Whatever We Hope Can’t Be Hoarded: A Conversation
on Motherhood and Environment

What we are really talking about is futurity. The desire for a livable future.
 – Emily Raboteau
 

Introduction

In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin describes art and the artistic process not as something owned by an individual, but as a manifestation of the universe’s ongoing unfurling. “If you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker,” Rubin says. “This isn’t because the other artist stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. In this great unfolding, ideas and thoughts, themes and songs and other works of art exist in the ether and ripen on schedule, ready to find expression in the physical world.”

That’s exactly how I’ve come to feel about environmental writing and motherhood: its time has come. As I wrote and prepared to publish We Are Animals: On the Nature and Politics of Motherhood (Trinity University Press, 2024), a book born from my own reckoning with what it means to be a mother in an era of reproductive injustice and climate disruption, I was heartened and emboldened by the sheer number of parents asking similar questions as me. So many of us are working out how to guide our children through this century—and writing about it. “Motherhood and environment” is in the air, ripening on schedule.

This interview brings together four of those writers: author and illustrator Martha Park, who for years has written beautifully about faith in the South and whose debut essay collection, World Without End: Essays on Apocalypse and After, will come out in 2025 from Hub City Press; novelist and nonfiction writer Emily Raboteau, who contributes regularly to Orion and the New York Review of Books and whose Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse” was published by Holt in 2024; Christina Rivera, whose essay “The 17th Day” in Terrain.org won the 2023 John Burroughs Nature Essay Award and whose debut essay collection My Oceans: Essays of Water, Whales, and Women will be published by Curbstone in 2025; and Pulitzer prize finalist Elizabeth Rush, whose most recent book, The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2023.

This past summer, the five of us connected via email to discuss what it’s like to be a mother and to write about environment and motherhood today.

Every single one of us is here on this planet thanks to the innate generosity of someone else’s body, and it is our responsibility, and honor, to pay that generosity forward.
 – Elizabeth Rush

Conversation

Jennifer Case: One of the reasons I wanted to bring this group together is because we all have recently published—or will soon publish—a book of creative nonfiction that integrates environmental writing with motherhood. We’ve all explored these topics from slightly different angles, yet there are enough overlaps that I knew it would be an illuminating and connective conversation. To begin, then, what was it about that intersection between motherhood and environment that intrigued you the most, or that you found yourself writing into?

Emily Raboteau: For me, it felt imperative to write in an intersectional way about threats to my kids. I’m raising two Black sons in inner-city New York. I started out writing about social justice issues like police brutality and school segregation, and then branched out into writing about environmental justice issues since we live in a fenceline community amidst poisoning infrastructure, and then after that I started writing about climate change.

Elizabeth Rush: Despite all I know about our changing climate (I have been writing about sea level rise for over a decade) my desire to have children has remained, and sort of unwaveringly so. I was interested in that and what it might mean to foster that desire instead of trying to tamp it down. I was really put off by branches of the environmental conversation that suggested not having children is the greatest way you can combat climate change. Instead I was animated by the drive towards life and towards care. Might mothering be a revolutionary act? How so?

Martha Park: I came to writing about climate change through writing about place and religion. I grew up a preacher’s daughter in the South, and those two parts of my identity shape pretty much everything I’ve written. In my book, I spend a lot of time thinking through scriptural interpretations that have shaped harmful perspectives on human relationships with other people and with the more-than-human world, and imagining how alternative interpretations and forms of faith can help repair those relationships. These are particularly urgent questions to me now that I am a parent: I’m thinking a lot about what version of faith my children will receive culturally and what ways I can constructively engage with and shape that inheritance.

Christina Rivera: No event in my life made me feel more animal than becoming a mother. And nothing makes me feel more interlinked with the environment than trembling in my animalness. The opening essay of my book tells of the birth of my daughter during four midnight hours as the moon traveled into full eclipse. I don’t mean to be woo-woo about this, and as much as I also define “mothering” as an inclusive verb, that raw physicality of birthing a child shook me—bloody and growling—into a new understanding of my body as both mammalian and influenced by the gravity of a shared ecosphere. A few years after the birth of my children, a list of ailments revealed my body as overburdened by toxins. Toxins I’d absorbed from my environment and passed to my children through breastmilk. I intimately felt the parallels between the poisoning of water bodies and human bodies. Hence the title of my book, My Oceans. I’m obsessed with science, but I didn’t see enough embodied stories of extinction and climate crisis. So that’s what I wrote into.

For myself, I struggled when my experience of early motherhood didn’t fit the story society wants to tell.
 – Jennifer Case

Jennifer Case: You all had established yourselves as environmental or place-based writers and artists before becoming mothers. Did having a child change your relationship to the natural world or to environmental writing/the writing life? I know that when I had my first child, motherhood became all-consuming for a while, and I couldn’t write about anything else. My sense of climate anxiety and environmental despair also spiked for a few years as I considered my daughter’s future. I’m curious what kinds of shifts and changes you noticed in yourselves.

Emily Raboteau: My environmental writing is urban and grew out of my maternal concerns for my children, who are threatened by multiple interconnecting forces, most of all, structural racism. I felt inspired by Camille Dungy’s seminal essay, “Isn’t All Writing Environmental Writing?” and Mary Annaïse Heglar’s provocative essay, “Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat” to start describing myself as an environmental writer, with insights about the climate crisis even though, and precisely because, I live in a city.

Elizabeth Rush: I have been working on changing the language I use to describe the more-than-human world with my son because I was hoping to teach him to recognize life in all sorts of things. For instance: instead of telling him to greet the beech tree in our yard when we get home, I say, “Look, the beech tree is waving at you.” What’s funny to me is that as he gets older and as I watch his imagination unfurl, I can see that he is inclined to think of so many different things as alive—stones, dirt, worms, flowers—and that it is us adults who don’t. So what was a kind of linguistic exercise that I thought I was undertaking on behalf of my son really has been teaching me to look at things differently.

Martha Park: I gave birth to my son in the late summer of 2020, so I spent almost my entire pregnancy isolated in our house. Since we couldn’t see friends or have a baby shower, a lot of people mailed us children’s books, some of which seemed to be placing an immense amount of pressure and anxiety about climate change and mass extinction onto children. (See books like Don’t Let Them Disappear by Chelsea Clinton…) By the time my son was born, something had shifted for me—it felt crucial that I introduce him to a world that was worthy of love and care. I realized I’d been seeing the world through the lens of my own anxiety about the future, and those early months of my son’s life allowed me to ground myself in a present-day relationship with this place even as it changes.

Christina Rivera: Matrescence was my portal to environmental writing, but that transition was rocky for me with four pregnancies including one harrowing miscarriage, a traumatic but chosen abortion, two live births, and years of prenatal depression. Those years broke me and maybe any experience that breaks time and the body and the spirit also builds a new path between the pieces. I am ex-Catholic, so I needed a new paradigm to make meaning of my way through negative space. It was through my fragmentation that I felt my body’s interconnections with the Earth’s. And from that perspective shift, I found the reverence, humility, and awe I was seeking. Before I had children, I also traveled extensively (and burned an inexcusable amount of carbon) moving between continents via my work in experiential education. The births of my children rooted me to the land under my feet in sheer need for stability. But they also rooted me in space and time and ancestry. I felt infinitely small; a grain of sand on a planet 4.5 billion years old. And it’s that tiny place, in an ocean of being, that now invokes my explorations.

Jennifer Case: One thing I’m fascinated by—and haven’t fully worked out for myself—is the link between climate justice and reproductive justice. Many organizations, including Project Drawdown, forward reproductive choice and educating women as key climate solutions, yet in the U.S., reproductive rights are under threat. We also know that women and children of color are particularly vulnerable to the effects of climate disruption. In response, some women have felt torn between activist causes, and others have questioned the ethics of bringing children into the world. It seems like a particularly fraught—or meaningful—time to be working out the personal, cultural, and societal roles of the “mother.” How have you navigated these tensions, personally or as a writer? What have you found yourself grappling with the most?

Emily Raboteau: I see a lot of radicalizing potential and political force in the role of “mother.” I don’t mean that in a strictly biological sense, although motherhood has brought great meaning, strength, and focus to my life. We can all be mothering. Even fathers. Even child-free folks. I wrote about this in a review/essay of Liz’s book and Camille Dungy’s Soil for the New York Review of Books last year: “A New Environmental Canon.” I’m interested in “mother” as verb; as an active stance about care, in the way Saidiya Hartman describes care as the “antidote to violence.” I also respect the perspective that mothering is not the only or best way to think about radical care, and that the space it takes up in the discourse, increasingly so, may bother women who aren’t biological mothers. What we are really talking about is futurity. The desire for a livable future.

Elizabeth Rush: Hear, hear, Emily! I think it is way too easy to get caught up in all the apocalyptic rhetoric around climate change (which I think is all too often pedaled by people who have been conditioned to think of themselves always as the survivors of whatever is coming down the pike, like doomsday talk is real sexy when you are the one with the keys to the rocket to Mars). I am interested in how to mother means to work for a livable future (and not just for one’s kin). It means recognizing the fact that every single one of us is here on this planet thanks to the innate generosity of someone else’s body, and it is our responsibility, and honor, to pay that generosity forward.

Martha Park: My friend Lena Moses-Schmitt wrote a poem with this line—“Tenderness in the declarative”—that I think about all the time; for me it speaks to the way motherhood can be a radicalizing and active force that is deeply rooted in care and vulnerability rather than domination or control. And it’s not just the vulnerability of the children we care for that is so moving to me, but the vulnerability (and strength) of mothers’ bodies throughout pregnancy, birth, and postpartum. I experienced a traumatic birth followed by a gnarly infection, so I went from spending months isolated in my home, to months receiving treatment from a wide range of healthcare providers who all happened to be mothers. They took care of my body but also shared their own stories about difficult births, their own early days of motherhood, and their journeys toward healing. Motherhood immediately removed any notions I might have had about my independence from this web of care, and has a way of constantly re-centering solidarity and community over isolation or fantasies about individual survival.

Christina Rivera: My writing is ecofeminist in that it consistently reveals the assaults upon the Earth’s body I see mirrored in the desecration of mothering bodies across the planet by the exploitative systems of patriarchy, capitalism, racism, and colonialism. A safe abortion was critical to my life path. I would not be writing this sentence had I not had access to it. That shouldn’t be a privilege. Everybody on this planet should be empowered with choice, consent, and the freedom to thrive, which are the links I see between reproductive and climate justice. That women do not have the freedom to protect and care in the best interest of their bodies, families, and futures—both in my country and around the world—is a scream-worthy injustice. So I fight for those rights tooth, nail, tears, and grief.

Jennifer Case: As you worked on your latest book, what was the most challenging thing for you in writing about motherhood? For myself, I struggled when my experience of early motherhood didn’t fit the story society wants to tell. Especially when it comes to conflicted emotions. Yet, even as I used the book to push against and broaden depictions of motherhood, I felt constricted by assumptions the industry makes about what a “motherhood book” is about and who it is for. I’d love to know what it was like for all of you to engage this topic.

Emily Raboteau: My editor kept pushing me to write more intimately about my children, but I wanted to maintain their privacy. I have written more about the experience of mothering my children than I have about my children directly. It was challenging to write about the forces that threaten their safety and well-being, such as pollution and police brutality, but I felt compelled to write about these issues out of love for them.

Elizabeth Rush: On the one hand the word “mother” can feel so immense, so planetary, and on the other hand it can, at times, feel really narrow. Like we have been conditioned to think of the mother as someone bathed in the color pink, someone quiet and sweet and domestic. And so when I write about motherhood, I also want to draw out its fierceness and attentiveness, which means being very purposeful about what I am putting it in conversation with.

Martha Park: It felt really difficult for me, at first, to write anything about motherhood at all. Pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood were such intensely unmediated experiences. I felt wholly subsumed into experience, into the slipperiness of time, its slow drip and its onslaught, and it took a lot of work, for me, to try and approach it through language, through my own dumbfoundedness, to say anything about it at all.

Christina Rivera: My biggest challenge was not so much subject as shape. Motherhood is a fragmented state of being and I wanted my book to embody that form in an ecosystem of interdependent fragments. Ultimately, the final shape of my book was “linked essays.” But I had to fight even for that. Countless people advised me to “make it narrative.” But motherhood is not a tidy narrative, and I do not think the ongoing climate crisis needs more Freytag pyramids or hero journeys. Fortunately, I found an agent and an editor who (unflinchingly!) believed in my vision. They both identify as women and mothers if that says something. But fitting into the publishing world with a book I would describe as both feminine and fragmented—in essence, shape, and its embodiment of science—was absolutely my most challenging task writing about motherhood.

Motherhood is not a tidy narrative, and I do not think the ongoing climate crisis needs more Freytag pyramids or hero journeys.
 – Christina Rivera

Jennifer Case: I can relate so much to all of that. (And my book, similarly, is fragmented for that same reason, Christina). As you all developed your projects, what books about the environment and/or parenthood or motherhood were especially influential to you?

Emily Raboteau: Braiding Sweetgrass has inspired me both as a writer and a teacher. I teach climate writing and Braiding Sweetgrass changes my students’ worldviews more than any other work on the syllabus, specifically because of how Robin Wall Kimmerer invites us to think of the non-human world as our kin. Another book that’s influenced me is Leah Thomas’s The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet.

Elizabeth Rush: Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s essay “m/other ourselves”. She really helped me think of mothering as a revolutionary act, especially when there are all these different structural forces threatening your children. She points out that this is especially true for people of color and has been since the very beginning in this country, so there is much to be learned from those who are here, surviving and flourishing. And also I often turn to Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions—for her humor, her levity, her willingness to be sacrilegious about the whole shebang.

Martha Park: Louise Erdrich’s The Blue Jay’s Dance: A Memoir of Early Motherhood, for its idiosyncrasy and how alive it feels, how grounded in a particular, personal geography. Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra: An Essay on Pregnancy and Earthquakes, for the way pregnancy, motherhood, and place are so tightly woven and reflective of each other. Sarah Menkedick’s Homing Instincts: Early Motherhood on a Midwestern Farm was the book that convinced me I could be a mother and a writer. And The World Is on Fire: Scrap, Treasure, and Songs of Apocalypse by Joni Tevis just blows my mind no matter how many times I read it—the essays “Somebody to Love” and “What the Body Knows” in particular continue to explode my sense of what writing about motherhood and place can do and be.

Christina Rivera: My writing instinct is always to be ultra-collaborative. Hence, the hundreds of citations in my book crediting the researchers, scientists, activists, and authors whose work I interwove with mine. The major influences on my book include Rachel Carson (environmental pollution), Dr. Bayo Akomolafe (post activism), Linda Hogan (Indigenous approach to ecology), Terry Tempest Williams (ecofeminism), Carl Safina (marine ecology), Lidia Yuknavitch (metaphor as portal), Ursula K. Le Guin (the “carrier bag” shape of writing instead of the hero’s journey), Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes (woman-centric mythology), and Francis Weller (ecological grief), among others! 

Jennifer Case: Those are all such great writers and books. I’d add ecologist Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith to the list, as well as anthropologist Sarah B. Hrdy’s work on motherhood. Both helped me really see humans as mammals and broaden that lens.

On a related note, I’m always interested in how parents who know a lot about climate change navigate conversations with their kids. If your children are old enough, how do you talk to your kids about the environment and/or climate change? Have you started to have those conversations yet? With my own kids, I strive to be honest, but I also don’t want to overwhelm them or leave them feeling helpless.

Emily Raboteau: I had my older son interview David Wallace-Wells for Orion when he was seven, because I felt he should speak to someone more expert than myself about his climate anxieties, and because I wanted to see how David would recalibrate his language. My kid asked really excellent questions, including where we should live to be safe, and what will happen to the whales. David skewed his answers for a young person. My kids are 11 and 13 now. We talk about climate change a lot. I orient the conversation around solutions.

Elizabeth Rush: My son is three and a half years old and my daughter is just two months old so I am not really having direct conversations where I am trying to teach them about climate change just yet. That being said, we talk about climate change all the time in our house. And when someone makes a comment about, say, the drought in Bogotá and they blame El Niño, I pipe up (or my husband pipes up) and we say, it is also because the climate is changing. We are trying to make it part of the world that they have been born into because, well, it is.

Last night Nico and I were watching Our Living World, a nature documentary on Netflix that aims to show how interconnected life on earth is. The images are stunning even if the explication is lacking. Towards the end of the third episode, they spend a while with snow hares in the Oregon Cascades, explaining that as the planet warms the snow is melting and the hares are more exposed to predators. Cue the typical climate change montage––wildfires, floods, more scary music. My son turned to me and said, “Este no es verdad.” I looked him right in the eyes and said, “Yes, human beings are causing the planet to change because of how we are living right now.” I thought about trying to say something more, but I left the interpretation out. What it means to live on a climate changed planet is, at least partially, up to us.

Martha Park: My son is also three and a half, and I’m currently eight months pregnant with our second child, so we are similarly not really having direct conversations about climate change at this point. But it comes up often, if obliquely. After living through several big storms and long power outages, one of my son’s big anxieties is about the power going out—whenever a storm blows in, he starts asking about whether we’re going to lose power, whether we’ll need the generator, and naming who is around to help us if we need help.

Christina Rivera: I don’t shy away. I focus our conversations (and books) on resilience, activism, presence, feelings (including grief), and even death. I think our culture shies away from too many complex discussions, yet I find my children so excited by the big metaphysical questions. So yes—according to teachers’ reports—my kids have “rich climate vocabularies.” Is my approach right? I don’t know. I also apologize often to my children. I am imperfect and want them to know that. I hope it builds acceptance of our sad realities, and our unjust world, and our imperfect but always-forgivable selves. My kids are now nine and 12, and I often check in with them: “Is this too much information? Do you want less or more?” They might change their minds later, but they sound confident and honest and relieved when they say, “I like that I can count on you to tell me the truth.”

What seems clear is that whatever I hope for my son can’t be hoarded.
 – Martha Park

Jennifer Case: What are your hopes for the future/your children’s future, and how does your work reach toward those hopes—or toward the future you hope might exist for your children?

Elizabeth Rush: Some part of me bristles at this question because people are always asking me about hope and sometimes I feel like they want to hear about where my hope lies in order to avoid working towards a hopeful future themselves. I am not saying that this is the case here, but I am going to answer a slightly different question. How am I raising my children to be resilient? We are raising our children to be bilingual (English and Spanish). This isn’t a choice that is an immediate reaction to something environmental. But, I often think about how their having both languages will make adaptation in the future easier. It also makes their brains more elastic, more expansive, and more able to think beyond the confines of Hollywood and English-dominant culture. In short, the ability to weather change seems important to me and we are trying, at a really fundamental level, to help our children be able to do just that.

Emily Raboteau: I like how Liz has reframed the question about hope in her answer about resilience. I have found myself making the same pivot because I don’t feel hopeful about the direction of global heating. We are teaching our children to be resilient in the same way, having sent them to a dual language Spanish/English public school, and by sharing examples of survival by historically resilient communities including, but not limited to, our ancestors. We are also teaching them the art and purpose of protest, and pointing out green infrastructure projects in our neighborhood in the Bronx.

Martha Park: Living in Memphis, at a time when Tennessee’s Governor has signed a bill into law allowing public school teachers to carry concealed weapons into their classrooms, when my son’s daycare has had two active shooter lockdowns before he was three years old, in a state with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the country, and in a city where the poverty rate is nearly double the national poverty rate, “hope” is a hard word to enter into. What seems clear is that whatever I hope for my son can’t be hoarded. I think a lot about something that Rabbi Jericho Vincent has written about the implicit warning of the Hebrew Bible story of the Great Flood: “If we only look after ourselves, we will ultimately be betrayed. Survival of our loved ones is not enough,” they write. “We must figure out how we’re all going to ensure that all children survive the flood.”

Christina Rivera: I work to reduce stress in my kids’ lives, and I don’t wrap myself up with concerns about test scores or college prep. I have difficulty seeing (even that far) into the future. Daily, I want them to be challenged (body, mind, spirit) appropriately, to be pushed out of their comfort zones, and to enjoy the comfort zone of our home to rest the muscles of adaptability, cooperation, and resilience they are exercising. My children are very different people, so this all looks very different for each of them. But for both, I hope for meaningful days that accumulate into the shape of meaningful lives. We also try to incorporate practices that encourage presence: short meditations, deep conversations, slow hikes, altar candles, and a lot of time in wilderness (to which we have easy access living in the Rocky Mountains). My kids are also now on the cusp of adolescence, so I’m just hugging them every chance I still get. 

Jennifer Case: As you prepare your children for the future—or try to be with them fully in this moment—what are some of your favorite environmental children’s books to share? Is there a favorite that you—or your child—loves to read?

Emily Raboteau: For little kids, I recommend Mary Annaïse Heglar’s picture book, The World is Ours to Cherish: A Letter to a Child. For older kids, I recommend Elizabeth Kolbert’s young reader’s adaptation of The Sixth Extinction and Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults.

Elizabeth Rush: We love Little Witch Hazel: A Year in the Forest by Phoebe Wahl. It’s got really great stories, even better illustrations, and it cycles through the four seasons in a northern forest with a lot of whimsy. I am particularly fond of a page where the always busy narrator dips her legs in the cool pond water on a hot summer day and all her rushing about just falls away. Life by Cynthia Rylant and Brendan Wenzel is equally gorgeous and wonder-ful; and the author wrote it because they wanted to be able to read a book to children that acknowledges the peril we are in while still celebrating how miraculous life on earth is. And as my oldest gets a little older we have been enjoying 5-Minute Nature Stories by Gabby Dawnay, which is a little more science-forward. It talks about things like mycelial networks and how honeybees make honey, but the rhymes make it fun reading and the illustrations are lovely. And, just this morning, we just read The World is Ours to Cherish (thanks Emily) and loved it!

Martha Park: Oh, so excited to know about The World is Ours to Cherish—ordering a copy now! Life by Cynthia Rylant and Brendan Wenzel is similarly a big hit in our house. And we read lots of picture books about the bodily and imaginative pleasures of just being in the world. My son loves A Walk in the Forest by Maria Dek, You Belong Here by M. H. Clark and Isabelle Arsenault, Over & Over by M. H. Clark and Beya Rebai, Look, It’s Raining by Mathieu Pierloot and Maria Dek, Over and Under the Pond by Kate Messner and Christopher Silas Neal, and Woodland Dreams by Karen Jameson and Marc Boutavant.

Christina Rivera: Children are so different and you never know what they will fancy! Ultimately, my daughter leaned toward the lyrical, mythical, and activist: We Are The Water Protectors, The Snail and the Whale, Little Turtle and the Changing Sea, and Greta and the Giants were favorites. My son loved books centered around science, facts, and international culture: The Photo Ark, The Great Kapok Tree, Ultimate Ocean Rumble, People. Both kids also loved many “wordless” books like Flotsam, which the reader and child narrate together, creating the story one page at a time—which strikes me as the perfect landing metaphor for navigating environmental shifts as a parent today.

Jennifer Case: Wow, what a wonderful list of books! My kids have likewise loved We Are Water Protectors, and Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults has had a huge influence on my daughter. Although some of his books are older than me, when my kids were young I became quite fond of Jim Arnosky’s Crinkleroot books, such as Crinkleroot’s Guide to Knowing the Trees. We obtained a stack of them from a retiring teacher, and they are such a delight.

Thank you, all, for sharing your thoughts, experiences, and recommendations!