A Mother's Lessons for Survival
Emily Raboteau talks about mothering through the climate crisis, New York's many layers, flooding, gentrification, and more.
Dear friends,
I started reading Emily Raboteau’s thoughts on climate change several years ago, right after she started a Twitter thread on January 1, 2019. In it, she shared people’s descriptions of a world shaped by the climate crisis—both the things she was reading and personal responses she was getting to the question: Where are you feeling the effects of climate change in your habitat? Raboteau added to the thread for months, compiling a fascinating historical record of the moment that I still think about. And I remember being moved by the fact that a novelist, essayist, and professor of creative writing at the City College of New York—a literary figure who could have chosen to approach the topic much more obliquely in her work—was sharing news about the climate so directly and asking her audience to respond.
So when Raboteau’s new essay collection, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse,” debuted earlier this month, I knew I wanted to hear more of what she had to say. She was kind enough to oblige. Here’s an excerpt from our recent conversation:
Your book is very rooted in your experience of living in New York City and your awareness of what's underneath the current city, the former ecosystems as well as the land theft, massacres, and slavery that has all taken place there. How has that layered experience shaped your current stance on climate change and the future of the city?
Like a lot of people, I moved to New York straight after graduating from college in 1998, and one of the first seminal events for me as a young person starting my professional life in the city was September 11th. So there was this big rupture that made me aware of the city’s vulnerability and my own vulnerability at a crucial kind of coming of age stage. And on a literary level, I really loved Teju Cole's book Open City for the way that he created a narrator who walked through the city, so the reader is having encounters with landscape, and culture, but we’re also inside the character’s brain. It feels like you’re on a walk with him. That was an instructive text for me a writer, to see how New York could be used as a setting in a way that felt deeply personal on a writing level. While at the same time, it's the place where I was maturing, and dating and eventually marrying, and then having children. And as I write about in the beginning of the book, there are so many ways of seeing and being in the city that change according to your own maturation and your class and where you happen to be going to school or working.
My experience of the city certainly shifted in an extreme way after having children because [I began] thinking about wanting to protect them from threats like pollution, the urban heat island effect, and the way poisoning infrastructure is sited in Black and Brown neighborhoods. And then I started noticing the Climate Signals and the bird murals. I started paying attention to those and recording them as a way of witnessing the way other people, mainly artists, were sending messages around a number of threats — climate change being just one of them.
I didn't think of myself as a person who was environmentally aware until I had kids and began to worry about the deleterious health effects of the places where I'd chosen to raise them. And then I also read Camille Dungy's beautiful essay, “Isn't All Writing Environmental Writing?” It kind of blew my mind because I had previously thought of environmental writing as having to do with wild spaces, wilderness, and nature, and being very removed from the city. But that essay made me understand, that we all live in environments. It was liberating to read and it allowed me to take on the mantle of “environmental writer” in a way that also incorporates motherhood.
When your older son was young, he expressed concern about flooding and you assured him he was safe because Washington Heights isn’t in a flood zone. But he countered by saying quite accurately: “But the A [train] was flooded during Sandy. The trains stopped running, and the mayor canceled Halloween.” What is your experience of talking to your kids about climate change now that they are quite a bit older?
My kids are 11 and almost 13, so they're tweens. I don't think they're getting very much climate curriculum in school, but it's the atmosphere in which they're growing up, and they are aware of it. They make a lot of casual comments. It'll often be in response to statements their dad and I make. We’ll say “you really don't need jackets at Halloween anymore” and they'll say, "Yeah guys, because of climate change, right?" Their comments often point to the way certain things that seem anomalous and remarkable to us just aren’t to them.
I try to calibrate the way I talk about climate with them, whether it's because they've brought it up, or it has come up in the news. I try to orient what I say toward solutions, and towards the things that young people are doing, not that it should be the burden of young people exclusively. When the group of young people sued the state of Montana last year and won, I wanted my kids to know about it. I’ve also talked to them about several of the legal cases arguing for the rights of nature. And in our neighborhood they're daylighting a brook that has been running underground until now, and will soon become visible. I've been talking through that project with them, because it's an act of climate mitigation that has involved so many people working hard over many, many years to remake the city in this way that seems good but it has also been messy. Because inevitably, when the neighborhood gets beautified, it's going to get more expensive and maybe those many millions of dollars would have been better spent thinking about moving people [away from floodplains]. I'm trying to acknowledge that we don't have all the solutions, but we need to figure them out together.
I also want them to know about careers and jobs in sustainability. Of course, it's their own choice to pick whatever path they want. But I want them to know that there are solutions.
Have you read about the waterfront homeowners who built a $60,000 sand dune to try to protect their homes from sea level rise—only to find that it was destroyed by the ocean after just three days? I thought a lot about your book while reading about it.
I haven’t read that particular story, but I do think we're tipping into an era where it helps to have money [in the face of climate change], but it can't save you.
What I find especially troubling is the fact that the insurance industry doesn’t want to insure us for floods [or fires] anymore and yet, there's still all this building happening. We're still in an era of growth. And so I think there is a layer of denial going on, and [much of] that denial is among a certain class of people who think they can buy their way out of the danger by throwing up sand dunes. And then there's this other layer of denial, which is this sort of real estate development notion that as long as you can find somebody to rent or purchase property you just keep building ... and that to me seems really evil. I was recently in Phoenix to accept an inaugural climate narratives award from Arizona State University. It was at the end of the spring semester, and everybody was saying, “You've come right in time, because in two weeks, we won't be able to be outside because the temperature is going to be above the century mark, and then it will reach 120 degrees in the mid-summer. And at the same time, all around campus there was all this growth happening, all these new buildings going up. And it’s all happening as everybody's describing how the only thing that allows human beings to live there in the summer is air conditioning. The cognitive dissonance was really disturbing!
I’m seeing a number of examples where efforts to decarbonize—whether that’s by electrifying homes or building better bike infrastructure—can be seen as a precursor to gentrification or displacement. Do you want to talk a little bit more about that?
That came up for me in the book most as I was admiring and documenting a series of bird murals across upper Manhattan, the Audubon Mural Project. It’s a way to commemorate John J. Audubon, who lived in that neighborhood and is buried there, and it’s also as a way of commenting on and maybe even memorializing the North American bird species expected to be extinct by 2080, owing to climate change. I wrote about the murals, which are not going to last forever, just like those birds aren't going to be around forever. But I also felt like I needed to write about how the people with asthma in the neighborhood—including my students and my sons—are also endangered by threats, including gentrification, but also more immediately environmental injustice, as they’re living in a frontline community. I wanted to be able to write about that all together and even though I find the birds beautiful, a lot of people in the neighborhood see them as an act like kind of "artwashing" that has made them ask: “Who are these birds really for? Is this to invite an incoming class of people who have more money?” This was a way for me to kind of begin thinking through the ways that green projects that alter spaces can also have this unintended effect of pushing people out.
After reading and reviewing Ben Goldfarb's book Crossings, I’ve been thinking about highways and road ecology. He made me so keenly aware of their mark on our landscape and their effects and he's interested in looking at the ways that we can lay [roads] more lightly on the land to not harm wildlife and wild places so much. But at the end of the book he also wrote about the ways people are affected, who is affected most by highways, and how are they are often sited quite violently and intentionally, and have often been used as weapons of segregation.
They’re reimagining the Cross Bronx Expressway, and it wouldn't have even entered my consciousness if I hadn't read that book. So now [I’ve been researching] the effort. It's the most awful stretch of Highway 95, in terms of the harm it has done and the harm it continues to do. They're not thinking about taking it down, but they’re talking about burying stretches of it and greening parts of it and I like that they have been asking members of the local community to come and talk about and give testimony about the ways that it's affecting people's lives in terms of noise, and pollution, and mobility—their ability to get to another part of their own neighborhoods, or have their kids walk by themselves to a park that's nearby.
If you’re living near poisoning infrastructure, then the question becomes, how do we make them less poisonous, but in making it more beautiful or less poisonous, how do we continue to take care of the people who live here such that they're not going to get squeezed out?
You have an essay about a woman you call Luz, a fifty-year-old Afro-Latina who lost her home in Hurricane Sandy and had been living in a van, nicknamed Langston, in and around New York City for five years by the time you met. What have you learned from that relationship?
I’m still in touch with Luz and I know there are certain luxuries she kind of misses. But she also finds the way most people consume and waste so much kind of sickening because she has been outside of it for so long now. I mean, she's a person who has to pay to dump her own shit and buy all of her own water. So she thinks about of her consumption and her waste in a way that people in much of the world do—but most Americans do not.
She's such an illuminating person in my life. And she’s the most liberated person in my life! She’s this Afro- Latina woman, born and raised in the city. But the words that were coming out of her mouth when we met were words that I associated with a very different kind of person. She was giving me all this unsolicited advice, like “You're a mom, you need to step it up. You need to have a generator in your house, you need this, you need that. And I was like, “She's loco,” until I realized she was speaking from experience. And that was actually her way of being loving, to say “be prepared.”
I’m interested in the way you wrote about bringing up climate change in social situations, and how you felt like you had be prepared to be a nuisance. What happened when you decided to do it anyway?
In that essay I quoted [my husband] at a point when he said, “Can we just lay off the subject tonight?” And I think that was a sign that I had become a nuisance to him because of the degree or the frequency with which I was bringing up the climate. And I think I actually needed to hear him say, "let's talk about other things, too."
But overall I was surprised by how most people really did want to talk about it. And they were thankful for the opportunity. I think we are speaking about it with more frequency now than they were in 2019. And, and at the time I did it because, like climate scientists Katharine Hayhoe says, one of the best ways we can combat climate change is to talk about it because most people don't, or didn’t at the time.
I decided to teach a climate writing class at City College because I started to feel that if I'm privileged enough to be a teacher, and I'm not talking about this and making it central to my classes, than I feel deranged. And when I say that I am using the framing of Amitav Ghosh, who has a great essay and a book that grew out of it called The Great Derangement, which [argues that] if writers are not actually making this a crucial part of our setting and our plot, then our future readers will look back and think we were deranged.
So I decided to create a climate writing class but I had to teach it during the pandemic on Zoom. And I did feel at that time like it was a double whammy of doom. I thought very hard about the texts that I was bringing to my students and the assignments that I was doing were definitely geared toward hope more than hard facts. We read that Adam Zagajewski poem that was circulating a lot at the time, “Try to Praise the Mutilated World.” I said, “We'll talk a little bit about the mutilating elements, but the assignment is to praise it anyway.” Because that's about articulating what's worth holding on to, right? That's dwelling in the space of love, which is as much as anger an animating force when we're talking about activism.
Climate News You May Have Missed
Cutting down U.S. forests to feed Europe’s energy needs
The biomass industry—which produces energy by burning organic material from plants and animals—often flies under the radar when it comes to climate impact. A significant percentage of the industry is focused on burning wood from a variety of sources, and it bills itself as renewable. But most evidence suggests otherwise, and several legacy environmental groups, such and the World Wildlife Find (WWF) and Center for Biological Diversity have sought to debunk the myth that burning wood from mature trees is carbon neutral.
Earlier this year, Drax, a large UK-based biomass company, announced plans to move into two of California’s forested regions to produce one million tons of compressed wood fiber pellets a year—and ship them to Europe to power homes and businesses.
“Our pellets provide a sustainable, low carbon fuel source that can be safely and efficiently delivered through our global supply chain,” Drax promises on its website. But as we’ve discussed, forests are not, in fact, renewable because trees take decades if not centuries to mature and when it comes to storing carbon, time is of the essence.
The company does typically source some of its materials from sawdust and waste, but it also plans to harvest trees specifically for the pellets. At its existing mills in Canada, Drax was found to have sourced wood from “primary” or previously undisturbed forests—the ones that we need to continue storing carbon. As DeSmog Blog reported, Drax’s plan for California “calls for sourcing wood from areas that encompass eight National Forests, and activists in California have raised concerns that the production of this ‘renewable’ power could endanger vital biodiversity.”
Despite all the talk of sustainability, burning wood creates more emissions than fossil fuels. Two of Drax’s 18 existing mills in North America are in Louisiana and Mississippi, where they are polluting under-resourced communities of color. The UK government was even accused of funding environmental racism in the south because it provided subsidies to Drax. In Missisippi, the company was found to be responsible for emissions that surpass local limits for air pollution and residents and advocates have been pushing back to no avail. California’s rural communities—one in the Central Valley and another in the far northeastern part of the state—may be up against a similar fight.
The staggering ecological impacts of computation and the cloud
I have a little tally going in my mind. I’m counting a) the number of news stories that report on how artificial intelligence (AI) can help solve the climate crisis and b) the number of stories that inform us about the potentially massive climate impact of AI. So far, the race is just about tied.
I was especially drawn in by this piece published last week in MIT Press Reader, which is the product of five years of research based largely on interviews with people living in and around the server farms needed to maintain the Cloud.
“To get at the matter of the Cloud we must unravel the coils of coaxial cables, fiber optic tubes, cellular towers, air conditioners, power distribution units, transformers, water pipes, computer servers, and more. We must attend to its material flows of electricity, water, air, heat, metals, minerals, and rare earth elements that undergird our digital lives. In this way, the Cloud is not only material, but is also an ecological force,” writes anthropologist Steven Gonzalez Monserrate, before going on to detail what that force entails.
The facilities that Monserrate visited all needed to be cooled constantly—or as he puts it, “heat must be relentlessly abated” with either air conditioning or lattices of cold water. He reports that cooling accounts for more than 40 percent of these plants’ power usage and describes one Utah-based data center run by the (ahem!) U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) requires 7 million gallons of water a day.
This fact led me to ask, repeatedly, as I read: Why on earth are so many of these farms located in warm, arid places like Utah and Arizona? The answer, of course, is NIMBY-ism; they’re typically sited near communities where people are neither wealthy or organized enough to fight back. And not only do these facilities impact the air quality in those places, they also create noise pollution.
This description—of the ongoing discomfort experienced by a nurse who lives nearby and can’t afford to move—will stay with me for a long time:
“It began as a dull boom, not unlike the racket of bass-frenzied teenagers partying late into the night. Later, it evolved into a continuous, mechanical whine. She tries not to notice it, she tries to unhear it, but it is there, behind everything, a hellish background track to her life. As a nurse, she knows that the sound is more than mere annoyance. She sees the signs of its toll—hypertension, cortisol—but she cannot stop it. No one can, because it does not sleep.”
Why so many wildland fire fighters are leaving their jobs
If you read one thing about firefighters this year, I highly recommend the latest Propublica investigation about the exodus of experienced wildland firefighters in the West. Journalist Abe Streep spent two years interviewing firefighters and others who work in and around the U.S. Forest Service to tell the story. The piece follows Ben Elkind, a 37-year-old smoke jumper who—like many of his peers—navigates injury and serious health challenges after years spent relying on overtime and living paycheck to paycheck (with a base pay of only $15 dollars an hour!). It illustrates just how different the jobs these men and women are doing now than the ones they signed up for. Fire season—and the fires themselves—have changed radically in recent years and the Forest Service, Streep argues, has a great deal of catching up to do. It also has reckoning to do around its use of PFAs and other toxic chemicals. In the end, the piece left me with a sense that our nation’s firefighters are enduring a reality not unlike our military personnel, and it’s no wonder the Fire Service has lost 45 percent of its permanent employees. As Streep writes:
“We’re so unhealthy in such a ubiquitous way that it’s almost hard to pinpoint,” a Forest Service firefighter in Oregon said. He had returned home from combatting a fire to find his house burned to the ground. Since then, he had endured symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder. A firefighter in Wyoming who recently left the service told me that, like many of his colleagues, he couldn’t maintain a relationship: “I wouldn’t date me either. I’m not emotionally available. I’m gone.” A recent survey of the spouses of wildland firefighters found that almost half had considered leaving their relationships because of the job.
On the Brighter Side
1. Last week I had a chance to hear historian Aaron Sacks, author of the 2023 book Stay Cool: Why Dark Comedy Matters in the Fight Against Climate Change, talk about the value of gallows humor as a coping strategy in the face of the climate crisis. And even if I can’t always find it in me to laugh at the disaster unfolding around us, I appreciated the way he pointed to other forms of humor that have emerged during very dark times and described how maintaining an eye toward the comic and the absurd is a way to “gain some purchase” on a situation that can otherwise leave us feeling completely unmoored.
2. As anyone who has taken a hike with me this winter only to see me wander off mid-conversation will tell you, I have had mushrooms on the brain. After two wet winters in a row, all kinds of fungi have been fruiting in Northern California, and I have delighted in cultivating my own new-found understanding of (mostly edible) mushrooms (so far my list includes chantarelles, candy caps, turkey tails, amanita velosas, hedgehogs, and pig’s ears!) and following along as folks in various mushroom-hunting groups I’ve joined share photos for identification.
I’m definitely not alone in this season of fungi affection. Last week, National Geographic published a cover story highlighting the movement by a growing number of scientists who are calling for “‘funga’—a new term for the regional fungi population—to be provided the same level of research funding and biodiversity conservation as flora and fauna.”
Relatedly: I really enjoyed editing this lively Civil Eats article (one of my last, as I wrapped up my role there last month) exploring the link between fungi and soil health by Grey Moran.
3. Invasive Asian carp (aka copi) have decimated native fish populations and completely changed the ecosystems in the great lakes over the last two decades. So it’s interesting—perhaps even heartening—to see an industry is taking shape around the idea of eating them. A new company called Freshwater Select has begin selling copi filets and fish sticks, among other products and a partnership with WWF has resulted in a new industry trade group. The move to feed copi to pets, farmed fish, and livestock could also be significant. Dog and cat food is responsible for release of up to 64 million tons of methane and nitrous oxide, two powerful greenhouse gasses (GHGs). Aquaculture is known for relying on wild seafood (think anchovies and sardines) to feed larger fish like salmon and tuna, and if invasive fish can fill in even some of that need, it could benefit ocean ecosystems, while allowing native species to return to the Great Lakes. I’ll be curious to see the industry develop.
4. Last week, the New York state Assembly passed a bill that will ban carbon dioxide fracking—a relatively new practice that replaces water with CO2, sends it horizontally into layers of shale rock to release methane gas. Fracking for oil and natural gas are already banned in the state.
5. The lake in Death Valley has been replaced by an unusual super bloom spurred initially by Hurricane Hilary, which hit last August, and followed by this winter’s atmospheric rivers.
“We are at 200 percent of average annual rainfall just in the last seven months," photographer and environmental advocate Patrick Donnelly told Newsweek. "So what's happening with the flowers right now is inherently unpredicted, based on the unprecedented climactic conditions we're experiencing.”
6. Scientists recently had a rare opportunity to observe and document a coral reef off the coast of Cambodia while it was spawning—or releasing thousands of pearl-sized balls into the ocean in order to reproduce. As many reefs suffer from bleaching and other stressors that have made spawning less common, and less successful when it happens, the event was seen as a sign of unusual health in the reef, which appears to be more diverse and more tolerant of warming waters than most. The scientists hope the young coral that results will help repopulate other nearby reefs in and around the Gulf of Thailand. “For a few minutes, the ocean is a snow globe, and then the balls float away,” wrote Vox’s Benji Jones in a recent article about the event, which was also caught on video.
Take care and stay strong,
Twilight