Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.
Climate change is an existential risk that could abruptly end human civilisation because of a catastrophic “failure of imagination” by global leaders to understand and act on the science and evidence before them.
Our approach starts with an unequivocal realization: human activity is systematically degrading our planet’s life-support systems. Yet prevailing norms and institutions continue to rely on systems of thought which are not fit for the situation we are now in. Through a new synthesis of contemporary science, economics and the humanities, we aim to reconcile fragmented disciplines and find a path to a world where our relationship with the community of life on Earth becomes mutually enhancing.
Humans are motivated by love, belonging, meaning, and mattering. People love good stories—even ones (or especially one) that have shame, fear, guilt, and anxiety. To understand such stories, one has to have a conscience and care about the world. There’s no need to sugarcoat the situation we’re in; let’s put a rest to that argument. What we need is heaps of fierce compassion and bravery.
Our framing and cognitive dissonance prevents us from moving forward with useful policies to restrain climate change. Solutions that protect growth are either destructive to the geobiosphere and/or intensive in energy use. But we have a conceptual scientific framework that explains our societal systemic behavior exists, the Maximum Power Principle.
I remember the birth of antipolitics. I was a young woman when dissidents in the communist world began to associate official political activity with support for an immoral order. Voting, they believed, was an empty gesture if the ruling party won 99% of the ballots cast.
Climate science can seem distant and inhuman, particularly when it’s foretelling the parched doom of humans. Wallace-Wells’ reliance on that doom and flourish has elicited the objection of some scientists. Telling the human race exactly what kind of threats await our home is sensitive business, a fact of which scientists are sharply aware.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
The Resilience Dialogues program provides resources and expertise to help communities build individualized plans for resilience in the face of climate change
New York Magazine has stirred up a firestorm of debate by publishing a worst-case scenario for climate change this week, “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells.
Observational records show us that half a degree of warming in the recent past has brought significant increases in extreme weather events, which provides another line of evidence for what an additional 0.5C of warming could entail. Differentiating climate impacts between 1.5C and 2C warming above pre-industrial levels has been a hot topic in climate science since the adoption of the 1.5C long-term temperature limit in the Paris Agreement and much research is underway for inclusion in the IPCC special report on impacts at 1.5C warming.
This month we’re going to talk about the current pace of anthropogenic climate change. That’s perhaps the most massive story of our time; it’s happening a good deal faster than I expected — though in all fairness, a great many climate scientists have been caught flatfooted by the pace of change as well.
