By the time you grow up...

a post from Belle

(Bea and Harriet on our trip west, evacuating Hurricane Florence in 2018.)

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A vivid memory: I am ten or eleven years old, riding home from the store with my family. Dad points from the driver’s seat to the thick stands of pines on either side of the road. “All this will be gone by the time you grow up,” he tells me.

I remember it in the blue light of dusk, my cheek cold against the backseat window. My dad spoke without satisfaction, but also without bitterness—I recognized his fatalism as a product of his own West Virginia childhood, maybe a disappointment he wanted to spare me. He’d certainly seen the mountain ecosystem around his home ripped up for coal mining, the rivers polluted by runoff. But his prediction, which I believed, made me sad enough to cry; I did this silently, so he wouldn’t notice.

I loved our Tidewater Virginia woodlands, and spent much of my free time roaming them, trying to get lost. In the spring, I found shady glens of lady’s slipper flowers, delicate-pink and low to the ground; in the summer, I scooped baby painted turtles from fallen logs in the lake behind our house. In the fall, my brother and I built pine-tag forts and wore blaze orange vests so hunters wouldn’t mistake us for deer, and in winter the lake froze thick enough to walk on.

It was hard to believe that this would all be gone, that someone would not want to save it—wouldn’t the hunters, at least, need some woods to hunt in? But the news from trusted sources was not good: I remember learning about the greenhouse effect even in my rural, underfunded, 1980s elementary school. We learned about animals on the endangered species list, including the bald eagle, whose egg shells were weakened by the poisonous effects of DDT. The bald eagle! Our national bird!

I’m raising my own children, Beatrice and Harriet, in the Piedmont of North Carolina, about four hours away from where I grew up. We live in the woods too, surrounded by tall oaks and poplars and hickories, some just inches from our windows. My children love roaming in nature as much as I do, and we’re lucky to see bald eagles regularly, perched on a branch above their massive nest or else soaring above the Haw River. Their survival, as one of the few species to make it off the endangered species list, is the primary ecological good news I can remember tracing, from my elementary school days to adulthood. No matter how often I see one, the moment of glimpsing a bald eagle remains special, maybe because I once thought they’d be gone.

The bad news, though, has only gotten worse, and more urgent. Beatrice, my older daughter, is seven, and Harriet will turn three next week. Their lives so far have been crowded with climate and environmental catastrophes, some of them frighteningly close to home.

2012, the year before Beatrice was born, was the hottest year on record for the lower 48 American states, beating the previous record holder (1998) by a whole degree Fahrenheit. Nearly the entire Greenland ice sheet turned to slush in four intensely hot July days.

2016 beat 2012, with temperatures rising 1.69 degrees Fahrenheit above average worldwide. This was the year Beatrice got into the British underwater-rescue cartoon, Octonauts, and became fascinated by the Great Barrier Reef (“you can see it from outer space!” she likes to remind us). Because of warming ocean temperatures, it was also the year of a major bleaching event, damaging two-thirds of the 1400-mile reef system.

In 2018, our daughter Harriet was born. Her spring birth was followed by the deadliest wildfire season in California history, which killed more than one hundred people and burned more than 1.6 million acres. Late summer brought two devastating hurricanes to our own state, and for the first time in my life, we evacuated in advance of a storm, packing up Harriet and her diapers and travel cot, Beatrice and her books, and heading west to stay with friends, where I refreshed the NOAA site and calculated Haw River flood predictions on my phone.

Did I mention that we live three hours from the coast?

Thoughtful people are now talking not about how many children to have, but whether it is ethical to have children at all, given all that a child born now will endure because of climate change. Because I had my children so late (I was 37 and 41 when they were born), I knew that if they had their children late, it was possible, even likely, that I would never know my grandchildren. In the years since their births it has seemed possible that my children will not even have the choice to have their own children—they will be too busy evacuating from storms, and too economically, emotionally, and professionally exhausted by the effects of climate change to even consider a life like the precarious one we are lucky to live right now.

They don’t know that yet, and I don’t know how to tell them. I don’t blame my dad for his bluntness—that’s just who he is—but, as an educator and mom, I also know that it’s not the best approach for my kids, and probably not for yours. This newsletter, my part of it anyway, is my attempt to work out what is the best way for parents, advocates, and educators to address environmental catastrophe with school-age children. It’s an effort to document my conversations and life with my daughters, and to confront the responsibilities we all have to recognize and fight climate change and to equip our children to do the same.

So, I’m curious: Have you talked to your kids about climate change? Have they talked to you about it? What do you say, and what do they say? How did your kids mark Earth Day in their schools this year?

P.S. I’ll post again Sunday, then Tuesday will be our first kid-focused activity post—we have lots of stuff about, what else, frogs. In the meantime, maybe you or someone you know would like to attend the Save the Frogs World Summit, a worldwide celebration of amphibians, starting today at noon Pacific Time, and running through tomorrow. It’s free and looks really cool!

P.P.S. I am still figuring out how our mailing list works—if you don’t want to get these newsletters, please free to unsubscribe. But! I want to build an audience for the kids who will participate in the chats and activities, so could you share this link with a few friends today?