Becoming A Hero; New York Burning

Plus, How You're Talking To Your Students About The Election

Hello friends.

”Our City is in a Drought and We’re Burning.” That was the subject line of an email I got from a city council member earlier this week. October was the driest month in New York City since recordkeeping began. There were 271 brush fires in the five boroughs in the first half of this month; 500 wildfires in New Jersey; and an 18 year old was killed battling a fire on the New York/New Jersey border.

150 million people are living in drought conditions in the US right now.

The drought snuck up on me during the anxious pre-election spell. In the city, it doesn’t feel like a drought; it feels like a succession of lovely, lovely, lovely days. And then, as my neighbor remarked the other day, all of a sudden the air smells like a dry sauna.

Then a silence fell, and I felt terrible, because I have oriented so much of my life these past couple of years around knowing what to say, to be a welcoming place to land when people voice this precise feeling of dread and wrongness, because we really need to talk about it, and yet I had nothing.

Yes. This is awful. Yes. This is climate change. Yes this is not normal, yes this is the new normal, yes there is no more normal. Yes, I am so sorry (my neighbor is younger than me).

What’s a dry sauna, my 8 year old asked while balancing on her pogo stick.

Yes, this is what collapse feels like, and I was surprised to see it named so in the New York Times editorial section, by John Vaillant, author of Fire Weather.

“Like many of us, I can sense things unsettling — eroding and encroaching at the same time. Jenga blocks, big and small, are being pulled from structures we take for granted, destabilizing the country, the climate, entire ecosystems…

We must recognize this moment for what it is: the beginning of a new era of civilizational retreat, contraction and consolidation.”

CIVILIZATION IN RETREAT. Feels like something that should be screaming on the front page in 80-point type. For multiple reasons.

At bedtime, we’re reading a novel about a London girl who is sent to the countryside during the Blitz. There is the joy, solace and routine of everyday life, plus solidarity in the face of a great menace roaring just offstage.

That’s also the vibe of an essay I read this week, “It’s Time To Give Up Hope For A Better Climate & Get Heroic.”

Pamela Swanigan attacks the many tired tropes of climate hope, especially the woo-woo spiritualist ones that have us transporting ourselves through collective consciousness shifting toward a life in eternal harmony with nature. I mean, yeah, I’ve been there, but then the drugs wear off and time starts to have meaning again.

She suggests instead, taking up what J.R.R. Tolkien called The Long Defeat.

“Tolkien saw us as called upon to fight a valorous but never-ending and ultimately futile battle against the world-destroyers.”

Ultimately futile?!

My mind rebels at this, but here’s how I make sense of it.

Here’s a simple fact. You will die. One day.
Here’s some more simple facts. Our civilization will end. Our empire will fall. Our species will go extinct. One day.

Time will be the ultimate victor, the Big Bang will reverse into a Big Crunch, Kali will get her due. “Nature,” at least as it exists on the only planet we know, restores harmony through repeated cycles of mass extinction.

But not yet!

I will die, and yet I still go freaking jogging. Because I want to feel alive while I’m alive.

You can have a small life, where your peace of mind rests on denial, or a life of meaning and purpose in the teeth of destruction. (And as the Lord of the Rings illustrates, also great friendship and love and singing and adventure and elevenses.)

This isn’t hope, because it doesn’t work out in the end. This is courage.

And we need it. With Trump’s re-election, even if he accomplishes only half of what he’s threatened, the world almost certainly will pass “safe” levels of warming as designated by the IPCC; in fact we are closing out this year above the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold, in the land of unsafety.

Things are getting worse now, and later they will get a lot worse, and I hope only to live to see us start to make them worse more slowly.

The exact same could be said, of course, for justice and peace and human rights and bodily autonomy and access to health care and housing.

Joanna Macy, as it happens, also told us in the podcast I produced earlier this year, that she prefers courage to hope.

I'm just a sucker for courage. As I say so often, I'm moved by the gift of courage, because when you walk towards danger, in the danger, and dare to do what's needed, you put your own safety at risk so you become in some way larger than life. Fear makes you shrink, doesn't it?

And she even invoked The Lord of The Rings to do it, as well as her childhood during, yes, the Second World War.

For Frodo, Mordor is there and he can see it, and he dares to go into it. He dares to pitch himself against the embodiment, the representation, the source of all that is evil, and dark, and murderous, and false. And so your heart beats faster. Just thinking of Frodo and his team, they look like nothing. That's a beautiful representation of the capacity to move beyond the conventional limits and beyond your fears.

Also of relevance, from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben:

Debord often cited a letter of Marx's, saying that 'the hopeless conditions of the society in which I live fill me with hope'. Any radical thought always adopts the most extreme position of desperation. Simone Weil said 'I do not like those people who warm their hearts with empty hopes'. Thought, for me, is just that: the courage of hopelessness. And is that not the height of optimism?

And then, after all that, I was awakened at one in the morning by rain drumming on the roof.

Links

Loved talking with my friend Pete Dominick on his great daily podcast this week.

Climate Mental Health Network, where I’m an advisor, is fundraising right now.

So is Climate Mobilization, where I’m on the board. Please consider supporting their work and attending their upcoming workshop, Tending The Seeds of Survival on December 5.

How You’re Talking To Your Students About The Election

A lot of you said you liked my post about how to talk to kids about the election, and I know a lot of you are educators. So I asked this on social media, and here are some of the helpful responses I received.

Almost everyone said some version of “mostly letting students know I am here for them.” And a theme emerged of less talking, more listening.

High school:

I teach 10th grade ELA as well as advise the GSA club at my school. With my newcomers and other immigrant students, I have emphasized that there are adults in the building who care about them, myself included. I do have students with both political views, some of whom voted in this election.

Because I teach ELA, I don't teach about the election explicitly, but when students bring it up, I recommend credible news sources for them to read on their own. For GSA students, myself and the other advisors held a restorative circle for them to express their feelings about the election.

Ultimately, my focus has been to continue fostering community in my classroom & in my school & to be an adult students can trust with their concerns. I anticipate that as the incoming administration starts to put in place new policies, students may have new/stronger feelings than they do now.

College:

Post election, there was a collective sadness on campus. People are afraid and angry and prone to unskilful debate (myself included). I had my freshman comp class power down screens and gave them paper and markers to journal and draw their responses to what had happened Nov. 5th. I told them they could keep it private. We talked about articulating the complexity of our emotions - ‘emotional granularity’. Looked at Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart passages on different emotions. Snacks helped.

I'm leaving the door open and letting *them* come to me if/when they want/need. I started class with, "The election outcome was surprising and upsetting for many of us. I'm not going to preach about anything or make predictions about things I can't yet imagine. But I'm here."

A teacher of teachers said:

We used the “pop up conversations” protocol to engage our students and model how they might handle it in their classroom from the incredible Sara Ahmed book, “Being the Change”. We acknowledged we don’t have all the answers or reassurances we would have liked. https://www.heinemann.com/products/e09970.aspx