My Climate Story

“What kind of ancestors do we want to be?”

The question rang out from the stage at a 2018 event I had produced. An indigenous artist earnestly asked the 250 theatre leaders in the room what kind of legacy they wanted to carry forward in our field. The artist’s question echoed through my head for weeks, then months, and still does.

Later that year, I would begin working with a climate artist and activist on another event (this is, after all, my job – producing creative gatherings for arts professionals). This time I was in Miami, where Xavier Cortada had lived nearly his whole life, making a name for himself with his teachings and his interactive, arresting art pieces calling attention to the Arctic conditions catalyzing unprecedented oceanic activity all over the world, and threatening the future of his hometown. I learned that around Miami, it took around 31 years for the sea level to rise by 6 inches. The speed at which Florida's sea level is rising has increased dramatically in the last decade and is now rising by as much as 1 inch every 3 years. Scientists now forecast that in just the next 15 years, the sea level will have risen by another 6 inches.

Cortada became the artist in residence of the event, working closely with me and my team on developing our first programming track on climate action. He brought an installation into our lobby, and was given time and space on the first day of the convening to introduce it; it was called Do Not Open: Letters to the Future. Cortada instructed us to write a letter to our descendants, people who will be here after we’re gone, telling them about our experience of climate change now. He writes in his description of the ongoing project: “In the 2100’s, our great-grandchildren will read the words we wrote them and want to understand why we didn’t do more when so much – everything – was at stake.”

The art-makers in the room began silently weeping and became visibly distressed as they wrote to their relatives that they’d never meet. The intended audience, of course, was really us, the letter-writers. He was challenging us to ask ourselves what kind of ancestors we wanted to be. Cortada would have us seal the letters and box them up to join thousands more that he was amassing in his archives, to be opened on some date in the distant future, after most of us would be gone.

As I watched the letters being collected, I remembered a conversation with the only friend I had who could be called a climate activist. She was a mother whose daughter was just a few months younger than my son, and she’d told me, as we spoke of her climate work and the terrifying predictions of the 2018 IPCC report: “I just want to be able to tell her that I did everything I could.”

It was this series of experiences that gradually gave my life a new purpose.

It began with lifestyle changes. I slowly began shifting nearly everything about the way our family consumes food, manages waste, spends our money, and experiences the natural world. I subscribed to podcasts, I read books and blogs, I went to workshops, I marched, and I even applied to a few jobs that I was utterly unqualified for. Somehow, all of that didn’t feel like enough.

So, I enrolled myself into the Executive Program at the Center for Social Impact Strategy at UPenn. I’m training to be a Climate Reality Leader. I’m plotting out my career trajectory, trying to figure out how long until I can make money trying to save the planet, just enough to keep us out of bankruptcy. If I couldn’t get hired in the climate action arena due to complete lack of experience or track record, I would channel my history of designing communal learning experiences and start my own thing. It would be dedicated to training communities, especially parents, around the climate crisis, getting them involved on the individual and local levels. I would call it: Better Ancestors.

Of course, a little over a month into my first class, the COVID-19 pandemic began ravaging my home city of New York, and my family and I fled and took cover in my parents’ summer home on the southern shores of Maine. For the first time in most of our lifetimes, the world collectively experienced a monstrous health crisis, the effects of which have been the most devastating to those whose governments have completely mismanaged it. It’s been a litmus test at how good we are at averting or mitigating the damage of a natural disaster as a country and as a global community, the kind of disaster that could become downright commonplace in the decades ahead.

With nearly 26 million worldwide cases, and well over 800,000 global deaths and counting – we have not passed the test.

My family and I got back from four months in Maine a few weeks ago. While we were there we hiked almost every weekend, an activity with which this Brooklyn crew had little experience. We bought waterproof gear and hardcore bug repellent, and we got really good at packing picnics. Our kids formed a new relationship with nature, appreciating the trees and the wildlife, like the turkeys and the deer that would stroll through our backyard, and the red-tailed hawks that my 6-year-old son loves to point out when he sees them. We bought a hammock. We planted an herb garden. We avoided the trauma that so many of our New York neighbors experienced, and are still reeling from.

(Lest this sound like some kind of quarantine dreamscape, rest assured we also dealt with the hardship of trying to work full time while our kids rejected distance learning, not to mention the tantrums, the fights, and the awkward Zoom play dates. No matter where we working parents were in the world, it was hard.)

The pandemic has not given me faith enough in our country’s leadership nor our collective action as a populace to feel like I can sit it out any longer, even to just get my family through these woods. Though while we were gone we couldn’t compost, we ate red meat, and we revived our use of Ziploc, now that we’re back in the city I’m doubling down on this fight.

The reports now show that by 2030 the worst effects of climate change could be irreversible, and that the next few years are pivotal. We don’t have time to wait for the pandemic to subside. In 2030 my son will be learning how to drive and my daughter will be graduating middle school. Neither will even be old enough to vote, and by then, who is on the ballot may not matter quite as much as it does today; the most consequential damage will have been done, and the survival mode we all find ourselves in now will be the new standard of living.

COVID is not only a litmus test, it’s a reminder. We all have agency in this. We all can choose to be better ancestors to those inheriting this world from us. We can protect our youth and future generations with the choices we make. We can act with purpose and collective care, and fewer people will suffer. Or we can pretend that nothing is happening, and thousands upon thousands of us, eventually millions, will continue to die.

It is within our power to be better than that. It is for our kids, and grandkids, and their kids, that we should muster up the will to be better than that.

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This story was written and submitted as the first of six learning exercises for my 2020 training to become a member of the global Climate Reality Leadership Corps.