Am I doing enough? What can I do?
If you subscribed to my newsletter before it became “Now Is Long,” you’ll know that I often struggle to maintain a fortnightly publishing schedule. Weeks fill up, weekends get enjoyed, life happens. But keeping a routine has become even harder now that this newsletter has a purpose and a narrower focus — I can’t just sit down on a Sunday afternoon and burp out some thoughts. I need to inform those thoughts with research and structure them in a way that will (hopefully) persuade the people reading those thoughts to take action.
I also need to feel like there’s a good reason to write anything at all.
The past few months have been hard. Between a difficult job, a neverending pandemic, and ceaseless portents of climate doom pouring in from every corner of the internet, I’ve found myself in a deep funk. It is perhaps the lowest I’ve ever been in my life. From this depth, it has been difficult to write anything, let alone a newsletter that requires research, planning, and — critically — action. Because action has also been difficult. Everything has felt just a little too hopeless. What, really, is the difference between calling my representatives and curling into a ball on my couch?
I know I’m not alone in this feeling. If you consume any amount of news, you’re confronted daily with the knowledge that things are bad and only getting worse worse. We’re watching powerful people blithely throw our futures away and we’re watching the devastating consequences of our climate legacy unfold. It feels like a death in slow motion, and beneath the anger and fear is a powerful grief.
I’ve been letting that grief pull me underwater, but I’m trying to work my way back up to the surface. Every night I’ve been reading a chapter from All We Can Save, an anthology of writing by women in the climate action and advocacy space. Each essay is staunchly hopeful; the book’s ethos is definitively anti-despair. I’m setting stricter limits on my social media time, since that’s where I’m getting my strongest doses of doom. I’ve written down a few lines of text to keep throughout my house as reminders that even if we can’t save the world, it’s still important to keep trying.
“What despair here amounts to is that ‘I can make no difference because I am unwilling to make a difference.’”
– Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up a Pipeline
“The fight is, definitively, not yet lost — in fact will never be lost, so long as we avoid extinction, because however warm the planet gets, it will always be the case that the decade that follows could contain more suffering or less.”
– Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth
“Without knowing the outcome, we have to try anyway; without a single guarantee, we must show up.”
– Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson, All We Can Save
Perhaps what climate action now requires is people who have reached the “acceptance” phase of grief, people who recognize that the world will never again be the beautiful thing they inhabited as children, but that whatever it becomes is still worth fighting for.
I watched Don’t Look Up this week and I was overcome by the “depression” phase of climate grief. The dread, the despair. At the end of the movie, the climate scientists played by Leo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence gather for a final meal with loved ones. They go around the table to share what they’re grateful for — what they’re glad to have experienced in their precious time on an intact Earth. “I’m grateful that we tried,” Jennifer Lawrence’s character says. That’s when the waterworks really started for me. When our reckoning comes, when the final piece holding our fragile civilization upright gives out, will I be able to say that I’m grateful for that much? That I tried?
It’s vital for my mental health and for my general sense of self that I’m able to answer “yes.” So I’m expecting more of myself in the coming year, and I hope you will see that expectation reflected in the work and writing of this newsletter.
What I’ve done recently
Today I signed up for SunShare, a community solar program that allows me to get clean energy at home without having to install anything. The organization develops community solar gardens that add clean energy to the grid, I subscribe to a portion of that energy, and my utility buys that portion from me.
I was so excited to learn about this service. As a renter, I can’t buy my own solar panels. This service will allow me to change 100% of my electricity to solar energy without installing anything or obtaining any permission from my landlord. Since SunShare will connect to my utility account and not my house, it means I can also maintain my subscription when I move, as long as I still live in an eligible area.
If you live in Colorado (and I think they have some solar farms in Minnesota as well), you can sign up too! Learn more and check your eligibility on their website.
If you’re like, “Hell yeah, let’s do this, give me that sweet sweet clean energy,” you can even get a little referral bonus: Become a SunShare subscriber by December 31 (that’s tomorrow, sorry) to receive a $150 gift card to a local business. Just mention my name (Lauren Thurman) as a referrer when you sign up.
Disclaimer: Solar shares are allotted based on availability. If you sign up today, you may not actually start using solar energy for a few weeks or even months. But they don’t charge you anything until you’re actually assigned a solar garden share. Even if you don’t start using clean energy right away, it’s still worth signing up so that we can continue to increase demand for renewable energy and tell utilities that this is what the people want.
Today I also made my end-of-year donations. (My life motto is, “If you do it at the last minute, it only takes a minute.”) I gave to the following organizations:
- The Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, which supports Native communities nationally with advocacy, education, and networking as they revitalize their indigenous food systems.
- Sunrise Movement, a national youth movement working to address the climate crisis through political advocacy and direct action.
- Conservation Colorado, which works to protect Colorado’s climate, air, land, water, and communities through organizing, advocacy, and elections.
I’ve been reminding myself often that nobody has to enter this fight alone. There are already so many people, communities, and organizations working their butts off to fight for a livable future. They know what they’re doing, and they want us to join them.
What I’m doing next
For most of my adult life, I’ve picked a mantra to start a new year rather than setting discrete resolutions. My 2022 mantra is “one thing at a time.” I’ve felt myself getting overwhelmed pretty much nonstop lately — by work, by the world, by the easy daily tasks that I can’t seem to finish because I start doing another dang task right in the middle of the first one. (Am I among the legions of women on Twitter discovering that they probably have undiagnosed ADHD? Maybe. Or maybe it’s just that things are terrible.)
The “one thing at a time” focus should be helpful in the way I think, write, and act in response to the climate crisis. I will remind myself daily that, yes, we’re fighting this battle on a thousand fronts, but if I try to hold them all in my head at once then I’m just going to get my ass kicked. One thing at a time. Find a place where I can lend support or make a difference, and push there with gentle insistency. That was the whole point of this newsletter, anyway: to take manageable and discrete actions and to tell you all about how they went, hopefully making it a little bit easier for you to do the same.
Which brings me to my more immediate 2022 goal: Modified Veganuary.
While I believe the whole concept of an individual carbon footprint is a massive scam run by corporations that don’t want to clean up their own mess, I do subscribe to the notion that we need to change the way we eat if we want to keep living on this planet. (By “we,” I mean the global wealthy who have access to a lot of food, much of it destructive.)
Veganuary is an annual challenge to go completely vegan for the first 31 days of the year. To be frank, I simply do not want to do that. I would consider myself mostly plant-based, but I lack the desire to unlock the 100% Vegan Achievement. Cheese is a nice little treat. Sometimes you need a nice little treat to keep going.
What I do want is to add more vegan meals into my rotation. So for the month of January, I’m going to eat at least one completely vegan meal a day. For many meals, this will be simple — I can just… not shred cheese on top of my butternut squash soup — but I already know that breakfast will be a challenge. Yogurt and eggs are my ride-or-dies. Whence the protein to start my day? I’ll just have to find out. I’m excited to explore more vegan options, try out some fake meats, and hopefully enter the month of February with greater knowledge of how I can feed myself with a lower impact.
Do you want to join me??
If you’re interested in undertaking your own version of Modified Veganuary, let me know! I want to see your favorite recipes and your recommended vegan baking ingredients. I want to know about your unreasonable affection for a certain kind of bean. Food can be great fun; let’s spread that around.
If you’re doing any sort of vegan food challenge this month, please please send me notes and ideas and recipes (and photos!!) so that I can share your updates with this wee community.
Some recommended reading
- I’m getting a lot out of All We Can Save; it feels like a refuge from the dread I get when learning about climate issues anywhere else. If you’re looking for some slow, steady reading this year, I recommend buying a copy.
- This is old news now, but Bloomberg’s choose-your-own-adventure about municipal climate policy is really fun and informative. Can you fix Smogtown?
- “It is easy to despair, but we cannot afford the luxury of nihilism.” Ed Yong’s (typically) excellent piece about our personal responsibilities amid systemic government failure gave me another needed dose of sticktoitiveness.