Welcome to The Window

An introduction to this newsletter, a way for me to record and reckon with a world shaped by the climate crisis.

“There is a narrowing window of opportunity to shift pathways towards more climate resilient development futures” – IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report

Dear friends,

I am writing to you as we face a planetary crisis the likes of which humans and most of the living beings we share a planet with have never known. And yet while some of us speak about it — in brief moments, between other things — most of us, most of the time, don’t speak of it at all.

I want to do my part to change that.

I have spent close to two decades writing and editing stories about food and agriculture, often about how plants, animals, and people, are impacting and being impacted by the climate crisis. I’ve also been watching the rest of the living world as if on the edge of my seat. What I’ve seen, and what so many scientists, farmers, Indigenous land stewards, and other people have seen is unequivocally frightening. And it’s happening at a speed that is surprising even the experts.

I spend a lot of time thinking about what it means to live in relationship to this world as it changes — to feel responsible, responsive. I’m trying to keep my eyes open to the climate crisis and I want to help my readers do the same, in a way that is connecting, and not alienating. I will start out sharing news, analysis, and interviews and I also hope to do some traveling and original reporting that will show up here.

I am humbled by the quantity of good reporting and analysis about the climate crisis that’s already out there. And yet I also feel compelled to step into the rushing river, to make a practice of writing to you — my actual friends and acquaintances, and anyone else who cares to listen — about what we’re seeing but more importantly about how to stay awake to it, how not to shut down, to turn off, to assume a foregone conclusion.

I was lucky enough to get to spend my early years largely outdoors, on a jungle-y 5-acre farm in the tropics. And now, when I’m at my lowest points, one of the only ways I can access hope is literally by getting low to the ground. Sometimes that means pulling weeds and planting things, sometimes it just means watching what’s growing, what’s alive and flying or crawling around. So that ethos, that sense of writing more or less from the ground, and from my connection to the land around me is an important driver.

This conversation is as much for me as it is for you. Because I’m pretty sure we can’t keep our eyes open to what’s happening, what’s really happening right now, without doing it together.

I’m also extremely aware that as a cis white mother in my 40s, mine is an unavoidably particular perspective, and it’s my hope to balance my own thinking and writing here with other important voices from the front lines of the crisis.

Thank you for reading and I welcome your questions and thoughts.

- Twilight

Climate News You Might Have Missed

Climate Blockades at The White House Correspondent’s Dinner and Met Gala

While Joe Biden’s sunglasses and Roy Wood Jr.’s Clarence Thomas jokes have garnered much of the attention related to last weekend’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner, I wanted to call attention to the 100 climate scientists and youth activists who blockaded the entrance to the event—causing a ruckus and causing attendees to walk by their bullhorns in black tie attire—to bring attention the Biden Administration’s expansion of oil and gas drilling. They were also joined by Justin Jones, the Tennessee lawmaker who made national news when he was expelled from the state house recently for leading a gun-control protest and later reinstated. According to Climate Defiance, the group that organized the blockade, “U.S. Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) pledged for the first time ever that she will call on Biden to stop Line 3, which is pumping 700,000 barrels per day of tar sands oil through her home state.”

Another group of mostly young activists also kept the limousines from dropping well-clad celebrities off at Monday’s Met Gala.

Are Youth Engaging, Checking Out, or Both?

I haven’t spent a lot of time on TikTok, but I’m fascinated and heartened by the way the platform galvanized millions of young people to respond to send letters to President Biden in March in an effort to stop the Willow Project, the massive oil drilling project in Alaska. Last week, The NYT reported that Biden’s decision to move forward with the project may have soured his relationship with young voters.

And this piece from Yessinia Funes over at Atmos also links teen’s grief over climate policies such the Willow Project and the death of Manuel Esteban Páez Terán, or “Tortuguita,” the climate activist who was shot at least 57 times this year while protesting the construction of a police training center outside Atlanta, with the rise in teen cannabis consumption. “It’s hard to imagine a world where teens never smoke weed, but how about a world where fewer are anxious and depressed?” write Funes. “A world where children don’t need an escape from their grief because the world is a better place? That’s not up to them. That is on us, the adults meant to be protecting them.”

The Warming Oceans

The world’s oceans have warmed up so much faster than usual that they’ve literally gone off the charts this spring and it’s worrying scientists. Not only do warmer oceans put marine life in danger, but they also mean more sea level rise because warmer water expands and speeds up the pace at which the ice caps are already melting. It’s also worrying because the ocean typically absorbs the bulk of the globe’s heat (or 89%) and if it stops, that could be very bad for the atmosphere and the land, which only take in 2% and 5% respectively.

Meanwhile, the ocean’s “twilight zone” — the area that spans 650-3,300 feet below the surface — has been relatively unscathed by warming trends in recent years, in part because it’s out of the reach of sunlight. Now, a new study has predicted the region will face “widescale disruption” in the coming decades. This is the stripe of the ocean that’s home to everything from lanternfish to glowing Portuguese Man O’Wars and whale sharks. In other words, some of the most wondrous and mysterious creatures on earth.

Electric Cars = Not Enough on Their Own

If — like me — you’re thinking about buying an electric car in the coming year, this latest research is also worth taking in: Experts say, even if we all shift to electric vehicles, we still need to actually drive less “to meet stringent carbon budgets and avoid high energy demand.” Electrification alone means carbon emissions that are 7 times higher than what experts say is required to prevent worst-case climate scenarios. That means more attention to public transit that people will actually use and more places that allow us to participate in “active travel” — walking, bicycling, skateboarding, roller skating — more often.

Sexy Peatland

“Peatlands are not the sexiest, but in fact they are amazing. Like the Amazon, they are one of our best aids in the fight against climate change,” says Tero Mustonen in this fascinating video. An advocate who spearheaded the restoration of 86,000 acres of boggy, soggy, carbon absorbing peatlands after ousting a highly emitting peat mine from his community in Finland, Mustonen is one of the winners of the year’s Goldman Environmental Prize. And he’s just one of an impressive list of people from around the globe who have successfully fought and reclaimed lands from mines, secured stewardship of forests, and won a legal case against a petrochemical giant. If you’re looking for a balm in the face of what can some days feel like a flood of climate losses, I recommend their stories.

Lake Tulare is Not Going Away Anytime Soon

When visiting the Central Valley in December 2021, I had the occasion to visit Kaweah Lake, a massive reservoir where water from multiple rivers that run down through the Sierra Nevada mountains collects before being released down in the farmland of the Central Valley. I had read about the so-called ghost of Tulare Lake—the 800-mile marshy lake that once filled the center of the valley and was home to a wide array of native fish and waterfowl—but seeing Kaweah Lake and its enormous dam, perched there above the valley, and visualizing how it would be used throughout the year to water citrus trees, almond trees, and alfalfa for dairy cows, really helped me understand how artificial the dry lake bed below really was. And while I’ve been fascinated by the re-emergence of the 100-mile-long and-growing Lake Tulare—which Governor Gavin Newsom has called “surreal” when he visited recently — and I’m especially curious to see whether or not it’s presence ushers in larger changes in the region. The last time this much water collected there was 1983 and it stuck around for two years.

Kurtis Alexander looked at the question of the lake’s future for The San Francisco Chronicle, and spoke to one of the Yokuts tribal communities in the region (“Imagine, if you’re Christian and if the Garden of Eden reappeared, how exciting would that be? It’s the same thing for the tribe,” said Shana Powers, of the Tachi Yokut’s Santa Rosa Rancheria.) and Steve Haze, executive director of the Tulare Basin Watershed Network, which has been working on a longer-term effort to restore parts of the lake to marshland. Over on the California Water Blog, veteran conservation biologist and fisheries expert Peter Moyle asked:

Under the Public Trust Doctrine, how could a navigable lake that supported fisheries (including the Yokuts’ fishery) be turned into private farmland? How did Lake Tulare come to be owned by white settlers, so it could be drained? To the best of my knowledge, the lake was historically a permanent feature of the landscape, maintaining its water even during severe droughts. Now, as the lake arises again, the same question persists: why is it legal to drain Tulare Lake for private gain? 

And while the farmer quoted in the story is, understandably, resistant to seeing a lake replace his crops, it’s worth noting that there’s also a great deal of planning going on related to the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act (SGMA), which will require some land in the Valley to be fallowed, or not farmed, in the coming years in order to essentially ration what’s left of the rapidly disappearing groundwater that collected there over the course of millennia. And some advocates are pushing to see that land fallowed in a way that will create habitat corridors that may help bring back the the plants and animals that have long made their home in the Valley, and provide a new — and by that I also mean old — way of looking at the relationship between the water that moves down through the Sierras into the ever-changing valley.

Books I Want to Read

The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape
By Katie Holten
In addition to collecting writing by several dozen smart people for this anthology, Holten literally created a typeface using trees.

Project 562 : Changing The Way We See Native America
By Matika Wilbur
This one is not specific to climate, but because I see recognizing and lifting up Indigenous knowledge as central to responding to the climate crisis, I’m really looking forward to making my way through this book, for which Wilbur — who is of the Swinomish and Tulalip Tribes — traveled 600,000 miles across 50 states over the course of 10 years to document people in all 562 federally recognized Native American Tribal Nations.

The Visual

I paid a visit to my local super bloom.

Banner design by Mara Greenaway.