A Conceivable Future testimony is your video, audio, or written statement from the heart about how the climate crisis is shaping your life, particularly your feelings, decisions, or experiences of childbearing and/or parenting.

You don’t need to be child-free –or a parent– to testify, you don’t need to have come to any firm conclusions about parenthood, and climate change doesn’t need to be the only factor on your mind–there’s no “right” answer. What’s important is that you step forward and tell the world how climate change is affecting your life.

A testimony is not a sermon: it’s a way to share your own experience, not a place to speak in generalities, or to tell others what you think they should do.

We invite you to identify yourself by making a video, using your name, talking about your specific experiences. You are also welcome to testify anonymously in audio or written form.

Across the world, abusive, authoritarian population control efforts have attached legacies of trauma to this subject. In the United States alone, the reproductive rights of Indigenous women and women of color have been repressed by many governmental and non-governmental actors and by implicit and explicit policies for hundreds of years. For many, reproductive justice is a path to healing from this legacy.

As Conceivable Future invites people to join this highly personal and deeply political conversation, we recognize that these topics– of population, reproduction, and climate justice– have different meanings for everyone, rooted in different histories of oppression and trauma. We honor your story. We advocate for self-determination, an inalienable right for ourselves and our communities.

Population corresponds to climate harm only to the degree that individuals consume resources and emit carbon. Research has yet to demonstrate a link between population increase and emissions rise. It’s common in the West to hear scare-mongering about population growth in developing countries, and low-income groups, for emissions growth, but it’s western countries, where populations are static, that per-capita emissions are dangerously high. If everyone on earth consumed the way middle-class and wealthy Americans consume, we would need an additional 5.1 earths worth of resources to meet that demand. And if we were all to consume like the ultra wealthy, we’d need 700 more earths. Therefore we condemn the use of this topic to scapegoat the poor, or another country’s citizens.

No! We love babies! We are fighting for the right to live free from massive, avoidable, government-supported harm. We are NOT advocating a particular path, be it having or not having children. We are simply drawing attention to the fact that the climate crisis is a big, negative factor in many of our generation’s view of our future. The fact that many are asking ourselves whether it is safe to have children is our call to action: there is no correct answer to an impossible question. Instead, however our families are composed, the only answer for each of us is to join in collective action for a habitable future.

Climate justice is climate action guided by an ethical understanding of history and inequality.

This crisis is a product of an unequal, exploitative economic system with a legacy of violence and plunder, therefore only justice-based solutions will address its root cause.

And as Naomi Klein says, when the planet gets hotter and resources become more scarce, people get meaner. A chaotic climate compounds pre-existing hardships like discrimination, domestic violence, health problems, and housing insecurity. Environmental disasters, and the man-made nightmares that follow, disproportionately displace and harm women, children, and people of color.

Climate action matters because Black Lives Matter. Climate action matters because all genders are equally precious. Climate action matters because we are all kin. We can only make an equitable future by walking a just path.

Conceivable Future does not and shall not discriminate on the basis of race, color, religion (creed), gender, gender expression, age, national origin (ancestry), ability, marital status, sexual orientation, or military status, in any of its activities or operations. These activities include, but are not limited to, establishing collaborative relationships with other organizations and individuals, hiring and firing of staff or contractors, or selection of volunteers.

We are committed to providing an inclusive and welcoming environment for all volunteers, partners, staff, and contractors. We aim to build relationships with a wide spectrum of partner organizations as we work to build moral power for climate action.