A mother's thoughts
In the UK this Sunday, it’s Mother’s Day. And I’m a mother.
At some point I guess we all ask ourselves why we’re here, and we probably all find different answers. But I’m going to hazard a guess that in the moment we become mothers, as our mothers did, there’s one answer to that question that kind of appears by itself and instantly takes precedence: we’re here to nourish and protect our children.
It’s the strongest biological urge and the deepest, most visceral emotional drive, and we share it with most living creatures. It’s what we’ll run into a burning house for.
Which is pretty much what we’re all having to do right now, because, as young climate activist Greta Thunberg keeps pointing out, our collective house IS on fire. Things feel pretty apocalyptic. In the last 12 months we’ve had devastating fires in Australia, in the Amazon, in Africa. Floods in Indonesia. Plagues of billions of locusts in East Africa – it’s kind of biblical in scale. And now coronavirus, overwhelming the healthcare services in multiple countries and turning us inward on ourselves in an attempt to slow down the need for emergency care.
Being on lockdown means we’re conscious of being mothers all the time – with kids at home all day every day… and conscious of our own mothers too, with many of them being among the most vulnerable to this illness. We may be having to support them more and yet keep away from them at the same time, a new and strange kind of caring to be engaging in.
I work from home, so at present my inconvenience is limited to my kids refusing to go to bed and behaving like we’re on holiday (except with added handwashing). But if you have a workplace to go to, and especially if you’re a single mum, it’s very different. School may well provide you with the ability to work in the first place. And that doesn’t begin to approach the crisis this sickness may be producing in less wealthy countries.
But even here in the affluent UK, it begs a really big question for me, about what we’re here for, about what, as mothers, we want for our children. About what makes life worth living, and about the difference between surviving and thriving. Are my children in school to train to get a job, as our society seems to dictate? A job that in many cases perpetuates the culture that keeps us consuming and poisoning the seas and the skies?
Research shows that people on their deathbeds regret two things the most: not enough time with loved ones, and not enough time spent in nature. Research also shows that communities that live the longest and stay the healthiest do lots of both.
I find it hard to believe that with humanity’s level of sophistication, knowledge and ingenuity we can’t enable everyone to do this. Just in my own country – the UK, one of the world’s wealthiest economies – there are completely unacceptable levels of poverty and loneliness. We have a lower proportion of old-growth forest left than most if not all countries in Europe, our wildlife is dwindling at a startling rate and our government fails miserably to keep air pollution below basic safety levels. It’s bewildering. I keep coming back to the sense that there are dots that just aren’t getting joined. I think it’s that same sense of disconnect that brought so many people onto the streets over the last year, with the climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion. There’s a feeling that the whole crazy show doesn’t make sense.
Sometimes it takes a child’s understanding to highlight this. Seven years ago my daughter overheard me talking about fracking, a way of extracting oil and gas using highly toxic fluids injected into the ground. She burst into floods of tears. “But mummy, if they are poisoning the Earth don’t they realise they are going to be poisoning themselves too? You have to call them and tell them to stop!” I remember thinking “my five-year-old can understand that this is insane. How can this be happening?”
A friend once asked me “if you were Prime Minister, what single policy would you bring in tomorrow?” And I have to say I was torn between two things.
One I saw as a supportive policy: universal basic income. I personally believe that one of the key reasons so many feel disempowered is that they are so darn busy working to put bread on the table (so that their kids can grow up to do the same, trapped by debt and running to stand still) that they’ve no energy left to pursue what they really care about or challenge the ‘norms’ that are already producing record levels of anxiety. A basic or citizen’s income could meaningfully address that, and now could be the perfect time to try out such a policy. It could provide a much needed safety net for working mums and others in similar situations, and could also free up time and energy for community interaction, resilience and catalysing change… and that is going to be so important in the unstable world our children are facing.
The other policy I thought about was the one I now work full-time on, which is this: making it a crime to destroy nature. Because right now it isn’t. So that’s what our campaign, Stop Ecocide, focuses on.
Making ecocide – or serious harm to nature – a crime is like a kind of safeguarding policy for life on Earth. We believe it should be a baseline rule, like the crime of murder. It’s simple: when destroying ecosystems is prohibited, the Earth’s ability to sustain and generate life is protected. It feels like stating the obvious, but we seem to have forgotten that nature is generative – that “she” is, in the most literal sense, the mother of all life, as so many indigenous cultures understand so well.
As one mother to another, but even more as one child to another (after all we may not all have children but we all have mothers), I’m inviting you to support this law to protect the Earth. When we protect her, we are doing the best mothering of all, because we’re protecting all of life – and the future of all our children.
Stop Ecocide web site: www.stopecocide.earth