This story is part of GQ’s Modern Lovers issue.
GQ: You've been writing about climate change and environmental disasters for more than 15 years. How has that shaped the way you think about love?
NAOMI KLEIN: Love, broadly defined, is central to whether or not we are going to survive the shocks ahead. I think the flip side of that is, I describe neoliberalism as lovelessness in public and lovelessness as policy. I mean, in the aftermath of every disaster, you see these amazing expressions of love. People risk their lives to save others. I'm describing a sort of abundance love, a love without scarcity. I've covered enough disasters to know that this is a profoundly human impulse. When disaster strikes, people are not asking, “Are you Christian? Are you Muslim? Are you related to me?” People are just faced with taking extraordinary risks to save each other, whether it is a home-care worker saving the life of the elderly person who they're taking care of or whether it is somebody risking their life to save somebody else's kids.
Outside of a crisis, are there ways we can make that kind of abundant love a reality?
Yeah, I think so. The question is, what are the structures that would enable us to have this sort of abundant love being more than a flash in the midst of crisis? When a society says, “You know what, the basics are going to be taken care of,” you have a really powerful intersection between policy and love. Nobody is locked out.
I think when you live in a society as we do, certainly everybody in the United States does, that clearly tells people, we do not have your back. We will not leave a social safety net to catch you. When you live in a society that tells people they can take nothing for granted, whether it is housing or food or water or health care, that lights up the parts of ourselves that are very fearful. That makes us take a scarcity approach to love, and scarcity love justifies barbarism. It can play out at a familial level or a neighborhood level, a national level or a race level, but the governing ethos is out of my love for my own, however “my own” is defined. I justify whatever it takes to protect my own.
What does that scarcity love look like today?
Look, we saw it during COVID, right? There's a huge flight to the suburbs and bigger cars. There's no policy of love in this country, so the message people take is “If I want to take care of my family, I need to build the best bubble I possibly can.” That brings disastrous effects, but it's not because people don't care about the planet. It's driven by the fact that they want to have a little bit more space for their kids.
How can we think about family more sustainably?
One of the things COVID has shown is that the nuclear family is a terrible technology. It's a relatively new one, and it's a really bad division of labor. We need to have different simulations of family so that people can get the things they need without it being all about getting a bigger house with a bigger yard.
People sometimes ask me if they should have kids given the climate crisis, and I always say that I would never presume to tell anybody whether they should have kids or not. I know that I highly resented it when people had opinions about whether I should have kids. Just speaking for myself, I think my son's life is tremendously enriched by the fact that we have a lot of friends who don't have kids and have taken him on as a godchild, soul child, nephew. So that's just the way we do it, and it's worked for us.
There's so much attention paid to this question of “Should people have kids or not?” It sounds like that focus might not be productive, and it's more important to expand our notion of what family is.
I just think we should have open discussion. I don't think anybody should be making the decision for anyone else. That's a huge start.
Then I think we should have more interesting discussions around how you can have kids without creating massive carbon footprints. But there's a way that discussion can become an extension of the individual consumer conversation around climate change, where people try to be the perfect low-carbon human and that's how they deal with climate fear and grief and responsibility. Just making individual low-carbon decisions when it comes to your consumption won't be enough to deal with the climate crisis, and just making individual low-carbon decisions about your procreation won't add up to what needs to happen, either. There are going to be more children. They need a future whether they're yours or not.
To me it's also adjacent to the idea that we care about the climate because we have kids. I had my son when I was 42. I cared about the planet before that, I assure you. The idea that somehow people fight harder because they have kids or grandkids is a really flawed and incredibly cruel projection on people who don't. That you don't care about the future because you don't have blood in the game? I think it's monstrous. When I didn't have kids and I heard people talk about it, I just thought, “Wow, are you saying that I don't care about the future because I don't have a toddler? That's just weird.”
Whether or not a person wants to have kids, are there climate conversations that people in any kind of relationship should be having?
I don't really give relationship advice or procreation advice, but if kids are in the picture, whether they're yours or not, be careful when you talk about the depth of the climate crisis.
What I know from being part of the climate-justice movement is that when people engage in the fiercest forms of land, water, and planet protection, they do so from a place of love. If they're trying to stop a pipeline, it's not because they hate cylindrical metal things. It's because they love their water. They love the natural world around them, and they're willing to fight for it. So as a parent or a teacher or an aunt or an uncle or a member of an extended community, make sure that the love is there before it's flooded with fear. Because this generation is going to have to fight to protect the habitability of the planet. They just are, and it's better if they're able to fight from a place of love than a place of fear, because love will sustain them much better in the long run.
Colin Groundwater is assistant to the editor in chief.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2021 issue with the title "How To Think About Climate Change And The Kids Conundrum."
Naomi Klein's latest book is How to Change Everything: The Young Human's Guide to Protecting the Planet and Each Other.