Earth Day Bonus: Unveiling Opportunities For Hope
Kaitlyn Teer on motherhood in the age of mass extinction, and her grandmother's garden
Hello friends.
Join me and Katharine K. Wilkinson for a live to discuss her new book Climate Wayfinding, Monday 4/27 at 5:30pm ET!
I had a really fulfilling pre-Earth Day Sunday, albeit cold, gusty and rainy. I spent the morning with my neighbor mom friends tabling at the farmers market with Climate Families NYC for the SUNNY Act, which is designed to bring decentralized balcony and plug-in solar to renters in NYC; then I headed over to Union Square to be part of a quick-hit activation, talking about climate emotions…
And I finished the day at a party for Climate Defiance, supporting the activists who got arrested yesterday protecting New York State’s climate law, which Gov. Kathy Hochul wants to weaken, which I’ve also been calling the State Assembly about all week.
Mirroring some of that abundance of energy, I’m bringing an extra post this week for Earth Day. I want to share with you my conversation with Kaitlyn Teer.
She lives in the Pacific Northwest, has two small children, and works for Cup of Jo, which is one of my favorite soft landing places on the Internet. Her sweet, wise and precisely crafted new book of essays, Little Apocalypses, blends the personal, lyrical, political and scientific. It charts her experiences since becoming a mother jolted her into a new level of awareness of the climate crisis.
I saw so much of my own journey in hers, and we had a really nourishing conversation. I so hope you’ll check out the book!
Anya Kamenetz: I’ve been really cheering you on as I’ve seen the book featured in platforms like Anne Helen Petersen’s, because they don’t do a lot of climate coverage. And so, do you feel like you’ve cracked the code a little bit in opening up a space for people to talk about this intersection of mothering and climate change?
Kaitlyn Teer: It’s something that my friends who are parents, we talk about in conversation all the time. And it doesn’t always feel welcome in parenting spaces, which I understand, because depending on the space, it can be polarizing or overwhelming. But it’s something that every parent I know is thinking about.
AK: Definitely, and seeing the space be filled in, it’s exciting, you know?
So, you know, getting right to the big questions this book is framed around, —“how to raise babies in an age of mass extinction,” and “how to mind the disappearing world while also minding our children” —what’s… what’s your answer to those?
Kaitlyn Teer: You sent that question over, and I was like, okay, ostensibly, I wrote a whole book trying to answer this.
Anya Kamenetz: Yes. :)
Kaitlyn Teer: But these questions about parenting and climate feel so big in so many ways. I’m still wrestling with them, like, every day.
How do we do this? We are figuring it out as we go, as parents always have.
But the first thing that comes to mind is I can’t do it alone, and I wouldn’t want to.
My husband and I so value building community with our friends and neighbors, and it’s so deeply nourishing, but I also think it’s political.
As a family, we just went to our local No Kings rally with our kids, and while we were there, we heard this familiar voice on stage, and our neighbor was one of the organizers, and it was so exciting for our kids to see our next-door neighbor on stage in front of all these thousands of people who had gathered to say, this isn’t right.
And afterwards, we were talking about it. My daughter, who’s 7, was like, I want to write him a letter! And so she got out this big piece of paper and her crayons…she said something like, thank you so much for standing up for our community. You’re a good neighbor. And then she went and put it in his mailbox, and then he came over with some balloons left over from the event.
…I really hope that she remembers this. This seems really important.
AK: And so your writing of this book is an extension of that community building idea, right? You’re, like, putting up a little flare and seeing who else sees this, who else is rallying.
KT: I sometimes felt alone in new motherhood…Parenting in general, it can feel a little isolating if you’re finding your way.
My truest hope for my kids, probably, is that no matter what happens in the future, they don’t face it alone.
[I think we both teared up here…]
AK: It’s so big. I mean, reckoning with how little power we actually have.
KT: Yes, as parents.
AK: Yes. But then, also, how much power we have.
KT: Owning it. It’s both. It’s both, and I think finding my way into that ability to hold both of those things as true, and to figure out the tension between doing everything and doing nothing, and that is one of the existential predicaments that I suspect has always been true of parenting.
And then layer on top of it this planetary emergency, and it becomes all the more… salient.
AK: Absolutely. So, I want to talk about hope.
We did an episode of the podcast, [We Are The Great Turning] with Joanna Macy, and we called it the H-word. And of course, she uses the term “Active Hope.”
Do you feel like it’s something that is necessary, important? Do you have a particular qualifier for how you embrace it? What’s the place of hope in your life?
And I guess I should say specifically, like, hope that we turn things around and stop being on this existential threat path.
KT: Wait, but you also said you’re allergic to hope. Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?
AK: I don’t want my well-being to rest on a projection of what might or might not happen in the future.
And I often think about Greta Thunberg’s words when she said, I don’t want you to hope, I want you to panic.
KT: Yeah.
AK: And I think that’s really right, you know?
The question is, like, who is telling whom to hope, and for what reason, and what are they telling them to hope for?
Whereas, I think that there’s another… there’s another potential orientation that you could have, which is, I know how I want to show up. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but I know how I want to show up.
KT: All of that rings really true for me as well. When I think about feeling allergic to hope I think about how, in some of the evangelical spaces I grew up in there was, theological stance that looked at anxiety, at worry, at fear, at really any emotion that could be considered difficult or negative.
As a sin.
And… instead of… Feeling anxious or worrying, the faithful response was to just trust that God had a plan.
And there was added to that, like, another flavor of that theology… the Thanksgiving must precede the miracle. Almost if the miracle doesn’t happen, then your faith must not be strong enough. You must not be grateful enough, or trusting enough. Your faith was weak.
And I’ve left the church. But of course, even then, it didn’t work for me. I still felt anxiety all the time. And it has never worked when someone has said, don’t feel what you’re feeling.
AK: Yes! yeah.
KT: I think that’s something that all parents figure out. You can’t just say, don’t feel that. It feels awful to deny your feelings.
So, when I think about hope it’s very important for me to distinguish from spiritual bypassing.
And from any sort of passing of judgment on other people’s feelings. Or trying to talk anybody out of their feelings.
And when I think about the riskiness of hope, the painfulness of hope, I think about trying to conceive.
Every month I felt like I was on that hope roller coaster, and my mind would just play these tricks…I’m not gonna jump the gun and start testing too early…I can’t let myself hope, but also if I just stay positive and relax, then maybe it’s gonna work out this time, and it’s just so miserable. I was often bracing against disappointment.
And I think what’s so unbearable about hope is that waiting is unbearable.
Uncertainty is unbearable. I remember this sense of, like, could I just take the negative pregnancy test? I just would rather know I’m not pregnant than to still live in this moment of not knowing what’s coming next, either way.
And so… I bring all of that to my thinking about hope.
I don’t think I… I felt so strongly a need to figure out my stance on hope until I had children.
I don’t think of hope as a feeling. To me, it is not the guarantee of a positive outcome. It’s not optimism. Yeah.
I’m trying to distinguish between the feeling of hopelessness or despair, which I feel all the time.
And… A blanket statement that the future is hopeless. Because that’s another way of removing uncertainty, and jumping out of the discomfort of waiting.
And so, I’ve embraced, sort of, the kind of hope that Joanna Macy talks about, and Rebecca Solnit talks about so well, where it’s not a feeling. It’s active, it’s moving in the direction of what you desire, it’s a tool for change.
When I was an educator, I remember reading Paolo Freira’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. And then I didn’t realize until later that he had written a follow-up, Pedagogy of Hope.
And in that, he says this great line that the role of the progressive educator is to unveil difficult truths about the world, and to unveil opportunities for hope. And I’ve adopted that approach as a parent.
AK: Raising children and educating children is a hopeful enterprise. It has to be, right? If you didn’t have hope, you would…you’d do it totally differently. You would just indulge them completely in every moment, and not think of the future at all.
KT: Yes! The future is what makes all of this matter. The stakes are raised because of the future, and our care for it.
AK: I had my own experience of infertility treatments, and I thought a lot about that, and about also the grief that’s not enfranchised, the grief that’s intangible, and has no timeline.
KT: Yes. Because the grief is there as long as you’re holding on to the hope.
AK: So you brought up Joanna Macy, we both love her, let’s talk about her! What do you find useful in her work?
KT: The book that I love is Active Hope. I return to it frequently.
One of the things I really appreciate about how that book frames our current moment is the three stories.
The Great Unraveling [collapse]
Business as Usual [The industrial growth society, corporate capitalism]
and The Great Turning [the seeds of a life-giving future].
And I was actually thinking before our call, that the first time I felt myself break with Business as Usual was after giving birth.
In those early days of just being up all night feeding, and exhausted and still in pain myself, I remember it was winter, and I remember laying in bed and hearing our neighbor get up and start their car and scrape their car off, and it was, like, 6 AM. And I was just like, I cannot imagine doing that ever again.
And of course, it hasn’t stayed that way for me.
But it was my first moment of experiencing the way that illness, or grief, or any other big event might just be a break with the story of business as usual…
And of course I cared about the planet before having children. Of course I cared about the world’s children before having children, and future generations.
[But] there was this widening of the circles of my life that happened after having a child. And I think part of that is just this experience of another being who’s so absolutely dependent on you.
And I grew up in the generation of school shootings, but after becoming a parent, I just had this… newfound palpable sense that we live in a society that does not care very much for children and families.
And that, of course, broke me out of business as usual. It became untenable.
AK: I mean, the part about multiple stories for me, too, I obviously love it as well as a storyteller, but you know, Joanna came up with that teaching sometime in the late ‘80s, and when she first taught it, as I understand it, there was a suggestion of three phases, with a Great Turning kind of coming.
And gradually, I think as things got more dire, she started shifting more toward the idea of multiple narratives. Without even knowing what the three stories are, the notion that there are multiple stories, is itself really helpful to me, because there’s this disorientation that happens, and sometimes we call it hypernormalization, between these narratives and, like, you’re there with the tree, with your family, it’s a beautiful day, also maybe a civilization is ending, also the moon capsule is up there, like, all these things are happening.
I found it helpful for me and for other people as well to know that there are multiple stories happening all the time.
KT: Always. Always. And that’s so true for me, too, as a parent, because of course I went back to business as usual.
I became a parent in 2018. I just feel like my entire experience of parenting has been looking at my phone in horror and back to my child! Like, I parented through the pandemic, and through the uprisings for racial justice, and it’s just been one thing after another!
So, I’m always holding that these stories are happening at the same time.
AK: So tell me about the stuff that you do in between looking at your phone? How do you parent? What are the practices that you found that people might find helpful, as you are trying to continue to be engaged and balanced and do all the things.
KT: As a family, we spend a lot of time at the beach. It is such a special place for us as a family, and so, of course, one of the ways that we honor it and care for it is going to community-wide beach cleanups. It’s super fun. Our kids love trash grabbers. That’s the pace of a child. Like, when we’re walking on the beach, they are stopping to look at every little thing, and so they’re good at noticing tiny pieces of plastic.
Here in the Northwest, where salmon is a keystone species, salmon restoration is incredibly important.
And every year, we go to the salmon release at the creek in our downtown city center.
AK: What does that mean?
KT: There are various organizations, environmental groups, and local tribes who are involved in salmon restoration.
There’s a salmon in the schools program, where public schools get, like, a tank where they see salmon raised from egg to fry, and then as part of their school day, they go on a field trip to release the salmon frys.
Every year our community does a Procession of the Species event. A parade that honors endangered species, and the Endangered Species Act, and so people just dress up in the most wonderful and amazing plant, animal, and tree costumes, and it’s just such a beautiful act of creativity. And we march together down, you know, the streets, and it’s so joyous.
And so all of these actually are so deeply rooted in community, too.
But when I think about the one that I love the best, it’s gotta be gardening with my kids.
I learned to garden from my grandmother. She lived several blocks away from us growing up, both my parents worked, and I spent a lot of time with her in the summers.
I have a vivid and clear memory of how her garden was laid out. She had this big backyard suburban garden, I can still picture, where the rhubarb plants were, and the tomato plants, and so gardening feels, to me, like a practice that reaches into the past and extends into the future. My children never met my grandmother, but, through me, I feel like it’s a way that they’re connected to her when we garden together.
It’s also so embodied. To pluck a carrot from the soil that’s right outside our door. And one that we have planted, and tended, and watered, and cared for, and watched grow, and then to take a bite of it and to taste, like, its crunchiness, and its sweetness, and then to take nourishment from it, that is teaching my children that we… are part of the earth, that it is part of us.
AK: Finally: Do you find that your inner work reckoning with the climate crisis has spilled out into other aspects of your life? Are you better off at dealing with uncertainty or decay in interpersonal relationships? How are you handling the current administration?
KT: So when Joanna Macy says, We have to take a clear-eyed look at the mess that we’re in, I feel like that has never been my problem, personally. I am a person who, when facing uncertainty, anxiety, fear, I want the whole picture.
And I am realizing that that is maybe not the strength that I once thought it was, because it’s, in some ways, another form of soothing myself.
AK: Yes, yes.
KT: Because in that search for information, what I’m really looking for is to remove the uncertainty.
And you asked how that inner work has affected my interpersonal relationships, and my relationship to decay, and within the last decade, both of my parents have had very serious illnesses. They’re better now, fortunately, but, when we were going through those different experiences, I was the one in the family who was, like just researching everything, about every procedure, about every scan, every diagnosis.
I just didn’t want, as we’ve talked about with trying to conceive, like, the unbearable uncertainty of not knowing what was going to happen next. I almost preferred the bad news.
When I participated in the 10 weeks with the Good Grief Network,
[I interviewed Kaitlyn’s facilitator, Kristan Childs]
what was so beautiful and meaningful about that experience was that once a week, we would log on to our Zoom and we would all have an opportunity to share about whatever step of the program we were working through.
And… there was no pressure to respond to anybody. We were just there to listen, and to hold uncertainty together
And to sit with it without trying to rush through it, and to soothe it with information, as I’m prone to do. And so, to have that container of that space where I was just with those feelings, but with other people, and we weren’t gonna solve them, we were just gonna be with them I still feel such a deep kinship with them, and sense of belonging.
And so that, I think, has changed my relationship to grief, to decay, to these uncomfortable feelings, to have more of a tolerance for just being with them.
AK: Yeah. And learning how to do that, which is with others.
KT: Yeah.
Behind the paywall: Kaitlyn’s top book recs on the intersection of motherhood and climate, and links to my interviews with two of the authors!
Kaitlyn Teer: Five book recommendations on the intersection of motherhood and climate
Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden By Camille T Dungy
Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher’s Guide to Doing Right By Your Kids and Everyone Else by Elizabeth Cripps (quoted in this article of mine)
Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” by Emily Raboteau
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Here’s my interview with Emily.