Wetlands and Anxiety

View of the Ballona wetlands at low tide from above the estuary inflow gate

Arguably the climate crisis is a topic that is personal to every living being, that said, this week’s approach to it hit close to home for me. Through the course of reading and hearing about the emotional reactions we have to climate change, the need for a cultural shift in order to achieve change and a visit to our local wetlands, we explored what it might take for each of us to be active in the fight against climate change.

Climate anxiety and grief are feelings I know well, and judging by Cara Buckley, Professor Sarah Jaquette Ray and my own classmates’ discussions this week, they are nearly ubiquitous in those who care for the environment. As an environmental studies student, it sometimes feels like I am going through cycles of curiosity, realization, despair, apathy, and nihilism, with the return to hopeful curiosity only getting easier after years of practice. Buckley wrote and spoke about her own paralyzing environmental fears at length, about catching a moth on a train, her despair at every plastic bag, and seeing a baby and thinking only of their carbon emissions. The impact of children is a topic I find interesting because I vividly remember a class two years ago where we read an infographic that stated, more than any other personal change, choosing not to have children would make the greatest individual difference in carbon emissions. Professor Ray, too, brought up my generation’s reluctance to have children because of our fear for the future. Thinking that it would essentially be unethical to subject a child to an unknown and possibly inhospitable world is something I have been ruminating on for years, but this may be the first time I’ve heard it addressed. Even in this lecture we didn’t linger long on the idea, but it was validating to hear it’s a shared concern. Part of what makes the future loom so terrifyingly is the sense that climate issues are too large. Ray says it “would seem that there is never an end; it will never be enough. We can fill a black hole with a frenetic outpouring of effort, but that is not a prescription for lifelong resilience,” and resilience combined with a sense of personal efficacy is what we ultimately need to address larger issues as a collective.

Overcoming our guilt and despair in favor of a more hopeful outlook and collectivism leading to social change is the key to avoiding the worst of the climate crisis. Doctor Ray advocates for change in, “small, often unglamorous, even invisible stages.” She refers to an effort to plant eelgrass, but this could just as easily be applied to most environmental activities. Maybe at this stage the St. Kateri Habitats initiative– described by Buckley in her article about Bill Jacobs– has led to the creation of 190 habitats, but it started with one yard. It’s over time with these smaller movements made over and over that we do see genuine progress, and when we learn change is possible it becomes easier to believe that each of us is capable of it. This also plays into the twelfth way to see Los Angeles that Price proposes in “13 Ways of Seeing Nature in LA,” the outlook through which we see the city as a focus of great good work, as the home of many collectives fighting against the challenges and struggles found here. The other shift that we need to make is in our outlook towards the world. Jacobs says “People have to love the Earth before they save it,” and Robin Kimmerer describes a model based on indigenous outlooks for us to find love and understanding. Kimmerer brings up the idea of language and how that affects our outlook:

In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reusing a person to a mere thing. So it is in Potawatomi and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.

She explains that the western way of discussing nature as made up of objects of things rather than of beings is part of what enables us to cruelly disregard with so little thought. Were we to see each plant and bug as “someone” the way an ecologist she references does, or even the way Buckley did in her moth story, we would be compelled to show more respect to these other beings. As Kimmerer says, “All things are possible in a world where everything is alive,” so we need to understand and participate in global human and nonhuman collectives.

Returning to the lens of the nearby Ballona Wetlands, I was reminded of one of the ways I personally have found some solace and personal efficacy facing climate change. From my first semester at LMU I have been hearing the story of the wetlands and volunteering on occasional

Tongva meeting space within Ballona Discovery Park

Fridays at habitat restoration events. I have spent less time at the discovery park, as it is meant mainly for educational purposes and has no real need for my physical labor, and learning the history of the park with the Gabrielino/Tongva people was a somewhat conflicting experience. The inclusion of a meeting space, recordings of stories and songs and the recently added memorial are an extremely positive step in educating visitors about not just the ecosystem but also the people who coexisted within it before being forced out. The knowledge that Tongva remains were exhumed without permission from the site, even with their reinterment and memorial, casts a shadow over it which may even seem to be appropriate to the atrocities of colonialism. This history could be emphasized more greatly in the salt marsh/

A path through the Ballona salt marsh used by volunteers to reach different areas within the section

area B of the wetlands where the majority of volunteer activities take place. The native plant gardening sessions may be a place for sharing the knowledge of species that were so important to the people of this land; unfortunately those sessions seem to only take place on weekday mornings when we are preoccupied with work or school. What that section has done well is restoring the ecological health of a small portion of LA’s last coastal wetlands. Through volunteer efforts removing literal tons of invasive species– an easily believable estimate after experiencing the weight of even a single wheelbarrow of ice plant– and cleared out space for the return of native species like the bedding savannah sparrow that nests in healthy pickleweed, the El Segundo Blue Butterfly which lives its whole life cycle out on dune buckwheat, and branching phacelia. Here I have seen the small unglamorous steps Ray described as each session of restoration makes a small dent adding up to clearing large areas over time. Visible results and personal involvement here are how I have supported my own personal efficacy to maintain enough hope to continue caring.