3 lessons on climate from the journey so far

We’ve got a new episode of How To! out - this time on building trust quickly with coworkers. The expert is none other than Marlon Styles, the superintendent who featured in my Christian Science Monitor cover story on his ingenious way of squashing CRT and anti-masking BS in his Ohio town. Listen and tell us what you think! And please please write or call in with your own questions and we’ll get them answered on air. Send us a note at howto@slate.com or leave us a voicemail at 646-495-4001.

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A few weeks ago I shared that I was trying to “grow up” around climate change - figure out a way to be continually and meaningfully involved in climate action. I want to thank this generous, engaged community for the climate resources you sent my way. I compiled, organized, and made a list of them here. It’s an open google doc, so please share with whoever you think could benefit from it.

Louise, who is a writer, teacher, and a dear friend, reached out, and we had lunch together after I published the newsletter and talked about climate. She has spent much of her many years on earth (nearly 85!), taking care of it, studying it, interacting with it in intentional ways. The most quintessential version of Louise, for me, is watching her walking gracefully home from a little tending session in our community garden, the pockets of her baggy linen pants filled with some vegetable that she is going to cook for her own dinner that evening. She pauses in the courtyard, smiles beatifically at whatever scene is playing out there, and floats on to her studio apartment.

My biggest take-away from our lunch, not to mention witnessing Louise all these years (we’ve lived in community together for a decade), is this:

“Growing up” around climate is not solely an intellectual or political job, it’s an emotional one, too.

We have to slow down long enough to feel our fears, grief, and deep desires for a healthier planet. We have to notice what is happening in our bodies—our bones, our muscles, our hearts—and how this is connected to the environment. We have to gather with others, not just to take action, but also to participate in ritual that allows this emotion to become spoken, witnessed, and shared. Louise and I have plans to create such a ritual with our community in the new year.

I’m not going to lie—this notion of “climate grief” feels out of reach for me. I feel fear. How can I keep my family safe? Where should we live? What should we be doing to prepare for what might be coming? Is the earthquake go-bag underneath the stairs really enough preparation?

I feel guilt and shame. I can’t believe I’m only now taking this seriously. What is wrong with me? White economically privileged Westerners have been some of the most extractive people on earth with the least obvious consequences. I’m one of those. What’s wrong with us?

I feel overwhelm. Which information do I need to understand first and which sources are the most trustworthy and accessible? Which action has the most leverage? Not knowing where to start, it’s easy to let the instinct to learn and do more get buried underneath the busyness of my life.

I am a beginning student of grief—writ large. I have had lots of little griefs along the way, and a couple big ones, but only now am I experiencing the kind of loss so profound that it rearranges you. Maybe my inability to feel climate grief is related to that. Maybe feeling my deep, very personal grief will allow me to feel other kinds—climate included.

Here’s another big takeaway for me right now:

Climate work is intersectional work.

Louise helps me see that part of the work ahead is not to make a separate space for my climate study, feeling, or action, but to begin to see it and feel it and act on it anywhere and everywhere that I go. I’ve got good intersectional muscles from all my years of feminist writing and action; now it’s time to braid in a new thread of climate.

I felt this happening already! I was doing a podcast interview last week and trying to describe the kind of civic life that allows a city to beautifully support its public schools, and suddenly I realized it was a perfect parallel to erosion. When there isn’t enough water and then a deluge, our soil can’t absorb it and you get dangerous conditions. The same is true in our educational ecosystems—when the civic soil isn’t nurtured, then manipulative forces can come in and shout CRT! and create a flash flood of fear. It’s the subtle, ongoing work of nurturing and connecting that we need in every realm. It makes us strong. It keeps our feet on firm ground.

I also had the benefit of a couple of hikes with my friend Twilight (a food and climate writer with a great newsletter) since I first wrote about this desire to wake up to climate change. She has mentored me on climate in so many ways just by being herself, but she also said something that I’ve been holding close. I was poking fun at myself for feeling chuffed about little behavioral shifts and she encouraged me to resist creating a big binary in my head about insignificant behavioral change and meaningful collective action. She said: “The small, daily actions — from bicycling to harvesting greywater to hanging our clothes on the line — make us into the kind of person that is more invested in broader policy change. For one, it gives us a more grounded, realistic sense of the resources we’re using every day but it also, ironically, makes clear how limiting those individual actions are and therefore how badly we need systemic solutions.”

In other words:

Don’t dismiss the little things. They are the critical, first steps towards bigger moves.

And lord knows we need BIG moves right now, but we can’t expect to get there if we’re not scaffolding up from something approachable. Do the intimate work, the domestic work, the community work, the neighborhood work, and the geopolitical work won’t feel so preposterous.

Thanks Louise. Thanks Twilight. Thanks to all of you for your recommendations and encouragement. The journey continues…