There is now a group of some 60 men and women apparently, and no doubt growing fast, not least thanks to all the extra publicity, called Birth Strike. They, you’ve guessed it, refuse to bring children in the world of a catastrophic climate change and man-made destruction of nature.

You can watch the somewhat longer video here – and it’s quite sad. Sad but not unexpected, because when you listen religiously to people like Sir David Attenborough (“If we don’t take action the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”) like one of the interviewed ladies does, it is a wonder you are merely chronically depressed and not already swinging from the ceiling.

If you think you are living in the end of days, fast approaching the man-made Armageddon, but that there will be no Rapture (as many Christians believe about their brand of eschatology) for those with small carbon footprint who have always carefully separated normal rubbish from the recyclabes and signed many an internet petition, why would you bring and have children in the midst of all this?

And if you do indeed believe all that then you certainly shouldn’t and I hope that everyone who shares in this apocalyptic perception that humanity and planet Earth are  heading into the final extinction to result in a dystopia a la “The Road” or “Mad Max” will join Birth Strike.

Of course in the course of Blythe Pepino’s and Alice Brown’s lives, lives have become significantly better for a vast majority of humanity in innumerable ways. The last half a century in fact (I’m not suggesting that Pepino and Brown, by the way, are that old) has been the period of a most staggering progress and improvement in the quality of life since Cro Magnon first became a thing some 200,000 years ago. Of course if you just read the Guardian you probably won’t know all that or if you do you won’t believe it anyway.

Maybe Pepino and Brown are right and we’ll all die soon, but I suspect that comes 2050 there will be a lot of rather disappointed cat ladies.

Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where this piece also appears.

Illustration: Kennedy Miller Productions/Warner Bros.

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