I.
Irony
An assassin is waiting around the next corner. Your friend, out in front of you, is about to turn that corner. They are too far away to hear you shouting. What will you do?
The answer should be obvious: try your best anyway. Run towards them. Scream. Look for some other, cleverer way to be noticed. Every second you spend would have a desperate and visceral value. Every moment would shine like gold. It would glisten off of a dual future (only a minute from now) where your friend is either dead (for all future minutes) or still alive.
This is dramatic irony in the form most familiar to cinema and to storytelling. It is easy to grasp; it involves events we can witness playing out in real-time. There is a clear tension between inner urgency (yours) and outer passivity (your friend’s), and the solution – to do as much as possible to transfer that urgency from the inner out, even if you’re bound to fail – is unproblematic.
Unfortunately, the dramatic irony we experience regarding the climate (knowing what’s happening, being unable to stop it) cannot easily be equated to examples like this. It all feels too diffuse, too complex.
But just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean it can’t be tried. Adam McKay certainly tries in his most recent film Don’t Look Up (released by Netflix on Christmas Eve, 2021). But even McKay must resort to a relatively short time-scale to make his urgency feel urgent to us viewers (in this case, 6 months and 14 days before an earth-destroying comet makes impact). What do we do – or rather, how does it feel – when an emergency is not a singular event at a specific point in time, but a gradually mounting death-heap of tragedies that will, in the end, have the same result?
First, a bit about Don’t Look Up, as the film will submerge and re-emerge a few times throughout this essay. The premise: an enormous meteor is hurtling towards Earth and, if it makes impact, will trigger a planetary extinction event. One astronomer (good ol’ Leo DiCaprio) and his PhD student (Jennifer Lawrence) attempt to sound the alarm but the world does not respond with urgency. The media makes it all too lighthearted, the internet makes memes, and those in power make big empty promises (after a period of denial and before a negation of those promises for greed).
The film is an on-the-nose allegory for our collective response to the climate crisis, and it has been met with a mixed critical reception due to its perceived lack of subtlety (and abundance of rage). Some can only see it as an exaggerated caricature of the climate crisis, perhaps because societal collapse and “the end of life as we know it” have still (remarkably) not reached public ears as clearly predictable outcomes of our emergency. A tweet by the self-described ‘ecofuturist’ Alex Steffen sums this up well: "3/4 of the critic’s responses seem like hot takes written by jaded culture workers from an alternate universe in which the planet Earth was not in the early days of its most catastrophic upheaval in 100,000s or even millions of years."
While I originally planned to include in this piece more thoughts on how these critics miss the point, I soon discovered an article by Nathan J. Robinson, who has already done this work (and well). But I will say this: it is odd to judge, blinkered, the quality of a film like this alone, as if we could stand ignorant of where it is pointing us (and of where, in us, it is pointing). It’s to point back at the pointer’s finger and say, “They should really clean under their nails.”
The truth is, however good of a film Don’t Look Up might be, I only bring it here as a way to highlight its resonance: it speaks to a real experience many of us have. No wonder the scientists love it.
I want to speak from and to that experience, and to ask: for those of you who hear the alarm, who know what it means when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change announces a Code Red, who can picture in your minds and even feel on your skin the heat-death of a global 6.0°C rise, who are facing the momentum of a world-ending event as vividly and somberly as you would, on a cold, clear night, look up at the trail of a space-rock hours from destroying your home… How are you doing? And isn’t this all quite strange?
The topics of climate grief, climate anxiety, climate despair, and the slew of other contemporary flavors of despondence and mourning are not new. They are also not topics that will be going anywhere anytime soon. But I want to focus on just one small element, one particular aspect inherent in the experience of those who are aware of (and feel) this past, ongoing, and impending knot of tragedies we call the climate crisis: the phenomenon of being alone in urgency.
This is a dramatic and ironic place to be, right? It’s one of the most common roles in drama: the Cassandra, the mistrusted soothsayer, the character who knows the tragedy to come yet cannot communicate it to others. Chicken Little shouting “the sky is falling!” and being accused of all sorts of dishonesty and insanity until it actually does. How strange to feel the contours of such an old mythological position in one’s own self. In so many of us. But even this, even this role and its internal tensions and dissonances, its small tragedies within the larger tragedy, is too large a topic here. Let’s narrow further still.
There is a unique nuance to the sensation of being a carrier for this invisible urgency, and I think it’s there because this emergency, this particular one, happens to be so goddamn slow.
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This element of the climate crisis (its abstraction, distance, and slowness) is a frequent topic of discussion within environmental circles. It is often framed like this: how do we get people to care about something without a clear and concrete object? Without a (metaphorical) face? The philosopher Timothy Morton describes the climate crisis as a hyperobject, something so big, so all-encompassing, that it’s impossible to take in or comprehend at once. (Incidentally, the production company that made Don’t Look Up is named Hyperobject Industries – a clear inspiration, I would guess).
But remember: here, we are focusing on those of us who already do care. Who already feel this. Who have no issue tapping into the grief, the death, the horror happening off-screen. Who have read The Sixth Extinction and The Uninhabitable Earth parallel to McKay. Who view the ridiculous events of films like Don’t Look Up, along with the incompetence of those in power, not as absurd but as all too likely. How does this slowness impact the irony? How does it affect the state of our internal urgency?
Strangely, I should say. Unpredictably. In fits and starts.
In some moments, the desire to transmute leaden melancholy into the shining gold of immediate, confident action is overwhelming. It’s in these moments I wish I had a tree to tie myself to - the ecological equivalent of a friend to warn of a lurking assassin. And for those out there tying themselves to trees (in all ways this can be interpreted – who have found a particular patch, a particular purpose with tangible goals and criteria for success) good on you. I both admire and envy the decisiveness, drive, and certainty required to funnel a life into something so fine. Incidentally - as I’ll get to more below - I also think local direct action from many sources at once represents the most hope we have for tackling this wicked problem.
For myself, though? I can’t avoid this bizarre grappling with hyperobjects. Without ever really choosing, I’ve ended up with the Whole Goddamn Mess as my dragon. Perhaps I’ve flown away from the concrete too readily. I always tend to drift up, up, to try to take in the whole picture. But there is no picture here. There’s paint off the canvas, on the walls, on the floor, in every room of the house.
I’m getting a bit lost in my metaphors. But the point is this: even if, in either case, no one listens to Cassandra and disaster comes, Cassandra is most fulfilled when she knows what she has to do (alright, I’m not sure that tracks with the Iliad – but bear with me). That clarity is hard when we’re not dealing with a comet or a hitman, but are instead enmeshed in a devil’s web of hundreds of simultaneous interconnected genocides and ecocides with efforts to obfuscate the reality of any.
Sure, we all know things we could do; specific actions that might make a small difference. We could (and should) vote, call our senators, sign petitions, march in numbers, make our voices heard.
But these actions feel viscerally at odds with that inner urgency. They feel almost nauseatingly insufficient: “Yes, hello sir. You know that comet hurtling towards Earth that will destroy life as we know it? Yes, well between my groceries and walking my dog, I just wanted to express my wish that it would be nice if, perhaps, this issue could be lifted from the sixth to the fifth priority on your political platform? Thank you, and have a good day!”
On the other hand, those more specific, short-term, and visibly urgent projects (cleaning beaches, protecting rainforests, de-polluting waterways) are real and important, but require leaps into lives many of us feel unprepared or unable to make. And after all, viewed from a utilitarian lens (easy to slip into in moments of despondence) even these clearly impactful acts become only a small drop of unpolluted water in a river with a line open to the city’s sewage. Or a chip a meter wide and deep from the side of the comet mid-flight.
There is, however, one climate action I want to put forward that I believe to be truly and universally effective. An action that is concrete and accessible, that can not only make a real difference for the more-than-human world but can also act as a salve for our unique subjective dissonance and irony. This action is familiar to all of us, is deeply human, and is deeply real, even if - like the earth under our feet - we almost always take it for granted.
II.
Love
No, I’m not being facetious. No, I haven’t gone suddenly sentimental, or lost sight of the severity of the problem (you’ve only known me for a few paragraphs, but do I really seem like someone who would lose sight of the severity of the problem?). I understand: “love” feels like a non-answer meant to put a neat bow on this depressing analysis so I can allow myself to end it on an uplifting note.
But it’s not. I promise you, it’s not. Just hear me out.
At the end of Don’t Look Up, all of our main cast (the good ones, anyway) eat a final meal together. The US’s half-hearted, short-sighted attempt to curtail the disaster in an economically lucrative way (a possible reference to the insanity of geoengineering, and a definite subversion of techno-jubilant disaster movies from the ‘90s and early ‘00s) has predictably failed and impact is imminent. Though no one discusses the comet, this is not a last-minute denial. Everyone is aware of what is about to happen.
Still, the authentic response to this impending disaster for Leo, Jen and crew is to simply - simply, that word’s important, and more radical than you’d think in a time of overwhelming complexity - share a meal in love and gratitude.
I’ll get the depressing part out of the way first: one reason love is so important is the same reason it’s important to hold someone as they’re dying. Dying well – dying held – is better than dying alone, both for the dead and for whoever is left behind. We intuitively know this, so why would it not be true of the planet? Why would it not be true of the trees in your neighborhood falling victim to an invasive beetle, or the currents in the increasingly polluted river outside your back door? Love what is around you so we all move more gracefully into oncoming tragedy. Be like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who, addressing the “Darkening Ground,” speaks his desire “to love the things / as no one has thought to love them / until they are worthy of you and real.”
Do this by paying attention. Take walks, admire leaf, bark, bird. Breathe in the sky. Feel all there is to feel – not just the grief, but the joy, the memories (in hospice, there are often joyful celebrations of old memories – even lots of laughing). You might not make it to your friend before their murder, but you have a good chance of making it in time to hear the whisper of their final words or to meet their final gaze.
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Are you still here? Good, because here’s the less depressing part: love is the first step to caring and, most importantly, doing.
Love (a word Erich Fromm defines as “the passionate affirmation of another”) changes a relationship. It changes what actions and behaviors are easy and hard. It’s hard to dedicate a year of your life to a cause when it comes at the cost of so much that you value – but if it’s for someone you truly love? Suddenly, it becomes hard not to.
Remember when I said those concrete actions (riverkeeping, protesting, rewilding) were just drops in the bucket, that they are ultimately temporary in the face of the wicked problem of the climate crisis?
Well, when I said that, I was talking to a relatively loveless you. I was talking to you before you go out and do this – before you learn to love. Once you do, you’ll realize that that’s bullshit. As you should. Your love won’t care about the ends nearly as much as the means, the act itself, and the absolute need to do all you can. Even in less tangible work - work like writing articles and grappling with hyperobjects - you can invoke that love, staying grounded in it and guided by it.
Love is a prime mover (in some faiths, the prime mover). Instrumentalize your love so you can take real action. If you have a problem with that – if love seems to you too precious, too sacred on its own to become the object of a word like “instrumentalize” – go back and love more; you’ll get over it. You won’t care about minor differences, you won’t care what words anyone uses, you won’t care about dramatic irony or quiet urgency or the inner, whirring tension of a distant impending crisis. Instead, you’ll just care. Inner decision, inner knowing, and a deep trust in what drives you has the power to restore the shine of each moment.
To add a further layer to the importance of love: living in sincere community is, simply put, far more rewarding and honest to who we are than living in detached ironic isolation and panic. Love is connection and connection is community. Connection is also life. So when I say this, I mean it, and it’s true: When in love with the world it is impossible to be alone.
The river, the trees, the soil, other hurting people… the more time you spend with each, the more attention you give to each, and the more you love each, the less alone in all this you will feel. It is from this place that others can be invited. That hearts may even change.
Recall that taking action without love is difficult and perhaps insincere. Forcing others into action without first inviting them into love is, as a result, ineffective and (more often than not) obnoxious. Imagine if I had said to you “If you don’t spend every waking moment campaigning to save the Amazon then you are a terrible person. You’re part of the problem, and your personal struggles and obstacles are irrelevant.”
This is, I think, an inner voice some of us have when we think of environmental action and alarmism. This is a voice we implicitly trust as a moral authority, and thus the voice we hide from in relentless distractions and rebellious nihilism. It’s the voice critics (often mistakenly) project onto vegans, or Greenpeace, or whoever, with Adam McKay being another easy target.
But that’s why I’m not saying this – it wouldn’t work, and more than that, it isn’t true.
Campaigning to save the Amazon is not what you should be doing… at least not first. Learning to love is what you should be doing. That way, when you do head for the rainforest (or into your studio, or into your garden, or into your community hall), you mean it, you’re sure of it, and it’s easy.
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Now here’s the best part: learning how to love the world is also easy. It’s easier than you’d think. In fact, we are made for it, and the more we do the more we receive. It just takes practice, like stretching legs that have atrophied from injury to relearn how to walk.
But despite being easy, it is of critical importance. And not nearly enough of us are doing it.
I know I just mocked our judgmental Amazon advocate but, well, I do feel that way about love. Perhaps call this “tough love,”: you’d better learn to do it. Our flourishing, the manner of our flourishing, and the flourishing of countless nonhumans depend on each of us learning.
So how do you do it? If love is a skill, and if it’s an easy skill, how does one develop it?
My skeleton key to loving absolutely anything (a bold claim, I know, but it really is okay for this to be simple) is a second inconspicuous and underappreciated word, one I’ve used a few times already: attention.
Attention is miraculous on countless levels: For one, there is no world without it. No experience without it. No you without it. To “pay” attention (an odd phrase that diminishes attention to a mere resource rather than the fundamental ground of your existence) is to decide what is invited into your reality. Into your scope, your world. So: the more beings you invite - the more you witness, do not turn away from, but really witness - the more paths to love open before you. Watch that horrendously sad film with the albatross full of plastic (the one the director, maybe not so mysteriously, calls “a love story”) if you can stomach it. If you can’t, be kind to yourself; watch the birds outside. But just be there. For something. For someone.
Attention can also reveal the inexhaustible depth of what is around us. When you really attend to something - when you honestly look, smell, taste, hear, and feel it - that thing will never cease to reveal new parts of itself to you. That tree you pass each day and barely see, except to note that it’s there? Pay attention, now, and see the pale brown and white tones of the bark; the way the smooth paper layers feel under your fingers; the way the blue of the sky sits stark and biting against the forked cow-patterned fingers of this - you now know - sycamore.
The more honest your attention, the more your capacity for surprise. The more your capacity for surprise, the greater your openness to wonder. The more wondrous your world, the more full to the brim it will be with love.
So that’s a working strategy of mine, at least - but it’s just a start. There is so much more to say about how attention by its very structure creates bonds; how those bonds are the rope ladders to pull us out of isolation into community; how community is, itself, enough of an answer in its simplicity. And how we give other false, distracting names to our bone-deep ache for it.
But I’m sure you have your own ideas on how to love. Trust yourself more than me. You know your experiences. You know your life. Pay attention to that, at least; learn from yourself. And implement those ideas. After all, it is your friend about to turn the corner as much as mine.
But most importantly, whatever your course: practice. Practice often. Practice constantly, obsessively. Mold your heart to the shape of the things around you. Choose one thing at a time, or choose several, or choose many. Learn to love, then learn to love more fiercely and more deeply - then follow your love, like a beacon, as it moves swiftly and confidently towards action.
The best antidote to tense, immobilizing irony is sincerity. The prima materia of sincerity is love.