Climate change

I COULD FIT right in with crunchy “MAHA” moms.

I wore my babies in patterned baby carriers, puréed organic squash and bananas for their first foods, and obsessed over toxins and microplastics in everything. I daydream about backyard chickens and growing enough tomatoes and cucumbers to last through the winter storedin neat rows of mason jars in my pantry. I, too, want cleaner water, soil, air, and food for my children.

The “Make America Healthy Again” movement is a strange “horseshoe alliance” of far-right and far-left hippies, homesteaders, vaccine skeptics — maybe even some who make their own granola. At its heart is a growing mistrust in the scientific establishment and a shrinking definition of health — from something we work toward together as a society to something we defend and purchase for ourselves and our families.

As a person with resources, I feel the easy draw of that narrowed mentality. If the air or water is polluted, I can buy fancy purifiers. If the soil is contaminated, I can pay to haul in garden dirt or move to land farther from polluting sources. But there are fewer and fewer places to go to avoid wildfire smoke, hurricane damage, or toxic emissions. Seeking my children’s health requires more than individualistic self-protection. It requires seeking the health of all people and the entire planet.

THE WIND AND floods of Hurricane Katrina — now, amazingly, 20 years in the rearview mirror — were an early wake-up call about climate change. Precisely what scientists had been predicting was underway — super-strong storms overwhelming the coasts. But Katrina taught another lesson too: Those most in danger in this new world were going to be poor and quite likely would be people of color. The Lower Ninth Ward became a symbol of all those things, and to wander those streets in the weeks afterward was to see the future.

But we didn’t see it clearly enough, not enough to really change what we were doing. Indeed, we’ve just inaugurated a president who campaigned on his conviction that it’s all a hoax. Drill, baby, drill.

Just as he was transitioning into power, we had the fires of Los Angeles. These, again, were just what climate scientists said would happen: Record dryness (essentially no rain since May); record warmth; record windspeeds. It was a conflagration as predictable as it was horrific. But this time it came with one new feature: A great many of the victims were rich. Not all of them — the middle-class community of Altadena burned (including the home of my earliest memories as a boy). But in Pacific Palisades, street after street of multimillion-dollar homes — the very definition of California as idyll — were swept with fire despite the airy breezes off the blue ocean.

I WRITE THIS two months before the November 2024 U.S. presidential election, knowing that it will land with you, dear readers, after all the votes are in and the course for the next four years is likely set. My insides lurch thinking about the potential outcomes. We are in the middle of the decisive decade for large-scale action to mitigate the worsening effects of climate change. Going in one direction or the other feels, sometimes, like a turn toward life or death for the planet.

Like many, I have learned to apply lessons from navigating the grief and pain of personal losses to our collective crises. I lost my dad suddenly to colon cancer earlier this year. A few weeks later, my mom was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Grasping for predictability amid the unknown, I tried to superimpose my dad’s illness onto my mom’s future. It did not help. My anxiety skyrocketed.

What helped, instead, was applying what Zen practitioners call “beginner’s mind.” A beginner has no background knowledge about a situation. They have no expectations for how things might unfurl. Approaching a situation as a beginner can open pathways that experts did not see.

LYDIA WYLIE-KELLERMANN HAS a large cemetery in her backyard. There lie “weeds and tulips and a few homemade tombstones ... beloved fish, brutally attacked chickens, stray cats, and two beloved rabbits.” In this cemetery, her two preteen sons, Isaac and Cedar, and wife Erinn Fahey host a lot of funerals. Why? Living during climate collapse means we must face death with dignity.

Approaching mortality with gentleness is just one of many lessons woven throughout This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse. Reading the book feels like listening to stories shared by a friend over a glass of sweet tea.

This Sweet Earth is filled with narratives from Wylie-Kellermann’s life as an activist, parent, and watershed-dweller. Every chapter is benedicted by corresponding prayers and blessings, which affirm that Wylie-Kellermann was brought up on a diet of poetry and anti-nuclear pamphlets. Former editor of Geez magazine and daughter of protest prophet Bill Wylie-Kellermann and organizer and writer Jeanie Wylie-Kellermann, Lydia chooses words with precision, power, and a bit of whimsy.

In every U.S. congregation, there are likely people experiencing grief, fear, or anger on behalf of creation. Most Americans now know that the climate is changing; according to recent surveys, a majority now also feel some level of climate-related stress or anxiety. But when terms like “climate grief” and “eco-anxiety” show up in the news, stories often point people toward individual behavior changes or activism, according to a recent study in the journal Environmental Research: Health. Missing from the conversation is the spiritual dimension of the climate crisis and the role that faith communities can play.

IN THE QUICKENING: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, Elizabeth Rush explores both the quickening in her own body — the first feeling of the life moving in her belly — and the quickening pace of climate change.

In 2019, Rush embarked on a scientific sea-bound expedition to Thwaites Glacier in Antarctica, a writer among dozens of scientists. Their journey, via an icebreaker ship, was the first of its kind, bringing together geologists, paleoclimatologists, oceanographers, and a dozen other flavors of scientists to better understand how climate change is affecting a glacier at the end of the world.

Thwaites Glacier is enormous, bigger than the state of Florida and up to 4,000 feet thick. Because of its sheer size and vulnerability to collapse under warming, Thwaites is often referred to as the “Doomsday Glacier.” This one glacier contributes to about 4 percent of global sea-level rise, and whenever it collapses, it will cause global sea levels to increase by more than two feet.

MANY CONSIDER LOUISIANA ground zero for the country’s most pressing environmental problems. The risks of living in a state long nicknamed “Sportsman’s Paradise” continue to mount as worsening, climate change-fueled hurricanes threaten its degrading coastlines, which slip away with rising tides. Meanwhile, an ongoing industrial boom endangers the health of residents living along the fence line of some of the major fossil fuel plants that help drive global warming. But for two quite different church communities — one deep in Louisiana’s countryside and the other in the state’s most populous city — the risks present an opportunity to model what’s needed for a resilient and faithful future.

Tucked in the rural remains of Louisiana’s plantation country, just under 500 people, most of them Black, call the small town of Convent, La., home. The 300-year-old community, situated about 50 miles west of New Orleans on I-10, moves with the bend of the winding Mississippi River, which cuts through the entirety of St. James Parish. Convent serves as the parish seat, and many of the families date back generations, descending from people who were enslaved on sugarcane and indigo plantations.

But people aren’t the only ones who reside there. Some of the wide swaths of land once used for plantations began to be sold to chemical companies in the mid-to-late 1900s. On the eastern end of Convent, a trio of industrial plants neighbor each other, spewing pollution. The coal export facility, fertilizer manufacturer, and chlorine manufacturer each silently release their own toxic mix of hazards into the air — and Convent residents like Rev. Roderick Williams breathe that air every day.

Williams believes his neighbors have suffered as a result, as cancer has spread throughout his community and others in St. James while chemical plants proliferated. It’s challenging to attribute a single cancer case to environmental pollution, but Louisiana Tumor Registry data shows that at least one census tract in St. James has a significantly higher rate of cancer than much of the state.

Williams’ hometown of Convent and the rest of St. James Parish sit in the heart of Louisiana’s chemical corridor, an 85-mile stretch of the Mississippi River running from Baton Rouge through New Orleans. The heavily industrialized swath — forged through the most generous property tax exemption program in the nation — has garnered the infamous nickname of “Cancer Alley” due to concerns about the health impact of the more than 200 industrial plants scattered there. A 2021 ProPublica report found that “Cancer Alley” was one of the country’s largest hotspots for toxic air.

I KNOW WHAT it’s like to be baptized in the meltwater of a dying glacier. It feels like a plunge into all the emotions of living in our climate-changed world: joy, dread, awe, fear, love.

In August, a few of my college friends and I took a trip, something of a pilgrimage, to Glacier National Park in Montana. We wanted to visit the glaciers that are projected to die off in the coming decades. The Kootenai people call this place Ya·qawiswitxuki,“the place where there is a lot of ice.” It is a place burdened with names that it will hold on to even after the glaciers and ice disappear.

The geology of the park is like a cake cut open to show layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone — a portal into deep time. About 100 million years ago, in an event called the Sevier Orogeny, the mountains in Glacier formed as the forces of colliding tectonic plates thrust two billion years’ worth of sedimentary rock upward. Across 100,000-year cycles, glaciers formed and retreated, slowly whittling away at the rock and carving out dramatic valleys, moraines, arêtes and horns, cirques and tarns. During a simple four-hour hike, we walked through billions of years of sedimentation.

Walking through such a place makes this moment in history seem both insignificant and deeply important. Thousands of feet of layered sediment formed organically, with nearly no human influence, but the small sliver at the top will be markedly human. This Anthropocene layer in the geologic cake holds markers of nuclear bombs, cow manure, and a lot of plastic. It holds the most dramatic increase in carbon concentration and the accompanying increase in temperature. It holds the extinction of hundreds of creatures, which may soon include the western glacier stonefly and meltwater lednian stonefly, who require ice-cold clear streams to survive.

This layer is also the moment, a blink of an eye in geologic time, when the mighty glaciers disappear. It is estimated that by 2100, two-thirds of the world’s glaciers will be killed. The reality is more devastating in the eponymous national park, where all the glaciers are expected to be gone by the end of this century. I can’t predict all the impacts the park will feel over the next 75 years, but I imagine that the numerous hikers currently making pilgrimages to the glaciers will instead walk in funeral processions to plaques, like the one marking the death of the Okjökull Glacier in Iceland.

WHEN I WAS 8 years old, I fried an egg on the street. Well, I tried to fry an egg on the street. It had been a particularly brutal summer in Florida. On the days when the playground slides were too hot to go down, my mom would say, “It’s hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk!” I kept my eyes glued to that splattered yolk for two hours until a car tire brought the grand breakfast experiment to an end. Frying eggs on sidewalks was how I learned to conceptualize extreme heat.

When it comes to describing climate change urgency in Black communities, Heather McTeer Toney taps into something simple: streetlights. In Before the Streetlights Come On: Black America’s Urgent Call for Climate Solutions, she writes that when she was growing up, kids could play all day outdoors, but they had to be home “before the streetlights came on.” As twilight settled in and streetlights started to flicker, kids would call out, “Hurry up, we ain’t got all day!”

“Right now, that same call to action is carried in the waves of massive hurricanes, on the winds of devastating firestorms, and in the uncharacteristic heat of winter,” McTeer Toney writes. Using a familiar metaphor, she issues a call to action of her own.

Climate change and environmental justice is not foreign to McTeer Toney or the communities she writes about. At age 27, she was the first female and youngest person to serve as mayor of Greenville, Miss., where she was born and raised. As mayor, she brought the city out of debt and established sustainable infrastructure repair. For three years, she led the Environmental Protection Agency for the southeastern United States. While at the global nonprofit Environmental Defense Fund, she addressed environmental policy and community organizing within and beyond the U.S. This spring, McTeer Toney became executive director of Beyond Petrochemicals, a campaign to stop the rapid expansion of petrochemical and plastic pollution, particularly in the Ohio River valley and along the Gulf Coast.

McTeer Toney and her family attend Oxford University United Methodist Church in Oxford, Miss. I spoke with her by phone about her work, her book, and the hope her faith demands. — Christina Colón