How Does It Feel? The Failure of Language in the Age of Climate Change
We don’t know how to talk about climate change.
Our current attempt is a battlefield of mangled syllables. Agreements and Accords. Degrees and Emissions. Parts Per Billion and Gigatons. Fossil Fuels. Sea Level Rise. El Nino and La Nina. It’s like we’ve boobytrapped our own tongues. Hell, even the word “climate change” is clinical AF.
But it’s anything but clinical. It’s deeply, deeply personal. Climate change is watching not just your childhood home, but your ancestral home, surrender to the sea. It’s being sold on an open slave market as you desperately cross borders to escape drought. Much more than contaminated water, it’s a ticking clock until your tap runs dry. It’s watching the whole future light up in flames right in front of you. It’s war. It’s famine. It’s skyrocketing suicide.
This ain’t a movie, y’all. It’s now. And it’s heartbreakingly human.
“You write in order to change the world,” James Baldwin, my personal hero, once said. “If you can alter, even by a millimeter, the way people see reality, then you can change it.”
You can’t change what you can’t describe. Well, I have been writing since I could hold a crayon. I spend my days (and often nights) editing policy for one of the world’s top environmental advocacy organizations. I know the difference between black carbon and regular carbon. I know what HFCs and SCLPs and GWPs are. I eat these alphabet soups for breakfast and I speak fluent wonkese. I’m big fun at dinner parties.
But I don’t want to deal in data here. I want to work in millimeters. I want to move beyond the projections and into empathy. I want to talk about how climate change feels.
As a lifelong lover of language, I will never believe that “words fail us.” I believe we fail to find the words. And if we don’t have the words, then let’s create them. As an avid daydreamer, I will never lose faith in the power of the human imagination. It’s one of our most powerful resources. Why aren’t we exploiting it?
If we can drill deep into the rocks beneath us to find coal and liquid dinosaurs (get it? fossil fuels?), why can’t we reach even deeper into ourselves to pull out the language to name our crisis?
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” Another Jimmy Baldwin quote. If we are to face climate change honestly, we have to be able to talk about it. And maybe then we can drop our shovels and stop digging our own graves. Maybe we can even climb out.
