Shrinking futures: ecologically childfree as emotion management

As climate change intensifies, some people connect it to their decision to be childfree. This is largely predicated on how they imagine the future, not their current climate change realities. Examining this shows how climate change enters and affects the lifeworlds of the environmentally privileged. I ask what motivates environmentally privileged people to connect being childfree to climate change through an in-depth interview study of 15 ‘ecologically childfree’ adults, recruited through an online group, BirthStrike. I find two subsets of BirthStrikers, those who see being childfree as sacrificial and those with multiple motivations. I argue being ecologically childfree is a strategy of temporal emotion management and a way to legitimise ecological grief, a disenfranchised grief that goes unrecognised. Being childfree alters the intensity of BirthStrikers’ emotions and their temporal frames of engagement. For BirthStrikers with multiple motivations, I argue being childfree legitimises respondents’ ecological grief by demonstrating personal impact.