When my daughter Sophia was born and her tiny curled up body rested on my chest for the first time, I panicked. Heavier than my doubts about whether I could successfully breastfeed her, learn to change her (compostable) diapers and save her from crib death, weighed my fear that one day I´d have to say,“Daughter of mine, this is your planet. I am sorry to tell you it has been trashed by previous generations.” No parent I know wants to utter those words, yet it's the truth.
There are many reasons why I never planned on having children. Among them were overpopulation, the looming environmental catastrophe, the fact that my fertile years were zooming by, and the question of whether I could ever afford the cost of supporting a child.
I found my husband when I was 39 and he was 55. It was not our first time at the love rodeo, so a little jaded and much wiser, with luck and effort we built a strong relationship. The love between us began opening us to the possibility of becoming parents. At first it seemed too late for that, but the Great Spirit laughed at our little human plans, and after two miscarriages, asked me to make peace with motherhood.
Before I gave birth to my daughter at the ripe old age of 42, I’d spent decades with my finger on the pulse of the environmental movement. I had reasoned my way through apocalyptic scenarios. I’d studied Starhawk’s The Fifth Sacred Thing and Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower as textbooks for the future of famine, war and displacement that would surely come. Being an overthinker, I figured the worst that can happen is to die, so I resolved to overcome my fear of death. I was already a serious meditator in the kundalini yoga tradition, but by pursuing lucid dreaming and other shamanic practices, I learned a lot about how to die consciously.
Yet knowing how to die is no consolation for a parent. Aside from the fact that most of us are likely to continue reincarnating on Earth, and will have to deal with the same environmental mess, Sophia is only two-and-a-half years old. I need to live so I can raise her, and I want to equip her as best I can for the troubled world her generation has inherited.
As the Senegalese environmentalist Baba Dioum said, “In the end we will conserve only what we love; we will love only what we understand; and we will understand only what we are taught." My first priority is for my daughter to fall in love with Mother Earth—“Movver Erf,” as she calls her—, to learn about nature’s cycles and to know where her food and water come from.
When I am daunted by the complex problems we face, my mind wanders into a recurring fantasy in which I drive an electric car and live in an off-the-grid homestead with solar panels. Alas, my family can’t afford that lifestyle, which is no panacea and poses its own problems. But we’re not aiming for perfect, just good.
I´ll tell you a secret that fills me with hope: every problem is the same problem. From homelessness to racism, from hunger to environmental destruction, every problem is the problem of separation: the false belief that we are not interdependent and our fates are not woven together. The solution, therefore, is relatedness and connection. Every time you connect and take an action that supports one area of life, whether you are protecting the life of a two-thousand-year-old redwood or a butterfly that emerged from the cocoon two seconds ago, you are living part of the solution.
From May to November, every Saturday our family drives our non-electric car to the Homeless Garden Project, a nonprofit that teaches work skills to homeless folks. For the past few years we've bought a share in their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program, which allows my two-year-old to pick the strawberries and beets, carrots and greens she eats. I suspect the reason why Sophia eats a wide variety of vegetables is that she sees her own food grow from seedling to harvest.
Participating in the Homeless Garden CSA has so many interrelated benefits. It helps the poorest members of our community to get out of homelessness. The peace of the garden is pure nature therapy for my husband, Dan, a full time hospital chaplain, who works every day amid crisis and loss. By harvesting our own food locally, we reduce the fuel and packaging, and we save a lot of money on organic produce. And by supporting organic agriculture, we protect the land, the water and the people who grow our food from harmful chemicals.
The most rewarding aspect of going to the farm is to observe my daughter awakening to the understanding that nature is a web where all strands are connected. At the farm she greets the ducks who feed on slugs and the cat who keeps the rodents away. When she notices the bees buzzing around the lavender bushes, she shrieks, “They’re making honey!”
Sophia knows honey can be used as medicine, but I haven´t explained the ethical dilemmas of honey extraction. She knows what goes into a pot of chicken soup but hasn't figured out that the chicken we buy at the co-op had to die for us to turn its bones into broth. One day she will learn those things. For now, her action figures are the friendly ladybug, the busy spider, and the owl who flies by night. In my imperfect ways I have succeeded in the first step toward raising a peaceful steward of the Earth, sparking Sophia’s passion for the natural world.
How do you balance realism with hope? In what ways do you create a connection between your children and nature? Or, are you someone who decided not to have children out of concern for our planet? What part do you want to play in the movement to curb climate change? I would love to hear your thoughts.