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Walking from shop to shop in Winnsboro, Texas, during this summer was a constant flux of trudging through thick, sweltering air to the sudden kiss of air conditioners rapidly evaporating the moisture off our bodies. Coming from dry and wispy Colorado, everything felt so heavy and oppressive. The sun was painted evenly thick across the flat landscape, and everyone's face permanently glistened with a faint sheen of sweat.
Towards the end of our trip, we sat under the shade of an oak watching camp counselors walk our crusty, bug bite-covered miniature humans over to us. After some negotiating at the concessions cabin, we piled them into an SUV for a three-hour drive to Dallas.
It wasn't until we were back in Colorado that I saw the flurry of blaring stories on the record-setting Texas summer of 2023. I mean the heat wasn't exactly pleasant, but with a little time and a perhaps some shade and breeze, it didn't seem so bad. It was by no means apocalyptic.
But there was a time when I experienced the weather in almost normative terms, as if it were not the apocalyptic and physical manifestation of our collective moral failings. Leaving aside the fundamental central validity of anthropomorphic climate change, it's hard to truly contextualize how strange, unnatural, and somewhat contrived this feeling is.
The gist of it goes something like this:
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have been using fossil fuels which release carbon dioxide, which in turn causes net atmospheric heat gain. Therefore, the climate has increasingly been out of equilibrium from its "natural" order. It's not just a Texas summer, it's the ecological interest payment of a Chinese factory. It's not just a really bad hurricane, it's the lingering cost of a million SUVs marauding across miles of asphalt. It's not just physical discomfort and sweat, it's the cosmic damnation resulting from the macabre Eucharist of gorging on the planet at the altar of profit and growth.
But after years of over-the-top and sensational climate projections ranging from "we only have 10 years to act" to "we are probably already doomed," the hypocrisy of elites becoming more apparent by the day, I realized the obvious: that I was just one person and the only thing I can claim for myself and my family is not climate salvation, but a personal peace.
But for many, climate alarmism is an emergent reality. Just within the past year I have had several conversations with friends and colleagues in which, when the topic of visiting the South or the Gulf Coast comes up, they remark on the how vast swaths of territory housing tens of millions may well be forsaken because of the coming floods or heat waves. It's a dreary sort of smugness, leveled from subdued, gaunt visages of would-be seers shaking their heads at the innumerable muggles ushering in their own, and everyone else's, deaths.
Another friend of mine expressed guilt for wanting a second child, lamenting, "It's crazy that humans and cows comprise more biomass than all the other animals put together!"
I still have trouble wrapping my mind around this level of absurdity. Imagine one day telling your child that the reason they don't have a sibling is because the ratio of human biomass relative to other animals is too high.
Ever since that epochal New York Magazine article came out, The Uninhabitable Earth, this overriding sentiment became substantially worse. Its author David Wallace-Wells suddenly became well known in climate circles, and in the five years since it was published, he became a father, scored a book deal, and has traveled around the world appearing for podcasts, interviews, and lectures.
He predictably jumped on the bandwagon of high-profile journalists and thought leaders opining on the morality of having kids. Apparently, this is among the most common questions climate journalists receive. I mean, who can possibly be qualified enough to even receive that question, let alone attempt to answer it (though in fairness most don't, instead they genuflect, pontificate, and eventually just dodge the question).
In a time of abundance and opportunity, birth rates are collapsing, anxiety is an all-time high and climate doomerism has taken center stage. This mindset relies on sensationalized projections and abstractions to forge a felt reality. However we come out of this, erasure of oneself from the gene pool and resignation into the deep abyss of climate nihilism cannot be the way.
Sai Medi is a physician and father to two beautiful girls.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
