patrick.net

SEATTLE — Erika Lundahl writes and performs her own songs. She works in Seattle for a company that publishes books on the environment. She thinks a lot about how best to occupy her place in the world. Yet, despite this full life, Lundahl, at 27, feels a clock ticking.

Her biological clock, yes, but also the one to fix global warming, or face the likelihood that she and her potential children will have to live in a seriously marginalized world.

“There is this sense that if you don’t have kids soon, you could be putting them in a harder position,” Lundahl said. “But if you do have them, that will not be easy either, with the storms, the intense droughts, the precariousness of the times. It’s like you are playing with two ticking time bombs — yours and the planet’s.”



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Four years ago, two women who shared fears about rearing children in such a world formed the group Conceivable Future to create a safe space for talk about it. One of the co-founders, Josephine Ferorelli, a writer, editor and yoga instructor, said that, early on, the topic was greeted as “fringey or hysterical or weird.”

They have no way of measuring how many people now share their concerns, but one thing is clear: “When we talk to women, there is a huge amount of relief, even excitement, that we were bringing this issue out in the open,” Ferorelli, 36, said. “People are like: ‘Oh my God. I felt like I was the only one who felt this way.’”

Natalie Lubsen, 28, a friend of Lundahl’s, would like to have children. But Lubsen — who works in the marketing office of a magazine that seeks “a more just, sustainable and compassionate world” — said she sometimes sees a bleak horizon.


“It kind of feels like anything can happen, as the impacts spiral,” Lubsen said, “with a lot more global unrest, famine, mass migration, water insecurity, food insecurity, potential political collapses and natural disasters.”

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Another in the Seattle friend-group, Caitlin Blair-Stahn, recalled the gathering as a time for “being present with our grief about climate change … and then being able to talk about taking action purposefully and, hopefully at some point, even joyously, to make a change.”

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But many, like Rachel Ries, say that their determination has only deepened, as they see new projections of water and food scarcity. Ries says it’s wrong to dismiss the very real fears of those looking toward a future threatened by global warming. “It’s visceral,” she wrote three years ago on the Conceivable Future website. “It’s dire. It’s real. And there’s POWER in that.”

Ries, 39, a musician in Minneapolis, feels she has not had to give up her maternal instincts entirely, because she lives in a house with her brother, sister-in-law and two nieces and a nephew. “I have found a way to parent,” Ries said. “And I have been very intentional in that way, but also very lucky.”