One evening earlier this year, I came downstairs after putting our 4-year-old daughter to bed to find my husband looking at a series of maps of the United States, each showing possible futures given different climate-change projections. In one, my home states of Oklahoma and Nebraska succumb to intense heat; growing crops gets harder. In another, wildfires seem to consume the West. In the Northeast, sea levels rise. Everywhere, average temperatures skyrocket. In Vermont, where I now live, the maps imply that we will still have precious rainfall—and that catastrophic floods will continue.
“Want to watch Netflix?” I said.
It’s not that I don’t care about these predictions of doom. But I admit that my initial response—as the United States has (again) moved to exit the Paris climate agreement, as the protections of the Endangered Species Act are threatened, as the way is cleared for drilling in the Arctic—is to succumb to the temptation of apathy. It’s all too much, I think. I find myself bewildered over how best to respond to these crises—and how to reconcile our daughter, peacefully asleep upstairs, with a burning world that is widely expected to keep burning.
My day-to-day parenting to-do list often goes something like: clean up endlessly after an enthusiastic tornado of a child; work toward a condition that, sometimes, resembles financial security; raise my child to be a decent adult; brace myself for the overwhelm that comes with the press...
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