We Are the Weather

by Jonathan Safran Foer

  So why would Gore deliberately choose to leave it out? Almost certainly for fear that it would be distractingly controversial and dim the enthusiasm he had just worked so hard to ignite. It has also been largely absent from the websites of leading environmental advocacy organizations—although this now seems to be changing. It’s also unmentioned in the celebrated book Dire Predictions, written by the climate scientists Michael E. Mann and Lee R. Kump to educate citizens on the fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2014. After forecasting existential climate disasters, the authors recommend that we substitute clotheslines for electric dryers and commute by bicycle. Among their suggestions, there is no reference to the daily act that is, according to the research director of Project Drawdown—a collection of nearly two hundred environmental scientists and thought leaders dedicated to identifying and modeling substantive solutions to address climate change—“the most important contribution every individual can make to reversing global warming.”

  In America, environmentalists have been fighting an uphill battle from the start, facing the challenges of educating citizens about something abstract and hard to believe, as well as enormous resistance from the fossil fuel industry and, after a brief period of bipartisan cooperation, from most of a political party. If they have spent decades trying to persuade the public that pulling carbon out of the earth and burning it causes climate change, and people still elect a president who has called global warming a Chinese hoax, how can they expect to launch a conversation that challenges fundamental aspects of our personal, familial, and cultural identities? Some organizations and public figures fear losing the momentum and support they worked so hard to achieve. Some fear being accused of hypocrisy. Some fear that shifting the attention away from fossil fuels would undermine decades of efforts to fight the global superpower of Big Oil.

  The politics and psychology of activism matter. Every argument is essentially a story, and certain stories (Rosa Parks) work better than others (Claudette Colvin). Sometimes it is best to hide a challenging reality in service of ultimately leading people back to it. But how truthful is an inconvenient truth that omits one of the greatest contributors to our planetary crisis, which also happens to be the easiest to correct? What if winning the most important war we will ever fight—the struggle for our way of life, and for life itself—depended on a collective act that, relative to the scale of our war, is proportionate to turning off the lights at night? Shouldn’t we at least talk about it? Even for believers, isn’t praying that people will find the strength to change incomplete until we reveal the changes in question?

  Our ways of addressing the planetary crisis aren’t working. Al Gore deserves his Nobel Prize, but the change he has inspired isn’t nearly enough—a fact he readily admits in An Inconvenient Sequel. The institutions of environmentalism deserve our support, but their accomplishments aren’t close to sufficient, either. Anyone who knows the science, and is willing to acknowledge the most inconvenient truth of all, will agree that we are doing far too little, far too slowly, and that our present course leads to our own destruction.

  According to one estimate, electricity use accounts for 25 percent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Agriculture accounts for 24 percent, mostly from animal agriculture. Manufacturing also accounts for 24 percent. Transportation: 14 percent. Buildings: 6 percent. Miscellaneous sources account for the remainder. All these emissions need to fall to zero, which will require innovation and cooperation—a feat that will be impossible if we don’t start talking about every contributing sector.

  The Paris accord’s goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), thought of as an ambitious target, is the outside edge of cataclysm. Even if we are miraculously able to achieve it—recent statistical models put the likelihood at 5 percent—we will be living in a far less hospitable world than the one we know, and many of the changes set in motion would be at best irreversible and at worst self-amplifying. If we defy the heavily stacked odds and limit global warming to 2 degrees:

  •  Sea levels will rise by 1.6 feet, flooding coastlines across the globe. Dhaka (population 18 million), Karachi (15 million), New York (8.5 million), and dozens of other metropolises will be effectively uninhabitable; 143 million people are projected to become climate migrants.

  •  Armed conflict will increase by an estimated 40 percent because of climate change.

  •  Greenland will tip into irreversible melt.

  •  Between 20 and 40 percent of the Amazon will be destroyed.

  •  The European heat wave of 2003—which cost more than seventy thousand lives and thirteen billion euros in crop losses, and brought the Rivers Po, Rhine, and Loire to historic lows—will be the annual norm.

  •  Human mortality will dramatically increase because of heat waves, floods, and droughts. There will be rampant increases in asthma and other respiratory illnesses. The number of people at risk of malaria will increase by several hundred million.

  •  Four hundred million people will suffer from water scarcity.

  •  Warmer oceans will irreparably damage 99 percent of coral reefs, disrupting ecosystems for nine million species.

  •  Half of all animal species will face extinction.

  •  A total of 60 percent of all plant species will face extinction.

  •  Wheat yields will be reduced by 12 percent, rice by 6.4 percent, maize by 17.8 percent, and soybeans by 6.2 percent.

  •  Global GDP per capita will drop by an estimated 13 percent.

  These are some upsetting statistics, whose emotional impact is unlikely to survive to the end of this sentence. That is, the horrific future they describe will be acknowledged by most readers of this book and believed by few. I am sharing these figures with the hope that you will believe them. But I don’t believe them.

  Meeting the goals of the Paris accord and living in the world described above is the best-case scenario. The few experts who think we have any realistic chance of achieving those goals are either deceiving themselves or, more likely, weaponizing optimism to alter the odds. The truth is, even if we were to somehow turn off all lights and outlaw all automobiles, without making the change that those like Gore know but don’t talk about, we have no chance.

  When I was a boy, my father told me that the best way to get rid of a bee was not to run from it, swat at it, or even stand motionless, but to close my eyes and count to ten. “It will work every single time,” he said. “And if it doesn’t, count to twenty.” It did work, but advice that works isn’t always good advice.

  There were a number of subjects my family didn’t talk about when I was young, the echoing traumas of the Holocaust chief among them. Who could blame us for closing our eyes until that threat seemed to go away? I have my own family now, and my own avoided subjects. I don’t blame myself for wanting to protect my children (and myself) from pain. Those acts of willful blindness are acts of love. But I will have to blame myself if closing my eyes permits far greater pain to grow, in the same way that I will have to blame myself if one day I am diagnosed with an illness that would have been treatable had I gone to a doctor before symptoms expressed themselves. I think of myself as health conscious, but I haven’t had a physical in years. Like you, I think of myself as many things, as if the thinking made it so. In the meantime, while I think—while you think, while we think—our actions and inactions create and destroy the world.

  * * *

  Imagine the scene: More than 150,000 soldiers are storming the beaches at Normandy. It is the largest amphibious invasion ever mounted. Even at the time, it is recognized as a hinge moment in history. The operation is happening now, June 6, 1944, because the full moon is necessary for the tide and for illumination. The Allied planning for the invasion has involved creating more than seventeen million maps, training four thousand new cooks to feed the collected men, constructing a duplicate of Nazi shore defenses for training,
and sewing hundreds of dummies—sometimes dressed with boots and helmets, sometimes equipped with recordings of gunfire and explosions—to be dropped at various locations to divide German attention. The soldiers wading onto the beach have come from a dozen countries. They are supposed to be no younger than eighteen and no older than forty-one, although younger and older men have enlisted with falsified documents. The landing crafts push forward, releasing as many as two hundred men at a time into the storm of war.

  A child’s father pulls the trigger of his rifle, hears the crack of the shot. He is unaware that he just fired a blank.

  A Jewish soldier from Pittsburg fires ten blanks per second from an M1919 machine gun.

  Someone’s piano teacher’s hand is shaking too violently to fire the first shot from a pistol loaded with blanks.

  Someone’s favorite outfielder throws a grenade as deadly as a baseball.

  The bayonet at the end of someone’s child’s rifle ends in a blunt stump.

  Because of the chaos of the battlefield, and because each soldier’s experience is wholly consuming for him, and because it feels like fighting, no one realizes that it only feels like fighting—that he is as effective a soldier as the dummies parachuting from the sky.

  * * *

  Close your eyes and count to ten.

  Advice that seems to work doesn’t always work.

  The final time I closed my eyes to get rid of a bee, the bee stung me on my eyelid. My eye swelled and wouldn’t open. As if that bee’s father had told it the best way to get rid of a human was to land on its closed eye.

  Ours Alone

  General Eisenhower prepared a statement in the event that the D-Day invasion was repelled:

  Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone.

  Of his historic moon walk, Neil Armstrong said:

  When you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this whole thing off.

  Show Your Hands

  This is a book about the impacts of animal agriculture on the environment. Yet I have managed to conceal that for the previous sixty-three pages. I have navigated away from the subject for the same reasons that Gore and others have: fear that it is a losing hand. I evaded even while I was critiquing Gore for his evasion—I never mentioned what he never mentions. I felt sure, as Gore must have, that it was the right strategy. Conversations about meat, dairy, and eggs make people defensive. They make people annoyed. No one who isn’t a vegan is eager to go there, and the eagerness of vegans can be a further turnoff. But we have no hope of tackling climate change if we can’t speak honestly about what is causing it, as well as our potential, and our limits, to change in response. Sometimes a fist needs the word “fist” written across it, so I’ll name it now: we cannot save the planet unless we significantly reduce our consumption of animal products.

  This book is an argument for a collective act to eat differently—specifically, no animal products before dinner. That is a difficult argument to make, both because the topic is so fraught and because of the sacrifice involved. Most people like the smell and taste of meat, dairy, and eggs. Most people value the roles animal products play in their lives and aren’t prepared to adopt new eating identities. Most people have eaten animal products at almost every meal since they were children, and it’s hard to change lifelong habits, even when they aren’t freighted with pleasure and identity. Those are meaningful challenges, not only worth acknowledging but necessary to acknowledge. Changing the way we eat is simple compared with converting the world’s power grid, or overcoming the influence of powerful lobbyists to pass carbon-tax legislation, or ratifying a significant international treaty on greenhouse gas emissions—but it isn’t simple.

  In my early thirties, I spent three years researching factory farming and wrote a book-length rejection of it called Eating Animals. I then spent nearly two years giving hundreds of readings, lectures, and interviews on the subject, making the case that factory-farmed meat should not be eaten. So it would be far easier for me not to mention that in difficult periods over the past couple of years—while going through some painful personal passages, while traveling the country to promote a novel when I was least suited for self-promotion—I ate meat a number of times. Usually burgers. Often at airports. Which is to say, meat from precisely the kinds of farms I argued most strongly against. And my reason for doing so makes my hypocrisy even more pathetic: they brought me comfort. I can imagine this confession eliciting some ironic comments and eye-rolling, and some giddy accusations of fraudulence. Other readers may find it genuinely disturbing—I wrote at length, and passionately, about how factory farming tortures animals and destroys the environment. How could I argue for radical change, how could I raise my children as vegetarians, while eating meat for comfort?

  I wish I had found comfort elsewhere—in something that would have provided it in a lasting way and that wasn’t anathema to my convictions—but I am who I am, and I did what I did. Even while I was working on this book, and having my commitment to vegetarianism—which had been driven by the issue of animal welfare—deepened by a full awareness of meat’s environmental toll, rarely a day has passed when I haven’t craved it. At times I’ve wondered if my strengthening intellectual rejection of it has fueled a strengthening desire to consume it. Whatever the case, I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that while actions might be at least somewhat responsive to will, cravings aren’t. I have felt a version of Felix Frankfurter’s knowledge-without-belief, and that has led me to some real struggling, and at times to extreme hypocrisy. I find it almost unbearably embarrassing to share this. But it needs to be shared.

  While I was promoting Eating Animals, people frequently asked me why I wasn’t vegan. The animal welfare and environmental arguments against dairy and eggs are the same as those against meat, and often stronger. Sometimes I would hide behind the challenges of cooking for two finicky children. Sometimes I would bend the truth and describe myself as “effectively vegan.” In fact, I had no answer, other than the one that felt too shameful to voice: my desire to eat cheese and eggs was stronger than my commitment to preventing cruelty to animals and the destruction of the environment. I found some relief from that tension by telling other people to do what I couldn’t do myself.

  Confronting my hypocrisy has reminded me how difficult it is to live—even to try to live—with open eyes. Knowing that it will be tough helps make the efforts possible. Efforts, not effort. I cannot imagine a future in which I decide to become a meat-eater again, but I cannot imagine a future in which I don’t want to eat meat. Eating consciously will be one of the struggles that span and define my life. I understand that struggle not as an expression of my uncertainty about the right way to eat, but as a function of the complexity of eating.

  We do not simply feed our bellies, and we do not simply modify our appetites in response to principles. We eat to satisfy primitive cravings, to forge and express ourselves, to realize community. We eat with our mouths and stomachs, but also with our minds and hearts. All my different identities—father, son, American, New Yorker, progressive, Jew, writer, environmentalist, traveler, hedonist—are present when I eat, and so is my history. When I first chose to become vegetarian, as a nine-year-old, my motivation was simple: do not hurt animals. Over the years, my motivations changed—because the available information changed, but more importantly, because my life changed. As I imagine is the case for most people, aging has proliferated my identities. Time softens ethical binaries and fosters a greater appreciation of what might be called the messiness of life.

  If I’d read the previous sentences in high scho
ol, I’d have dismissed them as a bursting sack of self-serving bullshit—messiness of life?—and been deeply disappointed by the flimsy person I was to become. I’m glad that I was who I was then, and I hope that other young people have the same inflexible idealism. But I’m glad that I am who I am now, not because it is easier but because it is in better dialogue with my world, which is different from the world I occupied twenty-five years ago.

  There is a place at which one’s personal business and the business of being one of seven billion earthlings intersect. And for perhaps the first moment in history, the expression “one’s time” makes little sense. Climate change is not a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table, which can be returned to when the schedule allows and the feeling inspires. It is a house on fire. The longer we fail to take care of it, the harder it becomes to take care of, and because of positive feedback loops—white ice melting to dark water that absorbs more heat; thawing permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases—we will very soon reach a tipping point of “runaway climate change,” when we will be unable to save ourselves, no matter our efforts.

  We do not have the luxury of living in our time. We cannot go about our lives as if they were only ours. In a way that was not true for our ancestors, the lives we live will create a future that cannot be undone. Imagine if history were such that if Lincoln hadn’t abolished slavery in 1863, then America would be condemned to uphold the institution of slavery for the rest of time. Imagine if the right of two people of the same sex to marry depended entirely and eternally on Obama’s conversion in 2012. When speaking about moral progress, Obama often quoted Martin Luther King’s statement that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In this unprecedented moment, the arc could irreparably snap.

  There are several pivotal moments in the Bible when God asks people where they are. The two most cited instances are when he finds Adam hiding after eating the forbidden fruit and says “Where are you?,” and when he calls to Abraham before asking him to sacrifice his only son. Clearly an omniscient God knows where his creations are. His questions are not about the location of a body in space but about the location of a self within a person.