One green baby

Limiting your quota of offspring to one is the latest way to reduce your carbon footprint. But will it really help save the planet?

THERE ARE many things Corrie Cuthbertson does because she believes they are good for the environment. She makes her own cleaning products. She grows her own vegetables. She has not flown for the past two years and, this month, her holiday involves taking the train all the way to the south of France. Last year she drove her car a mere 10 times. She has been known to take packaging back to the supermarket. But the biggest thing she does is to abstain from having children.

At 34 years old, Cuthbertson is “99.9% certain” she will never procreate. This isn’t because she can’t, or because she and her husband don’t want children, or because she loves her career too much, but because she believes that bringing another life into the world is the most damaging thing she can do in terms of climate change and sustainability. Another child equals another carbon footprint: another unwelcome addition to the 6.7 billion of us carbon-guzzlers already threatening to drain the world’s resources. That is her view.


Cuthbertson believes this is an issue that is being strangely overlooked by many environmentalists. Though she has many friends in the movement, she knows of no-one like herself who has made the decision to go childfree for the sake of the planet.

“I talk to a lot of green people,” she says, “and many of them agree with the theory, but there’s always a but’. They’ll say something like but I’d like a little one of me running around’.” In reality, Cuthbertson is not entirely alone in her view. The idea that one of the major contributors to climate change is sheer human numbers has been lurking around on the fringes of green thought for some time. Indeed, there are a few high-profile exponents of it, among them Prince Charles’s environmental advisor Jonathan Porritt and Sir Crispin Tickell. And yet, according to Professor Chris Rapley, former director of the British Antarctic Survey and now director of the Science Museum, this remains the Cinderella issue of the climate-change debate. Even the major environmental organisations are barely touching it. As Porritt has said: “I can’t recall any environmental or climate-change organisation ever suggesting that births averted’ is probably the single most substantial and cost-effective intervention that governments could be using.”

Sunday Herald