(No. 43, a ±06 minute read)
Unintended consequences are still consequences.
Editors are a marvel and it is a privilege to have their breed looking out for me in my work in print.1 There is obviously skin in the game at their end — they are, after all, making the decision to have a writer’s work potentially either grace or endanger their outlet’s pages. The best ones though — their real care is for the story, language, and the writer — and they provide an essential net beneath the tightrope. I’ve been fortunate to work with more than a few truly exemplary editors and I am finishing up pieces this week with some of that lot. It’s always bittersweet, leaving the transitory care of a favorite editor to return to the beleaguered world that freelance journalism is these days.
In the midst of working with an absolute favorite editor (and person) Biden dropped out of the election and Kamala Harris stepped in. It was a buoying event for me, the citizen, if not so much for me the journalist. As might be expected, I was writing an essay about a singular facet of global warming’s effects on us and I turned it in with acknowledgement of my not-great climatic outlook.
As someone reporting on aspects of global warming I am regularly asked if I have “any hope.” A couple of months ago I stopped dissembling, if not outright lying.
And here, in the course of our working emails, one of my two all-time favorite editors asked if my outlook were any more hopeful after Harris’ stepping in to lead the Democratic Party and presenting the possibility of defeating Trump, whose second administration promises to be environmentally calamitous. I wrote a bunch back, it just sort of fell out, a distillation of everything in my mind regarding “hope.”
Because writers are at heart egoists, I think that it’s worth sharing in its entirety. So here it is, my response to an inquiry about the status of my hope these days; the inquiry from someone who works to ensure that I don’t splat from the the high-wire writing can be, and for whom I have the utmost respect — for their humanity, intellect, compassion, and regard for the written word (I try not to use “ain’t” when writing them):2
Regarding Harris, yes — I have some optimism, but that is optimism for our not becoming an entirely oligarchic state under a racist, homophobic autocracy. That’s different, unfortunately, from my sense that humankind will not rise to the hour of need global warming assigns us. (To my credit in not being merely a misanthropic outlier, many I know in climate science share similar sentiments even as they absolutely will not go on record with them.)
In the Times this morning an evangelist of geo-engineering gets a big profile and platform for his radical idea of filling the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide to cool the planet. My upcoming piece in XXXXXXX [I redacted this here because the essay had not published] deals specifically with techno-optimism like this.3 I place it in the context of, first, wildly violating the precautionary principle at a global scale, and second, our systems of capital, and wealth building and sustaining, both of which are foundational contributors to greenhouse gas pollution.
My crankiness stems from what I see as our inability to modify the basic frameworks of human life as we have built them — our finance system in particular, but all of them; political, social, the broader systems of economics we’ve designed. My sense is that they will only be changed after catastrophe. And we’ve seen events that would appear to me to be plenty catastrophic enough to drive change (Covid, the climate crisis itself), and which nonetheless allow the status quo to hum along, receiving merely a tinkering at the margins. And so techno-optimism enters the arena, a very American inclination.
The rich are the problem, and as long as they have incentive to maintain existing status quos our climate systems will not be protected. (The rich in toto, to be sure there are those among them seeking change, unfortunately their participation in systems of wealth maintenance likely damns them too.) The papers I’ve read addressing the astonishing pollution contributions of passive investments to entrenching the climate crisis are sobering; as is the continued work to dissemble coming from carbon fuel producers and the failure of Americans and other comparatively wealthy Westerners to grasp the stakes at hand in an actionable manner — all and more inform my ungenerous outlook.
But, in the interim, for us alive now and the next generation or two, it's our work to improve things. There is no abdication in my lack of hope — that is morally indefensible. The overwhelming intractability of the mess which historical, and ongoing, human entitlement, arrogance, and exceptionalism have left us doesn’t mean we don’t have to try to clean it up.
I know this is dark in the morning [name redacted], but be assured I’m not sitting in a cave, miserable. I’m still here, in the islands I love and which made me. An ‘uhu (a blue, spectacled parrotfish) swam up to the surface in front of me while I was sitting on my board yesterday evening, out surfing for the first time in months.4 They don’t commonly do that, it was both beautiful and wondrous. I am possessed of an understanding that such specificities of beauty and wonder are changing, and will change — the sublime kelp forests I knew on the Northern California coast are largely gone today, for example. They will be replaced by different specificities. Maybe degraded from those we know today as ecosystems crater but I can’t judge those future aesthetics, only mourn the losses I understand.
Don’t worry about me, I came home to be with an archipelago I knew and which I understood to be effectively in hospice. I am happily spending my time here; though occasionally battered by anger, I am mostly enveloped in wonder. To be sure, sometimes sadness overwhelms me for what those arriving after us will not know.5 But they will know something different, impoverished perhaps, but leavened — hopefully — with the strengths and spirit of our species’ better angels; aloha ‘āina, community, music, art, love, kindness, wonder, awe, discovery. Friendships like ours will also persist; you push me to open my horizons, be more precise, clarify my thoughts, inhabit love. I believe there is something thankfully inextinguishable about such human relations.
I am convinced that all of these finer characteristics of humanity will be sustained, that only the stage they play out on will change. It is a heartbreak that the wondrous trajectory of evolutionary process we have known in our lifetimes will be degraded, that so many living things (especially including innocent wildlife and people) will suffer, that much of this reality can be attributed to the interests of so few. But that is our lot. Hope and joy, as always, must be where we find them. And there is comfort in the Talmudic understanding that the work is undeniably ours, just not ours to complete.
With all my love and aloha, and great anticipation to see your forthcoming editing comments on that grueling exercise in brevity! (To my limited credit the essay never exceeded 675 words; but I really wanted to include bits about the correlation of increased gun violence with high heat days possessing temperature anomaly attributable to global warming. That is an addressable margin in the climate crisis for sure!)
It’s all true, that’s my sense of things these days: we’ve got to get our shit together and I don’t think we will until it’s too late, if at all. But none of that excuses any of us, or our political representatives from trying. Because, I can tell you, the oil industry isn’t going to lift a finger it doesn’t have to in order to help.
To be clear these newsletters are written without undergoing the sort of rigorous editing process that any published piece I’ve written undergo — and probably they reflect that lack.
This is someone who has worked me to near despair to substantiate something almost impossible to be substantiated, and whom I referred to (lovingly) as a sadist in this correspondence for the requirement that I address something profoundly complex in fewer than 600 words. It’s not all roses and light in even the best editor/writer relationships!
I don’t think it’s my place to announce something unpublished, you’ll soon see things here that couldn’t be squeezed in.
It was preceded by a manini (a convict tang) and a mamo (the sergeant major) so there was something in the water column motivating them to the surface — none of these fish regularly show themselves there.
Teaching is excellent at provoking this!