Motherhood and Interspecies Solidarity in a Time of Climate Crisis

​Join curators and scholars Alexandra Moore and LuLing Osofsky for a conversation on their contributions to The Weather and the Whale, exploring motherhood, grief, and care in the midst of climate catastrophe.

​How do we caretake and grieve in a time of climate catastrophe? Drawing on the story of Tahlequah, the orca who carried her dead calf for seventeen days, this talk asks what cetacean motherhood can teach us about mourning, memory, and mothering. Alex and LuLing will explore the double binds of motherhood, and particularly the mother-child unit as both a site of life and a site of vulnerability to death, historically and in the present, for humans and whales. We take motherhood to include all forms of raising young lives, including non-biological primary care relations and the work of whale mothering. We ask what it would mean to understand a whale mother’s displays of grief and distress as demands for action, and whether, in doing so, we may take mothering as the basis for multispecies political solidarity.

​Alex and LuLing will read excerpts from their recently published essay and be joined in conversation by filmmaker and researcher (and Local Economy member!) Alix Blair Darling. Books for sale at the event in partnership with East Bay Booksellers.