HI.
I know not everyone is orbiting within or constrained by the same news and social media bubbles that I am, so I won't presume you've heard about the IPCC Climate Report that came out this week. Or that you even know what the IPCC is (I didn't, really). Or that you care about a climate report.
Actually, walk that back—I am going to presume that, by virtue of your being a reader in this space, you do in fact care about a climate report. At least in theory.
The IPCC is the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and this week they released the biggest, most unanimous report on the subject ever. That's right: Basically every nation on earth has cosigned this document that details the existing science on the ramifications of our warming planet.
I regret to inform you, though I'm certain you won't be surprised, this document does not read like a comedy. If you noticed a few extra tons of cosmic anxiety floating around this week along with the weight of Delta-variant COVID depression, it was likely due to humanity's reckoning with this document. As the New York Times' "The Daily" podcast called it, this was a "code red for humanity." Oy.
I cannot assuage your anxieties in total, nor would I even dare to try. However I do come bearing a gentle reminder: Much of the climate anxiety we feel may simply come from not understanding our relationship to the earth, or from not actually having a relationship with the earth at all.
Spoiler alert: That disconnect isn't our fault. That lack of earth intimacy you feel? That’s taught to many of us from an early age by a society invested in keeping us separate from nature so that we can be good cogs in the wheel of hypercapitalist patriarchy.
In this version of reality—ruled by the grand charade of human dominion —there’s no time to pay attention to seasons, soil, sky, or water. There’s no time for the earth, or for relationship, when there is money to be made and people and power to be exploited.
There’s no time to admit our interdependence with each other and the earth, our fallibility, our complete and total vulnerability to the unstoppable forces of nature that persevere every day, regardless of the extractive abuses perpetrated on them by us humans: a species delusionally convinced of its own supremacy.
So from the time we are young, we are sold the idea of human supremacy, capitalist supremacy, white supremacy, in the water we drink, in the food we eat, in the air we breathe, such that a life lived in relationship with the earth sounds not just quaint, but actually foolish. Foolish, despite the fact that a life lived in honest relationship with the earth—a life that acknowledges the dooming implications of hypercapitalism, patriarchy and white supremacy and celebrates our interdependence with all beings—might be the only kind of life that allows us to go on living here, on this planet, at this moment, for any meaningful amount of time.
So when we read climate reports detailing the potentially limited scope of humanity’s future, we panic. Because we don’t understand our relationship with the earth in the first place. Because nobody ever told us we needed to. Because we were sold a bill of goods, topped off with the toxic cherry of “personal responsibility” (* did you hear paper straws could save us? *).
But right now, in case nobody else has said this to you today, let me remind you: You can repair, or even just begin, your relationship with the earth.
She is right here. She always has been. And she cannot wait for us to get over ourselves and listen.
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