The Children of Man Made Climate Change
"But how can you sanction bringing a little girl... a child full of hope and naive belief into a world... when that little girl grows
to be a young woman and looks you
in the eyes and says, ‘You knew all
along, didn’t you?’ What do you say
then?" These are the haunting words of Philip Ettinger's character Michael in Paul Schrader's unforgettable film First Reformed. The entire film, this scene, in particular, has stuck with me since I first viewed it in 2018. Climate Change wasn't a regular thought in my mind until 2015 - the year I graduated high school. I was eighteen years old entering community college with a good feeling about the future, being somewhat confident in our political institutions, and believing everything would work out in the end. I'm twenty-four now and none of these thoughts apply to me anymore. The future is seeming bleaker and bleaker with each passing day, my political opinions have only been pushed further from inaction, and I highly doubt the world will "work this out" before our end. This begs the question: Is it morally responsible to have children in an age of incoming catastrophe?