> In the long term it means that you don't pass your set of values onto the latter generations. Education, activism, involvement in the community, publishing r

> In the long term it means that you don't pass your set of values onto the latter generations. Education, activism, involvement in the community, publishing research, etc. are all effective ways to pass on values to future generations. Nudging the overton window of society is arguably a much more effective way to pass on values. > Intelligence, conscientiousness and empathy are all heritable to a degree. Nowhere near enough to keep up with technological and societal change. > More importantly, your kids will likely inherit most of the socioeconomic factors that made you become environmentally-conscious in the first place. And I'm assuming you want the next generations to be as eco-friendly as possible. Those kids would need to have a net-positive contribution to the environment for this argument to make any sense. It also seems mostly irrelevant to the argument about whether to have kids or not: any virtue you ascribe to those potential kids can also be ascribed to anyone else: if those kids could be a net-positive to the environment, why not the friends and neighbours that are already here? If influencing others in similar socioeconomic situations is beneficial, we can find plenty of those people around already. And so on. > exploding birth rates across the globe Do you have a source for this? All the evidence I've seen says the exact opposite (e.g. the UN's data and projections for this century show birth rates declining across every continent https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery https://population.un.org/wpp/DataQuery )