How sustainability today can help us prepare for tough times ahead

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a climate justice protest in Washington D.C. with trees, the White House, and the Washington Monument behind a gathered crowd on a rainy day

Endless hurricanes, wildfires, and flooding; astronomically high prices and low wages; biodiversity collapse – is this the future you expect for your kids in 30 years? For many of us concerned about climate change and social inequality, it seems like the future is going to be pretty grim. Some people are even going so far to think we’re going to be living in something out of a dystopia SF novel (if we’re not already).

But while being prepared for a legit natural or human-caused disaster is a good thing, hunkering down in despair isn’t. Honestly, our children deserve for us to at least try to turn this ship in the right direction. No one wants to tell their kids, “We didn’t bother trying because what was the point?”

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Showing ourselves the grace we show our kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Shannon (a white woman in a teal scarf) looking up at the camera with my younger son (a white boy) sitting next to me playing a Nintendo Switch on a blue couch

“I’m sorry – what was your name again?” I asked the man sitting next to me at the community meeting.

“Luis,” he replied, then gestured. “Remember, I asked you about hosting the neighborhood pantry?”

“Oh, right!” I recalled. “I’m sorry – I’m really bad at both faces and names.”

I’ve had some variation on this conversation dozens, if not hundreds, of times.

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Experiencing the world through others’ senses

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of our rabbit (a white lop with brown patches around his nose, eyes, and on his ears) sitting on our blue couch

Watching our rabbit sniff and scratch at the floor, I wonder what he’s experiencing.

From reading Ed Yong’s brilliant book An Immense World, I know our rabbit’s sight alone is far different from ours. Rabbits don’t have the cone in their eyes that distinguishes between green and red, so they’re essentially red/green colorblind. Because their eyes are on the sides of their heads, they have much better peripheral vision than we do, but don’t see particularly well straight in front of them. And that’s just vision – his sense of smell and hearing is likely far different from mine in a way that’s hard to comprehend.

Yong talks about how we try to force our sensory experiences onto other animals and assume they experience the world how we do.

But the fact is, we do it with people too. I just have to put on my husband’s glasses to be reminded of how radically different the visual world is for him. (I have glasses too, but I merely get a headache without them – he can barely see a couple of feet in front of him.) Or watch my kids slosh the unicorn slime from hand to hand that touching it makes me shudder. While all humans have approximately the same sensory systems, we still have radically different experiences of how our bodies take in and process that information.

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Respecting all types of family time

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Photo of two white boys cuddled together on a giant bean bag, both playing separate Nintendo Switches

“Nothing is wasted in nature,” I whispered to myself as I dumped moldy strawberries in our composter.

I despise wasting food. There are so many things wrapped up in the production of our food – from how farm workers are treated to the amount of fertilizer used – that throwing it away feels a bit like sacrilege. But we bought far too much for our Christmas fruit salad and the extra got shoved back in the fridge with the other holiday leftovers. So into the composter it had to go.

I at least had the solace that this food wouldn’t be wasted – it would break down into good compost to feed our garden next fall. Just like the fallen leaves in the forest feed the insects and fungus, which in turn feed the roots of the trees and other plants.

In fact, this is idea that nothing is wasted in nature is a mantra I’ve been trying to adopt in life far beyond our composter.

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Valuing play for our children and ourselves

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Photo of a young white boy holding up his hands above his hands, with a white wall showing a shadow split up in rainbow colors

Reading the plaque on the wall at the National Children’s Museum, I raised an eyebrow. I had been looking around while my kids climbed on the huge structure rising up two stories in the middle of the museum. The sign on the wall caught my eye, so of course I read it. It had a little blurb about the skills children would learn from using said giant climbing structure – like problem solving and teamwork – and careers that used those skills. Although I was nodding along at first, I stopped and thought, “Wait a minute! Why are we so worried about them learning specific skills, much less for a career? Why can’t we just let them play?”

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Finding magic in everyday life

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Photo of a large stuffed owl with glasses next to a small stuffed owl appearing to read a large version of a book Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!

Whoooooo loves reading Mo Willems books to their kids? Props to my local library for setting up this adorable little scene behind the check-out counter!

I talked to one of the librarians and she said that it just happened to come together organically – someone left the book there after story time, someone else put the big owl there, then someone fished the glasses out of Lost and Found and put the little owl next to the big one.

It just shows that creating little bits of magic and wonder don’t have to be a big, preplanned thing. Magic and wonder will show up if you keep your eyes open for them, whether that’s my younger son playing “monster school” or pretending to shoot each other with laser beams on a spaceship.

When everything and nothing has changed in being a parent

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment
Photo of a Chinese-style lantern of an alligator next to a tree wrapped in purple Christmas lights at night

An empty changing table. But in my mind, my memory, it wasn’t empty. There was a child on it, an excitable, squirmy three year old who was potty training – slowly. A shock of recognition went through me – he was that young last time we were here, wasn’t he? Had it been that long? Yes, it had.

I was standing in the bathroom of a favorite cafe – a place I hadn’t been since COVID started. We were on our way to the Zoolights event at the National Zoo – an event they hadn’t held since COVID started. And when COVID started, my kid was a toddler and now he’s a kid. Not even a “little” kid – just a kid. It was strange how time had jumped like nothing at all.

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Weaving climate change discussions into everyday life

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Photo of a kid in a blue fleece jacket (my son) and older man in a green sweatshirt (my dad) walking down a hiking path with trees on both sides

Warm weather in January stirs up a lot of ambiguous feelings in me. On one hand – it’s beautiful out! On the other – it’s probably because of climate change! (It’s also called climate chaos for a reason – the up and down unpredictability is part of it.) And back to the other hand – we should enjoy it while we can! In reality, it’s probably a combination of all three.

Bringing kids out in nature and modeling enjoying it is one of the best ways to build lots of emotional and physical skills as well as environmental awareness. You don’t need to get all apocalyptic, but it’s also a chance to draw attention to how it is unseasonably warm and how the climate affects it. You can get curious, asking your kids what they think we can do to help. (It’s very possible they’ve already discussed it in school.) We don’t want to put the whole burden on them though, so be sure to talk about what adults (including yourself) are doing, like Indigenous water protectors fighting oil pipelines or Black and Hispanic activists working to close coal and natural gas plants in their neighborhoods. And of course, all of the people working to build renewable energy!

If you want somewhere to start, check out the Family Climate Justice toolkit I created with Raising Luminaries.

(I originally wrote this post on New Years’ Day and posted it to social media then.)