The Mother Of It All What If We're The Helpers? With Elizabeth Doerr
Sarah and Miranda move through their own climate change cognitive dissonance with the help of Elizabeth Doerr, author of the Cramming for the Apocalypse project. We discuss how parenting lends itself to climate action, how facing the climate reality can actually make you less anxious, and how mothers can give prepper stereotypes a much-needed makeover.
Links:
* How Do You Plan For a Future That Might Not Exist? by Liz Plank
“I miss my 2015 brain, the one unburdened by the weight of relentless catastrophes, and I miss my 2015 problems, those small, manageable worries that felt so monumental at the time. But more than that, I mourn the 2025 happiness I once allowed myself to envision, a life shimmering with possibility, untouched by the shadow of all we’ve lost. I grieve the future I was so certain would be mine, the life I thought I was building towards. I can’t pinpoint the moment it slipped through my fingers, but I know it’s gone. Most of all, I ache for the version of myself who believed in that future, who had the audacity to imagine a world that was bright and brimming with promise.
What we’re all feeling is grief. Not the tidy, private kind, but a vast, collective mourning that binds us together. We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit.”
* What If We Get It Right? by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and her Climate Action Venn Diagram
* Kathryn Schulz’s New Yorker article about the Cascadia Fault Earthquake
* Ecopsychological Development and Maternal Ecodistress During Matrescence by Aurelie Athan
* Twilight Greenaway’s Substack, The Window, with regular climate news coverage
* Donate to Baby2Baby’s fire relief support
* More links from Liz:
* Anya Kamenetz's Substack The Golden Hour
* Liz Doerr and Brekke Wagoner’s 10-week preparedness guide
* Britt Wray's Generation Dread takes on climate grief head-on
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