Some months ago now, I found myself in the company of a man and woman about my own age, perhaps a bit younger. They were not from here, and the woman had many questions about the country. Amongst other questions, she wanted to know things like: was the tap water safe to drink, and what about the fruit and vegetables – were they OK? I said I’d drunk the water for a year without issue – that was not to say there might not be dodgy water somewhere, but I hadn’t had any problems. And as for the fruit and vegetables, they appeared to me to be of good quality, although admittedly I hadn’t investigated their origins or methods of production. I added that I generally washed everything first before eating, but that I would do the same anywhere. She seemed satisfied with this. The reason she was asking, she said, was because she was expecting a baby. She wanted to be sure that what she was eating and drinking was safe, and not liable to compromise her unborn child in any way.

Now, on some level this made perfectly good sense to me, and I think I made some remark to that effect. I congratulated them on the baby. I also thought of the news that week, the general state of the world, and the cascading mix of environmental crises. There was little point commenting on any of this negativity when something like having a baby was done and dusted, or due to be. One might as well be celebratory. Yet with every infant-to-be that I am informed about, I have this feeling of unease. The reactions that I express might well be the result of social conditioning, rather than an honest appraisal. On hearing the words “We’re having a baby”, part of me is instantly filled with gloom at the thought. I feel inclined to say something like: “A baby!?! How could you??! In this world??” But that would be inappropriate and therefore I do not say it, although on some level I feel it.

The young woman who asked me about the water and the vegetables was clearly a thoughtful kind of person. Perhaps she had considered the state of the world, and decided that — on the balance of probability – it was still a good enough place with good enough prospects and a reasonable future for a child. To me, the scenario was a bit like being seated in a passenger jet on an unpreventable collision course into the ocean, and calmly asking the passenger next to you whether they think the tray table is clean enough to eat off.  I don’t know what the logic is when people make these decisions, and somehow it never seems a good time to ask. I am almost inclined to think that perhaps there is no logic – that the having of children is still a blind, evolutionary programmed, instinctual thing to do, that sits in a realm of its own somewhere beyond reason or questioning. I suppose it is worth noting that some children are purely accidental occurrences, although in today’s world, there is less real ‘accident’ about it than what there might have been once. My own ancestors excelled at procreation. They had families of a size that would have challenged anyone’s means of provision, and which would have been particularly draining on a meagre existence. Amongst the Scottish ancestors, there is a record of a child having been nick-named ‘Midge’ after an annoying biting insect found in the Highland regions in which they lived. Scottish humour aside, I suspect this says something of the mood at child number nine or ten coming along. Those were the days before contraception, of course.

I remember reading somewhere – and as usual I can’t remember where – that nowadays bringing a child into the world is one of the biggest non-consensual acts ever undertaken. On top of that, it seems to receive very little in the way of critical attention – or at least much less attention than one might expect for something of that magnitude. Much of what I have seen on the subject relates to the wishes of parents, and whether or not the presence of a child or children will enhance their wellbeing and general life satisfaction. Little is said about the prospects of the child, even supposing it is born into the most solid and nurturing of families.

During recent wanderings, I have stood atop a number of viewing towers looking down at the forest spread out in all directions. “Well”, I think then, “there is a lot of forest around here, and all I can see is forest in all directions. It is still a beautiful world, and things can’t be so bad as all that.” These are the moments when, supposing I were in a position to act on the inclination, I might be most likely to consider undertaking that most non-consensual act of having a child – not at the top of a viewing tower, I might add, but in a general sense. Yet, when I think further, I know that I am being very selective in where I stand, and that I am conveniently forgetting a whole lot of uncomfortable truths that are not to be seen right here and now, and that ecologically speaking this reasoning is altogether less than sound.

At such moments I do not think, for example, of the time we visited a landfill as part of a university ecology course. I am not sure if a word like ‘impressive’ should be used to describe something like the scale of a landfill. Maybe ‘disastrous’ or ‘sobering’ are closer to an accurate reflection. I think that visiting a landfill is one of those things that everyone should do once – a kind of perverse ‘bucket list’ if you will. One doesn’t have to go as far as a landfill, or even consider all the details of climate science, to see the scale of human impacts on the Earth. Walking a stretch of coastline recently, I zealously started picking up whatever rubbish I could. I was limited in that I already had a full load on my back, so there was only so much I could carry. The ship’s waste was out for a start – at least I suspected that’s where a lot of it had come from. Old bottles of WD-40, hard hats, buoyancy aids, water bottles. In what was really a very clean country, it was like seeing a complete overview of all the mess that humanity had created for itself. There were deflated balloons marked ‘Happy Birthday’ and ‘Celebration’ that would have been pretty once; children’s swim rings. I found an unopened pack of 100-odd surgical masks. And of course, the endless bits of plastic – wrappers and labels and fragments off goodness knows what. As the waves bowled in against the shore, I considered that what I was seeing washed up here was only a fraction of what was out there being sloshed around in the oceans. Humans had created a wasteland.

And the thing about rubbish is that every new infant will go on to create more of it — right from their infant days, through a lifetime of using all the things that we have become accustomed to using, potentially right through to their old age. An elderly friend of mind used to comment glumly on “all this medical waste” and he wasn’t wrong. Every part of life, down to the saving and caring about it, uses resources and produces waste, and a lot of it will inevitably end up being thrown away. Good recycling can go some way to mitigating the effects, but it can only do so much.

All this aside, we hear the dire predictions about declining fertility and birth rates, and how this too will create a different catastrophe of sorts – a social one. Because for all the detrimental impacts on the world that humans have, the circle of production and consumption inevitably requires more human bodies to keep the wheels spinning. Governments seek to encourage their citizenry to go forth and procreate, because there needs to be someone to pay the old age pensions and keep the system functioning the way it always has. I am not sure if that is the logic people follow when they decide to have children – I am doubtful. Maybe it has something to do with having company in old age, or a sense of purpose, or someone to carry on the family line. Whatever it might be, it seems to sway heavily in favour of the feelings of the parents as procreators, rather than the non-consensually created children.