Your Brain On Climate Parenting in the Climate Crisis, with Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng
How should you bring up baby in the age of climate breakdown? Should you tell them what's happening or not? And given how messed up is the planet we're passing on - is it even fair to *have* kids?
In a YBOC first this episode is a 3-way chat. Dave meets Nina Alexandersen and Sophia Cheng - respectively someone who became a climate activist through fear for her kid's future, and someone whose activism made them very ambivalent about becoming a mum, until something changed.
We talk about all things motherhood and parenthood - like what it does to your brain, and whether you still have as much time to care about things like climate change. And we discuss people who don't want to have kids because of the state of the planet: are they doing the right thing, or missing out on something core to being human?
See here for some of Sophia's project's stories of motherhood in a crisis, as discussed in the show.
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Owl noises = references:
- 18:57: More on matrescence. And 19:09: Matrescence, including Lucy Jones, in Time Magazine.
- 20:02: Lucy Jones wrote a brilliant book about foxes.
- 23:33: The (wrong) finite pool of worry hypothesis talked about in this from Vox. And 24.57: Sisco et al take apart the finite pool of worry idea.
- 26.15: Steve Akehurst discusses the importance of keeping climate in the news.
- 29:10: A discussion of Joanna Macy's Three Dimensions of the Great Turning.
- 38:55: Jo McAndrews's work.
- 45:55: Alice Brown, then of the Birthstrike movement, on Sustainababble.
The show is hosted and produced by me, Dave Powell. You can follow the show on instagram @yourbrainonclimate, and I occasionally put up a Substack.
YBOC theme music and iterations thereof, by me. Show logo by Arthur Stovell at https://mondial-studio.com/.