Parenting on Earth

‘Parenting on Earth’: Interview with Dr. Elizabeth Cripps

by Sarah Virgi

September 2023 – Amidst a chilly and rainy evening during a short visit to Utrecht, my friends and I sought refuge in a cozy café, yearning for the comfort of a steaming cup of cocoa. To our delightful astonishment, fate had a different plan in mind. On that evening, the very establishment we just entered happened to be hosting a Philosophy Café organized by a group of students at Utrecht University. What were the odds? The evening’s agenda promised an informal tête-à-tête with Dr. Elizabeth Cripps, centered around her recently published book Parenting on Earth.

Intrigued, we decided to partake in this unexpected rendezvous. Together, we embarked on a journey into a hitherto unexplored territory for me: the philosophy of parenthood. What challenges do contemporary parents face? What distinct moral responsibilities and obligations fall upon their shoulders, setting them apart from those who’ve chosen a different path in life? Is it at all ethically and environmentally sound to bring children into a world that teeters on the precipice of potential environmental calamity within the span of a few decades?

After hours of stimulating discussion, I couldn’t resist the urge to ask Dr. Cripps for an interview. And here it is!

We embark on an enlightening conversation about her book Parenting on Earth, where she navigates the challenges confronting parents in our modern age. Dr. Cripps dissects the unique responsibilities and moral quandaries woven into the tapestry of parenthood, set against the backdrop of a world besieged by global crises.

She underscores the imperative for nuanced deliberations on matters of family size and environmental stewardship, shedding light on the enduring duty of parents to safeguard not only their progeny’s present but also their future. Furthermore, Dr. Cripps elucidates the powerful agency parents possess in catalyzing political and societal transformation. Her personal life path, straddling the roles of mother and philosopher, lends a poignant dimension to the discourse, accentuating the profound interplay between theory and practice. Ultimately, Dr. Cripps reaffirms that parenting in our contemporary milieu transcends an individual journey, evolving into a collective moral imperative of profound consequence.

About Elizabeth Cripps

The Interview

Sarah Virgi: In your new book Parenting on Earth, you explore the specific challenges that parents in the 21st-century face. To what extent do you think they differ from the challenges of other generations of parents in the past?

Elizabeth Cripps: That’s a great question, because it’s really important to be clear on this. To some extent, we face a rare (arguably unique) moment in history. As parents today, we’re raising children in the face of overlapping global crises – climate change, antibiotic resistance, pandemic risk – which can only be resolved collectively. However, it’s also a real sign of our privilege that white, middle-class parents are only now having to face the reality that, unless things change dramatically, our governments are will not adequately protect our children. For parents of colour, Indigenous parents, and other marginalised communities, this has been the sad reality for many generations. More than that, Black, Indigenous and other children of colour have been the victims of horrific injustices, often at the hands of the very governments supposed to protect them. In the book, I quote Mary Annaise Heglar: ‘For 400 years and counting, the United States itself has been an existential threat to Black people.’

SV: Some activists argue that one should abstain from having children. On the one hand, because of their ecological footprint, which further worsens the climate crisis. On the other hand, because our children would have to bear the negative consequences of our impact on the climate. How does your approach relate to these arguments?

EC: For me, the more important question is what we owe to our children when we do have them (and how that fits the responsibilities we have to everyone else). However, many young people are grappling with the dilemma of whether to have kids at all, and how many to have, so I think it’s important to discuss it in a nuanced way.

The carbon impact of having a child in the global north is significantly higher than that of almost any of our other individual life choices. That does give us moral reason to think carefully about family size, just as it gives us a reason to reduce our individual carbon footprint in other ways. Individual lifestyle change isn’t the priority – this is a collective crisis and, much as it suits governments and corporations to push responsibility onto individuals, a fair, effective response takes political, institutional change – but it can be an important part of bringing about collective change and/or avoiding complicity in harm. However, it would be extremely demanding for some (perhaps many) people not to have children at all, or even not to have biological children. Parenting can be a fundamental part of a full human life. So we don’t have a decisive argument against having kids.

There is a moral case for keeping family size small: partly because of the carbon impact; partly because that gives more time for the many things we owe to our existing children, including climate action. However, I don’t say that everyone should ‘stop at’ some fixed number because different communities can value larger families more or less deeply, often for reasons grounded in past violations of reproductive rights.

The second consideration is very real for women such as the BirthStrikers. I am very sympathetic to these concerns. I’m particularly worried about leaving the next generation (current children) with a much starker version of our predicament, because things have got worse between now and then. For now, though, I don’t think it’s a binary choice between not having kids at all and giving them a life devastated by global crises. There’s a third option: have the children, if it’s important to you, but work as hard as you can with other parents and activists, to leave them a world fit to flourish in. That’s the focus of my book.

SV: Why do you think that it is a moral duty for parents to protect their children, not just from present but also from future harm? On these grounds, would this duty not apply also to future parents?

EC: Our responsibilities to our children don’t end with their childhoods. Philosophers tend to ascribe two sets of ‘special duties’ to parents (either because we bring our kids into the world or because we make a commitment to them). These are: to care for our kids in childhood, and to raise them capable of flourishing as adults. However, it makes a mockery of all the other things we do to prepare our children for adulthood – the healthy eating, the vaccinations and education – if we don’t try to leave them a society and a world that they can actually flourish in. For privileged parents, the background assumption has always been that others – governments, global institutions – will take care of those background conditions, so we only need to worry about raising our individual children. But that’s not the case.

To put it more succinctly, we’re reading bedtime stories in a house that’s about to burn down – and rather than douse the fire, we’re living in a way which fans the flames. That seems not only obviously wrong, but deeply inconsistent! And, yes, future parents would also have this duty and would also have to act on it, if institutional changes aren’t made to ensure before then that their children will grow up in a safe, just environment.

SV: As you argue in your book, solving the problems of the current climate crisis is impossible without the involvement of governments and institutions. Individual effort, on the other hand, has a much smaller outcome. Why is it nonetheless crucial for parents to be involved when it comes to climate action? What specific power do parents have?

EC: The real villains here are governments (especially in the global north) and corporations (especially fossil fuel giants, banks, insurers, and big meat and dairy firms). We have to be clear on this. But affluent individuals are citizens, voters, and shareholders. They are often drivers, flyers, eaters of meat and dairy, buyers of endless plastic tat. Thus, we are complicit. We are part of a harmful way of life. That means we share a moral duty to work together to replace our fundamentally unjust institutions with just ones. For parents, since we can no longer protect our own children individually, and governments are not doing it for us, there is a special shared duty to act together – if we can – to protect all of our children.

And we can! Parents have a lot of power. We have the extra motivational kick of this deep emotional tie to the next generation. We have political power. According to the Office for National Statistics, four out of five UK women born in 1975 had had at least one child by 2020. That makes parents a significant chunk of voters. We have huge economic clout. (Just think of the size of the global markets for baby food, or kids’ clothes or toys.) We also communicate with each other already. We have all sorts of existing networks, big and small, through which we can work together. And lots of parents are already using this power to cooperate on climate change, through activist groups like Parents For Future.

SV: In the introduction to your book, you talk about your personal experience as a mother. How did your role as a mother impact your theoretical thoughts about this topic, and vice versa?

EC: This is a very personal as well as a philosophical book. I’d researched climate justice for a long time before I had my daughters. I already cared deeply about it. But they made the subject real for me in a new, almost visceral way. So becoming a mother was what set me off on this philosophical journey of trying to work out what we owe to our kids – and everyone else – in our deeply challenged world. And the impact goes both ways. I reflect on the philosophical questions and try to use them to inform my own parenting, but the reality of raising kids also gives me insights into how difficult and complex this is in practice, and into the ways that we can learn from our children.