For many people I know, the climate crisis looms large and terrifying. You don’t have to be a scientist to have a front-row seat to the disconcerting news unfurling daily.
Even as someone with limited scope on social media platforms (on purpose), I nevertheless feel an urgency in these moments, a call to stop, and see and care.
It’s not that we don’t care. To the contrary, “climate anxiety” is on the rise, especially in younger generations.
But my personal hypothesis is that caring is more costly than we can wrap our heads around. Caring illuminates the cavernous gap between our consumption and our planet’s hope, and we simply don’t know how to balance the checkbook of our values and our actions. This is not all on us of course. We are strapped to extractive and consumptive engines, complicit with them in the actions that have become alarmingly mundane to our existence. But the incongruence with what is and what should be, and our felt powerlessness to reconcile the gap, breed despair and dissociation.
Yet Katherine HayHoe‘s words haunt me: “There’s little functional difference between dismissives who reject climate change and doomers who decide we can’t fix it.”
Environmentally destructive behaviors are woven into our nostalgia, our patterns of daily life and community, the meals we eat three times a day, the clothes we put on our backs. To dare to be different is not only socially alienating but also potentially self-limiting. To prioritize the planet is to deprioritize the convenience that has authored the infrastructure of our lives. And even if we are consciously aware of it, we still don’t know what to do about it.
Limiting human impact on the planet is rarely a discrete or binary endeavor. The intersection of food supply, water use, pollution, energy, and waste can rarely accurately be captured in a sound bite or one-size-fits-all prescription. Except perhaps this: consume less.
So in addition to trying to balance these equations in my own life, I’m also here with my words. They may not be much, but they are part of my craft. I struggle to know how to bring all of myself to my work sometimes. The science world is not interested in feelings, and thoughts, and philosophies. It is interested in data and facts. (And much of the time, I am too.) Furthermore, I am not a climate scientist, I am in immunologist, global health worker and writer. But climate touches all of us in all of our spheres.
So if I have four clumsy words to string together and that’s the best that I can do, I still want to know that they reflected what I thought true and necessary in the world. What I cared about.
And I very deeply care about our planet.
About the weather patterns that have changed in my lifetime.
About the oceans and rivers laced with plastics, industrial pollutants, fertilizers, and trash – the detritus of human society.
I care about the loss of biodiversity in our forests and in our soils.
I care about food security and unsustainable farming practices.
I care about the fate of mountains and other wild spaces, those sacred places that have always cupped my soul in their hands.
And I care about the real human people made destitute by all of this.
I also believe that something – anything – is better than nothing. And that the most powerful somethings will take hard honest reflection and tenacious courage.
Will you care with me?
Best,
CC
Christy Clutter, PhD 