After my divorce in 2001 I rented a room from a wonderful family: Catia Juliana, Tim Ingalsbee and their two young children, Kelsey, age 5, and Tivon, age 2. Being prominent environmental activists--I´d seen images of their wedding in a documentary about demonstration to save a forest from logging--Tim and Catia raised their children with a deep love and knowledge of nature. Years later, their daughter Kelsey Juliana has taken a tremendous leadership role as one of 21 youth suing the government over climate change. When we reconnected on social media, I wanted to ask her about parenting in the age of climate change, a topic she knows well. In this interview Catia Juliana spoke about:
- saving a forest from logging when Kelsey was born
- raising siblings
- informing our children while not overwhelming them with fear
- how Kelsey came to sue the U.S. government
- Catia's most painful parenting moment, and
- what it's like to have a world-changing activist daughter
Catia Juliana.-I can´t believe we had roommates when we were raising children, but we did what we had to do.
Magalí Morales.-I have such good memories of living with you guys. I remember Kelsey putting on Caribbean dance shows. And Tivon was a wild child. Your kids are adults now!
C.-Wow, yes. Tivon just moved out. He's twenty.
M.-I know you made a lot of choices to protect your time home with your kids. Tim has had a very visible role in environmentalism as an expert in forest fires, and I know you are an activist in your own right. Did you imagine your life was going to turn out as it has?
C.-I never had a super clear vision for my career path, what I had a really strong vision of was having children. I've worked almost the whole time I've been a parent and I did make some career sacrifices in order to prioritize my family. I don’t want to say parenting is my career because it sounds cheesy and anti-feminist, but I think parenting is my calling.
M.-It's helpful for me to hear about other women's path to motherhood. I used to be anxious about having kids. I was worried about overpopulation, I thought the world was heading for disaster. How could we have children? I have a different idea now. It sounds like you carried the decision to have children with you always. Is there a cultural piece to it in your Italian-American identity?
C.-Not necessarily. I have a sister who chose not to have kids. I feel like it's really organic to who I am as an individual. As a child I was a tomboy, I did not play with dolls, I played with the boys. I wasn´t a girly girl by any stretch. But I always felt there was a family waiting to happen in my life. My family of origin is not cohesive, there is conflict. When I was 20 I’d fallen in love with this man. We got engaged. We were young but it felt serious and I had my whole life mapped out with him, including kids. I´m not much of a planner otherwise, except for this idea that I wanted to have children.
M.-The next part of the story I know is that you married Tim at a logging blockade. What happened in the years between when your first relationship ended and you got involved in the environmental movement in Oregon and met Tim?
C.-That relationship ended when I was 23. My partner and I had moved together from New York to Eugene. Where I grew up nobody traveled or had a sense of adventure. My great-grandparents were immigrants and then my grandparents never went more than 30 miles from their home. My dad didn´t board a plane until he was in his 50s. We did one vacation to Florida and that was it. We never went camping. When I moved out here my sense of adventure was really strong. I settled in and found a community of people concerned about environmental issues, which I fell into. I eventually met Tim, who was in graduate school.
M.-You both studied Sociology, right?
C.-Yes. I ended up in the same graduate program he was in. We had a lot of affinity. He wasn't opposed to having a family, but it wasn't a priority for him, whereas I was determined. I had a deadline.
M.-How old were you when you gave birth to Kelsey?
C.-I was 31.
M.-How did you guys get involved in the Fall Creek tree sit?
C.- You are thinking about the Warner Creek blockade. We used to live in Fall Creek. Kelsey was born in a little cabin there. What happened in Warner Creek is that there was an arson fire in a spotted owl habitat area. The arsonist was never caught, but the outcome was the Forest Service decided to salvage log it. Someone filed a lawsuit to protect it and won, but Congress passed the infamous Salvage Rider, which meant they could throw out environmental laws for the purpose of salvage logging after a fire. Warner Creek was the first timber sale affected by the Salvage Rider, so they basically reversed the court decision.
That's how Tim and I got together. We went on a public tour of that place right after the fire and we sat together with pro-industry people. We were two lone activists and we started working on saving this place.
Clearly owls need fire, owls adapt to fire, but they were threatened because of logging. We spent 4 or 5 years between when the fire burned and when it was threatened with logging bringing thousands of people out to that place. My relationship with Tim evolved with the healing of that landscape and with the community learning about why it was important to protect it. When the Salvage Rider happened and the lawsuit was thrown out and they said they were going to log, they could´ve gone up and logged the next day. A group of people went directly from the courthouse to the site and occupied it. That ended up being an 11-month occupation from September to August. It went all through the winter. People would bring provisions and supplies on showshoes, through 10 feet of snow. I was pregnant during that time. Kelsey was born in March, a lot of work was done before the following summer to protect that place.
We were going to move to California because Tim had a job at Humboldt State University. I was going to lose my health insurance, so I figured, I'm losing work and health insurance, we have a baby, I'm following you because of your job, we might as well get married. We knew we were already a family. Then we said, all our friends were going to be at this event that we'd organized at Warner Creek, five years in a row, Fire Ecology Field Conference. So we were going to be at this place we love, so we got married there. We had two weeks to plan it, and everyone pitched in to make it a fun party. We left for California the next day.
M.-I love this story. I was in tears when I saw the recent 60 minutes segment with Kelsey and some of the other youth, and there was that clip where Kelsey was a tiny baby, because you guys had been on 60 minutes years ago when she was an infant.
C.-It was so sweet. We told the producer it was Kelsey’s second 60 minutes interview and he went and found it in the archives. I´d never seen the footage before that.
M.-I´m glad you were able to see it. I have also seen footage of your wedding, in the documentary about Warner Creek, with Tim in his iconic long braids. And to think that Kelsey, whose middle name is Cascadia, was gestated and born under the canopy of this forest that you saved and now she is an environmental activist in her own right. Did you ever imagine how your kids were going to carry your work forward?
C.-This is tricky because I always wanted my kids to be connected to nature, to love nature, and to be aware of the role that humans have as stewards of nature and the reality that humans are destroyers of nature. It was not a grand plan to raise activists at all. I have always believed the kids come in with their own thing, and you just provide them with your philosophy, your understanding, your passion, and if that merges with their thing, they can choose to incorporate it. I am so clear on the concept of nurture and nature. I know that you can´t make your kids into what you want. I knew I wanted a cohesive family, we are four unique individuals who support each other and understand each other’s passions. So, Tim does Kung Fu, it's not my thing, but I cheer him on, go to his events. I love photography, Tim likes to hike fast, but he will slow down so I can take photos. I raised my kids with the idea that we go to the church of the forest on Sunday, not because I want to turn them into eco-warriors, but because I want them to know that this is a sacred place that we live in, it's beautiful and maybe you will carry that into adulthood. I grew up going to church on Sunday. What I did carry is a sense of reverence about going to a place that brings you spiritual renewal.
M.- You respect your kids’ nature, but in your nurture you expose them to your values.
C.-My kids vary in how they've integrated our values. Kelsey appreciates her upbringing, being exposed to activism and being empowered to create a world that she wants to live in. She owns it. Tivon is more like, you tell me this, but I need to circle around the entire context and I´ll decide where I´m going to land. He´s challenged a lot of our ideas, some he has embraced, some are not for him. He has a very different way of integrating our family values. It's been interesting to navigate how to parent each of them, because they are so different, but also to navigate them as siblings. To work with them to respect each other’s way of being. It's so challenging, they are still learning to communicate with each other, but by and large, I'd say they're incredibly respectful, loving, forgiving to each other, more than most siblings. It's a job to parent siblings, that's where I've put a lot of effort. In my upbringing this got lost. I see it all the time, there´s so much competition among siblings, but there is no scarcity of love in this family, there is an abundance.
M.-In my family too, my parents didn't know how to support me and my sister to get along. From an astrological perspective, kids are unique, and sometimes they are compatible, sometimes not. How do you nurture what is there?
C.-If you were going to find two siblings who had potential to hate each other, it would be my kids. You knew them when they were little, Kelsey spent hours creating fantasy worlds with fairies and teacups. Tivon would come by with a car and grrrr, smash through.
M.-Yes, I remember not only the time that Tivon peed on the kitchen table, but you had a separate fridge for me, and I would find his teeth marks on my block of cheese.
C.-(laughing).
M.-Tivon was also a tremendous climber. He had such a fiery, warrior energy, and Kelsey being such a sensitive, creative child. Yeah, they are very different.
C.-You know astrology, Kelsey was born on March 18th, Tivon on March 21st.
M.-Pisces and Aries are a whole different world. Your kids are living proof.
C.-How I understand it is Pisces is ancient wisdom, my daughter is an old soul. If I tell her “the stove’s hot, don´t touch it,” she takes my word for it. Whereas my son is, “It´s hot? Can I touch it?” Why would he take my word for it? He wants to find out for himself.
M.- Exactly, he learns through experience and action, and he´s a pioneer, and he has to almost be against it before he can embrace it.
C.-I can see that their learning styles are different. I can see that they need to have their own experiences.
M.-As a mom, you are the steward of the relationship between these two beings that you brought in through your body and your love. You can't control it, but you can equip them with love and some tools. I love the concept of stewardship of relationships. When I landed in Oregon after I married my first husband, I began to learn about environmentalism. I remember flying home to Mexico and seeing the clear cuts for miles and miles from the airplane, it was devastating, the forests were almost gone. What I realized then is that in order to save ecosystems we needed to change people. On that farm there were mostly white middle-class kids who grew up with a lot of privilege and they’d turn their back on consumerism and growing up going to Disneyland, and they were living in the forest. They were good people, but unaware of their own racism and entitlement, and they would look down on all the working-class neighbors who hunted deer and went to the Christian church. And I was like, here you're telling me you´re preparing for Y2K, and you have 6 months’ worth of black beans and olive oil, but your neighbors have guns. What do you think is going to happen when Y2K hits? Your neighbors are going to bring their guns and take your beans.
C.- (laughing) We’re going to defend our beans with love.
M.-Getting along and learning respect for each other even in our differences is the first step before we can we can really do some concerted protection of the environment. The lessons of getting along with someone different, which your children are learning from day one in your home, are incredibly valuable. I would´ve become a full-on environmentalist, but I wanted to help people heal enough that they can really see and care what we are doing to the planet. If you are too overwhelmed with your own need or your own trauma, you don´t really care.
C.-So true. Everyone needs to make the connection that the Earth is our primary relationship. We´re in an abusive relationship with our Mother Earth, all of us. We forget she´s the one feeding us every day. We go to the fridge, and we forget the food in there comes from somewhere. It´s bizarre that we need to be told, the Earth is providing for us and we are abusing her. What’s going to happen? The food´s going to run out.The air is being poisoned, the climate is going to start killing people.
M.-It already is. Last summer when the town of Paradise, CA burned up, I thought, “Wow, we can really say there are now white, middle-class refugees within the United States whose situation is a direct result of climate change.” Maybe now people will listen, because if it doesn´t happen to white people, nobody wants to listen.
C.-That´s true, you probably know there’s a huge impulse right now to catch up on addressing racism in the environmental movement.
M.- I´m excited to see the signs. There´s such a diversity of youth in the Youth vs Gov lawsuit, and there´s such an awareness of class, geography, everything.
C.-Yes, more than inclusive, it´s representative.
M.-Tell me about the Juliana vs the U.S. lawsuit. How did Kelsey and Julia Olson, the attorney, first meet?
C.-To be clear, the lawsuit wasn't Kelsey’s idea, although some people think that. How this evolved is there is a law professor at the U of O named Mary Wood, an old friend of ours, she had been aware of climate change for a long time. She has three kids whose future she was concerned about, and she put her legal brain to work on possible legal approaches. One was a brilliant theory called Atmospheric Trust Litigation, and she figured out how to apply it in a court of law. She and Julia Olson built the legal framework for this case. There were a lot of around-the-dinner-table conversations about the legal approach and the activist approach, and Kelsey just by being our kid and being surrounded by these interesting, amazing people, was present. So we´d go listen to James Hansen talk at the U of O (a former leading NASA scientist who now directs the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions of the Earth Institute at Columbia University), or there was a national day of youth action through the i-Matter movement, which for a while was on the forefront of these activities. So Kelsey just started going to talks and rallies.
M.-I experienced you and Tim taking your kids to rallies in the early 2000s. I was living in your house the day 9/11 happened, and I remember going to the protest against the Iraq war together, I remember you taking your kids.
C.-Kelsey was attending a Waldorf Inspired school. At that time a lot of the parents were turning the news off when their kids walked in the room, they didn´t want them to know anything about it. I thought, this is their world, I´m going to find an age-appropriate way to talk about it.
M.-You didn't hide it.
C.-No. So Kelsey grew up surrounded by activism, and when she was in 8thgrade, at age 14, her teacher assigned a passion project. Some kids did it on their favorite baseball player, and she was interested in polar bears. She had a book about their habitat being threatened. One of our friends is a wildlife scientist who works at the Center for Biological Diversity studying climate change and its impact on wildlife. I suggested she call her. It was one of my most painful parenting moments because Kelsey, talked on the phone with our friend for an hour and our friend was frank with her about the plight of polar bears. She said thank you so much, hung up the phone, breathed in, and when she breathed out she just fell apart.
M.-I´m getting teary now. Every time I see pictures of polar bears floating on tiny ice floes that are disappearing, the environmental grief is so great.
C.-In that moment she got it. The weight of it hit her. As a parent everyone tells me, “You must be so proud of Kelsey,” and I just want to say, I don't want this for my child. I want my child to be empowered and engaged in the world, but I don't want my child to feel the weight of the world. And I don’t want my child to feel like it's her responsibility to fix it. It’s not a matter of pride. This is not what I wanted for her. Adults are so unaware of the pressures they put on these youth. People will come up to her out of the blue when she's working, and take her photo or ask to take selfies with her. She’s serving coffee. People put her up on this pedestal, people say “Thank you for doing this for us. You´re our only hope. Thank you for fixing this for us.” It´s so insane. She’s working three jobs, going to college, trying to get her degree, and being an activist who speaks all over the country. It's a lot of pressure.
M.-Celebrity culture is an awful trap. Now that youth activists like Kelsey and Greta Thunberg are doing this, people feel they can just sit back and watch. But environmentalism is not a spectator sport. You don´t get to do nothing, just because young peoples’ future is going to suffer more for it, it’s not okay for us to take this passive approach and let them do the work alone. This is one reason I am writing this blog. I want to enlist parents like me to do our part. I wasn't going to have kids because of the state of the world. Now I have a child, Sophia is such a loving, sensitive, empathic creature as well. How can we equip these children? How can we do our part? What is my role as a mom? As a generation X-er? I am 45 years old. I am not trying to paint you as a hero, although you are an inspiration and a great example. I admire Kelsey’s courage. This is no amusement park ride. I don’t want to insult you by saying, “You must feel so proud of Kelsey,” but how do you feel about what is happening? Her role and yours?
C.-I believe in putting your name and your face behind your actions, because the world needs courage. I taught Kelsey, if you believe in something, stand by it. When we did Warner Creek, we stood in front of the cameras. I believe in taking personal responsibility for your activism. It's not always what people have done. We need to talk about how to navigate climate reality for our children and for ourselves. I do not inundate my children with fear at all, we don't know what's going to happen. I try to give them a sense of having a future worth fighting for. We don't have to carry the burden on our shoulders, we don't have to be perfect. Anyone could look at my lifestyle and say, oh, “you drive a car, you live in a house made of wood, you…” These are things that people use to diminish the value of activism. A lot of people fall for it. Anyone trying to be the perfect activist can't do it, because they're too busy biking around with their glass jars full of beans and rice.
M.-Thank you for bringing this up, it's the topic of my first blog post. I remember when I met you you´d just bought a newer van, because your old one left you stranded in the snow with your kids, who were babies, remember? For you it was this great luxury at the time, but you said, "If I´m going to take my kids hiking, I can't expose us to hypothermia, so we're going to have a functioning van". I am totally with you. The solution is not to flood everyone with fear, nor is it to be paralyzed by perfectionism. We must try to change our probable future right now. I´m not going to put you on a pedestal, but you truly have inspired me. I am so grateful to you.
Last week I wrote about my greatest moments of environmental grief and awakening. What are yours? If you are a parent, how do you want to equip your children to face the world they are inheriting? What role do you want to play in the healing of our Mother Earth and all her creatures? If you want to learn more about the Juliana vs the United States and support the cause, go to https://www.ourchildrenstrust.org/kelsey