Parenting in a Changing Climate: Tools for Cultivating Resilience, Taking Action, and Practicing Hope in the Face of Climate Change

by Elizabeth Bechard

Writer Trebbe Johnson explores our relationship with broken places in her book Radical Joy for Hard Times. Referencing the work of prominent ecotherapists Sarah Anne Edwards and Linda Buzzel, Johnson acknowledges that the grief we feel about environmental changes is not a one-time loss that we eventually learn to move on from; it’s more akin to living with a chronic, degenerative illness, one we know will worsen throughout our lifetimes. For those of us who are parents, it’s like living with a chronic, degenerative illness that’s genetic, knowing we’ve passed it on to our children. We know they will be living with environmental grief throughout their lifetime, as well. Environmental grief—like the grief many feel with infertility or pregnancy loss—tends to be disenfranchised. It’s often unseen, unacknowledged, and unvalidated by our social norms, and we have few resources or collective rituals for metabolizing it.