The Third Option

When neither giving up nor having hope feels possible.

The majority of Americans are concerned about the climate crisis. And yet those who share climate information still engage in a great deal of hand-wringing about how to convince their audience to care without frightening them into paralysis.

“People don’t want doom and gloom,” a whole field of climate communicators say—on repeat. “They want solutions. They want hope. They want to know what they can do!”

And thankfully there are solutions. There are systemic changes we can learn about and advocate for and individual changes we can make. But there are days when the unending drumbeat of solutions, innovation and positive visions for the future can ring hollow to me, because they feel a little unearned—particularly when the solutions being floated seem too easy, too apolitical and/or too likely to generate yet more profits for the people who benefit from the same system that caused this crisis in the first place.

The deeper I get into thinking about and understanding the climate crisis, the more I want to reject that doom/hope dichotomy for a third option—a third state of mind. It’s one that acknowledges and doesn’t turn away from the actual doom—the melting coral reefs, the whole villages washed away in minutes, the forecast of what will likely happenwhen (not if) a summertime power outage occurs in Phoenix—but instead allows us to remain in, dare I say with, the unknown.

Growing up near the ocean was instructive for so many reasons, but one of the most important lessons involved learning to duck under the water when you see a wave cresting that’s too large to jump over. Submerge yourself, get down below the chaos and it will pass over you, I was taught early on in life.

There are days when I have no choice but to allow my own fears and sense of climate doom to wash over me like a wave. And while I’m submerged, I can only hope that I will emerge without losing my sense of momentum. And it may seem counterintuitive, but figuring out when to go deeper in the grief and sadness that comes up when we read about or observe the hardest news—rather than to stay on the surface—might help us weather the worst parts without giving up.

Photo by Mariam Antadze.

For that reason, I prefer to listen to those who are closest to the crisis whenever I can. I follow a wide range of scientists looking at climate through one lens or another, and I have found their unfiltered thoughts to be a useful source of comradery. They’re in the crisis every day, and many of them have learned how to work with their feelings about it, how to continue.

Similarly, right after I started this newsletter a friend sent me a note asking for everything I was leaving out. We have this immersive wave-ducking thing in common, so I gladly sent her the names of the scientists and journalists who seem least afraid to share the worst news. And I found it surprisingly gratifying to feel seen in that particular way.

 For some of us, understanding and trying to metabolize the bleakest aspects of what’s happening now feels like the only way forward, and it’s no small thing to feel the presence of  others who are out there seeing it and working through it at the same time. On many days that more lived-in way of seeing each other through this unprecedented time seems more attainable to me than hope or innovation.

And I’d argue that camaraderie is especially important for those of us with enough privilege not to be facing the worst impacts of the climate crisis already. As another record-breaking summer draws near, millions of people are preparing to work in extreme heat. Others will see their homelands—and the more developed places they’ve gone to work in order to send money home—flood and burn. And they need us to be able to live with the unknown—to acknowledge the deeply uncomfortable truths of this moment, while remaining clear-eyed and focused on reducing the harms to them, and eventually to all of us, while we still can.

The Palestine–climate Venn diagram

Tens of thousands of college students have been holding their ground and practicing nonviolence and mutual aid on campuses across the country despite mounting violence and intimidation on the part of their own schools (here’s an updated list of recent arrests from Teen Vogue).

The Guardian’s Dharna Noor wrote about how college students demanding divestment from Israel due to its ongoing attacks on Gaza had a head start based on their existing efforts to push for institutional divestment from fossil fuels. On campuses such as Columbia and Yale, she added, many students are drawing the connection between the staggering quantity of carbon emissions caused by Israel’s aircrafts, rockets, and tanks and referring to the scenario as “ecocide.”

And despite the fact that these same students might have been scorned for their lack of focus a few years ago, some media outlets may finally be understanding the value of their approach.

“As [environmentalists], we pride ourselves on viewing the world through intersectional lenses,” Katie Rueff, a first-year student at Cornell University told the New York Times earlier this week. “Climate justice is an everyone issue. It affects every dimension of identity, because it’s rooted in the same struggles of imperialism, capitalism — things like that. I think that’s very true of this conflict, of the genocide in Palestine.”

Some climate and environmental groups are also showing their support for the students. Greenpeace USA, 350.org, and the Sunrise Movement all voiced solidarity through a recent letter.

And a group of alumni of Columbia University’s Climate School’s Sustainable Management program and The Earth Institute also sent a public letter in solidarity with the students. They wrote: “We recognize there can be no climate justice without peace and no peace without the liberation of Palestinian people.” 

On Earth Day, students at Columbia University, Tulane University and the University of Virginia joined 19 other colleges around the U.S. in writing letters to their states’ attorneys general, arguing that their schools’ investments in fossil fuels are illegal.

The effort is fitting, as a group of students pointed out in a Chicago Tribune op-ed, because Earth Day started on college campuses over 50 years ago—a time when, “the mainstream environmental movement…remained separate from civil rights organizers, focusing on protecting places over people and maintaining a “politically neutral” ecological conservation agenda that ignored the intersection between environmental degradation and racial injustice.” As that agenda gets upended on so many campuses at once, this month’s events may be providing a preview of the kinds of antiwar and anti–fossil fuel activism we’re likely to see in the coming years—and the swift and chilling response on the part of the people in power.

Do poor countries need a Loss and Damage Fund or a just a billionaire tax?

Alongside the push for divestment, one of the big questions on the world stage is whether wealthy companies and individuals in industrialized countries will begin chipping in to cover the cost of the snowballing damages taking place in nations where per capita emissions tend to be very low. And the Loss and Damage Fund (LDF) that was established at COP27 (2022) and formalized but only minimally funded at COP28 (2023) is at the center of this discussion.

The new board of the LDF will convene for the first time in Abu Dhabi (UAE) this week, and a group of scientists and advocates are raising pointed questions about the paltry participation the board is allowing from impacted communities. The meeting “limits participation to two people per UNFCCC stakeholder group—some of which represent millions, even billions, of people—such as Indigenous Peoples, youth, and women and girls,” they wrote recently, adding: “If the Board does not explicitly and meaningfully include the diverse voices of the rightsholders who are meant to be the LDF’s main beneficiaries, the fund risks becoming another bureaucratic relic, preserving the status quo of climate injustice.”

At this point, the LDF is voluntary. But a tax would be a very different story. And that’s what Esther Duflo—the French-born MIT economist who at age 46 in 2019 was the youngest in her field to win a Nobel Prize—is proposing. Dulfo took advantage of an opportunity to speak before the G-20 to advocate for two taxes that would redistribute money from the people with access to the most resources in the world (mainly in the U.S. and Europe) to those with access to the least. According to Heated, “Duflo proposes increasing an existing international tax on multinational corporations from 15 percent to 20 percent. There would also be a 2 percent wealth tax on the world’s top 3,000 billionaires. The two climate taxes combined could raise up to $400 billion per year for another fund designed for the LDF.

It's early days for the tax, but the fact that Duflo was given space to float it at the G-20 is no small deal. And she sees it as the first stage of a longer process that could begin to address the inequity at the root of the world’s carbon equation. I really hope she’s right.

Yale climate polling

The results of the latest Yale climate poll are out and it found that overall, Americans are appropriately “becoming more worried about global warming, more engaged with the issue, and more supportive of climate solutions.” When asked about what questions they would most like to ask a climate scientist, the respondents said they wanted to know how scientists know that global warming is human-caused and what can be done to limit it. 

The researchers have broken the respondents into six groups, or “the Six Americas,” which include the Alarmed, the Concerned, the Cautious, the Disengaged, the Doubtful and the Dismissive. Unlike a decade ago, when those identified as either the Alarmed and the Concerned made up just over one third (39 percent) of Americans, it’s now nearly 60 percent.

On the brighter side

1. I appreciated the creative thinking from the Last Farm newsletter suggesting that members of new American Climate Corps could work to build floating farming systems, similar to the chinampas found in Mexico, in some of America's abandoned canals. “Some of these canals have been integrated into lightly used public parks, but many are entirely neglected,” the author wrote. “Converting them into chinampas would turn derelict infrastructure into a hugely productive, attractive, and valuable resource.”
   

2. As sea level rise changes the San Francisco Bay, it also endangers the Bay’s varied and life-sustaining marshlands. Erica Gies, author of Water Always Wins, recently wrote about a gentler-than-usual approach to marsh restoration taking place here called shallow placement. The Army Corps of Engineers “dropped sediment onto the Bay floor, then let the tides do the work of moving it around.” The result builds up the marshes slowly without disturbing tidal ecosystems, and Gies suggests that it could signal an important shift inside the Corps, which has traditionally taken a far-from-holistic approach to manipulating the natural world.
   

3. I can’t seem to take my eyes off the Klamath River, where several major dams have been removed in recent months and other changes—both small and dramatic—have followed suit. In late April, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife released 500,000 (or 16 truckloads) of juvenile salmon into the river. They’re heading out to sea now, but they should migrate back up the unobstructed Klamath in a few years to spawn. Tribal leaders in the region told the LA Times they see it as a symbol of hope.
   

4. Back in 2000, a New Zealand conservationist created “Zealandia,” the world’s first “fully fenced urban ecosanctuary” designed to keep out predators in the capital city of Wellington. In the years since, the city has seen a wide range of native bird populations bounce back, to the point where some residents say they must make an effort to muffle the sounds of all the chirping.
   

5. The state of California is awarding $107.7 million to fund 33 projects and support the return of almost 39,000 acres of land to California Native American tribes through its Tribal Nature-Based Solutions grant program. It’s a big deal—and a promising step. As California Natural Resources Secretary Wade Crowfoot said in a recent video release:  “We know that traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) is the way forward. We have huge unprecedented environmental challenges that we have to deal with, and it’s these traditional tribal practices that have stewarded land since time immemorial. So we have to do a much better job of centering TEK within our broad scientific approach—whether it’s climate change or biodiversity protection or any of today’s environmental challenges.”

One more thing: Thank you for all the clothesline photos and anecdotes! It honestly made my month.

Take care of yourselves,
Twilight