What gets left behind for future generations? Reproduction and the environment in Spey Bay, Scotland

Abstract

Based on fieldwork with people involved in the environmental movement in Scotland, this article describes the connections they made between the future of reproduction and the future of the environment. While we are used to thinking of Euro-American kinship in terms of the passing on of biogenetic substances, in this case an ecological ethic of reproduction, which places the emphasis on considering the kinds of environments into which children will be born, is more salient. An ecological ethic of reproduction urges (potential) parents to consider whether it is responsible to bring future generations into a world with stretched and unequally distributed resources and in which the accumulated consequences of human actions may be altering not only the natural world, but also the ability to reproduce at all.