all born of the same wounds.

October 4, 2020 1:59 PM

'We’re used to thinking about mass incarceration or climate change or public health or reproductive rights or immigration as singular issues. That’s why, for example, when the pandemic kicked off in the United States in earnest, there was a pernicious drop in climate coverage. As I and others pitched stories about the climate crisis, we were told, again and again, that “it wasn’t the time.” And now we’re out of time.' A powerful essay by Mary Annaise Heglar about climate grief, "climate vision" and the way crises cascade and injustices interlink.
posted by Lonnrot (8 comments total)

The population cannot, each, individually, fix every major issue. This is why we elect representatives. Unfortunately, the people's representatives have long since forgotten the deal. Now we have disfuntional power structures perpetuated by those who seek power, yet wield it only for personal gain -- mostly for distorting democracy enough to retain the power.

"For the greater good" has been replaced by "Anything to hang on to power", and "Only so far as I get what I want". The powerful do not care if the community is on a downward trajectory, so long as within it they are moving upwards.
posted by krisjohn at 3:17 PM on October 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

I think we're screwed. Salvaging our future would require worldwide collaboration in such a scale that I just can't see it happening. If it was possible, COVID wouldn't have been such a problem.

I wonder which superpower is going to be first to try some sort of geoengineering solution to fix their own problems.
posted by simmering octagon at 3:28 PM on October 4, 2020 [3 favorites]

Not sure where you’re posting from, but from a European perspective, the type of emergency global coordination we actually saw in this pandemic feels like a pretty decent first attempt at the kind of pooling of responses that the climate crisis requires, it’s actually given me reason to hope there’s yet a more general climate awakening on the cards. Some players have fucked their responses up, sure, but many others less so, and the overall bent of the world’s citizens is to figure out how to get it right, as fast as human(e)ly possible. Heglar is a beacon in facing all of this down, a constant inspiration in how to think about it and what there is to do, she’s definitely one of the better sherpas out of climate despondency.

(As regards geoengineering, the myth of “negative emissions” is of course one of the strongest distractions there is to the urgent reconvened collective push for the systemic downscaling of emissions that‘s the actual crucial current objective.)
posted by progosk at 12:32 AM on October 5, 2020 [4 favorites]

The way I see it currently, the work now is to find the locally valid convergences between holistic analyses that range from Heglar’s bottom-up vantage to others’ top-down variants.
posted by progosk at 12:47 AM on October 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

For those of us who saw this coming, there is absolutely no joy in having been right, no “we told you so” parties, no gleeful vindication. Only deeper, more visceral mourning.

Damn straight.

People still look at me funny when I say I got sterilized before I could add people to the world because, as a member and product of a high-consumption culture, I could see no other course as ethical. So I know this mourning. I know it well.
posted by flabdablet at 5:12 AM on October 5, 2020 [2 favorites]

Here's a 2013 essay by Roy Scranton titled "Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene". I recommend reading the whole thing, it's a powerful piece.
posted by are-coral-made at 12:39 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]

krisjohn, I think your account excuses the collective choices of the people too much. In the U.S., the Republican party has grown as extremely anti-science, anti-elitist, and anti-governance as it is now not because it was always that way (though it has certainly been a safe harbor for those viewpoints for generations), but because Republican voters have consistently turned against Republican elected officials who were prepared to endorse any moderate science-informed policies born from bipartisan compromise directed towards the common good. As much as 2010 was terrible for Democrats in the House, Senate, and state legislatures, it was also terrible for moderate (using the term solely in a relative sense) Republicans, some of whom had been in office for years but were defeated by extremist Tea Party candidates in the primaries. And even those who were not defeated saw the handwriting on the wall and immediately veered Rightward in rhetoric and in policy, to protect their future electoral fortunes.

While there is absolutely a significant effort by some elected officials and unelected party operatives to subvert the democratic process to retain power at all costs, we also must reckon with the fact that the failure of U.S. democracy to address the numerous, interconnected crises that have been building over the last few decades, from climate to healthcare to racial injustice to endless warfare to unfettered capitalism, this failure is due in part to the failure of the American people to take seriously the responsibility of self-governance and select representatives who will actually govern, rather than buffoonish demagogues who can only see politics as competition and a means of self-aggrandizement. Yes, our systems of governance are imperfect and contribute to our inability to act to address these issues, but the deeper root is a series of intellectual and moral failures at the heart of the American psyche.
posted by biogeo at 1:30 PM on October 5, 2020

Also, that photo of the sign about mask requirements for a senior center in the middle of a wildfire is probably the most perfect summary of 2020 possible.
posted by biogeo at 1:33 PM on October 5, 2020 [1 favorite]