Kindness vs. Courage

Emily Raboteau's Lessons For Survival is the book you need

Have I got a treat for you.

I first became aware of Emily Raboteau’s work on X (then Twitter). She had this beautiful project, starting on January 1, 2019, breaking climate silence by collecting and linking overheard snatches of conversation that touched on people’s lived experience of climate change. She says that she remembers meeting me at an event that same year about parenting in the climate crisis.

I am so honored to have gotten to know her a little better recently, and to be able to read her new book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”, which is out this week.

buy it!

It’s a searching and lyrical collection of linked essays grounded in her perspective as a Black mother in New York City, that also range as far afield as Alaska and Palestine. Pandemic stir-craziness is here, aging bodies, and the “excruciating” murder of George Floyd. She wields her considerable craft with ease; every page is lit up by curiosity and compassion. It’s deceptively tricky to draw a reader into a feeling of intimacy in this way while also treading into such harsh subjects.

I got a chance to interview Emily about the book recently, and here is some of our conversation.

I want to ask you about something we were talking about earlier: Not putting climate in the subtitle or the title of the book. Can you just talk about that decision?

In terms of messaging, there's a lot of fatigue around climate. I was afraid that it would seem like the literary equivalent of vegetables, and perhaps I was fearful that it would turn people off of reading something that that they could really genuinely relate to. I hope my voice has a sense of humor, you know, and there's a strong memoir thread that runs through this essay collection. My hope is that readers will kind of relate to me in my anxiety about the climate crisis and other crises, and feel less alone in it.

Very much so for me.

And I don't know about you, but increasingly I'm feeling that climate is the backdrop of so much storytelling that I'm ingesting that I wasn't sure it was necessary to advertise.

I was just thinking about—we're in a cultural moment where people are like, ‘we're gonna tell you the real truth about motherhood. Here's what they don't tell you,’ you know, and that's like a draw, right? It's like an enticing secret. 

Yes, it is, or menopause. I'm entering that phase, too, like, ‘here's what we never told you about menopause.’ And it's like, Oh, tell me more.

And then this opposite thing, which is this looming, enormous thing that we just don't talk about, because— why?

Yes, I think that with, say, motherhood or menopause, we secretly or subconsciously believe we can survive those things, even if they're hard as hell—whereas I think maybe for a lot of people, there's like a subconscious terror…The secret about climate change is, it’s really really bad.

I get very put off by the insistence that we always talk about hope and solutions.

I feel glad for all these approaches, but I also [feel] a little bit allergic. I think my ambition with this book was to— and this is why I loved your your climate emotions wheel so much — was to really honor all those emotions….fear and despair and horror…and anger. Anger for me is a really big one. I don't know about you, but that's for me, my persistent question as a woman, growing up, has been, what do I do with my anger?

And so, in contemplating this kind of destructive force, which is very much in the hands of a few powerful men—does that make you feel like this is a good place for your anger?

What do you mean? Like, writing about it?

Like it's a sufficiently large target, or like it's empowering?

I think it's a sufficient target. That’s actually something

Emily Atkin

writes about, I think, really well. If you're thinking about this as like a story, we know who the bad guys are. It's very clear.

And we know what the problem is actually like. It's a complex problem. But it's not a mystery, you know.

Right! I find anger very activating. I feel like it pulls me out of despair.

You mentioned that you teach the book The Intersectional Environmentalist [at CUNY]. And your book's very intersectional. I feel a sense of growing vitality in the climate movement— I would date it to Standing Rock, but also a lot of Black voices, basically, people saying, this is about people. It's not about trees. And this is about humanity. I wonder what you think about that.

I think you're absolutely right. I think Standing Rock was a kind of a watershed moment, and another more recent watershed moment that I perceived, perhaps as a New Yorker in particular, and wonder if you experienced too, was that during the pandemic George Floyd was murdered on the same day that Chris Cooper had his bad encounter in the ramble in Central Park with that white woman… those two stories got twisted together in such a way that it felt like all these conservation organizations — Audubon, Sierra Club—were suddenly putting out Black Lives Matter statements. And it wasn't just them, because everybody suddenly was putting out Black Lives Matter statements. In particular, the conservation movements found a kind of language around, like, you know, if we're caring about animals and the wild and nature we we have to care about Black people, too.

To me that felt really, really, really late, so incredibly absurd, and also important and vital. All those things.

And …it wasn't just George Floyd's death as part of this Black Lives Matter time but death on a different kind of scale during the pandemic, based on race and class and zip code.

We're all getting more aware, I think, in terms of media and storytelling, about all of our lives being at risk and some of our lives being at more risk. And we need to look at that, and think about justice.

And that relates to what you wrote about also, the different kinds of resilience, right, that are available to different communities.

Right? Thinking about fugitivity, for example. When I was learning about sea level rise from Liz Rush's book, and another book that I was reviewing. I kept thinking about my grandmother. During her time, it's not like global warming was really on her mind, but in terms of thinking about threats to life…she had the wisdom, as did a lot of black people during Jim Crow, to leave the South and look for better outcomes in the North.

And it’s arguable whether or not they they found those, but there was like a pathway to carry them in the Great Migration. And so fleeing and fugitivity became something I thought about as I was reading about managed retreat, the wisdom of running from something so threatening that it's gonna maybe kill you.

And then on the opposite end of the spectrum, when I was in Palestine, doing some investigative reporting on the occupation, resilience there was sort of the opposite tack. Sumud was a word that I learned when I was there. These shepherds that I was interviewing in the West Bank kept using it. It's the strength to stay put in spite of the threat and the danger of settler violence. It's like a completely opposite tack, right?

I was really interested in thinking through that word resilience in this book. It can look like so many different things. We talk about it in terms of financial resilience, and I was interested in thinking about it in more spiritual and emotional ways, too. I mean, that paradox is a very rich vein for me.

So Standing Rock is about the valorization of indigeneity. And that is like sumud, right? “We're gonna stay and make this place better” versus “we have to get going” is something that I think people everywhere all over the world are going to be asking in relationship to the land that they're on.

I mean there are staggering numbers of people moving already. Migrations will be increasingly underfoot within our own national borders, not people from elsewhere coming in, but people already here, moving about.

One person I really liked talking to for this book, who made me think a lot about climate migration in kind of more complex terms, was this woman Luz who lost her home in Hurricane Sandy. I kind of envy her for the relatively light footprint of living in a van, and the freedom to go, and also that she's not burdened by possessions in the same way. But it's because she went through this horror of losing everything she owned to Hurricane Sandy.

She refers to herself as a climate refugee as well as a climate migrant, and she's not anybody who came from outside…. and she has the ability to keep moving when whatever threats come. And she's keenly aware of what those are.

So, it's just complicated, what we hold up as being a healthy response or a strong response to these kinds of overwhelming damages. Which, as a parent is confusing. How do we teach resilience when it might look like this in one circumstance, or it might look like that?

I feel like I need to educate myself very fast and work in company with others. So resilience is something I want to learn a lot more about.

What are the types of decisions you're making as you're raising your kids that you think, that you hope, will be especially useful for them in the world that you can see that we're going into?

It's funny, because my message to them used to be, 'The most important thing in life is kindness.’ That’s a message I received, and then not for that just to be words, but to show what kindness looks like when it's being given to us, or when we have the opportunity to give it.

And during the pandemic I started to feel a revision of my thinking. Yes, kindness. But also courage.

There was one day when one of my kids out of boredom— cause we were stuck in New York the whole time, and so there was just like levels of boredom you wouldn't believe—one day one of my kids snuck into my makeup bag and painted his face like a tiger, like war paint. And remember, at 7 o'clock we were cheering for the the workers. He was trying to demonstrate strength in the face of fear.

Global Climate Strike in NYC 2019 via Wikimedia Common

The thing I struggle actually, a lot with is how much to incorporate them in things like marches or actions.

I took my younger kid out of school to the big climate march in 2019. He was 6. And then we got down there, and it was such a throng that that was too much sensory overload, and he was like, I wanna go home. He started crying, and I was like, Oh, did I do this for him, or did I do this for me?

I think, thinking about the scale of the march you're taking them to is a very good idea.

Right, like a small action. And then using that small action to talk about systems. In Kingsbridge, in the Bronx, they're daylighting Tibbetts Brook, that's one of New York City's dozens of varied streams and brooks and waterways. And they're doing this as a climate mitigation.

And our house actually is sited on this buried brook, on backfilled wetlands. We get these big rain events, and there's flooding that happens. And it's more disgusting than that.  The wastewater treatment plan can‘t handle the volume. It mixes with human waste.

So a small thing we can do to help with the flooding and with the pollution is to unbury the stream.

And that's something I'm able to talk to my kids about— this process underway. Because if things work out, we're gonna be able to walk along that stream, even though it runs along like the Major Deacon Expressway. But just to see, we can remake and redo wrongs.

Buy Lessons For Survival

Links

My column asking “Should Schools Teach Climate Activism?”

The relationship between climate change and the cutting of girl children:

“Many girls get mutilated so they can be married off at a tender age. When there are floods and droughts, we see more girls being cut.”

It was so lovely to be in conversation with Rona Renner, aka ‘Nurse Rona”, as well as her son Matt on KPFA in California this week about kids and climate mental health. Matt and I are both board members of The Climate Mobilization and he works expanding solar installations for the Seneca Nation.

I loved talking to these teens and their grownup for an episode of the teen-produced podcast This Teenage Life, about climate anxiety. Two great quotes: “The climate crisis is really scary and oftentimes I try to push it in the back of my brain” ; “The earth is amazing, it’s one of a kind and we’re not done protecting her.”