16: Fear of flygskam
A different sort of guide to end of year giving
Dante running from the three beasts, William Blake, 1824-27
So we have an international trip coming up fast which is going to vastly expand the household’s carbon footprint and I’m doing that thing right now where I tug on my collar and wipe my forehead out of guilt like ayiyi. There’s been a lot of debate lately about whether it’s OK to fly if you’re concerned about climate change, some people call it “flight shaming,” in Swedish it is flygskam, although shame is really an awful framing for that discussion if you ask me.
It highlights a major barrier that I imagine prevents people from engaging with climate change and probably part of why it was ignored for oh one million years. It can feel like a binary moral decision, either you are one of those climate change people and you only get around by sailboat, or you are just like welp that sucks good luck kids. When in reality there is a huge middle ground that we’re all floundering our way through. It sort of reminds me of this episode of The Good Place where *light spoilers* they discover that nobody is getting into heaven anymore because the unintended consequences of everything we do are so awful, the world has become so complex and interconnected that there’s really no good way to live.
Which means we all kind of have to walk around like these guilty moral philosophers, asking ourselves what am I OK with exactly? How much hypocrisy (especially those of us living in the Global North) will I be tolerating today? Should I just keep doing my usual thing or buy an electric car or purchase carbon offsets or go live in a cabin or block a highway or maybe go blow up an oil pipeline? Or, for a real life example from today aka right this very second, I skipped a big climate action and that sucks but you know I had shit to do including writing an article about climate change soooo.
We are constantly faced with this anxiety-inducing question of how to live a moral life during a climate crisis. I guess the good news is, none of us are alone in figuring this out and there isn’t really one answer. We’re all figuring out new ways to live, new ways to interact with each other, new structures to build.
Another common binary that makes this even more difficult is the argument between the need for systemic change versus individual actions. On this one, I do tend to lean toward the Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting camp.
Which is to say, there are exploitative systems, and profit-seeking corporations, and entire political parties to be honest, powerful people that have actively and aggressively fought to perpetuate the crisis that we are in. And that is not your fault Will Hunting. But I also think people take this logic too far sometimes, and use it to sort of absolve themselves of any duty to act on what is a collective problem with collective solutions. We seriously do all have to change our lives, but that change is not going to be perfect, and it’s literally impossible to do without systems change too.
So all of this is a roundabout way of saying that in an effort to offset the carbon bomb of this upcoming flight to Southeast Asia I am thinking about organizations fighting on the systemic side of things that I should donate some money to. And I figured, you know what, maybe you guys want to do something similar for your holiday travel, or you want to make a donation as a gift to someone, or whatever I don’t know your finances.
Oh, and I also saw a Vox guide to climate giving and it was from the standpoint of effective altruism, a philosophy I mostly disagree with and thought hey I could do that but from my own standpoint on giving which focuses on shifting power, supporting new leaders, backing local action and movement-building. So here is my very fast and furious guide to climate giving aka climate giving tokyo drift because I got kind of a late start this week.
Avoid the Big Greens: I don’t think your average person concerned about climate change should be giving their $100 or whatever to NRDC or EDF or The Nature Conservancy. These groups have generally speaking been disproportionately funded by philanthropic giants and wrapped up in corporate partnerships for years now, over-emphasizing market-based and incremental solutions as a result, and most of them have terrible diversity records. They have a certain role to play (legal strategies in particular), but their approach is overrepresented in the movement. If you insist, I’d say Sierra Club or Greenpeace have strengths, or a good alternative national group is 350.org.
Don’t Worry About Overhead: Overhead means things like human beings, computers, benefits, decent health insurance, organizational stability, competitive hiring, chairs. Don’t make the recipients of your generosity bow before you for scraps. When you give you accept risk and put faith in others so trust their leadership and that they know how to best use resources. Also don’t get caught up in an “impact per dollar” rabbit hole or something like that because that’s not really how this works.
Give Locally: I tend to think that individual giving is best not when it punts your social concerns out of sight and out of mind, but when you form a connection with the work being done. That’s one reason giving locally is important, but also bottom up solutions tend to be more durable and equitable than top-down solutions. Giving locally may feel small, but local change builds up to something profound it’s a fractal thing. Keep in mind you may not have a Local Climate Change Group, exactly, but you probably have a local environmental justice group or transit or green space or housing advocate whose work has implications on your community’s carbon emissions.
Now here is a list of groups that I like:
Climate Justice Alliance: This network of organizations is amazing and is working to make the green new deal more equitable, among other things. The best part about it is that you can look at its list of members and find one near you! So in Boston we’ve got ACE and GreenRoots, and back in my place of origin, Arizona has the Black Mesa Water Coalition.
Climate Emergency Fund: Want to raise some hell? This is a pretty cool project that I covered a while back and has gotten some mainstream attention lately. They make small grants for activists demanding urgent action.
Extinction Rebellion: Want to block some highways? XR also follows a nonviolent resistance theory of change which you may know from such hits as Indian independence and the civil rights movement.
Sunrise Movement: These kids helped put the Green New Deal on the map and have rapidly become power players in climate policy, mass protests, political engagement.
Corporate Accountability: I’m biased because Jamie worked here for years and we have a lot of friends there, but they have a badass climate campaign that includes getting industry out of climate negotiations and making polluters pay for solutions.
Indigenous Environmental Network: These folks had a big presence at Standing Rock and continue to be a national force.
Movement Training Organizations: Indigenous Peoples Power Project (IP3), The Ruckus Society, Movement Generation all participate in training the next generation of activists which is hugely important to building power.
And here are some more no shade I’m just running out of time!
Oh, and one more, support a political candidate who has made climate change a priority in their campaign. Because if you are supporting or not opposing national leaders who are blocking climate progress, I am sorry Will but this time it actually is your fault peace and love.
Podcasts
Kate Marvel is an amazing climate communicator even though she is by trade a scientist who works in climate modeling. She has a nice lengthy conversation with Ezra Klein in which he poses that very problem of what is the nature of climate change and how are we supposed to live with it. No easy answers here but they talk about some difficult ideas like whether democracy is up to this task, how radically we all should be responding, how bad things could get, etc.
It’s not necessarily a question of what we feel as individual people, it’s a question of a system that we as individuals are participating in. … How does one live in a world which is polluted with a bad thing that you are participating in whether you like it or not and it is almost impossible to cut yourself off from it? … It’s ways to think about systems, ways to understand the false dichotomy of individual choice versus social change.
Part of a series Ezra Klein is doing on climate welcome to the party pal.
Links
How climate change will impact real estate and insurance markets is terrifying. In California, the state took the unusual step of banning the cancellation of insurance policies in wildfire-prone areas.
Bad news of the week is that CO2 emissions hit an all time high so that is not the right direction if you’re keeping track. Natural gas, everyone’s favorite climate-change-causing climate solution, was the biggest driver of emissions. “Natural gas may produce fewer carbon emissions than coal, but that just means you cook the planet a bit more slowly.”
Last issue, I linked to a great column on the occupation of Alcatraz, written by activist, journalist, policy maker etc., Julian Brave NoiseCat. Now here’s an also great profile of NoiseCat, written by Eric Holthaus, a name friends of the Palace will also recognize. If you missed the Alcatraz link, it here.
There’s a car-free neighborhood planned for my former home of Tempe, Arizona of all places. An underreported feature is that it will include more greenery and twice the shade of a typical neighborhood to make walking manageable in soaring temps. Sounds like a veritable palace amid crisis.
Taylor Lorenz recently started writing for the NYT and she is cranking out these amazing articles about the surreal world of young people on the internet. This latest one is about a 15 year old who was making $10K a month with a meme factory.
I never really considered that it’s abnormal to grow up eating pizza at a place where live organ music is being played, but I guess it is. The longtime organist at my hometown’s Organ Stop Pizza passed away RIP.
With episode 6, HBO’s Watchmen made it much clearer what it’s up to and it is really something. If you’re not afraid of spoilers, read Jamelle Bouie on the game changer.
I meant to post it earlier and sorry if I actually did already, but this op-ed is one of the best critiques of philanthropy I’ve read in mainstream news media. “With a few notable exceptions, philanthropy is the white woman grabbing her purse when a black man enters the elevator.”
Listening
Universal Beings by jazz drummer Makaya McCraven, this is the whole album which is one amazing collection of live performances spliced together into one set but you can skip around and sample different parts enjoy.
Another music thing is that I went to my second Phish concert of the year which is pretty weird considering I do not like the band Phish. But my good friend Pat likes them and so I went to a couple of shows with him for fun. Both have had moments where I was like shoot me in the face but also other moments I very much enjoyed. You gotta keep trying new things you know. So anyways I’m going to start following them on tour next year see you all in the parking lot my dudes.
Don’t be afraid out there. Don’t be ashamed. We’re all stuck in this together, just like at a Phish concert.
Tate