Embracing "This Sweet Earth"

supporting children, and one another, in an era of climate change

Good morning, Blue Roomies!

It’s been about a month since I posted a “freedom watch”—a reflection on freedom, my word for 2024. This week I’m embracing freedom by giving myself permission to focus on book writing by leaning on the good words of others. In that spirit, today I bring you a short but powerful Q&A from the delightful Lydia Wylie-Kellermann, author of This Sweet Earth: Walking with our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse, newly published from Broadleaf Books and available from Bookshop.org, Amazon, and all the usual places.

Climate anxiety touches nearly everything we do, but perhaps nothing so tenderly as our parenting. What do we do with the fear, grief, and anger we feel? Parent and activist Lydia Wylie-Kellermann wrestles with these questions and argues that while the future remains unknown, we can still join our children in the beauty and hope of the struggle.

I know many of you are in the thick of parenting, many of you are past that phase of life, and many do not parent directly. As you’ll see below, the drive to find hope and purpose amid an uncertain future is the work of all of us. I can’t wait to read the book, and as a pastor of an intergenerational community, this short interview inspires me to lean into that identity and the ways that elders can teach children, and especially vice versa. And I loooove how Lydia thinks about hope.

Lydia Wylie-Kellermann

Lydia is a writer, editor, activist, and mother. She is director of Kirkridge Retreat and Study Center and the editor of The Sandbox Revolution: Raising Kids for a Just World (2021). Lydia’s writing has appeared in Geez magazine, Sojourners, Red Letter Christians, and various Catholic Worker papers, and she is a contributor to multiple books. She lives with her partner and two boys in Bangor, Pennsylvania.

A quick Blue Room housekeeping note: Book writing continues to go well, with the manuscript due to be submitted in November—not September as I’d originally planned, but a better timeline for a variety of reasons. From now through November, The Blue Room will move to an every-other-week schedule, with bonus content for supporting subscribers coming once a month. Thank you for your support and understanding!

And now, take it away, Lydia!

~

What inspired you to write this book?

This book had been churning in me for a while searching for a way to pour out on the page. Looking back, I feel so much gratitude for the chance to write and see what emerged.

I wrote the book I needed. A book to hold the reality of how hard things are, to honor my breaking, anxious heart, and to remind my body and spirit of the work that lies ahead.

Since the day my kids were born, they have been my greatest teachers. I often feel like I am following them around this wild watershed just trying to catch the bits of wisdom that fall from their mouths or grab hold of the way they carry themselves on this earth. There is a way in which they seem to not yet have forgotten that they are an animal in this ecosystem. I love being changed by the ways they can watch a cicada emerge from its skin or how their tears fall when they see a tree being cut down. They have changed my posture and summoned my vocation deeper into the work of climate justice.

Who is this book “for,” and what will people gain by reading it that they wouldn’t get anywhere else?

Well, I certainly wrote as a parent who is thinking constantly about what our kids need in this time. It speaks intimately to the questions and decisions parents are making. But I also believe that family is as wide as our imaginations can carry us. All of us are loving kids in one way or another—whether as a teacher, an aunt/uncle, a neighbor, a grandparent, and on and on. Our lives and our futures are bound up together. So, my hope is that this book is for anyone who is worrying about the future of this earth and reimagining how we need to live.

Children’s author, Laura Alary read this book and said that reading the book made her feel both calmer and braver. I think that would be my hope. That this book feels honest about where we are at, but within that there is so much room for joy and gratitude and possibility. And to know that none of us are alone in carrying this. I hope this book is good company.

What story/section of the book means the most to you?

Oh, what a wonderful question and one that is so hard to answer. This book is so full of tender stories. Lately, as I’ve started doing some book readings, I’ve been delighting in one of the chapters at the end where I transcribed a full conversation I had with my kids who were 6 and 9 at the time. Letting their brilliance and humor fill a few of those final pages is such a gift. And the last couple weeks as I’ve done some readings, I’ve been able to bring them with me and we perform the conversation as reader’s theater style. It just makes me so happy.

There is so much wisdom in intergenerational community. And so often, we fail to honor the children and our elders. I think this book weaves together so much that I’ve learned from generations before and ahead of me.

We’re all about hope here at the Blue Room, but not a simplistic hope—a robust and sustainable one, suitable for tough times. Your topic is a difficult one, yet I suspect that hope is present. Could you talk more about that? 

I started writing this book from a place of deep grief and anxiety, but the more I wrote, the more I stumbled on hope.

I wrote about the shifts we need to make with our lives, about the bone lessons my kids will need in this time. Things like—depending on community, honoring the dead, creating what we can imagine, resisting the structures that are perpetrating the climate crisis, and finding joy in it all.

So often I hear adults moan out the grief they have for kids because “they won’t have what we had.” What I began to realize is that I don’t actually want my kids to have what we had. I want my kids to lean on community, to be able to put seeds in the ground, to bake bread, to build local economies, to recognize the red-tailed hawk and praying mantis by name, to be able to sit with the dying, to put their bodies on the line for justice, to fall madly in love with this wild and wonderful world.

The more I wrote I realized that we don’t know what is going to happen. Maybe we will make huge changes collectively and we will transform our system into life-giving generous ones. Or maybe we won’t. Maybe we will face into the worst. But I realized that either way doesn’t change how I want to live. Either way doesn’t change that there can be real joy woven through it all. Either way, we can become more fully alive and human in this world. And that to me is a hope worthy of following.

What’s saving your life lately? 

The endless cucumbers I am pulling from the garden. The strong winds moving through the trees on a hot day. The quiet spaces to write poetry. The way that telling my own stories leads to listening to other stories…stories can change everything.

~

Your Turn

What’s saving your life lately? I’d love to hear.

Link Love

Hot off the presses: David LaMotte’s fantastic and galvanizing TEDx talk, Why Heroes Don’t Change the World. Watch it, internalize it, share it:

Steady on, friends!