But this specific question, which seems so important to me, hadn’t been massively discussed, and I thought, “I really need to figure this out.” There’s a lot about intergenerational justice generally. There was surprisingly little that was written about the direct question of what, as parents, we should be doing about climate change because we owe it to our own children. But then when I had my first daughter, I just couldn’t stop making the link between all these new responsibilities that I had to her and the state of the world for the next generation. I’ve written and thought about climate justice since I started my academic career. Is this a space where your academic interest and your private life as a parent sort of converge? And it seemed to matter to me in a whole new way, and I felt it was really important for me as a philosopher, but also as a person to try and figure out what it actually meant to be a parent at the moment. I’d already known how important climate justice was and then suddenly it was my own children whose future was at stake. Having them was what inspired me to write the book and made me think about climate change and these other emergencies in a new way. You can listen to the whole thing on the Gray Area podcast. The book walks the reader through the real-life choices we’re all facing, whether we have kids or not, and it explores what it means to be a climate activist in a world that forces us to make complicated - and sometimes contradictory - choices.Įxcerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity, follow. In her new book, Cripps makes what might seem like a strange turn to parenting, but it’s not strange at all, because it’s about the responsibilities we have as parents and citizens to build a sustainable future.
She’s a professor of political theory at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, and she’s the author of a new book called Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher’s Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids - and Everyone Else.Ĭripps writes about issues like climate change and the ethics of collective responsibility, and her work has always emphasized the real possibilities for political reform. I spoke with Elizabeth Cripps for The Gray Area (full episode below). You also have to decide, in a very concrete way, what you really value and whether or not you’re willing to live in accordance with those values. You have to wonder not just about the ethics of raising children in an unstable world. But if you’re a parent - as I am - the climate predicament takes on an additional dimension. There isn’t an easy answer here, in part because the problem is too big for any one of us to solve. The question a lot of us have asked ourselves at various points is: What is my responsibility in this situation? What can I, as an individual, do? And if you live in the northeast United States, you’ve probably noticed the smoke blanket looming over you in recent weeks thanks to wildfires in Canada. In fact, the average temperature was as hot as it’s ever been, or at least as hot as we’ve ever recorded it to be, several days already this month. I also know I can’t ignore it, because it’s real and it’s getting more urgent. It’s one of those problems that starts to overwhelm me when I consider the scale and the implications and all the barriers to tackling it. At the top of that list is climate change.
There are a handful of topics that I almost force myself to not think about because the thoughts lead to a dead end.
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