America is also known for its “resourcefulness,” due to both its innovation and its consumption. And although there is a temptation to describe the planetary crisis in apocalyptic terms, imagining total human extinction, the truth is that many of us who live in high-income nations with varied landscapes and sophisticated technology will survive our climate suicide. But we will suffer permanent injuries. When Kevin Hines jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, he shattered two vertebrae—most survivors sustain broken bones and punctured organs. We will be displaced by extreme weather, our coasts will become unlivable, and our economy will crash. Armed conflicts will erupt, food prices will soar, water will be rationed, pollution-related illnesses will skyrocket, mosquitoes will invade. And our psychologies will be changed by the traumas: being separated from our families in extreme weather events, leaving aging parents behind in places debilitated by drought or flooding so that children might have less arduous lives, competing for resources in ways more explicit and less civilized than we ever have before.
If we regard American apathy toward climate change as a kind of suicide, our suicide is made grislier by the fact that we aren’t primarily the ones to die from it. Most of the populations that are already dying from climate change, and the populations that climate change will kill in the future, reside in places with minimal carbon footprints, places like Bangladesh, Haiti, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and India. They will not die for lack of resourcefulness.
At this moment in the environmental movement, we can jump from the bridge, or we can cross it. We can allow the fear that it’s too late or too difficult to ensure resources for future generations to incapacitate us, or we can allow those fears to capacitate us. We are their—and our—most valuable resource.
Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. I am nearly my grandfather’s age when he killed himself. In the sense of facing the choice of whether to live, we all are his age.
The Flood and the Ark
One of the largest mass suicides in history is one of my culture’s seminal stories. Around 72 C.E., troops from the Roman Empire laid siege to the mountaintop Jewish community of Masada. For at least a month and a half, the greatly outnumbered Jews held off their Roman attackers. But when it became clear that the battle was lost, they committed suicide to avoid capture. As taking one’s own life is prohibited by Jewish law, the citizens of Masada drew lots and killed each other in turn, until there was only one Jew remaining—the only one then required to break Jewish law. The only one to die from his suicide.
I visited Masada as a child and was encouraged to see the collective suicide as a symbol of Jewish resistance: a heroic alternative to submission. But it struck me, even then, as fanatical. Why not try to negotiate a surrender? Why not just pretend to convert? Why not live to fight another day, or at least live to live another day?
The Masada suicide was also at odds with the heroism I was taught to revere with other foundational stories, like that of the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto in World War II—those whose fate Jan Karski came to America to share. In a situation no less dire than that of the Jews of Masada, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews battled to the end. They dug underground bunkers and tunnels, built passages across rooftops, stole a tiny arsenal of guns, made their own crude weapons, initiated an armed resistance, and fought until no more fighting was possible.
Much of what is known of the Warsaw Ghetto comes by way of the Ringelblum Archive, a collection of testimonies, artifacts, and documents secretly collected by a team of ghetto Jews, led by the historian Emanuel Ringelblum. More than thirty-five thousand pages were placed in milk cans and buried for future discovery. As one of the documents, written by a nineteen-year-old in 1942, attests: “What we were unable to cry and shriek out to the world we buried in the ground … I would love to see the moment in which the great treasure will be dug up and scream the truth at the world … May the treasure fall into good hands, may it last into better times, may it alarm and alert the world to what happened.”
What is known of the Masada mass suicide comes by way of Flavius Josephus. There is ample archaeological evidence of a Jewish community at Masada, but little reason to believe the historical accuracy of Josephus’s story. The myth of the collective suicide has been perpetuated and spread because there have been such strong incentives to keep those deaths alive. A tiny, new country, surrounded by neighbors that dwarf it and want to destroy it, needs others to believe in its unconditional refusal to surrender. And it needs to believe in it as well.
* * *
Carved into the rock of a permafrost mountain in Norway, 130 meters above sea level, is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest collection of agricultural biodiversity. In the event of a total agricultural collapse, the global seed vault could supply food security.
The structure was built to withstand the test of time, extreme weather, and human attacks. But in 2017—the world’s hottest year on record—unusual melting and rain flooded the tunnel entrance. Because the vault is kept at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 degrees Fahrenheit), the water froze and did not reach the seeds. Now Norway plans to spend about $12.7 million to implement even more protective measures. But the episode proved that even a structure designed to endure “the challenge of natural or man-made disasters” may not be able to endure a man-made natural disaster.
Another effort, called the Frozen Ark Project, strives “to facilitate and promote the conservation of tissue, cells and DNA from endangered animals.” Separately, Moscow State University recently received Russia’s largest ever scientific grant to create a DNA bank, dubbed “Noah’s Ark,” whose goal is to include genetic material from every living and extinct species of organism.
The Masada story and the Ringelblum Archive are seed vaults that we can draw upon. So is my daydream of going back in time and warning the Jews of my grandmother’s village: “You have to do something!” So is Karski’s successful effort to inform Frankfurter but failed effort to move him. In times of unprecedented threat, we can reach into history for help. We can also reach into the future. In the final lines of An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore says, “Future generations may well have occasion to ask themselves, ‘What were our parents thinking? Why didn’t they wake up when they had a chance?’ We have to hear that question from them now.”
We can uncover testimonies from the past, listen to testimonies from the present, and imagine testimonies from the future. But it is not enough to be convinced by them. We need to be converted.
* * *
The Noah invoked by the DNA-bank projects was the first person born in the world after Adam’s death—the first person who could have no direct contact with a living memory of Eden. He was the first person to enter a world in which natural death was present, the first to age knowing that he must die.
It is written that “Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time.” Why “blameless in his time” and not simply “righteous”? Because righteousness and blame are contextual. Being a good person at Normandy on June 6, 1944, is not the same as being a good person in a grocery store in 2019. The Warsaw Ghetto demanded something different from what Superstorm Sandy did. Eating blamelessly two generations ago is not the same as eating blamelessly in the age of the factory farm. Just as a situation can inspire hysterical strength, it can also inspire, and require, an unprecedented ethical response. The something we have to do must respond to the something that needs to be done.
Noah is described as ish ha’adama, a “man of the earth”—an ironic, or perhaps perfectly fitting, title for someone most strongly associated with a deluge. About one hundred years pass between God instructing Noah to build the ark and God enacting the flood. A century might seem like a long time, but even in the context of a biblical story, it is remarkable that a man and his sons (with no modern tools, no electricity, no Home Depot) were able to build a structure large enough to save two of every kind of animal so quickly.
But a century is an almost impossibly long period to have to sustain bel
ief. Imagine what those years must have been like for Noah—every day being dismissed as crazy, every day committing his full identity (his labors, his resources, his purpose) to something that could not be proved. The further time separated him from God’s instruction—the more over there the command felt—the more difficult it must have been to maintain the necessary conviction. It must have required a constant internal dialogue, and a steady supply of apologies. Would civilians participate in blackouts for a war one hundred years in the future?
Yet Noah was luckier than we are. We have far less than a century to construct our ark—we have, perhaps, a decade to make the changes we haven’t yet found a way to honestly dispute, with others or with ourselves. And unlike Noah, we have to do it without belief. Without instructions from above, we not only have to motivate ourselves to act, we also have to choose what kind of ark to construct. Our ark could be a spacecraft for colonizing Mars. It could be a seed bank to start over after the collapse of plant life or a DNA bank to start over after the collapse of animal life. It could be an act of collective suicide. Or it could be a wave of collective action.
After the floodwaters receded, God presented the rainbow as a symbol of His covenant with all creation never again to destroy the earth: this planet will be our only home. “My bow I have set in the clouds to be a sign of the covenant between Me and the Earth, and so, when I send clouds over the Earth, the bow will appear in the cloud. Then I will remember My covenant, between Me and you and every living creature of all flesh, and the waters will no more become a Flood to destroy all flesh. And the bow shall be in the cloud and I will see it, to remember the everlasting covenant between God and all living creatures, all flesh that is on the Earth.”
He uses the word “remember” twice. It is strange that an all-powerful being would need an aid to remember not to eradicate His most important creation. The God of the Torah is forgetful, and requires reminders—the groaning of slaves in Egypt, symbols of His covenants—and He makes clear that the reminder is for Him. But this is no “note to self” on the bedside pad of paper. God’s reminder is dramatic and public—literally written across the sky. So whatever the intent, the rainbow is also a memory aid for Noah. For humanity. We are reminded of what God did to us, and for us, and what God promised. But more, the rainbow reminds us of the possibility of destruction, which reminds us of something that seems so essential, it shouldn’t require any reminder, but because it’s so essential, requires a reminder more than anything else does: we don’t want to be destroyed.
Globally, more people die of suicide than war, murder, and natural disasters combined. We are more likely to kill ourselves than we are to be killed and, in that sense, ought to fear ourselves more than we fear others. A rainbow is also a rope: it can be thrown to a drowning person, or it can be tied into a noose.
No one who isn’t us is going to destroy Earth, and no one who isn’t us is going to save it. The most hopeless conditions can inspire the most hopeful actions. We have found ways to restore life on Earth in the event of a total collapse because we have found ways to cause a total collapse of life on Earth. We are the flood, and we are the ark.
That Is the Question
On the morning of April 14, 2018, the civil rights attorney David Buckel entered a section of Brooklyn’s Prospect Park that I have entered thousands of times. When I lived in the neighborhood, it’s where I would often go to walk my dog, play with my children, or simply gather my thoughts. At 5:55 a.m., Buckel sent an e-mail to news outlets explaining the decision he was about to make. He then doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire.
According to his husband and friends, he had not been depressed. And he had enough presence of mind to leave at least four separate messages explaining his act. The briefest of these notes was handwritten: “I am David Buckel and I just killed myself by fire as a protest suicide.”
A second note was found wrapped in a garbage bag in a shopping cart nearby. It read: “Pollution ravages our planet, oozing inhabitability via air, soil, water and weather. Our present grows more desperate, our future needs more than we’ve been doing.”
Buckel was a civil rights lawyer who had every reason to believe that progress was more than fantasy. He was a nationally recognized pioneer for gay and transgender rights. Gay marriage was legalized in Buckel’s adulthood, thanks in part to his efforts. In an atmosphere of apathy and resignation, he seemed hopeful and motivated. Those who have characterized his suicide as an act of defeatism ignore the fact that his death was explicitly a protest. And there is no action more dependent on the belief that things could be different than a protest. “Honorable purpose in life invites honorable purpose in death,” Buckel said in his suicide note.
* * *
Three months later, The New York Times ran the essay “Raising My Child in a Doomed World.” Half a dozen friends sent it to me. On the first read, I found it poignant. Its author was Roy Scranton, the same man who wrote “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene.” Scranton describes the powerful mixture of emotions he felt upon the birth of his child: “I cried two times when my daughter was born.” First came tears of joy, then sadness: “My partner and I had, in our selfishness, doomed our daughter to life on a dystopian planet, and I could see no way to shield her from the future.”
I was grateful for another addition to the conversation about the planetary crisis. Scranton is not only thoughtful but passionate, informed, and a damned good writer. He voiced something that I have often felt as a parent. And it’s no coincidence that so many people forwarded it to me, and that all of them were parents.
In this essay (and others), Scranton addresses the environmental crisis with the kind of philosophical rigor that is lacking from the present dialogue—a kind of thinking that we desperately need in order to comprehend our crisis. As David Wallace-Wells observes in his “Uninhabitable Earth” article, “We have not developed much of a religion of meaning around climate change that might comfort us, or give us purpose, in the face of possible annihilation.” Scranton advances a religion here, but it doesn’t give us purpose in the face of annihilation. As I reread the essay, I felt frustration, even anger. The longer I spent with it, the more it read as a kind of suicide note.
When considering the “ethics of living in a carbon-fueled consumer society,” Scranton notes that many advocate for living more responsibly. “Take the widely cited 2017 research letter by the geographer Seth Wynes and the environmental scientist Kimberly Nicholas, which argues that the most effective steps any of us can take to decrease carbon emissions are to eat a plant-based diet, avoid flying, live car free and have one fewer child.” (He is referring to a paper I cited earlier, “The Climate Mitigation Gap: Education and Government Recommendations Miss the Most Effective Individual Actions,” which argues that most of the efforts to curb climate change that are taught and recommended are relatively insignificant.) “The main problem with this proposal,” he continues, “isn’t with the ideas of teaching thrift, flying less or going vegetarian, which are all well and good, but rather with the social model such recommendations rely on: the idea that we can save the world through individual consumer choices. We cannot.”
Why not?
Because the world is a “complex, recursive dynamic” with “internal and external drivers.”
I’m not exactly sure what that means, but however complex the world is, people still recycle, protest, vote, pick up litter, support ethical brands, donate blood, intervene when someone appears in danger, challenge racist remarks, and get out of the way of ambulances. These actions are not merely good for the individual health of the actor, but essential for the health of society: actions are witnessed and replicated.
In their book Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler call social networks “a kind of human superorganism.” They write, “We discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend gained weight, you gained weight. We disc
overed that if your friend’s friend’s friend stopped smoking, you stopped smoking. And we discovered that if your friend’s friend’s friend became happy, you became happy.” Although we often refer to obesity as an epidemic, it is rarely described as contagious. But Christakis and Fowler illustrate that—like smoking and the rejection of smoking, sexual misconduct and the rejection of sexual misconduct—obesity is a trend:
In a surprising regularity that, as we have discovered, appears in many network phenomena, the clustering obeyed our Three Degrees of Influence Rule: the average obese person was more likely to have friends, friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends who were obese than would be expected due to chance alone. The average nonobese person was, similarly, more likely to have nonobese contacts up to three degrees of separation. Beyond three degrees, the clustering stopped. In fact, people seem to occupy niches within the network where weight gain or weight loss becomes a kind of local standard.
When it comes to health, this research suggests that individual behavior is much more impactful than federal dietary guidelines, which most Americans do not meet. While structures matter—food deserts, subsidies, and unhealthy cafeterias undeniably influence diet—the most contagious standards are the ones that we model.
We aren’t powerless within our “complex, recursive dynamic” with “internal and external drivers”—we are the internal drivers. Yes, there are powerful systems—capitalism, factory farming, the fossil fuel industrial complex—that are difficult to disassemble. No one motorist can cause a traffic jam. But no traffic jam can exist without individual motorists. We are stuck in traffic because we are the traffic. The ways we live our lives, the actions we take and don’t take, can feed the systemic problems, and they can also change them: lawsuits brought by individuals changed the Boy Scouts, the testimonies of individuals initiated the #MeToo movement, individuals participating in the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom paved the way for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Just as Rosa Parks helped desegregate public transportation, just as Elvis helped prevent polio.
We Are the Weather Page 13