Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. “We have to put our hands in the earth to make ourselves whole again. In it, she writes that it is not enough to simply appreciate nature or to weep over environmental destruction. Then, last year, I read Braiding Sweetgrass, a book of ecological essays by Native American botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. The city was actually abundant, if you knew where to look. Even the dismal New York winters I’d always dreaded seemed less barren when I found delicious wood ear mushrooms for stir-fries and gathered pine needles for cookies. While it wasn’t safe to eat plants from random street corners in the city because of lead and other chemicals that might be in the soil, at Forest Park in Queens, just 15 minutes from my house, I found a bounty - blackberries, wineberries, spicebush, and cherries. In California, I had picked lemons every night from the tree in my yard, but it wasn’t so different in New York once I began paying attention. I used the plant-identification app PictureThis to scan the weeds I saw and bought books about medicinal plants of the Northeast, and soon I began to recognize that the leaves poking out from the sidewalks were edible broadleaf plantain, burdock, purple dead-nettle. And now that I had the time to notice, it occurred to me that the nature in NYC wasn’t as sparse as I thought.
#Stefanie steward full#
My mental health was so fragile that I quit my job and started spending full days wandering the streets, lying on the grass in Bryant Park and ambling in circles around Bed–Stuy.
For years, I never bothered to learn what scraggly tree stood outside my window. In comparison, New York City’s natural world seemed so sparse and underwhelming. In college, I literally walked through a redwood forest to get to class every morning. I’m from Northern California, where a picturesque beach or mountaintop is often just a 20-minute drive away. It was a night heron - which looks nothing like a chicken. Like the time my father-in-law, a Queens native, sent the family group chat a photo of “a chicken in the Bronx!” and everyone was awed.
When I moved here seven years ago, I realized that many New Yorkers are … disconnected from the natural world, to put it kindly. It can be hard to love nature in New York.
#Stefanie steward how to#
I started crying every day on the subway, feeling utterly helpless and baffled at how to mourn a loss of this magnitude.īut in the past couple of years, one very important new relationship has acted as an invaluable balm on my climate anxiety - my relationship with the Earth itself. I could relate.Ī couple of years ago, I had a nervous breakdown over, among other things, our planet’s dark future.
When I logged onto Twitter, I was hit by dozens of panicked tweets in response to the report - a deluge of horror and despair. The report calls this a “code red for humanity,” with global temperatures likely to increase by 1.5 degrees within the next two decades, causing even more extreme weather events. This week, the United Nations released a new climate-change report warning us that we are locked into a much hotter future. The writer standing in Forest Park, Queens.