The Paternal Is Political: An Open Letter to My Daughter and A New Generation of Fathers

Dear Daughter,

You will be born in a matter of days, within a few weeks of my own birthday — 34 years after I took my first breath, grasping the atmosphere as my new lifeline with the same revelatory cries I’ll soon hear from your newborn lungs. These final nights, as I lay in bed, my hand resting on your mother’s belly like a holy book, amazed that it is you and her simultaneously, my breathing brings other revelations: thinking about your childhood, thinking of my own, and feeling that many of those sworn in as our government representatives represent a threat to children and childhood everywhere. As President Trump and his Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin deride Greta Thunberg, I read the subtext: don’t even try to have a hopeful future, we are foreclosing on it faster than the Great Recession deceptions that defined my generation’s political awakening.

In the 1980s, the CO2 level in my first baby breath was around 347 parts per million (ppm), just below the 350ppm target which Bill McKibben called “the most important number on the planet.” Staying below it, according to a pivotal study, assured a “safe operating space for humanity.” We tore through that safety boundary in the 1990s as the Western economies were celebrating their victory over the Soviet bloc by going on a shopping spree for new markets to globalize and Americanize; as I was living it up as a rich, white kid in the woods of Connecticut, oblivious to a ticking carbon clock, running ecstatically through backyard forests that danced predictably through seasonal colors of green, orange, grey and green again — my own climate-spun kaleidoscope.

We broke 400ppm CO2 around September 2016, just before electing a climate-nihilist president whose administration acknowledges deadly climate catastrophe, but uses that knowledge to justify loosening restrictions on emissions. By even more votes than President George W. Bush before him, Trump lost the popular vote by millions but still got the White House — even his unpopular election victory was a shot of political nihilism we all had to swallow. It’s now a White Supremacist’s House, with Trump stoking racial tensions, accusing American Jews of “disloyalty” if they don’t vote for him, and telling Congresswomen of color to “go back” to other countries for “telling the people of the United States… how our government is to be run.” But regardless of how low our politics goes, the CO2 level continues to tear up the charts (reaching 410ppm this year, the highest level in the past 800,000 years).

In writing you this letter, I’m joining a growing chorus of new dads talking about climate change and spelling out their reasons for having children. David Wallace-Wells, author of The Uninhabitable Earth, which chronicles the worst of global warming scenarios, writes about his choice to nevertheless create new life (his first child, daughter Rocca, was born in the course of writing his book): “I think you have to do everything you can to make the world accommodate the life you want to have for yourself, and your family, rather than giving up early, before the fight has been lost or won.” Likewise, former soldier and author, Roy Scranton, concludes that come what may of climate chaos, his parenting goal is to role model kindness and empathy for his young daughter.

I find this commendable — and I want even more from fatherhood in the climate age.

Fathers must be honest about the monstrous consequences of climate delay, must be willing to look in the closet and under the bed where society has swept the inconvenient truths of pollution, peak population, neoliberal capitalism and “disruptive” technology for too long. Then we must sit at our children’s bedsides and tell stories of courage and creativity that bring these monsters into the light, where they’re acknowledged not as monsters, but as the shadows of our deeply dissatisfying desires, all the stuff we accumulate, discard, shove aside and sell off.

As I lay with my hand resting over you, on your mother’s tummy, I feel I’m taking a vow, an oath to serve you and your generation by fighting like hell for a fossil-free future. This future isn’t a vague “someday,” but the specific timeline and temperature imperative of limiting our planet’s heating to 1.5º Celsius by cutting emissions in half by 2030 and reducing them to net-zero by 2050. In some ways, I’m relieved: it’s one of the clearest-cut situations I’ll confront as a parent.

My forthcoming fatherhood is not public office, but it is political. Many women have known that the personal is political, even before that slogan was born in the 1960s, but white guys like me have been slow to learn. I hope we are waking up. The paternal is political because responses to our climate crisis that focus on self-reliance, technical fixes, and competitive strategies are completely inadequate to the job of keeping you safe.

I never thought that the familial duty often pinned to fathers, of keeping family physically safe, would involve daily conversation with your mother about chemical processes like the greenhouse effect and planetary boundaries like global CO2 levels. Nor that the investments I’m most eager to obtain for you are not a college fund or family trust, but trillions of dollars in government investment to remake our energy, farming, housing and transportation sectors. The type of behavior I find unacceptable isn’t that of soberly realistic kids and teenagers talking back to authority figures, but rather the recklessness of the authority figures themselves. There are just 100 corporations responsible for more than 70% of greenhouse gas emission globally: it’s their boards’ and executives’ behavior that is out of control and needs firm discipline through regulations and lawsuits that assure that polluters pay. If the prospect of setting firm limits makes them tantrum, then so be it; I have no patience for the man-child.

Simply put, the only adequate parenting plan that matches my pledge to keep you from harm is a commitment to political transformation. This starts by voting out politicians who are bankrolled by fossil fuel corporations and their financial backers.

I march, as a physician, a citizen, and a soon-to-be father, in youth-led climate strikes under the banner of the youth-led Sunrise Movement. But I’m quickly growing out of that demographic. You will now be the flush of youth that leads me into the streets. At the Global Climate Strike in September, your pregnant mom marched with me, and so, in a way, you marched as well. We joined millions of people around the globe demanding comprehensive political action, just a year after Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Villaseñor and other young women began prioritizing human survival over school attendance by striking as part of the Fridays for Future campaign. When your mother left to attend to her duties as a pediatrician, I walked alongside a man holding a protest sign aloft with one hand and deftly pushing a stroller over train tracks with the other. We chanted our demands as his baby slept. I felt unflappable, seeing him balancing these two identities in the midst of a world-consuming crisis.

So here is my oath to you, little one. I’m finding and sticking with the others, the realists who seem like radicals. I will be your dad, doing what needs to be done in the home and on the home front. I will vote, organize, strike, and tell true stories. I will cook, clean, fold, swaddle, rock and soothe. There are many other dads like me, a new generation. We are Fathers for Future: the paternalism of corrupt politicians, the ones who talk down to our youth climate activists, is breathing its last tortured breaths, and a new paternal power of listening, caregiving, and father-first political identity is rising.