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. Résumé À partir d'un travail de terrain parmi des sympathisants du mouvement écologiste écossais, l'article décrit les liens qu’établissent ceux-ci entre le futur de la reproduction et le futur de l'environnement. Si l'on pense habituellement la parenté euro-américaine en termes de transmission de matériel biogénétique, on remarque davantage ici une éthique écologique de la reproduction, qui met l'accent sur les environnements dans lesquels les enfants vont naître. L’éthique écologique de la reproduction incite les parents (potentiels) à se demander s'il est responsable d'engendrer de nouvelles générations dans un monde où les ressources sont surexploitées et inégalement distribuées et où les conséquences cumulées des actions humaines pourraient peser non seulement sur l'environnement naturel mais même sur la capacité de l'espèce à se reproduire. Between late 2005 and summer 2007, I conducted fieldwork in a tiny village called Spey Bay on the Moray Firth coast in northeast Scotland, amongst the people who work and volunteer in the wildlife centre there. The Moray Firth has a resident population of over one hundred bottlenose dolphins, and sightings of dolphins, seals, porpoises and minke whales are common in the summer months. Although they are aware that cetaceans are wild animals, the people who work and volunteer at the wildlife centre think of them as intelligent, social, and generally kind-spirited; they represent what is good about the natural world and the ethical imperative to conserve and protect the environment (see also Dow 2016b). The staff and volunteers of the wildlife centre in Spey Bay have placed themselves in the role of caring for these animals, and by extension the wider environment. Along with their specific interest in cetacean conservation, they are influenced by the environmental movement, which compels them to reduce their carbon emissions, recycle their waste, and consume products that have been produced and traded fairly.1 In this article, I will focus on people in Spey Bay's visions of the future, and, specifically, the place of reproduction in the future. As they recognize, while access to food and a safe environment in which to live are of course crucial to individuals’ survival, the endangerment and extinction of species are ultimately caused by the failure to reproduce future generations. In the article, I will trace some of the connections people in Spey Bay made between reproduction, time, and the environment, focusing particularly on their concerns about infertility and endangerment. In thinking about the present and the future, people considered how best to manage natural resources, how to deal with natural drives, and what to do with things that humans have produced. In other words, when people in Spey Bay thought about the future, they worried most about what gets left behind for future generations. Running through all this are their ideas about the cumulative effects of human actions on the natural world and a view of the future as the accumulation of past and present events, decisions, and actions. People in Spey Bay think of having children less in terms of the inheritance of biogenetic substances and more in terms of ensuring a stable environment in which future generations can lead safe and healthy lives. I will call this an ecological ethic of reproduction. It is a model of kinship in which reproductive ethics are primarily about critically assessing the kind of world in which any future child will grow up. Rather than prioritizing a molecular perspective on the creation of new lives, which might be expected when discussing reproduction in the UK in the twenty-first century, it draws the focus out to the environmental scale – asking not whether a particular constellation of sperm, egg, and uterus will create a baby, but whether a person born in the future will be able to make a good life. As Marilyn Strathern (1992a; 1992b) has established (see also Bowlby 2013), in British kinship thinking in the late twentieth century, children were the future to their parents’ past. Kinship and reproduction have been characterized by questions about the future, including the inheritance of property, the solidification of lineages, the passing on of genes, blood, and other bodily substances, and the transfer of memories, artefacts, and stories from one generation to the next. In British kinship, reproduction entails the downward, future-orientated flow of these myriad inheritances from past and present generations to those yet to come (see also Carsten 2001).2 This common-sense connection between reproduction and the future has, since the late twentieth century, most audibly manifested itself in public debates about assisted reproductive technologies (ART), with many early examples characterized by questions about what kind of future we might unwittingly create through tinkering with life itself (see Edwards, Franklin, Hirsch, Price & Strathern 1993; Mulkay 1997). Many scholars of ART have pointed out that one of the revolutionary aspects of these technologies is that they have brought the previously private matters of marital relations, reproductive health, fertility, and parenting into the public domain, though this is also within a context of shifting family structures and kinship norms. But these debates also touched on much wider questions. For example, in his interviews with people about the potential future of ART in the 1990s, Eric Hirsch (1993) found that, in working out the likely effects of these technologies, people drew on the domains of the state and market exchange, which contrasts with the sense that a separation of family from such ‘public’ spheres is characteristic of modern life. In her most recent book, Biological relatives, Sarah Franklin (2013: 300-5) discusses the long history of anxiety about technology being coupled with fears about the future of reproduction. She illustrates this using the case of Plato and Socrates’ dismissal of the ‘sterile’ and ‘barren’ technology of writing. This ancient example of Plato and Socrates’ mistrust of writing shows the ambivalence that technology commonly provokes and how vital ideas about time, progress, kinship, and inheritance are to 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 epochal3 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. 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.5 In 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 slightlyuptight. 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.6 These 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] storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress (Benjamin 2007 [1968]: 257-8). 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. 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. 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