All of these things are true:
The climate crisis is already happening, and it’s bad.
We created this problem — we are responsible.
It’s going to get worse before it gets better.
The crisis is already leading to immense human suffering, and nobody is immune to its effects.
We are not yet doing nearly enough to address this.
Those are the terrifying facts.
Living With The News
Sometimes when I think about these truths, I can do so very clinically or academically. I hardly batted an eyelash typing them out just now, for instance. But there are other moments — more and more of them, actually — when the feelings which naturally follow from those truths will sneak up on me.
Those moments when grief, fear, anger, or sadness threaten to undo me. When I find myself crying as I consider some lost future, or yelling at the news on the radio while driving to pick my daughter up from daycare.
Last week, it was a headline and photo, about firefighters swaddling the trunks of ancient sequoia trees in blankets of foil, in a compassionate attempt to save them from fire.
Two nights ago, it was the news that Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia is destroying the most necessary and consequential climate provision in the Build Back Better plan. The climate movement’s biggest hope for truly effective US climate action, and a lynchpin of the US strategy to lead global change at the upcoming UN climate talks in Glasgow, is being dismantled by the whims of a trumped up coal baron in Congress.
And because it is both my job and singular obsession, I get to follow the twists and turns of these high-stakes policy squabbles day in, and day out.
So, with these facts ever-present in my life, how do I keep fighting for change?
Cultivating A Joyful Vision
There are lots of tools in the ol’ toolbox for me, but the single most important one is this: I have a joyful vision for the future.
It helps that the following things are also true:
Right now, there are private companies, governments, NGOs, multinational corporations, and individuals who are already creating real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions — and there are many more who are working to get there.
We may or may not yet keep global warming to 1.5°C — which is what current science tells us is the cutoff to avoid widespread human suffering and global destabilization. But even if we don’t get there, a 1.6°C increase will still be much better for us than a 1.7°C increase. And 1.7°C is better than 1.8°C, and so on. In other words, every bit counts.
There is still so much we can do, as individuals and communities and nations, to reduce present and future harm. I’m talking about real, tangible actions we can all take.
There are millions of people, all over the world, who feel exactly like I do — terrified, yet emboldened. As the title of a great podcast by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac puts it — there are many who feel both “outrage and optimism.”
I’m lucky to know so many of those people, and to know many of the individuals who are fighting on the frontlines of this movement in every sector. Partly because of them, partly because of the things I know about this global transition to a clean energy future, and partly because of a half-formed emotional and mental resilience I am actively working on (working on so hard here, folks), I have cultivated a vision that I can turn to when I need to dredge up some optimism.
It isn’t just a loose feeling, or a snapshot, or an abstract idea. It’s a vision, a meditation exercise — something I can close my eyes and willfully enter into with all of my senses. I’m talking about a vivid, imagined place I can go to when I need to remember what is possible. I’m talking about world building.
This is something any of us can do.
The brilliant Mary Annaïse Heglar talks about this practice in a great piece for Yes! Magazine. She says:
“World-building is often thought to be the domain of science fiction, but any work of fiction, or even nonfiction, requires it. You have to build the world as your character sees it, because as every novelist knows, world-building is more about the characters than about the environment…We need to apply world-building to the planet we live on. While artists might be the most accomplished at this, they can’t do it alone this time. We’re all going to have to push our imaginations.”
I urge you to spend some quiet time with your mind, cultivating your own, but in case it proves helpful, here’s a peek into my own vision for the future.
One Possible Future
On the south-facing side of a green mountain, there’s a broad cluster of white bungalows. It’s late springtime, the weather is sunny and warm, and there’s a sturdy breeze. The sun charges the shining photovoltaic roofs of the bungalows, and in the valley below, the towering propellers of a hundred white windmills spin lazily in the breeze.
I sit on the front porch of one of the bungalows, in a much-repaired rocking chair. Before me spreads a vast food forest, stretching in front of and behind our row of bungalows, with fruit trees and berry bushes and edible native perennials of all variety. Bees and butterflies pollinate the budding flowers, and a flock of chickens peck away in the beds we’ve let lie fallow. There are roll-over shelters to protect the garden from sudden flood rains and the most intense heat days, but they’re rolled up in their stands on this beautiful day. Birds, rabbits, and other living things come and go.
An elderly neighbor who lives in the house to our right, and a child from the house to our left, work together on stirring a compost pile. I can hear the sounds of my partner working away in his workshop behind our house, and I can smell a pot of spicy beans and rice, from where my daughter is cooking with her friends in our community’s shared kitchen.
Below the garden space, a 10-mile-wide greenway winds across and up the mountain. It’s just one stretch of millions of miles of conserved natural “greenways,” broad swaths of land where wild ecology is left to flourish, and which life in all its forms can use to move — both in latitude and altitude — as the changing climate dictates. Its proximity supports the soil ecology, as well as the pollinator population, which helps our food forest flourish.
A broad road heads down from our community, arcs over a bridge above the protected greenway, and slips down the mountain toward a city on the valley floor.
The city is all glass and solar panels and green. All possible surfaces are covered in energy-capturing photovoltaic sheets or air-cleaning plant life. There are historic old buildings which have been retrofitted for energy efficiency, as well as many new developments created under strict sustainability guidelines. Notably, there is no cloud of smog above the city — the whole valley is emissions-free, and the air is clear and clean. The city runs entirely on renewable power, and is criss-crossed with electric trains, bike paths, pedestrian squares, and electric bus lanes. Communities like my own exist all over the city, in myriad forms, and spread out from it across the valley.
Colorful regenerative farms — visually rich with both trees and crops — follow the curves of a river across one side of the valley, from near the towering windmills, and past the city. Wind-driven cargo sailboats move up the waterway, and floating vats of algae and azolla fern create a string of bright green squares along the river’s edge.
On a nearby mountain, I can just make out an ecological crew doing careful mitigation work in the vast pine-spruce forest, preparing for future fires. They move in bright orange suits through the deep browns and greens of the forest.
Everywhere in my vision, the reality of extreme weather is present, and too many people still suffer. But everywhere, as well, are the flourishing, innovative strategies of a species that has chosen survival over extinction, and discovered, in the process, that equity and sustainability go hand in hand. In our desperate efforts to go on, we have re-discovered so much that we thought was lost — interdependent ways to live, to connect, and to support each other. A truer, better relationship with all of the lifeforms around us.
I watch the sun set over the mountains to my right, and the sky above fills with a billion stars.
Thanks for letting me share that with you.
Sincerely,
Jessica
TL;DR
The climate crisis comes with a set of terrifying truths, but there is hope and inspiration everywhere, if you look for it. Don’t underestimate the great gifts your imagination can give you.