Safeguarding Hope

“Mommy-o, I can go outside?” my two-year-old son, Kai, just asked me, looking expectantly out our screen doors to the open air stretching out behind our home. Every day, he asks me this question after I bring him home from daycare. And every day, I’m grateful that my answer can be Yes.

You see, though we now live on my home island of Hawai‘i, Kai was born in Berkeley, California on September 9, 2020, the day the sky turned orange in the Bay Area.

I woke up that day knowing he’d be coming into the world. I had a 10 am appointment at the hospital. I remember opening my eyes and wondering if I had accidentally slept through the day because it was so dark, much darker than it should have been at 8 a.m. I went to the window and peeked through the blinds. Then, alarmed, I ran to the front door to get a better look from the courtyard of our apartment complex.

It was like someone had put a piece of fabric over a giant lampshade, and then thrown gray confetti everywhere. There was so much ash and smoke from the fires that had been burning through British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and Northern California for two weeks that it blocked out the sun and made the whole sky a deep and dark orange.

That’s when my phone started ringing. Friends and family were calling to reassure me: It’s okay, it’s not the end of the world. You have N-95 masks, right? Just try not to breathe the air on your way to your car; you don’t know what it’ll do to the baby.

You don’t know what breathing the air will do to the baby. Those words rang in my ears.

I remember wondering if this was really the world I wanted to bring this baby into. What about my other child, who was three at the time? We had already spent a few months each year keeping him inside while the AQI (air quality index) in our neighborhood soared. And what about the generations of children we haven’t even met yet? What kind of world are we leaving them? One where they can’t go outside, where the air is no longer safe to breathe, where we all speak this new language of AQI numbers while wearing masks?

Sometimes, in this work, the fear and urgency around the climate crisis get the better of us. For me, holding a Seven Generations perspective — an Indigenous framework and way of being that considers those who are not yet born but who will inherit the world — is both a challenge and a gift. I am grounded by the knowledge that the work I do is helping to create a thriving world for future generations. Yet I also recognize how much work that will require, and I know that time is running out.

It’s a tension I grapple with daily, and one that is soothed by my work with Women’s Earth Alliance (WEA), an Earth Island project that empowers grassroots women’s leadership to protect the earth, end the climate crisis, and ensure a just, thriving world. At WEA, we focus on hope, and the leadership of women around the world who are taking the energy and love behind their fears and transforming them into solutions that will bring us closer to that thriving future we envision.

Women like our colleagues in Indonesia. Around the time Kai was born, WEA leaders in Kalimantan were mobilizing to address the forest fires that had been burning across their region, causing orange skies and toxic air for four months straight. Knowing what the loss of their forests — the “lungs of the world” — would mean for future generations, and what each day of noxious haze meant for the long-term health of their own children, these mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters had trained themselves and the youth in their communities to become forest protectors and firefighters.

That’s just one example of the power of safeguarding hope for our future generations, and it’s one that builds my own resilience in this work and our movement.

That resilience serves me as an advocate, a leader, and as “Mommy-o.” Because at the end of the day, I am accountable to my children, and to the generations that will come after them. One day, those generations — through the mouths of my grandchildren — will ask me what I did to create change before the window for change ran out. And I want to be able to say that I held onto hope for a better world, and I worked to make that world a reality.