Asking the Right Questions

About Children and Climate Change

My son, with thanks to Robbie Patterson.

“If you expect to find an answer to your problem, you have simply not asked a big enough question.”

That’s a Sufi saying (unearthed by Joan Chittister.) It’s clearly not a contemporary one.

These days we are bombarded with answers and advice on nearly everything – including the things we would do best to answer for ourselves.

Many of these answers are inadequate, superficial, and wholly unsatisfying. Consuming them leaves me feeling the way I feel after bingeing something on Netflix. Filled but unfulfilled.

“Three ways to get rich.” “Four ways to persuade.” “Five ways to well-being.” “Six ways to improve self-esteem.” “Seven ways to discipline your child.”

The two sides of advice

I have always had an ambivalent relationship with our advice-heavy culture.

I am a deeply curious person. I want to learn and cannot be an expert on everything that interests me – if, in truth, anything at all. So, I read and listen to and learn from many people.

But deferring to an expert seems to close the door to possibility. To be the very antithesis of “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind.” Or as one of my literature professors once said of bad literary criticism: to close the book rather than open it.

Perhaps even worse, I find our advice-oriented culture disempowering. It seems to erect an impenetrable wall between me and my intuition, experience, and the joy of experimenting and finding my own way in life.

And now, as all the hoopla around ChatGPT suggests, we’re in for yet more and more guidance to come — this time, with relatively little human intervention.

But while some advice is clearly helpful, I often wonder: On balance, do we gain more than we lose?

Consider parenting

Mothers, of course, have been raising children forever. In wildly varying circumstances, they have known (more or less, like any of us) how to love and care for children from their first moment of complete dependency through the countless imperceptible steps toward maturity.

But then, in the 20th century, came the professionalism of parenting: a predominantly male parade of so-called experts who positioned themselves to tell women what to do about what we had already been doing for millennia.

More than 300 years ago, during the Age of Enlightenment, the philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau published influential works on education that included categorical (if conflicting) opinions about the nature of children and the role of parents.

The fact that Locke had no children and Rousseau left all five of his children to a Paris orphanage appeared to give neither man pause. And other theories and debates, usually asserted by male physicians, followed.

But Dr. Benjamin Spock’s wildly popular The Common Sense Book of Baby and Childcare, published in 1946, opened the floodgates. 

There are now more than 60,000 parenting books on Amazon. It would take roughly an average lifespan -- 82 years – to read even half of them at a clip of one a day.

When I was a new mom, I gave reading many of the most famous my best shot until I became thoroughly confused, and my mom offered the best advice – or anti-advice advice – I ever heard:

“Lisa,” she said, “put away the books, look at your child, and trust yourself to know what he needs.”

In other words: “You got this,” a simple phrase that is infinitely more helpful than the alternative voice of self-doubt.

And, in so many ways, I believe we do know more than we think we do — when we stop outsourcing our good instincts to others. Many of the most essential things in life come naturally.

But this does not mean we have all the right answers. Or any answers, for that matter.

Sometimes, the most important thing is to try to simply ask the right questions.

Wendell Berry’s guiding question

I met the writer, farmer, and poet Wendell Berry some years ago. He had agreed to join a sit-in in the Kentucky Governor’s office to protest mountain-top-removal coal mining (that sanitized phrase for blowing off the tops of mountains with dynamite to make coal extraction more efficient.) And I was there to write about it.

Kentucky, of course, is a state heavily dominated by the coal industry. And Berry is a highly intelligent man. I was having trouble reconciling those two facts in my mind.

So, before the protest began, I asked him: “Do you really think this will be successful?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “What I do know is that’s the wrong question. The right question is: ‘Is it the right thing to do?’ I know it’s the right thing to do.”

His point, as he explained, is that focusing on whether something will be successful before we even try tends to make us cowardly. To make us into people who calculate odds rather than act on our deepest-held beliefs.

That clarification changed me.

As someone who has always been inclined to question, it made me recognize that the best questions are big ones. The ones without easy answers or any answers at all.

Because ultimately, the answers don’t matter as much as engaging in the questions.

Questions open our minds, hearts, and souls the way answers – especially other people’s answers – never can.

My big question

And my big question, the one that has been a guiding question ever since I became a parent, is:

How do we love and care for children in a world being remade by climate change?

It’s probably apparent by now that I don’t mean this question will lead to a bulleted list of clear-cut answers. Sure, there are some things I believe are worth considering.

But how we love and care for children in a changing climate is a profoundly personal question. And those of us who feel called to consider it will ultimately have to reckon with it in our own hearts.

So, this is a place where I simply want to have the conversation. And I would welcome your thoughts, stories, and suggestions about people who might be interesting to feature here as part of the conversation.

Warmly,
Lisa

P.S. You may note I’ve changed the title of this newsletter from “Extreme Thriving” to “Safekeeping: Caring for Children in a Changing Climate” to better align with the book I am writing.