Speaker 1: We are at a place where we have the first
Speaker 1: truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
Speaker 1: becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far,
Speaker 1: the evidence is not overwhelmingly great. But you know it's
Speaker 1: not hopeless either.
Speaker 2: This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
Speaker 2: your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Climate Change.
Speaker 2: Climate change is something that affects every single one of us,
Speaker 2: and it is really hard to look at. It's such
Speaker 2: a great temptation to shut our eyes to what's happening.
Speaker 2: It's overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and
Speaker 2: author Bill mckibbon on facing the reality of the climate crisis,
Speaker 2: understanding what needs to change and what you can do
Speaker 2: not just to change the course of humanity and the planet,
Speaker 2: but to actually feel more hopeful and connected as this
Speaker 2: all unfolds. This episode is a deep, kind hearted conversation
Speaker 2: about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into
Speaker 2: it with me. It's coming up right after this first
Speaker 2: break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this
Speaker 2: episode is an encore performance. I am on break working
Speaker 2: on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix
Speaker 2: of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of
Speaker 2: the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed
Speaker 2: in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve
Speaker 2: multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness.
Speaker 2: Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational
Speaker 2: territory and our time here together, this show is not
Speaker 2: a substitute for skilled support or the license mental health provider,
Speaker 2: or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what
Speaker 2: you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out
Speaker 2: into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, I
Speaker 2: made it in my mind. A lot of people would
Speaker 2: be like tempted to skip this episode after hearing the
Speaker 2: opening clip, So I'm really glad you're still here. The
Speaker 2: climate crisis is just so overwhelming, and I try to
Speaker 2: keep my eyes open to so many difficult things, as
Speaker 2: we know, but even I find myself shutting down with
Speaker 2: each successive catastrophe, especially when it's set against the backdrop
Speaker 2: of corporations and governments who simply do not care. It's
Speaker 2: a lot. I saw something on Twitter the other day
Speaker 2: that suggested that having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should
Speaker 2: be treated as quote a mental illness, like, sorry, your
Speaker 2: hometown is flooded and wildfire smoked turned the sky orange,
Speaker 2: but you're resilient, work on your own coping skills. Having
Speaker 2: emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote
Speaker 2: mental illness, Like, there's so much wrong with that statement.
Speaker 2: Our personal resilience is not the problem here. And I
Speaker 2: know this is a much bigger topic than we had
Speaker 2: time to get into with today's guest, but if you're
Speaker 2: having a complex set of feelings associated with the ongoing,
Speaker 2: unfolding climate crisis, you are definitely not alone. Not having
Speaker 2: any feelings about it would be weird anyway. We definitely
Speaker 2: get into just how dire things are in this conversation,
Speaker 2: but we also get into hope, like real, tangible, actionable
Speaker 2: hope that is not like wishful thinking dressed up in
Speaker 2: fairy robes, you know, like none of that stuff, Like
Speaker 2: actual hope with somebody who has been immersed in the
Speaker 2: work of climate change for decades. Bill mckibbon is an
Speaker 2: American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on
Speaker 2: the impact of global warming. His books include The End
Speaker 2: of Nature, about climate change, and Falter has the human
Speaker 2: game begun to play itself out That one's about these
Speaker 2: state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing writer
Speaker 2: to The New Yorker and founder of Third Act, which
Speaker 2: organizes people over the age of sixty four progressive change.
Speaker 2: That Third Act is a super cool initiative you're going
Speaker 2: to hear us talk about in our conversation. There's so
Speaker 2: much goodness in this episode, and if you, like me,
Speaker 2: tend to turn away because things are too much, be
Speaker 2: sure to listen through to the end for your questions
Speaker 2: to carry with you. They're really good this time. All right,
Speaker 2: let's get to my conversation with author and activist Bill Mckiinnon. So,
Speaker 2: I am so glad to have you here with me today.
Speaker 2: I know that you don't necessarily do a whole lot
Speaker 2: of interviews, so I'm just really honored to have you
Speaker 2: with me here today.
Speaker 1: Well, Megan, it's a pleasure to be with you, in
Speaker 1: part to be able to say thank you for your
Speaker 1: good and important work, and it really is. It's a
Speaker 1: pleasure to get to chat.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. Okay, So there are so many
Speaker 2: places that we could begin our conversation. I've spent the
Speaker 2: last three days reading your books and reading your articles
Speaker 2: and watching you speak. We were talking before we got
Speaker 2: rolling that I was recently visiting my folks, and a
Speaker 2: lot of that time I was spent sort of immersed
Speaker 2: in your work. And I'm going to say something you've
Speaker 2: probably heard a lot, But spending so much time in
Speaker 2: conversations and in material about climate change, I found myself
Speaker 2: feeling really defeated. Is that sort of a common thing
Speaker 2: you hear a lot when people are sort of engaging
Speaker 2: with your work.
Speaker 1: I don't know about defeated necessarily, but definitely scared and upset.
Speaker 1: I'm doing nothing to sell books, I can tell, and
Speaker 1: that's you know, I'm afraid that's appropriate. It is a
Speaker 1: scary and upsetting thing. We're talking about, by far, the
Speaker 1: biggest thing humans we've ever done, are far the most
Speaker 1: dangerous thing humans were done. We're talking about something that
Speaker 1: is now playing out in real time, very much in
Speaker 1: front of us. Here's a great temptation to shut one's eyes,
Speaker 1: and sadly, that's the one thing we can't afford, because
Speaker 1: we desperately need as many people as possible at work
Speaker 1: on this if we're to have any chance of really
Speaker 1: not of stopping global warming too late for that, but
Speaker 1: of stopping it short of the place where it cuts
Speaker 1: civilization off at the niece, which is what's going to
Speaker 1: happen if we don't get our act together quickly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I've read that You've said that those like
Speaker 2: the doomsday descriptions of what scientists projected back in the eighties,
Speaker 2: right when we've kind of first started talking about what
Speaker 2: was then what was it then? Greenhouse greenhouse facts. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and that those predictions that they made back in the
Speaker 2: eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded.
Speaker 1: Sense that's right. I mean I wrote the first book
Speaker 1: about all of this back in nineteen eighty nine, So
Speaker 1: in many cases, I was just about the first reporter,
Speaker 1: first rioter, to get to sit and talk with the
Speaker 1: climate scientists who work on it. Scientists are by their
Speaker 1: nature conservative. They underestimate rather than overestimate. It's just the
Speaker 1: kind of nature of the profession. They were exactly right,
Speaker 1: I mean, eerily accurate about how much the temperature was
Speaker 1: going to go up. It's gone up on pretty much
Speaker 1: exactly the curve that people like James Hansen, the great
Speaker 1: NASA physicists first predicted, but they underestimated how much damage
Speaker 1: that increase in temperature would do because we'd never done
Speaker 1: this experiment before, at least with humans around to watch.
Speaker 1: So so far, we've increased the temperature somewhat more than
Speaker 1: a degree celsius let's say two degrees fahrenheit in round numbers,
Speaker 1: which doesn't sound like that much. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: sixty degrees when I walked the dog this morning. If
Speaker 1: it's fifty eight degrees when I walk the dog tonight,
Speaker 1: my body won't be able to tell the difference, So
Speaker 1: better off thinking about it. In other units, The amount
Speaker 1: of extra heat that we trapped near the planet every
Speaker 1: day because of the carbon we've put there by burning
Speaker 1: fossil fuel is the heat equivalent of about four hundred
Speaker 1: thousand Hiroshima sized explosions daily. Wow. And when you know that,
Speaker 1: then it's easier to understand how big big things have happened,
Speaker 1: and sooner than we thought they were going to We've
Speaker 1: melted most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic.
Speaker 1: We now see massive melt underway in the Antarctic. These
Speaker 1: are things that in the late nineteen eighties scientists hoped
Speaker 1: we might not see till the latter part of this century,
Speaker 1: but we're seeing them already, and we're seeing things as
Speaker 1: a result that we didn't really predict what happened. For instance,
Speaker 1: the jet stream works off the difference in temperature between
Speaker 1: the equator and the poles. There's less difference now, so
Speaker 1: that jet stream is acting in super funky ways, and
Speaker 1: we get these long periods of either drought or flood,
Speaker 1: depending on which side you get stuck on, and so on.
Speaker 1: So the damage that we've seen already very very substantial.
Speaker 1: The biggest wildfires we've ever seen, the biggest rainstorms in
Speaker 1: human history, on and on and on. They're already big,
Speaker 1: big problems. Sadly, the real danger is that we're currently
Speaker 1: on a path to raise the temperature about five degrees
Speaker 1: or six degrees fahrenheit, not the two degrees we have
Speaker 1: so far. And if we do that, it won't be
Speaker 1: three times as bad. It'll be worse than that, because
Speaker 1: the damage won't be on a kind of linear scale,
Speaker 1: it'll be on an exponential one. You go past certain
Speaker 1: tipping points that then everything shifts. Once there's no ice
Speaker 1: left in the summer Arctic, the world gets very very different.
Speaker 2: For instance, the abstract nature of it, right until it
Speaker 2: becomes personal. Until you're personally affected by it, it doesn't
Speaker 2: seem real. And certainly with floods and fires, fires showing
Speaker 2: up in places where they haven't been experienced and floods
Speaker 2: showing up like it's starting to get personal, which is
Speaker 2: you know, honestly, it's too late, right, like too late
Speaker 2: not to do anything, but like it's this weird human
Speaker 2: thing that we don't take something seriously until it impacts
Speaker 2: us personally and directly.
Speaker 1: You know, when I wrote that first book, Megan, I
Speaker 1: was twenty eight, and my theory of change was people
Speaker 1: will read my book and then they will change. And truthfully,
Speaker 1: a lot of people read it. It came out in
Speaker 1: twenty four languages. It was a bestseller all over the place.
Speaker 1: You know, it's like your book, but at least in
Speaker 1: big political questions, people don't just read books and change.
Speaker 1: There are a lot of forces beginning and ending in
Speaker 1: a sense with the power of the fossil fuel industry
Speaker 1: that kept us from making the changes that we could
Speaker 1: have made early on. Those changes, had we made them
Speaker 1: early on, would have been fairly small, and they would
Speaker 1: have gotten us out of an awful lot of trouble now. Sadly,
Speaker 1: we've waited so long into this mess that the changes
Speaker 1: necessarily have to be big and disruptive. The Intergovernmental Panel
Speaker 1: on Climate Change, which are the group of climate scientists
Speaker 1: that the UN assembles to offer their collective wisdom and
Speaker 1: all of this, said two years ago that we had
Speaker 1: until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half on this
Speaker 1: planet if we wanted to meet the targets, the temperature
Speaker 1: targets that we'd set in Paris just a few years ago. Well,
Speaker 1: by my watch, twenty thirty is what six years and
Speaker 1: seven months away. That's an awful lot of work to
Speaker 1: cram into that period of time. If we'd had thirty
Speaker 1: six years, if we'd started back when we got our
Speaker 1: first warnings, then it would have been a lot easier.
Speaker 1: But if you point out, human nature doesn't necessarily work
Speaker 1: that way, and the self interest of oil companies definitely
Speaker 1: doesn't work that way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know what I don't get, and this has
Speaker 2: bugged me forever. But like you said, the self interest
Speaker 2: of the oil companies and fossil fuels and those sorts
Speaker 2: of things, and the people who draft and vote for
Speaker 2: legislation that continues to damage the planet and communities like
Speaker 2: do they not realize they live here too?
Speaker 1: I think that if they stop to think about it,
Speaker 1: their calculation, at least their internal psychological calculation, is if
Speaker 1: I make enough money, I can build a wall of
Speaker 1: greenbacks around my house, my family, whatever it is I
Speaker 1: care about, and will be okay. But motivated reasoning is
Speaker 1: a powerful, powerful thing. You know more about it than
Speaker 1: I do. And I think it's also possible for people
Speaker 1: to convince themselves that all scientists are engaged in some
Speaker 1: conspiracy theory or whatever it is, if it's in their
Speaker 1: momentary self interest to do that. Yeah.
Speaker 2: In the End of Nature, Bill you wrote that there
Speaker 2: is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to
Speaker 2: pretend that it's not really there, that we're not really
Speaker 2: at a crossroad, right, And I think that's what we
Speaker 2: were just talking about, that there's this like psychic doubling
Speaker 2: in a way that happens both for industries and legislators
Speaker 2: who vote against Earth's best interests, in our best interests,
Speaker 2: but also people who sort of shut down in the
Speaker 2: face of increasing danger.
Speaker 1: Is that true? I think that's true. In Peopil's just
Speaker 1: like personal lives too, when they're confronted with things in
Speaker 1: their own personal lives that or like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean for me, it's this desperate desire to
Speaker 2: believe that we're okay, that we have some control over
Speaker 2: our safety and are the safety of our loved ones right.
Speaker 2: For me, it's that same mechanism this is this is
Speaker 2: my this is my griefy Rosetta stone for all of
Speaker 2: life is that we like to believe that we will
Speaker 2: be okay and the people we care about will be okay. Right,
Speaker 2: That's why there's so much shame and judgment, Like when
Speaker 2: you hear that somebody's child was killed by a drunk driver, right,
Speaker 2: Like I wouldn't have been on the road that late
Speaker 2: at night, or I would have paid more attention to
Speaker 2: the road, or I'm a better driver so I would
Speaker 2: have been able to evade it. Like all of these
Speaker 2: if then statements that we can say that prove to
Speaker 2: us that that kind of pain would never show up
Speaker 2: on my doorstep. Yeah, and I think that that and
Speaker 2: going back to what we were talking about a moment
Speaker 2: ago with climate change, when it is quote unquote just
Speaker 2: Haiti getting swamped, when it is just Central Africa heading
Speaker 2: another massive drought. Like when it is away from our gaze,
Speaker 2: we can tell ourselves that we're safe and everybody we
Speaker 2: love is safe. And for me, it's that same mechanism, right,
Speaker 2: it's the same grief avoidance.
Speaker 1: This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychologists, the
Speaker 1: marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry is
Speaker 1: set to work beginning about nineteen ninety, we now know
Speaker 1: how smart they work. They hired a bunch of the
Speaker 1: people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and
Speaker 1: the message that they brought was the same, the science
Speaker 1: is inconclusive, we don't know for sure what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: And that wasn't true. The science actually was conclusive. But
Speaker 1: I think it was psychologically powerful for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: Just the thought that maybe we didn't actually have to
Speaker 1: deal with this. The next generation or the one after
Speaker 1: that or something would be the ones who would get
Speaker 1: to deal with it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, deferred maintenance. Right, This is why it's so hard
Speaker 2: to get people to get their colonoscopies and get their
Speaker 2: like do stuff preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started the first with
Speaker 1: seven college students what became the first big global grassroots
Speaker 1: climate campaign about twenty years ago. We called it three
Speaker 1: fifty dot org. Now. The name came from what the
Speaker 1: scientist told us was the most carbon we could safely
Speaker 1: have in the atmosphere, three hundred and fifty parts per million.
Speaker 1: We chose the name part because we wanted to organize globally,
Speaker 1: and we figured Arabic numerals work better than English words.
Speaker 1: But when we chose it, people said, oh, it's a
Speaker 1: bad name because it's depressing. We're already past three point fifty,
Speaker 1: you know. And I said, well, in the first place,
Speaker 1: honesty has its virtues too, And in this second place,
Speaker 1: it strikes me that it's sort of like going to
Speaker 1: the doctor. If the doctor says, you know, keep eating
Speaker 1: like this and someday your cholesterol will be too high.
Speaker 1: You know, you stop for a cheeseburger on the way home.
Speaker 1: But if the doctor says, huh, you're already in that
Speaker 1: zone where people have heart attacks. You know, you might
Speaker 1: have had a small stroke already. That's the day where
Speaker 1: people say what pill should I take? You know, maybe
Speaker 1: it was a way to make it a little more
Speaker 1: real at any event, it worked pretty well. We've organized
Speaker 1: twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North
Speaker 1: Korea at this point, so that's amazing.
Speaker 2: And I think also like it gives people a goal
Speaker 2: instead of like everything is terrible, everything is dire, we
Speaker 2: have to act fast, like all of which is all accurate.
Speaker 2: I just feel like we interpret that sort of stuff
Speaker 2: as it's already too late and collapse into despair and.
Speaker 1: Overwhelm absolutely most people who do this kind of work,
Speaker 1: and for me it's just volunteer work. I'm a self
Speaker 1: taught organizer, but I've sort of helped lead very large campaigns,
Speaker 1: the campaign against the Keystone pipeline that was Big Oil's
Speaker 1: first defeat, this fossil fuel divestment campaign that's now at
Speaker 1: about forty trillion dollars in endowments and portfolios that have
Speaker 1: divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things, the
Speaker 1: psychological things that I think I learned, was that you
Speaker 1: had to have a goal that was on the one hand,
Speaker 1: plausible you could make a story about how you might
Speaker 1: reach it, and also plausibly large enough to matter. You
Speaker 1: had to have a story about why it actually would
Speaker 1: make a difference. It's quite easy to get people for
Speaker 1: a little while to do really easy things change your
Speaker 1: light bulbs. But people have pretty good built in bullshit
Speaker 1: detector too that after a little while you're like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I really don't think changing this light bulb is going
Speaker 1: to seek climate change, And so either you go to
Speaker 1: look for something more useful to do or you avoid
Speaker 1: the subject altogether.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. There's nothing
Speaker 2: I can do because the corporations in the greed are
Speaker 2: bigger than us and too much to battle. And honestly,
Speaker 2: like with all of the cascading disasters, with climate disasters,
Speaker 2: with gun violence, like with just all of the stuff
Speaker 2: that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds and
Speaker 2: in communities, it is really hard not to get ground
Speaker 2: down by this.
Speaker 1: Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually
Speaker 1: have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people you're
Speaker 1: working side by side with. For me, it's the most
Speaker 1: effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all those things.
Speaker 1: But I don't know what I'll I mean, I hope
Speaker 1: I don't find out, but I don't know what it'll
Speaker 1: feel like when we reach the point where if we
Speaker 1: don't do our job well soon, what it really does
Speaker 1: just seals our trajectory. That's why I continue to fight hard,
Speaker 1: and why it seems urgent, why you know, I end up.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've been to jail now going on a
Speaker 1: dozen times, I think, which is not at all how
Speaker 1: I thought my life would turn out. But I will
Speaker 1: say that once or twice there in jail, I felt
Speaker 1: a certain kind of relaxation isn't the right word, but
Speaker 1: there was nothing more I could do. I was there.
Speaker 1: I couldn't do anything, couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't write
Speaker 1: an email, couldn't you know, write a story, couldn't do
Speaker 1: all the things I'm used to doing. Just my being
Speaker 1: there was going to have to be enough, and that
Speaker 1: was There was a kind of relief that too.
Speaker 2: I got to say, I feel that there's a certain
Speaker 2: sort of rooted piece of being in knowing that you
Speaker 2: have taken the action you can take to this point,
Speaker 2: and at this point there is no further action right,
Speaker 2: knowing that that time to act will circle back again.
Speaker 2: This whole conversation I have Joanna Macy in my head,
Speaker 2: so you and I were talking is she's just the best.
Speaker 2: You and I were talking before we got rolling. You
Speaker 2: lived in Vermont, and I went to graduate school in Vermont,
Speaker 2: and a lot of my graduate studies were just deeply
Speaker 2: informed by Joanna Macy and friends. We'll link to Joanna
Speaker 2: Macy's work here so you know what we're talking about.
Speaker 2: But I remember back then I was doing a lot
Speaker 2: of women's rights work and reproductive justice work and just
Speaker 2: starting to get into some environmental activism, and Joanna Macy
Speaker 2: was the only one that I found at the time
Speaker 2: really talking about the grief inherent in activism. And her
Speaker 2: whole thing was that, like, if we don't let ourselves
Speaker 2: feel the grief that we feel, our social justice work
Speaker 2: can't be as successful as it needs to be. Totally
Speaker 2: paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?
Speaker 1: I think that's probably very true. I mean, look, I'm
Speaker 1: a white male of a certain era. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: an old guy, so being open about things like grief
Speaker 1: doesn't come super easy to me. I'm always grateful for
Speaker 1: my friends and colleagues for whom that can help me
Speaker 1: with that. The person I often lean on is the
Speaker 1: great Western writer Terry Tempest. Williams. He was one of
Speaker 1: my oldest and dearest friends. But who's writing, especially in
Speaker 1: books like Refuge and if people are interested. She just
Speaker 1: wrote a piece. She's from Utah. She just wrote a
Speaker 1: piece in the New York Times about Great Salt Lake
Speaker 1: and drying up and what that felt like. And I
Speaker 1: know it took a lot out of her to write it,
Speaker 1: and you can see it on the page. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: somehow we need to come to terms with that grief.
Speaker 1: The thing that makes it hard is that the patient's
Speaker 1: not dead yet. You know, you're more like the doctor
Speaker 1: in the emergency room who's you know, it's psychologically easier
Speaker 1: to just keep running around, you know, thinking of the
Speaker 1: next trick you can try. And we're still very much
Speaker 1: in that phase. There's lots of important things we still
Speaker 1: can be doing, but there's lots of things we're not
Speaker 1: getting back too. So you know, one way out for
Speaker 1: me is to remind myself every single day that for
Speaker 1: all the insults that it's taken, the world we live
Speaker 1: on is still incredibly beautiful and that it's not going
Speaker 1: to be more intact than it is right now. And
Speaker 1: so one of our jobs as the creature with consciousness
Speaker 1: who can look around. One of our jobs is to
Speaker 1: be out there bearing witness to its great beauty. So
Speaker 1: if I'm home, I'm out in the woods some part
Speaker 1: of every day. Just for that reason.
Speaker 2: Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I
Speaker 2: want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing.
Speaker 2: There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with
Speaker 2: prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: My thirty Day Writing your Grief course is not like that.
Speaker 2: The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get
Speaker 2: you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now,
Speaker 2: writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help
Speaker 2: you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful.
Speaker 2: You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course
Speaker 2: at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is
Speaker 2: WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample
Speaker 2: prompt from the course and get writing your own words
Speaker 2: in minutes. My thirty Day Writing your Grief Course is
Speaker 2: still one of the best things I've ever made for you.
Speaker 2: Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken
Speaker 2: the Writing your Grief Course Refugeinggrief dot com, backslash WYG,
Speaker 2: or you can find the link in the show notes.
Speaker 2: I love that you brought up Terry Tempest Williams along
Speaker 2: with Joanna Macy. She was one of the people I
Speaker 2: considered mentors to me in those early days. I love
Speaker 2: her work so so much. We almost had her on
Speaker 2: the show. I should revisit that and see what happened
Speaker 2: to that. I think it was good. It was a
Speaker 2: scheduling glitch for us. And thank you for telling me
Speaker 2: about that article. Because I have not seen that. I
Speaker 2: will find that And I'm just I love her so much.
Speaker 2: To me, she straddles those realms of telling the truth
Speaker 2: about what she sees happening and what she's seen unfold
Speaker 2: in this really intimate, intimate way, this intimate relationship with
Speaker 2: her home and her landscape, and talks about actions to take,
Speaker 2: and talks about the beauty, and talks about the pain
Speaker 2: of seeing what's ahead, seeing what's already changed, what's already lost,
Speaker 2: and what is ahead on the chopping block. And I
Speaker 2: just I feel like it's for me. And again, because
Speaker 2: grief is my lens through which I see most things,
Speaker 2: I feel like being afraid of what it will feel
Speaker 2: like if we truly pay attention to the devastation that
Speaker 2: has already come and the devastation that is ahead. If
Speaker 2: we truly turned our gaze to that, the grief would
Speaker 2: overwhelm us and we wouldn't be able to act. And
Speaker 2: in the face of that's probably not a conscious fear,
Speaker 2: but like in the face of that, we say, it's
Speaker 2: not that bad. Too many things to fight, let me
Speaker 2: find like that, we deflect ourselves to something that feels
Speaker 2: less overwhelming because that emotional visceral response would be too
Speaker 2: big for us.
Speaker 1: I think, Yeah, if you're attuned to what's going on,
Speaker 1: then there are daily opportunities for worry and grief around
Speaker 1: the world. They also come, in this case with a
Speaker 1: added kind of dollup of a certain kind of guilt too.
Speaker 1: Pakistan last fall had the worst flood since Noah, the
Speaker 1: kind of flood you can only have in a globally
Speaker 1: warmed world where warm air holds more water vapor than cold.
Speaker 1: It just started raining in August and it did not stop.
Speaker 1: There were places, large places that got eight hundred percent
Speaker 1: of their annual rainfall in thirty days, so eight times
Speaker 1: as much rainfall as they get in a year, they
Speaker 1: got in three weeks. People that live in mudhouses they
Speaker 1: work great most of the time. They're smart architecture. When
Speaker 1: it rains for three weeks without stopping, they melt away
Speaker 1: around you. Thirty three million people were displaced. Well, the
Speaker 1: two hundred million people are so in Pakistan. They've produced
Speaker 1: way less than one percent of all the carbon in
Speaker 1: the atmosphere. The three percent of the world's population that
Speaker 1: calls itself Americans has produced about twenty five percent of
Speaker 1: all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's, you know, the
Speaker 1: good things in our lives, big houses, cars, airplanes, so on,
Speaker 1: that have you know, at some level, caused the problems
Speaker 1: that hit all of us, but that hit the people.
Speaker 1: The iron law of global warming is the less you
Speaker 1: did to close it, the sooner and harder you get hit.
Speaker 1: So there's some kind of guilt added on top of that.
Speaker 1: But we also don't seem very well built to figure
Speaker 1: out how rationally to deal with I mean, in the
Speaker 1: same way that people are you know, busy insisting that
Speaker 1: schools shouldn't teach about, you know, slavery or something because
Speaker 1: it's you know, makes us feel bad. We don't quite
Speaker 1: know how to handle the fact that we owe a
Speaker 1: real debt to much of the rest of the world,
Speaker 1: and so the good news is it's a payable debt.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of things that should be giving us
Speaker 1: heart right now. In the last ten years, scientists have
Speaker 1: engineers really have cut the cost of renewable energy ninety percent.
Speaker 1: We now live on a planet where the cheapest way
Speaker 1: to generate power is to point a sheet of glass
Speaker 1: at the sun. That's Hogwarts scale magic. You know, I'm
Speaker 1: an occasional Sunday school teacher. That's water into wine kind
Speaker 1: of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or
Speaker 1: financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress
Speaker 1: of decarbonizing the earth. But it would take a huge
Speaker 1: push to do it at the speed that we need to,
Speaker 1: and it would have to be a push against the
Speaker 1: extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us
Speaker 1: from You keep us locked for as long as possible
Speaker 1: in their business model. One of the things that's hopeful
Speaker 1: to me is that becomes less a kind of story
Speaker 1: about dread and despair than a story about real, hopeful
Speaker 1: and bright possible ability. I mean, we could get our
Speaker 1: energy from heaven instead of hell. And not only would
Speaker 1: we knock the worst edge off the climate crisis. You know,
Speaker 1: maybe nine million people a year on this planet die
Speaker 1: from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one
Speaker 1: death in five. If you've been to Delhi or Shanghai recently,
Speaker 1: it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen
Speaker 1: what the air there is like. But really it's true
Speaker 1: in this country too. There's millions of cases of childhood
Speaker 1: asthma every year, mostly with black brown kids who have
Speaker 1: the ones who have to live near the highway, near
Speaker 1: the refinery, whatever it is. We don't need any of that.
Speaker 1: We can get rid of that, and in short order,
Speaker 1: not only that, depending on a resource that only is
Speaker 1: available in a few places, like coal and gas and
Speaker 1: oil means that the people who control those places get
Speaker 1: way too much power. So you know, in our country,
Speaker 1: that was our biggest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers,
Speaker 1: who took their winnings and used them to degrade our democracy.
Speaker 1: In Europe, it's Vladimir Putin who's used his winnings to
Speaker 1: launch a land war in Europe in the twenty first century.
Speaker 1: We don't need that the sun and the winder everywhere.
Speaker 1: After seven hundred thousand years of combustion, humans could give
Speaker 1: up their habit of setting stuff on fire and we'd
Speaker 1: be quickly better off. So that's a really beautiful story
Speaker 1: to tell.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right.
Speaker 2: If I have to give up my comforts, my transportation, autonomy,
Speaker 2: all of those things, I'm not going to be able
Speaker 2: to live well if I make choices that let other
Speaker 2: people survive. I didn't really say that very well, but
Speaker 2: it's like it's this binary right either or. And also
Speaker 2: like how I was talking about this with an investment broker,
Speaker 2: going over like you know, what things do you invest in?
Speaker 2: And I was like, it all comes down to how
Speaker 2: much of other people suffering are you willing to tolerate
Speaker 2: for your own gain? And that's like that sounds really crappy,
Speaker 2: but this really is sort of the equation that we
Speaker 2: have a lot right, like understanding the downstream effects of
Speaker 2: our choices and not that you're a terrible person for
Speaker 2: making those choices. And I think this is where it
Speaker 2: gets tricky. And you brought up how much communities of
Speaker 2: color are impacted by climate change. This is sort of
Speaker 2: true across the board, right, Like, if we start paying
Speaker 2: attention to the impact of our choices, then we're going
Speaker 2: to have to be uncomfortable. And we interpret that as like,
Speaker 2: if I do the work to make you safer than
Speaker 2: I am less safe. Right If I do the work
Speaker 2: to include you, that means that I'm excluded. Yeah, And
Speaker 2: there's just this, like such a scarcity model of community
Speaker 2: and existence and consumption, Like one of us has to
Speaker 2: win and the other one has to lose, and that's
Speaker 2: not serving us.
Speaker 1: The bigness is that technology has done some of this
Speaker 1: work for us. I mean, look, I live in a
Speaker 1: house that runs on solar panels, and I have a
Speaker 1: car that connects up to those solar panels and it
Speaker 1: works fine. You know, it's as good as any car
Speaker 1: I ever had, maybe better. I have an induction cook
Speaker 1: top in the kitchen. It doesn't cost any more than
Speaker 1: my guests to costs a lot less once you know,
Speaker 1: to operate. We have a heat pump in the basement
Speaker 1: instead of a furnace. It works just fine. So some
Speaker 1: of these changes are easy enough to make now, but
Speaker 1: you do have to be willing to make them. I
Speaker 1: think we also have to be willing to be honest
Speaker 1: about the degree to which we need to take some
Speaker 1: of our winnings that we've accumulated in the rich parts
Speaker 1: of the world by burning fossil fuel and let people
Speaker 1: in the rest of the world have some small share
Speaker 1: of them so that they don't drown whatever I mean.
Speaker 1: We are at a place where we have the first
Speaker 1: truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question
Speaker 1: becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species? So far,
Speaker 1: the evidence is not overwhelmingly great, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: not hopeless either. It takes some solace from the fact
Speaker 1: that the only other existential crisis we've faced, the one
Speaker 1: that comes from nuclear weapons, we've actually avoided since we
Speaker 1: dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one else
Speaker 1: has done it, and they knock on wood. But there's
Speaker 1: some sign that we're capable of sometimes rising to the occasion.
Speaker 1: But in this case, it definitely requires people working together,
Speaker 1: and that's why this movement building has been so interesting.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's interesting for me about this
Speaker 1: avoidance sort of stuff that we've been discussing a little
Speaker 1: is that most of the work has been done by
Speaker 1: young people. I started through fifty dot org with seven
Speaker 1: college students. We had this massive divestment campaign that was
Speaker 1: mostly run by kids in university around the world. When
Speaker 1: they got out of school, they wanted to keep working,
Speaker 1: so they formed the Sunrise movement that brought us the
Speaker 1: Green New Deal. The junior high and high school kids
Speaker 1: who kind of have followed Greta Tunberg, who is one
Speaker 1: of my favorite people to work with. I really really
Speaker 1: adore her, and her embrace of her autism as a
Speaker 1: kind of superpower has been ennobling to watch. And she'd
Speaker 1: be the first to say, look, there's ten thousand Gretas,
Speaker 1: and they really are around the world, and they have
Speaker 1: ten million followers. That's how many kids were out on
Speaker 1: school strike and twenty nineteen before the pandemic hit. So
Speaker 1: kids are doing their job. At a certain point, I'd
Speaker 1: heard one too many people my age say well, it's
Speaker 1: up to the next generation to solve these problems, which
Speaker 1: strikes me as nonsense of the highest order. I mean, look,
Speaker 1: they're doing the leading. Sure, you know they have a
Speaker 1: lot at stake, but a it's not their fault, so
Speaker 1: it's kind of ignoble to take the world's biggest problem
Speaker 1: and dump it on the lapse of junior high school students.
Speaker 1: But it's also highly impractical. For all their energy and
Speaker 1: intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to
Speaker 1: make change on the scale we need in the time
Speaker 1: that we have, which is why in the last few
Speaker 1: years my volunteer work has been organizing older people. We've
Speaker 1: started this thing called Third Act, which organizes people over
Speaker 1: the age of sixty for progressive action. And I'm really
Speaker 1: relieved and pleased to tell you that people have been
Speaker 1: lining up to go to work. And I think it
Speaker 1: has a lot to do with psychologies of various kinds.
Speaker 1: One of them is political Scientists have long said that
Speaker 1: people get more conservative as they age, and you could
Speaker 1: posit reasons for that. But if you're in your sixties
Speaker 1: or seventies or eighties, now, your first act was in
Speaker 1: this period of epic social and cultural and political transformation.
Speaker 1: And you know you were around when we started taking
Speaker 1: women seriously in public life. You were there at the
Speaker 1: apex of the Civil rights movement. Probably you marched on
Speaker 1: the first Earth Day, because twenty million Americans were in
Speaker 1: the streets that day nineteen seventy and so there's a
Speaker 1: kind of muscle memory or a kind of collective people.
Speaker 1: When people look back on their youth, the thing that
Speaker 1: they're proud of is having been part of that. So
Speaker 1: that's half of it, But the other half seems to
Speaker 1: be and this is seems to me deeply psychologically healthy.
Speaker 1: As people get nearer the exit than the entrance, it
Speaker 1: really feels to me like they're beginning to take things
Speaker 1: like legacy and solidarity and things seriously in a different way.
Speaker 1: You know, your legacy is the planet you leave behind
Speaker 1: for the people you love the most, and people take
Speaker 1: very seriously the thought that they're leaving behind a planet
Speaker 1: that's shabbier than the one they were born onto. I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's a lot of fun to work with
Speaker 1: older people like me because there's a little less of
Speaker 1: the kind of you know, I have to be in
Speaker 1: front or kind of dominance what We did a big
Speaker 1: demonstration against these banks, the four big American banks, Chase, City, Wells, Fargo,
Speaker 1: Bank of America that are the four biggest lenders to
Speaker 1: the fossil fuel industry. We did about one hundred demonstrations.
Speaker 1: We shut them down for a day across the country
Speaker 1: with people doing sit ins and rocking chairs, you know,
Speaker 1: all over the place. And the big banner that we
Speaker 1: had where I was this big banner that just said
Speaker 1: fossils against fossil fuels. It was good to see people
Speaker 1: who could, you know, laugh at themselves a little bit
Speaker 1: and at the same time understand that they had an
Speaker 1: important role to play in trying to set things right.
Speaker 1: The whole thing has felt that the very least psychologically
Speaker 1: healthy to me and enjoin it a lot.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. One of
Speaker 2: my favorite quotes from you is the human game as
Speaker 2: a team sport and finding finding ways to come together.
Speaker 2: And that's one of the things that that kind of
Speaker 2: irks me. Kind of is not a big enough word,
Speaker 2: but the inviting right between the generations. You've got the
Speaker 2: younger generation saying you created this world for us, you jerks,
Speaker 2: and the older generation saying it wasn't my fault. You know,
Speaker 2: I was part of the civil rights movement, Like it
Speaker 2: wasn't my fault. It was the corporations. And instead of
Speaker 2: coming together in our love for the world, in our
Speaker 2: care for the world, instead of joining together with that,
Speaker 2: we get into this you screwed up you are not
Speaker 2: doing enough.
Speaker 1: I think that's right. And on the deepest level, the
Speaker 1: key dividing line in my life and I think in
Speaker 1: the world was the moment when, in political terms, probably
Speaker 1: with the election of Ronald Reagan, when we decided that
Speaker 1: individualism was the most important thing, that markets were going
Speaker 1: to solve all problems, that your job was to get rich.
Speaker 1: It was his palm Maggie Thatcher he said, there is
Speaker 1: no such thing as society. There are only individual men
Speaker 1: and women. So two things happened as a result of that.
Speaker 1: One is that, you know, we melted the North Poole
Speaker 1: because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems.
Speaker 1: The second thing that happened was that people got more
Speaker 1: and more and more isolated and alienated and off by themselves.
Speaker 1: You're the one who really understands this stuff, but it
Speaker 1: strikes me powerfully. We are socially evolved primates. It wasn't
Speaker 1: that long ago that we were all sitting on the
Speaker 1: floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other's fur,
Speaker 1: you know, And just the command to go off by
Speaker 1: yourselves and good consumers just seems to have set us
Speaker 1: up for so much unhappiness and it's and one of
Speaker 1: it's not the reason we build movements. We build movements
Speaker 1: so that we can keep the planet from overheating or
Speaker 1: you know, keep black people from having to be killed
Speaker 1: by policemen or whatever. It is a nice side effect
Speaker 1: of building movements is that people end up working together,
Speaker 1: and that's what we're designed to do.
Speaker 2: I think, yeah, it intersects really with SIGNA did a
Speaker 2: study I think it's twenty eighteen or nineteen. I should
Speaker 2: know because I cite it all the time, but they
Speaker 2: found that loneliness is a bigger public health risk than smoking, right,
Speaker 2: And you know where I go with that is like
Speaker 2: why are people lonely? And we're lonely because we can't
Speaker 2: tell each other the truth about what we're feeling or
Speaker 2: what's going on for us, because we're sort of hit
Speaker 2: with Oh you think you have it bad, other people
Speaker 2: have it worse, or I have it worse. And this really,
Speaker 2: like this shows up in what you and I have
Speaker 2: just been talking about, right, like in the climate catastrophe
Speaker 2: or that individualism and thinking that it's you against the world,
Speaker 2: and the flip side of that of you can't get
Speaker 2: help unless you've exhausted every possible aspect of doing it
Speaker 2: for yourself, right, God helps those who help themselves. This
Speaker 2: sort of rugged individualism lays the stage for cataclysm devastation
Speaker 2: on social, political, environmental fronts. And what I hear you saying, yay,
Speaker 2: is that community and connection is the answer.
Speaker 1: Absolutely, and it may be the answer to winning those fights,
Speaker 1: but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive
Speaker 1: at the tough moment. You know, it's what we want
Speaker 1: to do at some level. I mean, to the funniest degree.
Speaker 1: I now have lots of older people coming up and
Speaker 1: telling me that it's on their bucket list to get
Speaker 1: arrested and could I help you know and things. Sure,
Speaker 1: I know how to do that, but it's brush, it's
Speaker 1: powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the
Speaker 1: place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do
Speaker 1: think that if we get through the next twenty years,
Speaker 1: which are going to be very tough, that humans will
Speaker 1: find far more interesting ways to amuse themselves going forward.
Speaker 1: I think that the chances that you know, seventy five
Speaker 1: years from now, all we can think of to do is,
Speaker 1: you know, go to the mall, or go shopping online,
Speaker 1: or you know, whatever it is. That seems slight to me.
Speaker 1: We're really interesting species. We wandered into this enticing called
Speaker 1: de sact of kind of high consumer consumerism, and it'll
Speaker 1: take us a little while, but eventually we'll get out
Speaker 1: of it. So my job, our job is to try
Speaker 1: and make sure we get through those twenty or thirty
Speaker 1: years so that the people who come after us have
Speaker 1: some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.
Speaker 2: I love that. I feel like you've answered my closing
Speaker 2: question multiple times, but I'm going to give it to
Speaker 2: you anyway. You wrote in Falter, a writer doesn't owe
Speaker 2: a reader hope. The only obligation is honesty. You've written
Speaker 2: about hope in a bunch of different ways. So for today,
Speaker 2: knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what
Speaker 2: does hope look like for you today?
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's always a hard question because I don't There
Speaker 1: are days when I don't even have you know, when
Speaker 1: the endthing that gets me through the day is just,
Speaker 1: you know, anger at exon or something like that. Sometimes
Speaker 1: that's a reasonable fuel to get you going. But the
Speaker 1: hope is that we don't walk off this particular cliff
Speaker 1: eyes closed. You know, it feels to me like climate
Speaker 1: change the climate crisis is a really interesting test of
Speaker 1: whether or not the big brain was a good adaptation
Speaker 1: or not. It can get us in a lot of trouble,
Speaker 1: can it get us out? And my intuition is that
Speaker 1: it's actually going to be less the size of the
Speaker 1: brain that matters than the size of the heart that
Speaker 1: it's attached to. And we shelse I have hope in
Speaker 1: most of the people around me and the people that
Speaker 1: I know that they are of good heart. Sometimes that
Speaker 1: hope is strained and tested. It's been not such a
Speaker 1: great few years, you know, and I don't pretend to understand,
Speaker 1: you know, some of the things that we see in
Speaker 1: our society now. But that's where my hope was that
Speaker 1: in the end there are enough people of good heart
Speaker 1: that we will figure out how to work together through this.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for being here, not just on
Speaker 2: the show but in the world.
Speaker 1: Back at you enormous thanks for your good work. And
Speaker 1: this has really been a fun conversation, a deep one.
Speaker 1: I've thought about things I hadn't really thought about before,
Speaker 1: which is the mark of a good interlocutor.
Speaker 2: Excellent. I am so glad to hear that it's been
Speaker 2: such an honor to talk with you. Now, we're going
Speaker 2: to link to your books. In the show notes, we
Speaker 2: will give people a link to the third Act, and
Speaker 2: we're going to add in some of the resources and
Speaker 2: the other authors that we mentioned in the show. All right, everybody,
Speaker 2: stay tuned for your questions to carry with you coming
Speaker 2: up right after this break. Each week I leave you
Speaker 2: with some questions to carry with you until we meet again. Now,
Speaker 2: you know, it really struck me in this conversation just
Speaker 2: how hard it is to really face the climate crisis,
Speaker 2: like it is so overwhelming. I know that sticking my
Speaker 2: head in the sand is only going to hasten the
Speaker 2: world I don't want, but I still have a hard
Speaker 2: time maintaining my gaze on how serious, how dangerous this
Speaker 2: all is. Like there are so many things we need
Speaker 2: to fight for, but if we no longer have an
Speaker 2: inhabitable planet, all of that fighting and all of our celebris,
Speaker 2: it just stops. Which is a little light thought to
Speaker 2: carry with you for the day. But that's not your
Speaker 2: questions to carry with you, because at the same time
Speaker 2: that I'm turning to face how dangerous and serious this
Speaker 2: all is, Like this conversation made me feel a little braver,
Speaker 2: not less overwhelmed, but more hopeful, more able to see
Speaker 2: this as the experiment in big heartedness. As Bill said
Speaker 2: towards the end of our time together, curiosity and engagement
Speaker 2: with the experiment feels a lot more sustainable and a
Speaker 2: lot less overwhelming than those other two options of like
Speaker 2: collapsing into despair on one hand, or pretending there's absolutely
Speaker 2: nothing wrong on the other. I hope you feel the
Speaker 2: same after this conversation today, a little more willing to
Speaker 2: sustain your gaze, a little more willing to take action
Speaker 2: in ways that feel right for you, a little more
Speaker 2: willing to open the conversation with your people, your friends,
Speaker 2: your families about all the feelings inside the catastrophes facing
Speaker 2: us as individuals and as a global community. It is
Speaker 2: such a massive grief and such a massive chance to
Speaker 2: be together, to band together inside it. So how about you.
Speaker 2: I would love to hear how not only this show
Speaker 2: affected you, but how grief and climate change come together
Speaker 2: in you. It is truly something we do not talk
Speaker 2: about enough. Everybody's going to take something different from this show,
Speaker 2: but I do hope you found something to hold on to.
Speaker 2: If you want to tell me how today's show felt
Speaker 2: for you, or you have thoughts on what we covered,
Speaker 2: let me know. Tag at Refuge and Grief on all
Speaker 2: the social platforms so I can hear how this conversation
Speaker 2: affected you. Follow the show at its Okay pod on
Speaker 2: TikTok and Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video
Speaker 2: clips from the show. But there are no video clips
Speaker 2: from this one because my guest lives in Rolle, Vermont
Speaker 2: and the Internet was not strong enough for video, so
Speaker 2: you're not going to see videos, but you will see
Speaker 2: videos from every other guest. Use the hashtag It's okaypod
Speaker 2: on all of the platforms, so not only I can
Speaker 2: find you, but other people can too. None of us
Speaker 2: are entirely okay, and as time we start talking about
Speaker 2: that together, Yeah, it's okay that you're not okay. You're
Speaker 2: in good company. That's it for this week. Remember to
Speaker 2: subscribe to the show and leave a review.
Speaker 1: Please.
Speaker 2: Your reviews are really special to me and I love
Speaker 2: to read them. Want more on these topics. Look, grief
Speaker 2: is everywhere. As my dad says, daily life is full
Speaker 2: of everyday grief that we don't call grief, including grief
Speaker 2: around climate change. Learning how to talk about all of
Speaker 2: that without cliches or platitudes or dismissive statements, or telling
Speaker 2: people to be more resilient, like those are important skills
Speaker 2: for everyone. Get help to have those conversations with training's
Speaker 2: professional resources and my best selling book, It's Okay that
Speaker 2: You're Not Okay at Megandivine dot Co. It's Okay that
Speaker 2: You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced by
Speaker 2: me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co produced
Speaker 2: by Elizabeth Fozzio. Logistical and social media support from Micah,
Speaker 2: Post production and editing by Houston Tilly. Our intern this
Speaker 2: season is Hannah Goldman. Music provided by Wavecrush and background
Speaker 2: noise provided by the new collection of Toys with digital
Speaker 2: sound effects spilling over my backyard beds from the neighbors