Emily Kwong

And while this paper was focused on the individual decision of whether or not to have a child, I think that part of the public's reaction to this work is

This is Jade Sasser, an associate professor of gender and sexuality studies and society environment and health equity at UC Riverside.

And she traced this idea all the way back to the 1800s and a British economist named Thomas Robert Malthus, who was writing against British laws that offered food aid to the poor.

To be clear, this is not the argument that Kimberly and her colleague were making.

But it is important to think about how this broader dialogue about population and the environment has a checkered past.

And in reality, population growth, particularly when it comes to consumption, definitely has local impacts on local resources.

But science tells us that is not what is driving global climate change.

Science tells us the issue is how we live, not that we live.

That means I get 50 flights a year.

So Kimberly Nicholas, the scientist in Sweden, talks really differently about the kid question now.

Now she focuses on the actions we should take to eliminate emissions today.

Yeah.

And Jade understands that, too.

She is really sympathetic to the emotions that climate change elicits.

This is a whole field of research now.

Climate anxiety, sometimes called climate distress, it's defined as the psychological distress that individuals experience due to climate change and its impacts.

And this growing body of research is showing that, yes, climate change is harming people's mental health and affecting their life choices.

These are not flimsy feelings.

It's a concern, especially among our generation, among Gen Z and younger millennials.

Jade took this topic so seriously, she wrote an entire book about it called Climate Anxiety and the Kid Question.