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Intergenerational Healing: A Climate Chat with Mary Heglar

[Climate Decoded theme music]

Lara Davies-Jones

Hey folks, welcome to Climate Decoded, the podcast where we decipher climate change communication. We untangle how different narratives illuminate or obscure pathways to climate justice.

Today we're doing a climate chat. These are episodes where we have casual conversations with people doing pretty damn cool climate work. For our last climate chat of the season, my co-host Jamie and I spoke with Mary-Anise Heglar.

Jamie Stark
Mary is a climate writer. She wrote the 2024 novel Troubled Waters, set in the U.S. state of Mississippi. The book charts a course toward intergenerational healing, spanning the 1950s civil rights movement to climate change activism in 2014. Through the eyes of lead characters Cora and her granddaughter Corinne, the book explores the themes of love, family, black resistance, and what it means to be alive in a world on fire.

Mary also wrote the children's book The World is Ours to Cherish, published in 2024, and she co-hosts the popular podcast Spill with Amy Westervelt.

Lara Davies-Jones
We chatted with Mary about her experience of writing about climate, intergenerational healing, and what makes a livable future. This was a timely conversation with one of the most important climate writers of the day, who is outspoken and steadfast in raising the alarm on gross injustices.

This is one of the more urgent conversations we've had at Climate Decoded. So thank you for listening.

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Mary Heglar
I was living in New York and I was realizing I could not live in New York much longer. I did not like being cold. And I was homesick. I really, really missed the south. So I realized that I would not be there when my nephew started asking those questions about climate change because she lived in New York and I was about to leave. So I decided to write something down about what would I say to him if he started asking those questions and that turned into, The children's book. One thing I realized in the process of writing the children's book was that as much as I thought I was writing to my nephew, I was also writing to my own inner child.

Lara Davies-Jones
And what did you find that you specifically wanted to say to that inner child? 

Mary Heglar
Um, that you can do hard things, but you don't have to do them alone. And yeah, basically, basically those two things. And I wanted to inspire a sense of wonder at the natural world. You know, I think it's difficult to tell children that things were so much better before you were born, because it just, you know, thanks, what are they supposed to do with that information if they weren't here? Um, but also there's so much still left to marvel at in this world. So I wanted to inspire that sense of wonder for my nephew. I've read it in a lot of schools, um, in particular in Mississippi. And so it's, it's very fun, the children get very into all of the animals, every animal they can name. Some of them are, you know, sophisticated animals that like, I don't, I didn't even know the name of that fish.

Um, and then some of them are very obvious, right? So it's like the older kids can participate, the younger kids can participate. Um, and when I read the book in Mississippi, I do a presentation that's, um, all the state animals and plants and flowers of Mississippi, walking them through all of those things, throwing them Mississippi is a wonderland. And isn't it so wonderful that we get to be from here? And then I go into the book and the conversations afterward are not necessarily like they, they noticed the part of the book where I'm very clear that climate change is real and the world is getting worse. There's a whole spread on that.

And I hear the kids like have that reaction, but by the time they come back around to doing the activities at the end of the book, they're like inspired and want to talk about how pretty this particular flower is that they saw or their favorite tree or things like that. So yeah, they don't dwell on it, but it's demystifying.

Lara Davies-Jones
And is that when you, when you wrote the book, is that the, um, I guess the sort of purpose that you wanted it to have or how you wanted it to be received by children was kind of conserving this sense of wonder and curiosity, but demystifying things.

Mary Heglar
Yeah. And I didn't want to gaslight them into thinking, you know, people always want to say that to children, that it's not that bad trying not to scare them. But I remember being a child and growing up in a place where there were tornadoes and nobody lied to me about how bad a tornado was.

Nobody gaslit me and said it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. They told me instead what to do when you hear a tornado siren. They taught me to go to the basement and protect my neck. And we had tornado drills and they prepared us for that. And that made tornadoes less scary. They're still scary. I know I don't want to be outside. I know I don't want to be in a car, you know, but you teach children how to deal with these scary things all the time. And so why is climate change so much different from that? So I wanted to talk to children as though I think that they are serious people.

And I also, you know, wanted to see themselves having agency, but I also didn't want them to feel abandoned. Because there's another thing that I've heard from younger generations, that they often feel that older generations, what we think is empowering them, so you're going to get out there and you're going to change the world, they feel like it's an abandonment and a dereliction of duty on the parts of older folks.


Lara Davies-Jones
Moving back to Troubled Waters and thinking about some of the kind of eminent themes that come through in that book, would you or could you describe what intergenerational healing feels like for you? Or what it looks like?


Mary Heglar
I don't know that I've actually ever experienced it, so it's more of an aspirational thing than anything else. But what I wanted to do with troubled waters was to chart a course toward intergenerational healing, which to me, that would mean that would mean generations healing together, what is often celebrated in lieu of that is something that people call cycle breaking, where, you know that's basically, granddad was alcoholic, your dad was an alcoholic, and you're the one who decides you're not going to be an alcoholic. So you break the cycle. But usually what that means is that you break away from the family, at least to some degree. And so intergenerational healing would be that, all right, granddaddy, Daddy, let's talk about why we're alcoholics, and let's try to heal together. That is a very, very difficult thing to do, especially because that requires three people to be willing to heal together, and that is often just not the case. So I wanted to set the course in Troubled Waters for what could that actually look like.

Jamie Stark
Why have you written these and sort of gotten into that deeper dive as a way of, yeah, as a form of climate communication? 

Mary Heglar
Um, I mean, when I got the idea to write it, I wasn't thinking about, like this is a great tool for climate communication, necessarily. I've always been a creative writer, even the essays that I'm known for writing on creative nonfiction. And in the course of writing those essays, there was one particular myth that I felt like I could never fully dispel for people, and that was this mythology around climate change being the fault of previous generations, and for me as a black American, that is especially insulting, because I know what my grandparents were doing during the Jim Crow era, like they were civil rights activists. And even for those of us for whom our parents were not activists or not parts of any sort of movement, they were still resisting simply by surviving through American apartheid. So this idea that climate change was the fault of my grandparents' generation just drove me up a tree, and I tried to write about it in several different essays, but it never quite felt like it was curling over. And I also wanted to talk about, like, what, what you feel like you owe when you are in the climate space, and your grandparents have this legacy, or your, your parents have this legacy, right? Like, another thing I'd often hear I was like, when they talk about black people and voting, they'll say our ancestors fought and died for that, like my grandfather saw my ancestor, like I knew them.

So, like, this wasn't that that long ago, and so I wanted to put that into conversation with climate change. And so, like I said, I tried in several different essays, and it just, it felt like a story that I couldn't tell. It was a story I needed to show. And so this story started coming to me of putting the climate change generation and the civil rights generation into conversation with each other, and like looking at the things that go unsaid and with the essays like some of them, yes, I guess have had like, sort of activist fence, but like, I don't when there's a black writer who writes about the black experience, he's not labeled an activist, but for some reason, when I talk about the black environmental experience, I'm labeled an activist, even though I don't see that big of a difference between those things.

And so that label of activist comes with you know, as someone who works with words, I like to deal with words in terms of what they mean, and activists means somebody who's willing to put their body on the line more. That means someone who is going to demonstrations, who's disrupting in person. And I'm not, I don't do that. I may go to a demonstration or two, but I'm never going to be the one organizing them like I think those are very different words that mean very different things from what I'm doing. If my work read by activists, sure, but so is James Baldwin. That didn't make him an activist. So, yeah, I don't, Trouble Waters doesn't have an activist call to action at all, at all. It's a story about, that is a story about familial love and intergenerational healing. 

Lara Davies-Jones
I wanted to to ask as well, Mary and we have slightly kind of spoken on this already, but in the, in the writing of Troubled Waters, Did it, did it bring a sense of healing for you, first?


Mary Heglar
To write the book? Um, not, not exactly. It more about, it more about a sense of self exploration and self actualization. So the Civil Rights narrative of troubled waters is such that it follows my main character, Corinne's Grandmother, whose name is Cora, and she was the child who integrated the schools in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957 and that is very much based on my aunt Jackie, who integrated schools in Nashville, Tennessee in 1957 and so to learn that story, you would think, you know, that's a story that somebody sat me down and told me the whole story and showed me family photo albums. And no, that's not how I found this story out at all.

And I found out about it through like little, little bits and bursts. It was always like some sort of outburst that let me know that this happened. And if I asked for more details, it was very clear that I was, you know, poking a wound. So to learn the story, to write this story, I had to do a lot more research of my own, I had to do some very careful interviews reading about other people's experiences in other schools to see like, how what sorts of questions made them tick and what sorts of questions they opened up to. Because it really is learning about it's like asking someone about a whole different world. Jim, the Jim Crow South is just not a world that I was, I was present for. So there would just be like little details that you wouldn't know to ask about. And so anyhow, I wound up going to the Tennessee State Archives. I wound up going back to the old house that's still there, visiting the school in person, seeing that they have a placard out front now.

And in doing that, I was able to bring that information back to my mother and my aunt Jackie, for whom these memories are very hazy, because they were very young, and it does not seem like they really talked about it as a family. So there were a lot of holes in their memories, and so I was able to fill that up for, for them. So I guess, in a way that is healing, in the sense that I got to like I felt like I understood my grandparents so much better. I understood the sorts of sacrifices that were made specifically for me, right? Because, like my grandfather did this with his daughter so that his granddaughter wouldn't have to do it, that is very specific, and so being able to better appreciate them, being able to better understand them, you know? I, after I learned more about this. I went to visit my grandparents' graves, and just like, spend some more time with them. And that felt Yeah. That felt Yeah. That did feel healing, so.

Lara Davies-Jones
And I had a, if you don't mind, a couple of questions, maybe more specifically, on on the on the characters, specifically the relationship between Cora and Corinne, and I had this sense of, and this is, you know, my, obviously, my own personal sense while reading it, of this, there's underlying frustrations, tensions, but a deep admiration and respect and love for one another, but sometimes, but sometimes these frustrations kind of rise to the surface in small, ish, way, small and inverted commas. My question is, if they could have an open and honest dialog with one another, what would you want that to look like? Yeah, also within that same space, what does it look like to express admiration and love?

Mary Heglar
So I would say that Cora and Corinne are, yes, they're in a space. They really deeply love each other, but they're at a position in their life where they are having to learn how to do that all over again, they're having to learn new love languages for each other. Corinne is 20 years old, which means she's effectively grown, but, you know, she doesn't have her frontal lobe yet. You know, like she, her brain's not finished developing, and so she's at that, that young and reckless part of her life. I think that's how Cora kind of views her.

And so Cora is having a difficult time understanding her, and she's gone away to college for the first time. She's come back a vegan. She doesn't quite know what to do with that. And so that's really difficult, because Cora and Corinne's love language before that had been food. And I don't mean like she would just cook you what you know you wanted to eat, or your favorite dish, like cooking together and working in a garden together and going to grocery store together. Like food was their, their love language. And so when Corinne comes back as a vegan, the reason Cora panics is because she doesn't know how to say, I love you anymore, and so they're having to learn how to do that altogether. 

And that's kind of the metaphor for that. Because outside of that, you know, they both just lost a family member, they're feeling this incredible weight of guilt, and it's like the both of them are trying to save the world for the other one without the other one ever knowing it. So Cora does this in the way of, you know, integrating. Not only does she integrate the schools, she wants to keep all of that drama, all of that trauma, away from her grandchild. She doesn't want Corinne to ever know the enormity of what that ever meant. And so she puts, she shuts it away. And that way she's, she is preoccupied with the past, whereas Corinne sees climate change on the horizon and wants to, you know, go out and do her part to stop it, but without ever bringing her grandmother into it. So they're both trying to save the world for each other without the other one ever knowing it. That's how much they love each other, but that is pulling them apart.

And there are several points throughout the book, where as I'm writing is, I'm sure other people are reading is like, Y'all just need to fight. Y'all just need to go ahead and have a fight, but they're so scared of hurting each other, but they don't want to do it. But, you know, eventually, that sort of that will have to burst, and they'll have to bridge that gap.

Jamie Stark
How can we use storytelling to honor the people in our own lives, trying to save the world for each other, for ourselves, like how do the rest of us translate what you're doing in the book into real life and, and have those conversations or fights so that we're honoring one another, saving the world for each other. 

Mary Heglar
I think we haven't been telling that story for very long, about there being a conspiracy behind this. I think the best person, bar none, telling this story is Amy Westervelt, especially in the first season of Drill. That was really eye opening for me so and there's plenty of other folks out there as well, but it hasn't been that long where we talked about it as a conspiracy. It hasn't been that loud. There's so much that we haven't tried, including consistency. So the fact that we've not described it as a conspiracy, as you know, a problem of the power dynamics. Of course, it's easy to, like, take over with other sorts of conspiracy theories when the actual, the people who know about the actual conspiracy are trying to water it down because they're so worried about not scaring people.

Lara Davies-Jones
I wanted to ask a question around what we term, or is termed, or can be termed, a Livable Future. And I am sort of relating this to Trouble, Troubled waters, where, on the one hand, you have the intergenerational trauma and a past that is painful, so that's kind of that's behind you and then ahead of you. You also have this future that, in theory, could also be quite painful and is uncertain. And so what can we do, I guess, in the moment, to make the moment liveable, as opposed to creating this Livable Future as well.

Mary Heglar
Well, one thing we could do is stop arming Israel!

Lara Davies-Jones
Absolutely.

Mary Heglar
So, I don't know. I have a hard time now thinking about a Livable Future when there are active genocide. Genocides happening right now.

Lara Davies-Jones
I mean, you have your your your your quote, I think, where you say, what part of a Livable Future has room for genocide? 

Mary Heglar
Yeah, I don't. I don't understand. And so I've kind of distanced myself from terms like Livable Future, or even just like the climate movement writ large, because it just seems deeply unserious if it thinks that we can, you know, fight for a Livable Future, climate action that allows for active and obvious genocide, like I have seen the inside of a Palestinian child's skull. I should not know what that looks like, on any planet, especially a planet where, like, a livable

Lara Davies-Jones
And we can never say, we can never say that we didn't know or don't know, because it's…

Mary Heglar
Yeah

Lara Davies-Jones
It's live streamed.

Mary Heglar
Yeah, it's been going on for 76 years, 

Lara Davies-Jones
Yeah, thinking of the climate movement or climate communication, climate journalism, what can it do? Or, what do you believe it can do better? Or, you know what, even just do not do better, to collectively show that solidarity with Palestine and call it what it is, of a genocide, because I still think there's some hesitation over using that word. We know that the media can be custodians of language and thereby influence how we take in information, how it sits with us, what we do with it, what will it take for them to show up.

Mary Heglar
I don't know. I don't know, if a year of genocide doesn't do it. I literally don't know. And I don't know that they're coming.

Lara Davies-Jones
Have you seen any examples, and you don't have to be specific here, but have you seen examples in the kind of climate movement space where the people are showing up and consistently showing up as well.


Mary Heglar
Sure.

Lara Davies-Jones
And I think you're an example.

Mary Heglar
Maybe. Maybe so. And I'm, I'm not the only person. There have been plenty of other people, but it's still not nearly enough, you know, especially since so many of these people during the Trump years were cosplaying as radicals and claiming they wanted to burn it all down and give the land back and give reparations. And now they, you know, the cat has their tongue when there's a genocide going on. That's it, that tells me everything I need to know. So, yeah, I don't know what it would take if you can stay silent through a year in this. I don't think anything is going to get you out and that just what we have to we have to decide is what to do with that information. How do you judge those people?

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Lara Davies-Jones
This climate chat marks the end of season two of climate decoded. 2024 has been a difficult year for many criss-crossed by the shadows of continued war crimes, mass climate tragedies and election results that don't instill much hope for positive change. The subject of where to find hope in the face of great pain, comes up regularly in our team conversations. For us, a group of friends spread across the globe, creating this podcast has been a way of refusing to be paralyzed, a means of staying connected, a window to the small joys, a way to platform important voices.

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We're going to leave you with a piece of writing from the book. What if we get it right? By Ayanna Elizabeth Johnson, we find ourselves in a time of reckoning, at an inflection point for humanity. What we will inflect toward is not clear. It has not yet been determined how much global temperatures will increase, how much sea levels will rise, how we will adapt to the inevitable and prevent the worst, or how we will treat each other amidst it all. Set aside your resignation and nihilism. There is a wide range of possible futures, peril and possibility co-exist. A few things feel clear about this world we must build together. They can be enough for each of us. They can be a home for each of us. They can be a role for each of us. The imperative is transformation, and the goal is to thrive, even if that's all we know for sure, it's enough to get started. So on that note, thank you for listening. Thanks for helping us get more people thinking about, talking about and acting on climate change. We'll be back in your ears before long, with season three, take care of yourselves and each other.

You've been listening to Climate Decoded. Climate decoded is produced by Chantal Kaufschultz , Isabelle Bordish , Kim Kenny, Greg Davis Jones, Jens van der Hansen, Jamie Stark, Gracie Neer, Alex Heske and me, Laura Helez Davis Jones, 

To read the transcript and see resources we mentioned in the episode, check out the link in the show notes to keep up with the podcast, follow us on all the socials we're at, climate underscore decoded on Instagram and climate decoded podcast on LinkedIn. To support the show, hit that follow button on your podcast platform of choice and drop us a rating or review. You can also donate to the podcast. Every little bit helps us bring you more climate content, you can find the link to donate in the show notes. Catch you soon you.


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