The Decade We Define Our Destiny
Overview: After reading The Future We Choose, I realized I needed to deepen my commitment to climate justice and engage in something that could contribute to the collective effort to combat the climate crisis. What follows are my reflections on the book, the need for urgent action, and the intent of starting a newsletter.
THE FUTURE WE CHOOSE
It’s the end of the world as we know it. And we have a choice to make: Will we combat climate change or descend into disaster?
This is the question of our time, and we answer it with our every action.
And this is the question directly addressed in the book The Future We Choose by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. That was the book I took with me on a visit to my mom’s place in Northern Idaho a few weeks ago. The book moved me so much that I spent all 5 days there harassing her with every thought that came to mind as I read the book, reflected on what I saw in her city, and digested the scenes of a fire-scarred state as we drove across Washington on my way home.
The book evoked intense emotions in me that were further fueled to fervor by the wildfire smoke filling the skies during my entire visit. Even with the panicked emotions it evoked and despite being such a short book, only 170 pages, The Future We Choose managed to motivate me more to deepen my commitment to climate justice than almost any other book I’ve read in recent years.
As with all accounts of the climate crisis, the book begins by painting a painful portrait of the catastrophes we are doomed to encounter should we fail to act on this crisis. But the authors quickly go beyond the gruesome display of the grim days ahead.
They intentionally share an inspiring vision for how we can collectively respond to the crises unfolding around us and create a new world to prevent this planet from becoming a barren, inhospitable hellhole uninhabitable to humanity. Despite the existential crisis confronting our entire species, the book contains a surprising optimism, a “stubborn optimism”–to use the authors’ words.
This stubborn optimism is one of the three mindsets the authors describe as essential aspects of the struggle against the climate crisis, the other two being “endless abundance” and “radical regeneration.” Endless abundance is about the need to abandon a scarcity mindset; this will allow us to better collaborate and cooperate in the creation of a carbon-free world. While Radical Regeneration refers to the need to move away from a linear, extractive economy — which requires the continual removal of resources from the Earth — towards a living, circular economy that respects the Earth’s processes and focuses on restoring, repairing, replenishing, and regenerating the ecosystems we’ve damage or destroyed.
These three mindsets, according to the authors, are crucial to the quest to realize a future that isn’t mired by mayhem and madness, but these mindsets alone are not enough.
The mindsets we adopt must inform and energize the actions we take which is why the authors articulate ten action areas that we must all engage in. They describe how we can get started in each area and how these actions will help to create a world in which we are not facing fires on all sides, a world in which climate justice is a true possibility. The curious reader will have to grab a copy to read more detailed descriptions of each action; for now, a list will have to suffice.
The ten actions they describe are:
- Let Go of the Old World
- Face Your Grief but Hold a Vision of the Future
- Defend the Truth
- See Yourself as a Citizen — Not as a Consumer
- Move Beyond Fossil Fuels
- Reforest the Earth
- Invest in a Clean Economy
- Use Technology Responsibly
- Build Gender Equality
- Engage in Politics.
And I’ve added an eleventh: Eat a Plant-Based Diet
Each of these is an action we must convince everyone around the world to engage in, and we only have 10 years to make meaningful progress. The challenge before us is quite daunting, especially when I witness the diverging directions of development pursued in places such as Spokane, my hometown, compared to cities like Seattle, my home of the past 7 years.
But in many ways, it is the realities we face in both cities despite the differences between them, combined with the insights gained from The Future We Choose, that has motivated me to make a new commitment when it comes to climate action.
THE TALE OF TWO CITIES
You see, Seattle is an excellent example of adopting city-level sustainability strategies and acknowledging the ecological imperative of the present, so it gives me a modicum of hope because at least we are lumbering in the right direction. However, even with its Equity and Environment Initiative, its new-formed Green New Deal Oversight Board, and its various climate action plans, Seattle is still lagging behind where it needs be, with a rise in emissions detected in the most recent inventory.
When I think about the slow progress of cities like Seattle, concerns wash over me. Concerns which grow into outright anxieties that threaten to drown me in grief when I contrast Seattle’s progress with the typical town in middle America, a category which includes Spokane.
Spokane is a medium-sized city that, despite its quickly growing population, has barely begun to accept and acknowledge the realities of the climate crisis and the need for carbon neutral development. This is despite the fact that for evermore weeks in every single summer, with evermore dangerous heatwaves, the air in and around Spokane is filled with dust and ash from ever-worsening forest fires.
As far as I am aware, Spokane and nearby towns only recently started to consider what climate action in the Inland Northwest could look like, but that has hardly slowed the increasing emissions in the city. And with more towns walking paths parallel to Spokane’s than there are those striving for sustainability alongside Seattle, it’s exceedingly evident that we need to adopt an increased urgency, we need to spread awareness, and we need to expand involvement if we are to prevent the impending apocalypse.
Luckily, cities like Seattle can blaze trails that others can follow, hopefully moving faster as they follow behind, learning lessons and avoiding pitfalls based on the examples set by the path’s pioneers. Admittedly, a deeper discussion is warranted on the developmental differences between a sustainable city and the typical town we see today: Spokane, Seattle, and a comparison of these sister cities would provide excellent examples on the subject, but that will have to wait for another time.
My point here is that when cities already aiming towards emissions reductions and ecological sustainability are still falling far short, then there is much work that needs to be done, among individuals and within communities. We need to come together quickly to act in alignment if we are going to keep the climate crisis from becoming an irreversible reality.
WHAT CAN I CONTRIBUTE?
It’s going to be a long, uphill battle against tendencies taught and lessons learned over a lifetime of carbon-based consumerism.
After all, almost everyone alive today has lived their lives exposed to the incessant influences of popular culture; popular culture produced by post-industrial empires powered by the constant consumption and carbon combustion which propelled us into our present future. But now, our fates rest on our ability to unlearn our reliance on fossil fuels; if we cannot, then a forsaken future awaits us. This is something we must all acknowledge and act to realize. It won’t be easy, but we can do it together. We have no other choice.
We all have a lot of work to do in the coming transition.
I have a long way to go myself, and that’s despite being someone who has already made some meaningful commitments to climate action: I don’t own a car; I am trending vegan; I actively advocate for climate justice; and I strive to center the climate in all my actions. But there is still so much more that I can do, starting with deepening each of my climate commitments and moving forward with enhanced urgency, inspiration, and optimism. And as I finished The Future We Choose, I found myself asking, “what can I contribute?”
And I realized that there was something specific I could do, something special that would put to use my curious combination of positionality, perspective, powers, passions, and privileges.
I realized I could do something to move and motivate minds to join the fight for our future.
I realized I could do something to contribute to the creation of a shared vision for the coming world we could create through collaborative climate action.
I realized I could do something to provide an outline of the path to achieving that vision.
I realized I could do something to catalog our attempts and actions to change our unsustainable society.
I realized I could do something to record the disasters that unfold with each passing day, each passing instant, of inaction.
I realized could do something to guide our work in the present while preserving a record, from the limited perspective of a single person, to inform future generations of what unfolded during that decisive decade, the 2020s, before things began to bend toward improvement or became irreversibly ruined.
I realized I could write; I could tell our story.
CHRONICLING CLIMATE CHANGE
So here I am, beginning this newsletter, in an attempt to chronicle the climate crisis and the movement to stop it.
Here is where I tell the story of the work being done daily in the quest to create carbon free communities.
Here is where I share the visions of the future forming as the transition becomes tangible.
Here is where I unearth the emotions evoked as we watch the old world wither and witness the emergence of something new.
As I say this, it strikes me that I should make one thing clear: I may be the narrator of the story contained in these particular Climate Chronicles, but I am not the author of this story.
At least not the only author.
We are all the authors of our shared story, and it is up to each of us alive today, everyone reading this piece and even those who never will, to make sure our story does not turn out to be a tragedy.
It will take all of us to ensure that we can tell the tale of how, mere moments before the complete collapse of our contemporary cultures, we created a new society steeped in sustainability.
We must recognize that if we don’t act urgently, if we don’t become the intentional authors of a new chapter in human history rooted in regeneration, then the ark of our story has already been plotted for us, and devastation lies ahead.
Luckily, we still have time to act. We still have time to tell a new story, and that’s what this newsletter is for.
I am creating this as a space where we strive to write a new narrative. This is a space where we see what it takes to make sustainability our story and tell the tale of the just transition while also acknowledging the realities of what awaits us should we fail to act. In fact, acknowledging the (un)natural disasters to come, and those already decimating our world, is crucial to the climate movement and making the urgency of our actions apparent; climate grief is an essential element of the struggle for a new story.
This newsletter is where I will make clear my motives, means, and methods–often, if not always, inspired by others–in the quest to combat the climate crisis.
This is where I will tell tales of the tragedies taking the world by storm, leaving it teeming with trauma. This is where I will archive accounts of the climate catastrophes claiming lives and causing chaos everyday.
But above all, this newsletter is where I will share stories of sustainability and how we can achieve it.
In writing this, I hope that others will find the motivation and inspiration they need to act.
There’s simply too much at stake, and inaction is no longer an option.
We must take hold of our fate and shape the future we wish to see.
No one can save us but ourselves.
It’s time we stepped up.
This story was originally published on Substack as a part of the Climate Chronicle newsletter. Click the link to read more and subscribe.
