The motion of water, and what we don’t know: a repost of a newsletter I shared last year.
SUMMARY
I write summaries for people who have to marshal their energy and attention.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, which has been in the news before, is in the news again.
What I know about the water, what I don’t know, and how I use my knowledge.
Uncertainty as possibility, again, forever.
PRACTICE (this one will work better if you get the instructions first): When you click on the first link below and read the article there, pause at the end of each paragraph to notice how you’re feeling. You don’t need to do anything about the feeling—you don’t need to shift it or question it or even “sit with it” (barf)—just note it before moving on to the next paragraph or, I suppose, closing the tab.
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An ocean current that affects most people is back in the news. The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current, while you’ve been alive and for the time that everything you inhabit was built, has been helping to keep land and water temperatures hospitable for a multitude of creatures, including humans, and contributing to the consistency of weather patterns like dry and rainy seasons. Recent news articles report that rising global temperatures have been pouring fresh glacial meltwater into the current, slowing down its circulation. The same articles and the studies they’re based on say that the consequences of this could be—very likely will be—more extreme temperatures and weather, straining food systems, livable temperatures, and the stability of the land beneath us.
This news, and many people’s responses to it (including mine), followed a pattern that has become familiar. A piece of information about future climate change—some process that’s unfolding, but isn't yet at its fullest extent—comes down the public pike. It’s huge, so seemingly out of scale to our human bodies and our human efforts that it sweeps us away. Then we get caught in the churn of people reacting, also publicly: minimizing, bemoaning, being flippant about it (my least favorite), insisting, recruiting. And then the things that are happening right now and need our attention right now (including climate impacts of other kinds) reassert themselves. The foam subsides. We don’t forget, exactly, but we don’t feel it—and so it doesn't move us any further.
One of the first things I learned as a swimmer, once I graduated from arm floaties, was to pay attention to the currents. That involves reading any signage, talking to people who know the water, and observing on my own skin and muscle and joints how the water pulls, how it nudges, at each step. If you’re only paying attention to riding the waves, you can end up way down the beach or lethally out beyond your depth. I am a good swimmer and I love to be in the ocean, but if I can’t tell what the currents are doing, I keep my feet on the bottom or I don’t go in.
The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Current is there whether we know it or not. It’s been there the whole time, and now the way that it is there is changing, so the shape that it will give to our lives is changing too, whether or not we think about it or feel it. The difference comes in how we feel it, how we let that change move us, and where. People who pay professional and informed attention to the current are making professional and informed projections, revising them based on new observations. At least some of those projections are probably going to happen, with the potential to hurt or kill a lot of people. If emissions climb, we can be somewhat certain of what the current is going to do. But we don’t know what we’re going to do.
Every beach is swim-at-your-own-risk, but in recent summers where I live the risks have been higher: toxic algae and man o’war jellies. Just before our local heat wave broke, some friends came over for a porch beer, and one of them said something like, “We’re going to die out but the jellyfish—”
“—and the roly-polies—” another one put in—
“—are going to be fine. They’re going to inherit the earth.” They looked at me. “I know you’re writing a whole book to get people out of that kind of fatalism.”
I said to them all what I’ll say now to you: not exactly. Or, more like, I want out of the fatalism no matter what kind it is. I don’t know whether humans will pass while jellies and roly-polies prevail, and neither did anyone else on that porch. I also don’t know that they won’t—that as a species and a set of relationships, we’ll survive. I hope we do, in the sense that I would like us to, but the point is not to have hope or to not have it; the point is to not pretend to know what you don’t actually know. If you do that in the ocean, you can drown.
My friend was, I think, going in the opposite direction—not wanting to pretend not to know what they do know, about the narrow window in which humans can live well—and that’s important too. You need companions to cut through the buffeting and the protective daze, and help you decide where to put your efforts when you’re ready to make them. Please don’t think I like uncertainty or am joyfully embracing it or anything like that. I fucking hate it. But I also sort of—sort of—welcome it, because it is a zone of possibility. We don’t know what we’ll do, but on the other hand, we don’t know what we’ll do.
SHORT READING: The interviewer here is, uh, very NPR but Hanif Abdurraqib handles it and says some good things about love, music, and staying in the world for the time being and because you might as well.
ANOTHER SHORT READING: Here is one thing that I know people are doing, right now: West Street Recovery’s micro-grids (for when the TX power grid fails), hub houses and other community disaster prep are pretty cool, and you can donate to flood insurance for vulnerable Houston households here. Even if you don’t have money to share, I think it’s good to know that people are doing these things, and how, and why, because you are a person, too.
I wrote a book, LESSONS FROM THE CLIMATE ANXIETY COUNSELING BOOTH: HOW TO LIVE WITH CARE AND PURPOSE IN AN ENDANGERED WORLD (Hachette Go, 2024). This newsletter holds the ways that what's in it has branched out: new reflections, events and workshops, unresolved questions, further reading, ways to connect and act. I'm glad to be here on earth with you.