I want you to panic and act as if the house was on fire
The Climate Strike in Boston today. It was a sweaty scene.
Pretty much as long as climate change has been in the realm of public dialogue, there’s been this oddly accepted wisdom that there are certain ways you should and should not talk about the issue. It basically boils down to don’t raise your voice, don’t be alarmist, don’t be a pessimist. Otherwise your message would be too depressing, too disturbing, and leave people without the necessary hope for constructive action.
Even worse, some warned, is politicizing climate change. The worst thing you could do was present it as a problem of people and power, intertwined with other issues that might come across as divisive like poverty, inequality, health care, or taxes. In fact, better to not even call it climate change. People respond much better in polling to ideas like energy independence or efficiency so maybe we can just sort of trick people into supporting climate action by way of euphemism.
Some of this wisdom came from well-intentioned academics and pollsters, doing their best to divine the tea leaves of why people were simply not engaging on the issue despite its growing urgency. But much of this fear of alarming or upsetting people comes from an intense aversion toward disruption as a path to change. There’s a certain theory of political change that the right way (or third way, if you will) is to find an appealing path most people in power will agree on. This was in part the theory that brought about Waxman-Markey in 2009, which did not go that great because people didn’t really give a shit about it.
Another theory is that periods of sweeping, rapid change are steeped in unrest. At first, most people react really badly to it. It makes us uncomfortable and can feel like everyone hates each other kind of like right now. But it also can jolt our norms and pull the culture into completely different realms of what’s possible. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler said. “But there are new suns.”
I have to wonder what people who have called for optimistic, measured responses to climate change think when they see a global event like today’s climate strike. Do they see millions of people in the streets across 150 countries and think, boy that’s really going to rub people the wrong way? Do they see signs made by 16-year-olds that read “This is a fucking crisis” and “I want to die of old age” and “Earth is in a state of emergency” and think about how poorly such messaging does in polling?
Because when I see that kind of thing up close—like the thousands of mostly young people who marched on the State House in Boston today—I think, Jesus we’ve been doing it totally wrong this whole time. And finally, gloriously, we are talking about climate change from the heart.
Another thing that was really striking about the climate strike (sorry I’m tired and don’t have that many words) is just how different it was compared to the countless marches and rallies I’ve been to over the years. Sometimes when you go to a thing, especially an environment thing, there’s this kind of gut response I get like oh it’s a bunch of these mf’ers again. This thing was very different. The activists have a different arsenal of funny songs and chants and dances. The mayor got one minute to speak and an 18 year old kid got like 15. Packs of actual children were running around unattended, like some kind of reverse Children of the Corn. There may have been the suburban white anarchist dudes there somewhere, but there were also hoodie-wearing black and brown teens pounding on drums spray painted with Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise logos. There were plenty of old people there like me but we all kind of had this look of like, holy shit, on our faces, at least I did. In other words, it felt weird and new in the best way.
One of my favorite little moments was this one older lady I was walking near toward the end and when people would chant like Fuck Charlie Baker or whatever, she would be like “no, no, no” scolding them. And one time some kids chanted something bad about cops and she said, hey those are people’s fathers and brothers and sisters. And this one teen said, “Yeah and they alllll suck.” Which I thought was pretty funny. Not the most strategic messaging I guess, and the teens were overall very chill, but the take home message being—that lady can no longer tell these young people the right thing to say. It’s not her show anymore.
Not anyone’s show really, and by that I mean not the environmental movement or liberals or the Sierra Club or very rational and concerned white people or communications professors or any particular interest group. Nobody gets to warn everyone to keep it down, don’t be alarmist, don’t upset people, and even if we did it wouldn’t work. We’ve lost control in the best way. That’s what change feels like.
Links
- Relevant to the day, American teens are frightened by climate change and 1 in 4 are turning that fear into action.
- A “full-blown crisis,” there are 29% fewer birds in the US and Canada than there were in 1970.
- In news about the color black, this chicken is entirely black its feathers, bones, organs, everything. Also, researchers made the “blackest black” even blacker than vantablack. It absorbs at least 99.995 percent of incoming light.
- “Making our first album with Ric Ocasek remains the most transformative and magical experience I’ve been lucky enough to have.” (h/t Swedlund)
- If you have been confused about what is going on with Jeremy Renner, Anne Helen Petersen is here to explain.
- An ode to Speckle.
Podcasts
That bird study is pretty brutal, and it made me think of this New Yorker Radio Hour episode with Elizabeth Kolbert, in which they were talking about a new report on biodiversity loss. She says:
The general trend line of biodiversity loss, it’s all just playing out according to plan, unfortunately. And it’s true that global GDP is larger than ever, and at the same time, species loss and the destruction of the natural environment, the natural world, is also greater than ever, and those two things are very intimately linked, and if you only pay attention to the GDP part you might say oh everything’s fine. But I think the point this report is really trying to make is that those lines are going to cross. People are still dependent on the natural world…these are biological and geochemical systems that we’re still dependent on for better or worse, and we are mucking with them in the most profound ways.
Watching
Years ago I saw a commercial for the American version of a miniseries called “The Slap,” and I thought to myself, my god that looks like the stupidest show ever made I will not watch it. If you google the slap one of the results is “Is The Slap a real TV show?” But I kept hearing good things about the original Australian version, which aired back in 2011. I’m halfway through and it is quite powerful and suspenseful in its own weird middle-class, middle-age way. I’m reading A Visit from the Goon Squad at the same time, also from 2011, and they are kind of thematically similar. Flawed people circling each other and the random interactions that shape all of their lives. Anyway, it’s a real adult drama and I guess now and then it’s nice to watch a show that is not about teenage witches or homicidal robots or my other bullshit.
Listening
I first came across A Tribe Called Red because they were referenced in Tommy Orange’s amazing novel There There. Here is a song of theirs, sorry if you don’t like electronic music go listen to some James Taylor grandpa.
That’s all for this round, sorry this one may be a little rough around the edges I wanted to crank something out about the strike. So if it turns out I am wrong about all of this I do not want to hear about it thank you.
Remember a lot of people work hard to make these actions possible so kick a little money their way why don’t you. And remember it is OK to panic a little.
Tate