Climate change, for me, for I am sure many of us, feels aggressively present in the summer. I’m reminded of it like clockwork. Just like it seems like every time I step outside the front of my house I see a cop car drive through my over-policed neighborhood, a reminder of our white-supremacist fascist state. It seems like the sun burns a little hotter each day, each season, each year. The knowledge is inescapable, always noticeable, as hot as concrete and as unforgiving as light reflecting off parked cars on the side of the street.
I ask myself things like: was it so hot in June last year? Was July last year this dry? Some of my vegetable plants that favor cooler spring weather withered this year. I got some seeds of varieties of plants that were originally cultivated in Central America, in warmer parts of Asia. The ones I’ve started are growing well. I’m going to try more plants that are adapted to high heat. I’m in Pennsylvania. I’m on antibiotics for Lyme right now because our winters don’t kill enough ticks anymore — and I can’t get a vaccine because the availability of our medicines is controlled, not by what we need, but by what is profitable. [My DOG has a lyme vaccine btw, because I’m a good parent.]
Watching plants change, adapt, fail to adapt, the growing season shift and alter, expand and heat up, keeps me aware of just how tangible this is. When I water my vegetables, pollinators descend. They’re thirsty. Wasps and bees and flying insects drop onto the leaves to drink like they’ve been lost in the desert.
It doesn’t seem sustainable. Nature, for lack of a better word, seems stressed.
Like many of the people here, I’m irresolvably angry with the people responsible for this, who are least affected, who won’t have to lose much of anything and who are going to live out the rest of their lives in relative comfort. I personally don’t understand how they can move through the world without someone spitting in their face, spilling a drink on them, refusing them service, pushing them down a flight of stairs — but I guess that’s part of what they buy with their money, a shield from anyone who isn’t also buying into perpetuating their abuse.
And it’s all twisted together, right? It’s colonialism and pollution on the part of Western European Countries and Canada, the US, China and other nation-states. It’s white supremacy not as something we’re moving away from, but as something the west is digging deeper into. It’s increased funding for police, reduced funding for infrastructure and services because the most important thing to our country’s politicians is keeping us working for them, not resisting, not protesting. Roe v Wade’s overturn is related because forced birth is an important part of making sure that the very wealthy can become even wealthier, that they’ll have a continuous supply of workers, and that people with uteri will be too afraid or distracted or sick or dead to do anything about our worsening circumstances.
AND ALL THAT IS VERY GRIM LOL, and also I don’t think we’re going to turn climate change around at this point. Because of all the above, I really don’t think that will happen. Tigers might very well go away within a few years time. The fish could all be gone by 2048. So many of the creatures that I thought would be around forever growing up, so many of them are going to disappear. Some of it is due to poaching or over-fishing and active habitat destruction, but there’s no doubt that changes in weather patterns and warming ocean temperatures are messing with delicate ecosystems. Our lives are going to keep shifting and changing and we’re going to encounter ever more frequent and horrific natural disasters. Above all, people are going to die. With that, it’s going to continue to be the world’s most vulnerable people who had no hand in making this happen who are harmed first and most, because nothing about this is just, and that is one of the hardest things to continue to wrap my mind around.
But, that being said, that means that the priority for me is clear. I have to prioritize being a part of doing what we can to ensure that as many regular people (not like, elites) are as safe and as free as possible, for as long as possible. That if and when it’s possible, that we make progress or reclaim progress temporarily lost. The priority is building community locally and online, about sharing info and gathering info, about listening to Indigenous leadership, learning about and building climate change resilience (mental and otherwise) and fighting against greed and laziness and complacency on the part of corporations and politicians and landlords in myriad ways from volunteering and direct action to donating to having hard conversations with friends. This is all just something that’s gradually being woven more and more deeply into my every day. I really do think the lifestyle changes we’ve had to adopt due to the pandemic are just the tip of the iceberg (lol) of the ways we’ll have to adapt or even completely overhaul the ways that we live, but also that this is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself.
Nothing makes me feel so small and powerless like climate change, truly. I feel you if you feel overwhelmed or just sinking into despair. I don’t think I’m alone in that I’m so deeply disappointed that we’ve wound up here, that I’m honestly shocked when people think that all they should do is crank up their A/C a little higher, as though that’s the proper response to a climate activist self-immolating in front of the Supreme Court. The fact that if left unchecked, climate change will kill and harm so many people (I DO NOT WANT TO LOOK UP HOW MANY), but that this is all within our power as humans, as a whole to prevent, and we won’t do it — I don’t think there’s a word for how devastating that is to witness. And here we are, witnessing it together. All we can do is keep chipping away at what we can. My heart goes out to you, reader, and I hope you’re doing okay. Please don’t give up. Not, yet.
I can be relentlessly practical, and so, when I tell myself: okay the goal is survival and freedom for as many people as humanly possible, that makes sense to me. The goal is no longer stopping climate change. It’s about mitigating its effects and supporting anyone who can do something about slowing it down. It’s about taking local action because that can make a material difference for the people around me, around us, and it’s where we’re going to make serious impacts in our neighbors lives and in each of our communities’ collective resilience. When I remind myself of that, in a way, it makes it easier to keep going. When I remind myself that I have to live for the now, in the world we have, and that there are still good things — like writing and love, friendship and books and food, gardening and dogs, art and music and the smell of rain — that makes it easier, too.
I also hate the heat and if I had to choose a way to go out via climate, it would be slowly freezing during an ice age, so I’m kind of mad that the way we have to is by burning up, just like, I am personally offended by this.
Comments
this…was actually really helpful. because i absolutely share the experience of despair when contemplating the enormity of what lies ahead, but feeling hope – not optimism, but hope – when i witness and (in my tiny way) contribute to everyday acts of resilience in the face of climate disaster. so thank you all for sharing your experiences – this was actually what i needed to hear this morning ❤️
i would add that my coping has been giving myself permission to skim the headlines but not to read the articles. knowing the details doesn’t help me practically or emotionally, but implementing a new sustainable gardening practice or having a productive conversation that plants a seed with someone in denial (i live in a very conservative area) or donating to an environmental justice project – i can do that without obsessing over scary numbers i can’t do anything about.
I’m so glad it was helpful to you 💜💜💜
“AND ALL THAT IS VERY GRIM LOL” – Nicole Hall, 2022, summing up my general background mood for life in general.
I don’t know. I don’t know? I don’t know what to do with any of it. For reference, I’m 24; as an elder Gen Z, it feels like global warming has been a known and generally accepted fact for my entire life. The melting ice caps, the dying Amazon – I don’t know a time before this destruction. People have always been screaming that we need to fix it and fix it NOW, and then they never did.
And then COVID came and millions of people died and/or suffered, and/or are currently dying or suffering, and that doesn’t seem to matter. It doesn’t seem to have changed much of anything; America’s public health policy right now is “deny we’re in the middle of a fucking plague”.
And I guess part of my climate grief and anxiety is that for the past 2 years it’s been made VERY clear that there is no communal goodwill to fall back on. Yes the politicians and industry bigwigs have failed us but – we, as citizens, don’t have much interest in saving each other either.
ALSO all the Forbes and Business Insider-type magazines keep hyping up the Sun Belt as the next regional hub for development and tech. This pro-desert propaganda is getting on my nerves lmao, the Hoover Dam and Colorado River are evaporating and these bitches are speed-building expensive-ass housing developments.
On a practical level, I know I’ll never be able to leave the East Coast, because everything west of Yellowstone is gonna be scorched within the next decade or two. And that makes me sad, because I’ve always wanted to live in the Pacific Northwest (Vancouver, specifically). I predict a wave of climate-based fiction being in vogue, similar to the YA dystopia rush, so I’m trying to throw some manuscripts together and start publishing. Y
Yes the world is ending but I want to be counted as The Great American Novelist As America Ended.
Totally hear you on the Sun Belt thing – my family lives in southern New Mexico and I’ve watched over the years as Las Cruces has exploded, and not a single one of those new builds requires any kind of oh, I don’t know, low-flow faucets? Solar panels on the roof? Nevermind something like composting toilets when the earth is literally cracking in places from the water table being so tapped out.
I too live in the Northeast, and I find half of my response to climate anxiety is trying to plant native things in my yard as fast as humanly possible. I cried massive tears this morning when I saw deer had eaten a bunch of the milkweed I planted. DO THE DEER NOT KNOW ABOUT THE MONARCHS. APPARENTLY NOT.
The other half of my response is leaning in to human indigeneity; shifting my budget to pay Indigenous folks as directly as possible, looking into an easement on “my” property for Indigenous people to grow and use whatever they want (the tax structure is often more beneficial to fund-strapped tribes than an outright sale), learning more about what my own ancestors did before the mindsets that created this mess.
I don’t know how many people have read this far in a comment reply but I would like to draw your attention to the following fact: in Celtic languages, there is not really a verb for “to have.” I think about this a lot. I think about how possessive the English language is – even things that are joyful, we talk about as obligations with a weird possessive element (“I *have to* go to my friend’s party this weekend,” “I *have* children”). What would the world be like if our very mouths did not speak such possession? If, as in Welsh and its cousin languages, we don’t *have* anything but there are things and people *with us*?
Ohhh I did not know that about the Celtic language verbs, thank you for sharing! I don’t know if I can envision a world without possession as a concept, honestly. It’s so foreign to everything I know the world to be. Especially when I think about obligations regarding relationships and how a lot of action when you *have* a child or parent or friend is taking care of them because no one else will. Is possession even a bad thing or did we ruin it with greed and ego? Maybe we’ll never know for sure.
I am genuinely curious about what’s going to happen to all of those millions of people in the Sun Belt when the water runs out (or the fires get too big, whichever comes first). They’re going to have to move east and north *eventually* and no one ever seems to think about it. Can’t wait for those culture wars! *scream*
As a zillenial I too feel very disillusioned that anything will get fixed, but as a scientist I have eternal hope in the innovation of humans. It is very easy to think the greed of the few represents the ideals of the many; and I really have to fight myself to remember that that is not true. I really feel a lot of the paradoxical opinions presented here.
Interestingly, I do want to probe into something Nicole said–that the fish will be gone by 2048. I got my degree in marine science and we actually spent quite a bit of time dissecting this particular piece of research, stemming from the 2006 paper “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystems” (https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1132294). This paper, while the dire wake-up call the fishing industry needs (which, population biologists do predict sustainability levels the industry needs to catch under, the industry mostly ignores these to maximize profit–discussed here https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308597X06000613?casa_token=7CmhgDJtBgAAAAAA:7nAgRlDFTEk7xKDOpVigk3TXnQ7ndUezirtP1Hq-nYaUHM53XbMasXLkOW3QutBVhddbCMGr), had some pretty dubious science that essentially involved extrapolating models beyond what they predicted. However, the biggest faux pas of this paper was that it ignores the extreme efforts of fisheries biologists, aquaculturists and marine scientists in general put forward to combat this very threat. It’s one of my favorite stories in science–a fisheries researcher, Ray Hilborn, got into a really heavy debate with the og author, Boris Worm (his direct response here: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-007-9100-5), but in the latter half of the year, started actively working on ways the industry can combat what Worm had published, leading to the industry management paper linked above, and culminating in this paper here: https://www-science-org.proxy-um.researchport.umd.edu/doi/full/10.1126/science.1173146, which rather than fearmongering, gives concrete ways the industry can actually improve the way they do their work.
The only reason I bring this up is to give an example of hope–that in addition to the individual efforts put forward by people, real effort is being made to change things on a greater scale–like the Detroit case Carmen cited and the book Lily cited. I personally believe that fish are the future, just the right kind of fish (low impact species like tilapia, yellowtail, shellfish and seaweed), and sustainable practices like multi-trophic aquaculture; but this is one solution among many. Anyway thank you for listening to my rant.
I resonate so *hard* with each author’s piece. Tragically comedic as this timeline is, having my realistic thoughts and feelings validated is like taking a deep breath, and autostraddle is one of the only places I find that. I think a lot about the fact that the majority of humans are conformist personality types or innately selfish. And how that spells doom for the planet when what we need is way more creative and compassionate thinkers. I keep thinking I’ve accepted all of this and then I wake up the next day and go to work and contribute to my IRA and a bunch of charities, as though that’s enough. As if I’ll even be able to use retirement funds. Will there even be a banking system then? Will those zeroes and ones that are modern money have any value when we’ll simply be trying not to die of thirst? I grieve for all the people younger than me, especially babies born right now. So I do my best, contribute what I can, and try sometimes to party like there’s no tomorrow. Cause there very well may not be.
I remember reading something on Twitter, “What’s a headline you want to read in 10 years? Ex: more affordable housing built in x city or country.
What can you do right now to make that headline a reality?”
For me it was more people in my city using a bike and/ or public transportation to get around. I started an org with a few other people and I feel good about what we’ve accomplished so far.
I’m a little late to the conversation here (I heeded the warning at the beginning haha!), but I found this incredibly useful. I work in international climate policy, so I spend pretty much my whole time thinking about this, and I always feel like I’m not doing enough. Policy moves slowly and even though the conversations seem to be globally, on the whole, mostly moving in the right direction, the pace of (in)action is absolutely infuriating. I do see small wins, which I grab onto, as others have mentioned, they give hope. I used to think climate change and wider environmental destruction were the biggest problem we faced, but I’ve come to see it really as a symptom of a worldview, mindset and values that support a capitalist economy, that support colonialism, that support racism and a whole host of other issues. As other commenters mentioned, it’s evident in the language we use every day. Coming off the back of an awful heatwave where I live, I did spend a couple of days terrified, and I took the time to just feel that, sit with it, and then got back to work a little more determined than before. I think any action, even if it’s small, is beneficial – a little chip taken out of the beast that’s facing us. Even if it should, change sure as hell isn’t coming from the top down, so somehow it has to come from us.