meet CHRISTINA

In the spring of 2018, I had a panic attack sitting on the floor of the ocean. Looking up at the top of the sea and deep-breathing through my scuba regulator, I realized it was my distance from my sleeping babies and their futures above that made my hands and heart quake with helplessness. I had recently read about the oncoming extinction crisis outlined in that year’s doomsday IPCC report. The overwhelm of stark facts paralyzed me. Swaying with the sea fans in the dark water that night, it was the ocean that held me. In the light of the next day, I began to reflect upon my decades of experiences submerged in oceanic life. I wrote into my wonder, my terror, my urgent need for new paradigms. I ascended from my exploration of the confluence of women and water with a name for what I saw missing in humanity: a “mother culture” (practiced by many marine mammals) based on the (inclusive) instinct to care. A search for shared feeling and resonance inspired me to write this book. 

A few years ago, I was in a car with five women winding down a Colorado mountain pass. I was squished into the back seat next to a PhD candidate. When she told me her thesis was on “ecofeminism,” I seized her arm. The driver gave words to the shared realization of all the women in the car, “I’ve never heard of that word and yet I’m positive I’m an ecofeminist.” The PhD candidate explained that the term was bogged down, caged and aged by academia. But that at its root, it was still the highly relevant—if repressed—branch of feminism that inspects the the connections between the exploitation of nature and the oppression of women (and how both are rooted in patriarchal systems). My lived experiences fell into two ecofeminism patterns: feeling the cross-species connections of motherhood and witnessing the extraction/exploitation pattern of mother earth and marginalized bodies alike. The world felt (to me) in need of lived, emotional, relational, and inspiring accounts of embodied human-climate relationships. I share my story—my submersion and ascent—to help others like me who feel the rivers of ecofeminism flowing through their bodies—raging but unnamed, tumbling from and toward a common source. This book grasps the arm of the reader and assures her: You are not alone. Further, it insists: Shared resonance and community are precisely our path through this.

My writing instinct is always to be ultra-collaborative. Hence, the hundreds of citations in my book crediting the researchers, scientists, activists, and authors whose work I interwove with mine. Major influences on my book include Rachel Carson (environmental pollution), Dr. Bayo Akomolafe (post activism), Linda Hogan (indigenous approach to ecology), Terry Tempest Williams (ecofeminism), Carl Safina (marine ecology), Lidia Yuknavitch (metaphor as portal), Ursula K. Le Guin (the “carrier bag” shape of writing instead of the hero’s journey), Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés Réyes (woman-centric mythology), and Francis Weller (ecological grief), among others! 

My writing process is fragmented, reflecting the faceted reality of motherhood and womanhood. My essays leans toward the lyrical, as I like to grapple with questions more than answers, allowing the white space on the page to offer as much as the sentences. I’m obsessed with metaphor, myth, dreamwork, and the subconscious, often drawing from these realms in a form of feminine resistance to patriarchal norms. I love embodied science, emphasizing both the emotional and corporeal influences of the environment upon our lived experiences. In weaving the search for metaphysical meaning with hard investigative questions, I strive to embody and exemplify the intricate dance between our inner worlds and physical environment.