It is natural to assume that if we are to summon the necessary will to meet the planetary crisis, we will have to summon the necessary care. We will need to regard Earth as our only home—not idiomatically, and not intellectually, but viscerally. As the Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who pioneered the understanding that our minds have a slow (deliberative) and a fast (intuitive) mode, put it, “To mobilize people, this has to become an emotional issue.” If we continue to experience the struggle to save our planet as a midseason away game, we will be doomed.
Clearly, facts aren’t enough to mobilize us. But what if we can’t summon and sustain the necessary emotions? I’ve wrestled with my own responses to the planetary crisis. It feels obvious to me that I care about the fate of the planet, but if time and energy invested are expressions of caring, it’s undeniable that I care more about the fate of a specific baseball team on the planet, my childhood-hometown Washington Nationals. It feels obvious to me that I am not a climate change denier, but it is undeniable that I behave like one. I would let my kids skip school to participate in the wave at opening day of baseball season, but I do virtually nothing to resist a future in which our home city is underwater.
When researching this book, I was often shocked by what I learned. But I was rarely moved by it. When I was moved, the feeling was transient, and it was never deep enough or durable enough to change my behavior over time. Even the reporting that terrified me, like David Wallace-Wells’s chilling essay “The Uninhabitable Earth”—the most-read article in the history of New York magazine at its time of publication—failed to shake my conscience or to take permanent residence there. This is not the fault of the essay, which is not only revelatory but clever, and pleasurable—in the way that only a nonfiction apocalyptic prophecy can be. It is the fault of the subject. It is excruciatingly, tragically difficult to talk about the planetary crisis in a way that is believed.
Thomas Boyle, Jr., didn’t need information to inspire him to lift the Camaro off Kyle Holtrust; he needed feeling: “All I could think is, what if that was my son?” But what if the emotional connection weren’t as strong? Would he have lifted the car—would he have been able to, would he have tried to—if it had been more difficult to imagine Holtrust as his child? If Holtrust had been a different race or age? What if Boyle had been watching a simulcast of the accident on a screen and been told that deadlifting three thousand pounds would save a victim halfway around the world? Despite the loving relationships most people have with their pets, and the frequency with which animals get struck by cars, there has never been an observed instance of an individual lifting a car off a trapped dog or cat. Our bodies have limits, and so do our emotions. But what if our emotional limits cannot be exceeded?
Writing the Word “Fist”
The last time I checked on my roof was too long ago to say how long ago. It is out of mind because it is out of sight—I literally can’t see its condition, and unlike a water stain on the ceiling, which is aesthetically unpleasant, a decrepit roof is no eyesore or embarrassment. Even if I managed to examine it, as a layperson I probably wouldn’t know it was in need of maintenance until it was in need of replacement. The prospect of having to replace my roof has discouraged me from determining whether I need to.
My younger son had a nightmare while I was taking a shower the other night. I heard his cry through the water, the glass door, and the three walls that separated us. By the time I got to his bed, he had already returned to a peaceful sleep. His lavishly decorated bedroom is beneath a roof that might be deteriorating.
Hysterical strength could explain my ability to hear his quiet cries, but what deficiency allows me to ignore the precarious roof, and the precarious sky above it? I would bet that at some point, every one of the Jews in my grandmother’s village swatted a fly that had landed on their skin. Whatever it is that allows me to ignore my roof and the climate is the same thing that allowed so many of them to stay behind when they knew the Nazis were coming. Our alarm systems are not built for conceptual threats.
I was in Detroit when Hurricane Sandy was about to hit the Eastern Seaboard. All the flights back to New York had been canceled, and it wouldn’t be possible to get on a plane for the next several days. The prospect of not being with my family was intolerable to me. There was nothing to be done at home—we had plenty of bottled water and nonperishable food in the pantry, flashlights with fresh batteries—but I had to be there. I found the last rental car in the area and hit the road at eleven that night. Twelve hours later, I was driving through the front edge of the storm. The wind and rain made progress almost impossible. The final hour took four hours. The kids were sleeping when I got home. I called my parents, as I had promised I would, and my mother told me, “You’re a great father.”
I had driven sixteen hours to get home simply to be there. In the days, months, and years after, I did virtually nothing to lessen the chances of another superstorm pummeling my city. I barely even entertained the question of what I could do.
It felt good to make that drive. Being there, doing nothing, felt good. It felt good to hear my mother’s praise for my parenting and, when they came downstairs, to see my children’s relief at my presence. But what kind of father prioritizes feeling good over doing good?
I was a boy when I learned why the word “ambulance” is written in reverse. I loved the explanation. But now I’m older, and there’s something I can’t figure out: Is there anyone alive who would see an ambulance in their rearview mirror—the bright lights spinning, the sirens blaring—and require the word “ambulance” to identify it? Isn’t it like a boxer writing the word “fist” on his boxing glove?
I run to soothe a nightmare in my son’s head but do almost nothing to prevent a nightmare in the world. If only I could perceive the planetary crisis as a call from my sleeping child. If only I could perceive it as exactly what it is.
Sometimes a fist needs the word “fist” written across it. Hurricane Sandy battered our home and our city. We received those punches without being able to identify them as punches; to most of us, they were just weather. Journalists, news anchors, politicians, and scientists were wary of identifying it as a product of climate change until there was evidence of the kind of irrefutability that will never come. And anyway, what does one do with weather but accept it?
I want to care about the planetary crisis. I think of myself, and want to be thought of, as someone who cares. Just as I think of myself, and want to be thought of, as a great father. Just as I think of myself, and want to be thought of, as someone who cares about civil liberties, economic justice, discrimination, and animal welfare. But these identities—which I flaunt with exhibitionist conscientiousness and dinner-party Op-Eding—inspire responsibility less often than they get me off the hook. They don’t reflect truths so much as offer ways to evade them. They are not identities at all—only identifiers.
The truth is I don’t care about the planetary crisis—not at the level of belief. I make efforts to overcome my emotional limits: I read the reports, watch the documentaries, attend the marches. But my limits don’t budge. If it sounds like I’m protesting too much or being too critical—how could someone claim indifference to the subject of his own book?—it’s because you also have overestimated your commitment while underestimating what is required.
In 2018, despite knowing more than we’ve ever known about human-caused climate change, humans produced more greenhouse gases than we’ve ever produced, at a rate three times that of population growth. There are tidy explanations—the growing use of coal in China and India, a strong global economy, unusually severe seasons that required spikes in energy for heating and cooling. But the truth is as crude as it is obvious: we don’t care.
So now what?
Sticks
Just as our descendants won’t distinguish between those who denied the science of climate change and those who behaved as if they did, neither will they distinguish between those who felt a deep investment in savin
g the planet and those who simply saved it. It might be that we cannot muster strong feelings about our home. It might also be that we don’t need to. In this case, feelings could impede progress rather than facilitate it.
The first photographic portrait of a human was taken in 1839—it was a selfie. Robert Cornelius set up a box fitted with a lens from an opera glass in back of his family’s lamp and chandelier store in Philadelphia. He removed a light-blocking cap from the lens, ran into the frame, remained still for more than a minute, and then ran back and replaced the cap. A little less than two centuries later, ninety-three million selfies are taken every day by Android users alone. Researchers recently identified a condition defined by an urge to take selfies and upload them to social media at least six times a day. They named it “chronic selfitis.”
If a cabal of evil psychologists had concocted climate change as the perfect catastrophe to destroy our species, they might have thrown in MSNBC, social media, and hybrid cars for good measure, each of which can provide a feeling of engagement at the expense of engagement, in much the same way that selfies can make us feel present at the expense of being present.
Explaining the rise of MSNBC, the Republican strategist Stuart Stevens said, “I think there are a lot of people out there who are dramatically troubled by the direction of the country, and they would like to be reminded that (a) they’re not alone, and, (b) there is an alternative.” But loneliness isn’t the problem; the direction of the country is. And being alone together is not an alternative direction, just as a cancer-support group does not shrink a tumor. It’s probably true that viewers of MSNBC are sometimes inspired to give money to progressive candidates, and perhaps there is someone out there whose politics were changed, rather than their loneliness assuaged, by Rachel Maddow. It’s certainly true that a hybrid car gets better mileage than a traditional gas car. But primarily, these things make us feel better. And it can be dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better.
A recent study published in Environmental Science and Technology examined 108 scenarios for adoption of hybrid and fully electric vehicles over the next three decades, considering such variables as oil and gas prices, battery costs, government incentives for alternative fuels, and possible emissions caps. It found that because decreases in tailpipe emissions are largely offset by the increased electricity generation needed to charge car batteries, “the model results do not demonstrate a clear and consistent trend toward lower system-wide emissions.” While that conclusion might be debatable, what isn’t is that an average person’s vehicle emissions are no more than 20 percent of their total carbon emissions. Even managing to live car-free—a far more significant action than switching to a Prius—would only be a start. We need to use cars far less, but we need to do far more than just that. Too often, the feeling of making a difference doesn’t correspond to the difference made—worse, an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done.
Do the children getting vaccines paid for by Bill Gates really care if he feels annoyed when he gives 46 percent of his vast wealth to charity? Do the children dying of preventable diseases really care if Jeff Bezos feels altruistic when he donates only 1.2 percent of his even vaster wealth?
If you found yourself in the back of an ambulance, would you rather have a driver who loathes his job but performs it expertly or one who is passionate about his job but takes twice as long to get you to the hospital?
To save the planet, we need the opposite of a selfie.
A Wave
Honeybees perform a wave to ward off predatory hornets. One after the other, individual bees momentarily flip their abdomens upward, creating an undulating pattern across the nest—the phenomenon is called “shimmering.” The collective fends off the threat, something no individual bee could do on its own.
For every story of an individual lifting a car off someone trapped beneath it, there are a hundred stories of groups of people lifting a car off someone who’s trapped. (And while there are no stories of a person lifting a car off a pet, there are many stories of groups of people doing so.) Someone trapped beneath a car does not distinguish between the astonishing act of the individual and the smaller collective efforts of individuals acting together.
Einstein is quoted as saying, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would have four years left to live.” He almost certainly didn’t say that, and the statement almost certainly isn’t true. Just as the widely cited statistic that one-third of all food crops rely on bee pollination isn’t accurate. But it is the case that bee populations have been collapsing globally because of changing temperatures (among other things, like pesticides, monoculture, and habitat loss from industrial agriculture), and not only will the effects be profound but they are already being felt—determining what kinds of crops can be grown, how they are priced, and how they are farmed.
From China to Australia to California, fruit and nut farmers will often rent bees trucked in from hundreds of miles away to pollinate their trees. And in areas where human labor is less expensive than bee labor—a thought worth pausing on—the trees are pollinated by hand. Workers swarm the fields. Using long sticks with chicken feathers and cigarette filters on one end, they painstakingly transfer pollen from bottles around their necks into the stigma of every flower. A photographer who documented this process said, “On the one hand it’s a story about the human toll on the environment, while on the other it shows our ability to be more efficient in spite of it all.”
Really? Can any sense of the word “efficient” describe a situation where humans are required to do the work of bees? Is there anything resembling an inspiring, or even acceptable, other hand?
Selfie sticks perfectly symbolize the supremacy of social performance—look at me doing something. Pollen sticks perfectly symbolize our planetary crisis—look what happens when no one does anything. It might not be the case that the selfie stick inevitably evolves into a pollen stick, but it won’t be possible to move away from the latter without moving away from the former.
Hold these two images in your mind: an individual lifting a car off someone trapped beneath it, and hundreds of human workers painstakingly placing pollen into flowers. Are those our only options when responding to a crisis? Hysterical strength or hysterical weakness?
No, there is a third option.
I have never started a wave at a baseball game. Waves do not require any more initiative than participation.
I have never experienced a wave reaching me at the precise moment of my feeling roused by enthusiasm. Waves do not require feeling; they generate feeling.
I have never resisted a wave.
Feel Like Acting, Act Like Feeling
Ninety-six percent of American families gather for a Thanksgiving meal. That is higher than the percentage of Americans who brush their teeth every day, have read a book in the last year, or have ever left the state in which they were born. It is almost certainly the broadest collective action—the largest wave—in which Americans partake.
If Americans had set a goal to eat as many turkeys as possible on one day, it’s awfully hard to imagine how we could surpass the forty-six million that are consumed on the third Thursday of November every year. If President Roosevelt had asked us to eat turkeys to support the war effort, if President Kennedy had inspired a moon shot of turkey consumption, I doubt we would have eaten this many. If turkey meals were given out for free on every street corner, I don’t believe more than forty-six million would be eaten. Not even if people were paid to eat turkey. If there were a law obligating Americans to have Thanksgiving meals, the number of people celebrating Thanksgiving would drop.
In his landmark book The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy, the social scientist Richard Titmuss argues that paying blood donors risks having the opposite of its intended effect, because it undermines the most important motivation: altruism. A recent study by the Stockholm School of Economics sought to test Titmu
ss’s theory, and indeed it discovered that for some populations—the findings were particularly dramatic for women—the supply of blood donors can decrease by as much as half when a monetary payment is included.
If you celebrate Thanksgiving—or Christmas, or Passover, or any collective commemoration—do you do so because there are external incentives, like a law or monetary compensation? Because you are spontaneously moved? Or because, like allowing an ambulance to pass or rising when the wave approaches at a baseball game, it is there and it is what you do? Thanksgiving certainly offers pleasures (a good meal, time with family) and frustrations (the hassle of travel, time with family), but for most people, those factors don’t determine the decision to celebrate.
How many people actually decide to celebrate Thanksgiving every year? If the possibility of abstaining were built into the culture—as it is for many national secular holidays, like the Fourth of July—would 96 percent really make the same choice? We arrive at the table not because of feelings but because Thanksgiving is on the calendar, and because we’ve never skipped it before. We do it because we do it. Often, merely participating in an activity produces the feeling that was meant to inspire it in the first place.
There was a study conducted at the Magh Mela, a Hindu festival held in Allahabad, India, and considered to be one of the world’s largest collective events. The control subjects—“comparable others”—did not attend and reported no change in their spiritual identities a month after the event. But pilgrims who had participated “exhibited heightened social identification as a Hindu and increased frequency of prayer rituals.” An altogether different study found that couples who were asked to cuddle for longer than they normally would after having sex reported greater satisfaction with their relationships than the control group. “Engaging in longer and more satisfying post-sex affection over the course of the study was associated with higher relationship and sexual satisfaction three months later,” the researchers concluded.
We Are the Weather Page 3