Words We Can't Say

The truth keeps shifting, out of reach

Before I knew I lived on a planet, I loved the earth.

It wasn’t so much that I loved animals. It’s that I was a small animal, and I recognized my relations. The litter of kittens born under the house. The white egrets catching the light at dusk. The possum with its pink nose and eyes that glittered in headlights.

I didn’t love trees either; I lived in trees. Live oaks curve invitingly to the ground like a spiral staircase. Crepe myrtles have smooth, dusty, surprisingly strong, slender, springy limbs, and festoons of blossoms like burst party balloons. But my favorite was the magnolia; its branches are closely spaced a long way up, making for a secure, high climb, and its broad, glossy, leathery leaves cast a shade as dark as a boudoir.

Words for all this came a little later. Bookworm. Nerd. Weirdo. Vegetarian. Environmentalist. Hippie. Rainforest. Endangered. Wetlands. Rio. Kyoto. Animal rights. Cancer Alley. Greenhouse gases. Greenhouse effect. Global warming. Sea levels. Coastal erosion. Katrina. Climate change. Climate crisis. Climate anxiety. Climate emergency.

Collapse.

For as long as I’ve known about what’s happening to the earth’s atmosphere, that truth has been concealed and revealed in its own shifting atmosphere of words and numbers. Climate change is a “hyperobject.” It’s too big to be seen all at once. It’s happening here and there, then and now, in the past and in the future, if there is a future.

The people who knew the most about it seemed burdened, even strangled by their knowledge. Because telling the truth about it makes you sound crazy. And not being heard makes you feel crazy. It was more than 20 years ago that a friend who was deeply engaged in environmental work leaned across the table and whispered, “The bus has already gone over the cliff.” I won’t give his name because even now, he probably wouldn’t want me to.

There are countless and strenuous efforts of “climate communications” and “climate storytelling” and “climate messaging” that amount to one thing: an uncanny, cruel pressure to smile in the face of continuous destruction. To sugarcoat a bullet.

That’s why it was so electrifying when 16-year-old Greta Thunberg told the World Economic Forum: “Our house is on fire…I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic.”

The unwillingness to say the truth pervades science as well.

Last month, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published an important article: “Is scientific reticence hindering climate understanding?”

Scientific reticence may be understood as the reluctance to spell out the full risk implications of science in the absence of perfect information. This practice has been leading to severe underestimations—and in the climate field, it has been of concern to leading researchers for more than two decades.

The facts are that the facts are now officially changing faster than expected.

Practically speaking, as the article cites, we have now passed 1.5 degrees average warming over historic levels, once the designated “safe” threshold.

In 2018 the IPCC projected we would cross that red line perhaps some time around 2040, without major action. When Greta told us to panic, in 2019, she also said we still had time to fix things. But that time is gone.

Scientists are alarmed. But they don’t tell us how alarmed they really are. And they consistently avoid talking about the worst-case scenarios. This happens because of political pressure, funding pressure, scientific convention, and because it’s fucking scary.

This is leaving humanity open to “civilization-ending” risk.

Risk, of course, is chance, and chance leaves open another outcome. None of us knows the future. None of us owns it.

I felt the urge to soften my statement just now, to qualify it, to send you away to a list of references and action steps. I’ve been trained, you see, in climate communications.

We all do this. I heard the great

Bill McKibben

speak this week, at Central Synagogue in New York City. He said “I’m going to be depressing here for a few minutes.” He told it like it is. Then he moved swiftly toward talking about the green energy revolution well underway, and the power of citizen action.

All of that is true, and none of it is likely to be enough.

On April 8, the Department of Commerce argued in a press release that federally funded climate research has promoted “exaggerated and implausible climate threats, contributing to a phenomenon known as ‘climate anxiety,’ which has increased significantly among America’s youth.”

Since this came from the Trump administration, you know it’s a lie. In fact climate research hasn’t exaggerated implausible threats. It has systematically downplayed very plausible threats. And the young people are still terrified.

Now a new set of gag orders have come down. The Trump administration has stopped gathering information about the atmosphere, which Bill compared to criminals spraying black paint on the lenses of a bank’s surveillance cameras. They are defunding climate scientists and trying to excise the word “climate” from our classrooms. The Department of Commerce, which houses NOAA, says it will no longer fund climate educational initiatives for K-12 students.

Last fall, I covered the launch of a Climate Literacy Guide for K-12 students published by the federal government. It’s a surprisingly clear, beautiful, accessible summary that covers the science, the impacts, mitigation and adaptation, but also climate justice, Indigenous knowledge, hope, agency and empowerment.

Now it’s been taken down. It circulates in samizdat. You can find it on this page of a site maintained—so far—by the University of Washington.

I’ve been in several meetings and conversations these past few weeks about what we will say if we can’t say “climate” anymore. We’ll say “extreme weather.” We’ll say “heat wave.” “Flood.” “Wildfire.” “Drought.” “Coastal erosion.” We’ll say “clean air.” “Clean water.” And we’ll say “cancer,” “asthma,” “birth defects.” We’ll say “cheap, reliable, locally produced energy.” We’ll say “healthy farmland,” “good soil,” “regeneration.” “Animals.” “Plants.” “Life.” “Help.”

And if they ban those words, we’ll come up with more. I loved this earth before I knew the word “earth,” and I will love it the rest of my life.

Some links

I wrote about the climate literacy guide in my final climate and education column for The Hechinger Report with the support of Laura Schifter's This Is Planet Ed at the The Aspen Institute. Fittingly, it appeared on Earth Day. I’ve been contributing to this series since 2022 and have covered early education through workforce development, Indigenous knowledge, climate storytelling in children’s media and more. It’s been an honor!