A New Environmental Canon
Soil:
The Story of a Black
Mother’s Garden by Camille T. Dungy.
Simon and Schuster, 317 pp., $28.99
The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth by Elizabeth Rush. Milkweed, 397 pp., $30.00
What is the radicalizing potential of motherhood? This was a central question in Adrienne Rich’s Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution, published in 1976, when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 332 parts per million and feminism’s second wave was cycling toward its third. Her answer:
The mother’s battle for her child— with sickness, with poverty, with war, with all the forces of exploitation and callousness that cheapen human life—needs to become a common human battle, waged in love and in the passion for survival.
Rich was thinking of the fight against patriarchy, but in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, an anthology inspired by the legacy of radical and queer Black feminists of the third wave and published forty years after Rich’s book—by which time CO2 had spiked to 404 parts per million—Alexis Pauline Gumbs proposes an answer that also points at fighting climate change:
In order to collectively figure out how to sustain and support our evolving species, in order to participate in and demand a society where people help to create each other instead of too often destroying each other, we need to look at the practice of creating, nurturing, affirming, and supporting life that we call mothering.
Two important recent books—Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden, by Camille T. Dungy, and The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth, by Elizabeth Rush—carry the spirit of Gumbs’s claim fully into the environmental sphere. Both were published in 2023, the planet’s warmest year on record, when CO2 reached 421 parts per million.1 Dungy and Rush explicitly critique patriarchal patterns in the literary
1Experts warn that we should be at or below 350 ppm for a healthy planet, and that surpassing 450 will mean that we have failed to meet the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement.
canon of nature writing, a genre long dominated by solitary white men of privilege hankering for escape or reverie in the wild. Instead, they argue, care and community should be at the heart of writing about the natural environment.
It’s illuminating to read these books back-to-back. In Soil, Dungy asks why
nobody in foundational environmental literature seems to do the dishes. In The Quickening, Rush pays attention to the people doing them by interviewing an expedition’s cooks as well as its scientists. Both insist on making the domestic visible and argue that an ethics of care that we often associate with maternity— whether we are mothers or not—is crucial in combating issues as large as the climate crisis. They emphasize the collective over the individual, posing old questions in fresh and urgent ways: What is our responsibility to the next generation? What does it mean to mother through perilous times of uncertainty, struggle, trauma, and change; to mother against violence, discrimination, plunder, and greed? To write “mother” as verb?
Mothers have often been prominent in activist groups. Our moral authority is often presumed, especially when our children are under threat. One thinks of Las Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, the band of women who organized against human rights violations when their children were forcibly “disappeared” under the Argentine dictatorship, and of COMADRES, a similar group in El Salvador. In the US, examples of mom-dominant protest groups abound: MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving); Moms Demand Action, which advocates for gun control; Mothers of the Movement, an organization of Black women whose children were killed by gun violence or police; Wall of Moms, who protested police brutality in Portland, Oregon; Moms Clean Air Force, united against air pollution; and Mothers Out Front, which has mobilized for a “livable climate.” On the other side of the political spectrum, chapters of the conservative group Moms for Liberty have campaigned to ban books that discuss race and ethnicity, critical race theory, discrimination, and LGBTQ+ rights.
Obviously, motherhood doesn’t confer or equate to moral legitimacy. Nor does anyone need kids of their own in order to worry about the world’s many ills or care about others. Yet motherhood has politicized me around planetary crises including pollution, biodiversity loss, war, and the climate emergency—quite simply because I want our kids to live.
“W hether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden,”