Emily Raboteau on Mothering in the Face of Climate Collapse

Emily Raboteau’s essay collection Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” opens in 2011, with the author on her way to a baby shower for her first child. While passing through Times Square, she spots a sign announcing that the world will end on her baby’s due date. She laughs it off, but as her son and his little brother grow up, finds that the sign wasn’t entirely wrong. From the rise of white Christian nationalism and fascism, to a global pandemic that disproportionately killed Black Americans, to increasingly frequent climate catastrophes, Raboteau finds herself a loving mother, engaged citizen, and a compassionate, thoughtful human being in the midst of a set of nested crises, each seemingly insurmountable, with roots deep in American history that have long gone unexamined. Spiritually channeling James Baldwin in his seminal essay on police violence in Harlem, “A Report from Occupied Territory,” Raboteau asked, “What to do?”

This book is her answer: turn to her community for help.

Over the course of 20 essays, each accompanied by photographs she took, Raboteau looks at different ways concerned global citizens are responding to the crises that face us, all of which are undergirded by climate collapse. Like a blanket for a new child, Raboteau’s book quilts together their wisdom. Many pieces stay close to home, as Raboteau travels by foot through various neighborhoods in New York City (most often Harlem, where she and her husband, novelist Victor LaValle, lived for many years), profiling people trying to affect change on a local level. Some are topical, diaries of the months before the pandemic, or reflecting on specific days, like May 25, 2020, when bird watcher Christian Cooper was threatened by a white woman in Central Park because his Blackness frightened her, and, later, George Floyd was murdered by a police officer in Minneapolis. And in one tour-de-force of narrative reporting, Raboteau recounts a 2016 visit to the West Bank of Palestine, where she witnesses virulent Islamophobia and colonialism that today fuels the decimation of Gaza by the Israeli Defense Force.

Rarely have I read a book that speaks so vitally to our current moment, which illustrates how entrenched these social and environmental crises are. I spoke to Raboteau about parenting, resilience, and the emotional journey she took while writing Lessons for Survival.

Brian Gresko: Sometimes when the news gets too awful, I find it negatively impacts my ability to write, so I choose to disengage for a couple of days for the sake of my work. It feels like in Lessons for Survival you’ve done the opposite. I’m curious to know about your emotional journey while composing this book, and what you did to protect yourself from spiraling down while writing. (Or, if such spirals happened, how you moved through them.)

Emily Raboteau: I’m not sure I’ve done the opposite as you, Brian! Choosing to disengage from the news cycle for the sake of your work is choosing engagement of another kind–deep thought instead of reactionary panic. What is apocalyptic thinking, really? The word “Apocalypse” comes from the Greek apokálypsis “uncovering.” My friend, the writer Ayana Mathis, just reminded me of this. It doesn’t actually mean the end of the world. I wish to see things as they are, with the scales wiped from my eyes.

For me, writing these essays, most of which focus on resilience, was a way to engage with others and to keep from doomscrolling or spiraling downward, as you put it. For example, I responded to the news cycle in 2019 by keeping a kind of climate diary that gathered expressions by dozens of people in my social network about how they were experiencing climate change in their bodies and local habitats. I did that because climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe said that one of the most important things we can do to combat the climate emergency is to talk about it widely among family and friends. I feel less despairing and alone when I can study large-scale problems, and possible solutions, in community. Writing is one way of doing that.

That said, while I was editing this book, my therapist prescribed watching fun TV for the sake of my mental health. I watched Love on the Spectrum, an incredibly heartwarming show. I recommend it!

BG: I’m glad you mentioned that essay-as-diary, “It Was Already Tomorrow.” I love how it gives us a taste of your joyously busy social calendar through the year, but there was one small moment that especially stayed with me: when your then eight-year-old asks you to “rummage through my head and take out the fire thoughts and eat them” before bed. This was so sweet, that you held his anxieties in your belly. Can you talk about how you address the climate crisis with your sons, as a mother? And how that’s changed and developed as they’ve aged, and you’ve engaged more directly with the topic via writing these essays?

ER: That was the bedtime ritual for a while. He would name all his fears and ask me to eat them one by one, and I would pantomime doing so. I was his grief eater. We have to be careful about how much grief we consume, don’t you think? A diet like that can make us sick. But I also wanted to validate my kid’s fears and let him know that he didn’t have to carry them alone.

This is how I address climate change with him and his brother, too. By diverting them from the fallacy that they can fight it by themselves. We now know that the idea of the individual carbon footprint, that is, how much we are each contributing to the problem as a way of pushing us to change individual behaviors (drive less, don’t have kids, fly less, recycle, etc..) was a marketing scheme cooked up by British Petroleum. Why? To deflect responsibility from the fossil fuel industry by tricking us into thinking it’s we who need to change. The only way we can take this fight on is in community with others, on local and global scales. So I talk to my kids about what is going on in the community to fight climate change and environmental justice.

For example, in our neighborhood in the Bronx, they are in the process of daylighting (unburying) a stream as an act of climate mitigation. I try to bring the climate emergency down to Earth and out of the realm of cosmic dread. And I talk to them about historical resilience. How we come from a historically resilient community that has survived existential threats before. As they get older, I want them to know more about careers in sustainability, though the paths they will walk are their own to choose. Ours is described as the last generation who can turn things around. Their generation—Alpha—they are inheriting a terrible burden. I think a lot about intergenerational justice; about what we owe them. I’m curious, because you’re such a thoughtful parent yourself, how are you thinking through this?

BG: A lot of this resonates with me as a parent. My son is almost fifteen. His room is verdant with houseplants, terrariums, aquariums. He loves life and science. He’s also a technophile, and he believes that while things are going to get real bad, ultimately technology will allow us to survive, that ingenious humanity will find a way. I appreciate his optimism but I don’t trust capitalism or corporations, especially big tech. Have you experienced anything similar with your boys?

ER: I’d like to hang out in your son’s room. It sounds amazing. Our kids are somewhat younger than yours. They’ll turn eleven and thirteen this spring. We’ve not yet gotten into disagreements or debates about best practices moving forward, like degrowth. Maybe that will come, when they’re truly teenagers, like yours, with strong opinions of their own. Or maybe they’ll want to join task forces, like the Sunrise Movement or Fridays for Future. Who knows. Right now they’re into playing video-games.

We do try to inculcate values, like experiences and relationships matter more than stuff. It helps me to know I’m not the only one educating them, and I hope that solutions-oriented curriculum about the climate crisis will become a bigger and bigger part of their education in middle school, high school, and college. The Ecopsychepedia is a good resource I turn to for current research and thinking on how psychological factors drive the climate crisis, how the worsening crisis affects us psychologically, and what we can do about it. And I’m encouraged by the two New York State climate education bills afoot that would mandate K-12 climate education. I’m also gaining a lot of insight about parenting in these times from Anya Kamenetz’s thoughtful newsletter, The Golden Hour.

BG: This talk of parenting makes me think of Lessons in Survival’s subtitle: “Mothering Against ‘The Apocalypse.’” What does the word mother mean to you and why did you choose to use it in this context?

ER: I’m aligned here with feminist thinkers like Gloria Steinem and Alexis Pauline Gumbs who use “mother” not as a noun, but as a verb. Mothering can be a revolutionary stance on the power of nurture and empathy—an ethics of care. People sometimes forget that when Julia Ward Howe invented Mother’s Day in 1870, it was supposed to be a day of unity for peace and opposition to war. It was about coming together to combat violence. It wasn’t about Hallmark cards and roses. It was in recognition, as Steinem puts it, that “when mother is a verb–as in to mother, to be mothered–then the best of human possibilities come into our imaginations. To mother is to care about the welfare of another person as much as one’s own.” Even if we aren’t biological mothers, we may be mothering.

BG: The essay “Mother of All Good Things,” where you report on the Israeli occupation of Palestine on its fiftieth anniversary, in 2017, is an incredible piece of journalism and artistry. You write that just as W. E. B. DuBois said “the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line, I’d heard it said the problem of the twenty-first century was the question of Palestine.” This hit me differently now, as the occupation and total destruction of Gaza continues unabated, then it would have a few months ago. Can you tell me the circumstances that led to that piece, and also update it for us?

ER: The Question of Palestine, with a hat tip to Edward Said. I was solicited by married writers Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon to write that essay for an anthology called The Kingdom of Olives and Ash (along with a lot of other international writers including Anita Desai, Hari Kunzru, Helon Habila, Porochista Khakpour, Eimear McBride, Raja Shehadeh) to examine the human cost of the occupation. It was a partnership with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—a radically humane organization made up of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories, witnessed firsthand the injustice there, and conscientiously objected to it, often at a high cost.

I wrote specifically about inequitable water and electricity use in one part of the West Bank. I visited with Palestinian shepherds trying to stay on their land. I wasn’t in Gaza. I was in the South Hebron Hills. It was my first explicit piece of environmental writing, and it was about the abuse of power. I am still in touch with many of the folks I profiled in that piece. They say that the settler violence has grown much worse since I was there, and it feels like the world doesn’t care. They’re praying for a ceasefire, yet feeling despair. I’ve been thinking a lot since this war broke out about the words of Lama Hourani, a community activist I met in Ramallah: “Does the US really care about Jewish self-determination? No. They wanted an ally for resources. Their main interest is energy. The main energy is in the Gulf. All of us are suffering because of that.”

I hope this essay gives readers some context about the violence that led up to October 7.

BG: The ways in which water and access to water has been weaponized by the Israeli government rooted that essay into the collection, as so many of the pieces have water on the mind, from rising seawater to hurricanes and floods, and the ancient pond that hides in plain sight in front of your house, returning to swamp the sidewalk whenever it rains. How did you settle on topics for these pieces? They each stand alone and yet speak to one another, with recurring themes and characters, like songs on an album.

ER: Water is one of the book’s leitmotifs. I don’t know. I think I just followed my curiosity. I looked as hard as I could at the places where something was wrong, to understand how it got that way, systemically. You mentioned the pond in the street in front of my house in the Bronx, for example. It’s an eyesore and it’s surely bad for resale value. But why is it there in the first place, and why doesn’t it go away? Well, it turns out I live on backfilled wetlands, and that pond is only one of many ponds in my area, which also floods, in places. It’s the water remembering where it wants to be. And why is flooding of this kind more common in Black and brown neighborhoods like mine, that were historically red-lined? Because plundered peoples are made to live in plundered places.

I’m glad you feel that the book hangs together like an album, with refrains. There are a lot of visual refrains and echoes. I’m a street photographer as well as a writer and I included over a hundred photos in the book. The majority of these images are of public artworks that reflect on social and environmental issues. As with the pond, I had to ask, what’s that mural doing there? What is it saying? Who made it? Who was it meant for and why?

BG: Can we return to the word resilience? What did you learn about resilience in the process of writing it, and profiling people like Luz, who, after Hurricane Sandy destroyed her home, now lives as a climate migrant in an RV?

ER: Luz, in particular, has taught me a lot about resilience. I credit her for wiping scales from my eyes in terms of the merits of disaster preparedness. One of the essays profiles her story. She didn’t own her home in Staten Island. It was a rental in her brother’s name. She lost everything she owned to that hurricane. So there was no way she could get government funds to “build it back better.” Luz was forced by circumstance to radically change her life, to critique consumer-culture, to downsize. She now lives much more sustainably and happily in an RV. I’m interested in learning from people like Luz, and from frontline and fenceline communities, who have a lot to teach us about survival, and what Anya Kamenetz would call “post-traumatic growth,” even though they’re seldom treated as environmental experts. If we come from a stance of thinking of economics as the chief measure of human welfare, we are missing out on a more wealthy understanding of resilience. Setting aside financial resilience, what does it mean to be spiritually resilient, emotionally resilient? What resources and reserves of strength does it take to make it through calamity?

Are you familiar with the gospel song, “How I Got Over”? Mahalia Jackson recorded it. So did Aretha Franklin. “My soul look back and wonder, how I got over…” I interviewed a lot of survivors in this book about how they got over. I also asked people what they do with their anger.

BG: What do you do with your anger? And how do you nurture hope?

ER: For a long time I internalized it and experienced it as depression. An elder I talked to in Alakanuk, Alaska, a real ground zero of climate collapse, told me that the best thing to do with our anger is to take care of other people. That resonated with me in a deep way, as a mother. As for nurturing hope, this may sound too simple, but the purest practice I’ve found is to garden. To nurture life with my hands in the soil, and be nurtured in return.