Chris Gerrard—Age 61, Nova Scotia

I was born in 1955 into a navy family in Nova Scotia, and into a world of unquestioned optimism where the the beacon of progress brightening the future with promises of bounty for all. The industrial revolution had matured, the green revolution was promising more than enough food, and the average family in my world was five children. Nobody worried about the consequences of our actions - the world was an infinite sink capable of absorbing the detritus of everything we consumed.

We lived at the end of town next to a shipyard where they built wooden fishing ships that collected the abundant North Atlantic fish stocks, which the first Europeans reported as thick enough to pull from the ocean in baskets. My first realization of real limits was when the Russians (not Soviets to us) introduced factory fishing ships. Capable of staying at sea for months on end and pulling in unheard of quantities of fish, they were at first unreal, then awe-inspiring, then monstrous.

Twenty years later a friend of mine, a Canadian government bureaucrat had to tell the Atlantic Canadian fishermen that, after 400 years, they could fish no more. The fish had been taken to the point of commercial extinction and were on the verge of physical extinction. Limits had been reached in what had seemed an inexhaustible research.

Within ten years I began to learn about the effects of the modern industrial age upon the planet. Local pollution dominated the bad news, the Love Canal infamously prominent, but we were learning about the thermal effects of greenhouse gases, and something about the likely long term consequences.

Now we know that we’re in real trouble. The world is cooking because of us, and it will continue to get hotter. The two degree C warming limit is already a mirage in the rear view window. The world’s weather is going to become even more chaotic and violent - just like continuing to add heat to any system increases its agitation.

I have one child, born in 1985. She works in refugee assistance, predominantly in Africa trying to help people displaced by essentially resource-driven strife. I shudder at the world she’s inhabiting, where more and more people will be contesting for fewer resources as the world burns and marginally habitable areas become uninhabitable, agriculturally productive areas become barren from drought, flood, or storm, and rising waters drive people into their neighbors’ homes, where they’re unwelcome.

The urge to have sex is primal. We’ll not change that as long as we’re animals. The urge to have children is deep, deep, deep. The question of whether to have children is a complex one, at the intersection of the needs, urges, and rights of the individual and the societal interests of everyone. My child is a great gift to me, a burden to you, as yours is to me.

There are too many people in the world now. As I write this in late August we -all of us- have already consumed the Earth’s carrying capacity for the year. For the first time people cover the planet as a single entity. No nation, no group, is so isolated that its expansion or demise does not ripple out and affect everyone.