Judging by my social media and the news articles, humans finally figured out that the climate crisis is 1) real, 2) going to kill us all. Obviously “all” is an incorrect word to use, because the rich – who are causing all this – will do just fine. (The American president, for instance, didn’t attend the climate summit – he, personally, doesn’t have to – yet.) A lot of post-apocalyptic cli-fi writers probably already described the new, crispy world that neither they nor I will be a part of, because we’ll be dead. When the climate anxiety becomes overwhelming, what can we really do apart from breaking down?
I’ve been doing my best to avoid politics, but the G7 summit, Mr Trump’s latest policies, and Mr Bolsonaro’s little ego trip – “I’ll only take your money if you apologise to me” – made me realise that it’s not going to be possible anymore. Because it’s not you or me who can really make a difference. It’s the rich and the politicians they bought.
Individual action doesn’t solve the problem, but…
Elizabeth Rush in Business Telegraph (this article was widely reprinted around the world):
Last fall, as I landed in New Orleans, a seed of existential anxiety lodged itself deep in my gut. It was my fifth flight in just over a week. I was in the middle of a tour to promote a book on how coastal communities around the US were already responding to the climate crisis […] I could see the landscape that my air travel would play a role in diminishing – the additional CO2 in the atmosphere melting Arctic sea ice and Antarctic glaciers, causing sea levels to rise. What am I doing here? I wondered.
[…] At the end of my presentation last year in in New Orleans, an audience member asked me whether I still have hope? […] The hope I do have resides in the fact that as the climate crisis comes home to us in deeply unsettling ways – in the form of heatwaves and freak storms, wildfires, and permafrost melt, twisting the world we know into new and disturbing shapes – it is also building unlikely coalitions amongst people who might not appear to share affinities at first glance.
(I recommend reading the entire piece.)
I’ve spent a good chunk of last week in my favourite hideaway – the Magical Garden, courtesy of my two wonderful friends, G and B. But I didn’t get as relaxed as I usually would. First, G showed me a picture of the garden a few weeks ago, during a drought. (See the main photo.) The grass turned yellow. Once the weather returned to normal, whatever “normal” even is these days, most of the grass returned to life. Most. G is resigned to the fact that the next year might be the last one when the garden will actually have any grass in it.
