Raboteau added to the thread for months, compiling a fascinating historical record of the moment that I still think about. And I remember being moved by the fact that a novelist, essayist, and professor of creative writing at the City College of New York—a literary figure who could have chosen to approach the topic much more obliquely in her work—was sharing news about the climate so directly and asking her audience to respond. She was kind enough to oblige. Your book is very rooted in your experience of living in New York City and your awareness of what's underneath the current city, the former ecosystems as well as the land theft, massacres, and slavery that has all taken place there.
How has that layered experience shaped your current stance on climate change and the future of the city? Like a lot of people, I moved to New York straight after graduating from college in , and one of the first seminal events for me as a young person starting my professional life in the city was September 11th. That was an instructive text for me a writer, to see how New York could be used as a setting in a way that felt deeply personal on a writing level.
While at the same time, it's the place where I was maturing, and dating and eventually marrying, and then having children. And as I write about in the beginning of the book, there are so many ways of seeing and being in the city that change according to your own maturation and your class and where you happen to be going to school or working. My experience of the city certainly shifted in an extreme way after having children because [I began] thinking about wanting to protect them from threats like pollution, the urban heat island effect , and the way poisoning infrastructure is sited in Black and Brown neighborhoods.
And then I started noticing the Climate Signals and the bird murals. I started paying attention to those and recording them as a way of witnessing the way other people, mainly artists, were sending messages around a number of threats — climate change being just one of them. I didn't think of myself as a person who was environmentally aware until I had kids and began to worry about the deleterious health effects of the places where I'd chosen to raise them. But that essay made me understand, that we all live in environments.
The trains stopped running, and the mayor canceled Halloween. My kids are 11 and almost 13, so they're tweens. I don't think they're getting very much climate curriculum in school, but it's the atmosphere in which they're growing up, and they are aware of it.
