Middle America: Love in the Time of Climate Crisis

We need to turn toward the recognition, as painful as it is, of our place in the world, and our looming potential extinction, to face what we’ve done, and still can do, to save ourselves and our home.

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My kids love the wilderness. In order to get some family time this summer, we trekked into the Presidential Peaks in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, where our middle daughter was working as a hut crew member on the Appalachian Trail. A month later, we chased our oldest and youngest daughters into the Boundary Waters on the border of Northern Minnesota and Canada, picking them up from their canoe camp and joining them for a paddle and portage camping trip for a week. When my husband slipped on a rock and broke his leg, the girls relieved him of his gear, hefting heavy packs and canoes while he hobbled over portages on two paddles. 

He’s the one who sparked our girls’ love of the outdoors, sharing his own camping skills and encouraging them to become the skilled paddlers, navigators, fire-builders, and hearty nature lovers they are now. I feel lucky to come along for the ride. I marvel at these three outdoorswomen and love being with them in their favorite remote places, slipping into clear water in the early morning, listening to loons calling at night. There’s no greater pleasure than watching your children reveling in their own strength and the sheer beauty of the world. 

Our daughter Rose, a budding naturalist, recently decided to take a semester off school and remain in the White Mountains for the fall season to work at the hut, where, in addition to cooking, cleaning, and packing in supplies on her back twice a week with her crew, she now gives evening nature talks to hikers who are passing through. Thrilled when she got this job, she told me on the phone about the first lesson she was planning: It was about recognizing the feeling in your body that a change in the weather is coming. Like all animals, we have the capacity to sense the way air pressure changes; to hear and feel the coming of a storm, she explained. It’s a beautiful lesson, I thought. And of course it’s true. We are creatures of this Earth and are connected to it in ways we don’t always recognize. We have to cultivate our ability to perceive that connection.

My children are more in tune with the beauty of the natural world than I was at their age. And that is both a source of joy and heartache. 

As the Canadian wildfires were raging this summer, my Midwestern city was engulfed in a choking haze. It was dangerous to spend a lot of time outside. Walking the dog at night, under a strange, blurry moon, I felt the burning in my lungs and thought there is nowhere left to hide from the destruction we’ve caused to our planet. I thought about our girls in the wilderness with a clutching pain in my heart for the ruin of the world just as they are falling in love with it. 

People like to tell the young that it’s up to them to save the planet. “We screwed it up; you’ll have to fix it,” I’ve often heard older adults say to young people, as they praise the next generation’s environmental and social consciousness. It takes a certain numbness not to perceive the gross injustice of this backhanded compliment. So many of my daughters’ friends and classmates are studying environmental science. It’s clear that they are, in fact, shouldering that burden—facing the awful responsibility of confronting the damage we’ve done to the planet and trying to figure out how to begin to address it. But they never should have been left with that charge.

At the end of August, we suffered through a week of the hottest temperatures on record in Wisconsin, a widely shared experience around the globe. The death toll in Maui, , from the shockingly destructive wildfires there, continued to climb. On my late-night walk with the dog, and early in the morning, there was no relief from the thick, humid air. 

Coincidentally, on the very worst of those hot days—with a heat index well above 100 degrees Fahrenheit—the Republican candidates for President met for their first primary debate in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and reaffirmed their unwillingness to address the climate crisis.

Like the Catholic Church officials who refused to formally accept until the 1990s Galileo’s view that the Earth revolved around the sun, climate deniers will go on sticking to their benighted beliefs until it’s way too late.

Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida—where the coral reefs have been dying this summer as the ocean becomes a hot tub and the coast has been pummeled by storms increasing in frequency and fury because of climate change—rebuffed the moderators’ show-of-hands question about whether climate change is caused by humans. Thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, the youngest candidate on stage, who captured a lot of attention for raising his profile in the debate and taking advantage of the absence of GOP front-runner Donald Trump, called the “climate change agenda” a “hoax.”

Like the Catholic Church officials who refused to formally accept until the 1990s Galileo’s view that the Earth revolved around the sun, climate deniers will go on sticking to their benighted beliefs until it’s way too late. But as a species, we know, deep in our core, that our planet is suffering, and we are suffering with it.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, a botanist, poet, and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, brings together scientific inquiry with a deeper, more intimate way of knowing that acknowledges how we humans are deeply enmeshed in—not separate from—the natural world.

In Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants, she writes: “For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything is a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it is just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.”

We need to turn toward that recognition, as painful as it is, of our place in the world, and our looming potential extinction, to face what we’ve done, and still can do, to save ourselves and our home.

It starts not with the alienated, polarized politics that feeds on outrage and pushes us further away from each other, creating narratives that have moved so many people so far from the concrete reality we share. 

It starts with that lesson my daughter has been dreaming up in her hut on the Appalachian Trail, reconnecting to our shared experience in the physical world, coming home to ourselves, our bodies on this planet, touching the Earth, and each other.