ABSTRACT

A student magazine asserts that a key action towards sustainability is ‘don’t have kids’ (Anon. 2008: 29). Another ‘green’ magazine for parents points out that ‘in the US, even having just one child creates a carbon legacy almost six times greater than each parent’s own lifetime carbon emissions’ (McAleer 2009). Sustainability and birthing human children are figured as mutually exclusive. So how do we get an edited collection of essays in a book with both the words ‘sustainability’ and ‘birth’ in the title?