Dear Dot: With Climate Action Under Threat … What Next?

Dear Dot,

What next?

– Kat

The Short Answer: “What next?” includes reaching out to those you can trust in this moment. Start thinking smaller, by which I mean … community. Rest. When you are ready to re-emerge and re-engage in climate work, look close to home for opportunities. I promise you that they’re there. Just because we can’t save everything doesn’t mean we can’t save anything. We must remain audacious in our conviction that a better world remains possible.

Dear Kat,

It is frightening, when those to whom we turn for calm, measured instructions on how to address our climate breakdown are, themselves, breaking down in the wake of what can only be considered a devastating defeat for U.S.-led climate action. One of my climate heroes recently posted something on social media that said something along the lines of, ‘I’ve avoided saying this but can’t hold back. We are f*#ked.’ Indeed, something like that might have prompted your question, Kat. And it is an important one. “What next?” when those we depend on for guidance are throwing out their maps, when the progress we thought we were making seems destined to be erased?

I don’t entirely know but I can share what I’ve been doing, because it seems to be working. And by working, I mean, Dot is able to rise each morning, to walk my dogs, to play a game of pickleball in this bizarrely warm November weather. 

Thích Nhất Hạnh, the Vietnamese Buddhist Monk exiled during the war in his country, reminds us to do the next right action within arm’s reach, which, in this moment, might mean reaching for your child or your cat or a tub of ice cream. It has meant all those things for me, but also doing the one thing each week that takes me outside of my overactive brain and gives me deep pleasure: Volunteering at my local soup kitchen. There is something primally satisfying about putting warm food into hungry bellies. I highly recommend it. (Incidentally, our soup kitchen is part of a system whereby grocery stores and catering organizations donate their leftovers, so we are also preventing food waste by rescuing food destined for landfill. Everybody wins!)

I’ve been reaching further and deeper, both inside myself, where I have had to spend some time getting still, and outwardly, where I’ve sought the wisdom of those who have walked through fire themselves and returned with buckets of water. 

I have tried to become quieter for now, knowing that my desire to be loud, to create change, will return. Right now, I (and I suspect you, too, Kat) must calm our frantic nervous systems, which are responding appropriately to threat. Muscles are tense. Breathing is shallow. Heart is pounding. Adrenaline and cortisol are flooding our systems. Stress causes our gaze to become so narrow that we are, literally and metaphorically, not seeing the big picture.

Get quiet, Kat. Which is not the same as ignoring your fear, or your rage, or your shell-shocked bewilderment, or your deep grief. It is sitting with all of those responses while, as my Headspace meditation app consistently reminds me to do, noting and labeling them: “thoughts” or “feelings.” 

Christiana Figueres, the former Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and founder of Global Optimism, urges us to “take a deep breath and, with no distractions, think carefully and intentionally about what you will do to take care of yourself and those you love. And then start to extend that bubble of love and caring on a daily basis until you are able to contribute fully to the extraordinary changes we need to make in the world precisely under the circumstances we face.”

Daniel Hunter, with Waging Nonviolence, offers up a list of actions we can take that might be helpful, Kat. He points to Hannah Arendt’s observation that loneliness can be a central ingredient in the rise of fascism and autocracy. So “What next?” includes reaching out to those you can trust in this moment — people who likely are feeling just as you and I are. Our cell phones and our wifi and our Zoom meetings with colleagues who live across the world have conditioned us to think globally. But my advice to myself and to you is to start thinking smaller, by which I mean … community. Maybe it’s seed saving. Or rewilding a space. Or a community fridge. Indeed, Bluedot Living was founded to highlight the many, many climate solutions that are grassroots, implemented by ordinary people in communities around the world. We believe that we learn from each other, and what works in a neighborhood in Los Angeles can, with some tweaking, work in Boston. And yes, countries can shift climate fortunes with the stroke of a pen (or the tearing up of a global agreement) but so can towns and cities and states and provinces. When you are ready to re-emerge and re-engage in climate work, look close to home for opportunities. I promise you that they’re there. 

I have been reminded again (it seems I must keep learning this) that I have had a life of enormous privilege. I have not lived through war or famine. My white body moves easily and safely through the world. It might seem now that our female bodies don’t matter, but they do. We matter greatly to each other. We are the knitters of community, the growers of people and food, the beating hearts of families. 

I know that we feel battered and weary, and we must acknowledge rest as part of the work we do. But let’s also listen to the wiser voices that urge us on, that ask us to take that next right step within arm’s reach. Those voices remind me to pull closer my gay child, my transgender friend, neighbors who’ve sought safety and freedom here from places of war and climate collapse and political unrest. 

And perhaps, Kat, you (by which I mean “I”) have to practice patience. I have to engage in what’s been called cathedral thinking — a reference to those who worked their entire lifetimes building cathedrals they wouldn’t be alive to actually see completed. We, too, must continue building toward a future we may never see. Giving up isn’t an option, Kat, tempting though that may be. Climate activist and writer Rebecca Solnit puts it this way: Just because we can’t save everything doesn’t mean we can’t save anything. We must remain audacious in our conviction that a better world remains possible.

There will be untold and unnecessary suffering. We know that, which is why so many of us are completely gutted right now. And so our job becomes doing what we can to reduce that. To save what we can. It’s that simple. And that hard. But we get to — we must — do that together, in community. Which is the only way this work has ever been effectively done. 

Move closer, Kat. Get smaller. Act locally. 

Communally,

Dot

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