An ounce of prevention…
In the midst of organizing my thoughts about a series of essays that explores how we’ll need to transform in order to survive the coming decades in a humane way, I read this weekend’s New York Times essay about rebuilding and community. It’s hopeful to me that even though the issue is called the “Tech and Design Issue”, the most memorable parts of this lead essay focus on community, which can be enhanced or hindered by tech and/or design, but which is by no means dependent on either. I liked the essay well enough, and it quoted the terrific Rebecca Solnit, but it has two devastating flaws, that are connected to one another.
First, the disasters described are overwhelmingly caused or super-charged by climate change, and yet the words “climate” and “fossil fuel” are nowhere in it. I did take heart from the author’s use of quotes around “natural” when describing “natural” disasters; he clearly understands. But this is far too subtle an approach: because of decades of fossil fuel companies’ and politicians’ lies and obfuscation, and because climate change makes people feel uncertain and overwhelmed, we have to speak the truth clearly: the ongoing use of fossil fuels* is the cause or amplifying agent of these disasters, and therefore, many of the disasters were by no means inevitable, and neither are many of the ones he clearly expects to come; we have the power to do much, much more to stop using fossil fuels.
We don’t need disaster in order to transform, and if we transform right now — even in the places not yet experiencing disaster in any obvious way — we won’t have as many disasters. Period. Tragically, we’ll still have quite a lot of them, because of the carbon we’ve already emitted, but as anyone who understands the science has been saying for years, every fraction of a degree matters: it represents lives (and whole communities and whole species) lost or devastated, and ecologies that will struggle for decades, centuries, or millennia to recover.
This leads to the second, much larger problem. Eliding the optional nature of some of these disasters would make some sense (the essay is about reactions, not causes) if the context in which it was published were a New York Times that had been dogged, bold, and truthful about climate change for a long time. This is by no means the case, though the coverage has improved greatly in the last several years — tracking rather than leading the general population’s understanding, in other words, which is not the mission of journalism. All the news that you’ve probably already figured out, mostly, is not the slogan of the gray lady. (Of course all the time-critical news we’re not saving for a book next year isn’t, either.)
But as much as I love a good David-and-Goliath fight (one-book poet vs. the newspaper of record! Place yer bets now, good people, step right up!), unfortunately, this isn’t just about the New York Times — I worry that something similar is afoot more broadly, including in organizations I’ve been intimately associated with.
I’ll just say it: in high-income, high-emitting countries/states/cities/ companies, etc., a focus on adaptation to the exclusion (or near-exclusion) of mitigation is profoundly immoral.
Adaptation is essential work — most especially because, mirroring the broader international truth, those who suffer most from climate disasters are nearly always those who have contributed the least to the problem. Strengthening our communities against fire, heat, drought, flooding, and more, while focusing our efforts on the communities with the fewest resources to simply move/add air conditioning/dig a deeper well/etc., is deeply moral. Taking care of each other will be our greatest work in coming decades.
But as meaningful and even joyous as this “yes” (aka solutions) work can be, one of its greatest strengths is also one of its greatest risks: it accomplishes good things right in our own communities, where we can see them and take heart from them…and that is an intoxicating thing. “No” (aka resistance) work, on the other hand — fighting fossil fuel companies and their clear plans to take us ever-deeper into catastrophe — can be extremely satisfying upon occasion, but a hurricane prevented or a community not uprooted is something much harder to take heart from, for the simple reason that it’s something that doesn’t exist.
Not everyone has to do everything; I’m deeply grateful for the folks who’ve spent years or decades working in our communities, and on solutions. But because our emissions are so high, and we’re at a latitude that’s far less impacted by climate change than the global south, if we flag in our efforts to stop fossil fuel use…we are allowing genocide afar in the process of prioritizing greater care at home.
So context always matters, and should be made explicit. When those who are doing adaptation work aimed at cooling centers speak out about the need for them, for example, they should express not just the importance of tending our community, and not just anger at the politicians who’ve abandoned houseless people, but also anger at the fossil fuel companies that created catastrophes like the heat dome to begin with, and the politicians (often the same ones) who are slowing down our transition to clean energy and low- and zero-carbon cities. Those who are writing about adaptation work should state very clearly that it’s necessitated not just by causeless “disasters”, but by fossil fuel companies fighting to keep us using their products, and the craven politicians who are in the industry’s pocket (and/or truly don’t understand the scope of the problem). Even/especially if your readers are happy to keep this fact subconscious, it’s your job to make it manifest, so that they can be appropriately agitated, and respond.
And groups that have a strong resistance history, and function as the left flank of the climate movement, should remember that a Green New Deal has to go hand in hand with a politically aggressive winding down of fossil fuels, because all the solar panels and good green jobs in the world won’t stop fossil fuel companies from an actually aggressive — often directly murderous, in other countries — attempt to extract and burn every last barrel, and every last barrel matters…to every life on Earth, but most especially to the lives you cannot see. We’ve benefited from this extraction, so this is our responsibility.
We cannot stop fighting against things, as well as for things, because only by fighting against the business as usual that continues even alongside our progress, can we hope to preserve the chance of a world that remains “well below” 2°C of warming (in the words of the Paris Agreement). Only by fighting, can we hope to preserve the chance that some communities won’t have to experience disasters in order to transform, and that many of their people and other-than-human beings will live to enjoy that transformation.
On a personal level, this is a little ironic, because I’ve just left the job where I did this work, to focus on some writing that will probably orbit around questions of social and moral/spiritual transformation. Clearly, I’ll need to heed my own words (though I hope my actions have spoken pretty loudly for me; the “context” is not exactly that of the New York Times), so I’ll be thinking about how resistance can have an honored role in how we adapt psychologically to the era that’s just begun. Stay tuned…..
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*When I say “fossil fuels” I’m mentioning the worst greenhouse gas pollution source, but I mean it to stand in, too, for the other bad actors: animal agriculture; industrial logging; sprawl that not only requires car use but also wipes out natural forest and grasslands, etc. In other words, all anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases.
