Letter of the week: Motherhood vs Mother Earth

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When reading the essay about the West’s falling birth rate (The NS Essay, 17 January), I was surprised that no mention was made of climate breakdown. Surely any discussion about why people are choosing not to have children must consider this factor in their decision-making. For example, in a 2021 study published in the Lancet, 10,000 people aged 16-25 were questioned in countries across the world. Of those in France, Portugal, the UK and the US, between 30 and 40 per cent said climate change made them hesitant to have children. An article by Damian Gayle published in the Guardian in 2023 cited research showing that many people are now basing their decision not to have children on fears about climate breakdown, including uncertainty about the future and the ecological impact of a growing human population.

For many young people in the West, the decision about whether to have children will become increasingly difficult as the impacts of climate change become more apparent and difficult to ignore.
Nicola Penwarden, Brighton

Destiny’s child

It’s a fair question, Madeleine Davies: why have children (The NS Essay, 17 January)? For me, family, children and grandchildren have been my main purpose in life. No bucket-list gap year could compete. Parenthood brings joy and tribulation aplenty, but above all love. No moment compares with the birth of one’s child, and they go on to inspire the purest, most unselfish love. Then – oh joy! – it is reprised with grandchildren, with their unstinting love, warming the desiccated heart.

Respect is due to those who find meaning and peace elsewhere, perhaps with a legacy of charitable work or reflection on a life well lived. For my part, I thank Madeleine for posing the question, and prompting my grateful answer.
David Longson, Sheffield

Bad education

Ian Cooling (Correspondence, 17 January) attacks Bridget Phillipson as “offering no evidence that her ideologically driven alternatives would improve outcomes”. Cooling himself has fallen into that trap and has not looked at the evidence provided by researchers such as Stephen Gorard at Durham University and others. There is no clear evidence that academies have, overall, been a success. The first wave of academies had mixed results. The second wave, especially after a policy change in 2014, converted mostly under pressure to become academies, again with no clear evidence that the pupils benefited. The effect is that we have a two-tier system, with about half no better off and many worse.

Gorard suggests a “pupil premium” policy, which gives funding according to the number of children on free school meals, who have been in care or who have special educational needs – not according to the school management type – to reduce the clustering of poorer pupils in sink schools and increase social justice in education. I hope Phillipson is thinking along these lines.
Martin White, Sheffield

The future is now

Andrew Marr (Politics, 17 January) reminds us that John Maynard Keynes said that in the long run we are dead. But Keynes is dead, and we are living in the long run.

So many of our problems – social care, crumbling hospitals and schools, inadequate National Grid, and so on – are the result of short-term decision-making. We suffer from a Treasury that regards pushing difficult financial decisions into the long grass a success. The long run is now the present. It is time to stop postponing difficult financial decisions.
Jonathan French, York

Community ties

I read Sanjiv Bhattacharya’s Letter from LA (17 January) on 20 January, the day of Trump’s inauguration. Bhattacharya’s piece captures so clearly the tragedies the fires have wrought – tragedies that will happen more often with Trump’s stance on climate issues and the ongoing crisis, and the lack of anything positive to stem the tide. But Bhattacharya also highlights the solidarity and support people can offer one another. We are going to need a lot more of that in the coming years.
Jol Miskin, Sheffield

Democracy now

I enjoyed Katie Stallard’s prognosis on the Musk-Trump bromance (Symposium, 10 January), but it’s surely not the case that Trump “will be a lame duck president” from his first day. That term is normally reserved for a president with only months or weeks left in office. Trump is four years away from that. If anything, that he cannot run again gives him greater freedom to pursue unpopular policies. (The more so if, as I suspect, he doesn’t care what happens to the GOP after he leaves office.)

In contrast, leaders such as Keir Starmer are too constrained to follow policies that will bear fruit within four years. This flaw in our democratic systems has been, and continues to be, a severe constraint on long-term public investment and progress towards net zero, both of which require short-term pain for long-term gain.
Martin Lees, Kent

Quote of the century

Phil Hebblethwaite’s nice piece on Vaughan Williams’ Sinfonia antartica (Music, 17 January) claims the most famous written line in exploration literature is Captain Scott’s “For God’s sake, look after our people” from that doomed 1912 expedition. But the most immortal phrase of the genre belongs to Captain Lawrence Oates: “I am just going outside, and may be some time”, one of the greatest and noblest exit lines ever spoken.
Tony Quinn, London N1

Che cosa?

It is good to see Elsa Morante’s work reappearing in English. Ellen Peirson-Hagger (The Critics, 10 January) calls it “part of a renaissance of Italian women writers, which includes Alba de Céspedes and Natalia Ginzburg”. Fair enough for the former, but in Italy Morante and Ginzburg have never been forgotten or neglected: on the contrary, they are regarded as 20th-century classics.
Ann Lawson Lucas, Cherry Burton, Beverley, East Riding of Yorkshire

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