Peace and repiece get into a boat
If you know you know and I'm sorry...
I’m just going to start with these revelatory paragraphs from my lovely friend, the most incredible climate thinker, writer, and doer Kim Nicholas, from this beautiful post about grieving her mother:
It is surprising to me how little I feel bothered by my inability to do more right now. A huge and important part of my life and my identity has been poured into caring about the world. My passion for abstract ideals like Nature and Fairness, and my desire to protect people and places I love, has fueled me to fight climate change. This passion has felt like not just a job or a career but a calling. It propelled me between Madison, Stanford, Sonoma, Davis, and Sweden. It inspired me to study the changes to the Earth that climate change was causing, and to become more and more involved in speaking and writing about these in a way I hoped would motivate others to care, and to help do the work necessary to protect what they loved. But right now, it is too hard.
Part of me wonders if this inward focus is how it’s always been for “everyone” else. That the tiny details of my own life feels so much more important and real to me than anything of global and lifetime-spanning significance, but doesn’t feel like it’s happening right this very minute, to me [reader, I’m talking about climate change]. It feels selfish and fabulous.
I’ve reflected on my privilege. Until now, I’ve had the bandwidth to focus so much on taking care of the wider world because my family and I were already so well taken care of. We never had to worry about basic needs like food and water and shelter (except when my family was evacuated during the wildfires and worried their homes would burn down). I’ve largely enjoyed very good health, though that’s something I’m not taking for granted right now. I’ve had far more than my fair share of luxuries.
This resonates with me so much — what happens when you’ve never had to cede your activism, but the circumstances of your life suddenly demand it? I’ve felt this to a much more modest degree over the past six months, as I’ve grappled with some issues that have never spotted my otherwise very privileged life (I’m fiiiiine!). I know that to have my basics covered, to have good family and friends, great dance teachers, and new bakeries on my corner is a luxurious pediment on which to build a life, and it’s this pedestal that affords me the time, strength, and power to focus my energies on things like stopping fast fashion, pushing carbon border adjustments, and encouraging heat pumps, successively, if not always successfully.
But what happens when that firmament fractures a bit? How do you find the reserves to regroup, replenish, recalibrate? I’ve been thinking much about all the re-words lately. It’s an occupational hazard when your day job is at a place called Rewiring. But we’re all also, all of us, the product of billions of dollars of petro-propaganda in the form of reduce, reuse, recycle. I’ll die with these words etched in my grey matter. Which, like grey water, is recyclable? Maybe.
I love that our newest national climate comms org here in Canada is called Re.Climate. Because we’re constantly reclimating the premise: personally, politically, peripatetically. But how do we reclimate in the largest of ways when life demands it? How do we reclimate when some of our good fortune abates like our carbon budget, which is to say, suddenly, and with not enough renewable energy to be ready for it?
I’m not fully sure, but there’s a continuum from the personal reset to the global reframe. For me, these past few months have been a there’s-a-crack–in-everything-that’s-how-the-light-gets-in period of reflection. I love Kim’s acknowledgement of her own reset, and her collective call to others to pick up what she’s putting down (temporarily). She writes: This month, it isn’t my month to push for climate action. Maybe you have the bandwidth right now to pick up the baton? If you do, maybe it’s time to flex more of your top 5 Climate Superpowers, or build community and find your climate peeps. If you don’t, please take care of yourself and each other. Let’s see where the river is taking us.
It’s incredible to see how so many now shoulder the work of climate together (see this post I wrote on the diffusion of responsibility of X and the March for our Lives for adjacent thoughtery!)…and equally incredible to see this transparency of need and generosity of baton tossing. Especially if we use a baguette instead of a baton. Which…we should?
But what does it mean to lean on others in all the ways? Last week, my friend Mio and his daughter Sachi slept over at my house while my husband and I were away. He tended to my children and ordered the best takeout. I love community, but I have never liked leaning on people. I like to be the leanee. I want to be the one cookiedropping my neighbours late at night. But resetting has forced me to step back and receive. So I can climate, and breathe, and dance once in a while. And it has felt good. And weird. And good again.
Though my own microclimate has consumed me, the macroclimate of global strife and suffering has seeped (sept?) in, and I’m readjusting my priors, or at least getting acclimated to my stronger prescription. I’ve been going deep on ideas of rebirth lately, and I wish I could call up my high school social studies teacher, Mr. Ierace, to tell him as much. I doodled my way through Fanon and Foner, but have come round to the former anew, after reading too many reviews of Adam Schatz’ new book on him not to just order The Rebel’s Clinic: The Revolutionary Lives of Frantz Fanon already. Writes Schatz: He placed his faith in humanity’s capacity for rebirth and innovation and in the possibility of new departures in history: what [Hannah] Arendt called “natality.”
Fanon is talking about colonialism but his words could be about everything: “No, we do not want to catch up with anyone. What we want is to move forward all the time, night and day, in the company of man, all men.”
It’s an unspeakable generosity when you consider the barbarism of colonialism and slavery. But it’s also what we must do with everything — hold hands with an oil rig and move, together, to a better place.
It also reminds me of the Jewish idea of tekumah, or rebirth. Wrote Liat Atzili in the New York Times a few months ago:
While preserving the memory of the horrors and losses the Shoah wrought remains important both for young Israelis and for children around the world, the concept of tekumah is also a central component of Holocaust education. Tekumah provides us with the vital life lesson of how to move on with dignity and purpose after experiencing a tragedy, and it is perhaps the most important gift that the survivors gave us.
In situations small to the opposite of small, it’s rebirth that makes us human, and lets us rise above minor indignity and major horror.
I’ve always been resistant to the concept of rebirths, of hard stops and resets. Why an arbitrary day when you will start doing that jazzercise class? Start now. Nevermind that we’re always molting, regenerating, iterating, palimpsesting, evolving in a way that is both unfixed and variable. And yet it’s silly to think these two things can’t coexist — and to not acknowledge that life sometimes injects an uninvited hard reset. It’s in the marrying of these two things that you can sometimes see the range of it all a little more clearly, too — this is who I am (a small, moving creature) in the world (a large, moving place).
Rethinking and revising and reworking is what gets us to new places, and absolves us of regret. I don’t regret time spent on shopping diets or mason jar activism because they were formative steps. And I love reworking, coming back to a piece or painting a few weeks later to instantly see how to make it better. Why would I not take the same view of myself and my climate work? I would. I have. I am.
I hope you are giving yourself grace and space so you can lead or not lead with love and light and truffle chips.
This planet
How do you re.climate? Let me know.
Last planet
Take it seriously, hold it lightly + Capitalism!!!
Take is seriously: Thank you, C, for your lovely note about 10% happier. I love when recos land with people! Send me yours, too.
Capitalism: Writes P (thank you), citing Hickel and degrowth in his response to my capitalism isn’t great, but it’s the only system we’ve got post?
I doubt we can get there from here any more than we can really imagine being completely decarbonized before we're further into it. I expect we need to make some more of the required climate changes and people need to see that they make things better - then with the momentum, we can propose more radical things. It's started with what we've got - some version of capitalism or post-capitalism - but the system will need to change as we decarbonize.
I'm not saying it will happen, but it could. There is so much pain and discontent; conditions are right for change.
And thanks for the photo, P!
Stuff
Congrats to the Canadian Youth Climate Action Award Winners! (h/t Tom!!!)
I love when people post their climate certifications from TCTM. It’s a thing to be proud of! Microcred for mega movement magic!
Fun to chat sustainability and electrification on Maredi design’s The Green Route podcast.
Rebecca Gao is such a great reporter. It was a delight to talk about how to not climate shame people (or feel that shame yourself) with her, for Chatelaine.
The incredible Lisa Robertson shot a 25-minute heat pump party documentary at my house for TVO. Lots of b-roll of my kids eating snacks. (And some good heat pump facts).
Excited to join Jolene of EllisDon and James of Indigenous Clean Energy at the Net Zero forum. Will you be there? Let me know!
Item #2,319 in My Colleagues Are the Best: They commit to the bit, and I’m grateful for it every day.
Bill McKibben in The New Yorker: right on the money on the Home Builders Associations terrible climate rollbackery. And point for use of the word caterwauling.
People dancing
Tierra Whack is my fave and she has a new album that I somehow missed, and her art is incredible.
Thank you, as always, for reading. Please let me know how to make this newsletter better. And send me your thoughts and dreams. If you like MVP, please feel free to like it, share it, dance it. Have a beautiful week! 💚
Sarah. These newsletters are very very inspiring. I always get good book/article recommendations from you, and that rules, but it’s more about your example. You are an astoundingly busy human with a ton of responsibility and yet you STILL make time to make this awesome thing. It makes me want to make more art. 👍 Thank you for the example.
I've been thinking about recharging/recovering lately, too. In my job, we're taking on the petrochemical industry day in and day out and educating people about the health and environmental impacts of plastic pollution. It can be draining and demoralizing though my lovely coworkers make it better and our growing network fo grassroots advocates is a major brightspot. But for me, being outside in my garden, checking on our wild ramp patch, yanking up some invasives, taking a walk in the woods, drawing something, cooking a delicious meal, doing a little bit of yoga, meeting up one on one with a friend (often for a walk in the woods - the only healthy multi-tasking I know of) are the main things that work for me.