Family environmental history and my transition
March 11, 2025 By: ROBERT PRITCHARD
For this essay I have decided to reflect on my father’s side of the family for two generations-distant environmental history. My father’s parents had six children. As the story goes, they had four consecutive daughters while trying for a son, before having my dad, their fifth. Having a boy this time game them hope for another boy, however, their sixth child turned out to be their fifth daughter. Here they called it quits on procreating. This story speaks (in my experience) to a very different time and culture. Of course, there are people today carrying out similar life choices to those in this story, but over the past couple decades I am hearing more decision-making, in general, with regards to having fewer children due to A. Affordability, or a lack thereof, and B. A combination of environmental concerns and overpopulation or crowding.
As environmental family history goes, my belief is that family planning choices like these were very common in the 1950s and 60s, and have led to the dramatic population increases we have seen since. There may be an argument that it is the lesser-developed countries’ population increases that most heavily affect human over-population and the resulting global crises (Bradshaw et al., 2021), however, it is well documented that overall carbon footprints per capita in lesser-developed countries pale in comparison to countries of highest affluence (Wiedman et al., 2020).
I do not know much about the upbringing and lifestyles of my grandparents aside from their parents taking part in World Wars I and II, as well as living far less affluent lives than the generations that succeeded them. I do know, however, that they used wood stoves/furnaces and less efficient gas vehicles than today’s. I also know that there was less awareness of keeping natural spaces intact than today. Although having smaller communities and less people overall may have contributed to why this was not a concern.
My father and his siblings mostly worked in construction and oil and gas, with one sister in nursing. As far as I understand, there was very little concern of or influence from environmental factors throughout their younger lives. The last two decades, however, have spurred conversations around climate change and human effects on the environment. This is likely to be a result of more media and cultural attention to climate and environmental issues, not necessarily a result of a new-found relationship with nature, per se.
As a result of my family environment and influences growing up, I too worked in oil and gas as a young person. I left high school in grade nine to seek out a full-time job to eventually pay my own rent in my mid to late teens, just like my father before me. I was never taught as a child or adolescent about environmental issues, striving to work in a field I am passionate about, or how to build any sort of relationship with nature. It was not until my mid to late twenties that I tried out hiking and other outdoor recreational activities following an eight-kilometer trail run in support of breast cancer research after my mother was recently diagnosed. What followed in the years to come was a discovery of my own personal relationship with nature and a complete unravelling my life as I knew it. I began seeing the work I did from a completely different perspective. The oil products that made their way into the river and drains; the black smog the old pieces of heavy machinery belched; the dust filtering systems that no one enjoyed repairing despite the pollution their unmaintained state caused. All these occurrences were undermining the integrity of my new-found passion: nature. I quit my high-paying job to become a poor student in an effort to do something with my life that was in line with my new values and worldview.
My personal environmental history story is a tale of two very different lives. Today I make very intentional daily choices with my impact on the local and global environments in mind. Like when to use my car over riding my bike or walking, and thinking of every dollar spent as a vote for a product, including buying at the local farmers market year-round and avoiding both grocery store items that come in plastic and corporate chains I do not agree with (plainly, all of them). I am also trying to make a more direct impact on the space I live in. When I moved to Courtenay, the home we purchased had a fairly pristine grassy lawn. I immediately planned for a patch of the yard to become a garden, increasing my family’s self-sustainability, and planted many trees indigenous to the area to create more moisture-retaining shade in the summer months, and hopefully enable the birds, bees and all the rest to call my little yard their home once again.
References
Bradshaw, C. J. A., Ehrlich, P. R., Beattie, A., Ceballos, G., Crist, E., Diamond, J., Dirzo, R., Ehrlich, A. H., Harte, J., Hart, M. E., Pyke, G., Raven, P. H., Ripple, W. J., Saltre, F., Turnbull, C., Wackernagel, M., & Blumstein, D. (2021). Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future. Frontiers in Conservation Science, 1. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full.
Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L.T., & Steinberger J. K. (2020). Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nature Communications, 11, 3107. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y.