This Sweet Earth: Walking with Our Children in the Age of Climate Collapse

By Lydia Wylie-Kellermann. Broadleaf Books, 2024. 173 pages. $18.99/paperback; $17.99/eBook.

Not too long after my first child (now five years old) was born, I began to understand the extent to which climate change was going to upend his life. As the crisis deepens, many people are waking up to this reality. Is it moral to bring children into a dying world? How do we prepare them for life in the age of climate collapse?

In her beautiful and poetic book This Sweet Earth, writer, activist, and mother Lydia Wylie-Kellermann shares a vision for the way humans can survive—and even thrive—in this challenging time of navigating not only a changing climate, but the breakdown of truth, democracy, and major institutions as well. How do we live with the grief that our children won’t have what we had? In 14 short chapters full of stories, poetry, and prayers, Wylie-Kellermann paints a vivid picture of the way she and her partner are raising their two sons to be able to face the specific challenges of being alive today: teaching them skills of feeling and metabolizing grief; helping them to get deeply rooted in their habitat, noticing the flora and fauna and falling in love with them, so that they will fight to protect their watershed; and learning with them how to get used to death by observing and participating in the cycles of nature.

Together they find joy in the midst of chaos; they lean hard into community, creating circular economies that prize reciprocity and relationships; and they seek to heal the disconnects that lie at the root of our willingness to let our planet and our kids’ futures burn. You can’t save what you don’t love, she tells us, and she shows us what love can do, both practically and spiritually. Her book is a manifesto, eminently readable, about embodying the changes that the world needs—and that we need as well.

Some of the lessons she hopes to impart to her children came to her from her own parents who modeled that justice work is essential to building a liveable future for all. She takes her children to community organizing meetings and protests; they watch their grandparents get arrested for civil disobedience. She doesn’t give in to the temptation to shield her kids from pain; she has learned to tell them the truth, to let their hearts break and to love them through it. We cannot protect our children from climate change; what we can offer them is the security of knowing that they are totally and completely loved.

She teaches her sons, on the one hand, to battle the systems of power that are wrapped up in the destruction of the earth; on the other hand, to cultivate their imagination and creativity to help build the new structures and society of a life-giving world. She surrounds them with rich community connections and teaches them joy as resistance.

Amidst all of this teaching, Wylie-Kellermann learns from her children as well. They have been raised intentionally to not feel separate from their ecosystem, to not forget, as so many Western folks have, that they are creatures. Through their eyes, she has been able to remember. They grow food, raise chickens, explore the wild areas of Detroit, bring home bones and feathers, and feed the birds. She describes lingering for hours in a park at night with one of her sons, watching a turtle laying eggs in the dark: a sacred pause. They partake of the abundance of nature together, making violet syrup from the blossoms growing in their lawn and gardening together. They learn to let the joy balance out the heartbreak.

“This is not the first crisis,” she reminds us. “This is not the first generation to face death. Through generations, folks have found it within them to choose life.”

Our children won’t have what we had, and she’s okay with that. “Maybe they will have something better! Maybe they will live more humanly, more connected to life and death, and more in relationship to the earth. That’s not a bad way to live.”

This book gave me hope for the future. It is beautifully written and inspiring, and a bit like falling in love with a new friend. Wylie-Kellermann is calling us to a new way of life: one that can heal us and the earth. Loving the earth, loving our children, she says, makes it “impossible not to fight like hell” to save them.

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Janaki Spickard Keeler is a writer, mother, family therapist, and lifelong Quaker. She stewards the Pendle Hill pamphlets series, serves her yearly meeting as coordinator of the Friends Counseling Service, and is a member of Chestnut Hill Meeting in Philadelphia, Pa.