UMass Boston

UMass Boston associate professor in the School for Global Inclusion and Social Development Meghan Elizabeth Kallman has debuted a new book exploring how the climate crisis is affecting family planning, parenting, and political action, with co-author and climate activist Josephine Ferorelli.

The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Crisis is a no-nonsense and compassionate guide to taking practical steps toward meaningful action in combating the climate crisis.  

“We want this book to be a resource for people who are struggling with those decisions so that they feel less alone, feel like they have all the relevant information, and can have a connection with people who are thinking about it the same way or in different, complementary ways,” Ferorelli said. 

Kallman and Ferorelli offer informed perspectives on population, reproduction, and climate justice, exploring how these topics have various meanings all rooted in different histories of oppression and trauma. The book also debunks common misconceptions among these topics, including the harmful legacy of population control, Kallman explains. 

“People assumed that if we were drawing attention to how the climate crisis was shaping family planning, we must then be talking about how we must limit the number of children and families,” Ferorelli said. “Unpacking that took years, and it’s great to have this book now as a tool to help people get there too.” 

Kallman said it’s important to recognize that not everyone gets to plan how they want their families to look for various reasons, including health, environmental justice, pollution, contamination, age, and sexual violence. She said this is especially understood within the justice-oriented UMass Boston campus community that often advocates for climate politics and community organizing. The book also addresses the guilt that many millennials and younger generations may be feeling about their family composition.  

“What we’ve tried to do is relieve ourselves of the burden of “individual choice”, and show that the only right answer in the entire book is to work as hard as we can together to ensure the safety of everybody’s children in the next generation,” Kallman said. “We try to say, you do you, and then as you grow up, you have a responsibility is to make the world safer, fairer, and healthier.” 

A decade ago, Kallman and Ferorelli were introduced to each other at a mutual friend's concert and immediately bonded over their shared passion for climate activism. Soon after, they co-founded the organization Conceivable Future, which brings young people together at house parties to have open conversations about climate change and its impact on family planning. The organizing project was created as an open-source framework for people to organize their own conversations in a nonjudgmental space.  

“People were so ready to talk,” Ferorelli said. “It was bursting out of people, and anyone who wanted to join the conversation were ready to talk about it.” 

Kallman and Ferorelli either hosted events themselves or collaborated with a network of organizations and then started offering support remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic. When they were contacted by a literary agent, they saw it as an opportunity to communicate the ideas discussed through their organizing project with more nuance and context to reach people who wouldn’t be likely to turn out for open discussions or activist events. 

“We also talk to parents and nonparents, grandparents, and childless by choice. The whole range of family compositions is represented by this book and organizing,” Ferorelli said. “We hope that for climate concerned people, particularly for people who are beyond their reproductive years, that they read the book and develop compassion and tools for engaging with people at different points of the generational experience.” 

According to Ferorelli, in the second half of the book, readers can learn more about how to get involved in community work and activism from the local to national levels with a breakdown of the issues mentioned in the first part of the book and how to support them. 

“Once you start doing one thing you meet other people, and you have a feeling of the richness that we need for a successful movement,” she said. “We’re trying to give people the tools to think about what level of intervention might feel right for them and there’s no one thing that’s right for everybody. Somewhere in there is the community and activist work that is a good fit for your skills.”