When Hurricane Irene pummels upstate New York in the summer of 2011, we are there on vacation. My father-in-law wakes us at 6am after the creek by our rental house overflows. My husband and I strap our children, aged two years and five months, into our car under gale force winds and we drive across a flooding river to get away.
Hurricane Sandy hit us at home in New York City just fourteen months later, the largest hurricane ever in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast region. In the first few years of their lives, my children lived through two of the worst storms in East Coast history.
As the polar ice caps melt and the planet warms, extreme weather events hit with more severity and greater frequency. There are monster hurricanes, tsunamis, earthquakes, wildfires, and floods. Myself and other mamas wonder, how can we keep our children safe in the face of worsening climate disasters? Where can we find a climate refuge?
Being a mother ignites some dormant, powerful feeling within me to shelter my children from harm. Maybe it is experiencing for the first time another being who is completely dependent on you for their survival. Maybe it is the knowledge that their tiny bodies, unformed infant skulls, wobbly heads are so vulnerable to injury. Maybe it is the feeling of responsibility for bringing them into this beautiful, chaotic, terrifying world. I have never believed in the instincts of motherhood as biological; that would deny the mothers who do not feel this way. I can’t explain my own reactions. I surprise myself the day my toddler son runs onto the road and I pull him back with such force that I fall and injure my hand. My desire to protect him is more than the fear of bodily harm to myself.
My close friend Devi, a Narungga Kaurna woman back home in Australia dreams of taking her two girls out to live on country, where they could learn to forage, fish, and grow their own food like her ancestors. When food production and supply chains are disrupted by climate change, she says, we’ll have to go back to the old ways.
I dream of raising my children in my coastal South Indian hometown of Mangalore. I have childhood memories of chasing roosters in the yard of my father’s ancestral house, drinking juice from the tender green coconuts of our tree. In my mother’s ancestral place in neighboring Udipi, her family cultivated rice fields behind the house. I roamed with my cousins through the fields, watching while the harvested paddy was threshed. There is a photo of me at age two with my cousin Saritha in front of the mighty kasalo plant, its leaves twice my size.
But Mangalore has changed. The region has been prey to the mining industry and transformed by overzealous developers. The lime green paddy fields, lush mangroves, and red dirt roads of my ancestral home have been replaced by shiny new hotels, mall complexes, and luxury apartments. Mangalore, like most of the country, has PM levels higher than what is considered safe to inhale. Children in India have greater levels of asthma and decreased lung function, and are more prone to cognitive impairment.
We decide to move to Sydney: my American husband, my two kids, and myself. My LA-based friend Priya has taken her boys and moved back to Melbourne. If we live away from the coasts and the bush, we might be safe from floods and fires. Another friend Yadira, an Afro Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx, has also moved with her husband and two children to Melbourne. She is after another kind of refuge, from gun violence against Black people, though she knows they are still not safe from racism and injustice.
I want to be near my parents and my large extended family. In Sydney, we can raise our children close to nature, with national parks and hiking trails nearby.
The Domain, Gadigal land, September 2019
The younger generation is mobilizing for climate justice. School children around Australia are organizing climate strikes as part of a global wave of protests. I pick up my son S from school and take him to the Global Climate Strike on the grassy lawns of The Domain in downtown Sydney, on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people. S is thrilled to protest. He has made a sign that says, “Why do we need more buildings?” In the few years since we moved to Sydney, S has seen new developments go up on all sides of us.
I text my mama friends to see who is coming. On the street we bump into Justine and her son. The kids play word games on the train. Sonja is stuck at work. Susan sends me a photo of her and her daughter with their signs at the university; they are marching from there to The Domain with a contingent from the union. We make plans to meet up, but when we arrive to the 80,000 strong protest, we have no chance of finding each other. All around me are school children with ponytails, kids carried in their parents’ arms. S holds his sign up proudly. A curly haired little girl with the Extinction Rebellion symbol on her forehead carries a placard that says, “It’s Not Us. It’s You! 100 companies = 71% emissions.”
The protest opens with a Welcome to Country from Aunty Rhonda Dixon-Grovenor, a Darug Yuin elder. “We stand together, my brothers and sisters,” she says. “We send a message all around the world, we’re united together. We stand as brothers and sisters to fight for the right of Mother Earth, and our waters, our riverways.” The crowd roars.
Aunty Rhonda introduces Gadrian Hoosan, a Garrwa Yanyuwa man from Borroloola, a remote community in the Gulf of Carpentaria. The rhythmic chants of his fiery voice with clapping sticks, and the black, red, and yellow Aboriginal flags across the stage and in the audience, remind us that this is an ancient land. Hoosan tells us that in his remote community in the Northern Territory, they can’t drink the water because mining companies, supported by the government, have destroyed their water sources. This has been going on since colonization. But he has survived. He has journeyed three days to tell us that.
“We are all one family,” says Hoosan, to massive cheers from the audience. “Black and white. A climate justice family.”
Their words make me wonder whether, in a time of climate emergency, as a mother, I have narrowed my energies to my own children. Finding a refuge for them. I am part of a privileged minority of mamas who can even make these choices. My friend Arlene in Texas has her son in the Texas prison system. She fears if a monstrous hurricane were to damage the prison, he could be reclassified and housed far away from her.
The Aboriginal speakers are talking about kin as all people, as all life on earth, as Mother Earth itself. That care should be extended from my own children to encompass all children and life on the planet, as mutually dependent for survival.
The event is organized and led by school children. We hear their stories, their concerns, their anger. “The number one cause of this crisis,” says fifteen year old student Daisy Jeffery, “is the mining and burning of coal, oil, and gas.” The government should be transitioning us to clean energy sources, she goes on, but instead they are helping billionaire companies like Adani that are trashing our environment and have removed the Wangan and Jagalingou people from their own land in the Galilee Basin to turn it into a mega-mine.
The school climate strikes in Australia the previous November were the largest school strikes in the world. It’s not surprising given that the continent is at elevated risk from climate change. The number of record hot days has doubled since the 1950s. Heatwaves are longer and hotter, leading to unprecedented bushfires. Weather charts now have added categories to indicate over 50 degrees Celsius (122 Fahrenheit). the fire-danger rating system has a new “Catastrophic” level. Flooding, droughts, and cyclones have become deadly. And yet, Australia has been the world’s largest exporter of coal for most of the twenty-first century. In 2012, the government proposed nine new coal mines in the Galilee Basin of Central Queensland, five of which would be the biggest coal mines in the world.
My throat tightens and my eyes fill with tears as I stand with and for my son and our climate justice family on Gadigal land. There is a text from Sonja. She has picked up her sons from school and is on her way to the protest.
Blue Mountains, Darug and Gundungurra land, October 2019
One of our favorite hikes in Sydney is the Grand Canyon trail in the Blue Mountains. It starts from a lookout where you can see views of the sweeping valley below. Forested hills rise in peaks where they meet sandstone walls topped by grassy plateaus.
Eleven-year-old A leads the way down the steep descent of the trail, binoculars in hand. During our hikes, she has spotted kookaburras, cockatoos, and a satin bowerbird. S, eight-years-old, is cautious. He and I walk together, slower than the others.
All around us is bushland: towering eucalyptus trees with papery bark and the mottled trunks of spotted gums. Dry leaves crunch underfoot and we notice how parched the land is. Sydney has been experiencing drought for the past year, and the region has gone for a long time without much rainfall.
Further below, the trail passes through rainforest. Water splashes down from waterfalls. Giant ferns grow along the sides of the path. The abundant roots of the coachwood trees are covered in moss. We cross over the creeks by skipping from one stone to the next.
The climb back up is almost vertical and I stop to catch my breath. My daughter shrieks. We must come and see what she has found. At first we don’t see anything. It looks like a pile of sticks and brownish leaves. She insists. “It’s there.” Then we see the camouflaged creature, its wrinkled head the same charcoal gray as the scattered sticks, the rusty patterns on its body like the fallen leaves. My Aunty Daphne discovers later on a Facebook reptile group that it’s a mountain dragon. Sometimes it takes a child to teach us how to notice.
This trail is on the unceded lands of the Darug and Gundungurra peoples who occupied this place for tens of thousands of years. Before invasion, the Darug and Gundungurra peoples carried out regular cultural burnings as a way of caring for the land. Fires were used to encourage new growth and protect habitat. After the country was colonized by the British in 1788, European settlers destroyed major areas of natural forest and dispossessed the Aboriginal people of their lands. Aboriginal people were prohibited from doing cultural burnings. Western fire management regimes are a poor substitute – they lack intimate knowledge of the land and vegetation, and fires are often lit at the wrong time or place.
The bushfires start spreading in October. The outside air smells like woodsmoke. By November the air quality is hazardous. We drive the children the five minutes to school rather than walk. We wear face masks and buy an air filter for the house. I download an app called Air Visual, and all day I check the app for air quality index and PM particles. When the index goes above 50, I close the windows. When the index goes above 100, I cancel the kids’ swim lessons. When it rises over 150, and a red notification “Unhealthy” flashes on my screen, we all stay indoors with the air filter on.
S asks me, “Is this what the future will be like? Bad and smoky?”
More than one hundred fires burn out of control across the state, engulfing the forested coastal regions, the valleys, and the Blue Mountains. On social media, people share images of neon orange and blood red skies. The news headlines read Apocalyptic, Unprecedented, Catastrophic. We watch in horror to see footage of the mountains set ablaze.
All summer, I have cousins, friends, and colleagues who are being evacuated from their homes. I grew up surrounded by cousins in Sydney, enough cousins to form a cricket team. But the investor-driven, wildly inflated housing market has made living in the city unaffordable for many of them. My cousin Vasant and his family moved out to the Blue Mountains. His brother Ravi and family live in Wollongong. Many people, especially migrants and the working class, have been pushed to the periphery of the city where they are at greater risk of extreme heat, bushfires, and floods. Vasant, his partner and three kids have to evacuate their house multiple times during the bushfires, for weeks at a time.
My sister and her family are visiting from LA. Six months from now, parts of their neighborhood of Monrovia will be evacuated as a result of Bobcat fires fanned by the Santa Ana winds. For most of the summer, we are indoors. My nephew K stays with us, and he and S do legos and build towers and play board games. I sit in front of a fan, the air filter turned on. It is a luxury. From my window, I can see the construction workers on a nearby site and the Indian Uber delivery guys who live next door. Not everyone can stay indoors.
New Years Eve is a sombre occasion. The state government goes ahead with their festive fireworks, but no one is in the mood. We are glued to our screens, watching the terrifying events unfolding across the country. In the beach town of Mallacoota, an out of control fire has come right up to the town and residents are ordered to leave their homes and get in the water. The world sees images of thousands of people taking refuge in the lakes and ocean under eerily crimson skies, even as temperatures dip overnight.
On New Years Day, I see on Twitter that my friend Dany who lives on a farm down south has lost several of her animals to the fires. I text her to see if she is okay and she responds:
The devastation is unfathomable. So much death. Entire eco-worlds are gone. Human communities where everyone is lost and animal communities all dead. We evacuated to Sydney last night and as l lay not sleeping and the fireworks went off I knew I was in a war. My rage is murderous but I’m also very determined not to lose this searing focus. I can’t imagine how our kids are making sense of this world.
By the time all of the fires were put out in March 2020, over a billion animals were killed and three billion birds, mammals, and reptiles were displaced. While the loss of 8,000 endangered koalas had a striking impact, less cuddly species like the micro-trapdoor spider and the assassin spider may have been quietly made extinct.
In July, we go back to the Grand Canyon trail. The bushfires tore through here and the trail has been closed until now. The area is unrecognizable. All around us are the blackened trunks and charred remains of trees. The birdsong is gone. Fallen burnt logs litter the ground. It’s a crisp winter day and we rub our hands together to keep warm.
I study the faces of my children. They are taking it all in. As their mama, perhaps I cannot always shelter them from climate crises. But I can show them beauty, let them know it deeply, so they may witness what is being taken from the world.
* * *
I have a recurring dream. In one version, I am driving with my children up the side of a mountain and the rain comes down heavily. The water level is rising. I drive higher to take the kids out of danger. In another version, we are home and the fire is coming closer. I grab my children and we try to escape the burning flames.
My impulse to flee with my children, to protect them, has a long lineage. My dreams carry me down the generations. My own ancestors were forced to flee their lands in Goa during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries due to religious persecution by the Portuguese rulers, or famine, or invasion by Maratha warriors. They left their houses and fields in the middle of the night, took their babies, and sailed on old patmari boats down the coast to the Mangalore region. Even in the new country there was no peace. During the British invasion, the Goan migrants were taken into captivity by the local ruler. Again they escaped, fleeing across the Western Ghat mountains with their bundles and their children. To this day we have continued dispersing and migrating. Colonialism and extractive capitalism altered our ancestral homes and livelihoods; our history has been one of continual flight.
East Coast, Australia, April 2022
After the bushfires stopped, the rains began. At first we were grateful for the relief of water to break the long drought, the reservoirs filling and plants reviving. But the extreme and continuous rains result in dangerous flash flooding. For two years in a row we have back-to-back La Niña events, where changes in ocean currents result in increased rainfall. With global temperatures rising, these events are more intense.
Beginning in February, the unrelenting rain is punctuated by severe storms where heavy torrential rain falls quickly, leading to unpredictable flooding. Again the news headlines scream out at us. 100-year storm. Unprecedented. Catastrophic.
I worry about our children taking public transport to school. After ten year old S is trapped on a train for one hour due to flooding on the tracks, I start driving him to school. When the flood waters are too deep to drive through, I keep the kids home.
The basement in our new rental house floods five times. The first time, we are up until midnight, removing the water in buckets, trying to salvage our possessions. Our fledgling garden does not survive. All of the peppers, basil, radishes, spinach, tomato plants, and lettuce that I planted with the children in January have washed away. We replace the air purifiers with dehumidifiers as creeping mold and mildew infests our home. We learn to live with the huntsman spiders who come seeking refuge. We too are privileged to hunker down indoors. We consider ourselves lucky to even have a home.
The flooding devastation spreads all along the East Coast through the states of New South Wales and Queensland. Twenty-two people are killed, tens of thousands lose their homes, and whole towns are submerged.
In early March, my Uncle Ritchie, eighty years old and blind, along with my Aunty Nanda and their daughter Priya, also with disability, are trapped in their home up north in Brisbane when the waters begin rising. The flood waters submerge the ground floor of their house and come almost up to the second story. They pack a go bag, and clear the furniture near the bedroom window in case they need to escape onto the roof over the carport. The emergency services are overwhelmed with calls from people needing to be rescued. By 9pm the waters begin to recede and the next day they are able to leave by the front door and evacuate.
In the light of morning, the extent of the damage is apparent. Behind the house was a sprawling garden where Aunty Nanda grew okra, gourd, karela, lokhi, and spinach from her native Fiji. She had over a hundred chilli plants, dragonfruit, a pumpkin patch, asparagus, melons, blueberries, potatoes and beans as well as avocado, mango, lime, and lemon trees. The garden was a space where neighbors and local communities of Filipinos, Indians, Fijians and others came to get produce they couldn’t find elsewhere. It was a place of exchange, a lifeline for many at a time of increasing cost of living, and a way for Aunty Nanda to keep active in her retirement. It took years to plant and nurture some of these crops. The garden is flooded by salt water. Aunty Nanda watches the plants die and shrivel in a few hours.
My relatives, and many others are asking, will this happen again? Should we move? Where to move when surrounding areas are flooded too? My cousin Priya says to me, “Where can you go where you won’t be affected?” The question is poignant. I recall visits from Uncle Ritchie as a child, how he spoke with such longing for our hometown of Mangalore, a place he never wanted to leave. I think about Aunty Nanda, a descendant of indentured laborers brought from India to Fiji. How long can you keep moving till there is nowhere left to move?
* * *
During the coronavirus pandemic, mass climate rallies switch to online Zoom rallies and digital actions. At an online protest of the Adani mining corporation’s occupation of Wangan and Jagalingou lands, I see the schoolgirls who have gathered in an empty gym. I see the elderly matrons who have brought their neighbors to a community center to join in the protest. I see the geoscientist logging in from Godda, India, where Adani plans to transport the coal to a power station built on the lands of the Santhal people. I see Wangan and Jagalingou elder Adrian Burragubba speak of what his country is like: the life-giving Doongmabulla Springs teeming with waxy cabbage palms, brolgas, and emus.
I see the other mamas. I recognize their distraction as they issue muted orders to someone offscreen, a child’s head occasionally popping into the frame. I know the look of determination, the fury we nurture as our weapon and our power.
Together we flood the inboxes of Adani investors to tell them they do not have the informed consent of the Wangan and Jagalingou people to go ahead with their coal mine. We write to the Queensland environment minister demanding that he protect the sacred Doongmabulla Springs. We send dozens of email invites to the State Bank of India, clogging up their calendars. We make donations and we post on social media and we write poetry and we join our bodies to the Wangan and Jagalingou camp on the grounds of the mining site.
Alongside the squares of faces and groups on Zoom, I see the now familiar chat box fill with messages of solidarity. Refuge might look like this. Apart but connected on this planet.
