More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 15 - April 22, 2023
To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot—and to know that we must act without knowing the outcome of those actions.
People often talk about the future as if it already exists.
The latest form of climate denial is no longer refuting climate change’s existence but merely recommending a slower track of action or offering ceaseless prayers to promisors of carbon sequestration. They hope that technology will prevent them from having to face the consequences of their actions.
We need to give people better ways to get involved in the work—beyond just online sign ups, occasional marches, and more. We need better channels to put power back in people’s hands.
There is too much bad news to justify complacency. There is too much good news to justify despair. —Donella Meadows
Well, what if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual but in your ability to be part of a collective? What if you broadened your perspective beyond what you can accomplish alone and let yourself see what you could do if you lent your efforts to something bigger? Yes, it’s true that you can’t solve the climate crisis alone, but it’s even more true that we can’t solve it without you. It’s a team sport.
There’s another fallacy embedded there: the expectation that a single, neat behavioral change will be enough.
Responding to this crisis is going to have to become part of who we are. All the time. Once you understand that, you understand that this isn’t about climate action at all. It’s about climate commitment.
It’s asking yourself: What can I do next? And always next.
But now that you’re aware of that truth, it’s crucial to remember one thing: it’s not enough to be right. The facts have been on our side for a very long time, but we’re still losing.
The right time to start your climate commitment is always right now. But the question remains. What can I do? Well, now that you understand that the question is complicated, the answer actually emerges as quite simple: do what you’re good at. And do your best.
As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.”
Effective climate action speaks to local circumstances—the local environment, economy, and society. Our climate future will emerge through local politics’ operating in the context of national policies and global initiatives.
Studies have made clear that the more rapid the transition, the less harm will be experienced. Delaying and slowing are making matters far worse, as the repercussions of the war in Ukraine have made painfully clear.
As a climate scientist, people often ask me what is the single most important thing they can do to address the climate crisis? My answer is simply this: recognize that you are living through the most profound moment in human history. Averting planetary disaster is up to the people alive right now.
The good news is that there is no evidence to support the notion that we are currently facing runaway climate change or the inevitability of an unlivable future. Once emissions start to stabilize, temperature follows suit. Sometimes this message is misunderstood by doomers and nonexpert commentators, so it is worth being clear about what the science has to say. The IPCC report explains that every single metric ton of carbon dioxide we prevent from entering the atmosphere lessens the severity of the impacts we bake into the system. Our assessment meticulously describes how every fraction of a
...more
Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is a series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.
We need stories to remind us why hope is complicated but necessary, because the opposite mode is to live neat lives powered by a self-affirming wireless fidelity to all-terrain gloom, where all signs point to defeat and despair waits at every turn. To hope is to embrace uncertainty, knowing the bad guys have not won yet.
Finally, I’d come because my personal and professional reserves were depleted. Like so many others working in the climate space, I’d been feeling overwhelmed since August, when the IPCC released part of its sixth assessment report. The conclusions were bleak. Reading the report felt like being buried alive by an avalanche of facts—the facts of sea-level rise and progressively severe storms, among others—and I was looking to claw my way out.
The answer to the question of climate change must come from everyone, or it will come from no one.
May we let the sadness come and teach us how to live. Let it be the mud for the lotus, as Thay [Thich Nhat Hanh] says. Let us sit with it and let it pass through us so that it might be transformed to something like love. —Ocean Vuong
Despair is also, quite simply, bad politics. By surrendering the fight outward, despair refocuses us inward. It encourages what I’ve called the politics of powerlessness, marked by navel-gazing, endless process, posturing, and the internal power struggles and call-outs that weaken our organizations and movements. When we don’t believe we can win, we reach instead for the comfort of being surrounded by people who think and talk and look like us, the thrill of being part of the in-group, the small pleasures of being right and pure.
Despair is a self-fulfilling prophecy; it blocks us from taking agency, which makes it all the more likely that our worst fears will come to pass.
Each time that we turn away from fear, we can increase the grip of dread. And, in doing so, we may miss the opportunity to strengthen and resource ourselves with what we learn from these painful landscapes, so that later we can face with humility and hard-earned wisdom what is happening in our changing world.
But for those who can speak the language of fossils and sediments, the past is not just an object lesson; the Earth has left us a road map for how to survive the climate crisis.
Motivation to read Otherlands
For those of us born into individualistic cultures, the vastness of deep time can be just as terrifying as it is comforting; it provokes our deep-seated fear that we are insignificant and powerless, even as it assures us in our darkest moments that things will not always be as they are now. But just as an ocean is a multitude of drops, eternity is an amalgam of moments: the minutes, hours, and days in which we find ourselves bound together, and to the planet, with a charge to be good ancestors.
Unlike the dinosaurs, we have a choice: Will we be the asteroid or the fern?
Too often, people seem to think that if there are not immediate and obvious consequences, there’s failure. In reality, what happens in response is often more subtle, delayed, unpredictable, incremental, and indirect—and yet still valuable and significant, sometimes more so—than simple formulas and short timelines account for.
From there I learned that hope is not something that you have. Hope is something that you create, with your actions. Hope is something you have to manifest into the world, and once one person has hope, it can be contagious. Other people start acting in a way that has more hope.”
Something I once learned about fame might be true, in another way, of ideas. A moderately famous artist is recognizable and visible, but a truly impactful artist is no longer what you see but how you see. They have become invisible because they are behind your eyes rather than in front of them. They are how you see everything else, not just their own productions.
“Moses Maimonides, the Jewish scholar of the twelfth century, argued that hope is belief in the ‘plausibility of the possible’ as opposed to the ‘necessity of the probable.’ While it is always ‘probable’ that Goliath will win, it is also true that sometimes David wins, a sense of the ‘possible’ that we experience in our own lives as well. Hope emerges from this sense of possibility, freeing us from the shackles of probability.”
You do not have to do this on your own. So much of this story about individualism needs to be left behind. The future needs to be one that’s collective and communal.
When I’m grieving. I know that I’m not grieving because death is unnatural, I’m grieving because love has overfilled my banks, and I can no longer just pour it into this other person. When I’m angry, it’s because I love something, and I want to defend it. When I am feeling fearful is because I love something.
Ruth liked this
It’s so important to be able to differentiate between what is necessary to hold in abundance and what is okay to let go.
What if the climate crisis requires renouncing not this version of wealth but its underlying poverty?
Climate chaos is a catastrophe but also a teacher, and its first lesson is that everything is connected, which is both the beautiful dream of mutuality and the nightmare of runaway consequences. We need to learn to see that interconnectedness, and as we both believe so deeply, this is why this crisis, like every crisis, is in part a storytelling crisis.
for far too long the rhetoric in many climate spaces is we need less—“Drive less, eat less, turn off our lights.” It’s this language that implies to people that in order to care about the climate you must have a lower quality of life. When really, the calls to action need to be questions of connection:
Often, winning is made up of what did not happen and thus what cannot be seen, and we only know about it through story. The radical poet Muriel Rukeyser said long ago, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” Choosing the stories you, yourself, are made of is crucial work as we enter this unfinished story of how human beings responded to the greatest emergency our species has ever faced.
Mary Annaïse Heglar, whose tenacity is matched only by her brilliance, declared in 2022, “If you’re worried that it’s too late to do anything about climate change and we should all just give up, I have great news for you: that day is not coming in your lifetime. As long as you have breath in your body, you will have work to do.”
Bill McKibben has long said, when people ask him what’s the most significant thing you can do for the climate, “Stop being an individual; join something.”
Doomism, as climate scientist Michael Mann calls it, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if it prevents the action that can shift us away from the worst-case scenarios. Despair is the opposite of complacency, but both can lead to inaction.
To be pregnant is to be acquainted with death. Through the process of creation, one has to also be ready for the realities of destruction.
