Emily Raboteau‘s 2024 essay collection, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against the Apocalypse, offers a unique view into our present moment. Confronting the perils of raising two Black sons in New York City, Raboteau situates contemporary life in the context of climate crisis and environmental justice. Learning to parent responsibly in this world of seeming perpetual disaster is a constant struggle, and we reached out to learn more about Raboteau’s perspective on the worlds we can build for future generations–and what strategies are available to us here and now. Our conversation sparked many ideas on what life looks like for those of us committed to building a sustainable future!

• Your book deals with surviving and parenting responsibly in a world filled with apocalyptic threats. What kinds of lives are available to us in such a world? What possibilities do you find it most important to seize? 

That depends on who you mean by ‘us.’ We must be careful about false equivalencies. While it’s true that the futures of all children living now are threatened by the climate crisis, the futures available to our children aren’t equivalent. They vary widely depending on race, place, gender, nationality, ethnicity, and class. The threats posed to my children, who are Black and live in the Bronx are not the same as the threats posed to Palestinian children in living in Gaza. My book highlights voices from marginalized communities not often centered in the environmental movement. As a mother, I felt I had a lot to learn about protecting my kids from people who know a lot about survival, who come from historically resilient communities that have survived existential threats in the past. I talked to indigenous peoples in Palestine and in the Arctic as well as people in my own community in New York City. I also drew lessons from the life of my grandmother, who fled the racial terror of the Jim Crow South along the path of the Great Migration to save the lives of her children, including my father. I think it’s important to focus on historically resilient people when imagining possible futures, and also, as Mr. Rogers advised, to look for “the helpers” in times of crisis. I’m especially fond of this quote by James Baldwin, whose centennial we are celebrating this year: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.” For me, the possibilities most important to seize are those that protect our children. All of them. 

• Birds play a significant role in your work and personal life, and they serve as a continuous thread through the book. We share this love of birds, especially rare and endangered ones. You also write that murals of endangered birds in New York City moved you to think about the future in relation to your two Black sons. Can you share more with our audience about why birds are important to you? How did the images of endangered birds connect with you? 

There is a very vibrant series of murals concentrated mostly in upper Manhattan’s neighborhoods of Harlem (where I teach) and Washington Heights, where John James Audubon used to live and is buried. It’s called the Audubon Mural Project. The project’s aim is to represent all 389 North American bird species that are threatened with extinction by climate change. There are presently 155 species painted, and I have photographed over 100 of the murals as an act of witness and documentation, because murals are so ephemeral. In that sense, I’m a birdwatcher. They’re painted in all different styles, by many different artists, some of them local, some not. I find the murals very beautiful and elegiac. Because they appear in zip codes threatened by environmental justice issues and gentrification, I also feel the bird murals are a sly commentary on social and environmental issues facing the Black and brown neighborhoods in which they appear. The birds are threatened, but not more so than the children who live in these neighborhoods, including my sons. 

• You explore a variety of issues we are facing: biodiversity loss, climate change impacts, poverty, racism, war, disease, and more. These are all interconnected problems that impact all of us on this planet, albeit unevenly. Is there hope in the face of these challenges? Where do you find it? 

Personally, I find anger to be a more animating emotion for action than hope. That Exxon knew the catastrophic place we’d be in today back in 1977 boils my blood. That the people suffering the worst effects of the climate crisis have done the least to contribute to it infuriates me. As a climate writer, I have learned that it’s also important to communicate a sense of agency to my readers, to focus on solutions rather than disasters. It inspires me, for example, that a buried brook in my neighborhood is being daylit (unburied) as an act of climate mitigation. But I will not say that I feel hope. In fact, negative climate emotions are linked with climate action. Not just anger but anxiety, fear, guilt, and worry. It’s important to feel those emotions because they actually drive pro-environmental behavior, as numerous studies have shown. If I felt hopeful, I’d be complacent.  

• What does anger motivate for you, especially regarding your understanding of the future? Is there a difference between anger and pessimism? 

Well, I am motivated by anger to write about the climate crisis. I mean, my anger about this issue has completely changed the course of what I write. I used to write fiction. Now I feel compelled to communicate the urgency of the climate crisis so that grownups understand they should not be feeling optimistic. I want my readers to feel pessimistic and outraged so they will act. I want them to be as furious as I am. I want them to feel responsible and provoked, or seduced into activism.  

• Learning how to parent responsibly in the face of climate crisis is a struggle for even the best-intentioned parent. What advice do you have for parents who want to raise their children with an awareness of the climate crisis without overwhelming them?  

The New York Times has this really good guide for kids on climate change and what we can do about it.  

Climate change means our kids’ life experiences will be much different than our own.  It’s a daunting subject to broach, but one of the most important. Like, as important as talking about sex. Despite everything I said before about the importance of anger, anxiety, and pessimism as drivers of climate activism, it’s really critical to stay positive with kids. Especially little kids. We can remind our children that they have roles to play as climate leaders and lovers of this world, in their own communities. The discussion approaches we’re taking with our kids depend on their ages and interests. Little kids are usually already inspired by a love of animals and the natural world. As they grow, we can connect what they’re noticing, like migrating birds, with concepts like seasons and weather. By elementary school, most kids have already heard the term “climate change,” so we can explain the basic facts to them and preempt an association with fear. How do we do that? By empowering them with actions they can take, like composting, turning off lights, caring for a tree or plant, and by bringing them to science museums, zoos and aquariums to explore and learn about climate change and biodiversity loss in child-friendly ways. By middle school, some of them are getting formal instruction on climate change, and we can amplify those lessons at home by connecting them with what’s going on in our local communities, like changes in grow-zones, hurricanes, heat waves, wildfires, but also what actions are being taken. Teenagers can be reassured that there are still paths forward and made familiar with stories of young people taking action, or connected to movements like the Sunrise Movement. We can also help them understand about misinformation and the value of reliable sources of information about climate change, but also about the world in general.  

Here are a couple more kid- and teenager-friendly resources that have been vetted by climate scientists and science educators. 

• CLEAN is a database of resources supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
• Subject to Climate offers news articles and lesson plans written for fifth graders and up.

• Islands are uniquely vulnerable to climate change and biodiversity loss, but they’re also places where we can have outsized beneficial impacts. Holistically restoring islands is a nature-based solution that benefits wildlife, oceans, and people, and it also builds climate resilience. It’s a bright spot in the normal doom-and-gloom, but many people are not aware. Often people get so focused on remote islands that we forget about populated ones, like Manhattan, where you live. You write about many of the climate change impacts you’re seeing now and projections for the future—impacts that are all the more dramatic on islands. What threats does New York face as an island, and are there any bright spots you’d like to share? 

Yes, islands are on my radar because I live in New York City, which is an archipelago of more than forty islands. Manhattan is but one of them. NYC has much in common with island nations like the Philippines, Seychelles, the Maldives, Cape Verde, and Indonesia in terms of sea level rise. Lower Manhattan, where the financial district is, lies in a floodplain and was devastated by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, as were parts of Staten Island, and Far Rockaway, just to name a few islands in the City particularly vulnerable to coastal flooding. All in all, we have 520 miles of coastline. That’s longer waterfront than Miami, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco combined. And all that coastline could be under water by 2100. I’ll be dead by then. But my grandkids won’t. Measurements from a tidal gauge off the southern tip of Manhattan indicate about a foot of sea level rise in New York Harbor in the last century.  

Some of the holistic nature-based restoration projects going on in NYC are The Billion Oyster Project, which aims to restore oyster reefs to NY Harbor, preserving 10,000 acres of wetlands at Jamaica Bay, transforming paved schoolyards into community playgrounds with green infrastructure, rewilding after managed retreat from the coastline, and the daylighting (unburial) of a stream called Tibbetts Brook in my neighborhood in the Bronx, which will help mitigate flooding. I’m writing about that project right now. 

• Islanders are often positioned at the front lines of the climate crisis, with their futures often already presumed to be foreclosed by rising sea levels. We also know that conservation has historically been a colonialist pursuit to control and manage landscapes and resources. Your use of the term “climate apartheid” captures these aspects of uneven futurity. How can the climate movement—and conservationists in particular—center justice in our imaginings of the future? What should we keep in mind as we work to protect vulnerable ecosystems and communities? 

I like my CUNY colleague, Ashley Dawson’s definition: “Climate apartheid alludes to the retreat of global elites (who are responsible for the lion’s share of carbon emissions) into various forms of lifeboats, while the global poor are left to sink or swim.” Developing nations are expected to suffer at least 75% of the costs of climate change – despite the fact that the poorer half of the world’s population generate just 10% of emissions. What we should keep in mind as we work to protect vulnerable ecosystems and communities is that people are migrating away from those places and will continue to do so. In the U.S., we can help those communities when they show up at our borders by counteracting the racially biased narrative that they’re a threat to national security. I’m thinking of what happened with Hurricane Dorian when 119 evacuees from the Bahamas, including kids, were kicked off a ferry heading to Florida because they didn’t have US Visas. Trump referred to them as “very bad people.”
 

• What have you found to be the most impactful action or line of thinking to build resilience and a clear sense of the future for yourself as a Black woman and mother? Does such a thing exist? 

I just think of my ancestors who survived enslavement and Jim Crow. They faced existential threats and still had kids, practiced faith, believed in a future. I am their future. I don’t have a clear sense of the future, but I know there is one.  

• If there’s one thing you hope people take from your book, what would it be? 

One of the best lessons I got was from a Yu’pik elder in Alakanuk, Alaska named Denis Sheldon. I asked him what we can do with our anger so that it doesn’t kill us. The answer, he said, is to take care of each other.