As I tend to tell it, my environmentalism started with grief and anger, at the young age of 10. I visited Homasassa Springs State Park and saw manatees for the first time. Their huge size and gentle nature enchanted me. As I watched them, my parents had to nudge me insistently to get me to leave. The same day, reading the informational signs, I learned that they were terribly endangered. I signed up for the Save the Manatees club that day and told everyone I could get to listen to me about it.
But in reality, my environmentalism started years before that.
Kids fly down my street on their skateboards and bikes to the nearby community center and I smile and shake my head. “I do wish they’d be safer on their bikes,” I mutter to myself, but am glad that they can do so. I think back to my mom talking about how she’d walk around her town as a kid and take the bus to the movies in the next town over.
Sadly, I know my neighborhood is a relative rarity in American society.
Images have been created by Craig Froehle, Angus Maguire, the Center for Story-Based Strategy and the Interaction Institute for Social Change.
“But he’s spoiled!” my older son proclaimed loudly, expressing his opinion that his brother always gets what he wants.
Now, his claim is blatantly untrue. In fact, my older son is probably the one who gets what he wants more often just because he has stronger opinions. My younger son is more likely to say, “Yeah, sure, that sounds good.”
But I wasn’t going to get into that conversation. I knew it wasn’t going to go anywhere and just turn into the nonsense of trying to list every time that my older son got what he wanted.
Instead, I took a different angle. “Well, you know that we do try very hard to be fair. But fair doesn’t always mean equal.”
Sure, it addresses some mature themes like the patriarchy. But we talk about hard social issues all the time in our family.
Sure, my boys are explicitly not the target audience. But they read all sorts of stuff that centers girls and women, including Squirrel Girl comics and the Ramona books, and love them.
Sure, they won’t get all of the jokes. But that’s true in day to day life and they’ll get plenty of them, like Ken’s job being “beach.”
So I think they’d enjoy it.
But more importantly, I want them to be exposed to the messages it carries in such an accessible way.
This weather – the record heat, the poor air quality – is scary and exhausting for adults. But what if you’re a kid? And what if you’re a kid who has heard it’s caused by climate change? Instead of avoiding the term climate change when talking to our kids, it’s becoming more important than ever. But there are some ways we can talk to them that are factual, don’t inspire fear, and even help empower them.
1) Present the facts without panic. Say something like “The weather is so much hotter than it’s been in the past because pollution we’re putting into the atmosphere is making the Earth warmer over many years.” Or for the air quality issues, “They are having bad wildfires in Canada and the smoke is blowing down here. It’s worse than usual because the spring was so dry. The climate is changing because of pollution we put in the atmosphere.”
2) Talk about what adults are doing to fix it. This is a big part of not sparking climate anxiety. Something like “Many adults are working to build and improve clean sources of energy that don’t make this pollution like solar and wind. Other people are pushing politicians to do even more to address the problem.” If they’re younger kids, you can point out what high schoolers and college students are doing. They feel like adults but not parental figures, which may have even more of a punch.
3) Involve your kids in making systemic change. Have them envision what a truly sustainable community would look like to them and how it’s different from your own community. Then have them write to local policy makers to tell them what they think of climate change and what they would like to change locally. This is really empowering! Check out the Cultivating Climate Justice At-Home Family Toolkit for a template and more ideas.
4) Find ways to live more sustainably in your own lives and explain the reasons behind it to your kids, like switching to solar or wind power, eating less meat, biking/walking/ taking public transit instead of driving, etc. This doesn’t replace systemic change though! Check out my book for tips (and tips on activism too).
5) Make meaning together in your actions. Find ways to be fulfilled through more environmentally friendly activities, whether that’s more time together, building relationships with neighbors or friends, more time in nature, writing stories or creating art, etc. This will be what makes your actions personally sustainable as well as environmentally sustainable!
“What’s that road named after?” my older son said, pointing to the road that his elementary school is named after. He was in his “asking questions about why things are named what they are” stage.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We can look it up.”
That’s how we found out his elementary school is named after an enslaver.
Kneeling on the bricks in our town square, my older son seemed to be attacking them with chalk. Intently focused, he was rubbing his blue piece of chalk onto a brick.
“I’m rage-chalking,” he informed me.
“Ah,” I said, now understanding. “Yes, that’s absolutely something you can do.” I nodded and went back to filling in my own squares.
“Can you water your garlic?” I asked my younger son, referring to the elephant garlic we planted in our garden. He loves elephants, so of course we had to plant an elephant plant.
“Sure!” he replied.
Now, did he actually water it? Well, no. He tried, but the rain barrel was out of water and then he got distracted.
Thankfully, the garden isn’t school and watering is not homework. But there is much my kids will learn from it, above and beyond the practical skills that go into planting and cultivating seeds. These lessons are drawn from my own experience, but also heavily influenced from broader points I’ve picked up from the books Braiding Sweetgrass and Lessons from Plants. As Robin Wall Kimmerer says in Braiding Sweetgrass, “Plants speak in a tongue that every breathing thing can understand. Plants teach in a universal language: food.”
I smiled as I saw my friend’s kindergartener running towards me waving the trans rights flag of pink, blue, and white. While she may have known what it stood for – her parents are supportive of trans folks – I suspect she was just happy to have a flag. But I was also heartened that the organization supporting LBGTQ+ youth had a prominent booth in-between the kids area and the carnival rides at our city’s big festival. It was impossible to miss, with all of the lovely rainbow decorations. When we stopped by the booth, we picked up a rainbow peace sign necklace.
Leaves reach upward, branches split as they rise into the air. There’s a striking gap between the two main branches, an absence of tree and canopy. Through that gap runs a power line, the industrial shaking its way through the biological, ecological. It’s nearly half a tree, restricted. And yet, it is still full in its own way, defiantly standing tall despite being cut again and again.
Some days, I feel like so many of us are that tree. Cut through for the sake of progress, of capitalism, of others’ needs. Having metaphorical branches cut away from us, making it harder to be healthy and whole. Letting go of parts of ourselves and working ourselves to exhaustion because the only other choice is to be cut down altogether.
