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A conversation with essayist Emily Raboteau about hope and her new book, Lessons for Survival.
It was another Emily who wrote, “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” but Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” builds on that notion in a fresh and literal fashion. The collection of essays, out March 12, is loosely structured around Raboteau’s attempt to see and photograph all of the paintings in the Audubon Mural Project in her New York City neighborhood, Washington Heights. In practice, though, the book is an honest look at the overlapping injustices of our current age and an inspiring suggestion — by way of example — of how to move forward and survive.
Optimism, though, is not easy. Scrutinizing the idea of “resilience” in the face of climate change, Raboteau notes that the word means something different to communities of color who’ve managed retreats for decades — including her grandmother, Mabel, who fled her home of Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, after Raboteau’s grandfather was shot and killed by a white man who faced no legal repercussions. Visiting the territory of Palestine, Raboteau witnesses the water crisis in the Middle East being weaponized against the region’s poorest communities; in Alaska, she sees traditional ways of living in the Arctic slipping out of reach for the survivors and descendants of residential schools, government-run institutions that aimed to forcefully assimilate Indigenous children.
Present in every essay is Raboteau’s perspective as a mother, which is fierce in demanding a better world while also necessarily believing that one is within reach. Even the bird murals — the tundra swan, the burrowing owls — become messengers of hope.
I spoke with Raboteau ahead of the book’s release about the adjective “mothering,” learning resilience from one’s community, and why “apocalypse” doesn’t have to be a bad word. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
I wanted to ask about the change in preposition from the title essay, “Lessons in Survival,” to Lessons for Survival, the book’s title. There’s an ever-so-slight change in meaning with that switch. Was it something you were thinking about?
What I like about the essay title from which the book title grows is that “Lessons in Survival” implies I’m the one who’s receiving lessons. To me, this is not a book that is offering — well, I don’t want to say it’s not offering guidance, but I hope it’s offering a feeling of camaraderie in the confusing and distressing times of the polycrisis we find ourselves in. It’s an acknowledgment of the bewilderment many of us are feeling and includes examples from people I think are wiser than myself about how to move through times like this.
Rather than being the author who’s offering lessons, I think of myself as more of a narrator who is interested in receiving lessons and witnessing examples of survival, and then sharing those with the reader.
You wrote the essays in this collection between 2015 and 2023. What was it like going back and revisiting your older essays? Is there anything that particularly strikes you about how your worldview has shifted over the years?
One of the earliest essays included in this collection, from 2015, is about playgrounds. In New York City, playgrounds are common spaces where all kinds of classes and races mix. Yet they are also spaces where a lot of parents encounter conversations about school choice that often are really coded conversations about race and class. And that can feel distressing. The concern that drove that essay, which is about imbalances of power, is a concern that drives all of the essays in this book. It’s not a coincidence that the less desirable school districts overlap with poor neighborhoods, which are also the areas with the highest rates of pollution and asthma. I’m really interested in staring grim asymmetries of power in the face, trying to dismantle them, and figuring out my position within them.
Another early essay was the Palestine one, about Israeli settler colonialism plus the installation of renewable energy and clean-water systems in the terrorized Arab communities of the West Bank's South Hebron Hills, which was actually my first explicit piece of environmental writing. Another thing that unites all these essays is the narrative perspective of a mother: How do I raise ethical and safe human beings in a world that feels in many ways like it’s unraveling? I had no idea when I was revising and expanding that essay for this collection that the war between Gaza and Israel would be unfolding, yet I hope that it offers readers some context about the decades of conflict that led to this war and that it gives a sense of apartheid — a sense of a literal imbalance of power vis a vis electricity, but also water access. I wasn’t in Gaza, I was in the West Bank. But still, you get a sense of what life is like for Palestinians there, and it’s only grown worse since the time I did the investigative reporting for that piece.
I really loved that essay — there’s a line when you’re going through border control in Israel that describes motherhood as “invisibility and power.” I was underlining and highlighting and circling that.
Motherhood confers a kind of moral authority, but there’s also the sort of thinking like, “Oh, but you can’t be too much of a threat. You’re just a mom.” In this context, I was using motherhood as a way to pass more easily through customs and then through a checkpoint. But I’ve been thinking lately about how radical a perspective and a stance motherhood is. To say, “You know, what I want more than anything is for all of our kids to live.” That’s my political stance: I want all of them to live.
The book’s subtitle, “Mothering against ‘the Apocalypse,’” seems like a call to arms — that fighting the apocalypse requires mothers. How do you see the role of mothers as different or set apart from the role of fathers or people without children when it comes to standing against the polycrisis?
Mothering is a very powerful way of thinking about the nurture and care that I feel is required to meet the moment. I also want to be sensitive to the fact that people who are not biological parents can also be mothering. We all have the power to be that; it’s why we also understand you can’t get between a mama bear and her cubs. You’re going to get torn apart. There’s great power in that role: Whether we are mothers or not, we may be mothering, and so — how did you just put it, that maybe mothers are required in the fight? It’s more like the fight requires the action of mothering.
It was also important to me to add scare quotes around “the apocalypse” in the subtitle because I felt it would be offensive to activists to suggest that the future is foreclosed. I wanted to suggest we’re in an apocalyptic mode, but I didn’t want that term to stop people from action.
Something else about the term apocalypse: I have a friend, Ayana Mathis, who is writing about the apocalypse in literature right now, and she reminded me that the ancient Greek term means literally “to unveil.”
I didn’t know that!
The way we use it so often is about the end times, the end game. We have a lot of biblical imagery we associate with it: fire and floods and locusts. But what the root word means is “unveiling,” which I find really exciting to think about. Yes, we’re in an apocalyptic moment and let’s actually accept that. It’s an opportunity for waking up.
There’s a tension in the book between the outdoors as being a kind of haven — it’s where your kids play, it’s where you go on walks and see the bird murals, it’s where you have your garden — and the outdoors as a source of danger, from the air pollution from car exhaust to the rivers rising. How do you manage to reconcile those two things?
I don’t want to suggest I feel the perils come from nature. The perils come from what is being done to specific communities, like the Black and brown communities that we’ve chosen to live in. My family lives in a frontline community, and so the solace that we get nevertheless from being outdoors, especially in parks in New York City, is crucial and restorative. In this book, I’m interested in holding cognitive dissonance. Nature is both a space that is imperiled, a place that has been plundered and abused, but it can also be a place of joy, a place that is home, and a place that is worth protecting and trying to alter to make safer for more people. I wanted to write about what it feels like for all those things to be true at once.
The sense of community in this book really struck me, particularly in some of the essays in the section “At the Risk of Spoiling Dinner.” Do you think of community-building as being one of your lessons for survival?
Absolutely. I’m really glad you picked up on that because I think it’s the number one thing. It’s driven by the feelings of care and love that I also associate with mothering. Ancillary to that is thinking about relationships not merely between parent and child but also in my extended and beloved community. That section that you’re referring to is an admission: “I can’t handle my degree of anxiety over how bad and scary things are by myself.” If I can’t talk about it among the people I love and trust and also listen to what they’re saying, I’m at risk of being stuck in this feeling, and that’s not helpful to anybody. It was a mobilizing gesture for me.
For a year, I committed to asking people in my social network both online and in person how they were feeling the effects of climate change in their bodies and in their local habitat. I did that because climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe has said one of the best ways we can combat climate change is to bridge the gap between the number of us who are appropriately fearful and the number of us who actually talk about it. I was like, “Well, that’s an interesting idea. Let me try to put that into practice.” Was it an uncomfortable subject at dinner tables? Sometimes. But mostly everybody had it at the tip of their tongue; they were just so ready and grateful for the question.
I wanted to ask about the photos in the book, particularly the ones of the Audubon Mural Project. You use the word “document,” but the pictures are also intentional and creative — there are almost always people in your frames, and the photos seem to be as much about capturing a small part of Washington Heights as they are about recording the mural. Was there a moment when photography became a creative endeavor for you in addition to being a log, or were those two things always the same?
I think they’re really interrelated. There’s also a third thing: a therapeutic hobby. Some people find repetitive gestures like running or knitting to be ways of calming down their brain, and for me, especially during the Trump years, that’s when I began photographing the birds. It was a way I understood I could relax. It was a repetitive gesture, a thing I knew I could do to make myself feel better because I was getting outside.
These bird murals are sites of beauty and also memorials. Some of these birds are expected to be extinct by 2080 if we continue our current trajectory. So photographing was a way of paying attention and being in community and, you’re right, it was also an artistic project. Including people on the same plane as the birds was important even in thinking about endangerment: When we think about conservation, we often think about wildlife and wild places, but I also really wanted to be intentional in thinking about who’s endangered in the community I live in and the nation I live in.
What do you do, now, to survive?
One thing that I do to survive is name that there are so many feelings involved. Knowing that some of the feelings are in the space of fear, despair, anger, rage, bewilderment, and confusion — dark feelings, for lack of a better term — and understanding that I don’t linger in any of those feelings, that there are strategies to get out of them.
For me, it’s photographing birds in my neighborhood and gardening, getting my hands in the soil and contemplating and engaging with the most basic miracle that out of a seed comes a plant. That helps me to move into the space of those other feelings of being in this time, which are more in the space of hopefulness and gratitude. The feelings that come from being in a community with others, working through the hard stuff. Feelings of purpose and a deep sense of meaning. What I’m trying to say is: Understanding you don’t have to linger in the dark side; there are strategies to move into the space of action and unity.
Normally I end these interviews by asking if you feel optimistic, but I actually left that question off this time because your book feels so hopeful that it would have been redundant of me to ask.
I’m really glad that you shared that with me. It’s a hard balance to strike in writing because we want to be honest. I was thinking about that, but I almost always tried to end my essays in a place of hope — even if it’s an image, even if it’s tinged by ambiguity, to still lean toward hopefulness. That was important to me because who am I to linger in the opposite of hope when there are so many people working?
I want to amplify, also, the people and peoples who’ve lived through existential threats before and to highlight their resilience. Because that’s how we get through this — with lessons. I’m not the one who’s offering them; I’m trying really hard to learn them so I can offer them to my children.
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Current conditions: Thousands are without power and drinking water in the French Indian Ocean territory of Réunion after Tropical Cyclone Garance made landfall with the strength of a Category 2 hurricane • A severe weather outbreak could bring tornadoes to southern states early next week • It’s 44 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Washington, D.C., where Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy will meet with President Trump today to sign a minerals deal.
The 16th United Nations Biodiversity Conference, known as COP16, ended this week with countries agreeing on a crucial roadmap for directing $200 billion a year by 2030 toward protecting nature and halting global biodiversity loss. Developed nations are urged to double down on their goal to mobilize $20 billion annually for conservation in developing countries this year, rising to $30 billion by 2030. The plan also calls for further study on the relationships between nature conservation and debt sustainability. “The compromise proved countries could still bridge their differences and work together for the sake of preserving the planet, despite a fracturing world order and the dramatic retreat of the United States from international green diplomacy and foreign aid under President Donald Trump,” wrote Louise Guillot at Politico. The decision was met with applause and tears from delegates. One EU delegate said they were relieved “about the positive signal that this sends to other ongoing negotiations on climate change and plastics that we have.”
The Trump administration yesterday fired hundreds of workers across the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the National Weather Service, key agencies responsible for monitoring the changing climate and communicating extreme weather threats. The National Hurricane Center and the Tsunami Warning Center both operate under NOAA, and the layoffs come ahead of the upcoming hurricane season. “People nationwide depend on NOAA for free, accurate forecasts, severe weather alerts, and emergency information,” said Democratic Rep. Jared Huffman, the ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Purging the government of scientists, experts, and career civil servants and slashing fundamental programs will cost lives.” A federal judge yesterday temporarily blocked the administration’s mass firings of federal workers, so the status of those affected in this latest round is unclear. Somewhat relatedly, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman reports that the Nature Conservancy, an environmental nonprofit, was told by NOAA it had to rename a major conservation program as the “Gulf of America” or else lose federal funding.
The FBI reportedly has been questioning Environmental Protection Agency employees about $20 billion in climate and clean energy grants approved under the Biden administration, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has insisted were issued hastily and without oversight. According toThe Washington Post, the Justice Department has asked several U.S. attorneys to submit warrant requests or launch grand jury investigations, but those efforts have been rejected due to lack of evidence or “reasonable belief that a crime occurred.” “It’s certainly unusual for any case to involve two different U.S. attorney offices declining a case for lack of probable cause and to have the Department of Justice continue to shop it,” Stefan D. Cassella, a former federal prosecutor, told the Post. Several nonprofits said their Citibank accounts holding the funding have been frozen without explanation.
Some Democratic states are apparently freezing out Tesla in response to Elon Musk’s political maneuvers within the Trump administration. Tesla operates on a direct-to-consumer sales model, so it doesn’t have to go through dealerships. More than 25 states ban or restrict direct EV sales in some way. The company has been lobbying to get permission to sell directly in these states, but some Democratic lawmakers are “disgusted” by Musk’s moves in Washington and are rebuffing lobbyists or dropping their support for proposed legislation allowing direct sales.
Apple is in trouble for claiming some of its Apple Watches are “carbon neutral.” A group of customers are suing the company after learning its claims relied on carbon offsetting projects in protected national parks or heavily forested areas, instead of “genuine” carbon reductions. “The carbon reductions would have occurred regardless of Apple’s involvement or the projects’ existence,” the plaintiffs said in their complaint. “Because Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are predicated on the efficacy and legitimacy of these projects, Apple’s carbon neutrality claims are false and misleading.” The lawsuit seeks damages, as well as an injunction that prevents Apple from using the carbon neutral claim to market its watches. Apple has a goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2030.
Researchers in Amsterdam have examined the nests of birds known as common coots and discovered plastic items dating back to the 1990s, including a McDonald’s McChicken wrapper from 1996, and a Mars wrapper promoting the 1994 USA FIFA World Cup. “History is not only written by humans,” said Auke-Florian Hiemstra, who led the research. “Nature, too, is keeping score.”
Auke-Florian Hiemstra
Did a battery plant disaster in California spark a PR crisis on the East Coast?
Battery fire fears are fomenting a storage backlash in New York City – and it risks turning into fresh PR hell for the industry.
Aggrieved neighbors, anti-BESS activists, and Republican politicians are galvanizing more opposition to battery storage in pockets of the five boroughs where development is actually happening, capturing rapt attention from other residents as well as members of the media. In Staten Island, a petition against a NineDot Energy battery project has received more than 1,300 signatures in a little over two months. Two weeks ago, advocates – backed by representatives of local politicians including Rep. Nicole Mallitokis – swarmed a public meeting on the project, getting a local community board to vote unanimously against the project.
According to Heatmap Pro’s proprietary modeling of local opinion around battery storage, there are likely twice as many strong opponents than strong supporters in the area:
Heatmap Pro
Yesterday, leaders in the Queens community of Hempstead enacted a year-long ban on BESS for at least a year after GOP Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, other local politicians, and a slew of aggrieved residents testified in favor of a moratorium. The day before, officials in the Long Island town of Southampton said at a public meeting they were ready to extend their battery storage ban until they enshrined a more restrictive development code – even as many energy companies testified against doing so, including NineDot and solar plus storage developer Key Capture Energy. Yonkers also recently extended its own battery moratorium.
This flurry of activity follows the Moss Landing battery plant fire in California, a rather exceptional event caused by tech that was extremely old and a battery chemistry that is no longer popular in the sector. But opponents of battery storage don’t care – they’re telling their friends to stop the community from becoming the next Moss Landing. The longer this goes on without a fulsome, strident response from the industry, the more communities may rally against them. Making matters even worse, as I explained in The Fight earlier this year, we’re seeing battery fire concerns impact solar projects too.
“This is a huge problem for solar. If [fires] start regularly happening, communities are going to say hey, you can’t put that there,” Derek Chase, CEO of battery fire smoke detection tech company OnSight Technologies, told me at Intersolar this week. “It’s going to be really detrimental.”
I’ve long worried New York City in particular may be a powder keg for the battery storage sector given its omnipresence as a popular media environment. If it happens in New York, the rest of the world learns about it.
I feel like the power of the New York media environment is not lost on Staten Island borough president Vito Fossella, a de facto leader of the anti-BESS movement in the boroughs. Last fall I interviewed Fossella, whose rhetorical strategy often leans on painting Staten Island as an overburdened community. (At least 13 battery storage projects have been in the works in Staten Island according to recent reporting. Fossella claims that is far more than any amount proposed elsewhere in the city.) He often points to battery blazes that happen elsewhere in the country, as well as fears about lithium-ion scooters that have caught fire. His goal is to enact very large setback distance requirements for battery storage, at a minimum.
“You can still put them throughout the city but you can’t put them next to people’s homes – what happens if one of these goes on fire next to a gas station,” he told me at the time, chalking the wider city government’s reluctance to capitulate on batteries to a “political problem.”
Well, I’m going to hold my breath for the real political problem in waiting – the inevitable backlash that happens when Mallitokis, D’Esposito, and others take this fight to Congress and the national stage. I bet that’s probably why American Clean Power just sent me a notice for a press briefing on battery safety next week …
And more of the week’s top conflicts around renewable energy.
1. Queen Anne’s County, Maryland – They really don’t want you to sign a solar lease out in the rural parts of this otherwise very pro-renewables state.
2. Logan County, Ohio – Staff for the Ohio Power Siting Board have recommended it reject Open Road Renewables’ Grange Solar agrivoltaics project.
3. Bandera County, Texas – On a slightly brighter note for solar, it appears that Pine Gate Renewables’ Rio Lago solar project might just be safe from county restrictions.
Here’s what else we’re watching…
In Illinois, Armoracia Solar is struggling to get necessary permits from Madison County.
In Kentucky, the mayor of Lexington is getting into a public spat with East Kentucky Power Cooperative over solar.
In Michigan, Livingston County is now backing the legal challenge to Michigan’s state permitting primacy law.