Words&Dirt

“What should we do with this fear that comes from living on a planet that is dying, made less alive every day?  First, accept that it won’t go away.  That it is a fully rational response to the unbearable reality that we are living in a dying world, a world that a great many of us are helping to kill, by doing things like making tea and driving to the grocery store and yes, okay, having kids.

Next, use it.  Fear is a survival response.  Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman.  But we need somewhere to run to.  Without that, the fear is only paralyzing.  So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

Yes, there will be things we will lose, luxuries some of us will have to give up, whole industries that will disappear.  And it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do.  But it’s not too late to avert the worst, and there is still time to change ourselves so that we are far less brutal to one another when those disasters strike.  And that, it seems to me, is worth a great deal.

Because the thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything.  It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, what we can demand from ourselves and our leaders.  It means there is a whole lot of stuff that we have been told is inevitable that simply cannot stand.  And it means that a whole lot of stuff we have been told is impossible has to start happening right away.

Can we pull it off?  All I know is that nothing in inevitable.  Nothing except that climate change changes everything.  And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.”

––This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein, pg. 28