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The Guardian newspaper explores how different marginalized communities bear a greater burden—face a greater threat—from climate change.

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The 2019 hurricane season, which has already seen parts of Texas flooded and the Bahamas devastated, is prompting existential angst for a unique US culture that fears being torn asunder by the climate crisis.

Fiercer storms and the encroaching seas are gnawing away at the Gullah Geechee nation, a distinct cultural group that historically dwelt on a 425-mile stretch of coastline from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida. Today, the bulk of this community, descendants of African slaves and native Americans, resides only on the low-lying fringes of South Carolina and Georgia.

Hurricane Dorian, which lacerated the Caribbean in early September, uprooted trees and left debris strewn across historic Gullah Geechee sites, according to Queen Quet, the elected chieftess and head of state for the community, which declared its own nationhood in 2000. A destructive recent pattern, marked most severely by Hurricane Matthew in 2016, is taking hold.

"The biggest concern is the massive number of [storms] that are arriving on our coast annually," said Queen Quet, also known as Marquetta L Goodwine, who is also a computer scientist and historian. In the English-based creole language used by the Gullah Geechee, she is known as the "head pun de boddee".

"We are convinced that this is directly linked to climate change dynamics," she said. "There have never been this many hurricanes and tropical storms in succession. This is causing a major strain on the community being able to recover financially from these."

A rapidly warming ocean and atmosphere is helping fuel stronger, if not more numerous, hurricanes, climate scientists have found. But periods of drought and rising sea levels are also a major concern for the Gullah Geechee, owing to their precarious perch on a string of tidal and barrier islands called the Sea Islands, previously the site of rice, cotton and indigo plantations.

"The very existence of the Gullah Geechee nation is threatened by the rapid erosion of our Sea Islands due to the sea level rise issues brought on by climate change," said Queen Quet, who has attempted to rouse the US government and the United Nations to the cause of a culture expressed through its arts, basket weaving and spiritual music, much of it based upon an intrinsic link to the sea.

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Queen Quet: 'There have never been this many hurricanes and tropical storms in succession. This is causing a major strain on the community being able to recover financially.' Photograph: Lynsey Weatherspoon/The Guardian

Because of their geographic isolation, theGullah Geechee developed a distinct language and culture, stemming from west and central Africa. Beginning in the late 19th century, theirs was a slow-paced life of fishing and mule carts on dirt roads. Dishes were based around okra, rice and yams. Many of the traditions continue today, with heritage tours helping provide locals with an income as well as cultural preservation. Threats loom, however.

Earlier this year Queen Quet appeared in front of a congressional committee to explain how prized seafood is disappearing as the waters warm. Shellfish are threatened as the ocean acidifies while once-common catfish are vanishing. Her people's unique culture "will not continue to thrive or survive if we are displaced from the Sea Islands," Queen Quet warned.

The plight of the Gullah Geechee is echoed in other distinct cultures across the US that find themselves on the frontline of the climate crisis. Often forced on to land vulnerable to drought or flooding by colonial dispossession and a lack of political clout, these communities face an overwhelming threat to their way of life.

"There will be tremendous stories of adaption and change as well as horrifying stories of losing homelands, family and cultural practices," said Kyle Whyte, an expert in indigenous environmental issues at Michigan State and a member of the Potawatomi native American people.

"Lots of indigenous cultures place importance upon resilience but that doesn't mean that climate change risks aren't a threat. Many are going to have to work very hard to maintain their way of life."

'Home is being eaten by the sea'

In Arizona, the Navajo are under pressure from rising temperatures and a dwindling water supply. In Washington state, the Quinault Indian Nation is attempting to relocate the village of Taholah - including its housing, post office, school, daycare, gym and police and fire service - to 200 acres of higher ground due to the threat of riverine flooding.

Further north, Alaska is heating up at twice the global average, causing roads to buckle and houses to subside as permafrost locked in the soils starts to melt.

Native communities, which rely on stable sea ice for subsidence hunting and transportation, are at particular risk, with at least a dozen towns attempting to relocate. One, the small coastal town of Newtok, received $15m in federal funding last year to start moving houses to safer ground, although the fate of other at-risk towns remains unclear.

The threat to traditional practices has helped spur a legal challenge led by young Alaskans who are suing their state government over the harm caused by the climate crisis.

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The small coastal town of Newtok in Alaska received $15m in federal funding last year to start moving houses to safer ground, although the fate of other at-risk towns remains unclear. Photograph: Andrew Burton/Getty Images

"Climate change is not just a political issue for me, it's my lifestyle, it's what I face every day back at home," said lead plaintiff Esau Sinnok, an indigenous Alaskan from Shishmaref, a barrier island menaced by coastal erosion. "The one and only place I get to call home is being eaten by the sea."

Adapting to the changing environment isn't simple - funding and political will is lacking and minority communities can feel wary dealing with US authorities that have previously wrought dispossession and discrimination.

Splits within communities can also appear. Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, populated by the ancestors of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe who were forced there after fleeing persecution, has lost 98% of its land mass over the past six decades due to coastal erosion, leaving a slender strip of land just two miles long and a quarter-mile wide.

In 2016, residents were the first to be given federal funding to relocate the community to drier ground, although many now don't want to sever their deeply rooted bonds to the island. "This here can't be remade someplace," island resident Chris Brunet told the LA Times.

"Cultural practices across the US have already been threatened for many decades and climate change is making things worse," said Whyte. "These people are often tied to a certain area and don't have the options to move like other people. They can exercise their culture and self-determination on small areas of land only. Native people certainly didn't choose to be in this situation."

Queen Quet said lawmakers need a much greater appreciation of the cultural threat posed by climate change.

"Without the ability to continue our cultural traditions on the land and the sea, we would not be able to continue to live in the healthy, balanced manner that is central to traditional Gullah Geechee culture," she said.

"You may move to another place, but that does not mean that the environment of that new place will allow your cultural traditions to be sustained. Heartache has killed many people that have been displaced."
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Gullah Geechee: distinct US culture risks losing island home to climate crisis

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The 2019 hurricane season, which has already seen parts of Texas flooded and the Bahamas devastated, is prompting existential angst for a unique US culture that fears being torn asunder by the climate crisis.

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“On-the-ground data clearly demonstrate a correlation between lower-income neighborhoods and higher temperatures.”

In other words, historic practices that created and maintained inequality are creating increased impacts of climate change on these populations.

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AP Photo/M. Spencer Green

Using citizen science volunteers, researchers are more accurately measuring temperature differences between city hot spots and their cooler surroundings. With heat waves intensifying, the results are now being used to develop a range of innovative urban planning strategies.

The volunteers fanned out across cities from Boston to Honolulu this summer, with inexpensive thermal monitors resembling tiny periscopes attached to their vehicles to collect data on street-level temperatures. Signs on their cars announcing "Science Project in Progress" explained their plodding pace - no more than 30 miles-per-hour to capture the dramatic temperature differences from tree-shaded parks to sun-baked parking lots to skyscraper-dominated downtowns.

The work of these citizen scientists is part of a new way of studying the urban heat island effect, with volunteers mapping two dozen cities worldwide in recent years. Past studies of urban heat islands - in which metropolitan areas experience significantly higher temperatures than their surroundings - have relied on satellite data that measures the temperature reflected off rooftops and streets. But Vivek Shandas, a professor of urban studies and planning at Portland State University in Oregon and a researcher leading the project, says the urban heat island effect is more complicated and subtler than satellite data indicates.

"There's much more nuance within the city," Shandas says. "What we're finding is that there's upwards of 15- to 20-degree Fahrenheit differences within a city. In fact, a city could have the same temperature reading in one area as its rural or forested counterpart."

On-the-ground data clearly demonstrate a correlation between lower-income neighborhoods and higher temperatures.

By understanding in detail where hot spots are located, cities can address extreme heat neighborhood-by-neighborhood, choosing from a variety of strategies that include removing or whitewashing black asphalt or roof surfaces, adding more trees for shade, requiring developers to vary the heights of new buildings to increase airflow, and opening more public air-conditioned spaces.

Using Shandas' research, Portland, the first city Shandas and his team surveyed, has proposed zoning code amendments and strategies targeting urban heat, including limiting paved neighborhood parking areas and increasing space for trees. In addition, city officials said that Shandas' on-the-ground data clearly demonstrated a correlation between lower-income neighborhoods and higher temperatures. Shandas' work also showed that the places where lower-income people often work, such as the industrial areas along Portland's rivers, also experience higher-than-average temperatures, the officials said.

Other urban heat island studies have shown that the hottest places in metropolitan areas are often in poor, minority neighborhoods with few trees, and this research can provide a framework for city planners to address the problem.

Shandas and his teams have mapped 24 cities in the United States and worldwide, including Albuquerque; parts of the Vancouver metropolitan area; Hong Kong; Doha, Qatar; and Hermosillo, Mexico. In the past, urban heat island studies relied on data from satellites or stationary sensors, but Shandas' appears to be the first enlisting citizen scientists to collect temperature data using mobile sensors.

Researchers have studied urban heat island effects in every major country from Australia, where a government study warned that heat wave deaths would quadruple by 2050, to China, which has more than 40 cities with populations exceeding 2 million people. Globally, heat is the number one weather-related killer, causing more deaths each year than floods, tornadoes, or hurricanes. Extreme heat can kill directly via heat stroke and indirectly through increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Climate models show that in some cities the number of high-heat days could double by 2040.

This summer's heat wave in Europe, with temperatures soaring to a record-breaking 46 degrees Celsius (115 degrees F) in the south of France, killed 1,500 people in France alone, the French health minister said this week. Russian officials reported that a 2010 heat wave killed 11,000 people in Moscow. The rise in overall global temperature makes extreme heat events, including consecutive days of high heat, more likely. Mitigating extreme heat, one recent study says, would save lives.

From high above, a new way of seeing our urban planet. Read more.

Urban heat islands have been generally understood since large cities began to emerge in the 19th century, but research by Shandas and others reveals a complicated patchwork of hot spots and cool spots that change during the course of a day and are determined by urban design. Satellite data, for instance, showed midtown Manhattan to be an afternoon hot spot. But mapping unveiled a different picture.

"When you actually go down to the ground, where people are walking and life is happening, it turns out it's not the same signal," Shandas says.

"Ultimately, we're trying to adapt the landscape to respond to the increasing frequency and intensity of heat waves," says one expert.

The long shadows of Manhattan skyscrapers, for example, can make parts of that borough cooler in summer than some neighborhoods in Queens, which generally has low-rise buildings. On the other hand, midtown Manhattan retains heat and starts the day much warmer because the heat that's absorbed by buildings, roofs, streets, and sidewalks during the day doesn't dissipate as well at night.

"It's the built environment that we're really trying to understand because, ultimately, we're trying to adapt the landscape to respond to this increasing frequency, intensity, and duration of heat wave," Shandas says. "We're trying to get more precise data. And there were so many surprises." A large expanse of water, for instance, or grass that is not watered, can be almost as hot as concrete, he says.

Jaime Madrigano, a researcher with the RAND Corporation who has studied urban heat, praised the way Shandas and his colleagues were using citizen science volunteers and "getting the community engaged in the issues around extreme heat... I think there are a lot of cities that are trying to make these changes. This kind of data is really important to doing that."

Shandas grew up in Bangalore, and during visits there and to other cities in India he began thinking about how cities have developed without regard for the increasing incidence of extreme weather events linked to climate change, including heat waves. He began his research with a bit of engineering, using a National Science Foundation grant to reach out to engineers who helped create the hand-made instrumentation that transmits data. With funding from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, he first mapped Portland in 2015.

A breakfast in Portland the next year with Jeremy Hoffman, who had just accepted a job as the climate and earth scientist at the Science Museum of Virginia, led to a partnership and citizen-science projects mapping Richmond, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C.

Those partnerships with local groups have been invaluable, says Hoffman. "It was really useful to have the local perspective" while creating the mapping routes, Hoffman says. "Where is the park that everybody goes to? Where are they going to redevelop over the next couple of years? That kind of knowledge made our campaigns not only scientifically useful, but publicly attractive. It was the people themselves getting involved; it wasn't just the scientists."

The studies correlated data to the tenth of a degree from sensors on vehicles that followed a series of one-hour, zigzag routes - early morning, mid-afternoon, and early evening - driven by volunteers recruited by local science museums, universities, and non-profits. Fifteen teams mapped Richmond during a summer weekend in 2017. One park along the James River measured 87 degrees F, while a few miles away, along a four-lane roadway, it was 103 degrees.

Shandas and Hoffman say their work demonstrates that extreme heat is a social justice issue. In Richmond's hottest areas, they found a higher concentration of poverty and of 911 calls for heat-related illnesses. Mapping last year in Washington, D.C. and Baltimore found a similar correlation, with higher temperatures in lower-income neighborhoods largely barren of trees and lower temperatures in more affluent, tree-shaded areas. Shandas and Hoffman recently completed a paper, due to be published soon, comparing redlined neighborhoods - those once illegally designated by lenders as too risky to make home loans - with extreme urban temperatures. "The big take-home point for the paper is that 92 percent of the cities that were redlined are now warmer than their A-rated neighbors," Hoffman says. "This seems like it's predominantly due to a lack of green and a dominance of gray."

Shandas says the research has uncovered six things that affect urban heat. Three are living - the volume of the tree canopy, the height of the tree canopy, and the ground level vegetation. Three are human-built - the volume of buildings, the difference in building heights, and the coloring of the buildings.

There were some surprises, he says. The volume of buildings can have both a negative and positive effect. Tall buildings that cast shade lower relative afternoon temperatures, while a large volume of shorter buildings, like the big-box stores in suburban areas, help generate hotter afternoon temperatures. Ground-level vegetation doesn't necessarily reduce temperature - it's not that much cooler than asphalt - unless it's watered. Shandas also has found that increasing the difference in building heights in an area creates more air circulation, which has a cooling effect.

Creating cooler cities doesn't necessarily mean building at lower densities. What matters, he says, is varying building heights, the canopy cover, and street widths. "It wasn't about no buildings and all green," he says. "It was about designing our spaces more thoughtfully."

Some cities are already using the detailed research to guide decisions. In Richmond, a heat map and a vulnerability map showing those more at risk appear in reports for housing, transportation, and the climate action plan, and the city's comprehensive master plan calls for reducing urban heat. Richmond hasn't invested in planting trees yet, he adds, but citizen-science groups like Groundwork RVA and the museum have developed programs such as Throwing Shade in RVA, a program teaching students about urban heat that has led to them planting peach trees at local high schools and designing shady structures for neighborhood bus stops.

Some of the deadliest heat waves in recent decades have taken place in northern cities, where people are not accustomed to extreme heat.

Groundwork RVA's parent organization, Groundwork USA, has funding to expand on this work for a Climate Safe Neighborhoods project exploring the relationship between historical race-based housing segregation and the impacts of climate change in Denver, Colorado; Elizabeth, New Jersey; Richmond, California; and Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

Even at higher latitudes, heat is an issue. According to the Centers for Disease Control, some of the deadliest heat waves in recent decades have taken place in northern cities like Chicago, where people are not accustomed to extreme heat and more residences lack air conditioning. A five-day heat wave in Chicago in 1995 led to the deaths of 739 people.

In Portland, Shandas has created heat maps containing demographic information including age, race, education, poverty level, and education. The city is focusing its efforts in areas where urban heat islands and indicators of vulnerability, including low-income levels, overlap. Shandas' work is reflected in Portland's Better Housing by Design zoning update, in which the city has proposed zoning amendments to reduce urban heat island effects, including limiting surface parking areas in residential neighborhoods and requiring landscaped setbacks between buildings and streets to provide more space for trees.

Energy Equity: Bringing solar power to low-income communities. Read more.

His next step is to expand heat island mapping to 50 cities in 2020. The key question, he says, is whether cities will begin making the changes necessary to decrease deaths from extreme heat.

"Those are very preventable deaths," Shandas says. "We can identify those locations and ameliorate some of the effects. It ultimately comes down to how to help these people. We have the technology.

Jim Morrison writes about the environment, travel, the arts, and business. His stories have appeared in Smithsonian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Wildlife, Pacific Standard, The Washington Post, and numerous other publications. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia. More →

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Can We Turn Down the Temperature on Urban Heat Islands?

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Using citizen science volunteers, researchers are more accurately measuring temperature differences between city hot spots and their cooler surroundings. With heat waves intensifying, the results are now being used to develop a range of innovative urban planning strategies.

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Who gets lifted (and who is lifting others) in Environmental activism

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Who gets lifted (and who is lifting others) in Environmental activism

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A lot of discussion popped around Greta Thunberg -- and her emergent central role in discussing youth activism around climate change. Some criticism noted that the public chatter focuses on her, but sidesteps leadership from members of marginalized communities. So it's refreshing to see how she attends to that -- and amplifies other voices that aren't being heard.

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For indigenous environmental activist Tokata Iron Eyes, climate solutions are all about indigenous rights and culture. When Iron Eyes met Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg a couple of weeks ago and realized Thunberg felt the same way, she invited Thunberg to her ancestral homelands. The two 16-year-olds forged a friendship-not much different, I imagine, from the girlfriends I made when I was a young woman.

For these teens, however, the stakes are much higher.

Thunberg arrived in the U.S. in August and has since toured the country and Canada. On Sunday, she joined Iron Eyes on a panel on the climate crisis hosted by the Lakota People's Law Project at the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota where Iron Eyes lives. Thunberg will be speaking on another panel Tuesday at Standing Rock in North Dakota, the site of a seminal 2016 protest over the Dakota Access Pipeline.

Greta Thunberg changed everything on Monday: She lit into the United Nations and then joined 15...
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Welcoming a blue-eyed European to lands that many Native Americans in the region consider sacred is no little thing. These lands were pillaged and destroyed by people who looked like Thunberg, and there's a long history of continued racism perpetrated on tribes by white Americans. Few white folks are received with such love and gratitude as what Thunberg has seen.

Her invitation to these lands sends a clear message to her critics: She's one of us. Some people on the left have criticized both the media for giving Thunberg so much attention and Thunberg herself for taking up space that some believe should go to young activists of color that have been doing this work for years.

Frontline communities like Standing Rock and youth from these communities like Iron Eyes have seen what climate change looks like, so they've been sounding the alarm on climate change long before climate strikes were a thing. The fossil fuel extraction that drives the crisis happens on their lands. The pollution as a result of that extraction ends up in their waterways. And all the while, these tribal nations have little to no say on whether such projects should continue or even be built in the first place. For many, it's not just an infringement to their basic human rights, but also a legal violation of treaty rights established with the U.S. government.

Iron Eyes knows firsthand what that's like; she was born in the Standing Rock Reservation and lived there at the time of the mass protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline. Youth played a central role in the fight against the 1,172-mile crude oil pipeline, making interstate runs to deliver petitions and producing a video campaign called Rezpect Our Water to raise awareness of the pipeline. And raise awareness they did: Standing Rock exploded into a textbook example of what climate mobilization can look like when frontline communities lead.

Iron Eyes was speaking out about environmental injustices long before Standing Rock, telling the crowd at Pine Ridge on Sunday that she spoke out about uranium mining at age 9.

For communities who face environmental threat on the regular, their history runs deep. Thunberg, on the other hand, only began speaking out about climate change a year ago when she began her Fridays for Future school strikes outside the Swedish parliament. She's still relatively new to the world of climate activism, and she's faced some criticism over it. I get the criticism, but I find it, quite frankly, unfair. And Iron Eyes ain't down with it, either.

"I think that it's not a problem of who's in the spotlight," Iron Eyes told Earther. "I think it's a problem of the U.S. media, especially, wanting to only cover a white narrative. It's not somebody's personal fault for being valued more in a system that values only them."

Truth! First of all, Thunberg is a child. And homegirl is out here doing more than plenty of adults in the climate space. She's a kid willing to say whatever she wants to whomever she wants (such as calling out the elite at the World Economic Forum for their role in the climate crisis in January 2019). Thunberg can get away with such bold statements, in part, because she's this seemingly innocent-looking, blue-eyed white girl. Butthe teen has been clear about using her privilege to provide support and allyship to her fellow youth of color who are not media darlings.

In regards to the landmark international climate complaint she and 15 other young people launched last month, Thunberg has been clear that it's not about her but about all of them. During the press conference, she kept urging the press to ask other youth questions. At a march and rally against the Keystone XL Pipeline in Rapid City, South Dakota, on Monday, Thunberg urged leaders to listen to indigenous voices, according to Rapid City Journal.

During the Sunday panel, Iron Eyes didn't shy away from addressing some of the criticism Thunberg has received from others in the movement.

"We have to realize that we're all on the same team, and we're all fighting for the same thing, so no matter who is in the spotlight, no matter who is getting the most camera time, we have to be able to come together as one under the same set of values and be able to speak to each other on this level of human being and talking about the same things and how we can make real change together without any forms of jealousy," she said during the conversation.

And jealousy can come quite easily when you're a teenager, so it says a lot that this is coming from a 16-year-old. It also says a lot about the moment we're in that Thunberg is at Standing Rock. We each have our own unique contributions to bring to the table when it comes to addressing the climate crisis. Indigenous people have so much knowledge and wisdom to offer. Thunberg speaks with an urgency that the world needs-and a privilege that many of her peers don't have.

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Greta Thunberg Heads to Standing Rock to Support Indigenous Activists

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For indigenous environmental activist Tokata Iron Eyes, climate solutions are all about indigenous rights and culture. When Iron Eyes met Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg a couple of weeks ago and realized Thunberg felt the same way, she invited Thunberg to her ancestral homelands.

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Another musical take on the discussion. Not so much funny like the one we watched in class, but definitely focused on the heartwarming hopeful side of things... https://youtu.be/6kPk4lMtZOg

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A sharp editorial by Lydia Hansen at Hamline's _Oracle_.

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I recently read a story on CNN about something called climate anxiety . Although it hasn't been defined as a clinical definition, climate anxiety refers to mental and emotional distress produced or caused by environmental change.

The article put a name to something I've felt for years: a suppressed panic that flutters in the back of my head when I think about climate change and environmental destruction. The feeling is a little like looking over the edge of a cliff when you're scared of heights. My stomach does that same flip when I realize the Amazon is burning and there's a hurricane pounding the Bahamas-and there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it.

Once I read the words "climate anxiety," I realized that sick feeling is my existential environmental dread rearing its head.

I also realized I don't know what to do with this feeling. What am I supposed to do when I'm afraid the world might catch fire or flood in the next decade and that there may be nothing I can do to stop it?

So I did what journalists do when they have questions: I reached out and asked if anyone would talk to me about their feelings on climate change.

Gabe Mianulli, a senior and creative writing major, was one of the first people who responded to my request. He told me he's lived with climate anxiety for most of his life.

"I think it's our survival instinct blaring its alarm," Mianulli said. "I know I'll be here to see the giant turd hit the air conditioning. And I need to start preparing for that mentally and emotionally."

Maybe that's part of the problem. In a way, preparation for environmental disaster is comparable to preparing for active shooters. Sometimes the act of preparing leaves its own scars. That's been Mianulli's experience.

"I think about [climate change] every day, all the time, more than I'd like to sometimes," he said.

Mianulli follows climate debate and environmental news closely, even though it sometimes makes him feel helpless. He says the key to learning about climate change and not being overwhelmed by it is to be intentional about what you do with the things you learn.

"You can and you should consume information, but you shouldn't let the information consume you," Mianulli said.

In other words, we can't keep kicking the can down the road and pretend nothing is happening. But we also can't collectively freeze in the middle of the road while the climate change truck barrels towards us.

I'm currently taking a class on environmental conflicts with communications professor Suda Ishida, so I asked her what she thought. She reminded me to be endlessly critical of information, to question where it comes from and to understand whose agendas it might be serving.

"This is the post-truth regime," Ishida said. "We sometimes don't have access to the knowledge, so we go to people and we repeat what they said."

Ishida was referring to journalists, but I think our media-saturated world makes it applicable to everyone. I'd like to know exactly what's going on, if we really have until 2050 to stop burning fossil fuel and make compostable computers and get rid of all the straws. It's hard to know what's going on when I don't have direct contact with the places where environmental upheavals are taking place and when I don't know enough about science and the environment to know what I should be worried about.

I'm not the only one with questions about what's happening. In three days, I had a half dozen conversations with students about climate change and anxiety. Each one raised new questions.

What do we do when we have questions that no one seems able to answer?

Is it even ethical to start a family given our current trajectory?

How do we compartmentalize fear so we can still function?

How will we know when the Earth is really dying?

I entered this conversation from a place of realizing that I had questions and no answers. I think it's a powerful place to be. Everything is on the table and open for examination.

My invitation to talk about climate change/anxiety is still open. Send me an email. Write a letter to the editor. Post on social media and engage with your community. Let's talk.

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How will we know when the world is dying?

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I recently read a story on CNN about something called climate anxiety. Although it hasn't been defined as a clinical definition, climate anxiety refers to mental and emotional distress produced or caused by environmental change. The article put a name to something I've felt for years: a suppressed panic that flutters in the back of...

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Drawing on a reading of a new novel by Nell Zink, and a very smart point about how we read Greta Thunberg, Rebecca McCarthy writes why we should stay negative.

"Just as important as hope is retaining the ability to see when someone is lying through their teeth."

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An ex-boyfriend once told me that if someone were to make a movie about his life it would begin with a pregnant woman riding a Coke machine out of a hurricane. That woman was his grandmother, pregnant with his dad during Hurricane Audrey, which killed at least 416 people, spawned 23 tornadoes inland, and effectively destroyed Cameron Parish - currently the largest parish in Louisiana and one of the least populated. Cameron was hit again in 2005 by Hurricane Rita, which wiped out my ex-boyfriend's house, and then again in 2008 by Hurricane Ike. It was in the news more recently when it was revealed the area has the highest percentage of climate change skeptics in the country.

I was indignant, not about the polling but about the way it was presented. The economy down there is heavily reliant on shrimping and oil. Young people generally move forty miles north up to the city of Lake Charles in Calcasieu Parish and the land in Cameron is forecast to be some of the first in the United States to disappear into the sea - a much-cited football field of the state is lost to the Gulf of Mexico every hour and the land is turning to lace. It's not that people in Cameron are just supernaturally stupid, I said to this ex-boyfriend over the phone, the problem is that most everyone who had the means and believes in climate change has already left. He's a coastal engineer working on a project to restore the state's wetlands, so it's not like he's indifferent to this, but he told me not to get worked up.

"We are stupid," he said.

*

Nell Zink's latest book, Doxology, begins with a marginal punk band at the end of the world. They don't know the world is ending, of course, not really. Nobody really knew back then except for oil executives, substantial portions of the United States government, and I guess the Unabomber. Doxology begins in the early 90's - David Dinkins' New York; post-cold war and financial crisis but pre-substantive gentrification, a city where a floundering business can still get a thirty-five year lease and environmentalism is embarrassing at best. "When the U.S. Army notified Winston Churchill that the first atom bomb had been detonated in New Mexico it chose the code phrase BABIES SATISFACTORILY BORN." Joy Williams wrote with a snarl, in a 1989 essay for Esquire:

So you entered the age of irony, and the strange double life you've been leading with the world ever since. Joyce Carol Oates suggests the reason writers - real writers, one assumes - don't write about Nature is that it lacks a sense of humor and registers no irony. It just doesn't seem to be of the times - these slick, sleek, knowing, objective, indulgent times. And the word environment. Such a bloodless word. A flat-footed word with a shrunken heart. A word increasingly disengaged from its association with the natural world.

Zink puts Williams's point more bluntly. The prevailing zeitgeist of the early-1990's, she says, was "post-sensitive."

Nell Zink has made a name for herself as a preeminent chronicler of post-sensitivity and one of the great weirdo writers of our age. Her first book, The Wallcreeper follows a woman who leaves her husband to become an ecoterrorist. In her second, Mislaid, another woman leaves her husband, kidnaps their daughter, and pretends to be black in order to hide from him. In her third, Nicotine, a woman falls in with an anarchist collective of smoker's rights activists who have been squatting in her dead father's house in New Jersey. Writing for Full Stop, Jesse Montgomery called her "a powerful American wizard," which is as good a description as I've heard. Zink rose to fame after sending Jonathan Franzen a letter insulting him and "almost ordering him to donate money to Albanian park rangers." They became friends - Zink is arguably the most endearing thing about Franzen, so if you're not a fan of his don't let that put you off - and he encouraged her to write fiction. She was in her late forties at that point and had spent most of her life working fairly menial jobs - as a secretary, a bricklayer, a cocktail waitress, and a technical writer, among other things. In her free time, she was a member of a band called F.E.R.R.E.T., and the editor of a tiny post-punk fanzine called The Animal Review. Put simply, Zink lived a not so extraordinary life for a bright, artistically-inclined, member of the lower middle class, but because her cohort is so underrepresented among writers her backstory seems insane and she dislikes romanticizing it. "I would cheerfully not have experienced much of the last thirty years," she told Huck Magazine in 2015. "I did so many bad jobs."

Not to defend bad jobs, but familiarity with them does define Zink's writing, which is marked by a highly literate attention to the marginal and sympathy that doesn't preclude mockery. Nell Zink's books are always funny, sometimes sloppy, and oddly comforting. Nell Zink the person, as one character in Doxology says of another, seems "indestructible. She's amazing. She doesn't learn from her mistakes, because she always lands on her feet, like a cat."

I do legitimately worry about the pressure to stay positive and who it will serve in the long run.

The first half of Doxology follows our heroes Pam, Joe, and Daniel as their band, the horrifically named Marmalade Skye, completely fails to achieve any measure of success and inadvertently launches Joe's solo career. Pam is a runaway, the only child of uptight WASPS from Washington, D.C., obsessed with Minor Threat to such an extent that she forgoes comfort, college, and even a high school degree to decamp to New York and pursue a career in punk rock. Instead, she lands a programming job. She meets Joe randomly, buying coffee from a Halal cart "at four p.m., because she had been escorted out of Merrill Lynch for calling this one dickhead 'fuckwad' in the presence of his subordinates."

Joe is a professor's son and "an undiagnosed, high functioning case of William's syndrome," which manifests, in Joe's case, as a kind of absurd friendliness that makes him perfect for the stage. Daniel, a Wisconsin native who works nights as a proofreader at a law firm, is "an eighties hipster...a by-product of the brief, shining moment in American history when the working class went to liberal arts college for free...An eighties hipster couldn't gentrify a neighborhood. He wasn't gentry. His presence drove rents down."

Pam and Daniel get married and have a baby - more or less by accident - and Joe soars to indie rock stardom, but still babysits their daughter, Flora. Life continues fairly happily for awhile until 9/11 - Pam and Daniel flee New York with Flora and Joe dies of a heroin overdose. Flora grows up with Pam's parents in D.C. and becomes an environmentalist, a career that quickly becomes discouraging. "Sustainability isn't about defending living things," she realizes, after a trip to Ethiopia to study soil degradation. "It's about doing human life in a way that enables scattered ecological islands. You have your climate volatility and your intensive industrialized exploitation of everything, but you also have your islands with totally profitable ecotourism and it's all great." Depressed and looking for a job, she joins the 2016 Jill Stein campaign.

*

"With each election there is the possibility that the environment will become a political issue. But it never does," Joy Williams wrote in that 1989 essay. "You don't want it to be, preferring instead to continue in your politics of subsidizing and advancing avarice...Your fundamental attitudes toward the earth have become twisted. You have made only brutal contact with Nature; you cannot comprehend its grace."

The essay, "Save the Whales, Screw the Shrimp," was later compiled in Williams' 2001 book, Ill Nature - one of the best and most underrated books about the abuse of the natural world I've ever read. It is funny and mean and essentially a battle cry, but it is overwhelmingly negative. Understandably so! The environmental movement, up until fairly recently, has been hamstrung by half measures and false promises; gestures towards "sustainability" that amount to no more than the most cynical greenwashing, ribbon parks placed along waterfronts when what's needed is managed retreat. Mainstream environmentalism has been the province of people like Michael Bloomberg - an exercise in beautification that changes nothing and generally ends up pushing the poor out of their neighborhoods as the air quality improves.

Williams has no patience for any of this. "Safariland" follows the wealthy tourists who travel to a gated area of Northern Botswana, paying exorbitant amounts of money to be immersed in a fantasy of pre-colonization Africa ("The illusion here is that wild animals exist," she writes). "The Killing Game" tracks the delusional self-justifications of American hunters. "Cabin Cabin" is a short, disturbing essay written from the perspective of the Unabomber's (suddenly sentient) cabin, sitting in an airplane hanger in Sacramento as he awaits trial. One of her longer pieces, "The Animal People," explains the rift between the "increasingly corporate environmental community" and animal rights activists. "St. Francis converted the wolf of Gubbio to reason, but he performed this miracle only once and as miracles go, it didn't seem to capture the public's fancy," Williams observes. "Humans don't want animals to reason with them." She goes after Greenpeace, The Nature Conservancy, Defenders of Wildlife, the World Wildlife Fund, the Environmental Defense Fund, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Audubon Society - accusing them of hypocrisy and band-aid environmentalism. "ECOWIMPS all, as their duped and disappointed supporters are discovering."

She was right! But the book was unevenly received and regarded with suspicion by the trade publication Publisher's Weekly. "At times, the collection falters under the weight of Williams's anger and moral indignation," the reviewer wrote. "While it is unlikely that her combative rants will win new converts, some environmentalists may find this book a powerful call to action." Last year the World Wildlife Fund (one of those ECOWIMPS) released a study that showed sixty percent of the planet's wildlife had been extinguished since 1970. But combative rants. Sure! Whatever helps you sleep at night.

*

The first half of Doxology is so much fun that it's a real bummer when we are thrust into 2015, although that isn't really Zink's fault. No one likes being thrown out of New York and into the Beltway. While working on the Stein campaign Flora becomes involved with two men; one a union organizer, the other an older Democratic strategist - a friendly but grotesque man by the name of Bull Gooch. "Politics is negative," he tells Flora, when they first meet. "That's the problem with your warming issue. It's not negative. How do you expect people to vote something down when you say it's everywhere all the time? It's intangible. You have to attack something people can beat. As in beat with a baseball bat."

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Gooch is vaguely associated with the left and able to quote Eugene Debs on demand, but fundamentally he believes in nothing and no one but himself. Still, he's a creature of his environment - picture a muscular eel in a Brooks Brothers blazer- and as such he's not without insight. Not long after he meets Flora he takes a meeting with the Clinton campaign. Trump, at this point, is gearing up to secure the Republican nomination but Ted Cruz is still in the game. Gooch intuits that the Clinton campaign doesn't really understand what they're up against and that the media will not be much help without prodding. "Are we preparing to debate issues with an opposing candidate, or are we noticing the animal in the room?" he says. "Hilary can beat a Republican, but she can't beat a totemic forest spirit." He tells them to go negative - really negative, accusing Trump of pedophilia negative. The campaign gives him two minutes to leave the building. Trump, as you all know, wins the election.

*

A few weeks ago Jonathan Franzen, Nell Zink's much despised friend, wrote a long article on climate change and basically everyone got mad. The article was ponderous, sometimes very inaccurate, and particularly frustrating because Franzen has a tendency to make a good point and then bury it by veering off into the Protestant Reformation (literally, this is not a joke). "You can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope," he writes, before mocking people who urge him to roll up his sleeves and save the world. Or, "If collective action resulted in just one fewer devastating hurricane, just a few extra years of relative stability, it would be a goal worth pursuing. In fact, it would be worth pursuing even if it had no effect at all," butting up against "it probably makes no difference how badly we overshoot two degrees [of warming]." He cites David Wallace-Wells recent book, The Uninhabitable Earth, but does it a disservice - Wallace-Wells makes very clear that the difference between four and eight degrees of warming would be immense and a matter of life and death for much of the world. Franzen's article is as much an exercise in despair as Wallace-Wells' book is a cry of fear - the latter admits that he was not environmentally inclined for most of his life and there are no human stories in The Uninhabitable Earth, just a relentless, beautifully rendered data dump that reads like a howl. But both Wallace-Wells and Franzen caught flak from the same people - for being too grim, for presenting a distant, worst-case scenario as an inevitable future, for frightening people (possibly) to the point of inaction, and for being upper middle class white men who will likely be removed from the worst effects of climate change.

These are all valid criticisms and I have no desire to defend Franzen's essay. If anything I recognize within it some of my own, less noble qualms around online activism - a distaste for gifs, the question of how to unite against a common enemy when some of your allies are often very corny. The answer is obviously to just get over yourself, but I do legitimately worry about the pressure to stay positive and who it will serve in the long run. The prevailing wisdom has been that environmentalists should avoid getting angry, compromise, don't make people feel guilty, and whatever you do don't scare people. But the last year has proven that fear is actually a pretty effective strategy for stirring people to action. Effective when used bluntly, without defeatism or apology. "Adults keep saying: 'We owe it to the young people to give them hope,'" sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg said at Davos. "But I don't want your hope. I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic. And then I want you to act."

Just as important as hope is retaining the ability to see when someone is lying through their teeth.

In 2011, Columbia Journalism Review and Propublica co-published a long feature by John Sullivan called "True Enough" about the rise of PR professionals and the fall of journalists. In the opening paragraph, a reporter for The New York Times named David Barstow describes going down to Houston to cover the Deepwater Horizon spill and finding, to his horror, "more PR people representing these big players than there were reporters, sometimes by a factor of two or three." At the time, there were about three PR professionals for every one journalist. Today there are six and the gap between PR and journalism is shrinking rapidly. This is the fault of funding obviously - Facebook and Google have eaten up ad revenue, websites shut down all the time, and everyone is being laid off. Still, it's not good. "There is the overwhelming sense that void that is created by the collapse of traditional journalism is not being filled by new media," said Nation correspondent John Nichols, "but by public relations."

If the Democrats win in 2020 (and that is admittedly a big "if") a lot of money is going to come pouring into the environmental movement and with money comes compromise and corruption and scumbags. I want the Green New Deal to work very badly, but there is no single Green New Deal - there is a non-binding resolution and a series of policy proposals, not all of which are created equal. Anything is better than what we have now, yes, but under a Democratic president the role of journalism versus PR in the environmental movement will become increasingly tricky. Lying to yourself is a luxury and not so long from now there could be Green New Deal advocates - looking right at you, Sean McElwee - who will be able to afford it. Those people will bargain your hopes away and tell you to stay positive. We all lived through the Obama administration and the earth doesn't have time for a repeat performance.

Both Zink and Williams are aware of this problem - writers preoccupied not just with gap between intentions and reality, but the extent to which people are willing to delude themselves in order to avoid admitting to that gap. In "Neverglades," Williams writes about the destruction of the Florida Everglades - her longtime home and an ecosystem ripped apart by the sugar industry. At the end of the essay, the Everglades, or twenty percent of them, are finally "saved" by the Clinton administration's $8 billion Everglades Restoration Act. "The final solution locks in the ultimate nonsolution," she writes:

And they couldn't have done it without us, the children of all ages, naive and hopeful to the bone. Couldn't have done it without our patience through the many many years...Looking back on it, we might just as well have brought a gallon of water with us when we visited the Park and dumped it on the ground.
We love you Everglades! We'll help save the place!
Chumps.

*

Hurricanes are multi-hazard events. The rating system - Categories 1 through 5 - doesn't explain the scope of the threat. It takes into account wind speed but not rain and storm surge, both of which are likely to increase as climate change progresses. A Category 5 like Hurricane Dorian is an insane storm - it sounds like a freight train, the water moves in with prehistoric violence, the wind beats you senseless. The stories coming out of the Bahamas are so horrifying they are difficult to read even when relayed in the driest language. A man named Adrian Farrington described losing his son in the storm surge and crawling to a church with a broken leg, only for the church to collapse. Escaping the ruined church, he saw another man trying to rescue his kids as the water rose. "The surge was halfway to the door and he couldn't open the door and I'm watching him and he's beating on the door," Farrington said. "His children inside crying and he's outside crying. After the surge came up and they couldn't get out, he just stopped swimming. He ain't even try to climb up on the roof...He just gave up."

This is going to get worse before it gets better and "doxology," which is by definition a short hymn to God, is more or less what fighting back against climate change means right now. Franzen compared environmental activists to religious evangelists and he wasn't all wrong, though it doesn't have to be framed as an insult. During a brief stint working at the Sierra Club, as Flora is beginning to understand just how lacking the response has been to the ecological crisis, she has a crisis of faith. "To help save the planet, she had to find out who was saving the planet and offer to help," Zink writes. "Nobody was saving the planet. Was it all just a trick that had been played on her?"

Obviously it's important to hold onto hope, but negativity does not preclude hope, nor does fury. Just as important as hope is retaining the ability to see when someone is lying through their teeth. Whether it's for personal gain or to comfort you or because they have sincerely convinced themselves that the shit they are selling is gold doesn't matter - the end result is the same. Asked about Greta Thunberg in an interview with the Guardian, Zink became emotional. "The question is: how angry is Greta Thunberg going to get, and will they still take her seriously after she is angry?" Zink said. "Right now, she a child warrior character from an anime film. She's straight out of Miyazaki. What's she going to be when she is 20, when we are at 500 parts per million [of carbon dioxide]? It's so out of style to be pessimistic about climate change, I am afraid to do it."

The Deepwater Horizon spill released an estimated 210 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico over a period of five months and remains the largest oil spill in history. Coastal Louisiana was hit the hardest - for years afterwards thousands of pounds of contaminated material were removed from the shoreline. In August of 2010, as the well was still leaking, the Obamas vacationed in Florida and a photo emerged of President Obama swimming in the Gulf of Mexico with his daughter Sasha. No members of the press were present - the photo was taken by then-White House photographer Pete Souza and they were actually swimming in Alligator Cove, not the Gulf. The Daily News ran the photo on their cover with the headline "OIL'S SWELL!" - a clunky play on All's Well. My ex-boyfriend and I were living in Brooklyn at the time and he tore the picture out and pinned it to our bedroom wall.

"There you go," he said. "The water's fine."

* * *
Rebecca McCarthy is a freelance writer and a bookseller based in Philadelphia. She's written for The Awl, The Outline, Medium, and others.

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Climate Messaging: A Case for Negativity

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An ex-boyfriend once told me that if someone were to make a movie about his life it would begin with a pregnant woman riding a Coke machine out of a hurricane.

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Youths, Climate Change, Pop Culture, and Anxiety

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Youths, Climate Change, Pop Culture, and Anxiety

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I felt this clip complemented the article for 9/20 from the Washington Post.

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And it keeps changing -- our use of different terms changes in impact, so we need to keep rethinking.

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August 27
In the middle of a winter's night in 2017, Frank Luntz's cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles. Luntz - who specializes in how the public reacts to words - saw scary evidence of a threat that he once tried to neutralize with language. In 2001, he'd written a memo of environmental talking points for Republican politicians and instructed them to scrub their vocabulary of "global warming," because it had "catastrophic connotations," and rely on another term: "climate change," which suggested "a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

Last month, with a revised script, Luntz appeared before the Senate Democrats' Special Committee on the Climate Crisis.

"I'm here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001," Luntz said. Nearby was a colorful chart of vocabulary, developed since his polling in 2009 showed bipartisan support for climate legislation. He went on: "I've changed. And I will help you with messaging, if you wish to have it."

Don't talk about threats, he told the senators. Talk about consequences.

Don't talk about new jobs created by green energy. Talk about new careers.

And sustainability?

"Stop," Luntz said. "Sustainability is about the status quo."

Even the committee's name had a troublesome word in it: "crisis." It's flabby from overuse, Luntz thought. If everything is a crisis, then nothing is.

From a word standpoint, that's true. And sometimes it feels true in the real world. The phone in your hand has become a police scanner of unfolding crises. The Kashmir crisis, the Hong Kong crisis, the border crisis, the trade crisis, the measles crisis. The crisis of mass shootings, of the national debt, of Puerto Rico, Brexit, the Amazon. And, yes, the climate crisis, formerly climate change - somehow the least tangible but most alarming of the crises, which makes it trickier to talk about.

Those who are talking about it have ratcheted up their rhetoric. In May, the Swedish activist Greta Thunberg ditched "climate change" for "climate breakdown" or "climate emergency." The Guardian now uses "climate catastrophe" in its articles. A resistance movement born in Europe last year named itself Extinction Rebellion, partly to normalize the notion of aggressive action in a life-or-death situation.

Luntz wants defter language. "The strongest advocates for a particular issue are often the worst communicators," he says later by phone, because "they forget that the people they need to convince are not themselves or their friends."

The climate problem is not just scientific. It's linguistic. If we can agree how to talk and write about an issue that affects us all, maybe we can understand and fix it together.

But words can be clumsy tools. They can be too dull to puncture ignorance, or so sharp that people flinch and turn away. Is "change" appropriately neutral, or unjustlyneutered? Is an "emergency" still an "emergency" after months or years? Does "catastrophe" motivate people, or make them hide under the bed? How long before words such as "breakdown" and "extinction" lose their bite?

And if we keep returning to the dictionary for new words to replace them, will there eventually be any left?

The second volume of the fourth National Climate Assessment is 1,515 pages long. The word "likely" appears 867 times, sometimes after "very" or "extremely." Last spring, as they distilled data into text, the scientists who wrote the report spent long hours debating the usage of "likely."

Without significant action to curb climate change, they wrote in the final chapter, "it is very likely that some physical and ecological impacts will be irreversible for thousands of years, while others will be permanent."

When translated to conversational English, "very likely" becomes "this is something really bad and totally crazy and wild," says one author of the report, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

"Why don't we use plain language and say, 'Yes, this is crazy and, yes, you should be freaking out'? Because that's not fair. That's not the role of the National Climate Assessment," the author says. "But then we sort of fail as a community in actually getting people to understand the severity of it."

The science community is supposed to interpret for the rest of us, but its dialect does not always pack rhetorical oomph. "I didn't realize that pointing to a climate graph I think is the Rosetta stone - people don't see it the way I see it," says Brenda Ekwurzel, director of climate science for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "We as humans don't experience an exponential curve viscerally, in our gut."

In the industrial age, environmentalist writers have tried to access the brain via the gut. "Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth," Henry David Thoreau wrote in the 19th century. In the 1960s, Rachel Carson envisioned an ecosystem silenced by chemicals: "Everywhere was a shadow of death." In the 1980s, as global warming was first debated widely, Bill McKibben pondered "the end of nature" itself.

But "there's a point at which words like 'climate change' become part of your mental furniture," McKibben says in an interview. "Like 'urban violence' - things that are horrible problems but you just repeat the thing so often that people's minds kind of skip over them."

Terms lose their power as they get used over many years, says Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, and "come to accrete their own set of connotations."

Such as: elitist, liberal, socialist. When thousands of pages of analysis become a two-word slogan, it passes from science to politics. Facts become less important than feelings. For some people, "climate change" is a wedge word synonymous with "hoax" and calls to mind former vice president Al Gore. For others, it summons the specter of ExxonMobil and is a rallying cry for restructuring the global economy.
[Al Gore is near the end of his quest to save the Earth. Nina Barrett just got started.]
"The facts do not speak for themselves," says Richard Buttny, a professor in the department of communication and rhetorical studies at Syracuse University. "People make decisions based on values."

And therein lies an opportunity, according to Kim Cobb, professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Georgia Tech. Scientists observe and publish findings for the public, Cobb says, but then often fail to "recognize the emotional toll this takes on the recipient and the challenge to their core values."

Cobb refrains from using words such as "crisis" and "emergency" on Twitter, where the character limit discourages context and nuance. Instead, she elevates language about solutions, and about the emotions triggered by the science, in the hopes of widening the circle of understanding.

"We're way behind creating these communities for shared values and shared goals," Cobb says. "And from that comes shared language."

We are gradually building that language to talk about where we are, where we're going and about the emotions that accompany that knowledge.

The Germans have a word for feeling guilty about flying on airplanes: "flugscham," or "flight shame."

The biologist Edward O. Wilson has a word for a future epoch following a profound loss of species: "the Eremocine," or "the Age of Loneliness."

Karla Brollier, founder of the Climate Justice Initiative, is listening to her fellow indigenous Alaskans as their language evolves to include loss and adaptation, without relying on words such as "climate refugee" that connote victimhood.

Jennifer Atkinson's students at the University of Washington at Bothell have used "blissonance" to describe the feeling of enjoying a record-hot day in winter - while recognizing that climate change might have something to do with it.

"Solastalgia," coined by environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, means distress over change in one's home environment. Atkinson phrases it as a homesickness without ever having left home.

Her students "describe how the sound of frogs has slowly disappeared over time - these changes that destabilize connections to personal memories," says Atkinson, a senior lecturer at Bothell. "Unlike with personal bereavement, we don't have a vocabulary for the grief people have for the loss of the natural world."

Her course is called "Environmental Anxiety and Climate Grief." One of the goals is to search for ways of communicating outside the bounds of science and its "value-neutral" vocabulary - all those likelys and somewhat likelys.
['Everything is not going to be okay': How to live with constant reminders that the Earth is in trouble]
"We're moving into an age of great earnestness, because we're trying to figure out, 'How do we show up for each other?' " says Sarah Myhre, a climate and ocean scientist who has studied social and ecological decision-making. "And the language that's being used in my spaces is all about heart-centered work."

Whereas Frank Luntz once tried to strip the climate problem of emotional resonance, Atkinson, Myhreand others are acknowledging and amplifying it. Whereas science has traditionally been guided by dispassionate, male-centric authority, women are rewording climate conversations to honor the collective, connective nature of the problem.

And how we talk about the environment affects how we think about it. In the colonial and industrial ages, Myhre says, our language reflected an idea of the natural world as an inventory of useful commodities - separate from, and subservient to, humanity.

Trees became timber.

Animals became livestock.

Oil and coal became fuels.

And thus a cultural problem has given birth to an environmental one, says Daniel Wildcat, a professor at Haskell Indian Nations University in Kansas.

"Think of how our worldview changes if we shift from thinking that we live in a world full of resources," he says, "to a world where we live among relatives."

In June, the White House slashed its red pen through certain labels in written congressional testimony from a State Department analyst. When the analyst used "possibly catastrophic" to describe the future impacts of climate change, a member of the National Security Council typed a note in the margin: "not a science-based assessment but advocacy for the climate-alarm establishment."

The analyst listed "tipping point processes" on a page that was entirely crossed out. A note in the margin: " 'Tipping points' is a propaganda slogan designed to frighten the scientifically illiterate."

Some activists believe fright is appropriate, and they're eager to use keener language than "tipping points" to do it.

"We've been told for years: 'Don't scare people, people don't want to know the bad news' - and all that's meant is nothing's changed," says Charlie Waterhouse, founder of the company behind Extinction Rebellion's branding. "We know that we have to up the ante, and we have to have a more extreme position because that opens that crack that lets other people follow."

The word "extinction" is a blunt instrument that whacks at complacency.

The word "rebellion" invites enlistees and subverts established power structures.

But this "constant inflation" in terminology hampers rational discussion, says the Danish author Bjorn Lomborg, whose skeptical writings on the economics of climate action have riled scientists and activists. Words such as "catastrophe" and "extinction" imply that we should either cower and do nothing, or overreact and do everything, says Lomborg, who is president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center.

"The conversation we should have is: How do we make smart policies that cost less than the damage they reduce?" Lomborg writes in an email. "Climate policy shouldn't be done with labels but with careful analysis."

We don't need labels as much as we used to, back when the effects of climate change were forecast instead of seen and felt.
[Extreme climate change has arrived in America]
"In a certain sense, words are no longer as necessary as they once were," says McKibben, author of " The End of Nature." "Twenty or 30 years ago we were describing things that hadn't happened yet, so you couldn't take a picture of them. Now every single day you can take 1,000 pictures around the world of the trauma of climate change."

Nearly two decades after Frank Luntz recommended it, "climate change" may still be the closest thing to a shared language that Americans have for describing what's happening to the planet. But we diverge from there. Scientists speak about consequences. Activists speak about crises and catastrophes. Politicians speak about doubt and propaganda. And if you're paying attention, you'll hear nature speaking loudly for itself.

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How should we talk about what's happening to our planet?

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August 27 In the middle of a winter's night in 2017, Frank Luntz's cellphone alerted him to a nearby wildfire. The longtime analyst of public opinion opened his bedroom curtains and saw, less than a mile away, flames chewing the dark sky over Los Angeles.

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Climate change and anxious white nationalism

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Climate change and anxious white nationalism

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Smart, scary little essay about how anxiety about the global impact of climate change is fueling various white nationalist (racist) ideologies.

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Before slaughtering dozens of Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand and gunning down Latinos in a Walmart, two mass murderers cited one unifying cause in their manifestos: climate change.

"Why focus on immigration and birth rates when climate change is such a huge issue?" the Christchurch killer wrote.

More and more, white nationalists hooked on visions of a " Great Replacement " of whites will say that the Christchurch and El Paso shooters were not alone in linking climate change to their fretting about mass migration. As the real-world effects of climate change become visible, young racists are increasingly latching onto the disasters it creates as the impetus for protecting a white homeland that they claim to be under threat from refugees.

The vision has some precedent in the history of white nationalist movements. The search for a whites-only nation has, for decades, been intertwined with the vision of a green utopia for racists, often juxtaposed with the idea of overpopulation as a driving environmental concern.

But over the years, the discourse on the far right has shifted from using overpopulation as a fig leaf for efforts to either keep out or exterminate people of color to sweat-soaked anxiety around displacement as a result of climate change, with hordes of climate refugees cast as the new bogeyman.

For Betsy Hartmann, a professor at Hampshire College who has studied the overlap between the environmental movement and white nationalism, the re-emergence of this phenomenon - the far right using ecological concerns to advance its agenda - comes as no surprise, and is part of what she refers to as the "greening of hate."

"It's an apocalyptic discourse that the world is going to hell because of the decline of the white race," she told TPM. Climate change, she added, provides a convenient backdrop in which the far right can place its fantasy.

'What happens to white people if climate change is real?'

At first glance, this trend may seem ironic: Many on the far right dismiss the science behind climate change. Some see political efforts to confront it as a globalist conspiracy.

But a strain of white nationalist thinking has seized on the dire warnings from experts of what could be in store as climate change advances: Swaths of the world could become uninhabitable, resulting in mass migrations to relatively hospitable climes.

These concerns have become particularly common among younger members of the far right - including the El Paso and Christchurch killers - who seem to accept mainstream climate predictions and incorporate them into their worldviews. The older cohorts, by contrast, either hew to dated notions of an impending Malthusian catastrophe, fretting about overpopulation, or hedge their planning for a migrant invasion with outward skepticism about the reality of global warming.

But for both the Christchurch and El Paso killers, climate change provided a sense of urgency, mixed in with anxiety about a so-called " Great Replacement."

"They are the same issue, the environment is being destroyed by over population, we Europeans are one of the groups that are not over populating the world," the Christchurch killer wrote in his hate-filled manifesto. "The invaders are the ones over populating the world. Kill the invaders, kill the overpopulation and by doing so save the environment."

Experts like Hartmann who study this trend describe it as "ecofascism." Within the white nationalist movement, it is sometimes referred to as "green nationalism."

Two leading voices on the white nationalist right - 41-year-old Richard Spencer and 68-year-old Jared Taylor - have staked out positions on the issue in ways that highlight the distinction between younger racists, who eagerly incorporate climate catastrophe into their worldview, and an older generation of white nationalists who remain skeptical.

When asked by TPM about his views, Spencer described a vision of the future in which global populations began to move en masse, doubting that "everyone" would be able "to come north, in the sense that everyone is going to live in Western and central Europe and North America."

Is not population control and reduction the obvious solution to the ravages of climate change? http://t.co/0vIV4R4rs1

- Richard ☀️ Spencer (@RichardBSpencer) March 31, 2014

He went on to claims of potential climate migration to the situation that came after the "unintended wave" of migrants to Europe following Arab Spring, saying that he did not want the U.S. to become "the refugee camp for the world."

"Do I want to make these millions of people now into newly minted citizens?" he asked rhetorically. "Does this disaster mean that they've won the lottery?"

Spencer's views echo, but are distinct from, those of Taylor, who has been a prominent white supremacist for decades and whose magazine American Renaissance is influential on the far right.

His website has mulled the issue of climate change in recent years in a way that is more hedged, tempering concerns about climate change with the view common among elected Republicans that mainstream science's predictions of disaster are wrong or overstated. One American Renaissance article posed the question: "What Does It Mean For Whites If Climate Change Is Real?" (That article concluded that "Migration triggered by climate change would overwhelm us.")

Another piece, published in January 2019 addressing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)'s Green New Deal proposal, concluded that "Earth can't survive an infinite African population boom, skyrocketing Asian consumption and pollution, and a white death spiral."

Taylor himself couches his decision to publish articles addressing climate change in skepticism, but hits the same points surrounding migration fears as the others.

"There is massive non-white immigration into white nations because whites have built agreeable places to live," Taylor told TPM. "If climate change makes the global south even more unlivable, that will be another reason to move north."

Taylor went on to call the resulting migration "the greatest external threat to Western civilization, just as massive non-Jewish immigration into Israel would threaten its Jewish character."

"White nations should do exactly what Israel does: build fences, deport illegal immigrants, and manage immigration in ways to ensure that the founding stock remains a substantial majority," he added.

Past Is Prologue

The nod to environmental concerns is not new for the movement.

The interest in climate change is the latest iteration of a long overlap between white nationalism and environmentalism. Today's claims that population displacement sparked by climate change threatens whites have roots in fears of global overpopulation during the 1970s.

Far-right anti-immigration activist John Tanton, the founder of influential group Federation for Immigration Reform, proclaimed his concerns about the environmental effects of overpopulation throughout the 1960 and '70s, and pushed virulent attempts to curb non-white immigration. Tanton, a member of the Sierra Club, even urged that organization to turn toward anti-immigrant activism.

Heidi Beirich, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center's intelligence project, described Tanton to TPM as a "diehard environmentalist who specifically blamed immigrants for destroying America's environment."

Over the years, he morphed into a para-mainstream figure, with FAIR exerting influence on the Trump administration's border policies. Even now, FAIR and similar groups like the Center for Immigration Studies publish articles linking immigrants to pollution.

By mixing them with rhetoric about climate change, Spencer and others have kept overpopulation fears alive on the far right.

"Overpopulation is a global problem," Spencer told TPM. "And it's not one in Western, Central Europe, among white Americans, or Japan."

Spencer added that he would support policies including "humane family planning" and other "national policies" to protect the "founding stock" of countries from the effects of climate change.

But when pressed on where or how that policy would be applied, Spencer replied, "When I'm talking about promoting humane family planning, that's something that desperately needs to be done in Africa."

Hartmann, the Hampshire College professor, warned that well-intentioned environmental advocates need to be wary of using rhetoric that plays into apocalyptic narratives related to mass displacement by climate change.

"We need to be cautious around the idea of large mass migrations of climate refugees," Hartmann told TPM, warning that it conflates the complicated political, individual, and economic reasons that lead people to immigrate into a vision of "one horde of people coming over the border."

"People need to be aware that the apocalyptic discourse around climate change can trigger unintended consequences," she said.
This story is part of Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.

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White Nationalists Latch On To Climate Change For Mass Migration Hysteria

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Before slaughtering dozens of Muslims at a mosque in New Zealand and gunning down Latinos in a Walmart, two mass murderers cited one unifying cause in their manifestos: climate change. "Why focus on immigration and birth rates when climate change is such a huge issue?" the Christchurch killer wrote.

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How might we examine different generational responses to climate change?

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How might we examine different generational responses to climate change?

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Younger folks don't need convincing -- in fact, they're more actively anxious and engaged about the challenges.

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Young activists participate in a climate strike demonstration outside the White House on Friday. (Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post)
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In a coastal town in Washington state, climate change has a high school junior worried about the floods that keep deluging his school. A 17-year-old from Texas says global warming scares him so much he can't even think about it.

But across the country, teens are channeling their anxieties into activism. "Fear," said Maryland 16-year-old Madeline Graham, an organizer of a student protest planned for this week, "is a commodity we don't have time for if we're going to win the fight."

A solidmajority of American teenagers are convinced that humans are changing Earth's climate and believe that it will cause harm to them personally and to other members of their generation, according to a new Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll. Roughly 1 in 4 have participated in a walkout, attended a rally or written to a public official to express their views on global warming - a remarkablelevel of activism for a group that has not yet reached voting age.

The poll by The Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) is the first major survey of teenagers' views since the explosion of the youth climate movement last year. Inspired by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg, whose year-long "strike" in front of the Swedish Parliament and carbon-neutral sailboat voyage across the Atlantic have made her an activist icon, growing numbers of teens have been skipping school on Fridays to protest on behalf of something they say is more important.

Extreme climate change has arrived in America

This week, in the run-up to a major U.N. summit, hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren plan to abandon their classrooms to demand more-aggressive measures to protect the planet.

After taking a solar-powered boat from England to New York to attend the United Nations Climate Action Summit, Thunberg discussed what activists need to do. (Video: The Washington Post)

"People feel very guilty when a child says, 'You are stealing my future.' That has impact," Thunberg told The Post. "We have definitely made people open their eyes."

More than 7 in 10 teenagers and young adults say climate change will cause a moderate or great deal of harm to people in their generation, a slightly higher percentage than among those 30 and older. By the time today's high schoolers turn 30, scientists say, the world must achieve a "rapid and far-reaching" transformation of society to avoid warming's most dire consequences.

Several teenagers told The Post they are already feeling its effects.

Gabe Lopez, 16, of Everett, Wash., said warming waters have taken a financial toll on relatives who fish in the Pacific. Graham, who lives in Silver Spring, was inspired to take action after seeing hurricanes bombard Puerto Rico, North Carolina and the Bahamas - and watching floods repeatedly deluge her grandmother's home in Ellicott City, Md.

"It's like a dystopian novel," she said. "To grow up seeing the world fall apart around you and knowing it's going to be the fight of your lives to make people stop it."

Lopez and Graham said thinking about climate change makes them afraid, an emotion they share with 57 percent of teens nationwide. Fewer than a third of teens say they are optimistic.

"A lot of it is connected to being a kid," Lopez said. "We can't vote. We don't have anyone to represent us."

Adults, he said, don't seem to take the issue as seriously, or as personally, as people his age. Lopez recalled getting into an argument with his driving instructor after the older man was dismissive of students' anxieties about climate change.

Adults think, " 'Oh you're so young, you don't know what you're talking about,' " he said. "But I know the facts, and I know what the most drastic consequences will be. I know that people aren't doing what needs to be done."

Teens are slightly more likely than adults to accept the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming, 86 percent vs. 79 percent. But in other ways, kids are much like the rest of the country when it comes to climate change.

Roughly a third of teenagers and adults say the issue is "extremely important" to them personally. Just under half believe the United States must drastically reduce its fossil fuel use in the next few years to avoid the worst effects of climate change. And roughly 4 in 10 say mitigating the effects of warming will require major sacrifices from ordinary Americans.

Teenagers also share adults' questions and misconceptions about the ways the world is warming. In both age groups, no more than 2 in 10 say they know "a lot" about the causes of climate change and ways to reduce it. Sizable minorities of teens incorrectly believe that phenomena such as volcanic eruptions and the sun getting hotter are major contributors.

Despite many teens' strong feelings about the issue, fewer than half say they've taken action to reduce their own carbon footprints. Their most common approaches are recycling, limiting time in cars and reducing plastic use. And most say they rarely or never discuss the issue with family and friends.

Meanwhile, the number of teenagers who say they are being taught in school how to mitigate climate change appears to be on the decline. Fourteen percent say they have learned "a lot" about the subject, down from 25 percent in 2010, when the Yale Project on Climate Change asked a similar question.

"It's terrible," said Sam Riley, 17, of Boston. "It's hardly ever brought up at my school."

The high school junior said he learned nearly everything he knows about climate change from reading the news and searching the Internet. What he found scares and angers him.

"We're killing the thing we live on," he said. "By the time that I'm old, I know I will see more impacts starting to happen."

Riley, who is black, believes that minorities and people in low-income communities will be most severely affected by warming, because they are more likely to live in vulnerable areas and less likely to be able to insulate themselves.

"The wealthier you are, the more protection you have," he said.

The Post-KFF poll finds black and Hispanic teens express a greater sense of urgency around climate change; 37 percent and 41 percent, respectively, say people need to act in the next year or two, compared with 24 percent of white teens.

Teens who do not think that human activities are affecting the planet are in the minority. Jane Palmer, 13, of Chubbuck, Idaho, said she doesn't see how people can influence the climate when Earth has been changing for millions of years. When her eighth-grade science teacher told her class that fossil fuel use is warming the globe, her mother dismissed those lessons as "fearmongering."

Still, Palmer has noticed that summers in Idaho are getting hotter. She worries that many people "don't really care about the Earth" and says she is still thinking the issue through.

"I'm kind of in between," she said. "It is a problem, but it's also not that big a deal. Teachers should talk about it and let us know what's happening in the world, but they shouldn't . . . make it seem like the world is going to end."

Many of her peers disagree: About 4 in 10 of those under 18 call climate change a "crisis." But unlike adults, most teenagers say they don't feel helpless. More than half - 54 percent - say they feel motivated.

"It's the greatest threat to life as we know it and humanity as we know it," Graham said. "When you're facing something like that, and you're 16 years old, and your mom's yelling at you, and you have classes, and, on top of that, everybody's going to die . . . it's easy to let fear overtake you."

"But," she said, "this generation - we're fighters. And we're going to win."

The Post-KFF survey was conducted online and by telephone from July 9 to Aug. 5 among a national sample of 2,293 adults and 629 teenagers through AmeriSpeak, a survey panel recruited through random selection of U.S. households by NORC at the University of Chicago. Adult results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points, and teen results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus five percentage points.

Scott Clement contributed to this report.

Dangerous new hot zones are spreading across the globe

Americans increasingly see climate change as a crisis, poll shows

How should we talk about what's happening to our planet?

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Most American teens are frightened by climate change, poll finds, and about 1 in 4 are taking action

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"It's like a dystopian novel: To grow up seeing the world fall apart around you, and knowing it's going to be the fight of your lives to make people stop it."

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Thinking about the complexities of how real, meaningful change happens.  

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Thinking about the complexities of how real, meaningful change happens.  

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"Despite the backlashes—or because they are backlashes—I remain hopeful about this project of building new cathedrals for new constituencies. Because it is well under way."

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We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within-or, rather, many overlapping structures. They're assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations. About race, class, gender, sexuality; about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of all things; about compassion, generosity, collectivity, communion; about justice, equality, possibility. Though there are individual voices and people who got there first, these are collective projects that matter not when one person says something but when a million integrate it into how they see and act in the world. The we who inhabits those structures grows as what was once subversive or transgressive settles in as normal, as people outside the walls wake up one day inside them and forget they were ever anywhere else.

The consequences of these transformations are perhaps most important where they are most subtle. They remake the world, and they do so mostly by the accretion of small gestures and statements and the embracing of new visions of what can be and should be. The unknown becomes known, the outcasts come inside, the strange becomes ordinary. You can see changes to the ideas about whose rights matter and what is reasonable and who should decide, if you sit still enough and gather the evidence of transformations that happen by a million tiny steps before they result in a landmark legal decision or an election or some other shift that puts us in a place we've never been.

*

I have been watching this beautiful collective process of change unfold with particular intensity over the past several years-generated by the work of countless people separately and together, by the delegitimization of the past and the hope for a better future that lay behind the genesis of Occupy Wall Street (2011), Idle No More (2012), Black Lives Matter (2013), Standing Rock (2016), #MeToo (2017), and the new feminist surges and insurgencies, immigrant and trans rights movements, the Green New Deal (2018), and the growing power and reach of the climate movement. Advocacy of universal healthcare, the elimination of the Electoral College, the end of the death penalty, and an energy revolution that leaves fossil fuels behind have gone from the margins to the center in recent years. A new clarity about how injustice works, from police murders to the endless excuses and victim-blaming for rape, lays bare the machinery of that injustice, makes it recognizable when it recurs, and that recognizability strips away the disguises of and excuses for the old ways.

*

My formative intellectual experience was, in the early 1990s, watching reactions against the celebration of the quincentennial of Columbus's arrival in the Americas and the rise in visibility and audibility of Native Americans that radically redefined this hemisphere's history and ideas about nature and culture. That was how I learned that culture matters, that it's the substructure of beliefs that shape politics, that change begins on the margins and in the shadows and grows toward the center, that the center is a place of arrival and rarely one of real generation, and that even the most foundational stories can be changed. But now I recognize it's not the margins, the place of beginnings, or the center, the place of arrival, but the pervasiveness that matters most.

It's easy now to assume that one's perspectives on race, gender, orientation, and the rest are signs of inherent virtue, but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently, through the labors of others.

We live inside ideas. Some are shelters, some are observatories, some are windowless prisons. We are leaving some behind and entering others. At its best, in recent years, this has been a collaborative process so swift and powerful that those paying closest attention can see the doors being framed, the towers arising, the spaces taking shape in which our thoughts will reside-and other structures being knocked down. Oppressions and exclusions so accepted they're nearly invisible become visible en route to becoming unacceptable, and other mores replace the old ones. Those who watch with care can see the structure expanding so that some of those who object or ridicule or fail to comprehend will, within a few years, not even question their lives inside those frameworks. Others try to stop these new edifices from arising; they succeed better with legislation than with imagination. That is, you can prevent women from having access to abortions more easily than you can prevent them from thinking they have the right to an abortion.

You can see change itself happening, if you watch carefully and keep track of what was versus what is. That's some of what I've tried to do over the years, in this book and others: to see change and understand how it works and how and where each of us has power within it. To recognize that we live in a transformative time, and that this process will continue beyond what we can now imagine. I've watched the arising of new ways of naming how women have been oppressed and erased, heard the insistence that the oppression and erasure will no longer be acceptable or invisible. Often, even things that impacted me most directly became clearer through this process, carried out by many of us together. I've seen many writers express versions of the same general principles, seen the ideas catch on, spread, become incorporated into conversations about what is and should be, and sometimes I've been one of those writers. To see it unfolding is exhilarating and sometimes awe-inspiring.

*

This is a time in which the power of words to introduce and justify and explain ideas matters, and that power is tangible in the changes at work. Forgetting is a problem; words matter, partly as a means to help us remember. When the cathedrals you build are invisible, made of perspectives and ideas, you forget you are inside them and that the ideas they consist of were, in fact, made, constructed by people who analyzed and argued and shifted our assumptions. They are the fruit of labor. Forgetting means a failure to recognize the power of the process and the fluidity of meanings and values.

*

I heard Gerard Baker talk recently. He's Mandan-Hidatsa, from the Fort Berthold reservation in North Dakota, and he spoke about his work in the national parks to change the way Native people were present, literally, as visitors and employees, as well as in structures, signs, language, and other representations. Immensely tall, enormously funny, a brilliant raconteur, he told us how he rose from doing janitorial work to being superintendent at two national monuments he'd told his family he'd never work at, Little Bighorn Battlefield (which was, until 1991, named Custer Battlefield National Monument) and Mount Rushmore. At both parks he changed what the place meant and whom it was for. At one he got death threats for doing so; some people intend to keep the old versions in place by violence.

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Recalling what he said, remembering my own early 1990s reeducation about Native American presences in the United States, contemplating the conversations we have now and those we don't, I wanted to yell at some of the people I run into, "If you think you're woke, it's because someone woke you up, so thank the human alarm clocks." It's easy now to assume that one's perspectives on race, gender, orientation, and the rest are signs of inherent virtue, but a lot of ideas currently in circulation are gifts that arrived recently, through the labors of others.

Remembering that people made these ideas, as surely as people made the buildings we live in and the roads we travel on, helps us remember that, first, change is possible, and second, it's our good luck to live in the wake of this change rather than asserting our superiority to those who came before the new structures, and maybe even to acknowledge that we have not arrived at a state of perfect enlightenment, because there is more change to come, more that we do not yet recognize that will be revealed.

There's a beautiful passage Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza wrote in the wake of the 2016 election:

This is a moment for all of us to remember who we were when we stepped into the movement-to remember the organizers who were patient with us, who disagreed with us and yet stayed connected, who smiled knowingly when our self-righteousness consumed us. Building a movement requires reaching out beyond the people who agree with you. I remember who I was before I gave my life to the movement. Someone was patient with me. Someone saw that I had something to contribute. Someone stuck with me. Someone did the work to increase my commitment. Someone taught me how to be accountable. Someone opened my eyes to the root causes of the problems we face. Someone pushed me to call forward my vision for the future. Someone trained me to bring other people who are looking for a movement into one.

Garza acknowledges that each of us had an education and implies that none of our educations is finished. At its best, at its most beautiful, this is a creative process. At its worst, it's policing by those who are inside aimed at those who are not. Sometimes they're not inside because they have not yet found the doorway or they hear condemnation rather than invitation issue from the doorstep. But people also forget that this is a historical process rather than ideas that have always been self-evident, and some have had more access to these ideas than others. I find now that most people forget the immense work done around race and gender and sexuality and prisons and power, and that it was, in fact, work -intellectual labor to reject the assumptions built into language, the forces that lift some of us up and push others down, to understand and describe the past and the present and propose new possibilities for the future.

*

Amnesia means that people forget the stunning scope of change in recent decades. That change is itself hopeful, as evidence that people considered marginal or powerless-scholars, activists, people speaking for and from within oppressed groups-have changed the world. For example, an unfortunate consequence of the relative success of what got called #MeToo has been to imagine that something began at that point. This obscures the extraordinary feminism of the five years before, including the work of campus anti-rape activists and the responses to the rape-torture-murder of Jhoti Singh in New Delhi and the Steubenville case.

The watershed called #MeToo in October 2017 was not that people spoke; it's that other people listened.

Even the surge of public response to those atrocities may obscure, as I wrote in one of the essays in this book, that the reason women's stories were able to be heard and generated consequences was because of what came before: the long, slow work of feminism to change consciousness and to put women-and men who regarded women as human beings endowed with inalienable rights and the capacity to say things that mattered-in positions of power. And the rise of new generations who were less bound by the old assumptions and denials. To change who tells the story, and who decides, to change whose story this is.

The watershed called #MeToo in October 2017 was not that people spoke; it's that other people listened. Many had spoken up before-the victims of the gymnastics doctor, the victims of R. Kelly-some over and over, and their testimony was ignored or disregarded. So #MeToo was not the beginning of women speaking up, but of people listening, and even then-as we've seen in the case of Christine Blasey Ford, testifying against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh-continuing to be rendered inconsequential. Just as Gerard Baker did, for changing the story about the Battle of Little Bighorn, Blasey Ford received death threats. One measure of how much power these voices and stories have is how frantically others try to stop them.

*

The title essay of my new anthology, Whose Story Is This?, is about the struggle of new stories to be born, against the forces that prefer to shut them out or shout us down, against people who work hard at not hearing and not seeing. A far, far too common response to #MeToo has been to bemoan that men feel less comfortable in their workplaces, which springs first of all from a habit of not just valuing male comfort more but centering attention on it. Similarly, the advancement of people of color is framed, by some, as a loss for white people, having to make room, compete on equal terms, or just coexist with difference. It's about who matters.

Comfort itself is often invoked as though it were a right of the powerful. Last June, CBS This Morning tweeted, "Border Patrol has reached out and said they are 'very uncomfortable' with the use of the word cages. They say it's not inaccurate and added that they may be cages but people are not being treated like animals." So a cage should not be called a cage, because the discomfort of people in cages is overshadowed by the discomfort of people who put them in cages having cages be called by their true names.

Similarly, racists have objected to being called racists of late, and well-housed people have talked about how seeing the homeless upsets them. "White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization-how did that language become offensive?" said Republican congressman and white supremacist Steve King. Comfort is often a code word for the right to be unaware, the right to have no twinges of one's conscience, no reminders of suffering, the right to be a "we" whose benefits are not limited by the needs and rights of any "them."

In the name of such comfort, part of the population in the United States and in Europe is moving backward, trying to take up residence in the wreckage of white supremacy and patriarchy, perhaps convinced that there is no shelter that shelters us all, that they need to be in places where whiteness and maleness dominate, that scarcity governs the world and hoarding is a necessary strategy. I said "alarm clocks," and I've been calling this process awakening. Those are value-laden terms, but to become more aware of others unlike you and of the systems that regulate the distribution of power and audibility and credibility and value is to awaken.

The opposite is falling into the nightmare that is also such a powerful force in this time, the nightmare of white supremacy and patriarchy, and the justification of violence to defend them. The permission given by the resurgence of white supremacy and misogyny is to not feel, not value, not extend oneself to solidarity with or even awareness of others, to be unaware, unconcerned, uninformed, unconnected. Not to wake up, not to hear the alarm clocks. You can see that this is often experienced as a giddy liberation from the obligation to be "politically correct," that is, to treat others as people having value and rights, including the right to tell their version of the story.

I call it a nightmare because it is delusional in its fears and its fantasies of grandeur and its intention of making decades of changes evaporate, of shoving new ideas back into the oblivion from which they emerged, and returning to a past that never existed. And because it turns truth from something to be determined by the evidentiary processes of science or investigative journalism or other empirical means into something decided by threat and force. Truth is whatever they want it to be, and as their wants shift, it bloats and billows and fades and flaps in the wind. To make a death threat against a storyteller is to believe that might makes right and even fact.

Despite the backlashes-or because they are backlashes-I remain hopeful about this project of building new cathedrals for new constituencies. Because it is well under way. Because the real work is not to convert those who hate us but to change the world so that haters don't hold disproportionate power and so that others are not sucked into the nightmare. Because the rising generation is better, overall, and because demographics are creating a United States in which nonwhite people will be the majority in a quarter century, because the pace of backlash-exclusion cannot keep up with the rate of diversification, because our stories are more accurate when it's about the sources of poverty or the reality of climate change or the equality of women, because our stories invite more people in, because these stories invite us to be more generous, more hopeful, more connected, because so much has changed from the dank world I was born into, in which male superiority and white supremacy were only just beginning to be challenged and new languages about the environment, sexuality, power, connection, and pleasure were just being born.

__________________________________________

Adapted from the introduction to Whose Story Is It?, courtesy Haymarket Books. Copyright 2019 Rebecca Solnit.

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We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within-or, rather, many overlapping structures. They're assembled from ideas, visions and values emerging out of conversations, essays, editorials, arguments, slogans, social-media messages, books, protests, and demonstrations.

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Greta Thunberg on how her Asperger’s shaped her activism

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Greta Thunberg on how her Asperger’s shaped her activism

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At 16, climate activist Greta Thunberg has been called the greatest threat to the world's fossil fuel industry. The teenager first made headlines last year with her solitary strike against climate change outside Sweden's parliament. Since then, she's inspired millions of supporters to rally in more than 150 countries.

Thunberg will be speaking at the UN's Climate Action Summit in New York later this month. In lieu of flying to the summit, she made headlines by sailing across the Atlantic in a zero-emissions yacht. Thunberg joined "CBS This Morning" on Tuesday to discuss her climate advocacy, and how her Asperger's has helped her deliver her message.

Thunberg emphasized that in order to prevent a climate emergency, world leaders must "step out of their comfort zone."

"The planet is outside its comfort zone and we also need to be outside of our comfort zone to prevent the worst consequences from happening," she said. "What I want people to do now is to become aware of the crisis that is here."

In some cases, that means shaming "those who need shaming," she said. "It's what I have been doing for quite a while now, and it actually has a lot of impact when you speak truth to power, when you don't bother to be polite because this is such a serious crisis, and you cannot -- we cannot -- focus on what we can or cannot say. Now we must speak clearly about what is happening."

When asked how she found the confidence to speak so clearly, Thunberg said that "I just know what is right and I want to do what is right. I want to make sure I have done anything, everything in my power to stop this crisis from happening, to prevent it."

"I have Asperger's, I'm on the autism spectrum, so I don't really care about social codes that way," she added.

In some cases, she said, her neurodiversity gives her an advantage. It "makes you different and makes you think differently," she said. "Especially in a big crisis like this one, we need to think outside the box, we need to think outside our current system, we need people who think outside the box and who aren't like everyone else."

When asked about the most important thing the public can do to help prevent a climate emergency, Thunberg said it's key to "try to understand the crisis."

"I think that once you fully understand the climate and ecological emergencies, then you know what you can do as well," she added. "And, of course, there's a lot of things you can do in your everyday life, but we cannot be focusing on these individual things you can do. We have to see the full picture."

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Teen activist Greta Thunberg on how Asperger's helps her fight climate change

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At 16, climate activist Greta Thunberg has been called the greatest threat to the world's fossil fuel industry. The teenager first made headlines last year with her solitary strike against climate change outside Sweden's parliament. Since then, she's inspired millions of supporters to rally in more than 150 countries.

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A brief editorial case for "speculative journalism"

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A brief editorial case for "speculative journalism"

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From a special issue of a magazine devoted to environmental (and therefore political, economic, and cultural) issues in the American West.  What do you think?  To what degree, and in what ways, could fiction shape civic engagement and understanding?

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In June 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a congressional committee, where he announced, with 99% certainty, that human-caused global warming was real. A year later, the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group formed by fossil fuel companies, began a determined effort to stymie climate action. Hansen, being a scientist, based his testimony on scientific fact. The GCC lobbyists, being slimeballs, based their efforts on telling stories - including, incredibly, the 1992 release of a video claiming that adding CO ₂ to the atmosphere would boost crop yields and end world hunger.

Thirty years later, we are still fighting stories with facts, and the results have been underwhelming. While it is easy to get frustrated by this state of affairs, it is also easy to understand why it's happening. Global warming is a human-caused phenomenon that exceeds the human capacity for understanding. The typical institutions that we rely on to guide government policy - science and journalism - have not been fully up to the task. We know this at HCN because we cover, over and again, a changing climate. The facts are there, and the problem is still there - and getting worse. So last December, when the U.S. government issued a damning, detailed assessment on the climate, even we were at a loss with what to do with it. How, we wondered, can we help people understand the importance of all these facts, if the facts aren't enough to speak for themselves?

One possible answer is this issue, a departure from our usual rigorous, fact-based journalism, and a foray into the world of imagination. Call it science fiction, or, if you prefer, speculative journalism. We took the projections of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, interviewed scientists, pored over studies - then imagined what the West would look like 50 years from the release of the report.

The result is a multiverse of future Wests, all set in the year 2068. No two stories take place in the same reality, but each is a reflection of possibilities presented in the climate assessment. In some, the West verges on satirical catastrophe. In others, technology steps up as reality melts away. Some of us imagined a better world; others imagined how much worse things might get. Readers weighed in, too. Taken together, we hope these stories inspire further exploration of the national climate assessment, which is available online and is an impressive body of work. For our hardcore readers, we've provided a citations page, where more information on the relevant science and studies can be found.

None of these stories are true, but any of them could be. The fact is, we don't really know what climate chaos will bring ... but we do know that enormous challenges - and opportunities - lie ahead. Our chance to change the future is now, but we'll need a better story first.
Poring through all of this peer-reviewed scientific literature wasn't easy. Luckily, the writers in this issue were aided by countless experts, including climate scientists, rangeland ecologists, hydrologists and others, who helped us interpret climate models and clearly imagine these many possible future Wests. See references to scientific research each piece was based on at the end of the story.
Brian Calvert is the editor-in-chief of High Country News. Email High Country News at [email protected] or submit a letter to the editor. Follow @brcalvert
More from Editor's Note

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In June 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before a congressional committee, where he announced, with 99% certainty, that human-caused global warming was real. A year later, the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group formed by fossil fuel companies, began a determined effort to stymie climate action.

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One of the key leaders of climate activism today recalls the neglected work of a female scientist, first to propose the impact of carbon dioxide on atmospheric temperature. Then article then pivots to explore how women are on the frontlines today, in facing the burdens of climate change *and* in leading political action to fight it.

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Why History Forgot the Woman Who Discovered the Cause of Global Warming

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Eunice Foote discovered the cause of global warming, but history forgot her. That can't happen to women working on climate science today.

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Smart conversation with Professor Betsy Hartmann on long-standing links between climate concern, eco-fascism, and right wing (white) nationalism.  Makes some great points about how our narratives about climate change and sustainability could (should) avoid certain ways of framing the issues which are then co-opted by these movements.

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This weekend's mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president's penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of racist message boards.

Patrick Crusius, the 21-year-old suspect police took into custody after the shooting, is believed to have uploaded a four-page white nationalist document to the message board 8chan (it's since been removed from the site, which itself has been forced into retreat, and we won't be linking to it) outlining his motives for killing at least 22 people at Walmart on Saturday. Included among its racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric are ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement. "[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources," it reads.

Where Crusius' views violently diverge is the solution to these real issues. The manifesto suggests Americans overconsumption will never stop, so the only option is "get rid of enough people" to make the American lifestyle "more sustainable." Horrific, disgusting, and absurd, this so-called ecofascist ideology uses legitimate environmental concerns to justify racist policies and, sometimes, mass murder.

In a future where storms are more powerful and entire communities are destroyed, people are going...
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This isn't the first time right-wing or fascist figures have pulled from environmentalism to further their cause. Some thinkers within Hitler's National Socialist party espoused the idea that "[o]nly through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger," though the relationship of the Nazis and environment is a bit more complicated than that.Racists throughout U.S. history have often misappropriated population control tied to resource protection, an idea popularized in the 18th century by Thomas Malthus. His idea that food production couldn't keep up with exponential population growth has been debunked since, well... here we are with 7 billion humans on Earth and enough food for everyone (if it were distributed equitably, that is). Much of the discourse around overpopulation centers on developing countries and stereotypes rather than the reality that rich countries-and their richest citizens in particular-are the biggest resource consumers on Earth.

The El Paso shooter manifesto itself echoes that of the gunman who killed 51 in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this year. Brenton Tarrant, the accused shooter in that massacre, identified as an ecofascist and defined it as "ethnic autonomy for all peoples with a focus on preservation of nature and the natural order." The El Paso manifesto is in the same vein, going further in some ways by noting that the goal of the murders was to preserve Americans' unique position as one of the world's biggest per-capita carbon polluters on Earth.

While I hesitate to call it a trend, there are growing signs the right-wing populists are leaning into climate change and other environmental crises as a way to drum up support for their policies of exclusion and hate. Fox News and the president have had an undue influence on fueling anti-immigration hysteria, creating a dark kind of symbiotic feedback with the rising tide of hate in the U.S. While climate denial is still en vogue on Fox News and in the president's addled brain, it's fair to wonder if we could see ecofascist ideas start to slowly creep into more open public discourse.

To get a handle on that as well as the origins of ideology, I spoke with Betsy Hartmann, a professor emeritus at Hampshire College (full disclosure: it's my alma mater). Hartmann has long studied the connections between white nationalism and environmentalism, something she's referred to as the "greening of hate." Our conversation is below, lightly edited for clarity.

Brian Kahn, Earther: What is the real genesis of this ideology? Where did these ideas coming from?

Betsy Hartmann: The deeper concerns about racial purity have a long history, but they became married to population concerns with the eugenics movement in the beginning of the 20th century and the idea that you didn't want the unfit procreating. And then, of course, Hitler used eugenicist ideas for genocide against the Jews and also gypsies, the disabled, and other people deemed unfit. He, like many eugenicists in the U.S., drew a link between national purity and racial/ethnic purity and a romanticized pristine natural environment. This link remained and continues to remain an undercurrent of certain population control ideologies and practices.

In terms of the white nationalist movement's use of explicit population-environment arguments, we need to look at the John Tanton network's deployment of these ideas against non-white immigrants. [ Editor's note: Tanton was an ophthalmologist who the Southern Poverty Law Center calls the "architect of the modern anti-immigrant movement," which includes grassroots groups and think tanks that hold sway in Washington, DC, today].

This network helped set the ground for the rise of these kinds of hate-filled environmental arguments, what I and others have called the 'greening of hate.' Deploying racialized fears of overpopulation destroying the environment, members of the Tanton network even tried to take over the Sierra Club in the late 1990s and turn it into an anti-immigrant organization. Fortunately, they were defeated. What we are facing now is the greening of hate, stage two. Old ideas, but with some new actors and manifestations. While ties exist between the Tanton network and the white nationalist movement, the lethal embrace of these ideas by violent, armed white nationalists is another order of magnitude.

"The manifestos of the shooters in both New Zealand and El Paso in a sense represent a coming together of a green apocalypse and a brown fascist one. This toxic mix serves as a rationale for saving nature and the white race."

Earther: What's driving this renewed interest in this? What are the factors bringing this to "stage two," as you call it?

Hartmann: I would say the internet and right-wing media certainly plays a role in spreading them. But we can't ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States. They are an important part of many environmental studies curricula. There's a deep racial undercurrent with poor people of color are presented as having too many children and destroying the environment. Unfortunately, Malthusianism has achieved the status of conventional wisdom in the U.S. It's not surprising that white nationalists are influenced by it and deploy it for their own hateful aims.

Now, there's also a powerful apocalyptic discourse that links climate change, environmental degradation, overpopulation, and scarcity. White nationalism is already steeped in violent apocalypticism-fears about the white race coming to an end feed the impetus to mount an Armageddon-style bloody-but-cleansing race war. The manifestos of the shooters in both New Zealand and El Paso in a sense represent a coming together of a green apocalypse and a brown fascist one. This toxic mix serves as a rationale for saving nature and the white race. The El Paso shooter's manifesto even mentions the unwillingness of Americans to change their environmentally damaging lifestyles as a reason to decrease the number of Americans through attacking immigrants.

Earther: Why does this strain of environmentalism seem to appeal to right-wing subculture in particular?

Hartmann: The environmental movement in the U.S. has, I would say, overindulged in apocalyptic thinking for a long time. There's that kind of apocalyptic bridge and then the nature-race-purity bridge. What's so horrifying and shocking to me is that these manifestos are openly Malthusian environmentalist arguments. I don't think we saw that quite as much before in the armed white nationalist movement.

Earther: Is it possible some of these extreme ideas in these manifestos will get laundered through think tanks and become part of mainstream political discourse?

Hartmann: Potentially, but the other thing I've been following in recent years is the growth of the climate-conflict, climate-refugee discourse. My concern has been that it's basically militarizing climate change and introducing a huge national security element into it, which is a real problem. Ironic too, since the military is one of the main culprits when it comes to carbon emissions.

There are a lot of superlatives that can be used to describe the U.S. military. It represents the...
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I don't want to deny that there may be climate conflicts or climate-related migration. But there is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict and climate refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries. It draws on highly racialized depictions of poor people-especially in Africa-as more prone to violence in times of resource scarcity as if they're savages not capable of cooperation. And these narratives also simplify the migration process with the claim that climate change is going to cause scarcity, scarcity's going to cause conflict, and that's going to cause migration. Most climate migration researchers believe a lot of migration that is likely to occur will be within countries not across borders. But to the extent that it is across borders, why are negative images fomented of these poor people coming to get us? That's not on the far right, that's in some liberal foreign policy and military scenarios around climate change.

Earther: That's interesting. There's often a push to win conservatives on climate change by highlighting the military's climate views. You're saying in some ways this could push us toward a dangerous state of militarizing the borders and militarizing climate change?

Hartmann: Right, we don't want to appeal to conservatives that way, it's not the way to go. It has unintended consequences. There are other ways to bridge party lines like carbon pricing policies and investments in renewable energy. Using this highly militarized and stereotyped Malthusian discourse about poor people of color is dangerous and counterproductive.

The notion that we're headed towards some kind of populational apocalypse-that there exists a line...
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Earther: Could we see this kind of language on closing the borders or deporting people or becoming a new flavor climate denial on the right and if so, what are some ways to counteract that?

Hartmann: Once we start using this threat language, it too easily can morph in the minds of some into 'those people are taking away our jobs, they are destroying our culture and our way of life, and they are destroying our environment on top of that.' So I think we have to be mindful of that.

This past fall, Matthew Phelan wrote an article in the New York Review of Books on ecofascism. He talks about how sustainability discourse is becoming popular in Europe among right-wing populists, especially in Italy with the Five Star Movement. Sustainability could become a mantra of these people, but their kind of sustainability excludes. It's sustainability for white people and for their particular nativist vision of the nation-state. So sustainability needs to be clearly delineated in terms of whose interests are being served. The same with climate policy. Green comes in many shades. We need to understand the differences between them.

We also need to acknowledge that migration may be a good response to climate change and people should be allowed to migrate. How can people migrate safely and equitably? These kinds of questions need to be addressed.

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How Climate Change Is Becoming a Deadly Part of White Nationalism

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This weekend's mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, has re-opened the festering debates over gun control, immigration, and the president's penchant for racist hate speech. But the manifesto believed to have been authored by the suspected shooter also reveals another horrific idea edging its way toward the mainstream from the primordial sludge of racist message boards.

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"anti-extinction activists the Yes Men" . . . 

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"anti-extinction activists the Yes Men" . . . 

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The Yes Men is a political prank group who have a long, beautiful history of fooling prominent businesses and media -- in ways that expose the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of the way things are working.

This particular prank was the release of a new "Equator Principles" policy document, meant to define sustainable climate action, particularly against investment in coal, for major transnational businesses.  The release of the doc, ostensibly for a major Japanese bank, led the actual bank to change its actual policies (for the *somewhat* better).

"The announcement as well as both responses, of course, were part of a hoax by anti-extinction activist group the Yes Men intending to highlight the hypocrisy of banks claiming to be socially conscious while financing coal plants in foreign countries."

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One day after a hoax impersonation shamed Mizuho and other banks for financing new coal power plants against their own industry standards, the real Mizuho announced that they plan to limit their coal-financing policies in the future. Sadly, that real resolution isn't more binding than the fake one.

Despite some banks announcing moves to limit coal finance, Japan's major commercial banks still enable new coal power plants to be built and operated in countries most vulnerable to their social and environmental impacts, including Indonesia and Vietnam, among others.

Read our draft of the Equator Principles 4 and press releases here.

Read the "coming clean" press release here.

The real EP4 was released on June 24. The disappointing draft falls short of improving the integrity of the EPs in any meaningful way, ensuring that they remain as toothless as ever and continue to permit new coal finance. EP4 is now under "stakeholder review." Stakeholders (i.e. concerned earthlings) should submit feedback, encouraging them to add effective grievance mechanisms, increase transparency, and build in consequences for members like Mizuho, MUFG, and SMBC who break their own industry-standard rules.

For more information and to take action:

f

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One day after a hoax impersonation shamed Mizuho and other banks for financing new coal power plants against their own industry standards, the real Mizuho announced that they plan to limit their coal-financing policies in the future. Sadly, that real resolution isn't more binding than the fake one.

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Climate strike
https://globalclimatestrike.net/

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“Can we, in other words, tell the story so people get it?”

Over 60 news outlets agree to a week of intensive, intentional coverage of climate change — September 16 through 23.

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That's the mission TV newsman Bill Moyers urged at the launch of Covering Climate Now, a project aimed at breaking the climate silence that has long prevailed within too much of the news media. Co-founded by and the Columbia Journalism Review , in partnership with The Guardian , Covering Climate Now aims to convene and inform a conversation among journalists about how all news outlets-big and small, digital and print, TV and radio, US-based and abroad-can do justice to the defining story of our time.

Today, Covering Climate Now is proud to announce the first batch of news outlets participating in this effort. More than 60 outlets have signed on so far, with more on the way. There are TV networks (CBS News) and local TV stations; major newspapers in the US ( The Philadelphia Inquirer , Minneapolis Star Tribune , San Francisco Chronicle , Seattle Times) and abroad ( Asahi Shimbun and la Repubblica , the biggest newspapers in Japan and Italy, respectively); eminent specialist publications ( , Scientific American , InsideClimate News, Harvard Business Review ); distinguished digital publications (HuffPost, Vox, The Intercept, Slate); regional outlets ( The Texas Observer , Colorado Springs ); public radio stations (in New York City; Washington, DC; Chicago; Philadelphia; Boston; New Orleans; Louisville; and San Francisco) and public-radio programs ( Marketplace , Science Friday , ); popular magazines ( of Canada, Newsweek Japan ); leading individual and institutional voices (author Bill McKibben; the radio and TV program Democracy Now!; Channel 4 UK correspondent Alex Thomson; veteran TV meteorologists Dan Satterfield, Mike Nelson, and Paul Gross); and many more.

Each of these outlets has committed to running one week of focused climate coverage, to begin September 16 and culminate September 23, the day of the landmark international Climate Action Summit hosted by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres in New York. We're not here to tell people what to write or broadcast. All that's required is for each outlet to make a good faith effort to increase the amount and the visibility of its climate coverage-to make it clear to their audiences that climate change is not just one more story but the overriding story of our time. The point is to give the climate story the attention and prominence that scientists have long said it demands so that the public and policymakers can make wise choices. Can we, in other words, tell the story so people get it?

We see Covering Climate Now as a fulfillment of journalism's most sacred responsibilities, which are to inform people and foster constructive debate about common challenges and opportunities. Arguably, no problem in today's world is more challenging, or offers brighter opportunities. In a report last October, scientists with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that humanity had just 12 years to slash heat-trapping emissions in half or else face catastrophic temperature rise and the record-breaking extreme weather it unleashes. Meanwhile, spectacular advances in solar, wind and energy efficiencyillustrate how doing right by the climate can make our societies better, not worse, if we're smart about it.

To elevate climate coverage is no more of a value judgment than it is to sideline such coverage. For many years now, most of the news media, at least in the US, has done the latter. The major TV networks devoted more air time in a week this spring to a new royal baby in Britain than they did in the entire year to the climatestory. When last October's IPCC report was released, 28 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the US didn't bother to tell their readers about it.

Here are the names of the journalistic leaders that have signed on to the Covering Climate Now initiative. If you don't see your favorite news outlets among them, ask those outlets to get in touch with us. We would welcome their participation.

We can be reached at coveringclimatenow@cjr.org

List (as of July 25, 2019)

Print & Online Newspapers and Magazines:

TV & Radio:

1. CBS News (national)

2. WNYC (public radio station for New York City area)

3. WHYY (public radio station for Philadelphia area)

4. WAMU (public radio station for Washington, DC, area)

5. WBEZ (public radio station for Chicago area)

6. WBUR (public radio station for Boston area)

7. WFPL (public radio station for Louisville, KY area)

8. WWNO (public radio station for New Orleans area)

9. KQED (public radio station for San Francisco Bay area)

10. Dan Satterfield, chief meteorologist, WBOC-TV, CBS affiliate in Salisbury, Maryland

11. Mike Nelson, chief meteorologist, Channel 7 Denver, ABC affiliate in Denver

12. Paul Gross, chief meteorologist, WDIV, NBC affiliate in Detroit

13. The Years Project/Years Of Living Dangerously

14. The Global GoalsCast

Independent Journalists (outlets listed for identification purposes only):

1. Climate Matters

2. Solutions Journalism Network

3. Boston University

4. The Lancet Countdown On Climate Change and Health

RELATED: Transforming the media's coverage of the climate crisis
Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope are the authors. Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation's environment correspondent, has covered climate change since 1989. His books include On Bended Knee: The Press And The Reagan Presidency, Earth Odyssey: Around The World In Search Of Our Environmental Future, and HOT: Living Through The Next Fifty Years On Earth. Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of Columbia Journalism Review.

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A new commitment to covering the climate story

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"Can we tell the story so people get it?" That's the mission TV newsman Bill Moyers urged at the launch of Covering Climate Now, a project aimed at breaking the climate silence that has long prevailed within too much of the news media. Co-founded by The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review, in partnership with [...]

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EarthGames — growing archive of games addressing sustainability, our interaction with the environment, and climate change.

To what degree does (or could) play — and our explicit interaction with and in games — affect our behaviors, our values, our knowledge?

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EarthGames is a growing community of researchers, game developers and students who share a passion for games and the environment. We're hard at work adapting the latest scientific research to develop amazing video and board games to teach and inspire players about the natural world and our role within it.

Check out our recent releases including A Caribou's Tale, Erode Runner, and Infrared Escape.

Our newest release is a rapid-fire series of minigames that highlights the great work of green student organizations at UW.

Play 21 different minigames, each inspired by a UW green group! Read more here!

EarthGames needs your support! You can help support students and staff to make high-quality educational games by donating here: EarthGames donation page

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for updates about our games!

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About Us EarthGames is a growing community of researchers, game developers and students who share a passion for games and the environment. We're hard at work adapting the latest scientific research to develop amazing video and board games to teach and inspire players about the natural world and our role within it.

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LitHub archive of resources — nonfiction, fiction, poetry

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An Appraisal (and Update) of Lit Hub's Climate Library

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8 of the best poems about climate change.

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8 of the best poems about climate change.

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From Amy Davis' Burning Worlds newsletter in the Chicago Review of Books -- 8 poems (all online) meant to "haunt, inspire, and in the best of all possible cases, provoke to action."

I loved Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's "Utilomar" in particular.  I lived in the Marshall Islands for a while; this nation will disappear with just a small rise in sea levels. And she wrote this for a conference in Minnesota -- and drew links between living there and living here that I find challenging (and, yeah, haunting).

I sometimes wonder how poems work -- and I'm curious how this different artistic form might affect readers & listeners differently than other art can.

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It would be difficult to write a " Burning Worlds " column this month and not mention the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Our thoughts are with you, Houston.

As climate change continues to wreak havoc on populations across the United States and around the globe, writers are fighting back with words that haunt, inspire, and in the best of all possible cases, provoke to action.

Previous installments of "Burning Worlds" have focused primarily on novels and short-story collections, but this month I'm offering a round-up of poetry - great poetry - that addresses climate change. Poetry that investigates human relationships with the natural world isn't new, of course. Indeed, poets working in both Western and Eastern traditions have long been invested in the topic. The poets whose work I link to today extend and examine those traditions, each working in a different style. Moreover, these poets come from nations around the world, bringing with them a unique perspective on climate change.

All of the poems linked to here are free to read online, and all are worth your time.
"A Language of Change" by David Sergeant
In 2015, The Guardian asked UK poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, to curate twenty poems about climate change. This poem by David Sergeant was one of them. In this poem, the speaker sits by the ocean and wrestles with mixed feelings of love and horror at its power and potential to destruct. Sergeant is the author of two poetry collections and has published additional work in Poetry Ireland, Poetry Review, and Rialto.
"Silent Sea" by Rachael Boast
Boast was born in Suffolk and currently lives in Scotland and the West Country. Sidereal, her first collection, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize for Poetry in 2012. This poem, another in Duffy's curated series for The Guardian, evokes imagery from both the natural and manmade worlds.
"Ovid on Climate Change" by Eliza Griswold.
Eliza Griswold is the author of two books, the poetry collection Wideawake Field (2007) and a work of non-fiction, The Tenth Parallel. Her work has also appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, Harper's, and the New Republic. In this provocative poem, she re-imagines the Ovid myth. You can read an interview with Griswold about this poem here.
"X" by Imtiaz Dharker
Another in the Guardian series, "X" hums with a nervous energy that makes climate change feel personal. Dharker is a Pakistan-born British poet and author of at least six books. She is also the recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for her English poetry.
Two sonnets by Craig Santos Perez
Published in the New Republic earlier this year, these two sonnets reimagine both love and the act of professing it through the language of landscape and climate change. Perez is a poet from the Pacific Island of Guåhan/Guam and the co-founder of Ala Press. He is the author of two poetry collections, the winner of the 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry, and is now an Assistant Professor in the English Department at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa.
"The Solace of Artemis" by Paula Meehan
Meehan is a poet and playwright from Dublin. She is the author of nine collections of poetry and ten plays. She has also won multiple awards, including the PPI Award for Radio Drama, Best Play, in 2005. In this melancholic poem, another from the Guardian series, Meehan opens with thoughts of a polar bear.
"A Radiant Romance" by Matt Harvey
In 2014, Harvey, a poet from the U.K., published The Element in the Room, a whimsical collection inspired by renewable energy. This post from artistsandclimatechange.com contains several snippets from that collection and "A Radiant Romance," a poem about solar energy, in its entirety. Harvey is the author of three other collections of poems and hosts his own mini-series on Radio 4 in the U.K.
"Utilomar" by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
Jetnil-Kijiner is a Marshallese poet and performance artist who in 2014 was asked to address the UN Climate Summit in New York City. Many of her poems, including "Dear Matafele Peinem," discuss the threats that climate change poses to the Marshall Islands. In "Utilomar," the poet articulates how climate change affects both her island home and the mainland.

Want more? The U.K.'s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) published this terrific collection of poems in concert with its climate change awareness event in 2015. You can learn more about that event, the RSA in general, and download the poems by clicking here.
is Amy Brady's monthly column dedicated to examining trends in climate change fiction, or "cli-fi," in partnership with Yale Climate Connections. Help the Chicago Review of Books and Arcturus make the literary world more inclusive by becoming a member, patron, or sponsor. Each option comes with its own perks and exclusive content. Click here to learn more.

Amy Brady is the Editor-in-Chief of the Chicago Review of Books and Deputy Publisher of Guernica Magazine. Her writing has appeared in Oprah, The Village Voice, Pacific Standard, The New Republic, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. Follow her on Twitter at @ingredient_x.

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It would be difficult to write a " Burning Worlds " column this month and not mention the victims of Hurricane Harvey. Our thoughts are with you, Houston. As climate change continues to wreak havoc on populations across the United States and around the globe, writers are fighting back with words that haunt, inspire, and in the best of all possible cases, provoke to action.

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Writer Jeff Vandermeer (author of Annihilation) on 

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Writer Jeff Vandermeer (author of Annihilation) on 

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How does, could, should a writer wrestle with the "slow apocalypse" of global warming?  Can any kind of art matter?  No spoiler: he doesn't know.  But he does think asking these (various) questions matters for readers and for writers.

In particular, he names a couple of ways fiction could do a better job at capturing the "slow apocalypse."  One, engage more deeply and diversely with how animals figure in our stories -- not just as background, but as vital players in every novel's "ecosystem."  Two, struggle with the challenge of "ineffectiveness" -- of the vital problem of action (and "agency") in relation to huge, sometimes overwhelming problems.

The essay is a little abstract, at times, and it doesn't have strong clear claims (or judgments).  But it does set up lots of issues/arguments that are useful for our class (and links to various useful resources).

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1 - Descending into the Substrata

The Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination Festival (Amsterdam, February 26 - March 2) as I experienced it was less festival than upbeat funeral march conducted in bright light, set to a soundtrack of experimental music, and festooned with colorful Power Point graphics like ornaments on a post-apocalyptic Christmas tree. According to the pocket guide, a fundamental starting point for the festival "is the thesis that we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Human activity has irreversibly changed the composition of the atmosphere, the oceans, and even the Earth's crust...humans have become a force on a geological scale." The festival brought together "scientists, philosophers, theorists, artists, and researchers" to talk about ways to rethink "our attachments to the world, our concepts of nature, culture and ecology."

To experience this in person for more than two hours at a time is a sobering experience, since you're entering a place that's trying to stare directly at the supernova known as global warming. You oscillate from finding it worthwhile to wondering if you're inviting depression and anxiety to take up residence in your brain - and for what purpose? To tell people what they already know? Except, in my case participation consisted of the even more useless context of a presentation entitled "AREA X: The Fictive Imagination in the Dusk of the Anthropocene," about what types of fiction are likely to go extinct before we do. This included thoughts about reactionary post-apocalyptic fiction, revisiting the way we write about our fellow animals, and interrogating the inefficiencies of so-called "smart" tech. If you were standing in a hideous post-apocalyptic landscape, would you want me to tell you a story or would you just want me to shut up long enough so you could convert me into edible protein?

If you were standing in a hideous post-apocalyptic landscape, would you want me to tell you a story or would you just want me to shut up long enough so you could convert me into edible protein?

Still, it was hard to be too glum, with my family in attendance as a slideshow of my favorite wilderness places ran on the screen behind me and I muttered on about: deliberately misunderstanding philosophy as a fictive strategy; how even in a Terence Malik film about the New World, the lack of biodiversity in the backdrop is a kind of lie we tell ourselves ( it was always this way, except it wasn't); and suggested mash-ups of Girls and The Walking Dead as a way to bring some frisson of the shock of the new. My grandson drew me as a bearded smudge and my audience as cats. Later, back at our daughter's place, he surprised us with the smiling piles of plastic skulls he'd arranged for us, promptly followed by marathon bouts of watching Adventure Time (which seems rather more on-point than I understood then).

In this context perhaps you can forgive me for wondering at times if the festival was in the least bit important or was instead impotent and useless, a death ride at the end of a death ride, all of us having arrived on death planes and going home on death planes, and in between trying to figure out a life based on the certain knowledge of impending doom. I say "wondering" because anyone invested in science, and thus in noncontroversial concepts like gravity and inertia, knows we're all just atoms anyway and forever about to return to atoms.

Yet any qualms I had about what could be accomplished, or at least articulated, dissolved when I explored the Sonic Acts book The Geologic Imagination. This fascinating tome represents an act of radical imagination, an attempt to wrench our thinking out of the same tired old tracks. There's heft to the book, and perhaps the juxtaposition of cutting edge content with solid, sturdy precision in the object reassures as well. Things that matter in the world have weight. Is that too human a reaction in these post-human times? I don't know. I don't care. But I do care about how the book and festival made me directly confront themes and issues that had previously come out organically in my fiction. When that happens, the way forward changes irrevocably.

2 - A Chronicle of Our Science-Fictional Present

Aral Sea

The cover and immediate interior of The Geologic Imagination are dominated by photos of the barren Aral Sea, destroyed by the Soviets and their successors for the sake of cotton crops - an ecosystem snuffed out by a fanatical devotion to ultraorthodox ideologies - and the photographs within are also alive with the ways in which human beings still try to grapple with our own destructiveness and understand the humiliations of our particular moment. Images from abandoned industrial zones in Russia might in another context scan as disaster porn, but here, foregrounded by the idea of viewing life at "Earth magnitude," are oddly melancholy yet redemptive. Visual elements like "Human Nonhuman," mostly blurred photos, require the full festival presentation to appreciate, but then you turn the page and something like Kurt Hentschlager's "Sublime Landscapes 3.0" confronts you. Fifteen pages of texture triptychs from his recent audiovisual installation "Measures" filter nature "through communication channels and media." This focus on environments in juxtaposed layers of strata is interesting even without the audio component and begins to hint at fresh ways of seeing the detail-work that goes into our world.

The essays and interviews in The Geologic Imagination are similarly provocative, smart, and uninclined to engage in melodrama. For example, rather than exist in the realm of the polemic or the abstract, Liam Young and Kate Davies traveled the world charting the path of the components that we use to create smart phones. Young and Davies, interviewed by BLDGBLOG's Tim Maughan, run the Unknown Fields Division, a "nomadic design studio" that explores "unreal and forgotten landscapes." That could be double-speak for something insufferable, but it's not. Their account of trekking "back up the global supply chain of consumer electronics" is not just fascinating and necessary but almost revelatory in its devotion to specific detail and understanding the consequences of that detail. (If you're reading this on a smart phone, don't worry - your minor discomfort will end... now.)

Essays like "Poetry and Bookkeeping" by Michael Nelland examine the role of the imagination in science, making by association a link between science and philosophy. The visual representation of a "tree of life" with Mankind at the top - sometimes mistakenly thought to have been endorsed by Charles Darwin - is juxtaposed with a "wheel of life" that shows human beings as just a creature between the common chimpanzee and the Norwegian rat, with no special significance. If the decentralization of humanity's place at the center of the universe begun by Copernicus had found its way to the wheel instead of the tree, would our cultures, our society, our science, look fundamentally different?

Tree of Life

Another essay, Timothy Morton's "Human Thought at Earth Magnitude" surprised me in the giddiness of its tone and shifting emphasis. The most interesting parts involve an argument that ascribes imagination and intent to the decision-making displayed by social insects and other animals. "It's been shown," Morton writes, "that ants, while climbing up little ladders, look around them rather than walk up automatically. They weigh options," which suggests they "anticipate and assess situations," and in other cases "rats experience regret" while "bees build mental maps to find their way home." Morton compares these findings to, for example, an architect's decision-making process, suggesting similarities. In putting forward this evidence, Morton asserts that too many scientists have gone into study of animal behavior already believing they knew the cause and effect: "Scientists are now beginning to figure out something we've known in the humanities and arts for ages and ages. Namely that you are entangled in what you are seeing."

Morton's argument is a way of saying that if you believe this kind of animal behavior is automatic, then what about manifestations of the human imagination? Are they perhaps being influenced by factors other than free will? This is an important thought experiment given how science is beginning to suggest that more of what we do than previously believed is reflexive rather than the result of conscious decision-making. Whether you believe humans have less free will than we previously thought or that animals have more, meeting in the middle brings us closer to accepting that we exist in close proximity to our fellow animals. And although it's possible to think of Morton's approach as substituting one type of human gaze for another, I prefer to believe that his ideas push back against animals' existence only as a reflection of our own making - in spiraling, multi-directional ways that include how animals perceive (in whatever way they perceive) our actions and the often non-logical systems we ourselves impose on animals due to our misunderstanding of them.

Alas, our world contains too many counter examples, on a daily basis, of casual cruelty and thoughtlessness codified as practical or reasonable behavior - or even an "empathy" regarding animals that twists the meaning of the word. Some of these unanalyzed meta-narratives exist at the LOLCats level, like the much-shared "cute" photograph of an otter imprisoned in a cage, with holes in the glass so you can shake hands. Mass media also flattens and simplifies animals into possessors of one human trait - for example, propagating the idea that sharks are dangerous solitary creatures, despite evidence of complex social systems and unique patterns of communication. Adding to the problem, the New Yorker blog reported recently that some dictionaries are being purged of words about the natural world in favor of words about the human-created world. (Acorn being replaced by motherboard is perhaps the saddest trade-off I can think of.)

Some dictionaries are being purged of words about the natural world in favor of words about the human-created world. (Acorn being replaced by motherboard is perhaps the saddest trade-off I can think of.)

Morton, then, challenges us to bring new complexity to bear from a particular angle, and, much as in the essays of John Gray, to question some of our most basic ideas. Given that most traditional systems and institutions created by the human imagination have contributed to ecological devastation and that even with some triumphs by conservationists we've been unable to stop the reduction of total animal biomass by almost 50 percent since 1970...don't we need a new way of seeing?

*

The concepts in Morton's essay verge on science fiction in terms of extrapolation, and throughout The Geologic Imagination science fiction is heavily referenced, although with an optimism and reverence that may, upon reflection, be unearned. The subject comes up again in Kodwo Eshun's interview entitled "Geologic Time, the Anthropocene and Earthquake Sensitives," in which he discusses the aftermath of the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. Eshun says that "our notion of the SF of the present is inspired by the work of J.G. Ballard," in the context of a "speculative fiction theory of the present." Ballard was a genius, and genius doesn't come around that often, but isn't this more or less an admission about contemporary SF? That it has either failed to take up the challenge of grappling with our modern condition or that interesting approaches have failed to register in the popular imagination? (Cyberpunk arguably represents a turning away from these themes.)

Science fiction is explicit, too, in contexts that you might not expect - for example, in the Center for Land Use Interpretation's "Terminal Atomic: Technographic Mounds," which features photographs from the air of underground catacombs built to store nuclear waste, described in the accompanying text as "uncanny monuments." These are rarely seen images for most people, especially from this perspective, and have the appearance of alien outcroppings, of alien beachheads on terrestrial soil. Which of course they are, since we have become alien to ourselves and continue to render natural settings unfamiliar by imposing a context that is uncanny at its core. The true alien quality of these uncanny monuments is that they, for a moment, bring to light all of the uncanny things that surround us daily, rendered invisible to us because we have made them mundane and overly familiar.

In all ways, then, the content, focused in part on "dark ecologies," should bring home to readers those specific facts, experiences, and ideas that might allow us to dream better, to create a world that has less of us in it, and more of something else.

3 - "Hyperobjects," Global Warming, and the Invading Presence

In examining The Geologic Imagination, I haven't brought up one important subject, in part because it requires a fair amount of unpacking. A concept that lurks behind almost everything in The Geologic Imagination is the idea of "hyperobjects," a term that Timothy Morton created and explored in his recent book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World. Morton's term is a way of using a word as an anchor for something that would be otherwise hard to picture in its entirety. For example, global warming can be considered as a hyperobject. Why? Because per Morton's definition a hyperobject is something viscous (they stick - to your mind, to the environment) and nonlocal (local versions are manifestations or hauntings from afar). Hyperobjects have a unique temporality that renders them invisible to human beings for stretches of time and they exhibit effects through the interrelationship of objects that may not seem to be connected at first.

Even with just this bare context given, I hope it's clear why the term is of use. Because a hyperobject is everywhere and nowhere - cannot really be held in one place by the human brain - reaction to it by the human world is often inefficient or wrong or even directly antithetical to the stated objective. For one thing, we are unable to hold in our minds the necessary number of variables and the connections between those variables; thus immobilized, sometimes also misled by disinformation, we rationalize or compartmentalize. In a sense, the enormity of the situation renders us irrational, could also be said to act as an invading agent or alien presence in our thoughts that destroys the impulse toward necessary autonomous action.

"Carbon Capture," a recent essay by Jonathan Franzen in The New Yorker, exemplifies this condition of being contaminated or undermined by a hyperobject. In brief, Franzen suggests that too great a focus on the fight against global warming threatens biodiversity in the short term by making conservation efforts of secondary importance. The essay contains a fair number of flaws, rightly pointed out by the Audubon Society and in David Robert's rebuttal over at Grist. I empathize with the outrage of scientists and naturalists who are doing hard work, in the face of powerful special interests and don't need an ally who discounts their efforts. But Roberts provides a wider context: "Jonathan Franzen is confused about climate change, but then, lots of people are," which drives home the point that hyperobjects deceive us.

Yet, in the spirit of Roberts' call for "better storytelling" about the slow apocalypse, I also have to note that in isolation - extricated from the faulty supporting evidence - some of Franzen's ideas seem reasonable in a certain context. If you don't accept the premise that the Earth's biosphere is now doomed, then I guess Franzen seems a bit deranged, albeit along with a number of climate scientists. But if you do accept the premise, one of the most ethical acts individuals can perform is to try to preserve every last bit of biodiversity for the present moment. In addition, although Franzen may create a false opposition between capping emissions and conserving wildlife and habitats, it seems not unreasonable in the era of Koch & Co. to guard against the possibility of cynical elements creating the appearance of such an either/or for their own short-term material gain. Franzen may also have read Rebecca Solnit's editorial in the New York Times that in certain paragraphs seems to pit conservation against global warming, although that isn't the ultimate message. (If you hate Franzen on principle, your discomfort at my partial defense ends...now.)

If you don't accept the premise that the Earth's biosphere is now doomed, then I guess Franzen seems a bit deranged, albeit along with a number of climate scientists.

It's not as if there aren't odd ideas amongst members of the very core of the conservation movement, either. As Brandon Kein writes about in "Earth is Not a Garden," some environmentalists are capitulating to what amounts to end-stage Capitalism with a bizarre form of corporate sponsorship of gentrified "nature." Further confusion occurs when considering books like Elizabeth Kolbert's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction juxtaposed with articles that seem to refute parts of her text, like " Rethinking Extinction" by Stewart Brand. Meanwhile, the Dark Mountain not-romanticists who advocate a pre-industrial human footprint are probably fuming at Solnit's Harper's essay " The War of the World," which suggests that if we had just kept to pre-World War II technology and population levels, global warming wouldn't be an issue. Is that true? I'm sure most of us hope so. Still others ask " Should We Be Suspicious of the Anthropocene," making assertions that don't match my impressions of the ways scientists and philosophers used the term at the Sonic Acts festival.

To be honest, such conflicting storylines can freeze me and, yes, confuse me. The flurry of points of view also brings to mind an interview in the Geologic Imagination with Dipesh Chakrabarty in which Chakrabarty grapples with the disconnect between "the issue of injustice between human beings" and the issue of "the environment and the collective human footprint." Chakrabarty suggests that neo Marxism, like Humanism before it, has failed to understand that the well-being of the planet, and thus humanity, depends on so much that is not human or connected to human ideology. A global approach that integrates earth systems science and evolutionary thinking with thinking about Capitalism and postcolonial studies is still in its infancy.

Paralysis, then, can occur due to competing or insufficiently interwoven ideological stances. Beyond that, the very real senseless slaughter we impose upon animals and the myriad ways in which we destroy ecosystems without understanding the complexity of what's been lost also creates stasis because it becomes so brutal and visceral that it's unbearable to think about.

Can "hyperobjects" help unfreeze us from all of this? Usually, I feel writers should be wary of pat terms, should interrogate and push back against them. The easier it is to transform a label into a marketing category, the more useless it tends to be. But I find "hyperobjects" interesting in part because I doubt there will ever be a "Hyperobjects" category in the bookstore - and for this reason I think it's worth exploring. This is not true of, for example, terms like "Cli fi" or "Eco-fabulism," which strike me as potentially compromised, even if many who enact the ritual of enshrining these categories seem to think that the Will will follow the name, or that, talismanlike, the enshrining of the word means the war on the War on Ecology will be won. In fact, the terminology as enshrinement usually just shortens the time before the enshrined takes its slotted space on the shelf in the Wal-Mart of Ideas: identified, commodified, ritualized, and digested like a capsule that makes us feel better for a short while but turns out to be a placebo.

A hyperobject so carefully defined, catalogued, stacked, and numbered is either messing with you or not a hyperobject at all, but a human being in a hyperobject costume trying to sell you a term of art.

4 - Why Fiction?

Because of both an explicit and implied complexity, The Geologic Imagination is a humbling affair for a fiction writer to read. It suggests ever more strongly that what you do is irrelevant, perhaps even counter-productive. Even in leafing through the pocket program guide for the festival, the thumbnail panel descriptions - for example, fresh perspectives on both light pollution and noise levels in the human era - suggest fascinating entry points to fictional narratives, few of which I've come across in my reading. It is impossible after this perusal not to conclude that fiction is languishing behind other disciplines in grappling with these issues. Yet, the entire time I'm writing this the hyperobject of global warming looms over me and shines through me and is all places and in all ways is shining out and looming over. How can it not be in the subtext of much of what we write?

Reading The Geologic Imagination, too, certain kinds of escapism or simplifications in near-future fiction begin to seem morally, ethically wrong. This thought, like the trickle and gush of oil from the BP Gulf Oil Spill, infiltrates your head and once an aspect of a hyperobject is in your head, once you are aware of it, even as a black dot at the corner of vision, fast approaching, you cannot get it out. Speck. Dot. Death Star. Well. Tunnel. Tower. The manifestation does not matter.

BP Oil Spill

In theory, the near-future mid- or post-apocalyptic scenario, even in the context of commercial fiction plots (or perhaps especially, as these are efficient and familiar delivery systems), should still allow for extrapolation and exploration of Morton's "Human Thought at Earth Magnitude." But few of these novels really deal with the issue of ecological devastation, using a magician's sleight of hand to make you think you are experiencing one thing when you are actually experiencing something else - i.e., a post-apocalyptic novel rather than nostalgia. There's a headache after or a kind of rush of disconnect, that the world you live in seems substantially less nice than the world you just read about thirty years hence. Ironically, this kind of fiction still becomes agitprop on behalf of the hyperobject, because what we are allowed to forget we only remember more vividly after putting down a Nostalgia Book.

Given our modern predicament, readers may soon reject myths that aggregate as they do in many near-future novels as wistfulness for car commercials, for Starbucks lattes, or for a thousand trifling conveniences. On the other hand - suspended in this slow apocalypse as we are, neither raw nor fully cooked - we may soon not accept these things in novels set in the present-day, either. We may begin to see novels of the mundane and modern that seem like they could be written thirty years ago, give or take a smart phone or two, as symptomatic of a failure. The only form of nostalgia not seen as grotesque may be a yearning for that moment in time before we had set upon a course that would ultimately require radical change to ensure human survival or the survival of the planetary biosphere. Who, sane, ethical, would wish for a time like ours of unrelenting animal carnage, for example? For the dead wreckage of our systems being sold to us as the height of technological evolution?

We may begin to see novels of the mundane and modern that seem like they could be written thirty years ago, give or take a smart phone or two, as symptomatic of a failure.

Another question I ask myself is this one: If sharp, intelligent fiction from the 1960s and 1970s by Ballard, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Brunner, and even T. J. Bass ( Godwhale) did not create sustained change then why should we think our fictional efforts now will result in a different effect? I don't have an answer, but perhaps it is because the opportunity remains so open. Only a handful of recent writers, like Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson, have made any real impact in this area, in terms of the ideas behind their novels pushing into the public awareness.

A number of what ifs come to mind that seem not to have entered the popular consciousness, but foremost among them is a radical reinvention, at the subatomic level, of how we position animals in our fiction. Animals still exist as inert objects, aspects of setting, in much of our fiction, or exist only in what is projected onto them personality-wise by us. They are in a sense, lost narratives, and lost lives or minds - in a context in which even a simple broach on a bedroom mantel can contain an entire series of stories both in real-life and fiction.

For living creatures to be less animate than the inanimate speaks to lapsed chances for interconnectivity, and a rebuke to the idea that we house a particularly deep imagination. Somehow we need to be humble enough to finally admit to the true complexity of and importance of animal life - not just some anthropomorphic and patronizing sympathy - and in the process continue the necessary step of de-centralizing the human experience within a universe that clearly sees us as simple atoms like everything else.

Portrayals of a thousand, a hundred thousand animals, in prior novels and stories wait like sleeper cells to be activated by new understandings of animal intelligence and behavior, the erosion of our human gaze, our hopeful new awareness of the truth of things and the value of minds not like our own. If that time ever comes, the ghosts of living things will stare back at us from the page, will rise up to destabilize both our fictional and real-life narratives. Because they were always this way despite our fatal lack of recognition.

If that time ever comes, the ghosts of living things will stare back at us from the page, will rise up to destabilize both our fictional and real-life narratives. Because they were always this way despite our fatal lack of recognition.

*

A true hyperobject for a fiction writer, then, might manifest as both all-encompassing metaphor that helps break through received ways of perceiving the world and also a localized phenomenon at the sentence level - both literal and figurative, here and there. Engaging with the concept could become an important jumping off point for storytellers wishing to engage with the slow apocalypse. This perspective even provides a very different point of view on basic elements of fiction, like how writers should think about their characters - from motivation through to ideas of effect and agency. The major attribute of human beings who come into contact with a hyperobject is ineffectiveness, according to Morton. How do we more effectively convey ineffectiveness?

And if we must talk about categories, is science fiction up to this challenge or is mainstream realism better suited? At this point, with a science-fictional reality impinging on our day-to-day, science fiction doesn't have a lock on prediction or on conveying an experience of the future, which means any fiction writer can find an entry-point. Certain strands of lauded mainstream literary fiction have less of an issue with "loose ends" and tend to generate plot through close observation of characters, an approach that may be more suitable to capturing this moment and this moment, and the next. I think of novels like Submergence by J. M. Ledgard, which contains more science-fictional ideas per page than many actual science-fiction novels - or Wallcreeper by Nell Zink, which does a great job of showing us ecological efforts at the tactical, neighborhood level, along with the attendant human folly. And what does it tell us that the most interesting fictional take on our future in 2014 came in the form of a fiction pretending to be nonfiction, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway's The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future? (Although even in that context, the authors have to resort to a random act of luck so that their narrator isn't actually a future ghost rather than a future survivor.)

To extrapolate further, is poetry perhaps even more aligned to what I've been reading in philosophy and science? Perhaps, as suggested by Nelland's "Poetry and Bookkeeping" essay, poetry is also more attuned to the subtlety required to meet the challenge of reflecting, refracting, and projecting - internalizing - the necessary sedimentary layers while still creating art not agitprop or didactic sermon? If ordinary extrapolation by definition is possessed of a very human logic, is it too limiting as a method of exploration? What simplifications are useful and which are harmful? Does dependable old logic get it wrong? Does it conflate the wrong things, put into contact too small a set of variables? Want the wrong things. Empower the wrong things. Place the wrong actors in the wrong context.

I don't know the answers, and, unlike some, I am not ever certain enough or rigid enough or authoritarian enough in my thinking to suggest all writers need to grapple with these issues. I also know that some questions fiction writers ask are always more useful if they remain as questions, without definitive answers. I just believe that the questions should be asked more often and that, despite my own failings, I have irrevocably turned toward this particular examination of the geologic imagination.
Many thanks to Matthew Cheney, Eleanor Gold, Ramez Naam, G. Eric Schaller, Cat Sparks, and Ann VanderMeer for conversations and emails about these topics, which helped clarify elements of this essay in rough draft form. Many thanks as well for insightful edits by Lincoln Michel and Halimah Marcus. Any mistakes, however, are my own. Much of this text is also part of a book in progress.

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The Slow Apocalypse and Fiction - Electric Literature

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1 - Descending into the Substrata The Sonic Acts Geologic Imagination Festival (Amsterdam, February 26 - March 2) as I experienced it was less festival than upbeat funeral march conducted in bright light, set to a soundtrack of experimental music, and festooned with colorful Power Point graphics like ornaments on a post-apocalyptic Christmas tree.