Parenting the Climate Change Generation

Earlier this month during Art Basel Miami Beach, at a cocktail party held just inches above Biscayne Bay, an art collector was describing the ordeal of his year of house hunting. He was one half of a well-off, middle-aged gay couple raising two children and hoping to find a place calmer than New York for their kids’ adolescence and their own semi-retirement. Their first choice, he said, was Montecito, the richest part of Santa Barbara County, but then the broker who’d been helping them there died in last December’s mudslides. They decided they couldn’t go back. They looked at a few houses in Malibu — “but they all burned down.” In the end, they chose Miami. “You know climate change is coming for South Florida, too, right?” someone asked. “At least it’ll be slow,” the collector replied, clearly having thought about it. With a hurricane, you get at least a few days’ warning, he said, and with sea-level rise, years. “Then, it’ll just be like Venice.”

Climate change isn’t a reason to not have kids. Kids are a reason to fight it.

As recently as a few years ago, this was not the way the wealthy tended to talk about the dilemmas of child-rearing. As much as Americans may have feared the wrath of global warming, we assumed that most of us would be spared its most brutal impacts, by the prophylaxis of our collective wealth, and that the very richest among us might be able to shield themselves entirely. But that’s changing. The Kardashians may have hired private firefighters to fend off this fall’s Woolsey fire, as the rest of the state relied on conscripted convicts earning as little as a dollar a day, but millions around the country watched the same family evacuate via Instagram Story, too.

Read the story by David Wallace-Wells from The New York Magazine - “Parenting the Climate Change Generation.”