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Has he reached his tipping point?
Last summer, my husband and I and a couple of friends went to the Hebrew center to hear David Wallace-Wells, a New York Times columnist and author of the book The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (available on Amazon and on Bookshop).
My husband, Joel, as some of you may know, walks around wearing a T-shirt that reads, ask me about thorium. He has about 30 of these (so don't worry it’s not always the same shirt), and he has given away as many. Thorium, he will tell you, even if you don't ask, is an element (90 on the periodic table). Joel has been researching the subject in depth, reading article after article after article and watching YouTube after YouTube after YouTube, and he will tell you, even if you don't ask, that small, safe thorium molten salt reactors are the answer to the energy crisis. He likes it for nuclear energy — it’s more plentiful than uranium, safer, and doesn’t require a water source for cooling.
And I will tell you, even if you don’t ask, that the energy crisis has been a sort of a midlife crisis for Joel, although admittedly, when I first met him in 1965, he was already outraged at people for not cherishing the planet properly.
So naturally, he was interested in going to this Life After Warming talk. Before we left, he Googled David Wallace-Wells and was reassured to read that his top three imperatives, when asked what can we do, were the same ones Joel has been espousing for 10 years: 1) don't fly; 2) drive an electric car (my husband thinks plug-in hybrids are fine, too); and 3) don’t eat red meat.
In the (hybrid) car on our way to the Hebrew Center, our friends asked Joel if he was planning on asking a question. “Maybe,” he said, but I knew there was no way he would raise his hand and — on a mic in front of an audience — ask a question or show off anything he knows. He’s a classic introvert.
The place was packed, and Wallace-Wells was articulate and fully informed on his topic. He talked about the fires, the droughts, the floods, the permafrost, the methane, the melting ice caps, and of course the storms. My husband, like many others, knows all about these things, and certainly knows that we’ve reached a climate emergency tipping point.
I sat there hoping that someone would challenge Mr. Wallace-Wells, the way Joel would have if he were not so set on not challenging anyone or showing off or sounding like an expert.
We were sad that Wallace-Wells never mentioned the three imperatives, even though people asked him for suggestions of what we, as regular citizens, could do now. Maybe he knew his audience — intelligent, curious people who can afford to travel and organic ribeyes — and knew it was hopeless to ask them not to fly or to stop eating cows or to trade in their gas-guzzling cars for hybrid plug-ins.
An elementary school teacher asked what he should tell his young students about climate change, because he didn't want to scare the kids with the actual, crucial, factual information. I can’t remember exactly what David Wallace-Wells said, but I think he was sympathetic to the guy, and they agreed that it was a tough situation.
Later (when no one could hear him) my husband said, “he doesn’t want to scare them? Of course scare them!!! It’s their effing future! Greta got scared. EFFING scare them! Please!”
Meanwhile, a year later, Joel is still wearing his ask me about thorium T-shirts and suffering from watching his favorite planet go up in flames. And he still stops and explains thorium when an individual actually does what the shirt requests. And I still roll my eyes because I’ve heard it all before. But, inwardly, I'm very proud that he’s passionate about the survival of our Mother Earth.
It occurs to me, as I write this, that wearing that T-shirt is Joel’s way of offering to share what he has learned, without having to initiate the conversation or sound like a pompous blowhard by going on about it unasked. I know he wouldn't approach anyone on the street or at a dinner party and say, “What do you all think of thorium?” The ask me about thorium T-shirt is the catalyst for the conversation he always wants to have. Always, and any time.
Maybe he’ll reach his own tipping point and become one of the guys onstage at the speaker series this year.
