I’ve been a little quiet around here over the last several months.
Partly it’s because I’ve been in the thick of my first year of graduate school (let’s just say this: studying epidemiology during a pandemic is fascinating), and partly it’s because I’ve been gradually winding down my day job of the last 10 years.
But mostly, it’s because I’ve been working on finishing my book!
Allow me a little bit of backstory. Though the idea for the book didn’t land until the early days of the pandemic, the seeds for it were planted a few years back. I’d had my own gradual experience of waking up to climate change in 2017-2018, as I grappled with the transition into motherhood while frightening climate change headlines spiked in the mainstream news. I was also noticing a trend of rising climate anxiety in my coaching clients, all of whom were individuals navigating various forms of infertility or pregnancy loss. After our own circuitous journey to parenthood, working with others who wanted to become parents was deeply meaningful to me. But there was a short stretch of time when I heard three separate clients, all of whom were deeply attuned to issues of social and environmental justice, name a version of the same fear: What if the babies don’t want to come? What if the world isn’t going to be a safe place to raise children in another few years? What kind of future will my children face?
Having just brought babies into the world myself, I couldn’t stop thinking about this.
Though I’d been struggling with my own climate anxiety for a while, hearing these words from my clients was the “penny drop” moment for me. The moment I understood that if we as parents are going to bring children into the world, it’s our responsibility to do everything we can to make sure the world is a safe place for them. And addressing climate change, along with all of the issues that intersect with it—racial and gender justice, for starters—is just as important in making the world a safe place for our children as ensuring that we have the safest car-seats and organic baby formula. More important, even.
It felt, at first, like a cruel joke to realize that I had to figure out how to show up for something as emotionally overwhelming as climate change during a season of life when I already felt overwhelmed by diapers, tantrums, and snack requests.
But gradually, with lots of missteps along the way (and the advantage of years of training as a behavior change coach), I found ways to lean into change and to embrace a new reality as a climate-engaged parent. Parenting in a Changing Climate is about this journey, and it’s an invitation to others who are on this journey, as well.
It’s important to acknowledge that I’m writing these words—and the book itself—from a position of incredible privilege. I’m a white, cisgender, socioeconomically advantaged American. My experience of climate anxiety is explicitly informed by all of these privileges: before waking up to climate change, I had never experienced a sense of dread about what the future might hold for me or my children (and maybe you hadn’t, either?). Many vulnerable and marginalized communities, on the other hand, have experienced the existential threats of genocide, slavery, forced migration, and systemic oppression for generations. For them, climate change is one of many existential threats, a multiplier of harms that are already far too familiar, and already killing them. What is new about climate change, author Sarah Jaquette Ray notes in an essay in Scientific American aptly titled “The Unbearable Whiteness of Climate Anxiety,” is that people who had previously been sheltered from systemic oppression—people like me—are finally waking up to the possibility of our own “unlivable future.”
It’s also important to name the complexity of writing a book about parenting and climate change that features two white children on the cover, children who look so much like my own twins, when it’s children of color who will be most impacted by climate change. Children of color around the world already are being impacted by environmental racism and the early impacts of climate change, which fall disproportionately on systemically oppressed and marginalized communities. I have to admit that I struggled with the cover at first, as much as I love the image, because of this. Yet at its heart, Parenting in a Changing Climate is a memoir, and this informed my decision to keep the cover image. My whiteness, and my children’s whiteness, informs how I think about my own responsibility to engage in climate action. My family’s social location is an unavoidable part of my climate change story. Your family’s social location is part of your climate change story, too.
For me, the core of Parenting in a Changing Climate is a story about how grief and love can be fuel for positive change.
It’s a story about how several very personal losses in my life intersected with a growing awareness of loss and devastation in the natural world. It’s a story about my own experience of learning how to hold the enormity of grief and love within the context of the demanding early years of parenting, and learning how to translate these big emotions into practical, concrete habits. It’s about finding ways to cultivate resilience, take action, and practice hope in the face of climate change, during a season of life that’s often already overwhelming. It’s about finding brave, doable ways to show up for the children we love and the future that all children deserve.
I can’t wait for you to read it.
Parenting in a Changing Climate will be released in partnership with Citrine Publishing on 9/21/21. You can read more about it here and pre-order the Kindle version here. It will be available in paperback form and through other online retailers on the release date.