63: Wayfinding
63: Wayfinding
When a point in the distance becomes the entire space in which you exist, in all of its complexity
For as long as I can remember, the discussion around climate change has been constructed out of a series of strict binaries. The biggest one being—is it happening or is it not, and by extension, do we do something about it or not. We now know that this was actually an orchestrated, weaponized binary, perpetuated by people whose financial interests were threatened by climate action, but it was the dominant divide, nonetheless.
There have been others too. Cap and trade or no cap and trade. Mitigation versus adaptation. Research versus deployment. So much of the discussion has been around how you sorted yourself on either side of these defining splits. What was the solution? What was the right path? You don’t see them quite as often these days, but a common, unfortunate genre of climate article was “Sorry, XXXX will not solve climate change.” (I wrote exactly one of these, but I stand by it, it was a banger).
A binary can be useful as a bright line in campaigning for or against something. And some of these divides do make sense in a particular moment—there was a point, albeit like 40 years ago, when the happening-or-not binary was real. There was also a time when many people, myself included, argued for a focus on movement building instead of technocratic policy fixes, based on the fact that a deep disconnect among the public would always block the kind of progress necessary. I still feel this way to some extent, but it’s becoming less of a cut and dry split these days.
In another sense, these binaries are useful as a form of wayfinding as one approaches a difficult concept to grasp. Philosopher Timothy Morton calls such concepts hyperobjects, “things that you can study and think about and compute, but that are not so easy to see directly.” Hyperobjects (a term inspired by Hyperballad by Bjork, who is a friend of Morton’s, no joke) are so massively distributed across time and space that you can’t see or hold them in front of you, even though you know they are there. They’re slippery, sticky things. So discussions like, well is it this or is it that, help us to get our bearings.
But, like a location on the horizon, climate change gets closer and closer, until it gradually ceases to become a solitary object off in the distance that you are trying to make out, and becomes the entire space in which you exist. It’s all that is around you in all of its complexity. When a point in the distance becomes the world you live in, the binaries that helped you before begin to lose their structural integrity. The decisions cease to be, is this real, or do we do this or not. Instead, it becomes a question of—OK yes, but what else. No way, not that, but maybe something a little different instead. Let’s do a small amount of that over there and much more of this over here. This is the process of mapping out the hyperobject.
I recently finished Eric Holthaus’s The Future Earth, a book that, if not in these exact terms, takes on the task of mapping out the world during climate change. Holthaus is a meteorologist turned journalist whose writing I’ve always appreciated in that it is very emotionally honest and has a strong climate justice lens. So I was eager to read his book, which focuses a lot on weather and storms, but also serves as a kind of cataloguing of all of the good ideas and ways to think about climate change that Holthaus has absorbed in his time writing about the issue, under the framework of charting the critical 30 years ahead.
The book serves as a contrasting companion to The Uninhabitable Earth, which poses the worst-case scenarios of climate change, and instead imagines what it might look like to actually do what is needed to avoid the worst-case scenarios. Both books also do a powerful job of dispelling the notion that climate change is merely one of humanity’s problems that we have to check off the list so we can move on. Instead, it is the problem, or more accurately our new reality within which all other problems live. The change required “dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them,” Wallace-Wells writes. “Every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.”
Holthaus goes a step further, arguing that climate change is symptom of an even larger planetary problem, which is the very way humans relate to each other. Pointing to the fact that the IPCC calls for “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” Holthaus concludes, “We need to develop a whole new type of human society.” One that is collaborative instead of competitive, that improves how democracies function and how means of production are distributed. One that dismantles colonialism and capitalism, but doesn’t merely replace it with socialism, building instead something new.
The Future Earth does not deliver this new, fully baked human society, but the way it comes up short in doing so is what makes it so successful as a climate book. When reading about climate change, I find myself often thinking about the recovery maxim, “Take what you need and leave the rest,” and that feels like what Holthaus is doing in this book. He takes everything he’s learned from many very smart people, and sort of cobbles them together in an approximation of a possible future. That includes ideas like participatory democracy at scale, climate reparations and open migration, the doughnut economy, the circular economy, just transition, and more. Less of a uniform manifesto, it’s at times a messy group of ideas living alongside of each other. He crosses boundaries that typically delineate different climate camps. For example, he explores geoengineering—a third rail in climate justice—but asks how we might combine it with humanitarian principles to mitigate inevitable harms already set in motion. He recognizes the need for huge breakthroughs in technology, but also Indigenous knowledge, and innovations in the way that democracies use technology.
All of this is the chaotic mapping out of the hyperobject, and the process is just as important as the outcome, because Holthaus’s primary goal is to challenge our ability to imagine.
Right now, Earth—the entire planet—is a liminal space. We are starting to learn this fact, that radical change is inevitable, yet we don’t know exactly what it’s going to look like. But this time is also vitally necessary in order for us, as a species, to figure out what we’re about to become.
Thomas Morton writes that we are currently undergoing a process of “upgrading” the way we think about things, based on the data before us, as well as philosophy and art. “Human beings are now going through this upgrade. The upgrade is called ecological awareness.”
It’s in that process that some of these clumsy lines that we’ve drawn along the way are likely going to blur, and the binaries are going to break down. There’s a Buddhist concept called “near enemies” in which a virtue, slightly altered, becomes a vice. It can go the other direction too. Ideas like carbon taxes and carbon capture are good examples of this—seemingly minor adjustments in execution can radically change their intentions and consequences. Some potential climate solutions will still, justifiably, end up in the trash. But the scope of change ahead is so great, that we need to put lots of these elements side by side and move them around, alter them, and rethink them. Take what we need and leave the rest.
One more thing, one of the ways the evolution of the issue is showing up in the day-to-day is what often gets characterized as “discord” within the climate coalition, most recently around Biden’s cabinet picks. This is really just the complexity of the issue coming to the surface. As Eve Driver wrote about the conflict, “We are finally seeing real and meaningful debate on the federal level about what climate leadership should look like, rather than bickering over the basic notion that we need it.”
When Biden selected John Kerry as climate czar (why do we use this term) the reaction on climate Twitter was something like “huh ok not bad, wait actually boooooo, wait hang on fuck I’m not sure.” And then it shifted to, OK well what else? And before long, Gina McCarthy was appointed to a domestic version of that role, a decision celebrated by activists. Two climate czars!
Kate Aronoff recently wrote an article about the cabinet appointments and an energy spending package in Congress, in which she made an interesting pivot that seems to reflect changing times. “Let’s have an ‘all of the above’ climate strategy that encourages both technocratic tweaks, grand gestures, and big legislative action, all aimed at rapid decarbonization.” The article was headlined, “The Climate Fight Needs Both Technocrats and Firebrands.”
The public-facing conversation is moving from let’s do something instead of nothing, to a debate over let’s do this instead of that, and finally into the realm of let’s do this and that and that. And that feels like progress.
Links
The big news this week was Deb Haaland’s selection as interior secretary, Michael Regan for EPA, and Gina McCarthy as senior adviser on climate change policy. Progressive climate advocates pushed for all three.
This article is to help parents cope with stress about climate change, but is probably helpful for non-parent humans too.
Heat is killing more people, and scientists are trying to figure out how we can live with it.
Creative ways to retrofit suburban sprawl.
Journalists going solo are basically becoming online influencers, a job that is not great!
Leaked bodycam videos show Boston police reveling in brutality against protestors, bragging about driving cars into people, stealing a necktie.
This article about people getting engaged during the pandemic is sweet.
Watching
Detroiters
Listening
Some nice soothing winter music especially if you are stuck in the snow.
It is officially the holidays and I hope you all thoroughly but safely enjoy whichever thingys you celebrate. It has been an unusual gift-giving season this year, but I did recently get some really amazing gifts from friends/family members Josh and Theresa, including a nice sketchbook and a pencil set ranked “expert,” which I feel is not appropriate to my skill level but you have to fake it until you make it.
I’m also giving a lot of gifts in my video games, including in Animal Crossing where you can give someone a single pear and they will say, “Oh wow a pear! You are the best friend I have ever had.” In Stardew Valley, however, the local villagers are a tough crowd at first and you don’t have a lot of options for gifts, mostly things that you can make on your farm like potatoes and mayonnaise. You have to win people over and when you give them gifts they say things like “Mayonnaise, why would you give me something like this??” or “Is this a piece of your garbage?”
I told Jamie about this and she got really mad at them. But since then I’ve learned how to make beer and wine and that seems to make the villagers happy, just like in real life. Sometimes friendship means giving people a couple of jars of mayonnaise before you can give them a bottle of wine. Newsletters are kind of the same I guess. I hope this one was closer to wine. Cue Indigo Girls fade to black happy holidays.
Tate