Even before her 4th birthday, my daughter began her wrestling with time and transience, as if sent by God to feel out my weakness. We read together the story of Jesus raising Jairus’ daughter to life. The backdrop to that miracle provided her first outright encounter with the fact of death. It spurred the first of many conversations in which she raged against God for allowing a world of heartbreak. “I am sad about love” are her exact words now written on my heart for eternity. Her undisguised anguish took me aback. It was as though I was listening to my own inner child speak my deepest thoughts and fears.
I wanted to tell her, “Everything will be fine. You’ll wake up in heaven and life will go on,” as though I had already stepped into heaven’s foyer to check it out for her. I resisted that temptation. Not only do I disbelieve that our disembodied souls fly off to an otherworldly heaven (God’s promise is a redeemed creation!), I also recognize that, in scripture, hope is never a magic wand that sweeps away death and loss. Instead of trying to anesthetize her against loss, I had to let the hardness of death sit on her little chest side by side with God’s promise that all shall be well.
From that day on, it seemed to hit her that evil is real and that not everything bad has yet been overcome. In my own life, it is the climate crisis and the threat of human annihilation that supplies that knowledge, and it is parenthood that makes me unable to ignore it. With eyes full of seriousness, my daughter has asked me if bad guys exist, if prison is real, and if a virus can kill you. I dread telling her that not only these, but human destruction of life as we know it is, by the best accounts, real as well.
For parents, our fears about global catastrophe are understandably bound up with our imagination of our children’s futures. This makes educating ourselves about climate change inseparable from our vocation as parents. Both require facing excruciating loss and uncertainty.
Lydia Wylie-Kellermann’s This Sweet Earth addresses that loss, uncertainty, and the grief that results. It is a book infused with the conviction that squaring up to the truth is always more hopeful than attempting to live a lie.
It is not a book for discerning the latest climate science or for learning what we can expect from the future. It’s not a book for assessing the mounting evidence for a human-caused climate change. This book is for those who have done their homework and need a guide for parenting in light of what they’ve learned. It is a book that empowers us “to choose joy in the face of death. To laugh though you have considered all the facts” (119).
Wylie-Kellermann confronts the interweaving of parenthood with the questions of climate change. Each chapter is a meditation on a theme or practical dimension of this journey, filled out by personal stories of struggle and concluded with a poetic charge and a blessing. The book has a contemplative quality to it. The topics range from lessons in being truthful with our children to wisdom for befriending death to the cultivation of love for our natural surroundings. Although packed to the brim with wisdom, this is anything but a how-to book. It is more akin to a personal reflection on coming to the end of easy answers and finding beauty amid struggle and uncertainty.
Among the most powerful questions addressed is how to engage our children truthfully. In my own experience, one of the scariest aspects of the climate crisis is the extent to which society seems to demand our collusion against reality. I remember once, after reading another report on the dismal prospects for human flourishing, walking along a city sidewalk amid the typical bustle, thinking about what a farce we adults were caught up in, performing for our children as though this world can go on for them, just like it is, now and forever. We are becoming socially conditioned to ignore the fact that the seasons are out of whack, that the trees are blooming at the wrong times. We pretend not to notice that it’s 80 degrees in October in Iowa or that wildfires are raging outside of fire season; that floods, droughts, and wildfires are all becoming more frequent. One of the most powerful gifts of this book is also the simplest: Wylie-Kellermann names these phenomena and the havoc they are wreaking on ecosystems. In doing so, she gives us permission to grieve them. Whatever else happens, my kids will grow up in a world of precarity, faced by mounting losses. They will not know the full beauty of the seasons as I have known it, nor the diversity of species that colored my childhood. They will know a higher proportion of natural disasters, a global refugee crisis, and increasingly strained governing structures. They might know increased warfare and global instability and economic collapse.
A story about her activist father’s honesty with her about a risk he knowingly incurred shows the reader that children can appreciate honesty about hard things. As a young child, she received her parents’ truth telling as invitations to deeper relationship (53). Many of us know from experience how fears kept secret or swept under the rug rather than protecting relationships tend to erode them. The lesson is that if we want deeper connection, if we want resilient children, we need to tell them the truth, albeit in age-appropriate ways.
To be clear, Wylie-Kellermann’s book is not a fatalistic call to acquiesce to a dark future. Rather, it’s a hope-filled, though realistic call to subvert the darkest version of that future through a variety of means. Her book includes chapters on fostering children’s intimate knowledge of and love for creation, building extended communities of interdependence and resilience, and participating in collective acts of resistance to the powers of destruction. Wylie-Kellermann simply reflects the truth that in the coming challenges, we must count our wins, both big and small. In a family, that might mean teaching our children to feel themselves members of the natural world. In a community, that might mean sharing in a neighborhood economy that sustains itself outside of the corporate structures of greed. This Sweet Earth offers beautiful glimpses of a deeper form of sharing that might only be possible through acknowledging our shared vulnerability as a species.
At the same time, the author’s unstated assumptions about the coming changes to human society may prove distracting to some readers. Wylie-Kellermann never explicitly states her view of the range of possibilities we must prepare for. No doubt, what makes facing the future of climate collapse uniquely challenging is that there are so many unknown variables. We simply don’t know what comes next. Wylie-Kellermann’s own practical injunctions subtly reflect her estimation of where things may well be headed. Envisioning a world post-economic collapse, she wants her children to be trained in the homesteading arts of growing and preserving their own food and making things with their hands (109). Others who take climate science just as seriously choose to direct their children toward the study of new technologies that might undo some of the damage done. Wylie-Kellermann makes clear that she is wary of unfounded hopes in technological solutions, which tend to reinforce our addiction to the status quo (99). Raised by two social activists, for whom participation in protests were as ordinary as family dinner, Wylie-Kellermann’s book is infused with the values of communal-living over individualism and craftmanship over consumption.
Finally, readers of The Reformed Journal should note that the focus here is not overtly Christian. A generous and largely undefined spirituality suffuses the pages. Those looking for engagement with scripture or with a Christian theology of creation will be disappointed. For this theologian, the author’s talk of “creation” and of humans themselves as “creatures” cried out for a theology of Romans 8, which recognizes our common groaning alongside the rest of the created order and nonetheless places this groaning in the context of a shared vocation and under the sign of hope in the Spirit’s work (vv. 22-23). For Christians, scripture’s emphasis on God’s unwavering commitment to creation, even to the point of taking responsibility for our violence, provides a powerful motivation to speak frankly about the threat posed by climate change.
When asked by her son, “Are human beings going extinct?” Wylie-Kellermann recounts that she needed time to process before answering. She soon realized that her reticence to answer the question had not really been about protecting her child from the truth. Rather, “It’s that I don’t want the truth to be true!” (57). Telling hard truths to our vulnerable little ones forces us to face our own vulnerability, and our responsibility, too. But if we aim to raise children brave enough to face this dangerous world, perhaps we need to be willing to face—and speak—hard truths.
2 Responses
Thank you for introducing us to this book and for your beautiful, poignant review. You are so right that “one of the scariest aspects of the climate crisis is the extent to which society seems to demand our collusion against reality.” How do we break out of the seeming urgency of our immediate tasks and lives long enough to imagine better ways to live through climate and political chaos? In our churches, for one, there is a great need to talk together about what’s happening.
I’m currently reading Brain McLaren’s “Life After Doom: Wisdom and Courage for a World Falling Apart.” McLaren sets out four possible scenarios for future life on earth (sketching in the “unstated assumptions” about what will happen to human society that Wylie-Kellermann leaves unsaid), and offers a lot of theologically-informed commentary, though he is writing for a broad audience, not just people of faith.
I remember once, after reading another report on the dismal prospects for human flourishing, walking along a city sidewalk amid the typical bustle, thinking about what a farce we adults were caught up in, performing for our children as though this world can go on for them, just like it is, now and forever.
The truth of this image cut to the bone. A farce indeed.