A call to action for the grownups of the world
Josephine Ferorelli and Meghan Kallman on what adults owe to kids growing up today – regardless of whose kids they are
Every January feels like a fresh start, and this year we're starting ours with a pretty deep, fundamental question: what would it look like to create an equitable, loving, hope-filled world for everybody's children, whether that includes mine or yours or neither of ours? We feel it’s important to hold that possibility because, as it turns out, an optimistic orientation is contagious. And we're not talking about the passive kind of optimism. No. We're talking about the kind that's hard-earned. That makes demands upon us. That requires responsibility. You know, grown-up shit. This way of being says the world is worth believing in, and it's what the young people and children in our lives intrinsically deserve to see us acting out.
It starts with dissolving the boundaries between parents and non-parents.
There’s been a lot of discussion around the question of whether or not to bring a child into our current climate. We’ve certainly explored the topic on Gen Dread. But regardless of the decision you personally arrive at, there are still a whole lot of children already walking around in a warming world. We need guidance around how we as adults hold, support, and fight for the children who are already here.
In 2014, Josephine Ferorelli and Meghan Kallman founded Conceivable Future, an organization that aims to bring the climate crisis into the conversations we’re having about raising the next generation. And on February 8th, their new guide to family planning during the climate emergency will be available to buy. It’s called The Conceivable Future: Planning Families and Taking Action in the Age of Climate Crisis.
Not a biological parent? Not in your child-bearing years? Doesn’t matter. You are still a crucial part of the conversation you’re about to read with Meghan and Josephine. So please, dive in.
GD: How do you think the climate crisis has changed the way we parent? And how do you think it maybe should change the way we parent?
M: One of the things our project has sought to do is collapse the barriers between parents and non-parents in this very formal definitional way, and really requisition everybody who's a grownup in support of everybody who's a kid in whatever ways that looks for yourself and your community. When we love the next generation, whether that generation came out of our bodies or the bodies of our partners, or through adoption, or they’re niblings, or siblings, or young friends, or whatever they are – we ALL assume responsibility for their future. So we want to do a call-in here: what does it look like to create a loving world for everybody's children, whether that includes mine or yours or neither of ours? We need to expand the definition of family and parenting, which is a very limited and particularly middle-class, white, this-moment-in-time construction.
J: Like so many discourses, this is getting more and more atomized and I think that anyone, whether they're a parent or not, who's been observing the discourse around parenthood can see that it’s always a pursuit of a “right answer”, like the “right” method of parenting, that there's the “right” decision for people who are struggling with whether or not to have a child, that it comes down to you and your own ability to succeed or fail at the standard that's been arbitrarily set. We know this happens in the climate discourse around resource consumption as well, as if there was some “right way” to live in a world where consumption is built to be excessive, where the demands of contemporary American life make you a wasteful person, make you an excessive person in a way that's beyond your control.
So we experience a lot of these things because we've been taught to experience these things as individuals just trying to do the best we can, when what we really need to do is view ourselves collectively and reinforce and heal our relationships. We’ve heard a lot about the fractiousness between boomers and millennials or between our parents’ generation and our own generation, but we only have to look at our own children or at the kids who are coming after us to imagine what it’ll feel like 30 years deeper into climate consequences. So we view this intergenerational responsibility as something that we all have regardless of our family specifics, and we have it both to our elders and to our kids, broadly defined.
How do I hold space for a child newly awake to the climate crisis?
GD: It’s really heartbreaking to me that there's going to come a moment where every kid suddenly realizes like, oh, this natural world that I love and play in is actually all completely in jeopardy, and maybe they experience a loss of trust in something they thought was safe. How do you see our responsibility during that awakening when they first realize the severity of the crisis?
J: The beautiful thing that is already happening is that there is that love and that trust. And the important thing to remember is that at no point do you have to break trust with the natural world. The threat is not coming from the natural world. The threat is coming from people. We saw in the pandemic when there was just a lot less activity in the streets, people were seeing wild animals in cities. Nature is just waiting for a break so it can catch its breath. That doesn't mean it's going to look the way it did before, but to have a lot of faith in the natural world's ability to heal itself is one of the only things that we can hang on to in this very dangerous, perilous moment.
M: Agency is what chases away despair, both for very young people and for adult people. You're not ever going to heal grief in a world where sad things are happening, but the way to keep it from becoming paralyzing is to feel agentic. Then there's the understanding that you're capable of engaging that. And that's where parenting comes in. Like, how do I model that? How do I teach that? How do I cultivate it in my child, however young they are, and how do those practices change as they get older? And how do we live a life as a family, whatever the family looks like, that takes those things seriously – both the delight and the pleasure and the faith in the natural world, and frankly, the delight and the pleasure and the faith in ourselves and being able to meet this moment?
J: I also want to say that you are allowed to be on the side of nature. Like, we are all implicated in the harm in some way, but: we are allowed to recognize that humans are animals. Humans live in the natural world. All this other stuff that's part of our lives is not essential to our character in the way that being a living being is. So you don't have to transmit that sense of guilt, or the taint of being a part of a broken system. Like, that's not the inheritance, right? That's a perspective that's harmful to us as well as to our kids. So I feel like there's a paradigm shift we all need to make, which is aligning ourselves with what's best in human nature, but also what we treasure in the world around us that’s interpenetrating with us. This sense that we're different from nature is something we can get rid of today.
M: We talked to a handful of several child psychologists around agency and activism. And their advice was, that whether your elders or your youngers are coming to you with their feelings, the first thing you do is just listen to them and affirm that that is their experience. Two, especially for young kids, there are lots of ways to model age-appropriate behaviour. Sometimes that's tree-planting with the school. Sometimes that's taking your kids to the statehouse to teach them how to advocate. Sometimes that's taking them to a march.
But one of the things that really stood out to me was that we spoke with a woman named Susie Burke, who's a child psychologist. She said if kids don't see their parents doing climate activism, then they think it's all on them to fix it. And they’ll feel increasingly crazy and isolated because they know that there's a problem, but their grownups aren't doing anything about it. And their grownups therefore become untrustworthy because they sort of promise that it will be okay, but aren't doing anything to make it okay. And kids smell the rat, right? Kids need their adults to be trustworthy and therefore we need to model what it looks like to take a global problem seriously.
J: I think it's really tempting for parents, in the absence of a robust visible public movement, to want to hide the worst from their children. They want to protect their children from knowing the worst, but the only thing that really accomplishes is making kids feel like they can't go to their parents for answers. It’s not giving the kids the support they need in a really difficult situation.
Kids need us to exist in the here and now…but what if you’re freaking out about the future?
GD: A lot of people in our community feel distracted, unable to focus, and are finding it really hard to be present for things like work and relationships, but most particularly children, who demand your full focus, presence, and attention in the here and now. What advice do you have for elders who are struggling with that?
M: The science says that the thing that calms that chatter is feeling agentic and being participatory in something that is moving. But there are a bunch of ways that we can be present to our feelings and our bodies, including noticing what our bodies are telling us, and trying to cultivate some of that presence. Josephine is a yoga teacher and I was a professional dancer in my early twenties. And what both of those practices do is, like, the first thing you’ve got to do is just be in your body for a minute. And that can be a 30-second reset. Even fractious two-year-olds can often handle a 30-second reset.
And it’s tremendously alleviating to do it in groups. The impulse to be like, “what can I do” is where people naturally land, especially people of our generation and how we've been socialized. It’s not the right impulse. The impulse, I think, really needs to be “find your people''. Nobody changes systems by themselves. Institutions don't change because I buy a Prius or change my lightbulbs. That's not how it works. Things get easier when they're shared, and the things on that list include the sense of isolation, impending doom, and fractured concentration. People can start with their workplaces, their religious organizations, your run club – wherever there is a set of pre-existing relationships that could be built and deepened and turned into something that has some political and institutional force.
J: There's this assumption that climate action is something that you're not already doing and that happens “over there”. So you have to somehow crack your life open and make a new wedge for some new activity that you're not already doing. When really, it has to happen where you already are with the people already in your life. And it has to fix problems that affect you in some meaningful way. So the solution is not some abstraction of like, some emissions in some distant place. Like, what's happening here? Something where you're going to benefit from the outcome.
It’s sufficient to pick one thing. You can't do everything. You can't even do anything – alone! So you should have a project you're involved in that’s attainable in this lifetime, that gives you a sense of inspiration, that’s bigger than you, and can only be done in a group. That's enough. Just work on being a social person in the world that you already live in, and think about how climate is coming down in that place. And most of all, what do you love? Like, what gives you pleasure and what connects you to what's great about being alive? That's the part that gets collapsed faster than anything. It's the part that we so easily give up, but I think it's absolutely the lifeline. I think it's how we stay present, you know? Because if we're not present, none of the rest of it is possible.
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‘Till next time!
This was beautiful. I loved: "I feel like there's a paradigm shift we all need to make, which is aligning ourselves with what's best in human nature, but also what we treasure in the world around us that’s interpenetrating with us. This sense that we're different from nature is something we can get rid of today." It's also so easy to cast off humans as terrible! We do such terrible things, but remembering we are part of nature and have agency is such an antidote. Thank you!!
As someone who has been thinking about whether to have a child or not for the past few years, I loved this newsletter and the discussion you had with Josephine and Meghan. They also brought up really really good points that I know I've been trying to embody the past year - doing things together, not doing EVERYTHING, and taking action to show people they can join in and/or they're not alone