I have a favorite quote in poster form on the wall of my bedroom by late historian Howard Zinn which I use to talk myself down from the hopelessness and exhaustion that often seem inevitable stages in caring about anything at all. Engaging deeply, or even at face value, with the topic of climate change in particular triggers layers of emotional and cognitive meltdown. I’ve written about ignorance as a cultural value in our country and the ways that anti-intellectual dynamic feeds the climate change conversation, but as part of a larger focus on building empathy and understanding, I’m beginning to unpack the ways that I respond defensively to it myself.
I wanted to write an Earth Day post, partially to be writing more frequently than I have been here and also because it seemed like an important day to mark, but I didn’t know what to say. I chewed through some of it in a recent Praxis show where I tried out a new theory of mine on dealing with climate crisis from three angles: understanding it, feeling it, and doing something about it. I didn’t feel hopeful when embarking on that project, but by the end I did. I’d like to share how that happened and some more details on how I started on this line of thinking in the first place.
By understanding it, I mean developing a basic grasp on the science of what is happening–no easy task–but also being comfortable in inquiry. It isn’t that we need to become equipped with exhaustive knowledge of every study and metric of the changing climate’s hows and whens, nor that we should be preparing to go into intellectual battle with climate change deniers. Scientists do the heavy lifting there. There are no scientists who deny a human link to catastrophic climate change. There is debate on how much warming and change to expect when, and on the best approaches to adapt, but those denying change altogether are paid to do so, or acting out their own feelings of denial and fear on the rest of us. I shared this video of one of Carl Sagan’s last interviews during the broadcast and encourage readers to listen to what he had to say about the ripple effect of inquiry in science into the rest of society.
In my own experience, doing that research leads directly into feelings about it. In my case, an entry point was studying the data around mass extinction. It’s hard to look at data like that in the context of human acceleration of violence and planetary destruction and not jump right into the second category: feeling it. Anger at yourself and your society for not being smarter, sooner. Fear that you will be there, or your children, when coastal cities submerge. Sadness that perhaps nothing will ever be normal again, and at that we might miss out on so much. Hopelessness and the wondering what the point could be of even trying to interrupt such a daunting machine, so many interlocking systems and people tangled in this mess. From this list, none of it sounds very fulfilling, and how reasonable it seems that ignorance and denial emerge when hard work and such feelings are the result of engaging!
Here’s why I think we need both the understanding and the feeling before we can get to doing anything about climate change. I have been in both of the categories I’ll describe and have witnessed many other activists move in and out of both camps as well. A person who understands the science, but who hasn’t felt through the complex emotional terrain of what it means to be experiencing such a huge shift may have command of the data, but often comes to unhelpfully cold conclusions. “Humans are a cancer on the planet; Earth will be better off without us; People are too stupid to fix this (but not me!); It’s human nature to destroy everything; The only real solution is for half the human population to die off and take pressure off the planet”; these are a sampler platter of reactions to rationalizing climate solutions based on the science alone, in which the urgency is felt, but empathy comes in second place if it shows up at all.
On the flip side, many well-meaning people feel that our societies and planet are in crisis and it hurts them. They want to imagine solutions that solve these negative feelings, but don’t necessarily balance that with a well-researched approach or a full knowledge of the status quo and how it operates. This results in feel-good but ineffective campaigns including all “green” capitalism, and the entire spectrum of superstition as solution. “My personal choices are enough to save the planet because I am enlightened; Carbon markets/Obama/God will save us in the nick of time; Aliens or other benevolent beings will bring us the technology we need; We don’t even really need food or a planet if we have enough love”; these are a sampling of the other side of denial in which magic replaces science and denial can be redefined as a focus on personal enlightenment.
I don’t believe that any individual is doomed to stop learning while in one of these camps, but if we’re going to see widespread action, we’re going to need to talk about how to process the information and the emotional reaction to this type of shift–one that has never been demanded of us before in human history. If you listen to the show linked before, you’ll hear that I was just muddling through some of this for the first time. It’s becoming more common to study the mental health effects of climate change, but I don’t know that activists are looking at climate change as a cognitive and emotional challenge. Thankfully, my mind spiral around this problem culminated during the same week as an interview with Ken Ward and a panel on direct action .
Wait, didn’t I say we had to lock down understanding and feeling before moving to action? Yes, but I felt reassured talking with Ken and others about the links between action, feeling, and understanding. Thinking of conscience, knowledge, and strategy on the same wave in a cycle feeding itself helped me make it through that difficult week and gain some new insight into how to approach climate change one bite at a time. Ken had acknowledged in our interview that climate change is fundamentally a cognitive and spiritual problem for humans to navigate and he also shared this excellent advice.
“Learn a specific thing [his is ice shell breakdown] then do something. Do any one thing, and if you want to be effective, pick something that does not involve business as usual, I think people have to figure out how they do that. I chose direct action, I think it’s the most effective way, and there’s ways to do that in an entry level way. And finally, it does require some degree of planned schizophrenia. If you spend all your time focusing on this, it can be hard to live a life. Somehow, people need to find some balance between apprehending the problem, but not being too depressed by the scale of what needs to be done, balancing that with ‘well yes, we’re still here, people with lives being happy and useful’. One of the best ways to do that is to find like minded people and do it together.” -Ken Ward
Ken was on the Direct Action Spokane-hosted panel to speak about his 2013 action with Jay O’Hara, known as the Lobster Boat Blockade, which blocked a shipment of 40,000 tons of coal at the Brayton Point Power Plant, alongside Mike LaPoint & Jackie Minchew of the Delta 5 (more on them in a moment), and Dylan Thompson from Deep Green Resistance. The panelists were there to help launch the new organization in Spokane and (I think) to gauge the readiness of Spokane activists to engage in direct action civil disobedience targeting the fossil fuel industry. If you are curious about what I mean by direct action or how it fits into the long tradition of civil disobedience, I recommend a mostly historical show that I recorded a couple of weeks ago for Praxis. If you’d rather read, the works cited are in the description of the track.
They summarized so much of what I had been feeling, but brought direct experience in confronting the industries and individuals keeping the planet harmed daily that was inspirational and informative to my still-growing outlook on how to address this defining issue. Sharing their personal stories of learning about climate change and each of their motivations for channeling their feelings of urgency and care for ecology together into inspirational and strategic action. Echoing Ken’s sentiment I shared before, I scrawled down this quote from Mike LaPoint, “All we can do is what we can do.” It may sound discouraging at first, or insufficient to the task at hand, but I found it nearly as encouraging as the poster on my wall. Because of the same complex interconnections that make climate change seem insurmountable, we also all hold a piece of the actions that we need to address it.
And what did the Delta 5, the group Mike was part of, do? They blocked a mile-long oil train from bringing its load to the export market for a day in 2014 with what they had, their own bodies and a simple, though sufficiently large, tripod. Their case has brought the tactic of direct action to broader attention, and set legal precedent for other disobedient climate activists of the future. You can hear an interview with Patrick Mazza and Abby Brockway, 2 of the 5, on last week’s Praxis show and read about them widely online. The pessimist who lives pretty close to my heart’s surface thought at first of such actions, “So what? The coal gets delayed for a day. Not stopped, not destroyed, or left in the ground. It isn’t enough.” I had failed to see these actions as merely the beginning of more widespread stoppages, the forcing of the issue into the media and the legal system, and a culture of dissent that can feed and support both attacks on what’s wrong and the building of new systems that work.
Direct action is part of a continuum that begins with education and inquiry and continues to spiral into a variety of approaches. What matters is that we build communities who understand the threat intellectually and emotionally that take time to unpack what it means for our existence, our relationships, and our daily lives, and that we take action in those communities. This is an exciting time to be part of this, and it’s also the only possible time to be part of it. This month marks an intensification of global direct action on climate change, the Break Free wave of protests around the globe. This weekend is Break Free PNW, where thousands are already gathering in Anacortes, WA to target the March Point refineries and draw attention to our region’s role in the export of fossil fuels that accelerate climate change. Hundreds have committed to risk arrest in shutting down the refineries.
So, back to where we started. The poster on my wall and Howard Zinn, who thankfully aren’t the only symbols of a different way of doing things to draw from during hard times. Wherever you are today on your way to understanding, feeling, acting on climate change, I hope that some of this is useful and that we can continue a conversation. It isn’t possible to address alone and I am always curious about what keeps others moving and sane in these interesting times. I’ll leave it to Howard to close the post:
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
-Howard Zinn
rwrrw4444
Brilliant. You need to A) be exposed to a larger audience because people should see your work. And B) get paid for this stuff! Because you’re better and more thoughtful at this than most who are (being paid, that is). Miss your lovely presence and hope all’s well….