When the smoke clears

Parenting in the age of climate change, plus, resources and to-dos if you just had your first real taste of climate despair

Photo by Kym MacKinnon on Unsplash

The night before LIVING SMALL was set to go out this week, I (for once!) had the whole darn thing written, edited, and uploaded and formatted in Substack, all ready to send. The burnt ash smell in the air was nagging at me to write something else, but I was processing the moment. (I still am.) So I sent you the scheduled content. Here’s what else was on my mind.

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On Tuesday night, my friend and sometimes running buddy texted me:

This friend works every day to fight the climate crisis. After a career with the state in energy conservation, she recently took a role as the chief sustainability officer at a multi-unit real estate developer. She’s actively decarbonizing the city. If you want to know about the best EV charger or solar installer, she’s got the answers. But I could read between the lines, my friend was just as rattled as I was.

Humor was a way to deal with the apocalyptic scene outside our windows. The air quality in New York was so bad, we may as well have split a pack of Camels. The end-of-days vibes certainly made it feel like there wasn’t much reason not to.

Texting my friend, my head ached and I tried to rub the fine grit from my eyelashes. Explaining the orange sky to our seven year old, I realized that the thinnest layer of ash covered the windowsills and the keyboard of my laptop. I felt the climate crisis so acutely. All of us did. 

New Yorkers have weathered our fair share of traumas in the twenty five years I have called this city home. Here it was again: Doom on our doorstep. But this time, it wasn't an unseen threat or a horror you could look away from: It was everywhere you turned. Even if you didn’t look out the window, you could see it in the way the light hit your tiles like it never had before, in the scrap of orange light streaked across the floor. 

Many more capable writers than I have written about the wildfire smoke and its impact on our psyche and the climate movement (including

Bill McKibben

here). I want to tell you about a time five years back in my own life that I was reminded of this week.

When my son was about three I had what I think of as an awakening to the simultaneous crisis of our time—what often gets called the “climate crisis,” but what is so much more. Changing climate and our planet warming, yes, but also plastic pollution, microplastics in our water, forever chemicals in our food, biodiversity loss, mass extinction, soil erosion, rising seas, I could go on… maybe ‘planetary collapse’ is a better shorthand?

I knew about all these things before, of course, I was always a treehugger type. But something about that time when my son came into his own as a fully formed human (and maybe reading Naomi Klein for the first time) made me realize the gravity of the situation. What kind of world would my son inherit? I asked myself. I imagined a future date when my son would ask me why we grownups didn’t do more to avert disaster.

So, I dug in. I volunteered time and my money to Congressional campaigns during the midterms that year. I gave up eating meat altogether. I went down a rabbit hole, reading anything and everything about the climate. I followed along as a young Swedish girl spoke truth to power halfway across the world. I learned an awful lot.

I was also more than a little depressed. I’d wake up in the night and think about the worst. Some call this ‘climate anxiety’ but for me it felt more like grief. I was in mourning. My husband wasn’t quite sure what to do with my existential doom and gloom. At an event for parents concerned about the climate I wept in a room full of strangers and I asked them how they could go about their daily lives now that they knew. I told those strangers that my new-found awareness felt like I had fallen off a cliff. Some of them nodded. Some of them looked at their shoes, but that is how I have thought of that time ever since: That time when I fell off the cliff.  

Eventually, I landed. Being terrified, obsessing about the worst, this was not going to help me or my son. I determined to do more: I set up monthly donations to charities whose work I believed in. I tried to push the magazine I was working at to offer more sustainable living coverage (to limited success). I also made peace with the fact that I was not doing more: I was a mom, I had to make a living, I had to live.

Since then I have occasionally met another parent when they were in that terrifying period of free fall after crossing from blissful ignorance to acute awareness. I have tried to offer comfort when I met them. 

Looking at Instagram on Monday, seeing the images of smoke-filled skies, reading people’s words of raw despair and fear, it felt like the whole city had fallen off my old cliff–or maybe from the observation deck of the Empire State building–lost in an orange haze.

If you felt climate despair acutely for the first time last week, I want to offer some resources. 

The first is this fantastic commencement speech by

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson

. I have been following Dr. Johnson’s work for years, this will give you a taste of why I love her so much. 

In addition to this speech, I’d encourage you to check out the anthology All We Can Save Amazon | Bookshop that Johnson co-edited with Katharine K. Wilkinson. The podcast she co-hosted How To Save A Planet is also fantastic (RIP). And finally, actually do the climate Venn diagram exercise she suggests: It is so clarifying

Project Drawdown helped me understand that there are real solutions to the climate crisis. The organization’s first book, Drawdown is a little wonkish, but founder Paul Hawken’s second, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation Amazon | Bookshop is more formatted for a lay reader.  

Another advocate for regeneration who has inspired me immensely is Doug Tallamy. Tallamy’s message is that we can all make a positive impact in our own backyards and even our windowsill pots. Tallamy has written and co-written several great books, but start with Nature’s Best Hope: A New Approach to Conservation That Starts in Your Yard Amazon | Bookshop.

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We own two air purifiers, and we were grateful for them this week. The BlueAir purifier, which was small, affordable, and recommended by several sources. (I will note that they recently had supply issues with the filters that are supposed to ship automatically every six months, which was irksome, so maybe buy a spare.) The other is the Dreo air purifier, which has a nighttime mode that is so silent it is almost imperceptible. It’s all black and bulkier (my husband calls it Darth Vader), but it is also more powerful: I’ve been using the turbo setting around the clock. 

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I also want to recommit to my own climate ikigai.

When I did the Venn diagram exercise I realized my best bet was to keep writing lifestyle content, but to try to write content that promoted lifestyle changes to help the climate. The LIVING SMALL newsletter is part of that goal.

I have written an awful lot about small spaces and clutter: Many of you came here for that and there will be plenty of small space inspo in this newsletter still, I promise (living in a small space, after all, is one of the easiest ways to reduce your negative impact on the earth). But I’m going to lean a little harder on my larger idea of living small: Having a small carbon footprint, consuming less, making small changes than matter. I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride. Please let me know how I can be of service to your own path; how can this community we’re growing here help?

I also want to tell you, it gets better, but it doesn’t go away. Once you have fallen off the cliff, you can’t climb back up to where you were before. But that’s okay, the path is forward.