Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into This World?

Introduction

Throughout the world, the birthrate is falling. I’m not overmuch concerned about this, actually; we humans have had a good run, have obviously taken more than our share of our planet’s bounty and so on, and as a species I doubt we’ll be missed. But I am at the time of life when my friends have kids of child-rearing age, and here and there I’ll hear one of these friends say, whether quoting their kids or expressing their own sentiment or both, “It just seems wrong to bring a child into this world.” This gets my hackles up; in this post I explore why.

Just to make sure this sentiment is a thing, vs. me just happening to know an outsized number of nutjobs, I did a little research. Sure enough, a large (N=11,945) Pew survey conducted in 2023, when the US fertility rate reached a historic low, catalogs a variety of reason people aren’t procreating, and among these are two flavors of “it seems wrong,” including “concerns about the state of the world, other than the environment” (cited by 38% of respondents aged 18-49) and “concerns about the environment, including climate change” (26%). A third position, which didn’t figure in the Pew survey but I kept stumbling upon in my  research, is the idea that it’s ethically wrong to bring about a human life, period, since we can expect that human to undergo a lot of suffering during his or her lifetime. (This is similar to the “concerns about the state of the world,” except that it doesn’t account for the specific circumstances that person would face: this perspective is that it’s always wrong.)

I’m going to address these in order of how much they bother me.

But first, some demographic grounding…

You might wonder why I would challenge any resistance to the idea of procreation, given how overpopulation has for decades been cited as one of the greatest problems facing the world. I first encountered this notion in junior high when “ZPG,” zero population growth, was treated like the most noble of human endeavors. At that time, the bestselling book The Population Bomb, by Paul Ehrlich, was still being talked about, years after its publication. In fact, Ehrlich’s influence continued such that his ideas showed up again in my college Environmental Studies course. But oddly enough, Ehrlich’s predictions have not been materially borne out.

I still encounter people who believe overpopulation is a major global problem. They haven’t gotten the memo: the human population will peak during this century and then decline. This isn’t some hunch or non-validated claim your blogger is spouting; it’s widely accepted by demographers, and explained in this report by the United Nations. (The timing of this downturn is somewhat debated; the direction is not. For example, the UN predicts a peak population of 10.3 billion in the 2080s, whereas University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, publishing in The Lancet, projects a peak of 9.7 billion as early as 2064.)

Why is this? It’s due to the dramatic drop in fertility rates globally. The term “fertility” in this context doesn’t just mean our capability of reproducing (e.g., sperm count, other biological factors). It’s generally short for “total fertility rate” (TFR) and indicates the number of children a couple ends up having, based on all factors including their willingness to even try to conceive. The current TFR for the U.S. is 1.60 (i.e., on average each couple has 1.6 children). It’s widely considered that to maintain a country’s population requires a TFR of 2.1. (This is the accepted threshold because slightly more boys than girls are born, and not all children survive to reproductive age.) Worldwide, the TFR currently stands at 2.25, and it’s dropping fast, and has been for decades, since 1965—the same year the birth control pill came out, and the US Supreme Court struck down state laws banning contraception for married people. Check out this graph, from the excellent book Factfulness – Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling et al:

So how come the world population isn’t declining yet, despite the low TFR? First of all, while one in four people already live in a country whose population has peaked, this sub-replacement-level TFR probably hasn’t been reached yet globally. (I say “probably” because there’s disagreement on this; some demographers believe it has.) The UN predicts the worldwide TFR won’t go below 2.1 until 2036. Even when it does, the population won’t decline right away, due to a concept that demographers call momentum. Jesús Fernández-Villaverde, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, describes it thus, in an interview you can read here:

Momentum means the population will keep growing for 15 to 30 years after you fall below the replacement rate. Let me give a simple example. Imagine you have a spouse and only one kid. You are below replacement rate, but you are two. You have two parents, your spouse has two parents. You are not replacing yourselves, but your parents have not died yet. The fact that you have one kid still increases the population. The problem is when your parents die, [you] have not replaced them.

In case you’re curious, the population of the US has been projected by our Census Bureau to peak around 2080, based on experts’ best guess at the immigration rate. Their low-immigration model forecasts a peak in 2043, and without any immigration, we’d have peaked already, in 2024. 

So what happened to Ehrlich’s predictions of doom? Interestingly enough, his ideas weren’t actually accepted among serious demographers even when The Population Bomb was published. He kind of duped us! In fact, his book came out three years after the average number of babies per woman had already peaked and begun its long decline. He was diagnosing a crisis at the precise moment the underlying trend was already moving us in the opposite direction.

All of this is to say, declining to procreate based on the specter of overpopulation is an outdated notion that would be all too easy to dismiss. But the population backdrop is useful to bear in mind as we examine the three rationale I mentioned for believing it’s wrong to bring a child into this world.

The environmental perspective

When people cite the burden of humanity on the planet as a reason not to have kids, I have to concede they have a point. Certainly we humans have taken more than our share of resources and caused massive damage to the planet, including the loss of countless species. It’s easy to see how not procreating would help, but I will challenge this position anyway. First, it’s easy enough for us to deride the environmental consequences of humankind, but aren’t we also enjoying our lives and the gifts that fossil fuels bestow? How convenient that we can take the high road regarding breeding, since we didn’t choose to be here. I notice very few are volunteering to leave.

The idea of not procreating does seem like the most effective way to lower carbon emissions. Sure, I can (and usually do) bike instead of drive, but of course I still have a carbon footprint. (In fact, most of my rides are for recreation, not transportation; I eat more because I ride hard; and I shower and launder my bike clothing after every ride.) The only way to shrink my carbon footprint to zero would be, of course, to off myself, but I’m not willing to do that. Making a pledge not to produce offspring that carry forward our planet-ruining ways is obviously much easier (at least for people who, unlike me, aren’t parents yet). My research produced a number of celebrities expounding this merits of this noble sacrifice. Perhaps the most outspoken was Miley Cyrus who told Elle magazine, “We’re getting handed a piece-of-shit planet, and I refuse to hand that down to my child.” She vows not to procreate “until I feel like my kid would live on an earth with fish in the water.”

I think her sentiment is a good example of how this is more of a values-oriented idea than a true strategy, unless you’re willing to go all the way. There are certainly people who are, such as members of The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) (pronounced “vehement”) whose motto is “May we live long and die out.” VHEMT’s founder, Les Knight, told the New York Times, “We [humans] came to be and then ran amok. And because we’re smart enough, we should know enough to end it.” David Benatar, a prominent moral philosopher at the University of Cape Town, speaking about the extinction of the human race, declares, “It would be better, all things being equal, if this happened sooner rather than later.” I am guessing that most people who trot out the environmental rationale for non-child-rearing aren’t this extreme.

I’m struck that the endgame of voluntary human extinction is rather similar to what happens if we do nothing about climate change: either way, we humans end up extinct. The difference is how much collateral damage we cause along the way. But the idea that we as individuals should sacrifice having kids in the service of environmental welfare doesn’t, for me, entirely hold up because a) if this perspective gained popularity, eventually the only people procreating would be climate change deniers, who don’t tend to devote themselves to clean energy and other pro-environment efforts, and b) based on wider trends, the fertility rate is dropping so fast already that our human impact on the planet is going to decline radically in the coming decades anyway. To showcase how radically, let’s look at some numbers, from this essay by Derek Thompson, a longtime writer for The Atlantic, in which he interviews Fernández-Villaverde, the economist at Penn I quoted earlier. Fernández-Villaverde explains:

Let’s suppose Thailand keeps its current fertility rate of 0.8 for 200 years. Thailand right now has 63 million people. At the end of 200 years, it will be around two million people [italics mine]. How do you wind down a society of 63 million people into two million? … It means you need to close 98% of the hospitals of the country. It means you need to close 98% of the schools of the country.

Just think of the diminishment of infrastructure worldwide. Fewer buildings, fewer cars, fewer drivers, fewer everything. We’re already seeing this in the US. My own kids’ schools in Albany, California used to strictly police their locals-only admission policy, but now accepts students from neighboring communities when space allows, due to declining enrollment. Similarly, Fernández-Villaverde mentions how his school district in Philadelphia is “closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids.”

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a climate change denier or apologist, but it looks like a number of factors are lining up to give a bit of relief here. The International Energy Agency, the Paris-based intergovernmental energy agency of the world’s major developed economies, asserts in its World Energy Outlook 2024 report that CO2 emissions in advanced economies fell by 1.1% to 10.9 billion tons in 2024—a level last seen 50 years ago, even though the cumulative GDP of these countries is now three times as large. Granted, China’s per-capita emissions are rising sharply as its economy grows, but the IEA report forecasts that it too will decline in the second half of the century—and meanwhile, China’s fertility rate is just 1.0, so their population will crash almost as dramatically as Thailand’s.

To reiterate, fertility rates are dropping very quickly, worldwide, which will have a dramatic effect on the global population. This is a giant boulder gaining speed. To abstain from having kids—just to give that boulder a little extra push—strikes me more as a nice gesture than a moral imperative. And if we really care about climate change, might we not consider that some of our offspring may help try do something to solve the problem? Giving them the opportunity seems like a small risk, when our prospective kids’ effect on the rapidly declining world population looks like a rounding error.

The ethical perspective

Aside from the pragmatic idea of defending the planet from human onslaught, there is a philosophical, ethical movement called antinatalism that objects to procreation in principle. In a nutshell, it holds that just being alive entails suffering, and thus by bringing a person into the world, we are causing that person to suffer without their consent. It’s as though antinatalists heard teenagers complaining, “I didn’t ask to be born” and took it too much to heart. But actually, this idea isn’t new. Around 400 BC, Sophocles wrote, “Not to be born is, beyond all estimation, best; but when a man has seen the light of day, this is next best by far, that with utmost speed he should go back from where he came.” (I confess it’s hard for me to take this seriously; I’m envisioning a horrified human scrambling frantically to try to crawl back into his mother’s womb.)

In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote:

One should try to imagine that the act of procreation were neither a need, nor accompanied by sexual pleasure, but instead a matter of pure, rational reflection, could the human race even continue to exist? Would not everyone, on the contrary, have so much compassion for the coming generation that he would rather spare it the burden of existence, or at least refuse to take it upon himself to cold-bloodedly impose it on them?

I guess Schopenhauer would be surprised not only that humans do now have the choice, but that so far a majority of us have continued to procreate. Maybe we’re all enjoying our lives more than he did.

Among modern thinkers there doesn’t seem to be a deep bench of full-time philosophers espousing antinatalism; perhaps their most prominent figure is Benatar, the guy I quoted earlier saying “the sooner we go extinct the better.” He wrote a book twenty years ago called Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, which might be the closest the modern movement has to a bible. The centerpiece of his antinatalism is known as “Benatar’s Asymmetry,” which (as described by Wikipedia) goes like this:

1. The presence  of pain is bad.

 2. The presence of pleasure is good. However:

3. The absence of pain is good, even if that good is not enjoyed by anyone.

4. The absence of pleasure is not bad unless there exists someone for whom this absence is a deprivation.

Thus, bringing a person into existence generates both good and bad experiences, such as pain and pleasure, whereas not coming into existence entails neither pain nor pleasure. The absence of pain is good, while the absence of pleasure is not bad. Therefore, the ethical choice is weighed in favor of non-procreation.

I have two fundamental problems with this logic. First, it assumes that pleasure and pain are like measurable building blocks of experience. They are absolutely not. Some people get more pleasure in life than others; some get more pain. But who could possibly calculate, on the whole, whether any particular person minds the disparity of his or her circumstance so much as to regret being alive? As operands in Benatar’s handy little grid, “pleasure” and “pain” work fine; in real life, they’re so messy as to be useless in any kind of experiential calculus.

My second issue with this Benatar’s Asymmetry is that it presupposes that all pain and suffering are in fact a net negative, whereas overcoming suffering can produce great satisfaction. Consider Eminem’s character in 8 Mile: most of the movie showcases his struggle, disappointment, and humiliation, until (don’t worry, no real spoilers here) it all comes right in the end. (If you haven’t seen that movie, go watch it right now and come back.) The triumph in the end is glorious. And now let’s consider Eminem’s actual life: he had a thoroughly miserable childhood, with a drug-addicted mother who suffered Munchausen Syndrome By Proxy, meaning she literally poisoned her child because she derived pleasure from the ministrations of medical staff. Imagine his satisfaction at not only surviving that, but going on to achieve worldwide stardom and excellence as a musical artist. Overcoming odds can be intensely gratifying. Listen to the triumph in Eminem’s voice in “Halie’s Song,” about the joy he gets from being a father: “ ‘Cause my baby knows that her daddy’s a soldier/ Nothin’ can take her from me.”

Perhaps the opportunity to gain strength and satisfaction from suffering can start to explain why people actually choose to endure pain—think of athletes. I myself have inflicted suffering on myself countless times (click here, or here, or here), just for the thrill of it. Naturally, there’s a difference between the suffering we willingly undertake and that which is thrust upon us, but I have experience there too, like when I broke my femur in a bike crash. Obviously if I could have chosen not to endure that, I’d gladly have passed—and yet, it did happen, and I did continue with the sport. It never occurred to me to quit. Why? Because on balance the pain is worth the pleasure. I’d just as soon decide where I fall on that pleasure/pain axis, vs. my parents having concluded on my behalf, ahead of time, that my life just wouldn’t be worth the suffering.

Another central argument Benatar makes is what he calls the “misanthropic argument,” which Wikipedia describes thus:

According to this argument, humans are a deeply flawed and destructive species that is responsible for the suffering and deaths of billions of other humans and non-human animals. If that level of destruction were caused by another species we would rapidly recommend that new members of that species not be brought into existence.

This one is just empirically false: I can easily name a species that causes the deaths of billions of animals: housecats. The peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications estimates that “domestic cats kill 1.3–4.0 billion birds and 6.3–22.3 billion mammals annually.” Are we really going to call for the voluntary extinction of the domestic cat? Look, Benatar: the world is a harsh place. Get over it.

Finally, a widespread tenet of the antinatal movement, as documented here and here, is that by having a child, we are exposing that person to pain and suffering without his or her consent. The popular antinatalist YouTuber Lawrence Anton explains, “So, you’re creating someone and they’re going to go through all this suffering, whatever it is in their life, and you’re not even able to ask them if they want to take those odds.” Well, what would that consent even look like? Don’t teenagers breezily blow past every privacy warning and end user agreement they ever see on social media, because they don’t have the fully formed neocortex required for the consideration of consequences? How much reasoning power does a zygote have?

Kidding aside, do these antinatalists really believe that we humans who have gotten the chance to exist are in a position to provide consent for our own future suffering? What if God came to me in a vision and said, “Dana, as a fallen Unitarian you are scheduled to have crippling back pain in your 70s. Would you prefer to be struck by lightning at 69?” I wouldn’t be able to decide. And what about the elder population a generation or two from now, whose safety net would be demolished if antinatalists got their way and there was no younger generation to pay into Social Security? Are we planning to get their consent? How come suffering is only to be avoided when it’s hypothetical instead of assured?

To be continued…

I advised earlier that I would consider each of these three “is it wrong” rationale in order of how much they vex me. As this post has gone on long enough, I shall save the “best” for last. Tune in next week when I’ll tackle the reason that 38% of the adults between 18 to 49 gave, in the Pew survey, for not having children: “Concerns about the state of the world.” I’ll also go into the number one reason those surveyed gave for not having kids, and why I’m actually fine with it.

UPDATE: Part II is now posted here.

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Online Holiday Gift Guide!

NOTE: This post is rated R for coarse humor and pervasive profanity.

Introduction

It’s gift-giving time! Let’s go gifting! Or better yet, let’s stay at home in our fuzzy slippers and gift from here! Then we won’t even have to touch the godawful shit we’re foisting on friends and family! All we gotta do is pay! We don’t even have to come up with our own ideas, because it’s not the thought that counts—it’s the money! So here is my online gift guide … all the crap you wouldn’t want for yourself but will gladly—for some reason—give to others!

How about a Keurig?

A Keurig coffeemaker is the gift that says, “I know you can’t figure out coffee filters, French presses, Mr. Coffee, or any other normal way of making coffee!” For the hapless, clueless, or just plain lazy, here’s another giant hunk of single-purpose plastic appliance—the Death Star of coffeemakers—to clutter up that kitchen counter!

It even takes little cartridge pods so your loved one can create maximum waste! And when he loads the pod he can pretend he’s slapping a magazine into some hi-tech weapon! But wait, there’s more! Your lucky recipient doesn’t have to make do with plain old coffee: with specialty K-Cup pods he can enjoy blueberry, caramel vanilla, and even French-toast flavored beverages, and pretend he’s one of those loser kids in the Willy Wonka movie! And that’s not all: this little coffee-brewing jewel comes with a 30” cord so if your gift recipient still manages to screw up his coffee—perhaps by running out of K-Cup pods—he can just strangle himself!

Wow, a nostalgic candle!

Look, you can send that former Texan in your life a fabulous scented candle that says “homesick” on it! That way his friends will know he wishes he still lived there instead of wherever he ended up! Kind of like celebrating the lack of agency in his life!

But it’s not just a statement, it’s an actual candle! It smells like dark leather, fresh pine, fish bones, thick lemon slices (which smell different from thin lemon slices for some reason), combined with cyclamen and a touch of sage to summon the big, bold aura of the Lone Star State! And you what else? Since a big Texan man might think it’s a bit wussy to have a fancy candle in his home, it also smells a lot like an old dried-out cow pie! But just in case that seems kind of dirt-baggy, the label informs guests that this candle is “Made in small batches in the USA!” Holy shit, this big-hearted, big-hatted dude is gonna love it! It’s the elegant home furnishing that says “Don’t mess with Texas!”

Internet-connected, voice-activated smoke detector!

This hot little number is for that special person who is good and fed up with standard smoke alarms that, when they go on the blink—and they always do—are impossible to silence. They shriek and howl, as does anybody in earshot, and no little button can ever stop the sound, nothing can, not until you’ve clawed at the alarm, banged on it, and eventually ripped it out of the ceiling, taking those stupid little molly-bolts and a bunch of drywall with it, and smashed it on the floor. Well, those days are finally over for the person lucky enough to be on your gift list! Finally, when this thing goes off—announcing in a computer voice (that is somehow even more excruciating than the standard shrieking) exactly what dangerous vapor is supposedly threatening her home—she just can scream at it, “ALEXA: SHUT THE FUCK UP!”

Macho coffee!

Give your boyfriend, husband, father, or son the gift that says, “I’m all about turning every aspect of my life into a pissing contest!” It’s badass coffee in a black package with a daring skull-and-crossbones logo!

And in case that’s not enough to impress his guests, it even has a warning label on the back!

Oh my god, this shit could kill somebody who isn’t ready for a big, bold taste and gobs of caffeine! And you know what? If you bought this poor bastard a Keurig coffeemaker last year and he’s still trying to fish his male ego out of the gutter, this strong-ass coffee will be perfect!

Electric roller skates that are also Segways!

You know that nerdy friend who actually wanted a Segway, but couldn’t afford one? And wanted the Google Glass but couldn’t get on the list? The friend who wishes there was a such thing as a wireless Internet-connected fanny pack? Well guess what? Segway makes “Electric Hovershoes” which are like roller skates you get to stand on instead of wearing! And they’re electric! And they have headlights and taillights!

These things are so fucking weird your friend will think they’re a hoax, until he tries them! Who’s laughing now!? He’ll be so thrilled he’ll almost die, until he finds out you don’t have a pair yourself so he’ll have to go skating all by his lonesome! But guess what? That’s just more babes for him! Win-win!

The Sweetgrass Boxed Set!

That sensitive—and literary—soul in your life probably can’t get enough books about humility, our sacred earth, and how to rebuild our relationships with plants, animals, and humans alike, learning from our plant-based elders. She also can’t get enough beautiful words like “meadow” and “compassion.” So give her the gift of sweetgrass—a treasure trove of books on the subject!

Included are Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Road Back to Sweetgrass: A Novel by Linda LeGarde Grover, Sweetgrass by Jan Hudson, Sweetgrass Basket by Marlene Carvell, Sweetgrass by Mary Alice Monroe, and—just for the hell of it—Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything by Elizabeth Gilbert! And they’re all packaged up in a beautiful faux-sweetgrass box lined with—you guessed it!—satin.

Camouflage bedding!

There’s a certain kind of man in your life who doesn’t have the time—or the headspace—for humility, for our sacred earth, for rebuilding relationships, or for plant-based elders. He’s a glowering, brooding type … and you know what he’s brooding about? Security. Protection. He doesn’t pretend for a minute that there aren’t threats—very real threats, clear and present dangers—and being prepared for them always falls to him since the little woman has her head in the clouds over satin-lined gift boxes and journeys to authenticity and belonging, shit like that. Who’s gonna keep this family safe during the most vulnerable time—when everybody’s lying in bed, fast asleep? Well, those dangerous would-be burglars and kidnappers will have to find this family first, am I right? And just try it with these badass camouflage bed sheets.

And guess what? If that intruder bastard’s tactical flashlight does foil the camo, there’s another little surprise in store: this comforter is an American fucking flag! Just so that bitch-ass punk knows what kind of patriot he’s dealing with! If he doesn’t just absolutely shit himself on the spot, he must be blind or something!

Sloth tea infuser!

There’s nothing worse than giving a humdrum gift, right? It’s always better to give your loved one something that causes utter bewilderment. Imagine your mirth when the lucky recipient unwraps this flabby figurine and resists the urge to blurt out, “What the hell is it?!” Well, she’ll figure it out. It’s a (pretend) sloth that your friend or cousin fills with her favorite loose tea and hangs on the end of her mug—or better, on the edge of her glass, so she can watch the lazy mammal appear to pee in her hot water!

And not to worry, this clever little sloth is made of food-safe, BPA-free silicone so it’s soft, non-toxic, and (obviously) tasteless! Your friend can stop worrying about teabags clogging up landfills or compost bins … clean-up is a cinch! She just discards the loose tea leaves, and hell, while she’s at it, the whole damn sloth as well! Throw its arboreal ass out into the street!

Star Wars cookbook!

The perfect gift for that rare, rare breed: the Star Wars fanatic who knows how to cook, or wants to learn! Inspired by Disneyland and the almost incomprehensibly venal cynicism of Hollywood, this actual hardback book is full of recipes for such made-up non-foods as Roasted Kajaka Root, Fried Endorian Tip-Yip, and Parwan Nutricakes.

The recipient’s dinner guests will have no basis to evaluate the authenticity of these dishes, so it’s a can’t-lose proposition! Maybe you’ll get invited over for Laser-Fried Deep Space Oysters (yes, that does mean wookie testicles)!

Freak his shit out!

OMG, do you have one of those boyfriends who’s totally insensitive about others’ crippling emotional problems? The kind of guy who learns that a mutual friend is in therapy and says something coarse about it behind the person’s back, like “Get a backbone”? Well, no time like the holidays to turn the tables! Get that callous motherfucker a pair of custom-printed boxers with your face right in the crotch! 

He’ll be freaking out and sweating bullets even before you insist, quite forcefully, that he put them on! Drag him over to the mirror and say something shocking like, “Look babe, you’ve got me where you want me!” Hold his damn eyelids open like in A Clockwork Orange and make him look at that shit!

When he stammers out some incredulous protest, you’ll be like, “What’s the matter, honey? Don’t you like them?” He’ll be so emotionally shattered he’ll lose his sex drive altogether! He’ll wake up in the night screaming! And then you break up with that insensitive prick! His New Year’s Resolution will be to try to put the pieces of his psyche back together!

Incongruous t-shirt!

Everyone on your list could use a new t-shirt—and this isn’t just any t-shirt. It says “Unicorns are born in July” on it because, well, God, who the hell knows? I guess that’s kind of the point, right? Unless I’m missing something? Damn, this thing is perfect!

Imagine your joy watching that friend, daughter, or sister do the math, trying to figure out when exactly those unicorn parents had sex to give birth in July. Except how long does a unicorn gestate? That’s an easy one—340 days!

Now, you might think this gift is only appropriate for someone born in July who identifies as a unicorn, right? Wrong! Everyone else can wear this shirt ironically!

Vanity beard comb!

If your man not only has a beard that’s so long he has to comb it, but is willing to actually take time doing this, let’s face it: chances are he’s a bit of a narcissist. But that doesn’t mean he’s not vain, too! Make sure you stroke his ego along with his beard, with this beautiful walnut-wood beard comb engraved with “DANGEROUS MAN.”

Yes, he’s not only a hipster, but he’s a bit of a rogue! Kind of a blackguard, really, and not above a bit of savagery—you gotta keep an eye on him! This little folding comb suggests those straight razors that certain murderers like to cut throats with, but don’t worry, these teeth don’t bite! Your man’s beard has never been so soft—and his heart so hard! Are you getting hot yet?

Just a shit-ton of batteries!

You know what’s harder than finding the perfect gift? Charging those stupid nickel-metal hydride batteries! What a pain in the ass. Those stupid chargers with the little colored lights that make no sense—like, why does it light up green when I plug it in, when I’m pretty sure these batteries are dead? Does the light go out when they’re charged, or does this mean the battery is already charged? Is this charger fucking stupid? Well guess what? Your lucky friend or family member doesn’t have to worry about that anymore, because you just gave him a shit-ton of old-school, single-use batteries!

And it’s all guilt-free because he didn’t choose them and it’s too late now to worry about it! For once he won’t be secretly bummed about his gift and thinking, “What am I gonna do with this?” With this inarguably useful gift, you’ll be a damned hero!

Note

In case you’re wondering, all of the above are real products except the Braiding Sweetgrass Boxed Set. All the books listed are real but you can’t actually get them in a boxed set (at least, not yet).

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Salmon Farm Force Power Flight Jacket

Introduction

Don’t overthink the title of this post. I had to get your attention. I’m sure nobody would read another word past the title “Salmon Farming – Pros and Cons.” But stop, don’t leave! I promise this will be interesting. Maximum strike open flight force! Stay with me! I’ll even include some gratuitous eye candy along the way. You’ll be glad you read this, trust me. I’m going to entertain you, improve your life, and empower you. Join me on my journey from aquaculture skeptic to true believer. Hyper strike epic!

Background

During a recent trip to Norway, my family was lured to the Havforsknings Instituttet. We thought this place would be devoted to the study of people who have foreskins, but it turns out to be a marine research center and aquarium. It was a great place, but despite all the cool otters, penguins, and exotic fish there, eventually we all got museum knees and had to sit down. So we headed over to the auditorium for a show about orcas, looking forward to some violent footage of their eating habits. At least, that’s what we thought was on the docket.

What we actually got was this long documentary about aquaculture—specifically, salmon farming. It could have been pretty interesting except it was pitched at the grade-school level. The best part was when an interviewer cornered an aquaculture scientist and asked, “Yes or no: is farmed salmon safe?” The scientist replied, “As far as we can tell, yes.” So tepid! So honest! In America the response would have been, “You bet your ass it is. There isn’t a safer food on the planet. Mega jacket open flash strike!”

I’d already been vaguely aware that Norwegian salmon was farmed. To be honest, this bothered me a bit every time we enjoyed it at a restaurant. When my wife declared that some salmon she ate in Oslo was the best she’d ever had, I had this cognitive dissonance—like, could it really be that the best salmon isn’t even wild? I decided her salmon was very good, but not as good as the local salmon I’d had in Scotland. This upheld my sense of myself as a sophisticated foodie until I considered that the Scottish salmon was possibly also farmed. After our trip, when I wrote my Food of Norway post, I tried to chase this Scottish thing down. But the more I looked into it, the more it looked as though I was in fact an uncultured rube, incapable of separating “real” food from rubbish.

Instinctive aversion

Upon reflection, I have to concede that my historical preference for wild salmon has been largely a knee-jerk thing. I recall Anthony Bourdain saying that, as a chef, he loved farmed salmon because it was relatively cheap, yet he could charge as much for it as for a nice lamb chop. (I’ve tried to find this quote, but Googling “Anthony Bourdain” is lately too depressing.) Meanwhile, I read years ago in Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma that farmed salmon isn’t necessarily healthier than grass-fed beef. I’ve come to realize that at some point I unconsciously lumped farmed salmon into the broad category of “food that has been tampered with,” which I instinctively avoid (except that I don’t, not really, but let’s not think about that right now).

Above all, I must confess I have enjoyed being the kind of gainfully employed person who can afford the good, wild stuff. Maybe my kids don’t get to wipe their butts with raw silk, but damn it, they get top grade wild Sockeye salmon!

Visiting Norway had me challenging all of this. Boring though it may have been, that museum documentary did showcase an industry that is clearly careful and responsible. Can you imagine a zoo in Kansas showing a documentary about feedlots? Hell no—they wouldn’t dare. Nobody would want to watch it, and moreover, the beef industry would crucify everyone involved.

A brief pause for eye candy

Okay, I did promise some eye candy. Here you go.

What’s really wrong with farmed salmon?

Virtually all of the salmon from Norway—over a million metric tons a year, worth $8 billion, according to the New York Times— is farmed. Granted, Norway seems to do a nice job with it, locating the farms in the fjords; they’re just netted-off areas of ocean where fish are generously fed. Not so different from a cruise ship, really.

Still, some environmental advocates strongly deride farmed salmon, even the Norwegian stuff. Kurt Oddekalv, leader of the Green Warriors of Norway, described farmed salmon to the Times as “the most toxic food in the world.” And I read in the Guardian how Don Staniford, of the Global Alliance Against Industrial Aquaculture, “a Liverpudlian who has lived in Scotland for many years, argued that cramming carnivorous, migratory fish into crowded tanks and releasing toxins, diseases and parasites into the surrounding waters was inherently unsustainable.” I took this with a grain of salt, noting how the word “tank” was used to describe a facility contiguous with open ocean. (This guy kind of puts the “pud” back in “Liverpudlian.”)

I’ll admit that it has always creeped me out a bit that farmed salmon wouldn’t be pink without a little help. According to the website fromnorway.com, “The pink color of Norwegian Salmon comes from a natural oxycarotenoid called astaxanthin. In nature, salmon receive astaxanthin by eating crustaceans. Norwegian Salmon receive these same beneficial nutrients as supplements in their feed.” It must be said that salmon farmers don’t use very much. As Time magazine reports, “The pigmenting compound doesn’t come cheap. It is the most expensive element of salmon feed, according to a 2011 study, taking up nearly 20% of total fish feed costs. Controlling and optimizing the concentration of astaxanthin in fish food is time and labor intensive.” Reading this is, psychologically speaking, a mixed bag. It’s like, “Don’t worry, it’s all very precise—a tightly-run factory!”

But then, so is the production of just about everything we eat, honestly. I don’t kid myself:  the practice of agriculture is closer to a factory than to a farm. It’s easy to be skeptical about farmed salmon when we peek behind the curtain, but we ignore other industries that hide behind a fence or a wall.

I watched some candid Internet footage of salmon being fed. Their feed consists of little dusty brown balls, like dog food, which is kind of depressing—but then, I feed my beloved cat cat food, which is also little brown balls. I should just get over it.

The problem is, just when I’ve figured out a way to discard another misgiving about farmed salmon (I am a cheap bastard, after all), another issue pops up, like ideological Whack-a-Mole. Wikipedia questions the sustainability of aquaculture: “Salmon require large nutritional intakes of protein, and farmed salmon consume more fish than they generate as a final product. On a dry weight basis, 2–4 kg of wild-caught fish are needed to produce one kg of salmon.”

Should we trust Wikipedia? Maybe not, but NPR essentially agrees: “It takes about three pounds of feeder fish to produce one pound of farmed salmon … but feeding more salmon depletes the ocean’s smaller fish.”

There are other issues. When farmed salmon escape their enclosure, they can breed with wild fish and create nonviable offspring. There’s also an issue around the spread of sea lice to the wild population. According to the Times, these parasites “feast on the mucus and skin of the fish before moving on to the muscle and fat, making the fish vulnerable to infections and sometimes killing them.” Yuck! Makes me want to opt for the burger—unless I allow myself to remember the poor overweight cows standing around in their own waste in tiny pens, jacked up on antibiotics because their blood pH has been screwed up by a diet of corn that they didn’t evolve to eat.

Of course, eating only wild salmon isn’t an obviously practical solution. The Times reports that the wild salmon population in Norway has fallen by more than half since the 1980s. There just isn’t enough wild salmon there to produce the 14 million meals of Norwegian salmon that fromnorway.com says are consumed every day worldwide.

Meanwhile, even if you insist on wild, you’re probably being duped at least some of the time. According to this article in Time, researchers conducting DNA testing found that about a third of salmon they tested that was touted as wild was actually farmed, and “you’re three times more likely to get duped at a restaurant, where 67% of the salmon were mislabeled, than a grocery store.”

Here’s an interesting product: wild keta salmon from a company called Pacific Seafood.

So what is keta salmon? According to Wikipedia it’s a type of Pacific salmon. Hence “Pacific Seafood,” I guess. But look at the label closely: this fish is a “wild product of China.” I’m not a geographer, but I just checked and China is well beyond the range of wild Pacific salmon:

So I’m getting a little confused here. I also note that this product has FD&C Yellow #6 and Red #40. Why?! “(Color enhancer.)” Yeah, but—why? Isn’t this Chinese Pacific salmon naturally pink? After all, it’s wild!

So what is to be done? As is so often the case, there seemed to be no simple answer. I was on the verge of shrugging my shoulders, reconciling myself to a future of very expensive wild Alaskan salmon when I’m feeling flush, and otherwise settling for canned salmon—which is always wild, but not all that tasty, particularly because it’s got all these sections of softened vertebrae in it, which are probably really good for you but are kind of chalky and aren’t so pleasant to crunch. But then, when I mentioned to my wife I was planning a blog post on farmed salmon, she said, “Instead of doing a trifling amount of research, throwing in a largely ignorant dose of pure opinion larded with stupid gags, and releasing another half-baked, largely useless essay on the world, why not interview a real expert for once?”

No, of course she didn’t really say that. What she actually said was, “You could interview my friend R—, who really knows this stuff.” So I did. Her friend, who has a Master’s and a Ph.D. in Aquatic and Fishery Science and works for a scientific research agency, happily obliged. (She asked to be quoted anonymously, though, as she doesn’t need “any more hate mail.” Whether her name even starts with “R,” I refuse to divulge.)

Another brief pause

Still there? Good job! Here’s some more eye candy.

The real skinny on salmon farming

I had a fascinating 45-minute discussion with R— about aquaculture. To begin with, she corrected some of the misconceptions I’d come across. For one thing, regarding efficiency of production, the feed conversion rate is now closer to 1-to-1 (the 3-to-1 statistic being really outdated).  Theoretically, she said, the conversion rate could be 0-to-1 as alternative feeds are developed. She forwarded me a couple of very thorough articles on the subject. Without getting into too much detail, here’s an interesting statistic: as explained here, one study found that for a given amount of feed, farmed salmon produces over three times as much edible product as poultry, and five times as much as pork.

Regarding interbreeding between farmed and wild salmon, R— pointed out that this isn’t a big problem on the west coast of the U.S., because we’re mainly farming Atlantic salmon here, which cannot breed with wild Pacific salmon. She concedes that “there are risks of farmed Atlantic salmon interbreeding with wild Atlantic salmon when they are farmed in areas where Atlantic salmon are native (i.e., the east coast and Europe).”

On the subject of alternative (non-fish-based) feeds, R— explained that this is being pursued very carefully: “There are definitely studies around how you maintain health with fish using alternative feeds; for example, they know that taurine, an amino acid, is essential to a fish’s diet.” I find this a pleasant contrast to the beef industry, which is notorious for using antibiotics to make animals gain weight faster, and the poultry industry, which grows its chicken “so fast that they have trouble walking because their legs won’t support the weight, in addition to other related health problems” (according to the Chicago Tribune here).

R— confirmed that antibiotics are not widely used with aquaculture, and asserted that farmed salmon is very safe and sustainable if it comes from Norway, British Columbia, Scotland or the US. In this country, there are nationwide regulatory standards for aquaculture to make sure its practices are safe. As for Pollan’s suggestion that farmed salmon may have fewer Omega-3s than grass-fed beef, R— clarified that currently, given the fish-based diet farmed salmon eat, wild caught doesn’t have more Omega-3s than farmed. This could change, if the aquaculture industry formulates feed from other sources, but they’re “experimenting with using fish processing waste, marine algae, even kinds of yeasts to feed to fish so they’ll still have lots of Omega-3s.”

(By the way, you know that bit about astaxanthin being added to the feed to produce the pink color? Well, far from the dye that Pacific Seafood adds to their “wild” salmon, astaxanthin is also sold to humans as a health food supplement. Dr. Andrew Weil, whom I consider a pretty staid, reliable source, touts its health benefits here.)

R— had a lot to say about the issue of scale, and the impossibility of meeting an increasing demand for seafood with a declining supply of wild fish. “Every other food we eat is [mainly] farmed except for fish,” she pointed out. “Why should fish be the one holdout? What other endangered or declining species are we running out to eat?”

Aquaculture, she explained, is scalable because there’s so much ocean that we’re not using: “One team calculated that we could replace the entire global wild captured fisheries with aquaculture and use less than 0.01% of the ocean’s surface. It’s totally doable; the question is what scale people will accept.” She’s frustrated because so many people reject aquaculture due to outdated information. “It’s so engrained in people that farmed fish is bad. When it first got going in the ‘70s all these NGOs cried foul because there was no oversight; now, these same NGOs are admitting that globally, [aquaculture] is what we need to do, but we’ve got these entrenched ideas in place that are hard to overturn.”

Hunger games

Having enough money to demand wild salmon is a convenient dodge, for a wealthy subset of the population, but it doesn’t address the wider problem. “What it comes down to,” R— pointed out, “is there are too many people [on the planet], but nobody wants to have that conversation. Everything has its impact. We can have this high-and-mighty attitude [about insisting on wild-caught] but everything we eat, everything we wear has an impact on the environment. I heard a lecture once where the guy said, ‘If everybody became vegan, we’d have to cut down every tree on the planet to bring enough land under agriculture to feed everybody.’ I’m not sure if that’s exactly true, but it’s interesting to ponder.” 

I’ve long felt that vegans, while admirably innocent of the many crimes committed in the name of animal husbandry, aren’t necessarily helping to solve anything. It’s not like they’re inspiring any significant number of people to follow their lead. At least if I insist on grass-fed beef I’m helping to create the market for it, which can help reduce the proportion of cows incarcerated in feedlots. For years I felt like holding out for wild salmon was similarly reasonable, but in fact there just won’t ever be enough wild salmon for everybody, so my position was unrealistic—it carried a strong whiff of “let them eat cake.” I like to think of myself as a responsible and fair person, not some unapologetically snobby epicure, but as the playwright Wallace Shawn has observed, “Sympathy for the poor does not change the life of the poor.”

During our conversation R—pointed out, “Eating seafood shouldn’t be a rich-person privilege. Omega-3 fatty acids have huge health benefits; why shouldn’t everybody get this food?” I totally agree: but without economies of scale, how can farmed salmon compete, price-wise, with a Big Mac or Chicken McNuggets and all the other cheap crap so many Americans are lured into eating, at the expense of their own health and that of our environment? Given that aquaculture is one of the most efficient forms of protein production, don’t we ultimately have a responsibility to promote it?

Here’s where choosing farmed salmon gives us a rare opportunity to eat like a king but also save money, while contributing to the growth of a responsible, sustainable industry. For bonus points, put your money toward local, or at least domestic, farmed salmon. Here are a final couple of tidbits R— sent me: the US imports 90% of the seafood we eat, creating a $15 billion seafood trade deficit. Meanwhile, over half the seafood we import is farmed anyway—so why not farm it here, where we do it safely and sustainably, and benefit our own economy?

Let’s return to my question about whether the best-tasting salmon could actually be farmed. Well, why not? Think of the most expensive Wagyu beef: is it hundreds of dollars a pound because it’s from wild-caught cows? No. It’s from cows raised meticulously by humans in a very controlled environment. So what’s wrong with raising our own salmon, too?

Now, if I sound like a scold, just remember this: open fighter force power launch! Maximum strike zone flight scatter! Go! Go!

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For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Why Train Travel Is Better

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and subtle insinuations of mild sensuality.

Introduction

 Six years ago I blogged (here, here, and here) about my family’s trip on Amtrak from the Bay Area to Chicago.  Well, we’re at it again.  I’m typing away from the observation car as the train makes its way through the mountains east of Grand Junction, Colorado.  Our destination this time is Denver.

(As far as you know I posted this after the fact and/or we’re flying straight home from there so by the time you read this it will be too late to burglarize our home.  Or maybe not … maybe this is the beginning of a long vacation, in which case you’re welcome to try to steal our sentimentally valuable but commercially useless family heirlooms, though you’ll have to deal with our psychotic gun-nut house-sitter and his meth-fueled pit bull, who never knew his father.)

Having tackled the overall train travel experience in my previous posts, today I’m going to give you the top 10 reasons why train travel is the best way to go. 

Reason #1:  Train travel is novel

Train travel is novel.  Flying has become as routine as taking a bus, more so actually, as has driving, and both activities get old pretty quickly (unless you’re driving on a cool highway like US 50).  And on the train if you get tired of your coach seat or sleeper car berth, you can mosey on up to the observation deck, or down to the lounge, and at mealtime you get to sit in the dining car (and actually, the Amtrak food is pretty darn good).  At bedtime if you’re in a sleeper you fold down one bed from above and turn the seats into another bed, which is really fun for kids (I think this gave my younger daughter goose bumps the first time).

The train stops from time to time, in places more rustic and less bland than the convenience stores along an interstate.  You can step off the train for a little fresh air.

Reason #2:  Flashers

Also, if you take the California Zephyr route you’ll cruise along the Truckee and Colorado rivers, where there are lots of rafters, and your chances of being mooned or flashed are very high.  It’s a long-standing tradition, apparently, for young men to moon the train, or young women to pull up their shirts or bikini tops for the benefit of Amtrak sightseers.  When my brother took his kids on this train back in ’05 they were flashed by rafters, as was my wife in ’06 (while my head was, alas, turned the wrong way).  And while I was sitting here peering into my laptop just now, a rafter flashed the passengers to my right.  I’m so bummed to have missed that.  Serves me right for writing this instead of just gazing out the window and watching life go by.  I hope you’re happy.

Reason #3:  Better for the planet

Wikipedia reckons that “a train seems to be on average 20 times more efficient than automobile for transportation of passengers, if we consider energy spent per passenger-km.”  They base this on an assumption of the car getting 39 mpg, which is far better than most cars get, especially with a bunch of luggage and/or bikes fastened to the roof rack.  In contrast, Wikipedia estimates that a passenger train gets 468 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.

I’m not sure how Wikipedia gets their “20 times more efficient” figure because they don’t show their work.  My Volvo gets about 28 mpg on the highway, so with 4 passengers that’s 28*4 = 112 passenger-miles per gallon, which—compared to the train’s 468 passenger-miles/gallon—makes the train look only 4.2 times as efficient as a fully-loaded automobile.  I’m not going to ponder this disparity at length, because I’m more interested in comparing a train to a plane.

Wikipedia estimates that an Airbus 380 (the dumpy plane most of us tend to fly) gets 78 passenger-miles per gallon.  That means the train is 6 times more efficient (per passenger) than the plane. On top of that, the plane is polluting up in the atmosphere where the emissions do the most damage.  The so-called “climatic forcing” effect of jet aircraft means that although “per passenger a typical economy-class New York to Los Angeles round trip produces about 715 kg (1,574 lb) of CO2,” this is “equivalent to 1,917 kg (4,230 lb) of CO2.”  That is, the fact of the aircraft emissions being high in the atmosphere increases the environmental damage by a factor of 2.7.  So the train is actually about 16 times less bad for the environment than a plane.  In other words, for the environmental cost of one family vacation involving air travel, we could take 16 train trips of equal length.

If these numbers start to make your head swim or your eyes glaze over, here’s a more interesting way to express the efficiency of trains:  in 2007 a man dragged a 7-coach train weighing almost 300 tons along its track for more than 9 feet, using his teeth.  This is possible because the steel-on-steel interface between the train wheels and the track incurs so little friction.  (You think that guy could lift even a small single-engine aircraft off the ground with his teeth?)

A final environmental consideration:  the benefit of your choice doesn’t end with your train trip.  Amtrak pays freight train companies for the use of their tracks, so by supporting Amtrak you’re also supporting the railroad freight industry, which is far greener than long haul trucking.

Reason #4:  Can be cheaper

If you can tolerate coach class—where the seats are way bigger than an airplane’s, by the way, with far more legroom—Amtrak can be very inexpensive.  I’m sharing a table in this observation car with an lady who is traveling from Winnemucca, NV to some town just outside Chicago for under $280, round-trip.  The gal across the aisle is going from the Bay Area to Denver and the total tab, one-way, is $222 … which covers herself and her two kids.  (Full disclosure:  this was her original cost, but a couple days before her trip, Amtrak ran a special on the sleeper car so she upgraded for “not much money.”)

The sleeper car is generally a lot more expensive than coach, but I sprung for the sleeper car because this is our big vacation for the year.  It was worth paying extra just to be able to tell my kids, “We’re livin’ large as possible, posse unstoppable, style topical, vividly optical.”  I can’t make this boast with air travel because first class there is way too much money to even consider, and the seats are still smaller than even the coach seats on Amtrak.  (Each seat in the sleeper cabin is wide enough for two.)

Reason #5:  None of the airline bullshit!

I hate flying.  Going through the security check, and having to take off my shoes (even though the one guy who tried to smuggle explosives in his shoe got caught), and having to drink up or forfeit my water, and let some guy pat me down so closely I expect him to ask for my phone number afterward, and then having to take my bag over to some table where somebody runs a little cloth swab all over it to check for explosives—as if!—and then, once I’m finally on the plane, being deprived of legroom, food, even peanuts, and invariably being seated right above the wing with the jet engine shrieking in my ear, and having the baggage policy get ever stingier practically every time I fly, and being asked to pay—get this—$150 each way to bring my 17-pound bicycle on the plane … it’s all just such bullshit I can’t even describe it without the “-shit” part.  I tried to use “BS” but it just wasn’t enough.

On Amtrak, there is no security check.  None.  I mean, what are you going to do, hijack the train and make them take you to the Flagstaff, AZ station instead of Denver?  The Amtrak process is so simple:  you make your reservation, print out your single sheet of paper which serves as the boarding pass for your whole family, show up at the station 45 minutes in advance (no check-in required), and bring practically as many bags as you want, for free, and take them right to the train where you’ll have access to them the whole trip and never have to wait for them to come off the carousel.

And you know what?  If you’re not that organized, and you get a late start riding bikes to the station with your teenage daughter, and if Google Maps totally screws you by leading you not to the station but to a barren place across the tracks and more importantly across a giant fence from the station, so you have to spend an extra ten minutes racing around on surface streets, you can literally roll up with your bike less than 15 minutes before the train leaves.  At least, my daughter and I did, and incurred only a very mild, brief tongue-lashing at the ticket counter, where I paid $10 each to take our bikes on the train.  And the bikes, un-boxed (because Amtrak had run out of boxes), didn’t have to go through some system of conveyor belts like at an airport, which present some danger to the bikes, which danger the airlines—being dicks about this, like everything—accept no liability for.  I put the bikes on a luggage cart, and the conductor said they’d just be leaned on a wall and lashed down.  Simple.

Reason #6:  Less stressful than driving

Driving is a leading cause of accidental death.  Even if you’re the best driver ever, you’re sharing the road with drunks, and irresponsible young men who think driving fast is a game, and drivers who just plain suck.  And you have no control over the weather, which can turn your road trip into a nightmare.

With a train, you’re responsible for  getting yourself to the station and that’s about it.  Then you can read, sleep, look out the window, play a board game, blog, or take advantage of the seventh reason why trains are better.

Reason #7:  Friendly fellow passengers

It is technically possible to have a good conversation on an airplane with a fellow passenger, but highly unlikely.  First of all, your only opportunity is with the person in the next seat, vs. wandering around a train with the opportunity to chat up anybody who seems friendly.  Second, most air travelers are too angry, too tense, and/or (if they’re on business) too preoccupied to want to chat.  In my experience, everybody in the Amtrak observation car is there to soak up the view and relax.  I’ve conversed with several friendly passengers today.

Conversely, if you don’t feel like chatting, you don’t have to be rude to the person in the (assigned airline) seat next to you who keeps asking what you’re reading instead of letting you read.  On a train, you can just return to your seat, or into your sleeper car where you can close the curtain and/or door.

Now, if you’re sharing an automobile with your favorite people, of course you can chat with them, but only to a point.  If you’re the one driving, you shouldn’t get too caught up in the conversation or you’ll become that “distracted driver” that is such a menace to society.  (Once, at the end of a 6-hour drive, I missed the exit to my mom’s town because I was so caught up in reciting the poem “Kill My Landlord.”)  If you’re not driving, you need to take care to not distract the driver too much.  And you can’t have a good conversation with your kids because they’re too busy fighting in the backseat, and dispensing toilet paper out the window to make comets, and fussing, and squirming, and asking, “Are we there yet?”  On the train you can split them up, banish them to their sleeping room, or tell them to go pester the conductor about the ETA.

Reason #8:  Better scenery

The view from the tiny plastic airplane window is okay during takeoff and landing, but once you’re at cruising altitude you’re usually too far up to see much.  Occasionally the pilot will get on the PA and say, “Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the Grand Canyon down there … looks a little like a cracked lip.”  Often there’s cloud cover below the plane so you can’t see anything at all.

The view from an automobile is better, but you still don’t see as much.  Train tracks sometimes go through places that don’t have roads.  I’ve been looking out at the Colorado River and the gorge it winds through, and it’s pretty impressive.  The tracks go through less developed areas so the landscape is often especially impressive.

Right now the train is threading its way between Routt National Forest and Arapaho National Forest, near the towns of Kremmling, Heeny, and Sheephorn.  Have you heard of these places?  Of course not, and that’s the point.  (“I used to live in Kremmling,” a friendly fellow passenger just piped up, having perhaps read that over my shoulder.  “One saloon and one cabin.”)

Even familiar scenery can be completely changed by the unique vantage point of the train.  I’ve seen the Carquinez Bridge hundreds of times, but never from below, as I did yesterday.

There are even volunteer docents on some stretches, who will give you history about an area (such as the gold country or the gorge we’re going through now).  They don’t just drone on either; they’re pretty funny.  “Look at that white thing way up on the bank there—that’s a Suburban,” one just said.  “That’s a teenager’s driving lesson.”

You also get to see cooler animals via the train.  On this trip my family has seen antelope; prairie dogs; some strange animal we’re calling a desert badger; a jackrabbit; mule deer; and even a T-Rex scarfing baby Ewoks like they were croutons.  (I made that last bit up to see if you’re still awake.)  Some animals seem curious about the train whereas no living creature has any interest in cars (except certain humans).

On top of all this, you’re not going that fast on the train, so you get a better look at everything.  (And you still get where you’re going sooner than a car because the train doesn’t stop for the night.)

Reason #9:  Don’t have to look at people

There comes a time during a conventional voyage when you get so bored, you may be unable to resist looking at other people.  How often have you been on a 6-hour flight and you get so stir-crazy you decide to head over to the lavatory, even though you know there’ll be a line, and you stand there looking out over all the other bored, irritated people, packed in like cattle, and you just hate them all?  Or you’re so bored during a drive that you start to look at every driver you pass, and in every single case they’re looking back at you, and you’re both thinking, “What are you lookin’ it?!” and it’s just kind of creepy?

I guess if the answer to those (albeit rhetorical) questions is “No,” then you’re a better person than I am, and you can have your boring interstate highways and jam-packed airplanes.  For me, boredom just isn’t a problem on a train, and there’s so much to look at, and everybody looks better to me because, like them, I’m so much more cheerful.

Reason #10:  No deep vein thrombosis or perforated eardrums

Okay, I’ll concede that deep vein thrombosis isn’t exactly an epidemic.  It’s the rare person who, due to being too cramped and still for too long, suffers a blood clot that moves through his/her system and causes a pulmonary embolism.  But it can happen.  What if you got one and died on a plane or in your car?  Wouldn’t that be a rotten way to go?  (“He died as he lived … stuck in coach” or “He didn’t die alone … his car veered over several lanes and took out a school bus.”)

Meanwhile, train travel is easier on your ears.  The pressure changes on a train are very gradual.  As you cross the Continental Divide, you might notice the foil on a single-serving coffee creamer start to bulge, but you won’t feel much in your ears.  This train is at over 7,000 feet elevation right now and I’ve barely felt a thing.  Airplanes are different.  Cabin pressure is at cruising altitude is equivalent to 5,000 feet of elevation, and can decrease to zero in a matter of minutes when you land.  Once, I had a minor cold resulting in a clogged Eustachian tube, so when the plane descended I suffered a perforated eardrum.  This was absolutely excruciating and turned my ear into a geyser of blood and pus for several days, and required several follow-up visits with a doctor.

Bonus Reason:  Hand-to-hand combat

If you try to give somebody a real beat-down in the aisle of a passenger jet, you’ll probably get arrested when you land.  And an automobile is just too confined a space for a good fistfight—your elbows keep hitting things.  The sleeping cabin of a train, however, is private and spacious.  I could hear my daughters going at it from across the aisle.  They don’t pack a good punch, those girls, so neither was injured, but I think they had a good, satisfying tussle.

This was confirmed when I interviewed my daughters for this post.  Among the reasons my older daughter gave for preferring train travel was “Can finally fight it out with your sister once and for all.”  She even admitted that she was fantasizing a bit about being James Bond, who never boarded a train without having one final battle with this or that nemesis.  (And for the record, upon reading over my shoulder just now, she has assured me that she was pulling her punches and actually could have done serious damage.  Maybe on the way home?)

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