Climate activists calling themselves “Birthstrikers” are refusing to have children due to their fear of climate change, according to a Monday interview with Bloomberg News.
“Our planet is in a kind of collapse. The natural world is collapsing around us, and that’s actually happening right now,” climate activist Victoria Derbyshire told Bloomberg.
“And I’m so disappointed by the response by authorities to this crisis, and so freaked out by everything I’ve read that I’ve — I’ve basically last year I came to the decision that I couldn’t bring a child into that.” Derbyshire continued. “And I was asking around people I know, put it up a little bit on Facebook and realize actually quite a lot of other people are making this decision. Yeah, and so, we realized it was really — really important to tell the public that there are people out there are so scared about this that they feel that they can’t actually have a family.”
The comments come days after Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised the issue during a question-and-answer session on her official Instagram account.
“It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it OK to still have children?” the freshman representative stated during the session. (RELATED: Ocasio-Cortez Invited To Debate Climate Catastrophe Skeptics)
Although Derbyshire asserted the collapse of the natural world as the central reasoning for her decision to not have children, others reach the same decision in an effort to reduce overall carbon emissions, citing a 2017 Guardian study that claimed that each child not raised will save an estimated 58.6 tons of carbon emissions per year.