As a mother and teacher, I’ve had a front-row seat to observe evidence of among teen girls in this country. I’ve taught environmental education at Warren Wilson College for more than two decades, but I’m not always sure how to support my students—or my 23 and 17-year old daughters—when faced with the realities of our climate crisis and the political obstacles to action, such as the recent approval of the Willow project for oil extraction on public lands in Alaska.

I’ve seen firsthand what author and researcher  at Stanford University calls  a phrase she coined to describe those confronted with a climate emergency they didn’t create, compounded by structural obstacles like racism and gender inequality. Yet Wray also calls for stories and community as a path toward purpose in real uncertainty.

So I decided to do something: I spent a year researching fifty women—one from each state in the country—who are taking action for climate justice. I talked to poets, scientists, farmers, teachers, community organizers and more. The stories became my book . What I found was that women are creating a road map through climate uncertainty with collaborative action toward a healthy, vibrant world for us all. This is a story I want my students and children to hear.

Worldwide, women and girls are disproportionately affected by the climate crisis, comprising . At its heart, climate justice is about access to a healthy environment for all.Ěý´ˇ showed the mental health impacts, including PTSD, anxiety and depression, from experiencing extreme weather events. Yet we also know that talking about climate may be one of the most effective things we can do to engage our neighbors, family, and friends around shared values, according to climate scientist

It turns out the  are worried about the climate, but most (63%) rarely or never discuss it with their family and friends. However, my own neighbors and friends do talk about dramatic weather events like droughts and floods linked to the climate crisis, as well as the first winter in our memory in these mountains without any snow. The  shows that talking about climate also reassures people they are not alone. The women I interviewed can attest to the power of imagining possibility together.

For example, filmmaker Dayna Reggero traveled to eight states to document conversations about climate and community: mothers fighting a natural gas blowout in California, sea level rise in Florida, and coal ash ponds in North Carolina. Through her , she worked with  to share the narrative of women from Stokes County, North Carolina—Black and white together—who fought fracking and the harmful effects of coal ash ponds on the health of their community.

“These mothers all care about children, their homes, and their community,” Reggero told me. “It gives them a connection and a common fight, sometimes even a common enemy.”

Likewise, I talked to Jacqui Patterson who worked with the 2,200 NAACP chapters across the country to tailor climate justice programs to regional needs, such as training people who’ve been incarcerated to work in the solar industry. She’s started the , a resource hub for building Black frontline leadership for climate justice.

“The weight of this work is amplified by the emotional pull of deeply caring for the people with whom I’m working, as they are my brothers and sisters,” she said.

If worrying alone made me overwhelmed, my conversations with these women made me feel a part of something larger than myself. Fifth-generation Montanan Grace Gibson-Snyder spoke about the intense smoke from wildfires in Missoula, as well as her role as one of 16 plaintiffs in the youth climate lawsuit —Held v. State of Montana—asserting the state violated their right to a clean and healthful environment. With Indigenous leader Bernadette Demientieff from Alaska, I heard how pressure on banks to divest from funding the fossil fuel industry could protect sacred lands and water.

In each case, I saw how the relationships between people and places created the power to imagine and act. As marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson said: “To me, it’s not a matter of joy or sadness or optimism or pessimism. It’s just a moral duty to be a part of the solution.” The title of her new book—?—poses a question my students don’t often hear from the media. In response to the Willow project, she also tweeted: “This fight is not over. See you in courts @potus.”

My environmental studies department in the Blue Ridge mountains uses the phrase “practical idealists” to describe how we want students to collaborate in this uncertain world, full of possibility. Of course, the fossil fuel industry is betting we the people won’t succeed, but I watch my students growing food, leading field trips for local schools, nurturing friendships from the ground up. And from these women’s stories, I see how working with others can sustain us with momentum, rather than paralyze us with anxiety. The question isn’t what can I do to confront the climate crisis, but with whom can I join together—right here and right now.

Click here to read an excerpt from Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice.

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With her feet rooted on the ground and her voice steady, Colette Pichon Battle seems to be the type of person most of us would want nearby in a crisis. When she speaks about climate change displacing millions, she uses measured words to describe strategies to dismantle structural racism, build alliances in community, and provide legal services for equitable disaster recovery. As I listen to , I’m reminded of a cheer from my high school in coastal Alabama: “Rock, rock, rock, rock, steady, eddy, eddy, eddy, rock! Rock steady.” So I wasn’t surprised to learn she describes her superpower as “seeing patterns in chaos,” an apt skill for the organization she founded, the Gulf Coast Center for Law and Policy, now called .

Working on the frontlines of climate disasters caused by hurricanes, sea level rise, and fossil fuel companies, she knows that recovery for industries has been quick, and recovery for communities has been slow. From Houston, Texas, to Pensacola, Florida, her work brings climate change to the community level, especially with women at the heart of neighborhoods and households.

“We found that the folks most willing to get to know each other were actually women,” she said in an interview with Reimagine. “When women talk about their communities, it’s sort of like women talking about their children . . . So a lot of the moral fabric and the moral movement of a family and of a community is done through the women.”

She and her staff used a meeting format called the People’s Movement Assembly, which involved Black, Latina, and Asian American women learning about each other’s lives and agreeing to reach a vision together. From there, groups of women followed through on actions, such as talking about the climate crisis and extractive industries with elected officials in Louisiana who needed the vote from people of color.

In Bayou Liberty, just north of New Orleans, Colette grew up in the house built by her grandfather, where her mother was born. There, water was a way of life: “The bayou is green and lush and all the things that equal bountiful life,” she told TED Radio, “But it is also watery and muddy. You can smell everything.”

She remembers the names of particular hurricanes along the Gulf Coast, much as I did growing up in Alabama. During the eye of the storm, family members would get into flat-bottomed boats called pirogues to check on neighbors before retreating to safety inside while the other band of the hurricane passed. But the water became unrecognizable given the severity of Hurricane Katrina. As an adult, Colette practiced law in Washington, DC, but after the destruction of Katrina, she vowed never to leave her beloved Gulf Coast again.

When she first saw the Louisiana flood maps at a community meeting, Colette says her life changed. The maps explained how the thirty-foot surge from Hurricane Katrina could flood her community as well as those in Mississippi and Alabama. She realized the land lost from sea level rise was the buffer to her own home—a buffer predicted to disappear. “I wasn’t alone at the front of the room,” she explained. “I was standing there with other members of south Louisiana’s communities—Black, Native, poor. We thought we were just bound by temporary disaster recovery, but we found that we were now bound by the impossible task of ensuring that our communities would not be erased by sea level rise due to climate change.

“I just assumed it would always be there. Land, trees, marsh, bayou. I just assumed it would be there as it had been for thousands of years,” she said. “I was wrong.” Knowing climate is predicted to displace more than 200 million people by the next century, Colette advocates for preparing for global migration by restructuring social and economic systems rooted in justice, such as investing in public hospitals before the impact of climate migration or additional storms like Hurricane Ida. It’s not like we don’t know what is coming, and Colette knows preparation is a life-and-death matter.

“Climate change is not the problem,” she said. “Climate change is the most horrible symptom of an economic system that has been built for a few to extract every precious value out of this planet and its people, from our natural resources to the fruits of our human labor.”

What holds clear and steady is her belief of what can be done now. “It’s already possible, y’all,” she often tells people, with the practical sense of someone who can get things done. Colette knows women who have the most to lose from climate disasters also know what it’ll take to plan for the future and anticipate the storm.

Reprinted with permission from Love Your Mother: 50 States, 50 Stories, and 50 Women United for Climate Justice by Mallory McDuff © 2023.

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