Editor’s Note: If you’re new here, welcome! The regular content schedule will resume in August, but in the meantime, I’m excited to share the next installment of the letters series. This time I went to Sari Fordham of Cool It: Simple Steps to Save the Planet. Sari makes individual climate action feel doable. Her notes and newsletter offer practical, concrete steps any of us can take that actually fit into daily life. It’s the kind of work that we need more of. When I reached out and asked her to write a letter to the next generation in 2050, for this series, she wrote to her daughter. Read what she said. — Bridget

Dear K,

Do you remember the whales?

Well, duh! you say because even in adulthood we revert to our brattiest selves with our parents, but also because your childhood was a particularly whale-y one.

Before you were born--weeks after a miscarriage–your father and I drove to Baja to see the wintering gray whales. Throughout town, there were pictures of people petting whales, and I told myself that if I touched a whale, I would have a baby. How ridiculous we humans are! That afternoon, we got into a panga with an older couple from California, an Italian man, a Mexican driver, and his pregnant wife. The pregnancy was good for all of us, the Italian said, because whales are drawn to boats with children or pregnant women, a fact I have repeated many times, though never researched. The driver took us into the middle of the bay and then cut the engine. In the distance, grays jumped and spied, and I wondered why we were sitting so far from the action. Then, like the kind of miracle I had been hoping for, two whales materialized, a mother and her baby. Did you know that gray whales are the only wild animal that will intentionally bring their babies to humans? I haven’t researched that fact either, but I’ve seen it happen. The two whales swam back and forth under the boat, jostling it lightly, poking up their prehistoric-looking faces, and gazing at us. I reached out and reached out, as if my whole life depended on what happened next, and then, the baby surfaced, swam toward our boat, and for an instant, its nose brushed against my palm. Your father has this moment on film, and you’ve likely seen it. I was so purely happy in that moment, not ascribing anything to it, just completely enveloped in awe.

I’m writing you about whales, but I’m really writing to you about hope. Shortly after you were born, I read an article by an old environmentalist who basically said, ‘It’s too late to do anything now,’ and suggested we go out and live our best lives. Let the planet burn. I was devastated for a week, and then decided, Fuck that. Fuck every old man who gives up, and especially fuck the billionaires and corporations who know exactly what they’re doing and don’t care.

Your father and I lived as if our choices mattered. We got a heat pump, planted native plants, composted our food scraps, avoided plastic where we could, attended protests, and mailed letters to voters. And, of course, we took you camping and hiking, and the three of us watched whales. By the time you were twelve, you had seen humpbacks, minkes, and sperm whales. At Laguna Ojo de Liebre, you patted a gray whale who poked its head up to see you.

Laguna Ojo de Liebre is also called “Scammon’s Lagoon,” which is like calling Los Angeles “The City of Charles Manson.” Scammon was a Maine whaler who discovered the lagoon entrance in 1860 and killed so many gray whales that the water turned red. The mamas fought back, destroying boats and killing crew members and earning the nickname, devilfish.

I want to fight like that for you. Though for me, fighting means calling legislators and asking them to pass a plastic reduction bill. You deserve a world without plastic pollution, and so do the gray whales who are eating microplastics at astonishing levels. You’ve seen me do this work. You’ve drawn pictures for legislators and shouted “tell them you have a daughter” when I ask my representatives (yet again) to protect the environment. It’s slow work, and sometimes, the plastic industry feels too big to fail.

Once upon a time, though, half the global economy ran on whales. Whale oil was used in lamps, of course, but even after kerosene, humans kept hunting. Whale blubber was turned into margarine, pet food, fertilizer, paints, and even bombs during World War II. Gray whales in the Pacific were hunted down to around 250 whales and would have gone extinct if legislation in 1986 hadn’t outlawed the commercial hunting of whales. By then, humanity started caring about whales. I grew up with the slogan “Save the whales,” the way you grew up with the slogan “Save the bees.” Turns out, the world runs just fine without whale blubber.

As I write this letter, the world is in the middle of an energy transition. I’m hopeful the transition will lead to the end of fossil fuels, both as a source of energy and a source of plastic. I’m hopeful that you will read this letter and then pick up the phone (or whatever we’re using for communication) and tell me, Mama, the world is running just fine without oil.

I don’t write with the kind of magical thinking that once led me to think that if I touched a whale, I’d have a baby. No, my hope is sturdy and ferocious. I believe that if we all show up and keep pushing against environmental problems, we can create a better world. Nature will do her work. She is good about healing the wounds we have created. We, however, have our task before us.

With all the hope in the world,

Your Mama

Sari Fordham is a writer, professor, mother, and environmental activist. Her memoir, Wait for God to Notice, narrates her childhood growing up in Uganda. Follow her on Substack, where she writes Cool It: Simple Steps to Save the Planet, a newsletter for busy people who care about climate change but aren’t sure what to do.

What actually makes travel “sustainable” for families? Is it possible, or are we just greenwashing our vacations?

I can still remember going to the post office with my mom at 12 or 13 to get my first passport. It was scary and thrilling; the whole world felt available. I want that for my kid, too.

But travel — especially air travel — comes with a cost that’s hard to square with everything else I’m trying to do. A single flight from the U.S. West Coast to the East Coast produces at least one metric ton of carbon dioxide. The average American already generates roughly 15 metric tons a year. Aviation accounts for around 2.5 percent of global emissions, and it’s growing faster than any other form of transport. Flying is also deeply unequal: in the U.S., just 12 percent of people take 66 percent of flights.

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So what do we actually do with that?

Go off the beaten path: This one is hard, especially when dictated by the school calendar, but if you can, consider the time of year and where you’re traveling. Can you travel during the off-season or to a less-popular destination?

Choose local, plant-based meals: You can significantly reduce your travel footprint by opting for local, plant-based meals.

Opt for public transportation: Traveling to your destination by train or bus can be impactful. And remember to think about how you’ll get around once you arrive at your destination. Can you take public transportation instead of hiring a car or taking a big tour bus? Or can you rent or borrow a car from a local family for a day or two when you need one?

Be resource-conscious: As you do at home, switch off the lights, keep showers short, and avoid plastic by packing a tote bag and a reusable water bottle.

Stay longer: When my daughter was 2, I started taking her on a month-long summer trip. I picked a destination; one year, we would fly, and the next, we would drive. Now this isn’t feasible for everyone, but staying in one destination for an extended period, something that’s known as slow travel, longer trips instead of multiple smaller ones not only reduces the carbon emissions associated with getting to and from destinations, but also during the stay as it reduces turnover emissions at a hotel or rental, and more extended stays may also benefit local economies more than small ones.

Be mindful of your surroundings: Be conscious of your impact on local communities, such as where you stay. For instance, many short-term rentals are pricing people out of homes. At the same time, major hotel chains often send more money out of communities in a process known as tourism leakage. Look for locally owned guesthouses or independent, locally owned hotels, and extend that mindfulness to your day-to-day activities.

Fly less: There’s no way around it. To travel sustainably, we need to fly less frequently. Yes, work is underway to adopt sustainable aviation fuels and new technologies, including electric planes. In the meantime, we still need to reduce our flights whenever possible. Some activists, like Greta Thunberg, have given up air travel entirely, and others have signed no-flight pledges. I can’t see myself doing that, but it’s worth thinking through how necessary flying is to get to a trip and how necessary the trip is. Don’t be fooled by “carbon offsetting.” It’s a band-aid over a much bigger problem, designed more to make us feel better than to actually do good.

None of this makes travel carbon-neutral, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But it’s how I think about attempting to be more mindful of the costs of travel.

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Emily, a domestic tabby that our local library ended up with after a patron found her on the streets on a rainy night as a kitten, was the library cat when I was growing up. One of my earliest memories of the library is helping to bottle-feed the cat after hours, courtesy of a librarian who also happened to live near my parents and asked them if I’d like to help. Emily spent her whole life at the library, curled on windowsills, joining storytimes, belonging to everyone. My kid never met her but knows all about her. Today, our library—housed in an Old Captain’s Mansion, which, yes, is as good as it sounds—has two new cats that are only allowed upstairs, and my daughter, like most people in town, makes a point of saying hello when we visit the library. There’s also an edible garden out back, free for the taking in warmer months. I grew up with the library quietly in the background of my life, and I love that it’s the same for my own kid now.

At its core, a library is a vision of what community can look like. You borrow, you return, someone else borrows. The garden gives. The cats belong to no one and everyone. And lately I find myself thinking about that vision in the context of raising kids who are inheriting a world in a climate crisis—kids who are being asked to understand something enormous, and how books can play a role in that.

Which is what led me to Martha Meyer, a library assistant at Evanston Public Library and the founder of the Blueberry Award, which celebrates nature books for kids; Elizabeth Bird, the Collection Development Manager at Evanston Public Library; and Patricia Newman, an author of children’s environmental nonfiction books. They recently presented “Crush Climate Anxiety: Use Our Librarian Superpowers to Support Kids’ Love of Nature and Eco-action!“ at the American Library Association Conference in Chicago.

The Blueberry Award recognizes nature and climate books with a focus on how books make kids feel. Martha realized that many writers, editors, and publishers working in the environmental space, while often well-intentioned, are not versed in the research coming out of environmental psychology on how children process climate information and what actually helps them engage rather than shut down.

“The idea is that we could support sustainability by using our core strength — book selection,” Martha says. I love that. For too long climate solutions work has been seen as niche whereas really we need everyone working on it in their own way, but that’s a newsletter for another time, maybe.

What to Look for in a Nature Book for Kids

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And before I respond I’ll take a moment to remind myself that bordeom is not somthing I need to fix for her. It’s not something you need to fix for your child either.

Between the whining, the desire to keep them off screens, and all the summer day trips and bucket-list TikToks, the pressure to keep kids occupied always to intensify in the summer. As if we’re not good parents if our kids utter the phrase “I’m bored.” And yet, boredom is a gift we can give our children, one essential to raising climate-resilient adults.

When kids are bored, the brain’s Default Mode Network (DMN) activates. It’s the system responsible for daydreaming, imagination, and reflection, and it’s during mental wandering that the brain makes creative connections and problem-solves in the background. Teresa Belton, a researcher and author of Happier People Healthier Planet, has spent years studying this link, arguing that boredom is crucial for developing what she calls “internal stimulus”—the capacity that makes genuine creativity possible.

The benefits go beyond imagination. Studies show that children who regularly avoid boredom tend to have weaker emotional regulation skills. Sitting with the discomfort of having nothing to do is one way kids learn to manage themselves. And clinical psychologists and educational specialists at the Child Mind Institute point out that boredom helps children build tolerance for less-than-ideal experiences, develop planning, problem-solving, and flexibility—abilities that kids with highly structured lives often lack.

Without a planned activity, adult direction, or screen time, studies show that kids will actively try to resolve the feeling by asking someone to play or by initiating a new activity on their own. In other words, boredom can act as a signal that pushes children to explore their environment. Often that means noticing the natural world around them: the poppies unfurling over days, the spiderweb glistening in the corner of the porch, the ant trail snaking across the driveway, the sound of crickets starting earlier than last summer.

These small, simple encounters are the foundation of ecological literacy—the kind that starts not in a classroom but in the heart. Boredom creates space for that relationship to blossom. And in the face of the climate crisis, raising children who feel connected to the natural world is one of the most powerful things we can do.

Boredom, or rather, the choice to allow it, is a small act of resistance against the hyper-consumerist culture that fuels the climate crisis. Yes, that might be a stretch, but think about it. So much of the “summer fun” industry is built around spending: tickets, gear, food. None of those things is bad in moderation, but they reinforce the idea that fun must be bought and scheduled. Choosing boredom disrupts that. It says, “We can make our own fun, with what we already have, right here.”

It redefines fun as something they can create rather than consume.

How I practice it

I do not ban activities. We create a summer bucket list. My daughter has participated in several camps, which I need as a working parent, and as an only child, she needs time with people her age. Plus, we take a vacation with days jammed packed with activities. However, I leave chunks of our summer calendar blank by scheduling a week of camp, followed by a week of nothing, mostly on repeat. I realize that might not work for everyone, but the idea is you have to almost schedule boredom.

During those moments when my daughter does flops into the chair saying, “I’m bored,” I respond with a question: “Hmm, what could you do to fix that?” Note if your child is used to you solving their boredom, you’re going to have to practice this one. You can also try: “I know you’re bored, and you want me to fix it…but you are capable of fixing it.” 

Often, my kid will sulk for a few minutes before figuring it out. She’ll wander outside to pick flowers for potion making, pull out the dress-up bin, or sit down to draw cats in her sketch book. Psychologists call this “self-directed play” or play initiated, led, and sustained by the child, essential for developing executive function, resilience, and independence. In a world where so many forces compete for our kids’ attention, letting them get bored is like handing them the keys to their own minds.

Of course, boredom doesn’t mean no rules. At a picnic beach concert last summer, my daughter and a friend came over to say they were bored. We told them to find something to do, “Go play, but remember the rules: stick together, no going in the water without a known grown-up, and no touching wildlife.” That wildlife rule was added after the previous week, when they’d discovered an opossum along the trails and, out of curiosity, tried to poke it with a stick. A reminder that “self-directed” doesn’t mean “completely unsupervised.”

I’m also not anti-screen. Our unscheduled summer weeks make it easier to use them more intentionally, as tools rather than defaults. One day last summer, on a no-plans day, my kid wanted to learn more about dreams and asked if she could watch something about them. After a couple of educational programs on dreamcatchers, she turned the iPad off on her own to make and decorate a dreamcatcher.

By letting her be bored, my kid learns that boredom isn’t a problem she can’t solve, it’s a starting point. Finding a solution to her boredom flexes her problem-solving skills and nurtures her curiosity, things I believe are essential for raising climate-resilient children. 

A summer of unstructured moments where time seems to slow and the air is full of the possibility of adventure even if it’s just in the backyard, is the summer I want for her and myself. That summer air smell.

~ Bridget

Published: New work in Martha Stewart Living on floral drinks.

Writing: Currently working on a bunch of June stories for Martha Stewart Living, including one on wild oysters, another on fermented foods, and another on air fryers.

June Reading List: The First Time I Saw Him by Laura Dave, Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver, and When The Forest Breathes by Suzanne Simard.

Summer Publishing Note: I have traditionally not published this newsletter in July and sometimes in August to give myself a break during the summer. This year, I have some newsletters in the works, although for those paying attention, the schedule and even content may look different than normal.

To my daughters in the year 2050,

It’s 2050, which means you’re both in your early-to-mid 30s. I’m writing you guys this letter in 2026 for two reasons: to share some thoughts about living wisely and well on our one precious Earth, and to remind you how much I love you. I know I said I love you a lot when you were kids–so much that by age 8 Isabella started rolling her eyes ☺–but, well, I guess I wanted you to have it in writing. It goes without saying that I hope this letter is redundant, and that in 2050, I’m very much alive, with my dad jokes still popping, but some things are out of our control.

When I imagine you guys in 2050, my first hope is that you both have lives thick with connection, joy, and meaning. That’s the foundation of a good and fulfilling life, and I want to say three things about it. First, there’s no step-by-step instructions for how to build one. It’s different for everyone. Figuring out what a joyful, meaningful life looks like for you is the defining challenge of adulthood. (We haven’t talked much about this as of 2026, but we will when you’re older.) Second, living a fulfilling life doesn’t mean avoiding struggle and suffering. Pain is an inherent part of life. You can’t avoid it. What you can do is build a community of people who will support you through it, just as you support them in their hard times. Third, real community and connection emerge from obligations. Marriage is one kind of chosen obligation. Community, with its intertwining proximity, is another. It’s a paradox that restricting our own freedom generates meaning and joy, but it does.

It’s notable how far I’ve gotten into this letter before even mentioning climate change. It reflects the truth that climate change matters because people matter. Hotter biospheric temperatures don’t threaten the planet, after all. The Earth itself will be just fine in a million years. It’s human society and civilization that’s at risk.

Sitting here in 2026, I’m honestly not sure what to say about tackling climate change. Not because there’s nothing to say, but because you know it already. We have to stop burning coal, oil, and gas, cutting down forests, and doing all the other things that are increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s endlessly frustrating because we already know how to do it. Progress has lagged because the oil companies hand-picked politicians, our information sphere sowed distrust, and factionalism drove people to side with elites who lied to them.

My generation tried to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but we came up short. I hope and pray your generation will do better.

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In addition to doing what you can for humanity, I strongly encourage you both to factor climate risk into your big life decisions. Nowhere is completely safe from climate change, but some places will be far better off than others. The list starts with the Great Lakes region, non-coastal New England, and upstate New York, but it also includes other areas. Try to build your lives in one of these places. And prioritize resilience when choosing a community and a specific home.

In the same vein, please avoid building your lives in a climate-vulnerable area. In 2026, coastal Florida is still thriving. By 2050, it no longer will be. And by 2075, it will be in decline. If life or work beckons you to a climate-vulnerable place for a period of time, rent a home there instead of buying one.

It’s often clarifying to think about climate resilience in financial terms, like home values, but there’s a lot more than money at stake. For example, a child who grows up in a climate-vulnerable area will see her “kid home” gradually decline in a feedback loop of climate damage, economic disinvestment, and social decay.

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Having said all of that, let me add something to temper it. Your lives are not a climate resilience optimization problem. It’s not a graded assignment. The rewards of climate resilience include picnics untainted by wildfire smoke, uneventful insurance renewals, and kids running through sprinklers unconstrained by water shortages. Climate resilience matters because it’s quietly life-enhancing in countless little ways.

And that matters because, as we said, it’s really life that matters. Living richly and fully, connected to neighbors and loved ones. Loving and supporting others and relying on their love and support. The ebb and flow of a rich life.

Wherever your lives take you and whatever happens, mistakes and all, I love you both more than anything, and I always will, Dad.

Ethan Fletcher is a realtor in New York’s Hudson Valley, focused on climate resilience, tracking how worsening extreme weather is transforming the housing market and our communities. Follow him on Substack and learn more about his work at ClimateResilientHomes.com.

How do you handle guilt as a mom with a young kid living in the climate crisis? I know some people say, “The kids will figure it out.”

This is a question I get a lot. And honestly, I hate the response that future generations will solve this problem. It shouldn’t be their job to solve it. It shouldn’t be ours either.

My values aren't going to change whether or not we were living in this time or a time when we didn't have to worry about it — my values are still going to be the same. So I'm going to figure out how to live them to the best of my ability in a world that sometimes makes it very difficult to do that unless you have unlimited money. In that sense, I don’t focus a lot on guilt.

I also think it would be a little arrogant of me to think that I know what the future is going to be. So I really focus a lot more on: how do I create joy in my day-to-day life? How do I create it in my daughter’s life? How do I raise her to be a good person?

~ Bridget

Day one — The glacier might be one of the most accessible in the United States. I’m not sure if that’s a good thing. Of course, even if seeing it only involves a 1.5-mile easy hike, you still have to make it to Cordova first, which is not on the road system, a fun phrase I learned on the way from the airport.

The icebergs in Sheridan Glacier Lake have sp…

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Wild, the poppies came with the house. They appear in roughly the same spot in the yard each year, but where exactly and how many is always a mystery until the first stems appear.

I suppose if I were really dedicated to native gardening, I would have removed them by now. While they are not invasive, the corn poppies in our yard don’t provide the same ecosystem benefits as native plants, having arrived in the U.S. likely as an accidental weed seed from Europe. Yet, I love them. Their seeds can survive for 100 years, so I can’t help but feel they are a connection to the past. To the people who stewarded our land before us. They also need soil disturbance to grow, which is why they so often show up in farm fields or, in our case, a front garden my child dug in as a toddler. It was a COVID spring when we first noticed them, and she delighted in finding them, pulling them up, and spreading the seeds around.

They force us to slow down and notice. We have to appreciate them where they are, as they don’t make for cut flowers, and if you miss the bloom, which only tends to last a few days, they’re gone until next year. The noticing that is required is a gift. A skill that I want my kid to carry with her in a world that will constantly try to rush her.

The conditions for noticing have never been worse. Kids today spend more time indoors than any previous generation. Their hours outside of school are increasingly scheduled, structured, optimized—music lessons, organized sports, art classes. Unstructured time, the kind where a kid might end up staring at a flower bud for 10 minutes or watching an ant walk across the sidewalk, has become a luxury. And that’s before we even get to the screens, designed by people specifically to capture our attention in a fast, fractured way that moves too quickly for us to really notice or think thoughtfully about anything.

Yet raising kids to notice is one step toward raising kids who care enough to act. As Meghan Fitzgerald, who has a whole Substack on raising kids to own their attention, recently wrote “attention is the ground on which everything is built. Love. Care. Experience. Any and all impact we make.”

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Attention, especially attention to nature, is so so so beneficial for kids and adults. A 2016 randomized controlled trial tested what researchers called the “Noticing Nature Intervention,” which involved simply paying attention to everyday nature and noting the emotions that arose. Participants showed increases in positive affect, hope, and feelings of connectedness. Studies also show that children who feel connected to nature are often happier and more likely to share and develop strong friendships than children who are not, and that children and adults who spend time outdoors are more joyful, content, and less anxious.

The world our kids are inheriting will ask a lot of them. Too much, honestly. I think a lot about the things the planet needs us and them to do. Compost, for instance, or understand carbon footprints, but they aren’t going to care about those things unless they care about the world. The planet needs people who not only notice and understand when something is wrong but who feel it personally enough to do something about it.

Which is where it gets tricky, right? We need systemic change to address the climate crisis, and it is not our responsibility or that of our children to solve it. Nor is it even possible for us to fix it, and we have to accept that reality—and help our kids accept it too. But acceptance isn’t the same as helplessness. Kids who grow up noticing the world around them have something to hold onto. They know their particular patch of ground. They’ve watched things change and come back and change again. That rootedness is a form of resilience. And there’s agency that comes from paying attention, from knowing what’s actually there, from caring about something enough to act when it matters.

Cultivating a kid who notices takes intention, but it doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as spending time checking whether poppies have bloomed, or taking a pause outside to ask what your child hears or sees. I like hear, as we tend to be so visually focused these days (screens again), or noticing the red bird that visits the yard. But you have to slow down enough to do it.

Everything around us is designed to fracture our attention. The algorithms are not interested in whether the poppies have bloomed. But we are.

~ Bridget

P.S.: A few other things …

Published: New work in Martha Stewart Living on sourdough bread. Plus, for North Star Monthly, how to create a kid-friendly garden (and why you should) and all about mud.

Writing: Currently reporting a story for USA Today on what losing a pet teaches kids and how parents can help them through it, and another story for Martha Stewart Living on why floral flavors keep popping up in coffee beverages and cocktails.

Reading: A Frog in the Fjord - One Year in Norway by Lorelou Desjardins which I picked up at a book swap, Leave big tech behind! How to replace Amazon, Google, X, Meta, Apple – and more which might be a summer project, What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? and Should schools get rid of homework? Some educators are saying yes both of which are things I’m thinking about as part of my board of education duties. I’m fascinated by this bit of good news: light pollution in France dropped sharply between 2014 and 2022 and also love seeing research I’ve written about show up on Substack.

Thank you for reading! Tapping the ❤️ button helps this newsletter find new readers.

What are some ways to foster a sense of connection with nature in my child?

Fostering a connec…

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I understand the community aspect, and if that’s something you find inspiring, that’s genuinely great. And yes—the fact that they piss Trump off is something I do appreciate. But I think your daily actions matter a lot more than showing up to a protest once every couple of months. That’s the part I haven’t quite figured out how to reckon with.

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There’s a French architect who said something in an interview years ago that has stayed with me: we can save the past, or we can save the future, but we can’t do both.

There are places we’re going to lose. Things we’re going to lose. But we also have to be willing to lose our entire way of life if we have any real hope of changing the future.

A few days before the protest, I was planning to take my kid to a poster-making party. I almost went until someone sent an email to the group suggesting we use AI to help design the posters. I couldn’t do it.

While I’m sure if I had voiced objections the group would have had a thoughtful discussion about the use AI, it’s exhausting being the person who has to say, “Can we just use our brains? So we stayed home. But it got me thinking about what resistance actually looks like on an ordinary Tuesday and whether our daily choices point in the same direction as the values being put on the ‘gram at a protest.

That poster party email wasn’t just an aesthetic objection, though I do think there’s something sad about outsourcing creativity to a machine at a gathering meant to be about human expression. Nor were my objections just about my child’s exposure to AI, although there’s more and more research that makes me think it is vital to protect our children’s brains from AI for as long as possible. But the companies building these tools—OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta—have funneled enormous amounts of money into the current administration. The same administration people were making posters to protest. Using their products to resist them isn’t neutral. It’s funding the very war you’re protesting. And I admit to being guilty of it too. I use Google Docs almost daily, and while I’ve briefly considered divesting from Google, it’s felt too overwhelming to start. I know that feeling in itself is intentional.

The push to make AI feel indispensable—that you need it to write an email, design a poster, think through a problem—is itself a political and economic project. It’s not a convenience. It’s a business model built on making you feel isolated and less capable, while quietly extracting your data, your creativity, and your dollars.

Amazon is the same story, just further along. It has hollowed out local economies, crushed independent bookstores and small retailers, and led to a media landscape where Jeff Bezos can simply decree that The Washington Post’s opinion pages will now exist to defend, in his words, “personal liberties and free markets.” Billionaire-speak for deregulation and the freedom to pay warehouse workers poverty wages while they injure themselves meeting impossible quotas. Katharine Graham was a childhood hero of mine. I read her autobiography in high school. For fun. (I was that kid). And later her book on the city I would call home in college. It’s not lost on me that she made The Washington Post the paper it was, oversaw it during the Watergate scandal, and that a man destroyed her paper in basically a decade. That was a business strategy.

And yet plenty of people who were at those No Kings protests have Amazon Prime and use it constantly. I’m not saying that to shame anyone. There are real accessibility reasons people rely on it, and breaking up with Amazon is genuinely hard when it’s been engineered to be the path of least resistance. But we should at least be honest about the contradiction. We cannot buy or optimize our way out of this.

A climate researcher I spoke to for my book put it plainly: he’d spent fifteen years working on green energy, efficient buildings, mass transit—all the things we think of as solutions—until a piece of research stopped him cold. No matter how fast we build the green infrastructure, he said, we can’t keep up as long as our culture stays focused on more and more stuff. The rate of consumption just keeps outpacing everything else.

Even the most eco-conscious among us often live in ways that contradict what we actually believe. And the place to start untangling that isn’t at a protest. It’s being more intentional on an ordinary Tuesday.

Slow the scroll. Before you add something to your cart, wait a week. You’ll be surprised how often you no longer want it. Years ago, a friend suggested that for home renovations, she only bought things she could find locally or order from a local store. I don’t always manage that, but it changed the way I think about shopping. When I first started trying to break up with Amazon, I set a rule: purchases once a month, max. If I missed my window, I had to find it locally or decide whether I really needed it.

Shop your house first. It’s finally starting to feel like spring, which makes it tempting to buy new clothes for the season. But what do you actually need? What has your kid outgrown that could be passed along rather than replaced? I haven’t bought a new swimsuit in eight years. My old one fits, I wear it for two months a year. Starting there —with what you already have—changes the question entirely.

Limit or break up with social media. Last summer, I took a break and found I didn’t miss much. I’m fine not knowing the latest whatever. And when I’m not on social media I don’t feel the need to buy a new swimsuit or garden lights or whatever else I’m seeing. Plus, when I skip a friend’s vacation photos, I get to ask about the trip in person or over the phone—and hear them actually light up talking about it.

Say no to AI for creative tasks. Writing a wedding toast, designing a poster, brainstorming with your kid—these are exactly the moments worth protecting. The struggle is the point.

Buy used when you can’t buy nothing. Secondhand is almost always the better choice—environmentally, economically, and politically. This is especially true for anything plastic.

Talk to your kids about consumerism. Not to scare them or make them feel bad for wanting things, but to give them agency. With my own daughter, I’ve focused a lot on plastic—keeping it simple and honest: plastic is made from oil and gas, the same stuff that’s warming our planet, and once it’s made, it never really goes away. I frame it as something we can figure out together. What does she want to look for on labels? What would she choose differently next time? Kids can handle more truth than we give them credit for, as long as we give them something to do with it.

Show up for your neighbors. Spontaneously. Imperfectly. Without a platform involved. Our Vermont neighbor pulled us out of the mud last weekend—I’m sure he had other things he could have been doing. But we needed help, and he just did it. You can’t get that through AI or Amazon.

Here’s what I keep coming back to, and what I think the poster party email was really pointing at: we’ve been so atomized—as parents, as neighbors, as people—that we’ve forgotten how to do things together without a platform mediating it. We’re used to outsourcing: to Amazon, to algorithms, to AI. And that outsourcing has quietly eroded the muscle we actually need right now, which is the ability to just be in community with each other.

The poster party, stripped of the AI email, was actually a good idea. People gathering, making things by hand, doing something creative and collective.

~ Bridget

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Familiar. The kind I grew up with—days off from school, hot chocolate and fried dough, boots by the door, snow that actually sticks around—snowbanks, taller than my childhood self.

Yes, the shoveling was a lot. Morning walks near impossible—parking at work a nightmare. At one point, the cold sent me into a small panic about frozen solar panel batteries.

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And still it was a gift. Getting to watch my kid experience it. Snow is mysterious to her. It has been a rare occurrence in her childhood. Until this year, she had had more school cancellations due to flooding than to snow. This winter, though, I got to experience her exuberance over the first flakes, her marvel at the piles bigger than her, watch her sled with the dog, help her gather up warm gloves from the radiator, and find seashells to use as eyes for a snowperson, see her understand the particular hush that falls over the neighborhood before a storm. Childhood is endlessly romanticized, but this part of motherhood was pretty special, too. Yet I can’t help wondering what will root itself in her memory as a “normal winter.”

Each generation understands the world they grow up in as normal. If snow becomes rare, children don’t mourn it. They don’t know to. They expect less of it. I expect snow because I grew up with it.

There’s a term for this: shifting baselines. The idea is that environmental decline is hard to detect because each generation calibrates to the world it inherits. What was devastated before you arrived simply looks like the baseline. You have no grief for the fish that were already gone, the forests already thinned, the winters already shortened, because you never knew them. Loss without memory isn’t felt in the same way.

This winter has made me think about the reverse problem. What happens when abundance is the baseline?

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My daughter made me take a photograph of her on top of a huge snowpile at the bus stop two weeks ago. “Next year, can we take another of me on top of a snowpile?”

Will this winter—at age seven, with its endless sledding days and boots that never fully dried—root itself into my child as her normal? And if it is, what then? Every thin, grey, snowless February that follows won’t register as the new reality. It will feel like a broken promise. A subtraction. She’ll spend winters waiting for the world to return to itself, not knowing that the world she’s waiting for may have been an anomaly all along.

That might be harder, in its own way, than not remembering. She’ll know exactly what she lost.

We are losing winter in slow, uneven ways. Not everywhere. Not all at once. But steadily enough that scientists have been documenting shorter snow seasons, more winter rain, ice that forms later and melts earlier. In many places, what I think of as an ordinary winter is already statistically unusual.

Grief mixed with anxiety. It’s what I often feel when I think about parenting in the context of the climate crisis. I wonder about what landscapes will anchor our children’s memories. What sensory markers will define “winter” for them? The smell of cold air? The weight of snow pants? Or gray, wet Februaries that feel like an extended November? When she asked about the snowpile, I said yes, but that I didn’t know if we would have that much snow next year.

Even if the future winters don’t measure up, though, I think my child will remember this one as magic. The kind of winter that sends kids flying down hills. That makes adults linger outside longer than they meant to. That transforms an ordinary street into a temporary commons. Years from now, I can imagine her saying, “Remember when I was 7, and it snowed every week?”

~ Bridget

P.S. A few other things:

Published: We have used our tagine so much this winter, and I’m glad I got to write this story for Martha Stewart: What Is a Tagine? And Why This Moroccan Classic Isn’t Just a Stew.

Writing: A story on children’s gardens for North Star Monthly, and a piece on wooden vs plastic cutting boards for Martha Stewart Living.

Reading: I have read less this past month, finding myself hitting refresh on the news tabs in my browsers too much: The girls in that school, the black rain. It’s too awful, and I’m so furious at the Americans who thought this was the better option than a woman as president. Yet, I did co-host a book swap last weekend and have a whole stack of new-to-me books I’m looking forward to. Before I start any of those, though, how cool is this: wildlife replacing historical figures on banknotes?

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In this conversation, school counselor and children’s author Jennifer Licate explains how anxiety shows up differently by age, why it’s so often misunderstood or minimized, and what actually helps kids feel safer in an unpredictable world. If a child’s worries seem bigger, or quieter, than you expect, this conversation will hopefully offer you language, perspective, and reassurance.

What are some of the biggest misconceptions adults have about anxious kids?

Jennifer: That being a kid is easy. Adults tend to romanticize childhood; we think of it as carefree and forget that their worries are real and meaningful to them, even if they seem small from an adult perspective.

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The ones who put their children on planes last summer and sent them here.

The ones who trusted us—people they didn’t know—to keep their kids safe.

At the university I work there is research to do, publications to write and grants to secure. But underneath it all—beneath what we say out loud—the only thing that truly defines a good day right now is a "no" to a single, devastating question: Have any of the students been abducted by ICE today?

That is not normal. And it is not abstract.

Since Trump took office for a second time in January 2025, more than 66,000 people have been detained, including more than 3,800 children under age 18, at least 20 of them infants. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has reported that the state doesn’t even know the number of children taken, where they are being held, or who they are.

To live in the United States in a time of rising authoritarianism is to ask whether we are willing to take responsibility for children who are not ours, and what kind of society we become if we refuse.

Somehow in the past decade or so, “I don’t like children” became an acceptable thing to say, as if we weren’t all children once. As if what’s really being said isn’t: I don’t want to be inconvenienced. I don’t want to have to care about other people.

I heard it a bit when I first started focusing on how the climate crisis is affecting kids and parents. The occasional utterance: “Oh, I’m not planning on having kids, so I don’t care about climate change.”

Climate chaos and authoritarianism have a lot in common; they coalesce around fear, exhaustion, and scarcity.

Whether we like children or plan on having them isn’t the point. To devalue children is a political failure. When societies decide that some people matter less, they normalize scarcity, conditional care, and the idea that protection must be earned. That logic does not stay contained. It ripples through families, neighborhoods, and entire communities. Children are often the first to feel the effects, and they are watching not just how we care for them but how we care for one another.

What children need in times like these isn’t to be sheltered from what is happening. I assure you, they already know or suspect something is wrong, no matter what we adults have tried to hide. They need age-appropriate information about climate change and politics, but they also need to know how to be with other people when things are uncertain. How to express fear without turning it into cruelty. How to listen. How to cooperate. How to stay in a relationship when conflict arises. And they need to learn how to set boundaries and stand up for themselves and others when faced with cruelty or injustice.

These interpersonal skills—communication, empathy, conflict resolution, emotional regulation—are not extras. They are the glue that holds communities together. They’re what make it possible for people to share resources, build trust, and take responsibility for one another when institutions fail or retreat.

The most recent climate research has begun to acknowledge this shift. Adaptation now matters as much as mitigation. But climate adaptation isn’t possible without resilient communities—and resilient communities aren’t built solely through policy. They’re built through habits of care, practiced over time.

Sometimes resilience doesn’t look like dramatic change. Sometimes it looks like habituation: people learning how to cooperate under new, even at times horrific conditions, how to communicate clearly under stress, how to resolve conflict without splintering. Those are learned skills. And they’re taught—explicitly or implicitly—to children every day.

I hate to break this to you, but it seems, given the conversations I’ve had with people over the past several weeks, it still needs to be said: things are never going back to normal, however you define that, in this country. Things will not magically change after the midterms or after the 2028 presidential election. The United States of 2016, or 2021, or even 2024 no longer exists. I need you to care about that. I need you to understand that. The kids in this country need you to start acting accordingly.

Community building is one of the most important climate-resilience skills. It is also one of the best defenses against authoritarianism. It is why what we’ve seen in Minneapolis is a master class.

Community doesn’t just appear during a crisis. Like meditation: you practice when things are calm so you can rely on it when things are hard. It needs to become muscle memory.

In October, some Minneapolis neighbors began gathering to start thinking about how to stand up to an authoritarian government. These were not organized groups, they were collections of neighbors throughout the city. They brainstormed, they dreamed, they started Signals. They continued to meet, and some handed out whistles alongside candy on Halloween. They made a point of reaching out to neighbors they didn’t know. They vetted who they let into their groups. When the invasion began, they were able to quickly create informal networks of care, offering rides to appointments, safer spaces for those appointments, childcare swaps, and coordinated school pickups. The distribution of food, winter gear, and other essentials through local businesses transformed into places of mutual aid. Anonymous groups fundraised to pay neighbors’ rents. At the heart of so much of this was a shared commitment to the kids in their midst, no matter who they were.

I’m not saying you have to start a Signal, although it’s not a bad idea, but you should if you haven’t already start thinking about how you care for the people in your community, how you can build a more resilient one, and how you can continue to practice those skills.

Here are a few ways to get started:

1. Take walks in your neighborhood. Say hi to everyone you come across.

2. Spend time regularly in third places. Seriously, become a regular at the local coffee place, or the local library, or the local restaurant.

3. Invite people over for dinner. It doesn’t matter if you think your house isn’t clean enough, or isn’t big enough. Just make extra of whatever you were already having and invite a few other people over. Do this once a week. Twice a month. Once a month. Just do it.

4. Check in with your local people. Do it regularly. Call, send a text, letter, what have you.

5. Host a swap. I’ll have a larger essay on this in a few months. But gather a few friends and invite everyone to bring a particular type of good they have in good condition, but they no longer use. Maybe it’s clothing, perhaps it’s books, maybe it’s small kitchen items that have sat gathering dust. Get in the habit of sharing resources.

6. Map resources. Where are the libraries, the cooling centers, the free fridges, coat libraries and food pantries, the safe public spaces, the adults kids can turn to when they need help? What is missing from your list? How can you help build what is missing?

7. Get comfortable with being uncomfortable. You have to ask for help, you have to show up, and you have to offer help even when it’s inconvenient, even when you’re busy. Even when it’s awkward.

Parenting in uncertain times isn’t just about protecting our own children. It’s about deciding—again and again—what we owe the children who live alongside them, and the ones who will inherit what we leave behind.

The most radical thing we can teach our kids right now is interdependence.

~ Bridget

Published: New work in Martha Stewart Living on hot chocolate debates and what food “best-by” dates really mean. Plus, for North Star Monthly, a look at whether heat pumps can really keep Vermont homes warm all winter.

Writing: Currently reporting a story on winter ice for North Star Monthly, and working on pieces about tagines, fibermaxing, and pulses for Martha Stewart Living.

Reading: They’re Coming For Our Daughters by Jessica Valenti, the AI-in-schools piece I needed from Miranda Rake, and I recently picked up What Sheep Think About The Weather by Amelia Thomas

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If you’d like to explore more first, here are some of my most popular posts:

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