Description
This paper reports on the findings of Future Families, a pilot research project examining how people in the UK are thinking about reproductive futures in the context of intensifying and increasingly visible climate change. Anxieties about low birthrates and population decline are looming large in a number of countries. While these sentiments can shade into the racist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory among the amorphous online far right, the idea that low birth rates represent an endemic societal pessimism is widespread across the political spectrum. Meanwhile, fears are apparently mounting among young people about unlivable, or at least highly uncertain, futures due to accelerating climate change. This paper attempts to provide a rebuttal to both the crude pronatalism of the ‘anti-woke’ right and the misanthropy of populationist environmentalism by reflecting on climate change-related reproductive concerns in their full situatedness and complexity. Drawing on detailed embodied accounts presented by research participants in six in-depth, qualitative interviews, it complicates narratives of ‘climate anxiety’, provides rich insights into how participants envisage (non)reproductive futures and points to possible alternatives to nuclear-family-based kinship relations.
