Scranton writes: “We are not free to choose how we live any more than we are free to break the laws of physics. We choose from possible options, not ex nihilo.”
Yes, there are constraints on our actions, conventions and structural injustices that set the parameters of possibility. Our free will is not omnipotent—we can’t do whatever we want. But, as Scranton says, we are free to choose from possible options. And one of our options is to make environmentally conscientious choices. It doesn’t require breaking the laws of physics—or even electing a green president—to select something plant-based from a menu or at the grocery store. And although it may be a neoliberal myth that individual decisions have ultimate power, it is a defeatist myth that individual decisions have no power at all. Both macro and micro actions have power, and when it comes to mitigating our planetary destruction, it is unethical to dismiss either, or to proclaim that because the large cannot be achieved, the small should not be attempted.
We need structural change, yes—we need a global shift away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy. We need to enforce something akin to a carbon tax, mandate environmental-impact labels for products, replace plastic with sustainable solutions, and build walkable cities. We need structures to nudge us toward choices we already want to make. We need to ethically address the West’s relationship to the Global South. We might even need a political revolution. These changes will require shifts that individuals alone cannot realize. But putting aside the fact that collective revolutions are made up of individuals, led by individuals, and reinforced by thousands of individual revolutions, we would have no chance of achieving our goal of limiting environmental destruction if individuals don’t make the very individual decision to eat differently. Of course it’s true that one person deciding to eat a plant-based diet will not change the world, but of course it’s true that the sum of millions of such decisions will.
In response to the lifestyle changes proposed by Wynes and Nicholas, Scranton writes:
To take [their] recommendations to heart would mean cutting oneself off from modern life. It would mean choosing a hermetic, isolated existence and giving up any deep connection to the future. Indeed, taking Wynes and Nicholas’s argument seriously would mean acknowledging that the only truly moral response to global climate change is to commit suicide. There is simply no more effective way to shrink your carbon footprint. Once you’re dead, you won’t use any more electricity, you won’t eat any more meat, you won’t burn any more gasoline, and you certainly won’t have any more children. If you really want to save the planet, you should die.
This is an extreme leap. Imagine yourself choosing not to eat animal products before dinner, choosing to take two fewer flights a year. Putting aside whether that would be possible for you, does it seem like “a hermetic, isolating existence”? Or does it seem like a reasonable adjustment? It’s true that making decisions on behalf of the planet’s health will cut us off from unbridled hedonism, but is this how we define “modern life”? If so, it should be a relief to cut ourselves off from it. It is only by making such decisions, such adjustments, that we will ensure a “deep connection to the future.”
There is no more effective way to shrink one’s carbon footprint than to die, but that suggests that everyone’s carbon footprint is independent. Unless you buy and eat your food in secret, you don’t eat alone. Our food choices are social contagions, always influencing others around us—supermarkets track each item sold, restaurants adjust their menus to demand, food services look at what gets thrown away, and we order “what she’s having.” We eat as families, communities, nations, and increasingly as a planet. Individual consumer choices can activate a “complex, recursive dynamic”—collective action—that is generative, not paralyzing. While the act of suicide can influence others, it is a final influence. We couldn’t stop our eating from radiating influence even if we wanted to.
Even more important is the question of what we’re trying to save. “If you really want to save the planet, you should die,” Scranton writes. But the planet isn’t what we want to save. We want to save life on the planet—plant life, animal life, and human life. Accepting the necessary violence of our existence is the first step to minimizing it: we must consume resources in order to survive. This would remain true in any political utopia. But plenty of species, including humans, have managed to live in harmony with nature, and they do not do so by committing suicide. They do so by taking less than the planet is able to produce and nurturing ecosystems. They do so by living as though we have only one Earth, not four. By treating the planet like our only home.
Scranton proceeds to describe the suicide of David Buckel, concluding that his “self-sacrifice takes the logic of personal choice to its ultimate end.”
I do not condone Buckel’s suicide, or any suicide. But it is important to remember that he did not kill himself to cap his carbon footprint. His self-immolation, in the tradition of Buddhist monks who publicly set fire to themselves to protest the Vietnam War, was explicitly designed to be witnessed: to burn into the public consciousness, to incite change. It weaponized an act of self-destruction to remind us that we don’t want to self-destruct.
The real choice we all face is not what to buy, whether to fly or whether to have children but whether we are willing to commit to living ethically in a broken world, a world in which human beings are dependent for collective survival on a kind of ecological grace.
What does it mean to live ethically if not to make ethical choices? Among these choices are what to buy, whether to fly, and how many children to have. What is ecological grace if not the sum of daily, hourly decisions to take less than one’s hands can hold, to eat other than what our stomachs most want, to create limits for ourselves so that we all might be able to share in what’s left?
I can’t protect my daughter from the future and I can’t even promise her a better life. All I can do is teach her: teach her how to care, how to be kind and how to live within the limits of nature’s grace. I can teach her to be tough but resilient, adaptable and prudent, because she’s going to have to struggle for what she needs. But I also need to teach her to fight for what’s right, because none of us is in this alone. I need to teach her that all things die, even her and me and her mother and the world we know, but that coming to terms with this difficult truth is the beginning of wisdom.
This is not the beginning of wisdom. This is the end of resignation.
Who cares if his daughter cares? Her grandchildren won’t. What will matter most to them is not whether she was kind, or tough but resilient, or adaptable and prudent. What will matter most to them is whether she did what was necessary. The future does not depend on our feelings, and to a great extent, it depends on us getting over our feelings.
Scranton is right that none of us is in this alone. Why not teach his daughter that if she eats differently, and convinces others to do so, she—they—we—could participate in saving the planet? Rather than preparing her to “struggle for what she needs,” how about struggling for what we all need? Eating less meat, flying less, driving less, having fewer children—these choices are struggles. If they weren’t, we’d have made them long ago. I have not yet managed to cut dairy and eggs out of my diet. If I were any other kind of animal, my obligations would end with my desire. But I am a human, and that is where my obligations begin. The decision to fight for what’s right requires us to cut ourselves off from what’s wrong.
I have never met Roy Scranton, and I’ve never met his daughter, but I have obligations to them, just as they have obligations to my family. Just as Americans have obligations to Bangladeshis. Just as affluent suburbanites have obligations to those living in urban heat islands and food deserts. Just as people alive today have obligations to future generations.
* * *
I agree with Scranton that we can’t properly conceptualize the environmental crisis—we certainly can’t be alarmed by it—until we acknowledge its ability to kill us. Because we created it, thi
s means we have to acknowledge our ability to kill ourselves. We have to be aware of the death that surrounds us, even when it hasn’t yet happened, even when it is easy to miss, even when our suicide will kill others first.
A few months ago, a man committed suicide in his car only a few blocks from my office at New York University. Despite our age of sharing and voyeurism, and despite New York overflowing with pedestrians and surveillance cameras, his dead body remained unnoticed in the car for a week. A real estate agent with a nearby office parked his motorcycle in front of the vehicle. He couldn’t believe that a body was inside, or that it was there for as long as it was. Traffic officers who write tickets on days of alternate-side parking will often ignore cars standing on the wrong side, so long as there is a driver at the wheel. Presumably a number of officers saw the body but assumed the man was living. A child complained of a terrible smell while passing the car and vomited on the sidewalk. His mother didn’t notice anything. Someone walking his dog noticed a figure in the car and thought it was a napping Uber driver. When the body was still there, two days later, he called 911.
There are only two reactions to climate change: resignation or resistance. We can submit to death, or we can use the prospect of death to emphasize life. We will never know what the author of “Dispute with the Soul of One Who Is Tired of Life” chose. We do not yet know what we will choose.
It is horrible to imagine coming upon David Buckel’s charred corpse. It feels yet more horrible to imagine passing a dead body many times without noticing it. But there is something even worse: not to notice that we are alive.
Four days after Buckel’s suicide, one of the joggers who came upon his body wrote a beautiful short essay, reflecting on literal and metaphorical running. But it was her description of the park that morning, her first minutes before coming upon Buckel, that remains with me. She had just returned from a trip abroad and was eager to get some exercise. “The birds chirped, the sun shone, and as I made my way through the tree-lined paths, I felt bathed in a sense of joy of being back home and alive.”
If all goes according to nature’s plan, Buckel’s daughter, Scranton’s daughter, and my sons will live on the planet without their parents. I hope they will feel bathed in a sense of joy of being home and alive. I hope that their parents, in their own ways, to the best of their judgments and abilities, will have done what they had to do to allow for that. I hope we will have taught them—not only with our words but with our choices—the difference between running toward death, running away from death, and running toward life.
After Us
I am sitting at my grandmother’s bedside as I type these words. I brought the boys with me, knowing that this will almost certainly be the last time they’ll see her. My older son is downstairs, ostensibly practicing for his bar mitzvah, although I don’t hear him singing. My younger son is sitting cross-legged by my feet, rotating his impossibly loose tooth. It has been “wanting to come out” for days, which looks every bit as much like “wanting to stay in.” The room is so quiet we can hear the tooth’s root as he turns it. It sounds like a tissue-paper flower. I find it impossible not to imagine my grandmother underground, holding the tissue-paper flower’s root as my son innocently wiggles the bulb.
* * *
It is now two months later. I e-mailed my father and asked what kind of tree it is that my grandmother saw out her window. He responded, “You are probably thinking of the wonderful Japanese maple. Unfortunately it didn’t survive. Its replacement is a sycamore, I think. It is still small.” In the first suicide note, the author observes, “Yet life is a transitory state, and even trees fall.” My son’s adult tooth has crowned at the root.
* * *
When Stephen Hawking presided over the signing of the University of Cambridge’s “Declaration on Consciousness,” he advanced the idea that, like humans, the animals we eat experience consciousness, “along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.” Generally speaking, we treat other humans humanely because we value their consciousness. It is also the reason many vegetarians don’t eat animals. And it is the case we would likely make to a more powerful alien for our own humane treatment.
But what if the alien didn’t regard consciousness as sufficient? What if it wanted to know what was done with that consciousness? Humans may have “the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors,” but how do we exercise it? It’s best not to inflict unnecessary pain on something that can feel pain, but is that an argument for its survival? I find the case against factory farming quite easy to make, whereas the case against meat, per se, has always challenged me.
What is the argument for our survival?
* * *
My younger son usually asks me to stay by his bedside until I can hear him sleeping. Sometimes, while sitting with him, I think about the last night my mother had with her father, when he kept kissing her and telling her he loved her. Sometimes I already miss what I haven’t yet lost, as if I’m staring through the masterpiece at the empty wall behind it.
I often write while waiting for my son’s heavy breathing—the sound of my typing assures him that I’m still there—and I am sitting on the floor of his bedroom now. In increments too small to be detected, he is outgrowing his pajamas, and outgrowing me. I know what I refuse to believe: no empire is big enough, or small enough, to last.
Every time we say “crisis,” we are also saying “decision.” We must decide what will grow in our place—we must plant our compensation or revenge. Our decisions will determine not only how future generations will evaluate us but whether they will exist to evaluate us at all.
We view the actions of civilians during World War II from the vantage of having won the war. Winning required the ravaging of lives, landscapes, and cultures. Perhaps we look back at those blacked-out houses with admiration, but more likely, we look back and think, It was the least they could do.
What if those who came before us had refused to make home-front efforts, and we had lost the war? What if the costs were not extreme, but total? Not eighty million, but two hundred million or more? Not the occupation of Europe, but the domination of the world? Not a Holocaust, but an extinction? If we existed at all, we would look back at a collective unwillingness to sacrifice as an atrocity commensurate with the war itself.
Human populations have driven other human populations to the brink of eradication numerous times throughout history. Now the entire species threatens itself with mass suicide. Not because anyone is forcing us to. Not because we don’t know better. And not because we don’t have alternatives.
We are killing ourselves because choosing death is more convenient than choosing life. Because the people committing suicide are not the first to die from it. Because we believe that someday, somewhere, some genius is bound to invent a miracle technology that will change our world so that we don’t have to change our lives. Because short-term pleasure is more seductive than long-term survival. Because no one wants to exercise their capacity for intentional behavior until someone else does. Until the neighborhood does. Until the energy and car companies do. Until the federal government does. Until China, Australia, India, Brazil, the U.K.—until the whole world does. Because we are oblivious to the death that we pass every day. “We have to do something,” we tell one another, as though reciting the line were enough. “We have to do something,” we tell ourselves, and then wait for instructions that are not on the way. We know that we are choosing our own end; we just can’t believe it.
With every inhale, we take in molecules from Caesar’s last gasp. And that of Nina Simone and John Wilkes Booth; Hannah Arendt and Henry Ford; Muhammad, Jesus, Buddha, and Confucius; Roosevelt, Churchill, Stalin, and Hitler; Enrico Fermi, Jeffrey Dahmer, Leonardo da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Thelonious Monk, Cleopatra, Copernicus, Sojourner Truth, Thomas Edison, and J. Robert Oppenheimer: all the heroes and villains, creators and destroyers.
But most of those exhaled molecules come from ordinary citizens, people like us. I just inhal
ed my great-aunt saying, “You are so lucky to be leaving.” And the silence my grandmother shared with her mother before leaving. And my grandfather telling my mother he loved her in Yiddish that last night. And Frankfurter saying, “My mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot accept it.” More than one hundred billion humans lived on our planet before we did. With each of our inhales, we might ask ourselves if we are worthy of what has been given to us.
We will rise to meet the planetary crisis, or we won’t. We will be a wave, or we will drown. If we don’t overcome our agnosticism and alter our behavior in the ways that we know are necessary, how will our descendants judge us? Will they know that they inherited a battlefield because we were unwilling to turn off our lights?
When my grandmother fled the Nazis as a teenager, she was saving more than just herself: she was saving my mother, my brothers, me, my children, my nieces and nephews, and all the people who will come after us. Life is not always indispensable in the abstract, but it is always indispensable in the particular.
Some humans will survive climate change in scattered, vulnerable populations. But as every other mass extinction on the geological record shows, species that survive one extinction will almost certainly be killed by the next. Their populations and resources dwindle too low for a second resilience.
We Are the Weather Page 14