Imagine There's No Countries
Escapist fantasy/Connected reality
Hello friends. Here we are. It’s 2025.
If you, your family or friends are affected by the wildfires in LA, my heart goes out to you. I just updated my slide deck for a school leader in Malibu seeking resources to support their students. It gives basic post-disaster mental health first aid, and I’m available to get on a Zoom with any school leaders, teachers, pediatricians, parents groups or other helpers to walk them through it and offer support.
Donate to Los Angeles mutual aid efforts here.
As a shell-pink dawn broke on New Year’s Day I was floating in a serene ocean, feeling transcendently one with the universe and awkward and guilty and try-hard and kind of cliche.
At that very moment, four thousand miles away, yellow police tape was cordoning off the tawdriest blocks of my hometown. The smell of spilled beer floated in the air with a chaser of alley piss. Overexposed, backlit transparencies of girls in G-strings stared down vacuously from the windows of Rick’s Cabaret as frozen daiquiris spun inside the Tropical Isle like psychedelic washing machines and Shaboozey stuttered from an LED-lit dance floor. The gutter was choked with bilious green disposable novelty cocktail glasses, and a street preacher was packing it in for the night.
There on Bourbon Street, a place whose wee-hours faces I know very very well, a decorated U.S. military veteran had taken 14 lives with a rented truck.
I wasn’t there. I wasn’t even in the hemisphere. I wasn’t anywhere I had ever been before. And here’s why.
I didn’t really sleep on Election Night. At 3:55 am I posted here about the results.
By 6:46 am I was texting my husband about accepting our friends’ outstanding invitation to join their large extended crew in Brazil over New Year’s.
Originally we had passed with regrets. As I’ve also written here before, I feel increasingly conflicted about elective air travel.
The New York Times ran a sharply argued editorial on the topic at the end of the year by Dr. Mark Miodownik:
“My Ph.D. dissertation was on jet engines, and I don’t see a credible path for the aviation industry to make flying sustainable in the near term. Once I realized this 13 years ago, I stopped flying for leisure. It seemed the least I could do to help people who are most affected by climate change.”
His children have never been on a plane. Of course, that’s likely true of most of the world’s children. It’s also true that he lives in London and can reach dozens of other countries easily by train, if he wants.
Anyway. My Hamleting about on this topic is becoming boring even to me. I recognize that to have the option to take this trip in the first place is a sign of great privilege that makes it even more obnoxious to waste energy projecting guilt about it.
I will certainly let you know if I figure out a way to resolve my inner conflict and bring our family into better integrity with our stated values. At least my dilemma gives me more sympathy for the difficulty of any sustainability fixes that rely on individual behavior change alone.
(I liked this Eric Holthaus piece about buying less and opting out—climate inaction instead of climate action. It offered creative takes on a familiar problem.
Get your books from the library instead of buying them online, and then donate the money you would have spent back to the author’s Patreon or newsletter. Or take more vacations, but take them closer to home so you can do them over a weekend and don’t have to fly.
Or reduce food waste. Almost 30 percent of the food in the United States is thrown away, and doing that less is the single highest-impact action people can take, according to a recent analysis from Project Drawdown. Counterintuitively, the easiest way to avoid food waste is to shop more often, but in smaller quantities. )
That November morning, my resolve was dissolved. I wanted something to look forward to when the future seemed bleak.
This might have been an example of what’s known in the addiction recovery world as “pulling a geographic.” Changing one’s physical environment, in the hopes that it will magically make one’s problems disappear.
Escapism is a particularly futile feint when part of the problem is climate despair. There’s only one Earth. The polycrisis is everywhere.
Still, this blue planet’s beauty can be pretty distracting. We flew, flew and drove til we were about 600 miles short of the easternmost point in the Western Hemisphere. A roadless outpost of white sand dunes and freshwater lagoons, fresh grilled lobster and sweet oysters, half-wild pigs and a lemur nibbling a small chunk of banana, cashew fruit, fresh coconut water, acai bowls and caipirinhas de maracuja. The Southern Cross in the sky each night, and a new moon on the new year.
It was glorious. It was exhausting. One or the other of the children was mildly ill most of the time. There were power cuts and gas shortages. It was 90 degrees by 10am, and did I mention the wind? Here’s the thing about a world-class kitesurfing beach: It receives that designation because it is steamrollered by world-class winds seven hours a day, a hot wall of steel with tiny stinging pieces of sand in it.
This is what money buys: a carefree night or two of dancing under the stars, with filthy fingernails and beach tar on your feet.
In this frontier-feeling town that believes its best days are ahead of it, I found myself among people with a global, mobile orientation, who speak three or four languages, who don’t feel tied to the success or failure of any particular nation, who are casting their lot with the future.
They were living in, or passing through, Lisbon and London and Amsterdam and Austin, Cape Town and Berlin and Mexico City and Sao Paulo. They were from Paraguay and Argentina and Colombia and Ecuador and Senegal and the DR. New York—sure, almost everyone had done some years in New York.
And this, it turned out, was actually why I came. (It’s always the people, right?) On the eve of Trump 2.0 I needed to de-center USA and USians.
Trump’s style of politics is old hat in Latin America. It’s not that people laugh it off, the corruption and the cruelty; they’re not as cynical as Russians. It’s that Central and South Americans (the ones I’ve been hanging out with recently, anyway) keep politics in perspective. They prioritize kindness, family, community, quality of life and decisions within their control.
We are of course all united by being subject to destructive forces beyond our control as well—terrorism, coups, gang violence, energy shortages and extreme weather. I talked to a woman from Paraguay about heat waves and wet-bulb temperatures. I talked to my friend from Florianopolis about the floods that ravaged her hometown in May 2024. The airport there didn’t reopen til November. This is a city of half a million. The hair stood up on her arms as she spoke.
One of the Brazilians I talked to was very excited about something called “the Network State.” This, taken to an extreme, is some kind of libertarian, Peter Thiel, crypto-obsessed, anti-woke fantasyland.
On a more valid and widely applicable level, though, it can simply describe a group of people who are affiliated in some way, by shared values or identity, and who act cooperatively and productively, with the help of instant digital communications, without being, usually, connected by geography or compelled by law or violence, such as the state wields. A kind of allegiance that exists alongside, and alternatively, to nationhood.
Like climate activists.
Like the Jewish people, in my experience.
Or like the group of friends and friends of friends who ended up on that beach.
Techno-utopianism has its limits. But there’s enormous potential in emphasizing our varied, braided strands of connection. They can and should be more than just the community at your physical doorstep. That’s one thing I learned on my winter vacation.
Here’s another. Speaking of mobility.
The “network state” guy explained to me that Dutch sailors originally settled this, northeastern coast of Brazil. Being on the more tolerant side, for Europeans, the Dutch were joined there by the first Jews in the Americas, expelled from Portugal. They built the first synagogue in the Americas, in Recife, in 1636.
In 1654 the Portuguese colonists expelled the Dutch and the Jews from this region, in turn.
Their next stop?
New Amsterdam, aka New York City.
Thank you for the slide deck, Anya. I’ll be sharing this with my department.