Are We Wearing the Right Shoes?

A response to Lydia Kiesling’s novel “Mobility.”

A short note on overlapping crises:

I didn’t send a newsletter last week because I was—and still am—bereft about the situation on the ground in Gaza and in Israel. I am part of the Jewish diaspora, and believe it is possible to stand for the people of Palestine and against antisemitism. Like many of you, I am praying for a ceasefire. 

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Dear friends, 

I process a great deal of the world through reading fiction, and Lydia Kiesling’s novel Mobility is currently rattling around in my mind, asking for a response.

Released in August, the book follows the life of Bunny Glenn, a woman who grows up traveling between oil-producing nations with her Foreign Service family and then “accidentally” works her way up within the oil industry in Texas. 

The bulk of the book takes place over the last three decades and its close third-person omniscient point of view gives the reader access to Bunny’s thoughts. We meet her as a teenager in Baku, Azerbaijan in the 1990s, where diplomats and oil executives are brokering deals over pipelines and then watch as she negotiates a series of offices and social spaces where she navigates rigid class and gender playbooks, while slowly proving her worth to the oil executives she works for. 

Bunny is painted as educated and liberal, but she’s also a little lost in the world of adulthood. While living in her mother’s family home in Texas, she lands a temp job for an engineering firm that morphs into a better paying job “exploring renewables” at one of the only family oil businesses left in Texas in the early 2000s. Bunny takes it, telling herself that it’s not the same as other oil industry jobs. And when she connects with other women in the industry under the moniker Pink Petrol, she chooses to focus on the fact that she’s helping empower women in a historically male-dominated industry, rather than the impacts of the oil and gas industry on the rapidly warming climate.

Two different journalists serve as points of contrast, reflection, and subtle awakening for Bunny. Charlie, an older love interest publishes an edgy underground newspaper in Baku called The Inter-Caucasian Times or “The Intercock” and peels back the curtain on the corrupt world her father inhabits. And Sofie, her brother’s girlfriend and a successful environmental reporter, takes a critical eye to Bunny’s professional choices while being disarmingly kind to her anyway. 

As Bunny hones her skills as a storyteller, however, she portrays the oil industry as another harmless business evolving to make people’s lives better. A passage reads: 

“She retweeted a cute video of a female office staff from Tengiz field in Kazakhstan, from where they had recruited an engineer… she quote-tweeted a photo of the Russian Women’s Oil and Gas working group, tough women in hardhats giving a thumbs up to the camera in Sakhalin. “Love it!” she wrote. And she did love it, more or less. These were good and important jobs, Elizabeth knew. They empowered women and gave them options.”

Bunny’s deliberate blindness strikes an all-too familiar key, even as the fallout from climate change is woven throughout the book. I won’t give away any more of the plot, but I’m especially interested in what I think Kiesling is trying to saying about how a certain kind of woman—a kind I’m not especially identified with but nonetheless can see in parts of myself—and what keeps her from stepping off the treadmill. It’s about the industry that enables continued drilling for oil and gas, despite abundant scientific evidence that it has warmed the planet, but it’s also about the broader death-spiral of capitalism itself. And while Kiesling deftly illustrates how much discipline, focus, and endurance Bunny has when she puts her mind to something—she also shows the reader in sentence after crushing sentence how penned in she is, or thinks she is, by what is expected of her.

Kiesling illustrates this in part by immersing you in Bunny’s constant brand awareness, and her inability to separate her agency as a person from her consumer choices. And again, this feels very tied to class, gender, and the interplay between the two. The author’s descriptions of the other women in the book are laden with notes on their choice of shoes, clothing, food, and fitness routines. The scenes are studded with J.Crew sandals, Vera Wang wedding dresses, and—when she’s finally made it to the inner circle of successful women in oil and gas—Christian Louboutin heels.

When Bunny meets Sofie, the journalist, her first impression is that she’s “untidy” in a haphazard ponytail and baggie sweater with a “boatneck that didn’t quite look intentional.” She wears dirty sneakers from the wrong season and a bathing suit that is just slightly stretched out. Bunny grows to appreciate Sofie despite these flaws, but the difference between them—as a person who is brand aware and impeccable-groomed and one who is not—remains a kind of permanent gulf between them.

Sofie eats and drinks what she wants, and argues with strangers in bars, whereas Bunny admits to living in a constant state of hunger. And it’s that vigilance, that undeniable respectability that makes Kiesling’s Bunny instantly recognizable, a symbol of the propriety that can lock many of us, especially women and femmes, up in a whole range of cages. 

As I finished Mobility I thought of Lauren Groff’s 2021 novel Matrix, which takes on a very different kind of project. It tells the story of Marie, a spiritual leader who runs an abbey in Medieval England in a way that completely belies the patriarchal power structure of the era and leads many of the nuns in the abbey to an alternative, feminine sense of the divine.

Whereas Mobility begins in the recent past and stretches toward the near future, Matrix begins in the distant past and extends to meet the present in the final pages. I won’t spoil that book either (read it! it’s amazing) but Groff’s core message aligns in many ways with Kiesling’s, or at least the two are very much in conversation.

Both books speak to the interplay between the kind of power women can and do have, and the negative space that can so easily open up and swallow us when we get stuck in a loop of second guessing, deference, and shame. When we believe we’re not good enough. And when that happens, Kiesling and Groff seem to be saying, it’s not just women who suffer, it’s the earth itself. 

Do I think Kiesling is saying we’re all too preoccupied with shoes to start a climate revolution? Not exactly. But I do think with Mobility she offers readers a chance to reflect on how they perceive and judge one another and whether those patterns are preventing some of us from having a more radical, practical vision for change. It’s about what keeps us waiting around for hope to emerge while keeping our lives tidy and respectable, rather than summoning our courage. And it’s the opposite of freedom. 

Climate news you may have missed

Water is at the heart of the conflict—in more ways than one

Among the many atrocities people in Gaza have experienced this week, the lack of access to water has been among the worst. With access to clean water cut off by Israel, residents of the crowded, bombarded region have had to drink salt water and tainted water, which puts everyone, especially children, at heightened risk of dysentery and cholera. And while some bottled water was trucked in over the weekend, it was a paltry amount given the need.

Control to water resources has also long been at the heart of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank. It’s region where Palestinian farms have been paved over, and many ancient olive orchards and herding operations have gradually lost access to water over the last half-century as Israeli settlements have expanded and planted other, much more thirsty crops.

And this is all made more challenging by the impacts of climate change. The Southern Mediterranean is warming faster than almost anywhere else on earth, and the region could see as much as a 40 percent drop in winter rainfall in the coming decades. The result is rapid desertification.

“The settlers used to stay on their small piece of land, but now, they have control over the whole area,” a Palestinian herder in the West Bank explained to +927 Magazine earlier this month. “We cannot take our herds out to graze, and we can no longer reach our two [rain] water reservoirs on the hill.”

In his 2008 book, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Raja Shehadeh chronicled his journeys on foot through the West Bank as he watched the Palestinian people be displaced and the landscape transform. His observations provide valuable context as the humanitarian crisis in the region wages on.

“Perhaps the paucity of rain is what makes us, the inhabitants of this land, Jews and Arabs, so anxious and temperamental that peace continues to elude us. It was here that prophets thought they heard God imposing punishment by withholding the rain or rewarding His people with fertile fields,” he wrote.  

Shehadeh describes a sales brochure advertising an ultra orthodox West Bank development that reads, “The city of Emanuel, situated 440 meters above sea level, has a magnificent view of the coastal plain and the Judean Mountains. The hilly landscape is dotted by green olive orchards and enjoys a pastoral calm.” Shehadeh then quotes the Israeli architects Rafi Segal and Eyal Weizman who say “the very people who cultivate the ‘green olive orchards’ and render the landscape biblical are themselves excluded from the panorama. The Palestinians are there to produce the scenery and then disappear.” 

The researcher who lost his job because he refused to fly home

Gianluca Grimalda was reportedly fired last week from his role as a social science researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy when he refused to hop on a plane to travel the 15,000 miles home after a 6-month research trip on Bougainville island off the coast of Papua New Guinea.

“My employer presented me with a stark ultimatum: return to my offices in Kiel, Germany, within five days, or lose my job,” wrote Grimalda in an op-ed in The Guardian.

“Empirical research shows that ‘walking the walk’ is important.” He continued. “Scientists who have reduced their carbon footprint are more likely to be persuasive with the public than scientists who have not, according to one study. Individual action, even if obviously ineffective in dramatically reducing carbon emissions, has been shown to have significant amplifying effects, as the individual’s ‘good example’ is replicated and further propagated by people on their social networks.” 

It will take Grimalda an estimated 45 days to get home via container ship, bus, train, etc.—a privilege most people don’t have as they consider whether and how to travel for work. As we all begin to ask pivotal questions about where our work can and should take place on the globe, his story also raises the question: Does the research need to be done by someone who lives 15,000 miles away? Furthermore, is it time to stop assuming the world’s experts—and the resources that make their work possible—must always originate in the Global North? 

Seeing sea level rise in California

Every time I drive up California’s coastal Highway 1, note the erosion and consider sea level rise, I wonder how many more coastal drives I will experience in my lifetime. And reading through the extremely well-researched and reported California Against the Sea: Visions of our Vanishing Coastline by Rosanna Xia this week has only strengthened my sense that many of the coastal towns in this state are not terribly long for this world. What has struck me most is Xia’s characterization of the last century as an anomaly that has led many to believe it was safe to develop the coast. Recent decades have seen what she calls, “the calmest period of an ocean-atmosphere cycle known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, during which generous winds pulled warmer water offshore, leaving the water along the coast much cooler and less expansive. This ‘sea level rise suppression,’ as scientists call it, kept huge storms in check and the rate of sea rise below the global average … In the last 100 years, the sea has risen less than 9 inches in California; by the end of this century, the surge could be greater than six, possibly seven feet.” 

It’s important to have the information, Xia argues, because—like so much of the natural world—once we stop trying to control the shoreline, we may form with it a different kind of reciprocal relationship. “Rather than confront the water as though it’s our doom,” she asks, “can we reframe sea level rise as an opportunity—an opportunity to mend our fractured relationship with the shore?”

Can Coca-Cola bring back refillable bottles?

This campaign from Annie Leonard’s Story of Stuff aimed at pressuring Coca Cola to consider going back to reusable glass bottles caught my attention. It would be an enormous shift for one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies and at first glance it may look far-fetched. But the more time I spent with the research, the more I started to think it might be money and time well spent for the company—and for the rest of us. According to the group’s report, the beverage industry sells more than 580 billion polyethylene terephthalate (PET) plastic bottles per year—nearly 1 million per minute. Coca-Cola accounts for nearly one quarter of those bottles. 

In addition to polluting the ocean, and killing wildlife, the plastic supply chain requires an incredibly climate-intensive chemical production process and emits nearly 9 million metric tons of greenhouse gasses in North America every year, which is close to the annual emissions of 2 million cars. 

The Latin American and European markets are beginning to move back to refillable bottles, in part because they create jobs, and policymakers in both regions of the world have been motivated to start making moves toward zero-waste economies, and—this is key—there has been less industry pushback there than in the U.S. In 2022, the Coca-Cola Company pledged to sell 25 percent of its products in reusable containers by 2030, but it’s all taking place outside the US.

On the brighter side

1. Renewable energy production is growing almost fast enough to triple capacity by the end of the decade—a rate that experts say could help the world stick to 1.5 C average warming above pre-industrial levels. “Last year’s year-on-year growth was 25 percent for solar and 14 percent for wind, so almost exactly what is needed,” said an analyst for the climate thinktank Ember.

2. Dam removal progress on the Klamath River (which crossed over the California-Oregon border) is moving fast. The first of four dams should be fully removed by this fall, allowing the region’s salmon population to access 400 miles of their traditional habitat and improving overall water quality. 

3. I was heartened to hear that, after a very rough few years, Florida’s manatees may get put back on the endangered species list. The change could help protect the manatees who remain as their homes are increasingly disrupted by sea-level rise, hurricanes, and toxic algae blooms.

4. Students at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) are facing some of the worst climate impacts—such as a recent flood that impacted students at Spelman, Morehouse, and Clark Atlanta—but as this Axios story illustrates, the students at these often underfunded institutions also have important voices in their communities. 

5. Relatedly, college students in Denver are getting trained to build solar canopies that shade parking lots, reduce heat, and generate electricity.
   

Want to know more about me? Listen to the conversation I had with Courtney Martin from The Examined Family for her new podcast, The Wise Unknown.

Take care out there,

Twilight