On one level, my answer to “How can you have a child now?” is simple. I have never been tempted to think we should all stop having children and disappear. Part of the reason climate change is so terrible is the threat it poses to human life and culture, and I want to help them go on. So the question I ask myself every day is how to explain this suffering world to a newcomer. This is what I find myself saying, to this little person who can’t understand me quite yet: “The world is good, for all the bad in it—a good place. And you are good: full of joy, born innocent. But you are not good for the world. When you do all the things you will do—work, play, love—you will be breaking down its systems, making it unlivable. And there is very little that you, personally, can do about it.” What kind of welcome is that?

It is a truthful one, at least, but it raises more questions. What does it mean to teach a child to live in a time of perennial crisis, always in the shadow of loss? I think about trying to teach him love and wonder first, before he inevitably learns fear. I would like him to be fascinated by a Manhattan red oak, a red-tailed hawk perched in its limbs, or a morel mushroom at its roots, before he thinks, This forest is going to die, with everything in it. When the thought of climate doom arrives, I hope it will arrive in a mind already prepared by curiosity and pleasure to know why this world is worth fighting to preserve.

Read: How I talk to my daughter about climate change

And I hope it will soften the edge of doom for him to know that the world we love has been desolated and climate-changed for a very long time. I imagine we’ll conjure together the ghosts of the wolves and elk that once lived in Manhattan, and the long-lost bison in the West Virginia hills where his grandparents live. A little later, he will know that 10,000 years ago there were giant ground sloths, dire wolves, mastodons, and more. He will learn that before 125th Street was a commercial hub of southern Harlem, it was a streambed running out of the stony flanks of Morningside Heights and curving down to what is still a wetland at the northeastern corner of Central Park. Some of the wonder of the world is what is already gone from it. Nothing he learns to love will be undamaged. Love for half-broken things and places is what he will have to practice, like all of us.

A love for imperfect and impermanent things isn’t a bad starting point for passionate democratic politics. We’ll be sure to tell him that being personally powerless to change the world doesn’t mean being collectively powerless, that we can still make a politics big and generous enough to change course. James was less than a month old when tens of thousands of people rallied in New York City for the global climate strike. We walked him down Riverside Drive and quietly joined in with the chants of elementary-school children marching for the planet. “Look, James,” I whispered, “big kids!” I hope he and his classmates will assume that the Green New Deal is only the beginning of what we need to make peace with the planet, and with one another.