Esther Phillips was born in the mid-60s in Germany, where her father was working at the time. He eventually left the oil industry in the 70s to work on renewables. As a physicist, he specialized in thermodynamics and understood the consequences of burning fossil fuels. “He also understood that more feet equals more heat,” she writes in an email to our editor, “and so my parents had no further children.”
In 1976, she watched the river by her grandparents’ house in Lorraine succumb to hypoxia, dangerously low oxygen levels in the water, brought on by a combination of heat waves and untreated wastewater. The stench of decomposing fish floating belly up, their white eyes staring back at her, left a lasting mark. She felt ashamed of humanity’s role in species loss and ecological degradation, later writing that she realized, even then, that there were already far too many of us to be sustainable.
“I was ashamed of my species. I understood that we were far too many for our behaviour already.”
Noting soaring population rates as a problem compounded by public figures such as the pope of the time, who condemned contraception, even as “children in regions around the world were dying of famine,” she explained. Esther has spent several decades speaking out about global overpopulation.
Upon her decision not to have children, she wrote the following poem in 2009 as a dedication to the children she never had, an expression of resistance to bringing children into a world shaped by ecological collapse, accelerating climate change and the destabilizing of global job markets by tech giants.
“My life was so painful for so long that I became an anti-natalist. This was in consideration of what was done to my family, and of what a very ailing biosphere overpopulated by an apex predator species who, let’s face it, misbehaves in times of scarcity, would offer to any new child.”
The poem was first published on Stanford University’s Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) website.
For the love of our children
If we had children they would have been pretty
If we had children they would have been witty
If we had children they would have been clever
Had we had children they may well never:
Never forgive us the collective stupidity
Never forgive us the unfettered greed
Never forgive us that on the day we conceived
We didn’t instead spend the time watching telly
For what future is there for nine billion of them?
All of them programmed to come out on top
Having grazed the surface of the planet
Left to search the universe for a place with a crop
If we had children we would have loved them
And hoped in return they would love us
Nobody to look after us when we are old
Nobody to leave things to when we are cold
The biggest act of love is not to have them
In 80 years time a search for life may be in vain
What chance do they have for a future?
Not having them we’ll have saved them much pain
I am a woman hence programmed to bear them
Have a lovely mate, would have been a fantastic Dad
I am depressed when I think about Humans
But maybe my children would have been barking mad!!
So leave them where they are, as such they are perfect
Won’t play, nor steal, lie, murder, love or create
Leaves me to long for what could have been
And leaves our children in a much happier state
