Creating Space: How are you practicing climate activism with kids?

Apr 20, 2023

Yesterday we introduced you to Elizabeth Cripps, a writer, mother, moral philosopher, and senior lecturer at the University of Edinburgh. Her new book, Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher's Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids – and Everyone Else, just came out this week.

Our conversation focused on the moral duty we have as parents and caregivers raising the next generation in a climate crisis and why, in the global North, we’re currently getting it, well, kinda wrong. If you missed that, you can find it right here.

Today we want to bring you the rest of our conversation with Elizabeth, where we talk about what it looks like in pragmatic terms to practice climate activism as a parent or caregiver. And then we want to hear from you in the comments below.

I'm curious about individual lifestyle changes you can make as a family – things like not flying or eating less meat or not owning a car. How much do these things matter?

EC: I don't think this is the most important thing we should be doing, because we have to think in terms of the collective. It’s sometimes impossible to make lifestyle changes if the system remains skewed to make those changes much more challenging and expensive. That’s another way privilege comes in: if we just focus on lifestyle changes and we say, well, I'm fine because I've given up my car, that probably means paying for incredibly expensive train and taxi fares everywhere that somebody else wouldn't be able to afford. So that’s not a very understanding way of looking at it.

Lifestyle changes do matter: they can be a really important part of promoting collective change. Movements like the vegan movement or the plant-based eating movement or the no-flight movement, if enough people are part of them, can really send a signal and then corporations and shops and restaurants start changing what they do. But as parents, when we think about the lifestyles that our children have, it seems a little skewed to be simultaneously trying to create a world in which we live in a different, more sustainable or just way…while also raising our children so they're getting hooked on these lifestyles. It's, at the very least, making things harder for them in the future. It speaks to a broader issue of moving away from consumerism, which is pretty bad for our children anyway in terms of how their identity can form around these consumer goods. I think it also engenders a certain mentality and it becomes a habit the more you do it. The more you rely on flying or meat and the more you teach your kids to rely on those things, then that’s problematic.

In the book, you discuss the need for parents to overcome short-term thinking and engage in longer-term thinking. What does that look like in practical, day-to-day terms?

I think being a parent can help longer-term thinking in that it really forces us to care about the longer term. There’s this exercise I tried to do called The Dear Tomorrow Project, where you write a letter to your child in the future and so you have to think about what you want that future to be like. That really puts into perspective some of the choices we make now. So I think that really helps. But in order to start thinking along those much longer time scales we need to look at different techniques. So, how do we cultivate really deep time thinking? How do we try and break this cycle of only thinking until the next election, or the end of a year, and instead, start saying, what is this city or this part of the world I live in? What was it like, however many thousand years in the past and what is it going to look like a few thousand years in the future? Is it gonna be under the water? What will be left of our cities for future generations to look at? I think these kinds of exercises are saying, well, in however many thousand years when people are trying to learn about our generation, are they just gonna see all these SIM cards and chicken bones, and think, that was what our society was like? Is this really what we want to be leaving? This is something I'm still trying to work out for myself, but I do think being a parent can be a way to try and shift yourself away from short-term thinking.

I want to ask you about non-parents: people who are active in children's lives, maybe in an uncle or an aunt capacity, or grandparents, or community members who are part of children's lives but not biological parents themselves. How do they fit into this conversation?

So firstly, it's not like, oh, well, it's only if you're a parent that you really care about the future. Non-parents care hugely about these causes. There are people who are passionate about intergenerational justice or protecting non-humans in all sorts of ways that are independent of whether they have children. There are some people who aren't having children because they're so concerned about those things. So obviously this concern for the next generation goes well beyond parents.

In the book, I start with this idea that as parents we have a specific kind of moral responsibility to our child. We have duties, if you want to put it that way, to our children that we don't have to anyone else. But we also love our children, right? And most of the arguments in the book could actually just start there. They could say, well, look, if you love this young person, or this generation, these are the things that should matter because this is the way in which they're vulnerable in a much broader sense than we tend to think about or focus on in societies like ours. And of course, it's not just parents that love children, it's aunts, godparents, close friends, communities. And this question is definitely important for a much broader range of people than just those who are currently, right now, bringing up children.

On a personal level, have you had a moment where your kids (9 and 7) did or said something and you felt you were really getting this right, or you felt really confident that you were doing well as a person trying to parent in a climate crisis?

When I took them on the climate marches and then afterwards they would be chanting about climate justice all the time, that was kind of an obvious win! But it's also the conversations that we have that reveal that they’re starting to think independently and more deeply about the kind of responsibilities they have and what the future will look like. This may change and I'll have to think about how to build their resilience and carry on building their resilience, but at the moment they're approaching it as a challenge and an opportunity rather than just this terrifying future. They’re very conscious of their political voice. And that's been important to me, because with teenagers especially, I worry about climate anxiety. So I'm hoping that by building this sense of empowerment about climate change, it's possible to get the balance right. Obviously they're gonna be scared, but also they feel empowered.

Climate anxiety is very real among young climate activists, so I certainly don't want to understate that. But I do think some involvement in activism can actually be empowering and a way of building resilience to the climate. To feel that you're actually part of trying to promote change. It also really helps to find a community of like-minded people. People tend to be drowning in their anxiety because they feel really alone and they don't feel like anybody's really listening to them. Certainly for me, taking this job and finding this vast network of people who care and who are working towards the same thing, that has been quite buoying for me.

Elizabeth’s book is called Parenting on Earth: A Philosopher's Guide to Doing Right by Your Kids – and Everyone Else and it’s out this week. Our US readers can get 15% off the book via the Penguin Random House website by entering the code READMIT15.

And now, over to you:

What lifestyle changes or environmental values have you instilled with your kids or other kids in your life?
How do you involve children in climate awareness and activism?
What has the biggest challenge been for you as a parent or guiding adult who is raising kids in the climate crisis?

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4 Comments

Jennifer Keluskar Ph.D.

Apr 20, 2023Liked by Gen Dread

My 8-year-old helps me table for an environmental organization. She is sewing earth day pillows to give to others. She is reading a book about female climate activists. A few months ago, we took a family trip to a trash art exhibit in NYC. In addition, as a family, we compost, drive electric vehicles, create recipes from leftovers, and use cloth napkins as much as possible. Sometimes we still feel isolated, but we are more and more connecting with others who share these values.

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