As I scrolled the newsfeeds during this last awful week, I had the faint hope—if that’s what you call it—that this might just finally be the moment: The cultural tipping point when people finally come to understand the severity of the climate crisis. The split screens of climate-fueled disaster promised to crack apart the complacency and manufactured confusion that for so long have been obstacles to addressing the climate crisis.
Everywhere you looked, there was wreckage. In New Orleans, a million or so people sweltered in the steamy Gulf heat without electricity after Hurricane Ida toppled powerlines throughout Louisiana. In New York and New Jersey, the fatal tail of the storm caused dozens of deaths after the rains came too fast to prepare for. Out West, wildfires tore through parched forests as the latest big one, with the Tolkien-perfect name Caldor, forced thousands of people to flee their homes. Maybe, together, these manmade catastrophes could be the decisive wake-up call for those who have tried to deny the science of climate change or else willfully looked away.
If you’re a veteran of the climate movement, you might’ve had this feeling before. Maybe you thought that the horrific autumn of 2017 would be the tipping point—when the Wine Country fires burned down parts of suburban Northern California, freakish Hurricane Harvey inundated Houston, and Hurricane Maria led to some 3,000 deaths in Puerto Rico. Maybe you thought the 2018 incineration of a place called Paradise would burst open public consciousness. Or the converging crises of 2020. Or the day when the San Francisco Bay Area awoke to a day without a dawn.
And if you’ve ever hoped for a breakthrough climate moment, then you likely also know the sense of loneliness that can come with being climate conscious—the penalty of ecological awareness and the burden of living in a world full of wounds, as Aldo Leopold wrote. With the evidence all around us of a world unraveling, it’s torturous to so often feel like a voice in the wilderness. To find oneself pleading with friends and relatives to understand what it really means for the glaciers to melt, for the Amazon to shift from rainforest to savannah, for the temperatures to keep rising for the next 30 years, and the seas along with them. To find oneself shouting—literally shouting, at the entrance of bank headquarters or in street marches or in front of the bulldozer’s maw—for the powers-that-be to preserve the planetary systems that undergird civilization.
The idea that people may finally wake up to the climate crisis may be, for now, a misplaced hope. What scant polling exists has found that even this summer’s serial disasters have “barely moved the need on climate concerns,” according to the public opinion researchers at Morning Consult. And still. It seems to me there’s a tremor in the cultural ether, a newfound sense of foreboding as the disasters pile onto one other. Among my friends and relatives, there seems to be a new recognition, even with those who long dodged conversations about climate change, that the droughts, fires, smoke, and floods are no longer isolated episodes, but instead permanent features of the era of climate chaos. At least according to anecdotes from therapists, climate anxiety is becoming more common, even though we may not talk about such anxiety as much as we should.
A society-wide wakeup call may be essential, but still insufficient, for dealing with our predicament. As Jeff Goodell wrote in Rolling Stone on Friday, “If this is what it means to ‘wake up’ to the risks of the climate crisis, then we truly are fucked.” A wakeup call will only be productive insofar as we are able to make some meaning out of this moment and transform any new climate consciousness into a fighting spirit.
It seems to me that—with the damage and destruction escalating and the casualties mounting—the key to that transformation lies in embracing climate grief and climate anger. Gauzy hope isn’t enough—it never really was. We need to get mad, and fight like hell.
“Don’t Mourn—Organize!” has long been a rallying cry among labor activists, a line inspired by the martyred union organizer and songwriter Joe Hill. That fighting spirit is just right, but in the 21st century we know how important it is to feel all the feels—including grief. As climate essayist Mary Annaise Heglar has written, “We’re all in the middle of one big, giant mourning process” and that, “given the sheer enormity of climate change,” this makes sense. Author Joanna Macy argues that the acceptance of mourning is a step toward what she calls “the great turning” as we transform grief into “active hope.”
Perhaps, then, the motto for climate activists should be, “First Mourn—Then Organize!”
Because there is so much to mourn. We should grieve for the 1,800 people who died in Hurricane Katrina, the 85 people killed in the Camp Fire, and the two-year-old toddler who drowned in a flooded New York City basement apartment just last week. We should mourn for the people made homeless by the fires. Mourn for the people driven from their homelands by climate-exacerbated drought and floods. Mourn, too, for the loss of simple pleasures—the summer days marred by smoke-filled skies and the winters that have turned too warm and snowless. Mourn the loss of sea stars, monarch butterflies, and polar bears.
Then, once you’ve wiped the tears away, get angry. Get good and pissed at the senselessness of this mess, at the fact that we might have avoided this fate had political leaders heeded the warnings of climate scientists 30 years ago. Know that this era of cascading catastrophes wasn’t inevitable—that some people in positions of power made it happen.
Mourn the loss of sea stars, monarch butterflies, and polar bears. Then, once you’ve wiped the tears away, get angry.
So let the righteous anger burn.
Get mad at how this epoch of chaos was abetted by an establishment media that went from credulous to confused and still somehow at this late hour (with notable exceptions) can’t muster a coherent connection between these disasters and human actions.
Get mad at an American political class split between scientific know-nothings and a putatively climate-conscious caucus that’s been disabled by the preening indecision of a pair of senators from West Virginia and Arizona—the former an impoverished resource colony left stranded by the delusions of the coal industry, the latter a desert mirage built on delusions of endless water.
Get mad, most of all, at the Carbon Barons at ExxonMobil and Shell and Chevron who, decades ago, knew perfectly well the dangers that were coming and who, in the reckless pursuit of profit, knit a web of deception and delay. Get outraged at the impunity.
Get mad, most of all, at the Carbon Barons at ExxonMobil and Shell and Chevron who, decades ago, knew perfectly well the dangers that were coming and who, in the reckless pursuit of profit, knit a web of deception and delay.
These are big feelings, and if you feel them deeply enough and long enough, you run the risk of going numb—or of succumbing to “amygdala hijacking,” in which the feeling brain cuts off the thinking brain. The trick, then, is to make these emotions productive, to take your grief and your anger and turn them into a wellspring of action for climate justice.
The coming months are likely to be among the most consequential ever in terms of climate action. Will the US Congress summon the courage to pass budget legislation that will make badly overdue investments to transition off of fossil fuels? Will global leaders meeting in Glasgow, Scotland for the latest round of international climate talks ratchet up their ambition to keep temperatures in check?
The answers lie, in part, with each of us. This is, truly, an all-hands-on-deck moment. Each of us has to do whatever we can, however we can, to move the levers of power.
So call and write to your senators and representatives—tell them about your grief and your anger and urge them to pass ambitious climate legislation. Ask your friends and family to do the same. Find the local and national groups in your city or town that are agitating against new pipelines, new oil terminals, new gas wells—and join them. Contact your local leaders and ask them to join the raft of state and city lawsuits against the oil and gas giants. Justice, after all, demands accountability, and climate justice won’t be fully met until the likes of Lee Raymond and Rex Tillerson are standing trial for crimes against humanity.
And as you take political action, make climate change personal to you. Do one small thing every day to reduce your energy use and your diet’s footprint, knowing that while individual lifestyle changes alone won’t be enough to “solve” climate change, they can still act as a kind of alloy that strengthens political activism. The work of walking more lightly on the planet can bind commitment to conviction.
Every moment counts. Every action matters. Everything you do can make a difference toward avoiding the worst-case climate scenarios. Let’s make sure this season of cascading catastrophes becomes a moment of clarity and commitment. Don’t turn away, and instead embrace your sadness and grief and make them a crucible of action.