Wandering Down Disaster Avenue
Searching for answers, finding nothing but questions.
This essay originally appeared in the newsletter Just Progress on October 23rd, 2023. You can find my essays like it on Substack.
We are in a relentless search, whether acknowledge or not, for the meaning of our existence. … But somewhere along the journey, we lost our way.
-Jeremy Rifkin, “The Age of Resilience”
Last year, when I launched the first edition of Just Progress, I wanted to offer answers. For myself, as much as for others, I wanted to share what could be done in the face of crisis and calamity as our governments stand impotent at best, and negligent at worst, as they alternate between simply enabling or outright accelerating the world’s headfirst plunge into pandemonium.
Thus, Just Progress emerged as an ostensible solutions-focused newsletter about climate and social justice. But in the months since my last edition, I’ve realized that while it is difficult for me to write about anything outside of issues pertaining to social, climate, or economic justice and still feel satisfied with my work, Just Progress cannot be a newsletter in the same way that Heated, Drilled, or Looking Forward are. Those exist to lay out news stories full of fresh, original reporting that allow their readers to understand what we can do to seize control from the forces that have gripped the world’s reigns and sent us careening down bramble-filled hills towards lands unknown.
While I admire them, I am not the kind of writer that Emily Atkin, Amy Westervelt, and Claire Elise Thompson are. I lack the journalistic acumen those women possess. Thus, I must assume the role right for me, which means that Just Progress must be less news and more letter — letters in which I can reflect on life, the world, climate, and justice (or the lack thereof).
Thus, in the same way that consecutive conversations over coffee with a friend or a lover might lurch from topic to topic, Just Progress will often do the same. I recognize that goes against the core tenants of digital brand building, but if writing in an honest voice about the topics that eat one’s heart whole helped Ta-Nehisi Coates build his career, perhaps it can help me too. Following his example, the consistency I can offer is this: me, my eyes, my ears, my questioning and curious mind, my buckshot and bleeding heart, all working together to present my perspective to you.
In every letter, I will report some of what I see as I search out some semblance of hope to grasp as I kick, breathless and frantic, to keep my head above water like a sea-stranded sailor palming through roiling waters, praying to find, on the other side of the next white-capped wave, a half-splintered plank of driftwood to cling to while God — if she watches with any mercy — sends either ship or shark to end the suffering.
As I tread the waters of this acidic ocean, I can’t promise that my reflections will always be hopeful or actionable, but they will always be honest.
Once, I fancied myself a modern Marx: someone who could one day elaborate a philosophy that might offer a solution to the twin crises of ecology and economy confronting us. While I still believe it important to explore and articulate new ideologies, I also recognize that philosophy is much like religion: they each offer the illusion of salvation only to believers, and they extend their effects to the infidel only when their followers turn faith into action, with impacts as often negative as positive.
Moreover, to create any impact, an ideology must penetrate a population in a way that risks perversion as it spreads from person to person: a process which requires prayer and patience, for no matter how well-watered, seeds can’t sprout in a day. Change takes time. But the IPCC reports from the UN make one thing clear: Time is a luxury we lack.
Do we still, in theory, have enough time to take radical action, accelerate a just transition, and keep average global temperatures below the Do Not Cross line? According to the ever-conservative estimates that always seem to underanticipate the rapidity with which global ecology is collapsing: Yes.
But, to give you my honest opinion as someone with a keen eye on the climate crisis and the responses of global governments: Not a chance.
We can certainly still prevent much of the warming to come and save millions of lives in the process. But I find it difficult to believe we will avoid the 1.5 or even 2 degrees of warming pledged in the Paris Agreement for one reason: The changes required must be not only fast, but fundamental. The dominant cultures and economies of our day rest upon a flawed foundation that threatens our collapse. Patching roofs, reinforcing walls, and actions of the kind offer little hope when a sink hole threatens to swallow us whole. Still, people and their governments hate one thing above all others: rapid, disruptive change — even when it’s in their best interests.
So, though I have long preached from the pulpit of progress about the power of hope, whatever fire burned in the passions of my youth has long since been starved of oxygen by a weighted blanket woven of wildfire smoke, and the fuels so waterlogged by biannual hundred-year floods that even the scorched-earth heat of the Southwest drought would fail to reignite it.
Do I still look with a heavy-hearted smile on the work of activists, engineers, and policymakers advancing bold solutions? Absolutely. Though the world we once knew is but an object in the rearview mirror — closer than it appears but fading fast — the world we approach is no more than a dark form in fog.
As we flee collapsing cities to drive down broken roads with forests burning to the right, seas rising to the left, and storms forming overhead while destinations unknown lie ahead of us, Just Progress will be the love letters to a lost world stuffed in the trunk. I can’t say what will come of them, only that each one will be emotionally honest.
Perhaps we’ll find in them some philosophy or spirituality that might offer us, however feebly, resilience in these disaster-filled days. Perhaps as we question the current world, we’ll stumble upon answers for what we can make of what comes next. Perhaps we’ll discover ways to transmute trauma into tools we can use to build a new way.
But if I were you, I would not wait with bated breath; I’d breathe as easy as ash-clogged air and long-COVID allow, and I’d keep walking. For, if nothing else, on the days you find yourself tripping down heat-cracked streets lined with melting wires, I’ll be there, hobbling beside you, offering what support I can; because, as folk musician Jake Blount says, “What is crueler than wandering? To wander alone.”
Through these letters, if nothing else, we can wander together.
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