407 words

Dear Reader,

What does hope look like in an age of climate catastrophe? I've been working on the second chapter of my dissertation, and I keep coming back to this question because, at times, things feel so hopeless. Yesterday, the United States federal government destroyed the EPA's ability to regulate pollution from cars, buildings, power plants, and other sources of greenhouse gases. More emissions means more asthma and heart disease, higher food prices, and rising temperatures and sea levels. It's easy to feel small in the face of a problem so big, and it makes me think about what Timothy Clark has called "derangements of scale." Basically, the varied and overlapping environmental crises affecting the world become harder to think and talk about because the simultaneously intimate and global nature of these crises screws up our sense of proportion.

The climate crisis is personal and immediate—empty dinner plates from climate-stressed harvests and flooded apartments from souped-up storms—but it is also global and all-encompassing, battering human and more-than-human planetary systems in ways we cannot fathom. Our brains struggle to make sense of it. We can't see how our small individual actions (like burning gas in my car) compound into global consequences, but also we assign ourselves absolute blame for global catastrophe (running my space heater to keep my pipes from freezing is directly flooding people out in Tuvalu, to use Clark's example). It becomes hard to make sense of our climate culpabilities, and so we give into hopelessness.

There's so much more I want to say about this (I haven't even gotten to Amitav Ghosh's idea of the great derangement or Timothy Morton's hyperobjects or any of the other interesting ways of understanding and talking about the climate crisis!), but I shouldn't accidentally turn this letter into my dissertation. Instead, I'll end with this: in reading for my second chapter, I've been thinking a lot about how we might hang onto hope in our modern age. And for me, the answer always comes back to community. Not walling ourselves off, but finding the folks who are pulling together in the same direction that we are. Only through community can we bridge those derangements of scale—to remain ourselves but also join those larger structures of life on planet Earth—and see both the intimate and the global effects of the crises before us.

Think about it, dear reader, and thank you, as always, for reading,
Leon