Wow, what a reaction the article described here has gotten… This version includes a follow-up comment below.
Jonathan Franzen’s “What If We Stopped Pretending?” articulates an important point about hope and hopelessness in the face of climate change.
Franzen suggests that an “all-out war on climate change” no longer makes sense because the scenario for overcoming climate change — and with it the catastrophes of massive dislocation and ecological as well as civilizational breakdown — relies on too many unlikely conditions being met: “that every one of the world’s major polluting countries institute draconian conservation measures, shut down much of its energy and transportation infrastructure, and completely retool its economy”; that the actions taken must happen “not only in every country but throughout every country” (in New York and in Texas); that the actions “be the right ones”; that “overwhelming numbers of human beings, including millions of government-hating Americans, need to accept high taxes and severe curtailment of their familiar life styles without revolting.” In other words, no more of Bush the Elder’s “The American way of life is not negotiable” (let alone of the quantum leaps backward taken by his Republican descendants since that statement of his at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit).
“If your hope for the future depends on a wildly optimistic scenario,” Franzen asks, “what will you do ten years from now, when the scenario becomes unworkable even in theory? Give up on the planet entirely?”
On the other hand, “Once you accept that we’ve lost” that battle,
other kinds of action take on greater meaning. Preparing for fires and floods and refugees is a directly pertinent example. But the impending catastrophe heightens the urgency of almost any world-improving action. In times of increasing chaos, people seek protection in tribalism and armed force, rather than in the rule of law, and our best defense against this kind of dystopia is to maintain functioning democracies, functioning legal systems, functioning communities. In this respect, any movement toward a more just and civil society can now be considered a meaningful climate action. Securing fair elections is a climate action. Combatting extreme wealth inequality is a climate action. Shutting down the hate machines on social media is a climate action. Instituting humane immigration policy, advocating for racial and gender equality, promoting respect for laws and their enforcement, supporting a free and independent press, ridding the country of assault weapons—these are all meaningful climate actions. To survive rising temperatures, every system, whether of the natural world or of the human world, will need to be as strong and healthy as we can make it. [emphasis added]
Instead of hoping for what’s highly unlikely, Franzen suggests that we focus our attention on the local, the doable, and the specific:
Keep doing the right thing for the planet, yes, but also keep trying to save what you love specifically—a community, an institution, a wild place, a species that’s in trouble—and take heart in your small successes. [. . .] As long as you have something to love, you have something to hope for.
Offering the Homeless Garden Project in his own Santa Cruz as an example, he writes:
There may come a time, sooner than any of us likes to think, when the systems of industrial agriculture and global trade break down and homeless people outnumber people with homes. At that point, traditional local farming and strong communities will no longer just be liberal buzzwords. Kindness to neighbors and respect for the land—nurturing healthy soil, wisely managing water, caring for pollinators—will be essential in a crisis and in whatever society survives it. A project like the Homeless Garden offers me the hope that the future, while undoubtedly worse than the present, might also, in some ways, be better. Most of all, though, it gives me hope for today.
Franzen is entirely correct to focus on what’s manageable and on what gives hope and sustenance as we act on it today. Humans aren’t made to work at the scale of the planet, and when we expend energy on something that is so highly unlikely to reap rewards, that energy rarely comes back around to us — who need it to keep pushing that Sisyphean boulder up an insurmountable hill. But when we put our hands to things we can see and feel, with people we can enjoy muddying them with, the circle loops around to nourish us and make the task more doable.
The real insight in his piece may be the idea that everything today becomes “meaningful climate action.” When anything you do can be a meaningful form of action, there’s no room for paralysis anymore. The climate destabilized world is already here. Whatever you can do to ameliorate that world for those who already inhabit it, that is a form of action in the face of this thing that faces us — this thing that up to now has been so difficult to take on because it’s seemed so big, so faceless, so distant, so unreal.
I’m reminded of a hymn I learned in my Catholic elementary school, which featured the refrain (from Matthew 25:40): “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers [and sisters], that you do unto me.” Climate change, with all the destabilization and dislocation it sets off, is the globalizing event of human history. We are here now, with no going back. Whatsoever we do for those who are already facing the worst of it, that we do unto all of us. (And, needless to say, to him who presumably uttered those words.)
The good news (capitalized, if you wish… the Good News) is: We can do that right here, right now. Just look around.
Update (Sept. 11):
Franzen’s article has gotten so much bad press in the three days (!) since it was published that I can’t go without commenting on it. One of the better summaries (!) of that critical response is this one (though it’s not the only one). I agree with most of what’s been said, if not necessarily with the vehemence with which it’s been said. The one point I strongly disagree with is this one:
This critique is really two critiques. One is about credentials: Franzen is a novelist, not a scientist, so why should we be paying special attention to his analysis of the climate crisis?
Why not? Are novelists supposed to be incapable of intelligent thought on a topic that concerns us all? Does the climate crisis not warrant treatment by perceptive and respected observers of the world, which our best novelists (and poets, and artists, and philosophers) are supposed to be? This argument seems to me a kind of tunnel-vision, as if one’s professional credentials are what matter rather than the quality of one’s thinking. Its end result is the hyper-disciplinary “siloism” we find in universities, and the anti-intellectualism, or at least anti-humanism (hatred of the humanities, humanitophobia), that is a little too widespread in the United States (less so in some other places).
OK, got that out. We do need to hear from scientists on this topic, obviously. (And we often do, though it doesn’t hurt to have good science journalists, like the New Yorker‘s own Elizabeth Kolbert, acting as the go-betweens.) But not only.
Otherwise, yes, the critics are pointing to some real deficiencies in the article, and some that aren’t in the article but that are just symptomatic of the genre (the New Yorker – New York Review of Books – et al. crowd). Fair enough. So write something better.
