As a long-time climate activist I’m waaaaaay too familiar with the resonances of melancholy. Reading bad news — especially bad news which has every likelihood of continuing to be bad for long after all of us have shuffled off this mortal coil — is demoralizing, depressing and dispiriting (and a whole lot of other things beginning with de- and dis-).
So...what’s a body to do?
Once you know, you can’t look away — any more than you can look away from cruelty and injustice when it’s happening right in front of you.
I’ve been in this place for 15 years, more or less. And I won’t be so presumptuous as to suggest that my own particular solution is the right one for everyone — but it’s a solution for me, in this moment, at this place, and that’s the best I can hope for.
Ritual is my tool for keeping my balance in a world gone mad. I am not a religious man, but I find deep value in repetitive tasks which improve my mental and moral focus.
When chaos and disorder increases it’s our responsibility to embody steadiness, calmness, fortitude. We do this for the sake of those we love: our children, families, pets, histories.
Ritualize resistance. Find a simple task that’s easily defined, bounded, repeated. The sameness of it makes a foothold, a “control surface,” a place to stand in the face of a crisis so enormous that individual responses are dwarfed.
Between 2010-2014 I wrote daily LTEs about climate change to newspapers and magazines all over the planet. That was necessary, easily-ritualized, but terribly depressing work. After 1461 letters, I stopped, and cast about for another way to use my daily energies in service to the world.
Greta Thunberg and I converged on the same solution. Actually I got there a little ahead of her, starting my every-weekday Climate Vigils the day after Labor Day, 2015.
Monday through Friday, I wake a little before 7, drink a cup of coffee, gird my loins, and carry my signs to a nearby intersection which gets a lot of rush hour traffic. And there I stand for an hour, holding my message, facing North, facing traffic, facing the truth. Some days my friend Craige joins me; that’s him holding up FIGHT FOR THE CLIMATE, FIGHT FOR YOUR LIFE!
While I’m there, I sing: I work to improve my understanding and performance of the music I've studied my whole life. It doesn't matter that I'm no longer flying anywhere for gigs; I went into Hindustani music 44 years ago to satisfy myself first and foremost.
An Announcement:
I’m working with the people at Music4ClimateJustice on a 40-hour online global music program to take place at COP-26 this November. Every day I’m reaching out to musicians around the world, asking them to be part of what may be the single most diverse musical event ever staged. If you’re a musician, please send me a Kosmail and I’ll tell you how to be involved.
My personal Venn intersection of art and climate activism is located at Roosevelt Circle in Medford, Massachusetts. Like the heavy weight in a Calder mobile, the daily ritual of truth-telling keeps the rest of my life free to move, turn, float.
Someone told me that their friend drives past me every day,and was motivated to buy an electric car in part by my continued presence. Maybe they’re just, you know, sayin’ that to make me feel good...but I’ll take it.
Biden wants American car manufacturers to pledge at least 40% of new cars & trucks will be electric by 2030.
“The White House has told US automakers that it wants them to back a voluntary pledge of at least 40 per cent of new vehicles sales being electric by 2030 as it works to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, sources briefed on the matter said.The administration is set as early as next week to roll out proposed revisions to vehicle emission standards until 2026.”
I’m linked on social media with a global network of people — for the most part a quarter my age — who are doing the same thing, all around the world. They have more of a stake in the future than 63-year-old me.
When you do something for the climate, let the folks at FFF Map Count know. We gain strength and solidarity in numbers. Climate activism can be lonely work.
My years in India make me feel especially connected to the work of young climate activists in India, Pakistan, and Bangla Desh.
I bring two signs each day: a big CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL, painted on primed plywood almost six years ago and renewed occasionally since then. The other sign changes from day to day. My favorite is the one I’m holding in the photo at the top of today’s diary:
1 — CHANGE OUR CONVERSATION
2 — CHANGE OUR CONSUMPTION
3 — CHANGE OUR POLITICS
CHANGE OUR CONVERSATION — That’s what I try and do every day, wherever I go. You can’t possibly solve a problem until you can talk about it.
CHANGE OUR CONSUMPTION— This is about how we live — individually and collectively. We use our power as consumers to bring about transformations from stores, businesses, and corporations, demanding they become good planetary citizens.
CHANGE OUR POLITICS — this is where the long-term climate lens has to bring short-term election-cycle goals into focus. Politics — our society’s principal problem-solving mechanism (I know, right? SMDH) — is bound by a 2-year cycle that essentially by design excludes long-term thinking from our public discourse.
Which in turn means that if we’re concerned about long-term stuff like human survival and civilizational health we must also perforce concern themselves with the ego-driven posturing of idiots like oh god damn it to HELL I’m nOt goNNa write youR names because we ALL kNow wHO yoU are anyway yoU FuCKInG BAstARDS YOu’Re GOIng tOKiLL US ALL!...
...ahem.
Even as we face a highly uncertain and dangerous future, we still have to contend with the ugly sausage-making of American politics in the present.
So when I get back from my daily hour by the roadside, I send a text message to Postcards To Voters and sign up to write 10 cards. Every day.
Because now that’s a ritual too, and if I don’t Ritualize Resistance, I’m a lot less likely to Resist.
And that’s how I make it from one morning to the next.
How about you?
To end on an optimistic note, here is science-fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, telling the "history" of how humanity ended the climate crisis and restored the damage done to Earth's biosphere. A rousing vision of how we might unite to overcome the greatest challenge of our time.