Inter-generational anger is "virtuous, righteous and well-deserved" when it comes to environmental mismanagement, says award-winning American writer Lydia Millet.
"We've co-evolved with all these creatures and suddenly we're just extinguishing it all. My worry is who will be without them? I feel that we will be much smaller and sadder creatures ourselves," she tells Kim Hill.
Writer and environmentalist Lydia Millet Photo: Cassidy Araiza for The New Yorker
As well as writing novels, Lydia is a staff writer at the Center for Biological Diversity – an activist group devoted to protecting endangered species via policy change and legal action.
Taking action – by investing in such environmental groups if you're wealthy enough and also voting in political candidates who'll make the best decisions about climate change – is how we can sustain hope, she says.
"You can't remain passive infinitely and [invite] hope to settle on you like Emily Dickinson's bird. You have to seek it out by engaging with the world and being the love that you feel for the world, to say it the way a hippie would."
As a young person, Lydia lived in Los Angeles, where she assisted a TV producer who used to throw water bottles at her head, performed as a clown at corporate picnics and copy-editing magazines like Hustler; SWAT: For the Prepared American and Fighting Knives: America’s Most Incisive Cutlery Publication.
For over 20 years now, though, she has lived in the "beautiful and strange" state of Arizona, writing novels with environmental themes and "low-level comedy in the midst of chaos and dark events".
Lydia's next book – a sort of memoir coming out in the spring of 2024 – is a return to the themes of her 2020 hit novel A Children's Bible (Kim's personal favourite).
"It's about having children in the age of extinction and climate change. It's just sort of about how did we come to this and how are we to be parents in this moment?"
"I believe anger among generations is actually virtuous and righteous and well-deserved ... My generation and several before and maybe one after have betrayed the very young and I wanted to write about what it feels like to be betrayed on the matter of the future."
Lydia is concerned about how existence on a less-diverse planet will affect the human experience.
"We are consigning our own species to a future that's going to be greatly impoverished in terms of the richness and diversity of its life. And we define ourselves based on that. We've co-evolved with all these creatures and suddenly we're just extinguishing it all. So my worry is who will be without them? I feel that we will be much smaller and sadder creatures ourselves."
