Search for a command to run...
Abstract This article explores how some people have channeled their feelings about the climate crisis into reconsiderations around having children, centering biological reproduction as an ethical dilemma and political lever during climate collapse. Through analysis of interviews and testimonials and working with Lauren Berlant’s concept of cruel optimism, the authors explore the emergence of a form of reproductive resistance and impasse whereby people are renegotiating how biological children fit into their notion of a good life. The authors offer the concept of the “fossil family” to articulate the inseparability of the individual and ecological during climate crisis and how attachment to the family, as an ideal and as a social and economic arrangement bound up with fossil capital, ultimately limits the available imaginative capacity about what a good life could be. Tied to futurity, gender, and notions of safety, the fossil family is a petrocultural phenomenon where having children is conceived of as both desirable and impossible amid such carbon intensive regimes. Opening to a more expansive notion of kinship, beyond the constraints of biogenetics, family, and fossil fuels, is a way to move through this impasse and engage with this intensely cruel moment.