Dwell, July 2025
I remember the moment I couldn’t deny my climate anxiety any longer. It was September 2017, and an ethereal, orange-red light was shining through our window, landing at the feet of my then-six-month-old baby. The beauty of the scene was eclipsed by the source of the light—a sun obscured by wildfire smoke blown in from the Eagle Creek Fire that was raging in the Columbia River Gorge to the east of where I lived in Portland, Oregon. The scene of my baby amidst a seeming apocalypse highlighted a dual crisis: raising a child in a dying world.
The feeling was overwhelming, and it resulted in me beginning to focus my writing toward the intersection of climate change and disaster preparedness. My anxiety prompted me to prepare by stocking up on food and water and creating go-bags. Preparing alone felt futile. But in early 2024, during a freak ice storm that blanketed the city in a sheet of ice for several days, when I could barely walk across the street to deliver bread to my elderly neighbor, I remembered a conversation I’d had with a colleague and friend Noelle Studer-Spevak a couple years before. She told me about living in a cohousing community. Initially I’d dismissed the concept; it made me think of living with roommates. But after that winter storm, I wondered: would these communities be more prepared for an uncertain future because of a shared agreement to support one another?
