Climate Resources for Parents
Last month, we shared a bunch of resources for you all to keep your kids engaged in climate and nature learning all summer long. Now the grown-ups get some recommendations this time around!
There is no shortage of excellent podcasts and reading materials for grown-ups around climate change and parenting in a climate crisis, so this is certainly not an exhaustive list. However this is a list to keep in your back pocket when you have road trips for the podcasts and audiobooks or you want to dig into an important climate change read on the beach.
As always, send us your recommendations and we’ll continue to add it to the list. In the meantime, we also have this page on our website with great online resources for your reference as well.
Climate Change Podcasts for Grown-Ups
Check out these podcasts that will help get you through those long road trips or give you something to listen to on your walks around the neighborhood.
Climate Change and Happiness
Climate Change and Happiness is an international podcast that “explores the personal side of climate change". Conversations dive into personal feelings around the climate crisis, what they mean for us, and how we can cope and thrive. — your feelings, what the crisis means for you, and how to cope and thrive. The episodes that might appeal most to families include the following:
Season 2, Episode 21: Tools for Couples Relationships in an Era of Climate Change
Season 2, Episode 22: Children and Nature with Louise Chawla
Season 2, Episode 23: Climate Emotions in the Family
Threshold
This Peabody award-winning podcast uses the “ancient technology” of the story to help people make meaningful connections to the people and other beings affected by climate change. Every season is beautiful and impactful, but we highly recommend Season 4, “Time to 1.5” which offers us an opportunity to grapple “with the responsibility and privilege of this pivotal moment in human history” to prevent warming beyond 1.5°C. Learn about Threshold here.
NPR Life Kit
NPR’s Life Kit is a useful life guide for anything from managing constipation to becoming a strong swimmer. But they also have a number of excellent episodes specifically geared toward climate change and living more sustainably. Our favorite as parents is the episode “Climate change is here. These 6 tips can help you talk to kids about it.” And you can find a whole list of helpful episodes within this article: “Learn to live more sustainably with this podcast playlist.”
How to Save a Planet
While How to Save a Planet was canceled last Fall, we still have two years’ worth of excellent episodes to keep us focused. One of the important features of the podcast is that it is solutions-focused. Episodes feature wide-ranging topics and each ends with the question “what can we do to take action?” With that, How to Save a Planet offers us an enduring climate action resource.
“The Repair” – S.5 of Scene on Radio
The 5th Season of the Peabody-nominated podcast Scene on Radio, “The Repair” is a sweeping investigative series on climate justice that centers the voices of the people most impacted by climate change. “The Repair” explores how we came to be in a climate crisis and how we can “save ourselves and our world.” Learn more about Scene on and “The Repair” here.
Drilled
Drilled is a podcast where climate change meets true crime. Hosted by award-winning environmental justice journalist Amy Westervelt, this podcast does a deep dive into the fossil fuel industry and its ills. You have eight great seasons to binge through and get you really ready to fight against fossil fuels. Learn more about Drilled here.
Wildfire
This one might feel quite personal to a lot of us who live in Northwestern Oregon as the first season is focused around the 2017 Eagle Creek fire that burned nearly 50,000 acres in the Columbia River Gorge. With Eagle Creek fire as the throughline, Wildfire from REI provides context on the history of fire management in the U.S and integrates important perspectives from Indigenous peoples and others looking at reframing fire management in the U.S., particularly as the climate changes. Season 2 looks beyond the U.S. and focuses on the wildfires in the Amazon. Learn more about Wildfire here.
Field Trip
This series follows journalist Lillian Cunningham, as she visits five U.S. national parks to explore the complicated history and the uncertain future of these seemingly wild places in terms of climate change. Each episode explores the complicated history of the parks, particularly through their means of attempting to erase Indigenous peoples and cultures and the uncertain future of these seemingly wild places in terms of climate change. Learn more about Field Trip here.
Climate Change Books for Grown-Ups
We love these books because they are both focused on climate action and take an optimistic approach to the climate crisis. Most of these are non-fiction, but we threw a little climate fiction in there for good measure. These are great options for beach reads as well as audiobooks to get you through those road trips.
Generation Dread: Finding Purpose in an Age of Climate Crisis by Britt Wray
So many parents we hear from talk about the sadness and grief they feel for the planet as we experience the disasters of a changing planet. Generation Dread offers a way for many of us to work through that existential dread. And Britt Wray does a wonderful job of addressing the climate justice implications of climate grief.
Parenting in a Changing Climate by Elizabeth Bechard
Similar to working through our climate grief there are specific tools we parents and caregivers need in order to help our children navigate the climate crisis. Parenting in a Changing Climate offers us those tools through Elizabeth Bechard’s personal experiences and what she’s learned on her journey. One of our members has participated Elizabeth’s group coaching program.
The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution by Mary DeMocker
Local Oregonian and co-founder of 350 Eugene, Mary DeMocker offers a really amazing climate action-oriented tool to parents in The Parents’ Guide to Climate Revolution. We love the user-friendliness of this guide as well as DeMocker’s revolutionary approach!
All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis ed. By Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson
One of the most impactful ways to engage with climate change is through stories. All We Can Save is a beautiful anthology of essays from women around the globe who are at the forefront of the climate movement that show us how we can work together to make change.
The Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + the Planet by Leah Thomas
Presented as a reference manual of sorts, The Intersectional Environmentalist offers action items for all of us to engage in climate justice work. Acknowledging that taking an intersectional approach to climate action is the only way to affect real, enduring change.
Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World by Katharine Hayhoe
Katharine Hayhoe argues that one of the most important things we can do to help the climate movement is to talk about climate change. But living in such a divided world, we often find ourselves in silos preaching to the choir or not dealing with the hard topics. Hayhoe offers a solution through Saving Us providing concrete solutions to talk about climate change across divides. It feels not only like a perfect blueprint for talking about climate change but other social justice issues such as racial justice and LGTBQ+ rights as well.
The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson
Last, we offer a climate fiction novel, set ever so slightly in the future to make it feel eerily realistic. Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson’s fall 2020 publication of The Ministry for the Future opens with an extreme heat wave in India. (Just nine months later, public officials were pointing to this book as the Cascadia heat dome hit.) The novel follows Mary Murphy, director of a fictitious UN ministry charged with shifting economic and legal systems to curb carbon emissions. It’s an expansive, somewhat disconnected novel, heavy on economics, that gives snapshots from various perspectives of the climate movement. While ultimately the novel does end on an optimistic note, it takes awhile to get to there, so stick to it.
What are you reading and listening to?
Send us your recommendations that we can add to this list!
