmental justice world, but climate stuff maybe adds into this element a little bit more about these big spectacular events that could happen to a community like Katrina.
SASSER: Absolutely. The film also really makes it plain who can evacuate, who can leave a space, leave their home, have somewhere else to go, one of the things that I appreciate so much about the film is how it connects all of those aspects of experience to climate emotional outcomes. So for example, just one person whose story was told in the film is the filmmaker's aunt who relocates, I believe, to, Houston, Texas.
And it is so stark. In just one scene in the film, she talks about how, after evacuating and relocating with her family for many weeks, she just stopped combing her hair because she was so depressed about the experience of upheaval and disruption from that storm. And small things like that. It's not small, but that kind of everyday life functioning being disrupted because of the impact of climate change.
These are the kinds of things that we really, really need to think about how communities can be resourced, to grapple with, the emotional upheaval, the impacts to mental health and to be supported. In culturally competent ways that don't make people feel unwanted and marginalized, even in the mental health space, which another story? We don't have time for that one.
RAY: Well, I mean, even just the language around mental health and climate themselves are already so kind of rarefied, both each on their own. So in some ways, the story you just told about climate as a frame is the same story about mental health as a kind of model through which different types of communities have better access to support than others. And, you know, the stories are actually quite similar. Parallel, I should say.
SASSER: Yes. You're absolutely right. I do want to say, though, that in that film and in my interviews, people are talking about being depressed. People are using the language of anxiety and trauma. People are talking about feeling emotionally overwhelmed and unable to cope. And so even if we don't respond by using the words mental health or using a mental health framework, people's recounting of their own experiences is in line with the kinds of conversations that we have in the mental health, or a mental health adjacent community. So perhaps there are ways to sort of meet people where they are without using what they might perceive as stigmatizing language.
RAY: Yeah. And yeah. So that's the beautiful way of bringing the problem with the frame of climate and the problem with the mental health frame together from a racial justice lens. So yeah. Thank you. You can kind of circle back to the kid question part. That I mean that's there too, right? Who wants to be raising children when you're under the circumstances that you just discussed? And even the name of “Katrina Babies” suggests that there is a real potency, the power of thinking about climate change and futurity in general. You know, what's the future going to be like through the lens of intergenerations or legacy?
Or, you know, what might there is a little bit of in your book. You talk about this too, but part of the demographic crisis that people talk about in contemporary politics comes a lot from this kind of heteronormative, nationalistic history that you describe in your book. Both of your books actually, which we know is not new. But how might like you mentioned a little bit to earlier queer communities, maybe indigenous communities, communities where disability justice is really a priority.
These lenses may offer perhaps more environmentally sustainable models of thinking about kinship and relationship and family. I'm curious if you could unpack that a little bit, because I think a lot of the sense of crisis that we hear in the voices of folks like JD Vance, who talks about the fear of childless cat ladies not having any stake in the future of the country, the sort of heteronormative, pronatalist, white supremacist, you know, you can sort of keep naming these things, that gets in the way of the grandness of the country. Whether or not some of these other communities might be able to nuance that a little bit from your research.
SASSER: So one of the things that I argue is that part of the problem with how we think about these issues, and part of the problem with how people experience increased reproductive anxiety is that our model of family in this country is so heteronormative and so nuclear, family focused. First and foremost, it isolates parents and it disrupts them from so many potential networks of care that in previous generations were not only stronger and more present, but they were actually expected.
So one of the things that I think a lot of communities of color are still very aware of is that in order to raise children with a sense of resilience and not just for kids, but for parents, you need multi-generational family support.
RAY: Especially if you can't count on the state to help you out because it's structurally designed to prevent you from accessing those resources.
So yeah, if you're just joining us, I'm Sarah Ray. This is climate magic. We're talking to Dr. Jade Sasser about her book on climate change and reproductive anxiety.
So getting sort of to this question of current political moment. I sort of hinted at it earlier, but, you know, how is climate anxiety, reproductive anxiety in particular, shaping the kind of misogyny turn we're seeing, the kind of pronatalism we're seeing? Do you think there's something new that we should be paying attention to here, or is this just, performance theater that we should, that's distracting us from something more important? We've got Musk campaigning to have as many babies as he possibly can, thinking that this is going to save us, right? And of course, the freak out about childless cat ladies not having a stake in the future. Yeah. How is this playing out in our culture wars?
SASSER: I don't actually think that Vance was concerned about whether so-called childless cat ladies have a stake in the future. He was making an argument that they don't and that they should be politically disenfranchised. Absolutely. And potentially, I can say from personal experience that there are certain politicians who feel even that my work in this book is dangerous and should not be out there.
So excerpts from the book were published in a major newspaper, and there was backlash from a pronationalist politician who said that just by doing this research alone that I was encouraging young people to not have children, when in fact we need strong, robust families moving into the future. So I think that it is a performance of care about families. I don't believe that that care is actually there.
We tend to think of population control as efforts to slow, reduce, and surveil the growth and movement of populations. But efforts to make populations grow are also a component of population control. And I would argue that the repeal of Roe vs. Wade and the institution of Dobbs as the law of the land on reproduction is part and parcel of that.
RAY: Absolutely. I love how you just wove all that together. It's so impactful because, I mean, the irony here is, of course, that these are people in charge who are absolutely climate deniers, absolutely defunding any climate work. They're canceling climate as fast as are canceling DEI (diversity equity inclusion) initiatives right, left and center. And they're doing it on the grounds that the research itself is causing young people to have so much climate anxiety that they don't want to have children, for example.
I can cite that in the show notes. If that sounds crazy to listeners, I will tell you it's out there. So, you know, the irony of all of that in this particular, you know, that they would sidestep climate as a reason for some of their policies when it seems so obvious that climate anxiety is actually driving many of their policies. Would you go that far?
SASSER: I would go that far as to say that climate anxiety is driving some of their policies. I don't think they would ever admit it or no use or take seriously that term, which is another thing. I mean, when that sort of backlash came about to the excerpts of my work that were published and the backlash, never, ever engaged at all with the climate anxiety argument. The backlash completely sidestepped that and delved into these reproductive and demographic anxieties. But the only way that you can do that, and focus solely on demographic anxiety is to pretend that climate anxiety isn't there or isn't a component of what is causing potentially demographic changes. And if you don't take climate anxiety or climate emotions, climate distress seriously, then I think you cannot and will not understand potential long term demographic shifts that might come about in the future.
I'm using this careful language “potential” and “might come about” because we don't know what will actually happen in terms of young people's reproductive decision making in response to climate change. Many of the young people who are most climate distressed and reproductively anxious are in generation Z. But most people in this country have their first child on average, at around age 27. So we won't know what actual decisions these Gen Zers are making in terms of reproduction until we move through around the next, let's say ten years or so and see what they've actually done. So there are still a lot of questions to be answered, but it is quite clear from what Gen Zers are saying, how they're responding to surveys, what they're saying in interviews, which is that these questions of can I and should I have children?
And for those who want children, can I and should I have the family that I actually desire in the midst of this climate crisis and this broader policy crisis? And for many, that answer is increasingly no.
RAY: Yeah. I mean, you know, I do find it sad. I also know that the folks who we're talking about here also find it sad, but they find it sad for these cynical, pronatalist reasons that you just described. Yeah. You write in your book, “as a black woman, I see hope for the future as a tricky thing.” It's a it's a little bit of the, you know, it's easy to intellectualize your answer, but you can go wherever you want with it.
SASSER: Honestly, I have no intellectual response to that. Hope for the future– I find it laughable in many instances. However, I asked my grandmother about that. My grandmother is 97 years old. She was born in 1927. I said to her “grandma, when you were having children in the 40s, the infrastructure of racial injustice was quite formal, still in this country. Why did you want to have children? Did you worry about what they would experience in the future? Did you talk to other people about whether having children was something to look forward to or not, and why?”
And she said, for black people in America, the prospect of having children is always predicated on the hope that they will have it better than we did. And so it's not based on a realistic, pragmatic sense of where things are right now, today, which is always challenging, for people of color in various marginalized communities.
But it is a sense of real, deep belief in the prospect that the future is a desirable, better place to live into, and that there is something very hopeful about bringing in children into this world so that they can live into that. And I have to take that seriously. I have to and taking that seriously helps me understand the perspectives of those who I interviewed for the book who, despite all of their deep-seated climate fears, were deeply uncertain about whether they would have children. Again, not because they don't want to have them.
So I just want to make it clear that even a sense of not feeling a lot of hope, or feeling a lot of distress and fear and anxiety is not always a barrier, for people around these questions of reproduction, because of this desire to feel hopeful and to believe that something better will be there for children,
RAY: I really well, your grandmother said right there just really struck a chord with me, too, about how it no evidence of how bad things are right now can bear on the possibility that the future could be different, and that somehow planting the seed of having a child into that future can be not. It doesn't have to be, it is not the only way by any means. But that idea of, of faith despite reality, is available to any of us parents to draw on, you know.
SASSER: Yes. But. Okay. Yes, but, or perhaps I should say yes, and, the other part of what she said, though, was that black people or African-Americans in this country have never been able to rest on the assumption that someone else would bring about that better future. And so that is where involvement in resistance to racial injustice, coming together with community members, organizing or just kind of fighting and resisting on a smaller scale has always been absolutely imperative. One of the things that I argue in my book, and I just want to make it clear, in case anyone is listening to this conversation and thinking that I advocate against having children, I absolutely do not advocate against having children.
RAY: Or for. That’s not the point.
SASSER: It's not, it really is not. But one of the things that I do argue is that if having children is important and meaningful to you at this time, you absolutely cannot abdicate your role in responding to climate crisis. And what I mean by that is having a child or children raises the stakes for parents in particular, in response to a climate future and having a stake in the fight, having a large stake, a small stake, a broad stake, whatever that stake may be, it becomes very clear that that in part, is going to be a requirement for parents who don't want to be stuck in the quagmire of reproductive anxiety.
RAY: Yeah, that's a reminder to me. And I also love what you just said, because it makes me think about how there's, almost a strange, I don't know, hope there's maybe not the right word, but what you just described about not being able to rely on some, you know, part of the reason why hope is such a funny term is because of this implication of the term that we would expect somebody else to make it work, like I have hope, so I can deflect responsibility to some, you know, benevolent savior coming to fix this, or some great politicians or people in power.
And this kind of goes back to your students talking about, some students are like this, right? Like there's so much desire to blame the structures and the adults in the room, which is legitimate, but it also can have the effect of deflecting their own responsibility or just disavowing responsibility entirely because it's too complicated to figure out how to fix the problem as an individual.
But this idea that if you are going to participate in, you know, multi-generational kin-building in whatever biological or not forms that you can imagine, and the fact of the matter is that we are in those relationships, whether we want to or choose to or not, right? That we are implicated. Right? “Implicated subjects” as I think Michael Rosenberg talks about in his book by the same name, and I'll put it in the show notes. But, yeah, there's this kind of we're implicated in relationships. And, you know, the question of whether to have children or not is just another level of that. But, you know, not abdicating implicating, as I find that actually a quite a beautiful, hopeful argument, right. Like, no, it's not just that the people in power are going to fix this for us. So yeah, let's let's not wait around. Yeah. Let's get to work. I love it.
SASSER: Especially when in a moment like this, the people in power, or at least at the federal level, aren't anti climate and anti progress on climate. Right. And especially…
RAY: Anti-parent I would say.
SASSER: While also promoting pronatalism I mean.
RAY: So it's a classic Orwellian topsy turvy discourse happening. But I suppose that’s some of what we're in. So yeah yeah yeah absolutely.
SASSER: So then that then raises the question of okay so what are the possibilities? What are the opportunities in a moment like this, we know what the distressing factors are. We know what the opportunities are to buckle and to put our heads down and say, we can't do this. But what what are the ways in which we can actually dig in and come together with others in unexpected ways?
We did an exercise in class yesterday, that was created by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson. And, it's basically a Venn diagram of the kinds of climate action that you can take when you focus on what you're good at and what brings you joy. And it was an interesting exercise in class, because we've spent a number of weeks really delving deeply into the more challenging emotional responses to climate change.
And then I sort of almost abruptly said, okay, how do we not get stuck in a quagmire of heaviness and focus on distress? How do we start to begin to build some personal resilience, some “internal activism”, as Caroline Hickman calls it? And think about what we already possess in terms of our own skills, resources and things that activate and energize us around joy.
So we did this activity, and the students were quite surprised at the things that they came up with that they had previously thought had no relationship whatsoever to any potential climate action. So, for example, one student, she said that what she's good at and that what makes her happy or brings her joy is all fashion related. She's good at putting together different looks. What brings you joy is shopping.
And she said, I don't think it has anything to do with any kind of potential climate action. I said, well, what about doing thrift flips or thrift swaps where you and your friends get together and shop each other's closets? You bring your clothing that you no longer want. And you shop each other's clothes and you have maybe a fashion show or whatever, but you also have a dialog and discussion about thrifting, and these kinds of really small actions that can get conversations going where they haven't been before, but also that can build on the skills and the talents and just the opportunities for happiness together in community with others. They came out of that class so energized, so energized, and I actually came out of it and said, I need to do this exercise for myself.
RAY: It's funny you should bring up that Venn diagram because it comes up in almost every one of my interviews, and I think of the overlay of those three circles as what brings you joy, what your skills and interests are, and what does the world need from us? Those are the three categories of these circles. I always thought that that overlay of where those circles meet was called climate magic. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson calls it your climate action spot.
SASSER: Yeah.
RAY: I'm always teaching it as the climate magic, which is where I got the idea for. So it's full circle. It's good of you for just naturally coming to that because we definitely can start to wind down here. I would just have one last question for you, which is what's next for you?
SASSER: What's next for me is actually my next book. I'm already working on it. It's called The Climate of Motherhood
RAY: It’s such a good title. Oh my gosh, I love it.
SASSER: It hones in on the various ways that climate change is actually really remaking the experience of motherhood. It is shaping the ability to get pregnant. It is shaping maternal mental health, but it is also providing opportunities for community members, politicians, policymakers, etc. to engage in new ways around advocacy and support for pregnant people and mothers. So I'm really excited about this book. It's not going to be out anytime soon. I'm still in the initial research stages, but I'm really, really, really excited about writing it, so that's what's next.
RAY: Thank you so much for surfacing all of these complex relationships between climate parenting, the question of having children, thinking about the future, how these things emerge differently based on identity, our current political moment, the fires in LA. We covered it. Thank you. I mean, it's so fun to talk to you.
SASSER: Here, too. As always, thank you so much for having me. I really enjoyed it.
ANNCR: You've been listening to Dr. Jade Sasser on Climate Magic with Sarah Ray. To see the show notes for this episode, or hear other episodes of Climate Magic, visit KHSU.org.
Produced at Cal Poly Humboldt.
