Fighting for a future beyond the climate crisis [MIT Tech Review]

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When it comes to climate breakdown and the extinction crisis, the question I get most often is: How can we have hope? 

People ask me this in a range of contexts—in Q&A sessions, in emails, and on podcasts and radio shows, whether I’m doing outreach for my novels, like A Children’s Bible or Dinosaurs, or for nonfiction like We Loved It All, my new memoir. I see numerous iterations of it in the media and my social feeds and hear accounts of its ubiquity from writer friends, scientist and lawyer colleagues, activists and community organizers.

I’ve thought about the impulse behind the asking and am left with the lingering sense that many of us tend, in this cultural moment, to privilege our feelings on these existential threats over reason, say, or moral virtue, or apparently antiquated notions of civic and collective duty. Feelings are the beacon we entrust with shining a path through the fog to guide us home—anger and aggrievement, maybe, on the right of the political spectrum, and on the left something akin to defensive self-righteousness. 

It’s almost as though we lay our fate at the feet of feelings and wait for deliverance.

In the realm of emotion, hope guards against despair, whose rationalized intellectual output is cynicism—a free pass out of the tension of grappling with our responsibility to the future, with the difficulty and possible unpleasantness of engagement and resistance. But like cynicism, hope is its own free pass, filling the space of subjectivity with a passive expectation of relief. For the most part “hope” functions as a unit of rhetoric, as amorphous as “happiness” or “freedom”: a shredded flag in the discourse around climate doomsaying and denial that can only droop over a citadel under relentless siege. If we rely on hope, we give up agency. And that may be seductive, but it’s also surrender.

It’s possible that feelings aren’t our most useful gift. Other animals have feelings too, yet they haven’t radically modified the planet toward unlivability; we’ve done so by pairing our feelings with the unique combination of capabilities that were our species’ answers to the pressures of evolution. These include communication and collaboration, the sophisticated languages we share, our ability to conceptualize a distant past and future and make tools with our opposable thumbs—capacities that, together, have allowed us to construct empires and complex machines and cast our intelligence into the deep sea and the far-off thermosphere. Even beyond the sun. 

Yet the mission we chose to undertake has been one guided by desire and by a framework of ideas we’ve built to justify projecting that desire into the appropriation and liquidation of our resource base. The result has been voracious production and reproduction. Over the course of just a handful of fast-moving centuries, that hysterical vector of taking and making has landed us in a state of emergency that suddenly appears, with a high degree of credibility, poised to bury us under the sea or burn us off the land: in effect to steam open our small envelope of life and peel our paper-thin atmosphere, forests and rivers, grasslands and tundra and reefs and polar icescapes and the creatures they sustain, right off the surface of the world.

To fathom the danger of our situation, to let its immediacy dawn on us and drive us to act, it’s true that emotion is required. But in the stable of emotions to which we have ready access, hope is a pale horse. To spark an understanding of our history of error and push us to reconceive and heal as passionately as we now lay waste, we need to embrace a more extraordinary recognition.

We need shock and awe in the face of the majesty and fragility of nature, humility in the face of the vastness of the transformations our kind has set in motion—a bristling realization of imminent peril, a visceral apprehension of the nonfungibility of our zone of life. Of this marvelous place, infinitesimal in the solar system if not the galaxy, that has given us, on the thin skin of a solitary planet, the combination of flowing water and breathable air that are the preconditions for life. 

Only awe can drive us to work as frenziedly from fear as, it might be argued, we’ve worked from greed until now.

More than ordinary emotions, we need an encounter with the shock of our finitude, a sensation of awe, reverence, and astonishment before the richness and precariousness of being. 

Ordinary emotions let us blunder through the onslaught of information in the slow befuddlement of a stubborn belief that the familiar is bound to persist. But without a swift, far-reaching, and cooperative global effort, the familiar will not persist. Social and political stability will vanish along with biological and geophysical vanishments—the disappearance of coral reefs, for instance, whose absence will denude the oceans of diversity, or the collapse of the AMOC, the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation, under the influx of fresh water from melting ice, which could render Northern Europe inhospitably cold, raise sea levels along the US Eastern Seaboard, and overheat the tropics. 

In the realm of emotion, awe is the prerequisite to action. Not hope. Only awe can drive us to work as frenziedly from fear as, it might be argued, we’ve worked from greed until now. And whether it’s music or nature or art or religion that leaves us awestruck or just a simple decision to suddenly, deeply notice the world beyond ourselves, each of these requires the suspension of chatter—a willingness to halt and stand still within the rushing momentum of daily life. 

If we wish to thrive beyond it, the next century will have to be a time of unmaking and remaking: unmaking the technologies and culture of fossil fuels and their massive, entrenched infrastructure and remaking our template for prosperity from one based on limitless growth into one aimed at accommodation to a delicate biosphere. This means, among other key policy steps, defending and funding reproductive rights, equity, and education both at home and abroad—chiefly for women, since women’s access to education is a central driver of the lower birth rates that will be crucial to living within our means. 

To champion makerdom alone as the answer is to add willful ignorance to hubris. It’s a fact that we need to manufacture and rapidly propagate better tools—energy and food delivery systems that don’t disintegrate our life support to fuel our daily activities—and, equally, it’s a lie that better making by itself can save us or the other life forms we depend on.

Less making and unmaking are also the solution—less making of what we do not need and more unmaking of harmful machines and ideas. The sprawling patrimony of bad ideas—that Homo sapiens reigns supreme over nature and so is miraculously independent of it, in defiance of ecology and physics; that market capitalism is the unassailable apogee of civilization and ongoing expansion the correct communal goal, including endless human procreation cheered on by neoliberal economists who whinge over declining birth rates in industrialized nations—should be dismantled as steadily as the destructive machines. 

Neither the United States nor the world community has mechanisms in place to adequately curb potentially catastrophic enterprise, either when that enterprise is demonstrably causing climate chaos or when it purports to meet the demand for fixes. Treaties made under international law have been famously toothless to date, while the US legal system, which does possess sharp teeth, defers to the legislative bounds established by a Congress deeply beholden to fossil fuels and related industries bent on maintaining the status quo. And that legal system, far from being disposed to address the exceptionally high public health and security risks posed by climate change and extinction, is clearly, through the recent stacking of courts with antigovernment and antiscience jurists, in the business of radically increasing its deference to private actors as it erodes the rights of the dispossessed and the power of federal oversight. 

If we in this country can’t rely on the legislative or judicial branches of our central government to tackle the crises of their own volition, while the executive branch directs, at best, movement toward renewables without movement away from fossils; if we can’t rely on the myopic and nihilistic companies dominating the energy sector to pivot anytime soon; then who remains to help us? To whom can we turn, we who exist, always and only, here and nowhere else, in this walled city of the Earth under such terrible siege? 

The answer may be, for now, only ourselves. Those of us who have language and believe in the wisdom science can offer. Who know the surpassing vulnerability of the rivers and prairies, the jungles and wetlands, the cypress swamps of South Florida, the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa, the Siberian taiga, the Tropical Andes, Madagascar, the island Caribbean. Who can gaze into the future and, beholding the prospect of a frightening and emptier world for our descendants, feel compelled to fight on behalf of the one we have. 

Lydia Millet is the author of more than a dozen novels, including A Children’s Bible; her most recent book, We Loved It All: A Memory of Life, is her first work of nonfiction.