It’s the End of the World as We Know It…
…and I don’t feel so good. And neither should you.
So: ‘climate change’ is… abstract. I imagine each of us will have our own ‘oh–wait… but; oh, shit’ moment. Mine was reading “Deep Adaptation“–UK sustainable development prof. Jem Bendell‘s sky-is-falling-no-but-seriously-look-up-idiot (scholarly) article on the subject of just how far past screwed we already are. Feedbin fed me a Vice piece on the support groups people were joining after reading the thing… which, of course, made me want to go read it.
You should go read it, if you haven’t already. It’s okay–go. I’ll be here when you get back.
Right? Take, like, a minute… or two. Maybe five. I mean–Jesus.
Two categories of things followed, for me: Home things, and Other People things. At home, K and I started talking seriously (for the first time) about family-scale emergency preparedness; I started reading ‘prepper’ blogs/guides, and filling an Amazon cart: radio, water storage, dry-food-in-a-bucket, extra stuffed animals… that sort of thing. I felt a little nutty (Mad Max!), but I *do* think there’s sort of no downside to having two weeks’ worth of provisions and paraphernalia stockpiled in the basement.
That phase lasted about 72 hours (+/-). The much stickier question–and the reason for this exercise–was: now what?
…which leads, eventually, to the thornier, ‘Other People’-oriented question. Of course, there’s always the comforting compound-in-the-mountains-off-the-grid-with-clean-field-of-fire fantasy—but I think the more… urgent? compelling? matter is: how will we continue to live together through increasingly ugly ‘new normals’?
Actually… prior to that is a (set of) question(s) more personal/relational in scope: what will (or does) it look like for me, in the context of my own life(-as-a-social-critter), to start making decisions with an eye toward this new reality? In other words: what’s different? Not in the abstract, but in this moment? What can I imagine doing, or choosing, right now, that felt impossible (or implausible!) a moment ago?
Obviously (or not), I don’t pretend to have an answer for these sprawling questions. As a scholar/(pseudo)intellectual, I *have* been interested for a long time now in how the horizon of possibility–quite simply, one’s sense of what’s possible (or, perhaps more importantly, plausible) within the world one can imagine from within a particular moment–moves. In the case at hand (n=1), for instance, how does one actually go from ‘people-who-talk-about-the-societal-imact-of-climate-change-are-crazy-mad-max-preppers’ to ‘I-have-a-bucket-of-food-in-my-Amazon-cart-and-K-is-talking-about-maybe-learning-midwifery-and-now-it-all-only-sounds-a-little-crazy’? In that same case (i.e., mine) I’m finding that each conversation is a little less fraught with apprehension about whether or not I’ll sound like a loon (…not least because that train has long-since sailed).
I deeply don’t know where all of this (writ small or large) is headed… but it feels like a start. It does seem clear that something is shifting… in climate journalism, at least. Wallace-Wells had some insightful things to say on precisely this point… and recent headlines have the quality of snowflakes starting to stick together as they roll downhill: especially in the wake of the U.N’s.’s recent no-longer-pretending-everything-is-fine report. Although I’m a big fan of Science, I claim no such expertise here; while I expect to share a reaction or three to scary headlines like this, what I’m really interested in (I think) is the more ground-level question of what it might look like to start living differently en route to the world that our kids will have to navigate.
More to come!
Also: if you’d like a for-serious primer, you could do a lot worse than the annotated version of Wallace Wells’ 2017 article “The Uninhabitable Earth.”
George has been a wilderness guide, a political speechwriter, and a rock-n-roll DJ. He has a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Princeton University, where he also taught for six years.