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November 7, 2022
Across the United States and around the world, motherhood is often the foundation of vital caregiving networks that help make communities more resilient in the face of crisis and conflict. Effective climate adaptation policy should account for the ways in which mothers are disproportionately affected by climate change hazards, while also supporting the essential caregiving role their communities depend upon. With COP27 underway, Dan and Alison sit down with Diana Duarte from MADRE, an international women's human rights organization and feminist fund, to talk about how motherhood empowers climate activism in the global south. They are also joined by Moms Clean Air Force Co-Founder Dominique Browning for her insight on how networks of moms and dads are engaging with climate policy in the United States.
Show notes:
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Episode Transcript:
Dan Bresette: Hello, everyone, welcome to The Climate Conversation. I'm Dan Bresette, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And with me today is a very special guest, co-host Alison Davis. Alison is an associate on our communications team. And we don't often get to do this together, Alison, but welcome to the podcast today. It's great to have you.
Alison Davis: It's great to be back. I’ve really been looking forward to this, especially since when this episode comes out, it will actually be the one-year anniversary since I started here. Also when this episode comes out in early November, you will be all the way in Egypt.
Dan: That's right. I'll be at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, with my colleague, Anna McGinn. Anna has been at several COPs. This will be my first one. I'm really, really looking forward to it. Speaking of COP27, we are doing a ton of work in our Congressional education efforts around COP27. We have a series of briefings, What Congress Needs to Know About COP27. We'll be talking about issues like loss and damage, nature-based climate solutions, talking about the negotiations themselves, talking about the state of climate science, as reflected in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. During COP, which is when this episode will be coming out, if you haven't already signed up for our daily newsletter, our COP27 Dispatch, I encourage you to do that. We started the newsletter last year and it went great. This year will be even better. And even when COP27 Dispatch ends, we'll still be doing our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. And that's obviously the best way to keep track of everything that we're doing. So I will be in Egypt, and I will take great solace knowing that this episode will be out on time and people will get to listen to these two really excellent guests talking about this really interesting issue.
Alison: As some of our listeners may already know, the COP presidency highlights key topics by creating thematic days such as Finance Day, Energy Day, Adaptation and Agriculture day, and the one that I'm most looking forward to is Gender Day. And that's the inspiration for today's episode. More specifically, we'll be talking about the power of motherhood in climate activism. But before we jump into it, I want to acknowledge that families come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and this conversation is not exclusive to mothers in the traditional sense. Fathers, LGBTQ folk, women without children, and people of all backgrounds can engage with the lessons and the themes of this episode.
Dan: There's a long history of women using motherhood as a tool to bring about social and political change. For example, when suffragists of the early 20th century were fighting for the right to vote, one of their winning strategies was to leverage their maternal status. They argued that women needed the power of the ballot so they could protect the welfare of all children, not just their own. Now, activist moms are using similar tactics in response to climate change and environmental degradation. The notion of motherhood offers a lens that we can use to build our relationships with other people and guide our approach to problem solving.
Alison: According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or the UNFCCC, women in general—mothers or not—are already more vulnerable to and more affected by climate change hazards, especially in the Global South. Throw motherhood into the mix and the hardships from climate change become increasingly dangerous. During pregnancy, climate-related threats like extreme heat, air pollution, and vector-borne disease can lead to negative long-term health outcomes for both mother and child. For many people, the decision to bring a child into a world with an uncertain future can be difficult. A 2020 poll from Morning Consult found that one-in-four childless adults in the United States have factored climate change into their family planning decisions.
Dan: Mothers in the United States and around the world are teaming up to slow the momentum of climate change and increase resilience in their communities for the sake of their children's future. With COP27 underway, today's conversation will begin with a closer look at how maternal climate activism is playing out internationally.
Alison: Our first guest is Diana Duarte from MADRE, an international women's human rights organization and feminist fund that supports women who protect and provide for communities facing war and disaster. As the Director of Policy and Strategic Engagement, Diana oversees MADRE’s policy and public education work designing and implementing initiatives to advance women's human rights worldwide. Diana is here to discuss the dynamics of motherhood and climate activism on the global stage.
Diana Duarte: MADRE partners with grassroots and women-led organizations all over the world, and our partner groups in Latin America, in Africa, and the Middle East are truly on the frontlines of this global crisis. And they're also contending with the reality that climate change is not gender neutral. Mothers often carry the responsibility to care for their families, and in nearly every society, women and mothers are largely responsible for securing food, water, and—particularly in the Global South—household fuel and medicinal plants. And these resources depend upon the stability of the climate. And then there are, of course, the climate risks that are associated with pregnancy, such as when increased heat and air pollution occur, those have been associated with premature, low-weight, and even stillborn babies. Just as much as climate change is not gender neutral, it is also not race neutral. Indigenous, Black, and brown communities here in the U.S. and in countries of the Global South, all around the world, are facing the disproportionate impacts of climate change because of the legacies and realities of racism and colonialism. So if our global and local climate responses are going to meet that reality and truly respond to people's needs, then the truth is we need to be able to place care and caregiving at the very center of our priorities. And that has a lot to do with mothering, which is one of the most vital social roles that sustains entire communities and responds to those vulnerabilities that I just named. So in many of the places where MADRE works, mothers have told us of their responsibility, that they feel very deeply for the survival—and even just the peace of mind—of their children and families in the zones of disaster and displacement. Understanding the role of mothers facing climate crisis is both about grappling with the ways that they're particularly at risk, but also about the indispensable role that they play in sustaining communities through crisis and by caring for the most vulnerable. Mothering is an action as much as it informs an identity. You know, mothering is one lens on what it means to put love for others into action, to care for one another, to sustain and heal someone's body, to nurture someone's mind. These are all actions that we're all capable of doing, regardless of our identity. So that means that we can all learn from that caring and mothering lens. When you center mothering and caregiving, one benefit is that you can better understand how threats are interrelated. You can trace the ripple effects that a specific climate threat can set off and then create solutions that respond to all of its permutations. And I can share an example of what I mean. In Kenya, we partner with rural and Indigenous communities who have faced long and repeated and terrible droughts year after year. And when the water dries up and their cattle—which are often their main source of income—their cattle die, families are forced into these impossible choices in order to survive. So if they have daughters in school, some families may choose to pull those daughters out of school. They think, better to have them at home to help search for and to haul dwindling water supplies. So at MADRE, we learned of these stories because we partner with a local women's organization called the Indigenous Information Network, and they saw all these challenges that got in the way of a girl going to school, and they saw the clear connection to climate change. Most importantly, I would say, is that they were organizing with mothers who are grappling with these impossible choices. And together they were able to create community funds to support families through drought and to sustain girls’ schools. And all of this is part of an effective, comprehensive climate response. But when we talk about climate change in the media or in global policy discussions, how often do you hear people talking about these very local, very gendered impacts? And it's often a missed connection. When we face a large-scale problem like climate change, it's easy to assume that in order to match it, we need large-scale solutions. And don't get me wrong, we definitely do need a coherent, global response to the climate crisis. But some of our most sustainable practices occur in very local, very specific places. And the people who are most responsible for caregiving, like mothers, are constantly investing in these local small-scale networks that are what we need in order to build resilience. For almost 40 years, MADRE has partnered with Indigenous women in Nicaragua. I remember once a few years ago, I traveled there for an annual women's forum, which gathered around 1000 women who came from all across that region to share their stories and their experiences and to present their demands to local and regional authorities. And I met one woman who had traveled for two days along a river in a canoe with her one-month-old baby daughter strapped to her chest, just so that she could be part of this forum. Since then, I have had two children, and I know what it means to care for a newborn, so I know that that was no small feat. But back then I asked her, you know, why did she and so many others feel that it was so important to be there at that forum. And many of them said that it was because they wanted to be able to connect with other mothers and women leaders in their community to strategize and to collaborate together about how they were going to build better lives and futures for their children. And over and over again, they told us that climate change is a huge threat to that goal. So I think it's an important lesson that mothers can teach us and that we can learn at both the personal and the policy level, which is that resilience depends on these kinds of networks of care and community that we set up at the local level. So when we talk about centering mothers in our work and in our policymaking, I want to be clear that this is not at all about some biological, essentialist idea about quote-unquote maternal instinct, which frankly can often be used to actually restrict women's agency and freedoms. But what I'm actually talking about is about prioritizing the expertise that comes from doing the hard work of caregiving, that communities do depend upon, especially through crises. You know, when I first became a mother, I had to completely transform my life in order to make it possible for me to care for my child, which is an experience I share in common with millions of other mothers. But what I hadn't anticipated going into it was that it would transform the way I look at every single other person in the world that I encounter. I would find myself walking down the street and looking at people on the subway and wondering, who did all of this for you? All of this work that I'm doing for my daughter, who did it for you? Maybe it was someone's mother, but also maybe it was a father, a sibling, a grandmother, a teacher, a family friend, you name it. If anyone is walking the streets, is in our lives today, somebody provided care for them. And it's become clear to me that the care that we've given and received in our lives is an invisible web really that connects all of us, and it makes every single thing that we do possible, and yet somehow we never acknowledge it. And we certainly do not do enough to support it in policy. But just as invisible as that care web feels, it also feels really powerful to me. You can start to feel yourself being in league with others, which then feeds into this potential for networking and for building a movement that's based on those shared experiences so we can keep up the pressure and demands for more supportive policies. A few years ago, there was a group of women farmers in Sudan, who learned that some of the mothers we work with in Kenya and Somalia were struggling through a terrible drought. And those women farmers and mothers in Sudan mobilized through MADRE to send their surplus crops to support those mothers that they had never even met. And so that was a role that MADRE played, to be able to facilitate that connection and strengthen that web between caregivers.
Alison: MADRE does a lot to help mothers around the world, and in turn, mothers also help the organization simply by doing what mothers do. That's because MADRE’s guiding principle is to “think like a mother,” which can also be practiced in a wide variety of situations like policymaking and international diplomacy. Let's turn it back over to Diana for more on how a maternal approach can inform activism and policy.
Diana: We're living through a historical moment that has made it increasingly impossible to ignore one point, which is that the way we care for each other and for our planet is crucial. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown this to us, and certainly the climate crisis has shown this to us. So we have an opening to learn that lesson, to put an ethic of care at the heart of our own lives at the heart of our policies. But it's been too easy to dismiss that reality, in large part due to gender discrimination and the devaluing of care work, which is often performed by mothers, by women and girls. And that is truly a missed opportunity, especially as we seek ways to make a just transition to more sustainable and renewable economies. So for example, the conversation about green jobs. MADRE is part of a coalition for a Feminist Green New Deal. And one of the things we've been pushing in that space is the need to recognize care work as some of the greenest lowest-carbon work that there is. And this recognition could help to guide policy to support and invest in a low-carbon economy while also bolstering the kind of work that fosters more healthy and resilient communities. So this principle of “thinking like a mother” means that we all—anyone who's plugged into the question of building a more climate-just world—can evaluate proposed policies and practices with questions like, does this reinforce the caregiving and healing capacity of our communities? Does this policy intervention enable our communities and ecosystems to heal and regenerate? And then we can chart a new path forward. At first glance, a lot of these simple daily acts of mothering—whether it's nursing, feeding, healing—it might seem like this is a personal, private family matter that does not belong in a policy discussion. But I'm also reminded of this decades-old feminist saying, which is that the personal is political. So “thinking like a mother” means that we can take these personal, fundamental truths, and work so that public policy can be oriented in support of that essential care work. Last month, U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry was confronted by Farhana Yamin, who's an environmental lawyer and climate negotiator, about whether the U.S. would be willing to give up obstructing efforts to set up a loss and damage financing facility. And this has been a growing demand, especially from countries of the Global South who've contributed the least to climate change and are experiencing some of its worst impacts. They've been calling for a facility with adequate funding to address the loss and damage of climate dangers that they're facing and to help rebuild. It has to be said that fairness and justice demands that the U.S. play a leading role in this, given that we have been the largest historical carbon emitter in the world and we've played an outsized role in creating this crisis. At the same time, Kerry's response was very dismissive. In short, he said that there weren't enough resources to fund this loss and damage, that the funding should be allocated elsewhere, and that furthermore he refused to feel guilty about it. That says a lot about the policy paradigm that he's starting from. So once again, “thinking like a mother” simply means seeing the world through the eyes of those who are most responsible for its most vulnerable people. It's in fact a choice. There's a choice in “thinking like a mother” and often policymakers don't make the right one. You know, sometimes we choose to prioritize a narrow sense of self-preservation that can leave others to their fates. With that, it shows that we need a course correction. Our global response to the climate crisis is our chance to reimagine our economies and societies in ways that are more just and more fair, and in all the ways that I've been suggesting. So there is hope there that I want to point to. So in short, U.S. policymakers can learn from these women, these mothers, these climate activists around the world, by opening space at the table for them and by learning from people like our partners who are organized and ready to provide policy recommendations that can lead to a more sustainable, effective and just climate policy. Finally, what's more—and this is a priority going into the upcoming COP session—the U.S. can reevaluate and drop its obstruction to loss and damage funding, which would go so far in rebuilding climate-impacted communities, and also in relieving and supporting the care work of mothers worldwide.
Dan: Here with us to talk about how maternal climate activism is playing out domestically, our next guest is Dominique Browning, Director and Co-founder of Moms Clean Air Force. Moms Clean Air Force is a nonpartisan, or mom-partisan, organization with a community of over one million moms and dads united against air pollution and climate change. Moms Clean Air Force focuses on both local and national climate policy through an expansive network of state-based organizers. Dominique is also an accomplished writer. She's the author of several books, and has contributed regularly to Time.com and The New York Times. Dominique, welcome to The Climate Conversation.
Dominique Browning: Thank you for having me.
Alison: To start off, how does motherhood define your organization's approach to effecting change? And do you think climate activism centered around parenthood can bring together people working towards a common goal?
Dominique: Motherhood is the basis of Moms Clean Air Force, and by that I mean first my own motherhood. I started Moms Clean Air Force about 12 years ago, and it was post Waxman-Markey—the defeat of the only significant climate legislation that Congress has ever faced in my lifetime. So it was right after the defeat of that and what I would call a general depression that settled over the environmental movement, and my two children growing up and leaving home. And I began to think a lot about, how am I still a mother? What am I doing to protect my children still, even though they are grown and don't need me protecting them in a day-to-day way? And I also began to read a lot of reporting on what went wrong with Waxman-Markey. And the most significant theme that came out was that no one had bothered to mobilize regular people. And nobody was really making an effort to engage on why we needed to care. At that time—12 years ago, it's hard to believe—but blogging was new, and there was an entire group that were referred to as “mommy bloggers” online. And I began to read them quite avidly to see what's going on with women and motherhood and where they are. There was an enormous amount of energy around keeping children safe and worrying about children's health, but all the solutions were pointed towards buying something. You know, you need to buy an air filter, or buy a BPA-free baby bottle, things like that. And nothing was pointed towards, what can we do to make systemic change? And so those two things—wanting to talk about these issues in a personal and relevant and accessible way, and harness that energy around children to a political and systemic change—and they were the way for me to keep sort of being a mother, in the sense of feeling protective and putting children front and center. A lot of the conversation around climate change was about polar bears, and I wanted to change the conversation from polar bears to people.
Dan: What are some of the top concerns that moms in your organization have regarding how climate change might affect children? Do you take solace in any of the provisions of the recent legislation that Congress has passed—the bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act—that you think might address these concerns, or begin to address these concerns?
Dominique: Enormous solace, and I will say that I feel like both the Infrastructure Act and the Inflation Reduction Act are the culmination of 12 years worth of work. We made legislators—we meaning moms, but also the entire community—made legislators understand that climate is an incredibly important issue. And with climate, I include air pollution, because if you get rid of air pollution, a lot of those pollutants are climate forcers, so it's all one. The reason I take both pride and hope from what was passed is that it is the single largest investment in fighting climate pollution. And a lot of our moms are living at the edge or very, very close to fracking fields, to the development of methane, and a lot of those fields are leaking. And when they leak, they not only leak methane, but the system leaks—from the hole in the ground, to the delivery—it leaks a lot of volatile organic compounds, heavy metals, horrible things that are cancer-causing agents. The tragedy is many of these leaks are fixable very easily, but you have to find them and you have to address them. And you have to understand it's important because children's health is being impacted. The same is true in the petrochemical area. You know, we have an entire part of this country that we have sacrificed to the petrochemical industry, and people are dying of childhood leukemia in the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and in Texas because of petrochemical pollution. So these are the kinds of things our parents are concerned about, worried about—everybody should be—and the bill that was passed now has a huge amount of money devoted to something called orphan wells. These are wells that have been left behind by producers, just left behind, moved on to something else. There are pipes sticking out of the ground, often they're covered with weeds and brush. People don't even know where they are, there's not even an accurate number, the number is probably 10 times what people are saying is out there. And when you go around—as some of our moms have done—with an infrared camera, it's shocking. It looks like a pipe sticking out of the ground, but it's spewing gases. So this bill has a lot of money in it to find those wells and cap them.
Alison: Maternal activism has been a heavier undertaking for Black, Latina, Indigenous, and other women of color faced with systemic racism, especially given the history of family separation in the United States. How do you see a climate movement centered around motherhood able to address some of these historical and ongoing inequities? And can you give some examples of how women of color, especially mothers, have been impacted differently by climate change than white women?
Dominique: I would agree with you that the fight in frontline communities has been much tougher than it has been elsewhere. However, it is people in frontline communities who have been fighting as hard as they possibly can for many, many years, and it's often mothers. They're not necessarily part of or reflected in the makeup of the big green organizations, they haven't been running them. But they are on the ground in communities fighting against pollution, and also trying to keep jobs, so it's a really, really tricky needle to thread. By definition, frontline communities are either low-income, people of color, people who are getting the full impact of pollution and of poisons in the air. And so therefore, they are severely hampered. And they're also dependent on jobs from these industries that are polluting them. So what I hope will evolve—and what I think is evolving—is much more awareness on the part of organizations that have a lot of money and a lot of resources to support one another, and raise up community engagement fights to a federal level, where action can be taken that covers everybody and that helps everybody. At Moms Clean Air Force, one of the programs I started about five years ago is called EcoMadres, and that is organizing in the Latina community. And that really started when we began working on mercury issues because there's a lot of culture around eating what you catch in Latina communities, and when that fish is laced with mercury, that's a really bad thing. And we found a lot of mobilization around that. So there we work with Latina communities on issues like asthma issues that have a huge bearing and that are getting much worse. You look at the Southwest and what's happening with dust and wildfire and all the other things that are triggers of asthma. It's really a problem.
Dan: Dominique, when you talk to moms and dads of little kids, what do you tell them? What advice do you have for them for how they talk about climate change, how they talk about the reality today, the solutions, and maybe hope for the future? And what do you say to moms and dads who want their kids to feel empowered that they can become part of the change when it's their chance?
Dominique: It's such an important question. And how do you do that without depressing people and without frightening people beyond what they can absorb? That said, it's quite amazing, the level of compassion and empathy children have and the level of understanding of fairness and what's right and what's wrong. So the first thing I'll say, in talking to parents—or people who are thinking about becoming parents—I interviewed a climate scientist, Michael Oppenheimer, he said to me, “It is arrogant to think that you know what's going to happen.” So I refuse to go there. I want to be open to the possibility that either miracles will happen, or genius technological solutions will happen, or cultural shifts against waste, plastic will happen, things like that. So I try never to say, if you don't do this, it is a disaster. At the same time, we do need to get parents focused on this in order to protect their children. I have a six-year-old grandchild, and we were looking at a picture book about the ocean recently, and there was a section thankfully about pollution in the oceans. And there was a photograph of a plastic cup, and inside the cup was a crab, trapped, and it couldn't open its claws to get out. My grandson stopped on that picture and said, “This is terrible! It's so unfair to the crab.” And he just described what he was seeing in the picture and he followed the whole thing. “Why is there plastic in the water? Why is there a cup here? What can we do, Dotie?” And I think that's the kind of conversation where children are like, yes, let's pick up these dead balloons off the beach so that things don't get tangled up in them. So I think we can call on their compassionate nature. That picture is horrifying—we get older and we rush past those, but children see and they feel very deeply and they can be motivated to understand, you can do something about this.
Alison: I love that story about your grandchild, and I'd like to ask you a little bit more about your personal journey. In your experience, how has motherhood shaped the way you understand and engage with climate activism?
Dominique: Let me just first preface by saying I'm not a big believer in maternal instinct. I am a big believer in following wherever your passion is, and in my case, it is children and protecting the children. That's a moral compass for me—what does this do to our children? I am very aware at my stage of life that I will be leaving this plane and leaving it to future generations, and I really want to be able to say I did everything I could to leave the world a better place. And I know it sounds incredibly corny, but it is my moral compass. And it's a good thing that I have that too, because it's constantly renewing my love for my family, my love for my sons, my love for my grandchild. But it's also what gets me through these moments of just the top of your head blowing off because you can't believe a political leader just said what he said.
Dan: Well, I don't think that's corny at all, Dominique, I think that's very inspiring. And I'm 100% sure that everyone who listens to our episode today will find inspiration in it. And we really appreciate you joining us, sharing your perspective, telling us a little bit more about Moms Clean Air Force, and really appreciate you joining us today. Thanks so much.
Dominique: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.
Dan: Well, thank you, Alison, for putting together this really great program. Really interesting topic. I remember when I was looking at the list of days that you mentioned for COP27, this one stuck out to me, too. It's one that I'm eager to learn more about. And I think we had two just tremendous guests talking about, you know, where they find the inspiration to do their great work. I know one thing I was thinking of, especially listening to Dominique, was I have an eight-year-old. He has a rapacious appetite for small pieces of plastic that come with chicken nuggets and things like that. And something to think about, we talk about it actually at home quite a bit, which is, you know, we don't need to have everything we can see, especially when it just ends up going into recycling—or in the trash, even worse and probably more likely. So these are issues that you know even if you're not a mom—you’re a dad or an uncle or an aunt or friend or anyone—next time you come across kids and talk with them, pick up that they really are aware of a lot more than they let on. And my guess is that most of them are, at least past a certain age, probably starting to follow this issue and maybe even being concerned about it, and that means adults have to be prepared to talk with them about what can happen, what everyone can do, how everyone can pitch in, and why this isn't a lost cause. We have the time, if we're able to put the will together, to make a difference and advance climate solutions.
Alison: That's right. And what I really liked about this episode is that we're living at a time when thinking about motherhood can create feelings of uncertainty for a lot of women—partly because of climate change, also partly because of the debate surrounding reproductive health care. So this episode was super refreshing because of the way that we examined motherhood as a source of empowerment rather than a source of anxiety. And regardless of anyone's stance on Roe v. Wade, I think it's really important to start thinking about what it means to be a mother in this era of climate change, and how can we as a society support mothers moving forward? That really just boils down to empathy because a huge part of being a mom, or being a parent, is standing up for people who are too young, who don't have the life experience or the resources, to advocate for themselves. And that requires putting yourself in other people's shoes. If you liked this story, and want to learn more about EESI 's work related to environmental justice, head to our website at eesi.org. Also follow us on social media at @eesionline for all of our recent updates. The Climate Conversation is published as a supplement to our biweekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Go to eesi.org/signup to subscribe. Thanks for joining us, and see you next time!
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