My thoughts on climate change are riddled with contradictions.
When I experience a heat wave or a month of smoke, I am rent by panic and fear that this is all the future holds.
Then the crisis recedes and I return to my life, eating dinner out in the sun and hiking in the woods that did not burn down.
When I read a new study about how far we have gone down a path we should not be walking, I spiral, unable to focus on any book I read, unable to hold a conversation about anything else.
And then the terror abates and I sit down at my desk to work, chipping away at the problem in my own tiny way.
At its worst, I feel all of this at once: my mind is rife with fear and also determination, the middle-of-a-marathon feeling that the finish line will never come but also that the next step forward is so very doable I’d be a fool to give up now.
They never feel like enough, as if I need to feel the pain in order to feel like I’m making a difference.
I’ve long done the easy things: riding a bike or driving an electric car if I need a vehicle; paying extra for renewable energy; eating a plant-based diet; avoiding consumerist hobbies. Or the things that, I should say, are easy for me, as a person with enough money to make these choices. But they never feel like enough, as if I need to feel the pain in order to feel like I’m making a difference.
Sometimes, self care feels like self-indulgence, but still I light candles because they comfort me, even if their flame emits carbon. I berate myself for wasting calories on a workout when the correct thing to do would be to make my needs as few as possible, but still I run because I need the endorphins to face the day.
In 2020, I took a week off my job to volunteer for the election because it felt like four more wasted years would quite literally doom the planet. Then I quit my job and got a new one at a climate startup because it felt like forty hours a week were too many to devote to anything else.
I believed these changes would make me feel better. But I should have known that making myself feel better is not the point.
I believe, now that I have reflected upon this sufficiently, that the predominant emotion I feel is not fear or even anger but grief. I mourn the world I grew up aiming for, imagining. I feel sour and twisted and sad. But grief is paralyzing, and we cannot afford to hold still.
COP26 is wrapping up now. It brought both triumphs and tragedies. We will never do enough.
We have always known that.
Each of us cannot make a difference, but we still have to try, because eight billion drops in the bucket would topple over the system and pour the whole thing out.
But we are doing something. Each of us cannot make a difference, but we still have to try, because eight billion drops in the bucket would topple over the system and pour the whole thing out.
How do we hold both truths in mind at the same time? We are powerless. We are the only ones with any power.
I confess that I don’t know how to reconcile the depths of my own impotence, the extremity of my distance from a position where I can solve anything of note, with the knowledge that I have no choice but to try. Somehow, we have to decide that whatever we are doing is enough so that we can sleep at night, and then wake up the next day and decide that we can do far more. And we have to do that every single day for the rest of our lives.
I can’t say that I feel okay about climate change. I can’t say that I don’t dread the future just as much as I long to see it. But I do long to see it: I crave the day when I wake up, at last, to good news.
This was the first COP that didn’t feel like a waste of time. Intellectually, I know that none of them have been useless, that each of the previous toothless accords and feel-good conversations have brought us here, to a world where the business-as-usual projection is less bad than it was before (2.7 degrees C, down from 4.5 degrees C), where 70% of Americans are concerned about the climate, where climate tech companies are raising record amounts of money.
Optimism does not come easy to me. It feels like a lie, like a deception, like imagination instead of prediction, and I do not want to be this way. When projecting forward, the easiest thing to see is the worst: total collapse. But we are not going to fail, because we cannot. I have to tell myself this, even if I don’t quite believe it.
In truth, I don’t know how to feel hope. I’m not even sure what it feels like. But even though I don’t think the future will be as good as I wish, I am starting to feel like they might be better than I fear.