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

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.

that ambivalence.Ambivalence about technology parallels ambivalence about the future: 'It is the fear of degeneration in the wake of technological change, set against a more confident expectation of an improved, more fruitful, future, that has long characterized technological ambivalence ' , Franklin writes (2013: 300).One of the most striking characteristics of these fears is how quickly they turn to questions about the future of kinship and fertility.It may seem obvious that ART would provoke concerns about kinship, since many have supposed that this is what they are all about, but Franklin makes the important point that this relationship between technology and kinship is not unique to ART -it may even apply to something as (now) banal as writing.Similarly, when people worry about the future of kinship and reproduction, they may be concerned about much more than family.
By positing a crisis on the global scale in which every single person is implicated, environmentalism makes connections across, and thereby potentially renders meaningless, the boundaries around domestic, local, national, and natural worlds.This is its power and its challenge.British people's concerns about human interventions in both the environment and reproduction suggest radical consequences for the concept of nature and its ability to act as the ultimate context.At the end of the twentieth century, as Strathern (1992a) has pointed out, it seemed that interfering with nature by manipulating embryos in vitro or destroying the rainforests could have epochal 3 implications: human interventions, whether at the microscopic or the industrial scale, put nature's status and its future in question.Fears about the destruction of the natural world were not only potentially catastrophic in a practical sense, but also had enormous conceptual ramifications, as they created a sense that nature might not be as all-encompassing or powerful as modernist thinking had assumed.
Despite these predictions about the effects of ART and environmental destruction on nature, what was less clear at the end of the twentieth century was what effect environmentalism might have on kinship.In an ecological ethic of reproduction, the importance of biogenetic substance in creating relatedness is still assumed, and the universality of the desire to have a child 'of one's own' goes unquestioned, but the main concern is whether it is responsible and ethical to bring children into a world that has been severely damaged by human actions and which has stretched, dwindling, and unequally distributed resources.An ecological ethic of reproduction is one aspect of a worldview in which humans are part of an interdependent and biodiverse environment, which cautions that straying too far from nature is dangerous for everyone, and which conceptualizes parental responsibility as reaching beyond the individual parent or nuclear family to whole communities and societies which create the conditions into which children are born.This article attempts both to describe how this reproductive ethic is manifested in Spey Bay and to suggest its wider implications for our understandings of kinship, reproduction, time, and the environment -and how they might be connected.
In my fieldwork in Spey Bay, I followed Strathern's (1992a) approach of tracing analogies and connections, paying particular attention to the ways in which analogy compels action (Street & Copeman 2014).Analogies cross boundaries and show no deference for scale.It behoves anthropologists to focus on these apparent transgressions, since they can make our ways of knowing visible.In talking about reproduction, people in Spey Bay made connections between different worlds and they considered the ramifications of such connections.In conversations about reproduction, they discussed kinship, relatedness, and family, but also nonhuman animals, industry, government, the state of the natural world, and the future of humanity.People in Spey Bay worried not only about their own children or grandchildren, but also about unknown and not yet conceived future generations, including those of other species.
Along with this attention to the ways in which people make connections across domains, it will become clear that there is some slippage in the kinds of environments that people in Spey Bay are concerned about in relation to reproduction.They are, certainly, explicitly informed by environmentalism and concomitant concerns about 'the environment' , 4 as in that which surrounds all species and provides the habitat and resources upon which we rely for survival, but they are also concerned about other environments.Their anxieties about the future of reproduction are about the domestic, economic, social, political, and ecological environments in which future generations will live.Not only is this a reflection of the capacious nature of the term 'environment' , but it also indicates the fact that environmentalists are attentive to the interactions between these different environments.In other words, they are particularly concerned about the effects that humans have on the natural world, and so are attentive not only to the state of the ecological environment but also to human society.As I will show, thinking about the relationship between reproduction and the wider world is a reflection of the interdependence that environmentalists perceive between humans and nature.By following the promiscuous connections people in Spey Bay made between different domains of life, I will show their sense of the connectedness of humans and their environments, as well as the centrality of reproduction to how they think about the future.Before focusing my attention squarely on the reproduction of future generations, I will give a sense of what everyday life in Spey Bay is like, with specific reference to the problem of the proper management of waste, illustrated by the examples of public beach cleaning and household recycling.

Caring for the environment
The people with whom I worked in the wildlife centre in Spey Bay, their friends and family, ranged in age from their late teens to sixties.Some had grown up in the area, but most had grown up elsewhere in Scotland or England, and a few were from Western Europe and North America.While some volunteers come to Spey Bay only for a set period of time, everyone saw it as a place in which they could build a good life, and many of the permanent staff in the centre are former volunteers who have decided to settle in the area.The thirty or so houses that make up Spey Bay sit along a road that heads north, then, just before it reaches the sea, turns left to a dead end which becomes the wildlife centre's car park.Beyond that is the mouth of the River Spey.The wildlife centre is based in a complex of buildings, now owned by the Crown Estate, which once housed a successful salmon fishing station that operated between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. 5In the 1990s, a local couple converted some of the buildings into a wildlife centre aimed at locals and tourists.Later that decade, it was taken over by an international conservation charity, which still runs the centre as its flagship national site for advocacy, education, and fundraising.
While the people who work and volunteer in the wildlife centre are those most obviously involved in the environmental movement in the area, I had many conversations with visitors to the centre and other locals who are concerned about the environment and climate change.Although they might not all identify themselves as environmentalists, living 'close to nature' seems to compel people there to think about their relationship to their environment.This is in line with the mainstreaming of environmental ideas and values in the last few decades.Indeed, the Scottish Government (2014) included a pledge to pursue environmentally friendly policies in its draft constitution for a potential independent Scotland.
Caring for the environment is popularly perceived (and sometimes derided) in Britain as a middle-class concern, and most of the people who work in the wildlife centre are middle class.There is certainly a congruence between their core ethical values -taking responsibility, planning for the future, and making good lives -and their own socio-economic positions, but this popular association of environmentalism with a certain class also overlooks the foundational role that many more marginalized groups have played in the environmental movement (see Taylor 2011 on environmental justice and environmental racism in the US; see also Klein 2014 for numerous examples of indigenous peoples' battles against environmental exploitation).One important aspect of caring for the environment entails recognizing that everyone will be affected by climate change, but that its effects will be unevenly distributed, and that those best resourced to cope also have the most power to prevent it.
The wildlife centre in Spey Bay holds regular beach cleans on Sunday afternoons.These events represent a crucial opportunity to educate visitors about the anthropogenic pressures faced by marine creatures and their environments.At the beginning of the beach cleans, staff give the participating adults and children protective gloves, litter picks, and tips about what to look out for as they comb the shoreline for human-made debris.The rubbish is collected together further up the beach, to be sorted by staff and later removed by the local council.When they have finished collecting, participants are faced with piles of car tyres, innumerable types of plastic, rope, and netting, glass bottles and cans, and plenty of other more unusual finds besides.At this point, wildlife centre staff point out what the presence of all this rubbish might mean for the species that live in the sea.They tell children that turtles and whales often eat carrier bags, mistaking them for squid or jellyfish, and that dolphins and fish can get entangled in abandoned fishing nets.Through this example, they show them the consequences of careless waste management, or what gets left behind.They remind them not to drop litter, especially in parks and nature reserves.They encourage adults to recycle their household waste and to use reusable fabric shopping bags rather than plastic ones.Finally, they thank them and congratulate them on the important job they have done and remind them about the generous servings of cake on offer in the wildlife centre's café.
Twenty-first-century environmentalism is, in many ways, a contemporary reworking of the Green movement(s) of the 1970s and 1980s, fitted to a context of globalization and neoliberalism.The beach cleans in Spey Bay exemplify the close connection between consumption and the environment and the assumption that educating people, especially children, about the effects of waste on the environment will bring about a change in their behaviour.Over the decades, environmental discourse has sometimes been explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, yet most people who care about the environment not surprisingly find it impossible to extricate themselves from capitalism in their everyday lives.For many twenty-first-century environmentalists in an era of advanced capitalism, a more pragmatic way of framing the argument is to focus on questions of sustainability (see Uekoetter 2012), although some environmental scientists argue that it is too late to attain this goal and urge us instead to focus on adaptive strategies and resilience (Benson & Craig 2014).
Activist writer Naomi Klein (2014) has recently called for a global rethink of our political economy, arguing that capitalism and its core 'extractivist' mind-set, in which the natural world primarily represents resources for humans to exploit, is the main barrier to preventing catastrophic climate change.Similarly, David Graeber (2012: 278) argues that efforts to prevent climate change have so far been 'woefully inadequate' , because the cosmology of industrial civilization encourages ecologically unsustainable ways of living.Recycling is a term that originated in oil refining, but came, in the 1960s, to indicate what consumers did with household waste.For Graeber, this semantic shift parallels a change in focus from industrial practices to individual responsibilities, bolstered by pre-existing ideas about the morality of waste, saving, and degradation, as well as Christian and early scientific ideas about balance and equilibrium.While increasing numbers of people are attempting to live their lives in more sustainable ways, these efforts will ultimately have to be matched by industries and corporations, which produce far more carbon than households anyway.As the beach clean example suggests, the management of waste is an important part of the everyday efforts that people in Spey Bay make to enact their environmental ethics, though in fact when it came to the management of their own household waste, it raised more dilemmas than it solved.When I first moved to Spey Bay, I lived in the house for residential volunteers, just next to the wildlife centre itself.Residential volunteers were given a food budget by the charity that runs the centre, and they often shopped, cooked, and ate together.They usually ordered their food on-line to be delivered from a local supermarket.While many were uncomfortable with supporting supermarkets, given their reputation for the mismanagement of natural resources and poor treatment of suppliers, they did think that these deliveries were a relatively fuel-efficient means of procuring food in this particular location.When they had the chance, those who had less tight budgets would often substitute and supplement supermarket shopping with items from local independent shops, especially those that stocked organic and Fair Trade brands.
While living in the volunteers' house, I noticed that the recycling, which was collected in separate bins in the kitchen, would often build up for a long time before anyone dealt with it.At the time, the council did not collect recycling separately from residents' homes, so to prevent it going into landfill, the recyclable waste had to be taken to the nearest designated recycling plant.This was only a few miles away (though off the main road), but far enough to necessitate a car journey to carry the weight of up to seven people's recyclable waste.This raised an intractable dilemma for the volunteers, many of whom felt that regular car journeys to the recycling plant were environmentally unjustifiable.By not instituting household recycling, they thought that the council was being 'lazy' and putting them in an invidious position.Yet the manager of the wildlife centre, who lived next door, encouraged the volunteers to separate their rubbish, not least because the centre had to be seen to be encouraging the principle of recycling in its own staff members' behaviour.As the only person living in the volunteer house who owned a car, and as an anthropologist rather than an ecologist, I often took the recycling to the plant myself -to be helpful and because I had a low tolerance for watching it accumulate, especially since the house was prone to rodent infestations.In a sense, I was prioritizing our immediate, domestic environment over the health of the natural world.By doing so, I facilitated the volunteers in circumventing some of their qualms about making a car journey, powered by fossil fuels, in order to deal with their waste in a more environmentally friendly manner, though of course it also marked me out: as an outsider, as someone who was prepared to put her environmental credentials to one side in the interests of hygiene, as a car-owner, and as ever so slightly uptight.
The everyday ethics of people in Spey Bay might be described using Felix Ringel's term 'techniques to create a future ' (2014: 56), by which he means actions that both allow for present conditions to endure in the future and hold the promise of continuity in time.These issues of endurance and sustainability in the future point to questions of hope and despair, which are never far from the minds of environmentalists.But, as their actions bear out, people in Spey Bay clearly do retain some hope for the future, even if only the near future.They fear environmental crisis rather than expect it.Temporalities of hope are complicated and contextual, but attending to people's hopes is one way of learning what they fear, now and in the future.In public debates about ART, opponents have expressed weighty concerns about what technological interventions into the creation of human life might mean for the future, from charges of Nazi-style eugenics, to a loss of humanity, to the creation of monsters.Environmentalism could be charged with painting a similarly catastrophic picture, though getting caught up in the intensity of such fears -rather than their content -is to miss the point. 6These fears are not so much about the end of the world as about what might be lost if one path is taken and not another; they express what kind of world people want now and in the future. 7 A model of time that seems apt, with some modifications, to people's thinking in Spey Bay is Walter Benjamin's classic description of the angel of history, with its direct reference to climatic chaos and overtones of impending crisis: Both environmentalism and the reproduction of children are concerned with, and productive of, the future.But the timelines of reproduction and of environmentalism are not singular.On the one hand, people in Spey Bay believe in scientific theories of evolution and cultural models of progress, but, on the other, they know that the future is the accumulation, rather than the progressive or linear culmination, of the past and present.The 'pile of debris' that the angel faces contains the wrong turns, the sidesteps and the leaps forward, all together.But for people in Spey Bay, as he is blown to and fro in the storm, the angel of history is facing forwards and, rather than contemplating the debris of the past, anticipating it in the future.

Reproductive resources
People in Spey Bay rarely brought up ideas of inheritance in the sense of either phenotype or property when we talked about reproduction and kinship, but they did share the sense that future generations will inherit the environments that we create.This is encapsulated, in a practical sense, by their assumption that parental responsibility begins with planning and creating a 'stable environment' for children to be born into.Erin, 8 who is married with a daughter, used this evocative phrase when describing the ideal conditions in which to become a parent, and it eloquently condenses her aspirations and anxieties for future generations, which were shared by everyone I knew.Erin's phrase encompasses the biological, relational, social, economic, and ecological worlds, variously and simultaneously indicating a pregnant woman's body, the family home, the landscape, the planet, and various other environments in between.Scotland has the lowest birth rate of the countries that make up the UK and is below 'replacement rate' (i.e.fewer than two children per couple), though this is currently balanced out by immigration (Scottish Government 2010).In my discussions with people in Spey Bay, it became apparent that many were aware of this low birth rate.Rural areas of Scotland have higher birth rates compared to cities, and Moray (the county in which Spey Bay is situated) and neighbouring Aberdeenshire have some of the nation's highest rates.According to the Scottish Government (2010), some of this may be 'driven by selective migration of people wishing to start or increase their families from cities to suburban areas as a result of housing market and quality of life issues' .People living in Spey Bay certainly see it as a good place in which to bring up children, and many of their ideas about what makes a good life are coterminous with those about what makes a stable environment in which to parent.Access to beautiful landscapes and fresh air, proximity to the seaside, and opportunities to spot rare wildlife were assumed to be beneficial to both children and adults.The fact that young families could afford to live in houses rather than apartments, often with their own gardens, on public and charity sector salaries was also valued.

Journal of the
I asked people in Spey Bay whether they thought the state should have any role in encouraging a higher birth rate in Scotland, or whether it should offer incentives for women to have children while they are younger.Generally, people were uncomfortable with state intervention in reproductive decision-making and felt that, given the relatively dense population in the UK as a whole, increasing the birth rate in Scotland was not a major concern.People perceived infertility as a physiological condition which usually had negative effects on people's lives and so thought it fair and humane to provide access to fertility treatments wherever possible, but many voiced doubts about whether the National Health Service (NHS) should allocate much money to this type of treatment given its finite resources.While they were highly sympathetic to the infertile and the desire to have biogenetically related children, no one thought that having children was a right. 9 A commonly held view amongst people in Spey Bay was that there are already large numbers of children without parents or homes in the world and many suggested that people who want to become parents (whether or not they are infertile) should consider adoption.Andrew was a volunteer in the wildlife centre at Spey Bay.He was in his mid-twenties, in a relationship, and had no children, though he planned to have them in the future.Although, like everyone I spoke to, he sympathized with the 'natural' desire to have children 'of one's own' , he countered this by saying that there is 'huge pressure on this planet in terms of resources' to frame his concerns about whether it was appropriate for people to turn to infertility treatment.
Jenny, whose partner Paul also volunteered at the wildlife centre, similarly described the world as 'overcrowded and overpopulated' and concluded, 'I don't think humankind is managing itself very well' .Jenny was in her early fifties; she has two adult children and works as a social worker.Like Andrew and others, she was sympathetic to infertile people's desires to have children, and she drew on her own experience of meeting Paul later in life to express her empathy with older people seeking technological assistance to achieve a pregnancy.However, like Andrew, she compared the 'resources' that would be needed to help an older couple achieve a pregnancy to the needs of the 'unwanted children of the world' and concluded that 'it doesn't stack up' .In this, Jenny reflected a common belief amongst people in Spey Bay that it is ethically preferable for people to look after children in need who have already been born than to expend finite resources on creating new ones.
Although some ART are available on the NHS, 10 provision is still quite limited in relation to the typical 'success rates' of these technologies, and so even in the UK, medical treatments for infertility are difficult to access, especially for people on lower incomes who cannot afford private treatment here or abroad.In their comments about caring for children who need homes, both Jenny and Andrew explicitly referred to resources.Their concerns about infertility treatment using up stretched resources point to their sense that the world's resources -whether parents, medicine, money, or decent homes -are unevenly distributed and their fear that ART could exacerbate this.This concern about the uneven distribution of resources demonstrates their keen sense of the dependence of future generations on current and past ones.These concerns are also linked with a tension between individuals' freedom of choice, on the one hand, and collective goods, on the other.The everyday ethics of people in Spey Bay and their reproductive ethics are both characterized by concerns about how to control excess and waste in order to achieve stability.Andrew and Jenny fear that greater access to ART will direct resources away from the 'unwanted children of the world' .This concern is not only about entrenched economic inequality, but also about how we best manage existing resources and needs.Their ideal future is one that is sufficiently resourced to receive future generations.

An endangered future
Now that climate change has been accepted as scientific orthodoxy, scientists have become more vocal in pointing out the necessity to take reproduction into account in studying the natural world and predicting its future. 11In 2009, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society published a themed issue which focused on 'Impacts of environmental change on reproduction and development in wildlife' , edited by Stuart R. Milligan, William V. Holt, and Rhiannon Lloyd.In their introduction, they write that, while the global human population is growing rapidly, reproduction amongst nonhuman animals is not faring so well and rates of extinction in other species are accelerating (2009: 3313).They note that '[s]uccessful reproduction is fundamental to the survival and evolution of all species' (2009: 3313), but bemoan the fact that little interdisciplinary work has been done by scientists specializing in reproduction and scientists looking at the effects of environmental change on populations and ecosystems (2009: 3314-15).Their conclusion makes clear the importance of the environmentally sustainable distribution of resources and the interconnectedness of species and their environments: In reality, the success of humans to populate the planet has been dependent on the combination of their ability to reproduce successfully and then to minimize loss of offspring through controlling and manipulating their own micro-environment.Unfortunately, this local control has largely operated without consideration of the knock-on effects of resource use on the macro-environment.It is now clear that anthropogenic environmental changes may affect both the reproductive success and the survival of many wildlife species by multiple routes and in often unpredictable ways.Since man [sic] does not exist in isolation, these wider impacts of anthropogenic macro-environmental changes need to be understood by society at all levels (2009: 3318).
In Spey Bay, a vital locus of concern about the environment is species endangerment.In December 2006, a dead sperm whale washed up on a nearby beach.The incident was covered by the national and local press, which reported that the whale, an adult male, had died of malnutrition.For people in Spey Bay, this tragic incident exemplified the consequences of the destruction of cetaceans' environments by human activity.They told me that the whale was probably unable to feed sufficiently because it could not find enough squid owing to industrial fishing methods or because it had swallowed some of the indigestible plastics that pollute the seas.For them, this whale's fate epitomized the effects of accumulated human activity, as well as the inattention to the fact, by those who pollute the seas, destroy wild habitats, and decimate the food chain through industrialized fishing, that we live in an interconnected and interdependent evironment.
Sperm whales are a threatened species because of environmental changes and because they are still recovering from the effects of whaling, which was a booming industry in northeast Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.As well as being endangered species in themselves, sperm whales represent many of the problems that environmentalists perceive to be threatening the environment more generally, from the effects of industry and acquisitive capitalism, to a tendency to think of plants and animals as resources to be exploited, to a lack of respect for other species' ways of life, to chronic short-termism. 12They prismatically reflect the past, present, and future, exemplifying the effects of catastrophically poor management of 'natural resources' and the more or less effective responses to the losses that mismanagement has caused. 13 In his ethnography of environmentalism in Hong Kong, Timothy Choy says: To speak of an endangered species is to speak of a form of life that threatens to become extinct in the near future; it is to raise the stakes in a controversy so that certain actions carry the consequences of destroying the possibility of life's continued existence.Species can be endangered, as can ecosystems.And, as environmentalists grapple increasingly with the tight bonds that can be formed between people and places, between situated practices and specific landscapes, and between what are commonly glossed as culture and nature, discourses of endangerment have come to structure not only narrowly construed environmental politics, but also politics of cultural survival (2011: 26-7).
Choy describes endangerment as provoking 'anticipatory nostalgia' , and this is apt here too.In contrast to many of the British communities that have been described by anthropologists, people in Spey Bay do not dwell on the past and tend to locate (potential) crisis in the future.They feel that life in Spey Bay offers a sense of warmth and belonging and see this as a sign of hope.They wish to conserve this, not to preserve a past idyll so much as to ensure the survival of future generations of all species.While present life in Spey Bay is not characterized by nostalgia for a lost, better past, people there do fear being nostalgic for what they have in the present when they reach the future -and the ability to reproduce 'naturally' is crucial to this.
In his history of environmentalism, Joachim Radkau (2014) has noted that environmentalism is characterized, within the contemporary 'risk society' , by a focus on hypothetical risks.The affects of endangerment include fear, anxiety, and a sense of heightened threat.While these affects may all originate in the past or present, they are anticipatory of worsened future conditions.The temporality of environmentalism is future-orientated, but it is a negative future of crisis, death, and destruction.This contrasts with the normative generative temporality of reproduction, which posits having children as a necessary and positive event in a normal adult life-course (which, of course, adds to the sense of loss of many who experience infertility).However, the negative affect of endangerment can also be generative, in driving the efforts of those interested in caring for the environment.In Spey Bay, people's primary focus was on cetacean endangerment, but when we talked more about how people have children, it became clear that their fears extended to humans, pointing to an endangered future in which the expected link between generativity and futurity could become denatured.People in Spey Bay connect reproduction and children with the future.They believe that future conditions are produced through present and past actions, and this is crucial in their understanding of their own ethical responsibilities.In the discussions I had with them, these concerns were manifested most forcefully in two examples, both concerning future infertility.One was anxiety about pollutants in water affecting people's ability to reproduce, and the other was a sense that technological assistance in reproduction might eventually 'breed in' infertility.These examples demonstrate the links they perceived between reproduction and the state of the environment and the assumption that future generations will be affected by the actions of current ones.This suggests a sense that infertility may be a sign of environmental problems as well as a harbinger of endangerment.
When we discussed whether rates of infertility might be linked with contemporary life-styles, Jenny was prompted to think of the interaction between human activity, biology, and the environment, suggesting that oestrogenic chemicals in the water supply were contributing to a 'feminization of men' .She told me that she thought that these pollutants were causing 'physiological stresses' that were 'contributing to difficulty in conceiving' for many people.Various scholars have written about the environmental movement's framing of pollutants, like the endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs) to which Jenny refers here, and specifically the ways in which gender is made through activism on this issue (see di Chiro 2010; Lamoreaux 2013; Scott 2009).EDCs are striking because they show no deference for human boundaries -these 'oestrogen-based residues' , as Jenny described them, are promiscuous chemicals, associated with female sexuality, hormones, and reproductive physiology.As they circulate through water supplies, food, and bodies, they seem to poke fun at binary categories of male and female, human and animal, land and water, threatening to leave confusion, infertility, and endangerment in their wake.
Internationally, campaigns against EDCs have been especially effective in capturing public attention because they touch on existing assumptions about the universality of maternal responsibility and our future existence relying on 'normal' sexual reproduction, pervasive fears about runaway scientific progress, and the sense that future generations will inherit the consequences of previous ones' choices and actions.To people who are concerned about the future of the environment, EDCs are also a reminder of the importance of ideas of waste, and how to deal with it.The idea of EDCs polluting water supplies concerns not only boundary crossing, but also what we do with excess.In talking about children who were orphaned, homeless, or had been taken into care, Jenny and Andrew both suggested an imbalance between the numbers of children in need and the world's 'resources' .This sense that excesses need to be managed and that balance needs to be maintained became even clearer when people talked about the potential long-term consequences of relying on technology to conceive children.
Andrew articulated his concerns in the following terms: 'I think, in our society, or the human race as a whole, we've evolved beyond evolution' , since 'people who naturally can't conceive can now conceive with science' .Sophie worked with Andrew in the wildlife centre.She was in her late twenties, single, and had no children.In discussing current fertility rates in Scotland, she referred to what she had learnt about animal husbandry as an undergraduate student and recalled that 'actually humans are pretty crap at being fertile if you compare them to the farm animals [which] we breed . . .over the successive generations to be really fertile' .She went on to describe her concern that assisting people to have children through technology could mean that 'some things don't naturally select out' , which led her to conclude that humans would find it increasingly difficult to reproduce successfully.In the next breath, she pulled her focus out to the planetary scale, saying, 'Then again, I suppose . . .from the ecologist's point of view, I might say, well, there's quite a lot of humans and maybe this is just the way it goes, maybe this is the way the cycle goes' .
In general, people in Spey Bay were nuanced and sensitive in their judgements of ART and were very sympathetic to the 'natural' desire of infertile people to have children, but there were examples of assisted conception that we talked about which provoked strong negative reactions, specifically those which seemed to be the result of (potential) parents putting their own needs above those of their children.For many, the idea of post-menopausal women using ART seemed to represent an excess of individualism manifested in personal choice that could both denature reproduction and dehumanize kinship.Paul's own father was in his mid-forties when he was born and he thought that women using ART when they have passed menopause was 'a bit selfish' .He said, I don't think it's fair on children, really.And it's so unnatural.I don't know if we should as a human race be necessarily moving -I feel this about a lot of things -I don't think we should necessarily be moving away from nature all the time into some world of science.It just seems the wrong way.
People in Spey Bay drew on images of movement and momentum when they described their concerns about the future, linking space and time as they outlined their fears about human activity becoming divorced from nature through scientific over-reaching.It is well established that science and technology are, in Euro-American thinking, closely associated with progress and forward movement, and much of the positive rhetoric, and marketing, surrounding ART promotes their promissory value.This resonates with the biogenetic model of reproduction, in which children are their parents' future, but also with an ecological ethic that holds current generations responsible for creating stable environments for future ones.Like space, how we envisage time is closely linked with how we see our environments and with our visions of the future.But in the concerns about 'moving away from nature' that people expressed to me, they were not simply reproducing a linear progressive view of history.Andrew even made the striking claim that ART had caused humans to 'evolve beyond evolution' .The future, in their view, is the accumulation of choices and activities, though these are never fully predictable or 'rational' , but are contingent on context and relations.As humans are the species with the greatest capacity to spoil the environment, they believe that we have a particular duty to try to prevent catastrophic destruction by responsible action and careful planning.
In her comments comparing the fertility of farm animals with humans, Sophie switched between different models of time.The timeline of selective breeding, which she overlapped with evolutionary time, is a linear one in which certain traits can be bred in (or out).In this model, future generations are a product of the decisions and actions of previous ones, which can be progressive or degenerative.In thinking about the distant future, Sophie referred to the cyclical 'ecologist's point of view' .In doing so, she was making clear not only her concerns about technological hubris leading to human endangerment, but also her sense that humans are only one part of the environment -and, from an ecological point of view, not necessarily the most important one, either.There is a strain of environmental discourse that emphasizes the importance of stabilizing the human population in creating an environmentally sustainable future.Here, Sophie goes beyond this dystopian scenario of too many humans consuming the world's resources to another vision of the future in which humans have themselves become endangered, and there is an implication in what she says that, if humans do become endangered or extinct, other species might live on.

Conclusion
In contrast to the temporalities described by Jane Guyer (2007) in her thoughtprovoking discussion of the near future, people in Spey Bay think about and plan for a range of futures, including the near future.Their everyday efforts to care for the environment and their concerns about creating a stable environment for children both suggest that the near future is salient.People in Spey Bay draw on multiple chronotopes (see Bear 2014) when thinking about future generations, but they do perceive connections -albeit complex ones -between actions in the present and the future.
People in Spey Bay were not militant in their adherence to environmentalism, much as they worried about the future of the planet and its myriad inhabitants.Although they are aware of 'tipping-point' arguments about species extinction, sea-level rises, and the extraction of fossil fuels, they see themselves as being at a place in history in which there is still time to prevent catastrophe.Their everyday practice and ethics reflect a striving for stability, and this is true of their attitudes to technology as much as anything.They did not dwell on dystopian visions of the future and their concerns about the future of human reproduction were suggestive rather than expectant.They did not assume that ART would lead to human endangerment, but instead hoped that those with the power to do so considered such hypothetical risks when developing, promoting, and providing treatments for infertility.As Sophie pointed out in her example of selective breeding in agriculture, some technical intervention in reproduction can be desirable, and technology is not necessarily degenerative or endangering.The difficulty is in achieving a balance between individual desires and collective well-being, or present needs and future consequences.Envisioning a future in which people have become over-reliant on ART to reproduce, people in Spey Bay worried that there would be a cumulative effect of choices which favour individual desires over collective goods.For them, the future is the accumulation of those choices, which can build up like waste or pollution and create loss and death.
While we are used to thinking of Euro-American kinship and reproduction in terms of biogenetic substances being inherited through the generations, in an ecological ethic of reproduction, the emphasis is on the environments that parents create and leave behind for future generations.In this ethic, having children is about passing on stable environments in which they can thrive.This is an important departure from established understandings of kinship both in the anthropology of Britain (and the Western world more generally) and in the literature on ART.It suggests not only that people are thinking about more than biogenetic inheritances or kin relations when it comes to reproduction, but also that fertility emerges from good human-environment relations.This complicates a cultural model in which reproduction consists of the mixing of particular bodily substances and with it the implication that humans simply reproduce through their own gametes.It provokes a change of scale in perception to take account of the fact that, in order to be fertile, humans must have access to good-enough environments in which to conceive, gestate, give birth to, and nurture children.The greater awareness of infertility that has accompanied the development of ART and the increasing age of women having their first child have both contributed to a sense that fertility cannot be taken for granted and that pregnancy is achieved.In the ecological ethic of reproduction, which is informed by concerns about species endangerment and the effects of pollution and climate change as well as greater popular awareness of human infertility, fertility is not an essential property of persons, but is made through creating stable environments.Importantly, these concerns about building stable environments can be read back into a biogenetic model of kinship, since anxieties about the circulation of EDCs and the over-use of reproductive technologies posit that human activities are not only potentially destroying the environment but also causing infertility by changing our very substance.An ecological ethic of reproduction proposes that we should take account of environmental factors when considering the health of all species, and it suggests that infertility may be a clue to environmental harms.Rather than jumping straight to a biomedical 'fix' for infertility, an ecological ethic prompts people in Spey Bay to consider why people might be infertile in the first place and whether it might have something to do with the state of the planet itself.Scientists are also increasingly interested in these connections, for example in toxicological research on the effects of environmental pollutants on sperm (Lamoreaux 2013), and contemporary biological science is paying increased attention to cellular environments, for example in research into epigenetics, regenerative medicine, and the culture media in which IVF embryos are matured before being transferred to the uterus.Recent sociological and anthropological research has also shown the current importance placed on parenting, or what we might call the familial environment, in British culture and public policy (Lee, Bristow, Faircloth & Macvarish 2014), suggesting that the prominence of conception in reproduction has somewhat diminished.
The contemporary environmental movement has been criticized for its focus on individual efforts, which can have the effect of detracting attention from the ways in which corporations and governments contribute to environmental change.But individual concerns and actions are still an important part of the struggle, not least in building awareness of the causes and effects of a changing climate.The case that I have discussed here, of the people who work and volunteer in the wildlife centre in Spey Bay, shows just how deep anxieties about the environment go.It illustrates that reproduction is not only about kinship or biology; it is also about how people build and grow environments.The anxiety expressed by the people of Spey Bay that the world will not be fit to nurture future generations reflects a highly critical perspective on the world in which they live: it is an indictment of a hegemonic worldview that prioritizes economic growth over ecological fecundity and it reflects their sense of the profound interdependence of humans and their environments.
In an ecological ethic of reproduction, the goal is to live and reproduce in an environment that is both liveable and capable of regenerating itself.The implication of this, that environments nurture people, has significant implications for anthropological understandings of reproduction and kinship in the twenty-first century.An ecological ethic of reproduction moves the emphasis away from the biogenetic model with which we are familiar -and which seems to drive demand for ART -towards the making of healthy and stable environments.This suggests a subtle shift in the temporality of reproduction, in which reproduction is as much about the ongoing nurturance of children as it is about the conditions of their conception.This is also significant in Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 653-669 C 2016 The Authors.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 653-669 C 2016 The Authors.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 22, 653-669 C 2016 The Authors.Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of Royal Anthropological Institute.