'Changing the texture of the world one inhabits'
5 questions for Pulitzer Prize finalist author & climate creative Elizabeth Rush
As you may have read Wednesday, I’ve been trying to grapple with climate change more intentionally and find my own way into activism around it. I’ve started and abandoned podcast episodes and books on the topic; often finding them too wonky or too pessimistic. I’ve started to read more short form journalism on it, particularly by my friend Twilight Greenaway, and that’s been helpful. But I’ve felt hungry for more teachers that “speak my language” that can guide me into this conversation and this consciousness.
Enter Elizabeth Rush. My sister-in-law Mary Austin Speaker (a poet, amazing mama, and book designer genius…she did Braiding Sweetgrass and Just Kids!), handed me her Rush’s book when I was out in Minneapolis visiting this summer. I was immediately drawn in by the gentle accompaniment that Elizabeth offers for someone like me.
The Quickening is, in many ways, a travelogue of her adventure getting aboard a giant boat and heading to Antarctica with a bunch of scientists, but it is so much more than that. It is a reflection on what stories have been told about that mythic land and what stories are so missing. It is an exploration of impending motherhood in a time of planetary crisis. It is an ethnography of a boat and all its quirky characters. It is a deeply accessible look at how science is actually done by real people in extreme circumstances.
I was so excited to interview Elizabeth, my guide into deeper climate consciousness…
Courtney Martin: One of the things you wrestle with throughout the book is your impending choice to bring a child into a warming world. I’ve heard a lot of women in the climate movement talk about this, but not as many men. In what ways are these still gendered questions?
Elizabeth Rush: It is so culturally engrained in us to evaluate a woman’s worth, as a human being, around two very specific metrics: motherhood and beauty. And so I am not surprised that this question of whether or not to have children as the climate crisis accelerates is one we tend to only put to women. Men are measured by different metrics: achievement, bravery, intellect, and so on. Which means they are just not even expected to weigh in on this really heavy subject, despite the fact that to put it bluntly, it takes two to tango. I think that younger generations are stepping about from these gendered binaries, and yet many of the values that they uphold are painfully persistent.As I prepared to deploy to Antarctica, I also got questions like: is your husband going with you and are you leaving children behind? Which, it was impossible to imagine someone asking a man on our mission the same question.
What I am trying to get at is that we see women almost always inside of the familial web of relations that shapes their lives, and to be honest, I don’t think seeing us inside of this web is a bad thing on its own. It’s when that is the only way that we think about that person, or the defining way, that it becomes troubling.
Moreover, I think there is another side to this problem: we don’t recognize the worth of men in our society in the same interconnected way. We are at a moment where we are starting to hold up care-work as aesthetically beautiful and valuable, but as long as we continue to think of that work as the domain of women and people of color (who often hold the positions of domestic labor: cleaning, caring for the children of those who hold white collar jobs) then we haven’t done much to change the actual structure of our society.
What was the most surprising thing about being at sea for so many days with strangers? I found the communal life of the boat fascinating!
I am an introvert and I need quietude to recharge. The two and a half months I lived on this icebreaker were the first time in my life I had a roommate. I thought I was going to go crazy with the lack of alone time, that I would struggle with the idea that this community wasn’t something I could escape.
But something really surprising happened––by being around my shipmates 24/7 I was able to stop preforming or “being on” when in the company of others. Like at some point your guard just has to come down and you just have to exist and so you cease to cover up your imperfections and quit making excuses for things that you need. Sometimes I would hide out alone in a little room called Aft Control (where the crane operator sits when there are back deck operations running), but unlike my life on dry land, I didn’t have to explain myself or apologize. I could just disappear for a spell. Not forever, but for a little while.
We all gifted each other the flexibility to take care of ourselves as best we could when we could because we also knew that there would be extended periods (of intense data collection for instance) when that wasn’t possible. The rules that governed our interaction were at times way more flexible than those that govern social interaction in “normal” life. I think this was possible because there is a sense that you also have no choice but to be accountable for your actions.
There is no not taking responsibility for what you say and do and there was something really liberating about that.
The book integrates transcripts of various crew members, not just scientists, about everything from their relationship to their jobs to their own birth stories. I loved it, but would be curious to hear: why did you choose to do that?
The overwhelming majority of the stories that circulate around Antarctica (a place that human beings first saw just 200 years ago) are penned by White men from the global north who set out to conquer the last continent. And these stories are often framed around a single man venturing forth to achieve some unthinkable goal, or else die trying. As I read them, I was fascinated by what has been left out of the frame––the networks of support that made such missions possible from the women left behind caring for the explorers’ children, to, more recently, the support staff that often deploy for whole seasons, cooking for scientists and maintaining the equipment they use to gather data.
I wanted to make a book that presented a more democratic account of our mission where all of the participants got to share directly with readers a little bit of the experience, the idea being that there is never a single linear narrative of any event and that by hearing from a plethora of people we are more likely to touch some (perhaps contradictory, or at least more complicated) truth of the experience.
Yes! Love that. It seems like this book is one really beautiful response to the question - what is an artist’s role in the midst of an environmental crisis? Who else do you see answering that question in ways that are edifying and original?
I just put down Lola Milholland’s Group Living and Other Recipes (forthcoming in 2024). As the title suggests it is a book about growing up and choosing to continue to live with more people than comprise the typical nuclear family. And that part of the book is really interesting and I certainly found myself thinking about how some of what the author learns about community can be applied to my life, despite my dwelling in a more traditional set up. I mean we talk so much about collaborative actions being central to any attempt to slow the environmental crisis, but we really don’t have a lot of stories that illustrate what that collaboration looks like in a lived, day-to-day way, which is part of what I really appreciated about this book.
And each chapter of this narrative nonfiction book ends with a recipe, written in partnership with someone that Lola has lived alongside, someone that has cooked for her or with her over the years. Now, I love to cook, and I own a bunch of recipe books, most of which I never use because they are (I am realizing) written by chefs and not normal people who cook for people they love. Normal people cooks also have to hold down jobs and do loads of other things that aren’t cooking (including the damn dishes afterwards.)
What I am getting at is this: these recipes are really approachable. I literally cooked three of the recipes from the book last week and all of them were delicious, easy, and mostly possible to fashion from stuff I had in my own refrigerator (or backyard). I loved that this book, and its attitude towards caring for others, literally helped me to care for the people in my life in novel and participatory ways.
How old is your kiddo now and what have they already taught you about the natural world?
My son is now a little over three years old. More than anything he has taught me to move through the world, and in particular the natural world, with less drive. Like what’s so great about walking steadily in one direction down a path? He stops, he swerves, and whole worlds open up: mossy worlds peopled by ants down by a riverbank that I would have walked past on my way to the bridge that carries me from one side to the other. Yes, the enchantment of children is intoxicating. And also their relationship to time and space makes both eddy and expand and unfurl, changing the very texture of the world one inhabits. It is so damn cool.
We will be donating to Anthropocene Alliance in honor of Elizabeth’s labor here. Order her book here. And support Milkweed Editions while you’re are it; they have given us so many gorgeous book in these last few years (Ada Limon’s for starters!). I can’t wait to hear what you think of The Quickening.
What a fascinating & a beautiful interview, thank you. I was unaware of this Writer’s work & I look forward to reading / discovering Elizabeth’s book.