Mothering As a Radical Climate Solution

With the words “SURVIVAL” and “APOCALYPSE” in all-caps on the cover of Emily Raboteau’s latest book, one might assume the contents are heavy and dark. While there are certainly heart-wrenching scenes in her descriptions of the overlapping injustices of climate, race, and health, this book is a thing of beauty and love. Raboteau’s engaging lyrical essays call for readers to more clearly see and care for all they hold dear.

The book is also a window into the radical potential of parenthood—and nurturing more broadly—for bringing us together into the future. Raboteau writes, “It was my ambition, in gathering our voices, to suggest that the world is as interconnected as it is unjust.”

While some chapters bring the reader along with Raboteau to Palestine and the Arctic, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” (Henry Holt and Co.) focuses most intently on the author’s shifting perspectives and interpretations of her home environment in New York. When Raboteau and I spoke on the phone in March—on the momentous day when she birthed her latest book into the world—she tells me she did not always identify as an environmental writer. The professor of creative writing at City College of New York in Harlem says she began to reconsider the notion after reading . This and other works of “nature” writing by authors of color helped her see that nature is not limited to forests and grasslands and wild places. Her urban neighborhood, too, cradles wildness and life in abundance.

Raboteau tells me her teaching—and her parenting—now include climate change explicitly. “It no longer felt appropriate to just teach creative writing without making space for this thing that is of great concern to my students,” she says.

Each of Raboteau’s identities—writer, photographer, professor, mother—shapes her perspective as she explores the changing nature of her relationship with her environment. Early in the book she describes how, when she was single, she got a used bike and developed a cyclist’s-eye view of New York. “The bike lanes became a network in my mind, a nervous system. Manhattan was an island whose spine I could navigate in a day, with bridges poking off it like ribs,” she writes. “My rides were epic, and seemingly endless.”

I read this section with intense, bittersweet feelings. I, too, thrived on two wheels when I lived in New York. I actually looked forward to my daily commute, riding from my fourth-floor walk-up in Crown Heights over the Manhattan Bridge and up to my office on Park Ave. I would weave my bike around the cars stopped in traffic, feeling like my quads could take on the world (and save it from a fossil-fueled demise in the process).

But Raboteau ends that section with a brief sentence that fells me: “Then I traded that ride for a stroller.”

Parenthood shifts Raboteau’s perspective from a cyclist’s-eye view into a parent’s-eye view of New York. As she maps the city now using playgrounds rather than bike lanes, the environment around her again changes. It shrinks to the size of her neighborhood.

“I felt at first a little bit stuck … by the condition of motherhood,” she tells me. And I get that. I often struggle with the label of mother and all the things that society (and my children) expect of me as a result. For me, the book’s most resonant metaphor is that motherhood is a cape with two magical but contradictory powers: invisibility and power.

As we commune over the ups and downs of this shared role, Raboteau tells me her children are now 11 and 10. Mine are 5 and 2.

“You’re in it!” she offers with empathy. Parenthood is many things, simultaneously “tedious as hell,” Raboteau writes in the book, but also tender and so, so sweet. She tells me she misses having a 2-year-old and recalls with fondness how her son used to call his bathing suit a “bathing soup.” In much the same way, I can’t bring myself to correct my daughter when she asks for “mac and roni” for dinner.

Raboteau describes her heart and hurt in searingly beautiful detail in the book. She writes, “My spine was either the sum of my moods, a barometer of the era, or a vertical timeline of historical abuse.” The relentless pain she was experiencing, while seemingly impossible to diagnose, in some ways came as no surprise considering the roles she played and the ways they aligned with the health and body of her relationships: “I am the backbone of my family … I am the backbone of my community,” she writes. “I birthed two babies at home without drugs because I trusted my own body to be a mammal more than I trusted in a healthy outcome from the medical machine.”

To navigate feelings of depression and despair, Raboteau writes that she started seeing public art pop up along the 2-mile stretch of New York between her apartment and her office. “It’s like a gallery, actually, if your eyes are open to it.” She chose to layer on a photographer’s-eye view of the city, bringing her camera with her as she walked the streets.

“My gaze shifted,” she writes, and that feeling of stuckness eventually gave way. She fell in love with the world in a whole new way, one that no longer relied on her former freedom of movement. She realized that she could live hyperlocally with just as much joy and curiosity.

Raboteau explores murals about knowing your rights, co-opted road signs about climate futures, and birds. The opening section is a guided birdwatch unlike any I’ve encountered. She introduces readers to a burrowing owl in Harlem and a glossy ibis in Washington Heights. These birds alight on walls and storefront gates across the boroughs of New York. And she would document how they do (or don’t) interact with passersby. Raboteau says she would explore the city in search of these wild beings, “to balance my sorrow.” She writes, “I needed the birds because I was in pain.”

The intensity Raboteau elicits through the written word stops me in my tracks again and again while I’m reading the book, because she puts words to stark realities with incredible tenderness. “I am the mother of Black children in America,” she writes. “It’s not possible for me to consider the threats posed to birds without also considering the threats posed to us.”

Raboteau writes with equal poignancy in describing solutions. Across her essays, she repeatedly comes back to the ways we might collectively move forward: political will, communal action, and care. The last is a quality she says is attached to motherhood, but not necessarily in a biological sense.

“I feel hope whenever I witness or participate in even small acts of care,” she tells me. She says taking care of each other is something she views in a broad sense: both a stance and a way of being. Raboteau, like so many caretakers, knows firsthand that nurturing is not remunerated and it’s not supported by our social safety net. But that doesn’t diminish its importance to her. “It’s really revolutionary,” she tells me. “There’s a lot of revolutionary potential.”

And a revolution is necessary because Raboteau is also extremely tuned into yet another map overlain on the city: One of public health, environmental damage, and social injustice. She points to the neighborhood of Washington Heights in uppermost Manhattan, where she birthed both her sons, as a case in point. Raboteau describes the neighborhood as vibrant and wonderful. “It’s known as the second biggest city in the Dominican Republic, which I love,” she tells me. Here, her children were able to attend Spanish-English immersion schools, but they developed asthma too. “It’s also a neighborhood that’s really choked by poverty and also by highways,” she explains.

This poisoning infrastructure is often placed in poor Black and Brown neighborhoods like hers by design. And this is top-of-mind in her parenting. “My kids aren’t so little anymore,” she tells me. “I can speak with them a little bit more honestly and truthfully about these kinds of threats.”

But knowing how to talk about climate change and the related injustices isn’t always clear or easy. “I’m still learning because we weren’t taught this,” she tells me. “My husband and I, to a degree, we were prepared for racial trauma by our parents. We were given ‘,’ right? But they couldn’t have prepared us for this, because it wasn’t part of their reality.”

I am a white woman who grew up in a white family, and my parents didn’t discuss racial trauma with me, nor did we broach climate change. But the subject has already come up with my young kids, I tell Raboteau. Last year, we visited family in Wisconsin over the holidays, and the landscape was strangely devoid of snow. My daughter asked worriedly, “Mom, what happened to winter?” The inquiry cut to the core of the issue I spend my days trying to address as a climate journalist. It really brought to the forefront, for me, the responsibility of nurturers, caretakers, and parents like myself to address these existential questions.

“You can’t really lean on an answer that was given to you by your parents, because you didn’t ask them that question,” Raboteau tells me. “Because we had winter when we were kids. We were born at whatever parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that it was. It’s just accelerating so fast that even within your own 5-year-old daughter’s lifetime, she’s either witnessed that shift or knows from the culture that that’s not what it’s supposed to look like at Christmastime.”

Raboteau points to a similarly gutting exchange in her family, in which her husband remarked that they didn’t have to wear jackets at Halloween anymore because it’s no longer seasonably cold like it was when they were kids. Raboteau says her son responded frankly, “Yeah, that’s because of climate change.” And Raboteau could only agree.

Neither Raboteau nor I have figured out the answers to these crushing questions from our children. But we’re both actively trying to find them. And Raboteau’s book is a resonant meditation on her efforts.

In so many ways, the situation we are in is unprecedented: We have added so much CO2 to the atmosphere that our are higher than ever before in human history. As a result, we have put so many communities in incredibly precarious situations, and forced them to adapt. And yet they’re still here.

“People have lived through existential crises before and come out the other side of them,” Raboteau reminds me. And she emphasizes that those experiences—and the people and communities that survive them—have lessons to impart. That’s why she’s a strong believer in intergenerational friendships and intergenerational justice. She invests in it deeply in her life, including through her participation in a group called the .

The small group is led by two septuagenarians—a Buddhist and a moral philosopher—and Raboteau says they mostly just ask questions that don’t have answers. The tenor of the inquiries is “What are we being called to do at this moment of great uncertainty and change?” This shared space on Zoom offers Raboteau a practice of reflecting and deep listening. And that is something she holds dear as she navigates how to have “the climate talk”: balancing the wisdom of elders with listening deeply to children.

“I think that’s what we’re being called to do,” Raboteau tells me. “Really listen to their questions, take them very seriously. Have them participate in the solutions.”

She shares the example of efforts to as an act of climate mitigation. “New York is a city of buried streams,” she tells me. “I didn’t really know that before we bought this house that’s sited on top of the buried stream.”

Raboteau makes clear that the city isn’t prepared for what’s to come: She describes how the infrastructure can’t handle the increased rainfall that has resulted (and will continue) from climate change. The subway system can’t handle it, nor can the sewer system. And the same goes for wastewater treatment plants, which get overwhelmed and end up releasing raw sewage into the rivers, especially in Black and Brown neighborhoods like the ones her family has called home.

Raboteau says she’s excited about daylighting the brook, but she worries what will happen if it comes to pass. If the brook beautifies the neighborhood, welcomes more wildlife, adds a waterfront bike path, and boosts the property values, are her neighbors going to be able to afford to stay here and enjoy it? In many ways, birds and people are both endangered by climate injustice in New York.

But she doesn’t stop there. “Or is that question even short-sighted?” Raboteau asks me, rhetorically. “We don’t know how fast and how soon the waters are going to rise and overtake this part of our coastal city, which is quite low-lying. Does it even make sense to spend many, many millions of dollars unburying a brook that maybe, sooner than any of us would like to conceive or imagine, is going to be underwater anyway?”

We can’t know the answers to these questions. Not elders. Not parents. Not nurturers. Not children. But each one of us is implicated in the outcomes and therefore should be striving to find our own ways of coming to some sort of clarity about how to move forward. We can shape our responses. And we can find solidarity in asking these questions in good company, as I was privileged to do with Raboteau.

For her part, Raboteau says, “I feel deeply invested in trying to learn the names of things right now, whether that’s the names of endangered birds, or the name of Mosholu, the original name of this brook that our house sits on.”

In her commitment, I see the confluence of climate and racial justice bubbling back up to the surface: Saying their names has always been an important part of doing the work.

Breanna Draxler is a senior editor at YES!, where she leads coverage of climate and environmental justice, and Native rights. She has nearly a decade of experience editing, reporting, and writing for national magazines including National Geographic online and Grist, among others. She collaborated on a climate action guide for Audubon Magazine that won a National Magazine Award in 2020. She recently served as a board member for the Society of Environmental Journalists and the Northwest Science Writers Association. She has a master’s degree in environmental journalism from the University of Colorado Boulder. Breanna is based out of the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people, but has worked in newsrooms on both coasts and in between. She previously held staff positions at bioGraphic, Popular Science, and Discover Magazine.

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