Not Too Late

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Not Too Late

Highlights

In general, I try to expect nothing and hope that everything is possible. I want the courage to need very little and demand a lot. — Jia Tolentino

Involvement depends on having a sense of personal power—the capacity to make an impact.

The parts that are worse—in many, perhaps most cases, they’re worse due to good people doing nothing, or rather not enough of them trying.

Hope is not optimism. Optimism assumes the best, and assumes its inevitability, which leads to passivity, as do the pessimism and cynicism that assume the worst. Hope, like love, means taking risks and being vulnerable to the effects of loss. It means recognizing the uncertainty of the future and making a commitment to try to participate in shaping it. It means facing difficulties and accepting uncertainty. To hope is to recognize that you can protect some of what you love even while grieving what you cannot—and to know that we must act without knowing the outcome of those actions.

Sometimes victory leaves nothing to see, the trees that weren’t cut down or the drilling permits that weren’t issued.

Capitalism encourages us to imagine ourselves as consumers rather than citizens; authorities like us to believe we have no power.

The Serbian activists who helped overthrow Slobodan Milošević have been spreading this methodology for years with the simple truth, “If people withdraw their support, the ruler cannot rule!”

There is a tender balance between urgency and humanity, and the truth is that keeping our brilliant selves whole and standing in solidarity with others will deliver so much more in the long run.

The poet and noted ornithologist J. Drew Lanham aptly said, “Joy is the justice we give ourselves.”

If you are terrified, that could be a good thing, because it means you’re paying attention. What you can’t do is let it immobilize you, to pull you down to worse depths. We have to learn how to bend with the intense winds and not be so rigid we break like the pine trees.

At another level, the IPCC report tells us that transformation is now inevitable. The choice is between the transformations we choose and those forced on us by the climate we have altered.

[…] the IPCC report recognizes a fundamental fact: climate change is a problem of people. We already have the technology we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change in a manner that brings about sustainable development. We have failed to act on it.

As a climate scientist, people often ask me what is the single most important thing they can do to address the climate crisis? My answer is simply this: recognize that you are living through the most profound moment in human history. Averting planetary disaster is up to the people alive right now.

The idea that the climate change problem is fundamentally unsolvable is not only scientifically wrong and unhelpful, it also tragically leads people down the same path of disengagement and inaction that allows fossil fuel burning to continue.

We will not see the political response we need to address climate change until we redefine the cultural and social norms that are destroying life on Earth. As voters and consumers, we are responsible for creating or removing the social license needed to maintain the status quo of burning fossil fuels and the destruction of nature to the point of planetary instability.

Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is a series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

We need stories to remind us why hope is complicated but necessary, because the opposite mode is to live neat lives powered by a self-affirming wireless fidelity to all-terrain gloom, where all signs point to defeat and despair waits at every turn. To hope is to embrace uncertainty, knowing the bad guys have not won yet.

Facing loss, despair, uncertainty, and death is as much a part of the human experience as anything else.

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. — Viktor Frankl

I remember that despair is my vanity talking. It is an indulgence in the illusion that what is here and now is inevitable, that the future is written, that we can see how it will unfold. Despair is not about reality, or the world, or even ultimately the people we care about. It is about us. It is the act of allowing our very real sadness and fear to limit our sense of what is possible, about finding safety and comfort in that darkness, about avoiding heartbreak. Despair is the easy way out.

My old friend Joseph Goldstein wrote, “When fear arises, it means that we’re at some edge of what we’re willing to be with, what we are willing to accept. Right there is precisely the most interesting place of practice because that is where we have set a limitation, a boundary for ourselves. If we can see that and recognize it, then that is the place to work, to look, to explore. That is the place to open.”

The novelist Haruki Murakami wrote in his Kafka on the Shore, “And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”

It is some very effective marketing that has convinced so many of us that getting off of fossil fuels is a sacrifice as opposed to a money-saving, peace-promoting, water-protecting, health-improving, technological leap forward. — Dr. Elizabeth Sawin

But this age is poor in so many ways—there is so much loneliness and disconnection, from love, friendship, community, from the natural world, from moral and visual beauty, so much hopelessness, so many who don’t have enough in a world full of people who have too much. What if that is what we need to renounce? What if the climate crisis requires renouncing not this version of wealth but its underlying poverty?

Climate chaos is a catastrophe but also a teacher, and its first lesson is that everything is connected, which is both the beautiful dream of mutuality and the nightmare of runaway consequences.

Truly, and for far too long the rhetoric in many climate spaces is we need less—“Drive less, eat less, turn off our lights.” It’s this language that implies to people that in order to care about the climate you must have a lower quality of life. When really, the calls to action need to be questions of connection: Are you getting to know your neighbor? If a flood came through tomorrow, would you be ready to assist each other? Are you holding politicians accountable for how their policies impact frontline communities? Are you getting to know the various names and patterns of the plants in your area?

One of the burdens no one needs to carry is perfectionism, including the idea that if we can’t save everything we can’t save anything, that if we don’t win perfect, comprehensive, final victories, then we must be losing. Most victories are partial or compromised, nearly all of them are interim, because the story continues.

We are all called upon to balance a sense of danger with a sense of possibility, to pack some of both in our kits and not let one outweigh the other. Too much of either leads to inaction. To do that means recognizing we are capable of complexity, of holding many emotions, of understanding the sheer uncertainty of the future and the possibility of participating in shaping it, of knowing that since we cannot know outcomes ahead of time, we are also making decisions about who to be and how to live.

“Even a wounded world is feeding us,” writes the Indigenous plant scientist Robin Wall Kimmerer. “Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the Earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.”

Yes, there will be more heat waves, more monstrous cyclones, more crop failures. The current status of our warmed planet is already horrifying, and the future projections even more so. Yet we are fools wrapped in privilege if we think that there hasn’t always been suffering.