Time-strapped parents often approach Mary DeMocker at fossil fuel blockades and pipeline protests, wanting to know a few quick actions they can take to help avert climate change.
Over the years, DeMocker, a mother of two and co-founder of 350.org’s Eugene chapter, began to make a mental list of suggestions for those parents. That list of ideas eventually culminated into a book, “The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution: 100 Ways to Build a Fossil-Free Future, Raise Empowered Kids, and Still Get a Good Night’s Sleep,” to be released in April by New World Library.
It’s not another to-do list of home maintenance and lifestyle changes aimed at shrinking your family’s carbon footprint. Hanging your laundry out to dry and trading your car for a bike are not the most effective ways for busy parents to combat climate change, DeMocker said.
Instead, she offers a menu of activities aimed at attacking the root causes of our fossil-fuel-addicted culture while also providing tips for fostering family connectedness and raising free-thinking and innovative children.
While some chapters focus on promoting climate literacy in our schools or ensuring you’re ready for the next extreme-weather event, others offer ways to inspire children with environmental success stories and a clear path toward real solutions.
The comprehensive guide lays out 100 methods, each with various options for parents to choose from based on factors such as the amount of time they want to spend, their budget and the age of their kids.
On Saturday, April 14, DeMocker will be at Powell’s City of Books in downtown Portland to discuss climate-conscious parenting. A question-and-answer session and book signing will follow her 2 p.m. talk, and 350PDX Director Adriana Voss-Andreae will be onsite to help connect interested audience members to local climate campaigns.
Street Roots spoke with DeMocker recently to find out more about parenting in the age of climate change.
Emily Green: At what age do you think children are ready to learn about climate change, and how do you recommend telling them that their planet is heading toward catastrophe?
Mary DeMocker: I don’t tell any kid under age 14 that their planet is headed toward catastrophe. I think there are distinct periods of childhood that we need to honor where children are developmentally. And we also need to honor who they are as individuals.
I would tell a young child that we need to work together to make sure that we’re protecting our forests and protecting the climate. It’s more about living well on a day-to-day level and making good decisions to support our animal friends, to support people in other countries, to support the health of humans and animals and the planet.
My kids, because we didn’t use TV at all in the home, they didn’t see frightening images, and we were very careful not to bring that to them when they were young because it’s not fair to burden them with adult problems. For young children, they need to have an adult filtering the information so that it’s age appropriate.
For an older child, an 8- to 10-year old, that’s different than it is with a 4- or 5-year old. They’re starting to be much more out in the world and getting much more information on their own, separate from you and your family life. They’re going to start getting information in schools and on their cereal boxes – endangered pandas on their Panda Puffs cereal. They’re going to have questions about it, and they need to know that we’re working on things – that adults are working very hard – and they need to hear about the different solutions that are out there.
And if they’re interested, they need to know about different ways they can engage in those solutions. To know that Earth Guardians exists, for example, would be really empowering for a 10-year-old, who is hearing about climate change and watching the news or reading about it or talking about it with friends. (Earth Guardians is a worldwide group of youths fighting climate change together through litigation and other actions.)
What gets tricky is that there are a lot of different opinions out there about how dire the situation is. There are some scientists who say we may have passed the tipping point. And I hope they’re not right, but I’m certainly not going to tell a very young child that. To an older child, I think it’s appropriate to say, hey we’re in a big race, and we’re going to have to work hard on this, and there are lots of people working on it, and we’re going to get this done.
Moving to teenaged children, they’re in an amazing time. Teenagers right now, my own kids, all of their friends, all of the teenagers that I see and sometimes work with on this climate stuff, they are amazing. They are so brave, and they are so able to look this crisis in the eye and say, “We’ve got this. We’re not letting it go down. Not when we’re on this planet, and not when we have decades ahead of us to live on this planet.”
I am lucky to be around a lot of young people in Eugene that are engaged in a really positive way in the Our Children’s Trust lawsuits against the federal government.
I’ve learned a lot from the teenagers in my community about despair and about positive ways of engaging, and those are the things that I point readers to: Look at what these young people are doing, look at what they’re facing with such energy, intelligence, heart and courage! Those are the people we need to be pointing our own children to, and even adults to, because they are profoundly engaged in ways that are actually making a difference.
What I would tell anyone 13 and up is that we do have solutions and we do have a dire problem, and we have to get to the root problems, and that’s going to take everybody.
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E.G.: What would you say to someone who says that if you really care about climate change, you shouldn’t have become a parent in the first place?
M.D.: I think that’s a very unrealistic point of view. I see life in a much broader context of humans being part of a natural system, and part of a natural impulse to giving life. That said, we also have a crisis right now of too many people trying to share a dwindling number of resources.
One of the ways that I believe we need to approach this is from a pragmatic point of view. Who wants to have children, and who is in a position to or doesn’t want to have children? Both of those sets of women or couples – are they empowered in their choice?
At the same time, I think it is important for us to be aware of the impact that First World families in general have on the climate crisis. The American lifestyle is destructive to the planet, and it’s a lifestyle that’s been actively cultivated by the industry and corporate world toward consumption.
There is often focus and blame put on families for existing, for wanting children, for wanting babies in their lives, which is a beautiful thing to want. It’s a natural thing to want, and I think we have to be careful not to villainize people who have children, when really the issue is that we have a larger culture of consumption that is destroying the planet. It’s not our babies destroying the planet; it’s the culture of consumption that’s destroying the planet. And that’s where we should be focused.
The fact that I did have two babies, and my babies are now consuming because they’re not babies anymore, I’m aware of that. And I think that’s something that I struggle with in terms of just looking at my own carbon footprint – it’s bigger than it was 25 years ago
E.G.: There was a lot of information in your book that surprised me. For example, that the typical American family dog has a larger carbon footprint than a person living in Haiti or Afghanistan. Why is that, and what can we do to rein in our pets’ carbon “paw prints” as you put it?
M.D.: That was a quote from Larry Schwartz in Salon magazine, and that surprised me, too. I found the reason dogs in particular have a large carbon footprint is they’re often big, they eat a lot, and they eat a lot of meat. And the cereals that are in some of those foods have palm oil or a palm oil derivative in them, and they’re really tricky to find. Some of the names of palm oil are really cleverly disguised these days, so it’s hard to trace. But for dogs, one of the ways to shrink the carbon footprint is to really examine the ingredients, look at all the derivatives of all the cereals that are part of that food.
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The main thing is the food, but there is a whole industry now that has grown up around pets as part of the family. There’s a huge industry for pet collars, and there are a lot of plastic chew toys. There is much more medical care, grooming care, products – and it’s not just for dogs. There are elaborate things for cats and for all kinds of animals. A lot of the smaller animals, guinea pigs and such, or even chickens – the shavings that we are giving our chickens for their nesting area, those are from trees. So part of it is, look at the deforestation or what may be happening with whatever pet you have and start to trace back what it is you’re buying and where it comes from and what the carbon footprint actually is, for whatever animal you have living with you.
E.G.: What are some small steps you think even the busiest of parents might be able to take to get their kids thinking about climate change or engaged in the movement?
D.M.: One of the first things would be to inspire them, and let them meet other kids who are engaged already. And that could be through Earth Guardians, it could be through Our Children’s Trust, sharing a video or reading about William Kamkwamba, the boy in the book, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.” I think stories are a great way to start.
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Another would be to know what’s happening in the local community.
Find your local fight. Check out 350.org; they have a national map online. Here in the Northwest, we’ve choked off every proposal in recent years for new fossil fuel infrastructure. All through North America, people are stopping those dangerous projects one by one, by forcing local officials to deny permits. Learn about your local fossil fuel resistance fight, and talk about it in age-appropriate ways with your kids.
FURTHER READING: Rebel cities go head to head with fossil fuel industry
If there is a vote coming up in your town, show up for it. You don’t have to go to meetings, you don’t have to knock on doors or join the campaign per se, but you can show up when it’s important. Just show up for a public hearing. My kids did that; it literally took an hour and a half, and we went down on a Monday night, and we were there for the vote. When your local grassroots group has a campaign and they say, “Hey, this is when we need people,” be one of those people that show up.
Show up for a protest. That’s every now and then on a Saturday afternoon. Help your family put their bodies where they can see other people and be part of a group that’s making their presence known at a time that matters.
Give money to grassroots groups fighting for clean energy. If nothing else, make a call to your local official or agency to demand they oppose permits for new dirty energy projects.
Another thing I would say is to do something creative with your children. Make one sign that’s colorful. This could literally take 10 minutes. Stick it in your window, stick it on the back of your car, stick it on your bicycle trailer. Somewhere, put some public statement that says something that’s important to you and your family. It might be “Exxon knew.” It might be “One less car ride,” “I’d rather be on the bullet train,” “This family is for wind energy,” “This family is against pipelines,” whatever it is that’s important to your family that links to something that’s happening in your community. Put up a sign about it; make it fun; make it colorful.
E.G.: As sports have come to dominate many aspects of family life, you point out that there are unintended carbon consequences as parents cart their kids from one out-of-town game to another. What’s your advice for all the soccer moms and dads out there?
M.D.: There’s a writer, Bruce Feiler; he says it beautifully: Youth sports industry is colonizing family life. What we have done to try and minimize that is to point our kids toward sports that aren’t as all-encompassing as some of the year-round travel teams. And we were in those year-round travel teams with one of my children for about four years. There are many ways that it was wonderful because it was a very tight community. We spent a lot of time together with those families, and it was wonderful for my child. At the same time, it was pretty all-encompassing.
I made an effort to point my child toward sports that were a little more balanced. When my child left the soccer world, we went to martial arts for a while, and then to ultimate Frisbee. And ultimate Frisbee, in general, is a lot more balanced for family life. There are several sports that are. One of my kids was in lacrosse, and it only met for one season, and then the rest of the year they were off. Look for sports that are only one season, or that are through, for example, the YMCA. It’s affordable, and it’s only once or twice a week instead of five or six days a week.
The other thing I would say is to delay it as long as possible. That’s getting harder and harder, so I know that’s hard for parents to do because all the other families are doing it. But if possible, delay it, especially those year-round clubs.
E.G.: One chapter I could relate to my childhood was “Let Kids Play with Knives.” I just don’t see kids running around the neighborhoods the way they used to. But how does encouraging unstructured outdoor play tie into climate activism?
M.D.: There is more and more research about how unstructured play allows children to naturally develop their capacity for personal agency and problem solving and even conflict resolution – this is in Richard Louv’s book “Vitamin N.”
One of the big things we’re going to be handing our children is a lot of conflict in this climate crisis. If you look at what happened in New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina, it was devastating in terms of the kind of human conflicts that came out of that and the kind of duress that families were put under after that flood.
If you look at Houston, that’s the fourth-biggest city in the U.S., and it was under water. That’s hundreds of thousands of people and families that were impacted, and when you impact a family, you impact children and you put the whole system under duress and that causes conflicts.
I know that’s a long road I’ve just taken you on, from floods in New Orleans and Houston back to playing in children’s backyards, but one of the things we’ve taken from our children in this whole stranger-danger culture, and penning them indoors, is that free movement and play with other children that allows them to negotiate, share and invent games together.
I grew up doing that. I have eight siblings. We invented games all day long. We hardly spent time on TV. We’ve taken that away from children and we’ve put them into these structured sports activities and we’ve put them on screens. And what I’m advocating strongly is that we take them off of screens and we stick them in dirt, and we give them a stick and a ball and other kids to play with and we set them free, in a sense, to do what they naturally want to do, which is climb and jump and invent and create and have battles and imaginary play and shape their world.
And if they can shape their world and their imaginations in the woods and build tree houses and invent games and battles, then they can invent solutions to the climate crisis. And they can build new cities and new forms of cities.
The capacity to imagine and then create out of that vision is intimately linked to raising children able to solve the climate crisis and transition this world to something that’s healthy and thriving for human beings and all living things.
I’m not advocating for sending them out on their own, by any stretch. When my kids were younger, I was scared to send them out. I don’t want to belittle parents’ fears. It’s not the parents who are to be judged here. What I’m looking for is a way to support parents in allowing that kind of play for their children and at the same time, feeling safe themselves as parents.
E.G.: You write in one section of your book, “I honestly don’t care whether you drive an electric car or a Hummer.” That’s not a statement I think that most people would expect to hear from a climate activist. Can you explain?
M.D.: We have to be really careful about blaming individuals and put our attention on the source of the problem. The source of the problem is, in my opinion, the petro-chemical companies and their investors, their CEOs and the politicians that they’ve been allowed to buy. Those politicians are carrying out industry agendas, and they’re doing it beautifully. They’re doing it better than they ever have before right now under Donald Trump’s administration. We have to be really careful not to knock each other down at this point. The progressives are so good at eating each other alive.
We have to support one another as people, as communities, as families, as people who care about one another, who care about our children and care about the planet and care about a beautiful thriving ecosystem in every place that humans live and every place that they don’t.
Everybody wants that, and I think it’s really easy for us to get pulled into criticizing one another and keeping score on who’s eating what and who’s driving what, and the fact is, we’re all captive in a petro-culture. We’re stuck within a dirty energy infrastructure. And when we start to come at it from that point of view, it illuminates our path much more, and it allows us to be more gentle on ourselves and gentle on each other. Ultimately, that’s what’s going to help us transition out of this outmoded and dangerous dirty energy infrastructure that’s literally killing us to something that’s life affirming and healthy for everyone.
Email Senior Staff Reporter Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org. Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites.
IF YOU GO
What: Mary DeMocker's book signing and discussion on climate-conscious parenting. 350PDX Director Adriana Voss-Andreae will be there to connect people with local climate campaigns.
When: 2 p.m. Saturday, April 14.
Where: Powell’s City of Books, 1005 W. Burnside St., Portland.
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