It’s another hot and smoky morning, and I am busy implementing the climate control system employed by the AC-less crowd in Seattle – i.e. most of us. I woke up early and opened up all the windows and doors, hoping to air out the stuffy heat that built up inside yesterday. (I was also conscious that I was letting in the wildfire smoke… but today the heat feels like the direr threat.) And now that the temperature outside has risen again, I am shutting the house back up: closing windows, drawing curtains, pinning up scarves and towels to block every possible ray of sun that might find its way in and roast us all afternoon. While I make the rounds, I’m listening to a New York Times podcast about the latest UN climate report, the gist of which seems to be:
1. Things are bad. Well, duh. Tell me something I don’t know, NYT.
2. Things are going to get worse for another thirty years, no matter what we do. Reporter Henry Fountain analogizes: if you’re on a giant ship chugging full-speed ahead toward a rocky shore, and you finally decide to change course, “it’s not going to stop on a dime. Or in a mile.” I’ve heard this before, of course – it’s a common talking point. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the carbon we’ve already emitted will continue to heat things up… But I’m not sure I knew that this unstoppable spiral of climate chaos is scheduled to coincide so neatly with the literal rest of my life. I feel a familiar wave of despair and dread coming on – this time tinged with self-pity. Oh, great. You’re telling me this miserably hot, orange-hazed apocalypse is actually the most pleasant summer I’ll ever see again?
3. Then comes the standard “glimmer of hope,” as Henry puts it: We may be able to slow or halt the damage beyond 2050, if we act right now. Again, this is not news – but, again, the specificity of the timeline hits me. So there is at least some chance that thirty years from now, when my kids are my age, they will have lived through the worst of this crisis, and will be able to live out the rest of their lives on a stable, if markedly less hospitable, planet?
As Henry Fountain and Michael Barbaro keep talking, I flounder up the crest of the wave
of despair. Okay, so this isn’t the future I signed up for when I
started forging my path (such as it is) through life. But I think it’s a
future I can get on board with, if I must. Plenty of people have made painful sacrifices and undergone grueling transitions in
order to give their kids a chance at a better life. So far I’ve mostly
been the beneficiary of such sacrifices (thanks, previous generations!); now it's my turn.* I’ll need some time to process this
conception of my final decades – and to figure out how it might shift my current behaviors and future plans. But at least
it’s got a recognizable purpose, unlike most of the futures I’ve been imagining lately. And there’s some possibility (however small) that in the end I’ll
look back and feel like it was worth it.
4. And then the wave crashes over me. That's only if we act right now. Only if we seize the rudder and reverse the thrust of the massive engines propelling our giant ship toward the cliffs. Only if we do way more than we are currently doing, way faster than we are currently doing it: way more and way faster, in fact, than anyone is even talking about doing. More and faster, Henry laments, than has ever been possible, politically.
Okay, so what if we fail to act with sufficient speed, and twenty years from now the climate continues to spiral out of control? It seems awfully likely. Will my life have a purpose once it becomes clear that human existence will be more and more precarious and desperate, not only for the rest of my life, but also Josie and Simon’s and beyond? Just for the record, I absolutely feel a sense of urgent responsibility for other people’s children, including those who are far away or yet to be born, and who may face direr dangers than my own. But I’ll admit that the two human beings who came out of my body, whose happiness and well-being have been the focus of so much of my time and energy, whom I love more (as I used to tell them) than I ever thought I could love anybody – well, they do have a unique power to help me reframe the meaning of my existence.
The podcast wraps up, and Michael says that thing he says every time: “Here’s what else you need to know today.” I stand there, momentarily stunned. Dude, what else could we possibly need to know? What is there to think about today besides this?
Well, says Michael, the Taliban is about to take over Afghanistan, again. Also, the National Education Association has come out in favor of vaccine requirements for teachers. I wince: fair enough. Bullets are still flying, bombs still falling. A pandemic still rages across the planet. The cruelties of unbridled capitalism continue. White supremacy and patriarchy maintain their grip. All these realities are intertwined, of course – with each other, and with the climate crisis too.
I attended a seminar a couple years back where I was introduced to the word conjuncture: a moment when historical events and societal forces align in such a way that huge dramatic change is possible – even inevitable. Imagine a teetering Jenga tower, the professor said. You can try to hold off the inevitable collapse by hovering vigilantly, making delicate, desperate adjustments as more and more blocks are added to the swaying structure. But the time comes when you just have to step back and watch the whole thing come clattering down. Game over.
Of course with a societal collapse, the game isn’t over; assuming our species survives in some form, we’ll still have to figure out how to live with each other, on a finite planet. And it matters how the collapse unfolds: which direction the tower falls, and how the pieces lie when the dust settles. I left the seminar still pondering this metaphor – and struggling to figure out what I could do (as an individual, an activist, a person with some access to power) to nudge the cascade of tumbling blocks in the right direction.
I’m shuttering an east-facing living room window with an old cardboard protest sign when the next podcast in my feed starts playing: my friend Alex Steffen’s “The Snap Forward.” It's another climate conversation – this one built on the idea that the “orderly transition” we keep talking about is actually a delusional fantasy. That window has closed. The orderly transition ship has sailed. What we’re in for now is an era of chaos: unpredictable, uncontrollable, impossible to plan for. In this new world everything you think you know is probably wrong. Whatever happened in the past is mostly irrelevant. We need to abandon our old assumptions and habits, and develop new skills, new ways of thinking. (My friend Simon has pointed out that some of these “new” skills and ways of thinking may turn out to be very, very old – the lessons of the distant past may be more relevant than we think. I first met Alex in a history seminar – I think he’d probably agree.) These next thirty+ years are gonna be hard: full of trauma and tragedy. But there will also be tremendous opportunities to transform some things we thought would never change.
This thought isn't totally new either, but it's one that can sometimes penetrate my despair and keep me moving forward. I don't know what's next, and that's scary as hell – but at least the predictable, untenable, infuriating path we've been on is coming to an end. We have proved ourselves incapable of changing course voluntarily. Well, guess what? It's not up to us anymore.
And who knows – maybe thirty years from now the pieces of the old world will lie scattered around us, splintered and charred. Maybe the ship will have come apart in the water, when the rusty bolts holding it together suddenly gave way. Maybe everything will be in crazy, beautiful, unpredictable flux, and my kids will be vigorously and creatively engaged in building a future that is just, compassionate, and sustainable – a future they will look forward to growing old in. I may live long enough to glimpse that future; I kind of doubt it. But either way, I want to die knowing I devoted my remaining time to making it possible.
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