Environmental journalist Madeline Ostrander, writing recently in The Nation:

Even in the restrained language of science, the future holds unprecedented difficulties and disasters. For many people, these problems were an abstraction, but as an environmental journalist, I knew enough to imagine them in front of me. Driving across the bridge to my house, I pictured city beaches drowned by the rising sea. Watching the news, I wondered when the next colossal hurricane would strike the Gulf of Mexico or the mid-Atlantic. These thoughts are not paranoid. According to scientists’ predictions, if society keeps pumping out carbon dioxide at current rates, any child born now could, by midlife, watch Superstorm Sandy–size disasters regularly inundate New York City. She could see the wheat fields of the Great Plains turn to dust and parts of California gripped by decades of drought. She may see world food prices soar and water in the American West become even scarcer. By 2050, when still in her 30s, she could witness global wars waged over food and land. “It does make me wonder if maybe I shouldn’t have kids,” one of my friends whispered to me.

The whole article is worth reading, especially to see that there are some people beginning to take seriously proposition that the future is bleak enough that it really is wicked to bring new lives into the world. It’s not full-bore antinatalism by any means. But full-bore antinatalism is such a counterintuitive idea for most people that it’s remarkable to see even baby steps (ahem!) being taken in its direction.

Of course, if one ever does decide that it is wrong to bring children into the probable future that we face, the next step might be to ask, what future is it acceptable to put children into?