Lydia Millet’s Long View

It’s easy to be selfish. Sure, the planet is warming, species are going extinct at unprecedented rates, and marginalized communities are disproportionately impacted by climate change. Yet, given the economic structure of modern life in countries of abundance, individual choices simply don’t carry the significance we often hope they will. So, there can be a tendency to feel absolved of personal responsibility. Is my willingness to compost really going to change anything? Is a 10-minute shower really that much worse than a five-minute one?

Then one has a child, and suddenly it’s hard not to consider the wider web to which these seemingly small actions are connected. At least, that was the case for acclaimed novelist and National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lydia Millet, who explores the onrush of existential concern sparked by our offspring with pathos and lucidity in her recent memoir We Loved It All.

“Nothing held me captive. If any friction slowed me down it was only the icy burn of atmosphere,” Millet writes of that more-selfish time in her life before kids. With perhaps a touch of wistfulness she adds, “It was the freedom of having nothing to risk but myself.”

Procreating, however, means having a greater stake in what is to come. Warns Millet: “When you turn into a mother you lose the power of coldness. Lose it for good, as it happens. You never get it back.”

This may come across as dire, coldness elevated to power. Millet is not one to put a veneer on our circumstances, or the way her own personal trajectory has led to a reinterpretation of them. One of the startling aspects of her book is the way she shifts between objective assessment of our current predicament to unabashed appreciation for the creatures amongst us — the “beasts,” as she calls them, out of reverence for their “exquisite strangeness”— to a subjective, emotional view of her own complicity in their undoing.

In an email, Millet described her book to me as “a memoir-y thing about animals and children and extinction.” She meaningfully weaves these together. Through parenthood, Millet recognizes the full arc of her relationship with beasts, people, and planet. After all, as she notes in her book, “personhood is built out of narrative units.” This same tendency towards individual narrative-construction has also placed humanity at the center of its own epic, thereby objectifying and subjugating anything outside the sapien realm. But kids don’t see it that way, and perhaps, she suggests, that worldview should be embraced.

“The way many children respond to animals — not only with curiosity and delight, but also with a sense of companionship and instinctive solidarity that tends to disregard or minimize the boundaries between species — has an experiential authenticity that should inform the perspectives of biological inquiry instead of being dismissed,” she writes.

This is not to say that Millet believes a childlike approach offers any sort of solution to the climate crisis. Her master’s degree in environmental economics and her work as an editor and writer at the Center for Biological Diversity in Tucson since 1999 have given her a clear-eyed view of the present. Her memoir is chock-full of the kinds of astute analysis and fascinating minutiae one might expect from someone steeped in conservation work. For example, she notes, in 2018 Americans spent $490 million dollars on Halloween costumes for their pets, more than the federal budget for protecting endangered species. That year, the US Fish and Wildlife Service budget for “ecological services,” which entails species protection, was $225 million.

What Millet does suggest, ultimately, is that if we are to define our world through narratives, and utilize our powers of introspection wisely, our connection to the next generation might be a thread that helps us tell new stories. “What if we said: our parenthood is not the lonely consecration of our own, of what has emerged from us, but also of the many they depend on?” she asks. “What if we turned, in a dawning instant, and saw ourselves for what we are — the parents of the world to come?”

This question has stayed with me, as a parent who, like so many others, often feels caught between the countless tasks of daily life — from diapers to meal prep to bath-time to bedtime — and the sinking weight of a biologically barren future. Millet is able to reckon with extinction not by decrying procreation but by embracing the vantage it offers. It is an ability I hope to emulate, for a future I hope to help write.