by Kendall Furlong

Created on: January 07, 2008   Last Updated: October 20, 2009

This is an empirical question and in theory it should not be part of an opinion poll. That it has not been the subject of a controlled experiment does not leave us fee to opine at will however, for even without quantifiable data we can still do a thought experiment by imagining a Popperian falsifiable hypothesis, and see where it takes us.

A good place to start is to examine just what the destruction of the extended family, as the initial proposition somewhat overdramatically puts it, actually means. If you go back far enough, extended families referred to blood relatives and their retinues living under the same roof. Breaking them up meant moving these assemblages from single to multiple households. Although the former would have been much larger, shared communal areas and services probably meant that both the square footage and total energy used was considerably less in the larger dwellings. Score one for keeping families together.

But there are other consequences to breaking up extended families. My own extended family no longer lives under the same roof, but we remain very close, visit often, and support each other in myriad ways. Although two of my children live close by and could easily walk or ride bicycles, in fact they, as do most people, add greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption by driving. If families living further apart retain comparable enmeshment, inevitably they will spent even more energy, though it seems more likely that they would reduce contact and consequently the energy used to achieve all those face-to-faces. My other child, lives across the country and his participation in family togetherness is limited to once or twice a year. Still, his infrequent trips do mean more jet fuel than if he lived at home.

Families that break up and do not retain contact, that are destroyed in the terms the present question seems to imply, probably add no more to climate change than already occurred in the move from single dwellings to multiple ones. Still, if this analysis is correct, and mind you it is speculation, there is at least some negative influence on climate traceable to the break up of extended families.

The polling question did not extend to the breakup of nuclear families, but surely fairness would require it be included, and is subject to a similar analysis. Nuclear families do, however, tend to be more contentious when they split than extended families, thus more likely to spend energies and lawyer's fees (who then buy gas-guzzling

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