By now, the science is undeniable: climate is changing. The Earth is in crisis. For those with children or grandchildren, the future looks especially bleak. How should a parent approach this topic with children seeking answers … and hope? How to handle the grief, fear, and anger we feel? Lydia Wylie-Kellerman is the author of This Sweet Earth. She writes about how to handle these feelings and restore hope in our children for the future.
“I think about just the time between my childhood and [the childhood years of my children], how quickly things have shifted,” Wylie-Kellerman says. “There are ways that all of us have experienced some sort of climate catastrophe, and if we haven’t, we will soon. We feel it all the time. In little ways, like when we pick cherries, or in big ways when we worry for folks being evacuated for fires or hurricanes or floods. I feel that fear and despair in me. The rain comes harder and the snow comes less and the aqueducts are drying up and the air is growing toxic. Songbirds are going quiet. Mountaintops are being harvested. Topsoil is drifting away. All of this is just too much.”
Wylie-Kellerman realized that her children, ages 8 and 11, were sensing the changes, too. They, too, were feeling anxiety. From that, but also from the hope her children would find in simple enjoyment of nature such as the discovery of a cicada, she began writing her book about how to talk to children about climate change and how to keep hope alive that we may yet survive all these changes. The future is an unknown, she says.
This Sweet Earth discusses how to build community into a system based more on barter than on overuse of natural resources, how to develop gratitude and care for what remains in our biodiversity even as species become extinct daily. With gratitude, she recommends teaching our children the names of plants and animals. When we name something, we get to know it better and begin to develop a relationship. When we know something, we can grow to love something, and when we love something, we naturally want to protect it. The author lists 100 ways to be better stewards of the earth and to appreciate the earth while we have it. It begins with telling children the truth about what is happening around us.
Wylie-Kellerman is director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center and the editor of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World. Her writing has appeared in Sojourners, Red Letter Christians, Geez Magazine, and various Catholic Worker papers, and she is a contributor to multiple books. A former resident of Detroit, Michigan, she now lives with her partner and two boys in Bangor, Pennsylvania.
Wylie-Kellerman will be reading and answering questions at this is a bookstore/Bookbug on Thursday, August 8, at 6:30 p.m. Registration is suggested.
