We Are the Weather

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  While it’s true that people celebrate Thanksgiving to express gratitude, and participate in religious festivals to express religious identity, and cuddle to express affection, the initial motivation doesn’t always need to be strong, or even present at all. Motivation can beget action, but—more remarkably—action can also beget motivation. We don’t trek to the desert to look up at the stars because we’re feeling spiritual. We feel spiritual because we are in the desert looking at the stars. We don’t fight lines at airports and travel thousands of miles for Thanksgiving dinner because we feel especially close to our families in the third week of November. We feel that special closeness because of the journey and meal.

  After the grocery store Pay and Save put green arrows on the floor leading to fruit and vegetable aisles, 90 percent of shoppers followed the path, and sales of fresh produce skyrocketed.

  In countries where citizens have to opt in to organ donation, about 15 percent do so. In countries where they have to opt out—where the default is organ donation—the number of organ donors rises to about 90 percent.

  By nudging men to aim at the right place, playful stickers—houseflies, targets, the New England Patriots’ logo—applied near urinal drains reduce spillage by as much as 80 percent.

  While it is probably the case that if the celebration of Thanksgiving were legally enforced, fewer people would celebrate it, it is certainly the case that if the celebration of Thanksgiving were not facilitated by being a national holiday, fewer people would celebrate it. The collective action occurs because the structure encourages it—our amorphous, un-urgent emotions about Thanksgiving need a scaffolding.

  * * *

  About 37 percent of registered voters voted in the 2014 midterm elections in the United States. In the 2016 presidential election—widely referred to as “the most important election of our time”—about 60 percent voted. Why is there near-unanimous participation in the collective action of Thanksgiving while so few people participate in American democracy? Each requires some work, and each offers a deep gratification. But only one of them shapes the world for the next four years. We have no trouble celebrating history together, but we find it difficult to participate in its creation.

  Unlike Thanksgiving, Election Day is not a national holiday. Although the events often occur weeks apart, and although the latter is far more practically consequential than the former, significantly more people show up at Thanksgiving than do at the polls. Thanksgiving is inviting. For many, voting is prohibitive. Most people would describe their experience of Thanksgiving as sitting at a table and enjoying a leisurely meal with loved ones. Most people would describe voting as standing in a long line among strangers, often in inclement weather, worrying about being late to work, or worrying about being late to dinner, and then worrying about whether they filled out the bizarrely complicated ballot properly.

  Of course, there is an alternative. We could make Election Day a national holiday, giving everyone the day off from work and school. We could allow people to vote online, as we allow them to pay taxes online. We could greatly simplify the ballot, show images of the candidates beside their names …

  Various architectures exist to encourage the celebration of certain values and the consumption of certain foods on Thanksgiving. Architectures also exist to discourage voting.

  Some events—seeing a teenager trapped under a car, hearing a child crying out in his sleep, feeling an insect land on your skin, competing at an Olympic event, participating in military combat—generate feelings that facilitate actions. Yet many events equally, and often more urgently, require actions that they don’t inspire. Conceptual events—the Nazis approaching your village, a national observance of gratitude, an offshore war, a presidential election, climate change—require structures that facilitate actions that generate feelings.

  Building a new structure requires architects, and often it requires dismantling the existing structures in the way, even if we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing them that we no longer see them at all.

  Where Do Waves Begin?

  “When, at the end of this great struggle, we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no ‘sacrifice.’” Americans heard those disembodied words through their radios; Roosevelt delivered them from a wheelchair. History’s most public polio patient was also its most private. He never denied having lost the use of his legs, but he carefully stage-managed his political appearance: photographers who took pictures of him in a wheelchair were banned from the White House press corps; he rarely entered or exited a car in public; he wore steel braces to support his legs when standing. If you’ve ever watched a video of Roosevelt delivering a speech—perhaps the “Infamy” speech to Congress—you’ve probably noticed that his head gestures almost spastically. His chin is substituting for his hands, which are gripping the podium to keep him upright.

  Despite his privacy, Roosevelt was instrumental in the development of a polio vaccine. In 1938, he helped create the organization that would come to be known as the March of Dimes, which became the primary funding source for polio research. One recipient of that funding was Jonas Salk. In 1952, after successfully inoculating thousands of monkeys with his unorthodox “killed virus” vaccine, Salk began human testing—his first patients were himself, his wife, and their three sons. Two years later, he initiated the clinical trial, which would become the largest public health experiment in the country’s history. Despite there being no guarantee that the vaccine was safe, nearly two million people became “polio pioneers.” On April 12, 1955—a decade, to the day, after Roosevelt’s death—the results of the trials were made public. The vaccine was “safe, effective, and potent.” Jonas Salk had cured polio.

  * * *

  When a social norm changes quickly, it allows people—releases them—to act. But as with a wave at a baseball game, even if the participants are eager to join, collective actions need to be set in motion. For more than two hundred years after the first Thanksgiving meal, different colonies, and then states, commemorated different Thanksgivings. They were celebrated on different days (often in different seasons); some involved feasts of regionally specific foods, and some involved fasting. George Washington declared a Thanksgiving Day in February 1795. John Adams declared one in 1798 and one in 1799. Thomas Jefferson chose not to declare any. It wasn’t until 1863—the middle of the Civil War—that Abraham Lincoln, in an effort to unify the fractured nation, proclaimed the last Thursday of every November a national holiday. The Thanksgiving that we celebrate today is meant to commemorate a feast shared between the Plymouth colonists and Wampanoag Indians in 1621, but when Lincoln first proposed the holiday in a speech, he emphasized general gratitude that “harmony has prevailed everywhere except in the theatre of military conflict.” Whatever his reasons, by codifying the holiday and making it easy to celebrate, Lincoln created a new norm.

  While most children received Salk’s vaccine in the months after its approval, the rate of vaccination among teenagers, who were also vulnerable to polio, was low. (Because polio was also known as “infantile paralysis,” there was a misconception that only infants and toddlers could be stricken.) In 1956, before going on The Ed Sullivan Show to support the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (now known as the March of Dimes), Elvis Presley was photographed receiving his polio vaccination. The photographs were then published in newspapers across the country. That moment has been cited for a parabolic increase in vaccinations—a widely circulated if dubious statistic claimed the event raised immunization levels in the United States “from 0.6% to 80% in just 6 months!” Which might suggest that Elvis eradicated polio in America.

  * * *

  When I was young, people smoked cigarettes on airplanes. It is so unthinkable now, I had to check to make sure I was remembering correctly. How do we regard the prevalence of smoking in our near past, a norm in which nearly every demographic—including children and pregnant women—participated? Probably the same way people from environmentally conscienti
ous countries regard Americans. The way our descendants will regard us.

  Over the past decades, smoking norms changed: how many people smoke, how often, and where. What once was acceptable and even attractive became taboo, or at least unpleasant. So-called sin taxes and legislation helped—and resistance from industry lobbyists hurt—but the changes were primarily engendered by grassroots campaigns. Most people want to do what’s good for the world, when it doesn’t come at personal expense. Smoking is a physically addictive habit whose global implications (secondhand smoke and the health-care burden of cancer) feel remote. Yet the smoking rate in America has halved in my lifetime, largely because of grassroots campaigns. That sounds like a triumph, but it is a failure.

  Why has smoking only halved? And what has taken so long? As early as 1949, 60 percent of Americans said that cigarette smoking was harmful to health. Information wasn’t the obstacle then, and it certainly isn’t the obstacle now. How do we reconcile the broadly accepted knowledge that smoking kills and the reality that there are still more smokers in America (nearly thirty-eight million) than there are people in Canada? Why would someone as aware and deliberate as Barack Obama still occasionally indulge a habit that, on average, reduces life span by twenty years? Probably for the same reason someone as aware and deliberate as Obama did not adequately address climate change. Many forces are stronger than a conceptual threat.

  The tobacco industry has genetically altered cigarettes to be twice as addictive as they were fifty years ago and has disproportionately marketed them in low-income neighborhoods, often near schools. The industry has offered free cigarettes in housing projects and handed out tobacco coupons with food stamps. Despite the rising cost of cigarettes, nearly three in four smokers are from low-income neighborhoods.

  Just as social movements like polio vaccination, #MeToo, smoking cessation, and environmentalism are advanced by concurrent forces, they are also hindered by concurrent forces.

  * * *

  Elvis’s public vaccination might have contributed to the dramatic leap in immunization, but it didn’t cause it. According to the historian Stephen Mawdsley,

  It was obviously a help in getting teenagers to take up the vaccine, but—intriguingly—not an overwhelming one. The real game-changer came through the teenagers themselves. With the help of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, they established a group called Teens Against Polio, canvassed door-to-door, and set up dances where only vaccinated individuals could get in. It showed, almost for the first time, the power of teens in understanding and connecting with their own demographic.

  Social change, much like climate change, is caused by multiple chain reactions that occur simultaneously. Both cause, and are caused by, feedback loops. No single factor can be credited for a hurricane, drought, or wildfire, just as no single factor can be credited for a decline in cigarette smoking—and yet in all cases, every factor is significant. When a radical change is needed, many argue that it is impossible for individual actions to incite it, so it’s futile for anyone to try. This is exactly the opposite of the truth: the impotence of individual action is a reason for everyone to try.

  On November 1, 2018, an estimated twenty thousand Google employees participated in a wave of international walkouts, mainly protesting the company’s handling of sexual misconduct cases. The walkouts came together in less than a week, and more than 60 percent of Google’s offices around the world participated. The collective response was especially significant because it challenged the kind of individualism that reigns as the dominating ethos of Silicon Valley. In a news release, the organizers of the protest said, “This is part of a growing movement, not just in tech, but across the country, including teachers, fast-food workers and others who are using their strength in numbers to make real change.” A week later, Google granted the organizers’ first request: it ended forced arbitration for sexual harassment. (Forced arbitration had previously prevented sexual harassment complaints from reaching the courts.) Days later, Facebook, Airbnb, and eBay followed suit.

  In less than a week, an international protest was organized. A week later, Google changed its corporate policy. Days after that, three other major companies changed theirs. All this occurred in less than a month.

  Polio couldn’t have been cured without someone inventing a vaccine—that required an architecture of support (funding from the March of Dimes) and knowledge (Jonas Salk’s medical breakthrough). But that vaccine couldn’t have been approved without a wave of polio pioneers volunteering for a trial—their feelings were irrelevant; it was their participation in the collective action that allowed the cure to be brought to the public. And that approved vaccine would have been worthless if it had not become a social contagion, and therefore a norm—its success was the result of both top-down publicity campaigns and grassroots advocacy.

  Who cured polio?

  No one did.

  Everyone did.

  Open Your Eyes

  Like its author, most people reading this book are not scientists on the level of Jonas Salk or celebrities on the level of Elvis. We live our lives without making ripples, much less waves. And when it comes to the planetary crisis, most of us feel lost inside the causes and effects, confused by the ever-changing statistics, frustrated by the rhetoric. We feel powerless, yet inexplicably calm. How are we, ordinary civilians, supposed to do anything about a crisis that we know about but don’t believe in, that we have a muddled (at best) understanding of, and that we have no obvious ways to combat?

  Watching Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was an intellectual and emotional revelation for me. When the screen went dark after the final image, our situation seemed perfectly clear, as did my responsibility to participate in the struggle. Like the tens of thousands of Americans who went straight to their local recruiting offices upon hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, I felt eager to enlist.

  And when that film’s credits rolled, at the moment of greatest enthusiasm to do whatever was asked to work against the imminent apocalypse that Gore had just delineated for us, suggested actions appeared on the screen. “Are you ready to change the way you live? The climate crisis can be solved. Here’s how to start.”

  Tell your parents not to ruin the world that you will live in.

  If you are a parent, join with your children to save the world they will live in.

  Switch to renewable sources of energy.

  Call your power company to see if they offer green energy. If they don’t, ask them why not.

  Vote for leaders who pledge to solve this crisis.

  Write to congress. If they don’t listen, run for congress.

  Plant trees, lots of trees.

  Speak up in your community.

  Call radio shows and write newspapers.

  Insist that America freeze CO2 emissions.

  Join international efforts to stop global warming.

  Reduce our dependence on foreign oil; help farmers grow alcohol fuels.

  Raise fuel economy standards; require lower emissions from automobiles.

  If you believe in prayer, pray that people will find the strength to change.

  In the words of the old African proverb, when you pray, move your feet.

  Encourage everyone you know to see this movie.

  I found that list frustratingly vague (Call radio shows and say what exactly, and toward what end?), unproductive (I can tell my parents not to ruin the world that I will live in, and they can tell their parents the same, but at some point, doesn’t someone have to actually do something?), plainly unrealistic (“Hello, Mr. President, it’s me. Sorry I had you on hold—I was just helping some farmers grow alcohol fuels—but now that I have you, I insist that America freeze CO2 emissions”), and tautological in a way that would have been laughable if I weren’t on the verge of tears (Watch this movie so that you can encourage others to watch this movie so that they can encourage others to watch this movie).

  It is good to speak up, good to recycle, to plant trees, lots of
trees. Those activities are good in the way that combing the skies for enemy planes that will never be there is good: to remind us that a war is being fought, to generate solidarity and will. According to a 2017 analysis, recycling and tree planting are among the most often recommended personal choices to combat climate change, but they aren’t “high impact”—they are feelings more than actions. Among other actions that are considered to be important but aren’t high impact: installing solar panels, conserving energy, eating locally, composting, washing clothes with cold water and hang-drying them, being sensitive to the amounts and kinds of packaging, buying organic food, replacing a conventional car with a hybrid. People who make those efforts—and only those efforts—are saying the word “fist” to an object they want to punch. Planes patrolling Midwestern skies without boots on the ground in Europe would have been suicidal.

  There is a glaring absence in Gore’s list, and its invisibility recurs in 2017’s An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, with one minuscule exception. It is impossible to explain this omission as accidental without also accusing Gore of a kind of radical ignorance or malpractice. In terms of the scale of the error, it would be equivalent to a doctor prescribing physical exercise to a patient recovering from a heart attack without also telling him he needs to quit smoking, reduce his stress, and stop eating burgers and fries twice a day.