Mothering Through a Climate Emergency: A Conversation with Author Sarah Marie Wiebe

Join our online conversation and audience Q&A with author, scholar, and mother Sarah Marie Wiebe as we discuss her new book, Hot Mess: Mothering Through a Code Red Climate Emergency.

Saturday, January 18th
Time: 1pm PT/ 2pm MT/ 3pm CT/ 4pm ET/ 5pm AT
Length: 1hr 15 min

Format: This event will include a presentation by the author followed by a conversation, and then a Q&A with the audience.

In a recent article in Macleans, Sarah writes: “There’s no simple answer to the question of whether to have a child amid a climate crisis. For me, responding to this moment as a parent goes far beyond lifestyle choices. Raising children can be a radical political act when we transform homes into environments of care and community-building. This is the best chance we have to collectively strive for climate solutions. I must. My son’s future depends on it.”

About the book: 

“No longer is the climate emergency purely an external threat to our wellbeing: this profoundly political circumstance is deeply personal. The summer after giving birth, Sarah Marie Wiebe and her baby endured the 2021 heat dome in British Columbia, with temperatures over 20 degrees above normal, creating all-time heat records across the province. It was the deadliest weather event in Canadian history. The extreme heat landed Wiebe in the hospital, dehydrated and separated from her nursing baby from dawn until dusk. So began a year of mothering through heat, fires and floods. The climate emergency’s many incarnations shaped Wiebe’s politics of parenting and revealed the layers, textures and nuances of the disastrous emergencies we encounter in a world dominated by extractive capitalism.

Drawing on hospital codes to explore the connections, Wiebe opens up tender conversations about intimate matters of how our bodies respond to emergency interventions: informed consent, emergency C-sections, reproductive mental health, and anti-colonial and anti-racist resistance. A critical ecofeminist scholar, Wiebe invites collective envisioning and enacting of caring, ethical relations between humans and the planet, including our atmospheres, lands, waters, animals, plants and each other.”

– Fernwood Publishing

About the author:

Dr. Sarah Marie Wiebe (she/her) grew up on unceded Coast Salish territory in British Columbia, is the mother of a three-year old and an author of the recently published Hot Mess: Mothering through a Code Red Climate Emergency. She is an Assistant Professor in the School of Public Administration at the University of Victoria and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa as well as a Co-Founder of the FERN Collaborative. Her research focuses on community development and environmental sustainability. At the intersections of environmental justice and public engagement, her teaching and research interests emphasize political ecology, policy justice and deliberative dialogue. As a collaborative researcher and filmmaker, she worked with Indigenous communities on sustainability-themed films including To Fish as Formerly. She collaborated with artists from Attawapiskat on a project entitled Reimgining Attawapiskat which is a companion website to her recent book Life against States of Emergency: Revitalizing Treaty Relations from Attawapiskat. Dr. Wiebe is also the author of Everyday Exposure: Indigenous Mobilization and Environmental Justice in Canada’s Chemical Valley (2016). For more about Dr. Wiebe’s research see: https://www.sarahmariewiebe.com/.