We are at a place where we have the first truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far, the evidence is not overwhelmingly great. But you know it's not hopeless either.

We are at a place where we have the first truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species. So far, the evidence is not overwhelmingly great. But you know it's not hopeless either.

This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Climate Change. Climate change is something that affects every single one of us, and it is really hard to look at. It's such a great temptation to shut our eyes to what's happening. It's overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and author Bill mckibbon on facing the reality of the climate crisis, understanding what needs to change and what you can do not just to change the course of humanity and the planet, but to actually feel more hopeful and connected as this all unfolds. This episode is a deep, kind hearted conversation about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into it with me. It's coming up right after this first break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support or the license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, I made it in my mind. A lot of people would be like tempted to skip this episode after hearing the opening clip, So I'm really glad you're still here. The climate crisis is just so overwhelming, and I try to keep my eyes open to so many difficult things, as we know, but even I find myself shutting down with each successive catastrophe, especially when it's set against the backdrop of corporations and governments who simply do not care. It's a lot. I saw something on Twitter the other day that suggested that having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote a mental illness, like, sorry, your hometown is flooded and wildfire smoked turned the sky orange, but you're resilient, work on your own coping skills. Having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote mental illness, Like, there's so much wrong with that statement. Our personal resilience is not the problem here. And I know this is a much bigger topic than we had time to get into with today's guest, but if you're having a complex set of feelings associated with the ongoing, unfolding climate crisis, you are definitely not alone. Not having any feelings about it would be weird anyway. We definitely get into just how dire things are in this conversation, but we also get into hope, like real, tangible, actionable hope that is not like wishful thinking dressed up in fairy robes, you know, like none of that stuff, Like actual hope with somebody who has been immersed in the work of climate change for decades. Bill mckibbon is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. His books include The End of Nature, about climate change, and Falter has the human game begun to play itself out That one's about these state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing writer to The New Yorker and founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty four progressive change. That Third Act is a super cool initiative you're going to hear us talk about in our conversation. There's so much goodness in this episode, and if you, like me, tend to turn away because things are too much, be sure to listen through to the end for your questions to carry with you. They're really good this time. All right, let's get to my conversation with author and activist Bill Mckiinnon. So, I am so glad to have you here with me today. I know that you don't necessarily do a whole lot of interviews, so I'm just really honored to have you with me here today.

This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm your host, Megan Divine. This week on the show, Climate Change. Climate change is something that affects every single one of us, and it is really hard to look at. It's such a great temptation to shut our eyes to what's happening. It's overwhelming. This week on the show, climate activist and author Bill mckibbon on facing the reality of the climate crisis, understanding what needs to change and what you can do not just to change the course of humanity and the planet, but to actually feel more hopeful and connected as this all unfolds. This episode is a deep, kind hearted conversation about truly terrifying things, and I hope you'll lean into it with me. It's coming up right after this first break before we get started. Two quick notes. One, this episode is an encore performance. I am on break working on a giant new project, so we're releasing a mix of our favorite episodes from the first three seasons of the show. Some of these conversations you might have missed in their original seasons, and some shows just truly deserve multiple listens so that you capture all of the goodness. Second note, while we cover a lot of emotional, relational territory and our time here together, this show is not a substitute for skilled support or the license mental health provider, or for professional supervision related to your work. Take what you learn here, take your thoughts and your reflections out into your world and talk about it. Hey, friends, I made it in my mind. A lot of people would be like tempted to skip this episode after hearing the opening clip, So I'm really glad you're still here. The climate crisis is just so overwhelming, and I try to keep my eyes open to so many difficult things, as we know, but even I find myself shutting down with each successive catastrophe, especially when it's set against the backdrop of corporations and governments who simply do not care. It's a lot. I saw something on Twitter the other day that suggested that having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote a mental illness, like, sorry, your hometown is flooded and wildfire smoked turned the sky orange, but you're resilient, work on your own coping skills. Having emotional reactions to climate catastrophes should be treated as quote mental illness, Like, there's so much wrong with that statement. Our personal resilience is not the problem here. And I know this is a much bigger topic than we had time to get into with today's guest, but if you're having a complex set of feelings associated with the ongoing, unfolding climate crisis, you are definitely not alone. Not having any feelings about it would be weird anyway. We definitely get into just how dire things are in this conversation, but we also get into hope, like real, tangible, actionable hope that is not like wishful thinking dressed up in fairy robes, you know, like none of that stuff, Like actual hope with somebody who has been immersed in the work of climate change for decades. Bill mckibbon is an American environmentalist, author, and journalist who has written extensively on the impact of global warming. His books include The End of Nature, about climate change, and Falter has the human game begun to play itself out That one's about these state of environmental challenges facing humanity. He's a contributing writer to The New Yorker and founder of Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty four progressive change. That Third Act is a super cool initiative you're going to hear us talk about in our conversation. There's so much goodness in this episode, and if you, like me, tend to turn away because things are too much, be sure to listen through to the end for your questions to carry with you. They're really good this time. All right, let's get to my conversation with author and activist Bill Mckiinnon. So, I am so glad to have you here with me today. I know that you don't necessarily do a whole lot of interviews, so I'm just really honored to have you with me here today.

Well, Megan, it's a pleasure to be with you, in part to be able to say thank you for your good and important work, and it really is. It's a pleasure to get to chat.

Well, Megan, it's a pleasure to be with you, in part to be able to say thank you for your good and important work, and it really is. It's a pleasure to get to chat.

Thank you so much. Okay, So there are so many places that we could begin our conversation. I've spent the last three days reading your books and reading your articles and watching you speak. We were talking before we got rolling that I was recently visiting my folks, and a lot of that time I was spent sort of immersed in your work. And I'm going to say something you've probably heard a lot, But spending so much time in conversations and in material about climate change, I found myself feeling really defeated. Is that sort of a common thing you hear a lot when people are sort of engaging with your work.

Thank you so much. Okay, So there are so many places that we could begin our conversation. I've spent the last three days reading your books and reading your articles and watching you speak. We were talking before we got rolling that I was recently visiting my folks, and a lot of that time I was spent sort of immersed in your work. And I'm going to say something you've probably heard a lot, But spending so much time in conversations and in material about climate change, I found myself feeling really defeated. Is that sort of a common thing you hear a lot when people are sort of engaging with your work.

I don't know about defeated necessarily, but definitely scared and upset. I'm doing nothing to sell books, I can tell, and that's you know, I'm afraid that's appropriate. It is a scary and upsetting thing. We're talking about, by far, the biggest thing humans we've ever done, are far the most dangerous thing humans were done. We're talking about something that is now playing out in real time, very much in front of us. Here's a great temptation to shut one's eyes, and sadly, that's the one thing we can't afford, because we desperately need as many people as possible at work on this if we're to have any chance of really not of stopping global warming too late for that, but of stopping it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the niece, which is what's going to happen if we don't get our act together quickly.

I don't know about defeated necessarily, but definitely scared and upset. I'm doing nothing to sell books, I can tell, and that's you know, I'm afraid that's appropriate. It is a scary and upsetting thing. We're talking about, by far, the biggest thing humans we've ever done, are far the most dangerous thing humans were done. We're talking about something that is now playing out in real time, very much in front of us. Here's a great temptation to shut one's eyes, and sadly, that's the one thing we can't afford, because we desperately need as many people as possible at work on this if we're to have any chance of really not of stopping global warming too late for that, but of stopping it short of the place where it cuts civilization off at the niece, which is what's going to happen if we don't get our act together quickly.

Yeah, And I've read that You've said that those like the doomsday descriptions of what scientists projected back in the eighties, right when we've kind of first started talking about what was then what was it then? Greenhouse greenhouse facts. Yeah, yeah, and that those predictions that they made back in the eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded.

Yeah, And I've read that You've said that those like the doomsday descriptions of what scientists projected back in the eighties, right when we've kind of first started talking about what was then what was it then? Greenhouse greenhouse facts. Yeah, yeah, and that those predictions that they made back in the eighties were too conservative given what's unfolded.

Sense that's right. I mean I wrote the first book about all of this back in nineteen eighty nine, So in many cases, I was just about the first reporter, first rioter, to get to sit and talk with the climate scientists who work on it. Scientists are by their nature conservative. They underestimate rather than overestimate. It's just the kind of nature of the profession. They were exactly right, I mean, eerily accurate about how much the temperature was going to go up. It's gone up on pretty much exactly the curve that people like James Hansen, the great NASA physicists first predicted, but they underestimated how much damage that increase in temperature would do because we'd never done this experiment before, at least with humans around to watch. So so far, we've increased the temperature somewhat more than a degree celsius let's say two degrees fahrenheit in round numbers, which doesn't sound like that much. I mean, it was sixty degrees when I walked the dog this morning. If it's fifty eight degrees when I walk the dog tonight, my body won't be able to tell the difference, So better off thinking about it. In other units, The amount of extra heat that we trapped near the planet every day because of the carbon we've put there by burning fossil fuel is the heat equivalent of about four hundred thousand Hiroshima sized explosions daily. Wow. And when you know that, then it's easier to understand how big big things have happened, and sooner than we thought they were going to We've melted most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic. We now see massive melt underway in the Antarctic. These are things that in the late nineteen eighties scientists hoped we might not see till the latter part of this century, but we're seeing them already, and we're seeing things as a result that we didn't really predict what happened. For instance, the jet stream works off the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles. There's less difference now, so that jet stream is acting in super funky ways, and we get these long periods of either drought or flood, depending on which side you get stuck on, and so on. So the damage that we've seen already very very substantial. The biggest wildfires we've ever seen, the biggest rainstorms in human history, on and on and on. They're already big, big problems. Sadly, the real danger is that we're currently on a path to raise the temperature about five degrees or six degrees fahrenheit, not the two degrees we have so far. And if we do that, it won't be three times as bad. It'll be worse than that, because the damage won't be on a kind of linear scale, it'll be on an exponential one. You go past certain tipping points that then everything shifts. Once there's no ice left in the summer Arctic, the world gets very very different.

Sense that's right. I mean I wrote the first book about all of this back in nineteen eighty nine, So in many cases, I was just about the first reporter, first rioter, to get to sit and talk with the climate scientists who work on it. Scientists are by their nature conservative. They underestimate rather than overestimate. It's just the kind of nature of the profession. They were exactly right, I mean, eerily accurate about how much the temperature was going to go up. It's gone up on pretty much exactly the curve that people like James Hansen, the great NASA physicists first predicted, but they underestimated how much damage that increase in temperature would do because we'd never done this experiment before, at least with humans around to watch. So so far, we've increased the temperature somewhat more than a degree celsius let's say two degrees fahrenheit in round numbers, which doesn't sound like that much. I mean, it was sixty degrees when I walked the dog this morning. If it's fifty eight degrees when I walk the dog tonight, my body won't be able to tell the difference, So better off thinking about it. In other units, The amount of extra heat that we trapped near the planet every day because of the carbon we've put there by burning fossil fuel is the heat equivalent of about four hundred thousand Hiroshima sized explosions daily. Wow. And when you know that, then it's easier to understand how big big things have happened, and sooner than we thought they were going to We've melted most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic. We now see massive melt underway in the Antarctic. These are things that in the late nineteen eighties scientists hoped we might not see till the latter part of this century, but we're seeing them already, and we're seeing things as a result that we didn't really predict what happened. For instance, the jet stream works off the difference in temperature between the equator and the poles. There's less difference now, so that jet stream is acting in super funky ways, and we get these long periods of either drought or flood, depending on which side you get stuck on, and so on. So the damage that we've seen already very very substantial. The biggest wildfires we've ever seen, the biggest rainstorms in human history, on and on and on. They're already big, big problems. Sadly, the real danger is that we're currently on a path to raise the temperature about five degrees or six degrees fahrenheit, not the two degrees we have so far. And if we do that, it won't be three times as bad. It'll be worse than that, because the damage won't be on a kind of linear scale, it'll be on an exponential one. You go past certain tipping points that then everything shifts. Once there's no ice left in the summer Arctic, the world gets very very different.

For instance, the abstract nature of it, right until it becomes personal. Until you're personally affected by it, it doesn't seem real. And certainly with floods and fires, fires showing up in places where they haven't been experienced and floods showing up like it's starting to get personal, which is you know, honestly, it's too late, right, like too late not to do anything, but like it's this weird human thing that we don't take something seriously until it impacts us personally and directly.

For instance, the abstract nature of it, right until it becomes personal. Until you're personally affected by it, it doesn't seem real. And certainly with floods and fires, fires showing up in places where they haven't been experienced and floods showing up like it's starting to get personal, which is you know, honestly, it's too late, right, like too late not to do anything, but like it's this weird human thing that we don't take something seriously until it impacts us personally and directly.

You know, when I wrote that first book, Megan, I was twenty eight, and my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. And truthfully, a lot of people read it. It came out in twenty four languages. It was a bestseller all over the place. You know, it's like your book, but at least in big political questions, people don't just read books and change. There are a lot of forces beginning and ending in a sense with the power of the fossil fuel industry that kept us from making the changes that we could have made early on. Those changes, had we made them early on, would have been fairly small, and they would have gotten us out of an awful lot of trouble now. Sadly, we've waited so long into this mess that the changes necessarily have to be big and disruptive. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are the group of climate scientists that the UN assembles to offer their collective wisdom and all of this, said two years ago that we had until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half on this planet if we wanted to meet the targets, the temperature targets that we'd set in Paris just a few years ago. Well, by my watch, twenty thirty is what six years and seven months away. That's an awful lot of work to cram into that period of time. If we'd had thirty six years, if we'd started back when we got our first warnings, then it would have been a lot easier. But if you point out, human nature doesn't necessarily work that way, and the self interest of oil companies definitely doesn't work that way.

You know, when I wrote that first book, Megan, I was twenty eight, and my theory of change was people will read my book and then they will change. And truthfully, a lot of people read it. It came out in twenty four languages. It was a bestseller all over the place. You know, it's like your book, but at least in big political questions, people don't just read books and change. There are a lot of forces beginning and ending in a sense with the power of the fossil fuel industry that kept us from making the changes that we could have made early on. Those changes, had we made them early on, would have been fairly small, and they would have gotten us out of an awful lot of trouble now. Sadly, we've waited so long into this mess that the changes necessarily have to be big and disruptive. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which are the group of climate scientists that the UN assembles to offer their collective wisdom and all of this, said two years ago that we had until twenty thirty to cut emissions in half on this planet if we wanted to meet the targets, the temperature targets that we'd set in Paris just a few years ago. Well, by my watch, twenty thirty is what six years and seven months away. That's an awful lot of work to cram into that period of time. If we'd had thirty six years, if we'd started back when we got our first warnings, then it would have been a lot easier. But if you point out, human nature doesn't necessarily work that way, and the self interest of oil companies definitely doesn't work that way.

Yeah, you know what I don't get, and this has bugged me forever. But like you said, the self interest of the oil companies and fossil fuels and those sorts of things, and the people who draft and vote for legislation that continues to damage the planet and communities like do they not realize they live here too?

Yeah, you know what I don't get, and this has bugged me forever. But like you said, the self interest of the oil companies and fossil fuels and those sorts of things, and the people who draft and vote for legislation that continues to damage the planet and communities like do they not realize they live here too?

I think that if they stop to think about it, their calculation, at least their internal psychological calculation, is if I make enough money, I can build a wall of greenbacks around my house, my family, whatever it is I care about, and will be okay. But motivated reasoning is a powerful, powerful thing. You know more about it than I do. And I think it's also possible for people to convince themselves that all scientists are engaged in some conspiracy theory or whatever it is, if it's in their momentary self interest to do that. Yeah.

I think that if they stop to think about it, their calculation, at least their internal psychological calculation, is if I make enough money, I can build a wall of greenbacks around my house, my family, whatever it is I care about, and will be okay. But motivated reasoning is a powerful, powerful thing. You know more about it than I do. And I think it's also possible for people to convince themselves that all scientists are engaged in some conspiracy theory or whatever it is, if it's in their momentary self interest to do that. Yeah.

In the End of Nature, Bill you wrote that there is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there, that we're not really at a crossroad, right, And I think that's what we were just talking about, that there's this like psychic doubling in a way that happens both for industries and legislators who vote against Earth's best interests, in our best interests, but also people who sort of shut down in the face of increasing danger.

In the End of Nature, Bill you wrote that there is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there, that we're not really at a crossroad, right, And I think that's what we were just talking about, that there's this like psychic doubling in a way that happens both for industries and legislators who vote against Earth's best interests, in our best interests, but also people who sort of shut down in the face of increasing danger.

Is that true? I think that's true. In Peopil's just like personal lives too, when they're confronted with things in their own personal lives that or like that.

Is that true? I think that's true. In Peopil's just like personal lives too, when they're confronted with things in their own personal lives that or like that.

Yeah, I mean for me, it's this desperate desire to believe that we're okay, that we have some control over our safety and are the safety of our loved ones right. For me, it's that same mechanism this is this is my this is my griefy Rosetta stone for all of life is that we like to believe that we will be okay and the people we care about will be okay. Right, That's why there's so much shame and judgment, Like when you hear that somebody's child was killed by a drunk driver, right, Like I wouldn't have been on the road that late at night, or I would have paid more attention to the road, or I'm a better driver so I would have been able to evade it. Like all of these if then statements that we can say that prove to us that that kind of pain would never show up on my doorstep. Yeah, and I think that that and going back to what we were talking about a moment ago with climate change, when it is quote unquote just Haiti getting swamped, when it is just Central Africa heading another massive drought. Like when it is away from our gaze, we can tell ourselves that we're safe and everybody we love is safe. And for me, it's that same mechanism, right, it's the same grief avoidance.

Yeah, I mean for me, it's this desperate desire to believe that we're okay, that we have some control over our safety and are the safety of our loved ones right. For me, it's that same mechanism this is this is my this is my griefy Rosetta stone for all of life is that we like to believe that we will be okay and the people we care about will be okay. Right, That's why there's so much shame and judgment, Like when you hear that somebody's child was killed by a drunk driver, right, Like I wouldn't have been on the road that late at night, or I would have paid more attention to the road, or I'm a better driver so I would have been able to evade it. Like all of these if then statements that we can say that prove to us that that kind of pain would never show up on my doorstep. Yeah, and I think that that and going back to what we were talking about a moment ago with climate change, when it is quote unquote just Haiti getting swamped, when it is just Central Africa heading another massive drought. Like when it is away from our gaze, we can tell ourselves that we're safe and everybody we love is safe. And for me, it's that same mechanism, right, it's the same grief avoidance.

This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychologists, the marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry is set to work beginning about nineteen ninety, we now know how smart they work. They hired a bunch of the people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and the message that they brought was the same, the science is inconclusive, we don't know for sure what's going to happen. And that wasn't true. The science actually was conclusive. But I think it was psychologically powerful for a lot of people. Just the thought that maybe we didn't actually have to deal with this. The next generation or the one after that or something would be the ones who would get to deal with it.

This explains, among other things. Yeah, what brilliant psychologists, the marketers and pr guys that the fossil fuel industry is set to work beginning about nineteen ninety, we now know how smart they work. They hired a bunch of the people who used to work for the tobacco industry, and the message that they brought was the same, the science is inconclusive, we don't know for sure what's going to happen. And that wasn't true. The science actually was conclusive. But I think it was psychologically powerful for a lot of people. Just the thought that maybe we didn't actually have to deal with this. The next generation or the one after that or something would be the ones who would get to deal with it.

Yeah, deferred maintenance. Right, This is why it's so hard to get people to get their colonoscopies and get their like do stuff preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.

Yeah, deferred maintenance. Right, This is why it's so hard to get people to get their colonoscopies and get their like do stuff preventative care, Like preventative action doesn't sell.

Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started the first with seven college students what became the first big global grassroots climate campaign about twenty years ago. We called it three fifty dot org. Now. The name came from what the scientist told us was the most carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere, three hundred and fifty parts per million. We chose the name part because we wanted to organize globally, and we figured Arabic numerals work better than English words. But when we chose it, people said, oh, it's a bad name because it's depressing. We're already past three point fifty, you know. And I said, well, in the first place, honesty has its virtues too, And in this second place, it strikes me that it's sort of like going to the doctor. If the doctor says, you know, keep eating like this and someday your cholesterol will be too high. You know, you stop for a cheeseburger on the way home. But if the doctor says, huh, you're already in that zone where people have heart attacks. You know, you might have had a small stroke already. That's the day where people say what pill should I take? You know, maybe it was a way to make it a little more real at any event, it worked pretty well. We've organized twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea at this point, so that's amazing.

Yeah, it's funny, you know, I started the first with seven college students what became the first big global grassroots climate campaign about twenty years ago. We called it three fifty dot org. Now. The name came from what the scientist told us was the most carbon we could safely have in the atmosphere, three hundred and fifty parts per million. We chose the name part because we wanted to organize globally, and we figured Arabic numerals work better than English words. But when we chose it, people said, oh, it's a bad name because it's depressing. We're already past three point fifty, you know. And I said, well, in the first place, honesty has its virtues too, And in this second place, it strikes me that it's sort of like going to the doctor. If the doctor says, you know, keep eating like this and someday your cholesterol will be too high. You know, you stop for a cheeseburger on the way home. But if the doctor says, huh, you're already in that zone where people have heart attacks. You know, you might have had a small stroke already. That's the day where people say what pill should I take? You know, maybe it was a way to make it a little more real at any event, it worked pretty well. We've organized twenty thousand demonstrations in every country on Earth except North Korea at this point, so that's amazing.

And I think also like it gives people a goal instead of like everything is terrible, everything is dire, we have to act fast, like all of which is all accurate. I just feel like we interpret that sort of stuff as it's already too late and collapse into despair and.

And I think also like it gives people a goal instead of like everything is terrible, everything is dire, we have to act fast, like all of which is all accurate. I just feel like we interpret that sort of stuff as it's already too late and collapse into despair and.

Overwhelm absolutely most people who do this kind of work, and for me it's just volunteer work. I'm a self taught organizer, but I've sort of helped lead very large campaigns, the campaign against the Keystone pipeline that was Big Oil's first defeat, this fossil fuel divestment campaign that's now at about forty trillion dollars in endowments and portfolios that have divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things, the psychological things that I think I learned, was that you had to have a goal that was on the one hand, plausible you could make a story about how you might reach it, and also plausibly large enough to matter. You had to have a story about why it actually would make a difference. It's quite easy to get people for a little while to do really easy things change your light bulbs. But people have pretty good built in bullshit detector too that after a little while you're like, yeah, I really don't think changing this light bulb is going to seek climate change, And so either you go to look for something more useful to do or you avoid the subject altogether.

Overwhelm absolutely most people who do this kind of work, and for me it's just volunteer work. I'm a self taught organizer, but I've sort of helped lead very large campaigns, the campaign against the Keystone pipeline that was Big Oil's first defeat, this fossil fuel divestment campaign that's now at about forty trillion dollars in endowments and portfolios that have divested from fossil fuel. And one of the things, the psychological things that I think I learned, was that you had to have a goal that was on the one hand, plausible you could make a story about how you might reach it, and also plausibly large enough to matter. You had to have a story about why it actually would make a difference. It's quite easy to get people for a little while to do really easy things change your light bulbs. But people have pretty good built in bullshit detector too that after a little while you're like, yeah, I really don't think changing this light bulb is going to seek climate change, And so either you go to look for something more useful to do or you avoid the subject altogether.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. There's nothing I can do because the corporations in the greed are bigger than us and too much to battle. And honestly, like with all of the cascading disasters, with climate disasters, with gun violence, like with just all of the stuff that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds and in communities, it is really hard not to get ground down by this.

Yeah, I think there's a lot of that. There's nothing I can do because the corporations in the greed are bigger than us and too much to battle. And honestly, like with all of the cascading disasters, with climate disasters, with gun violence, like with just all of the stuff that we're sort of bombarded with in news feeds and in communities, it is really hard not to get ground down by this.

Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people you're working side by side with. For me, it's the most effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all those things. But I don't know what I'll I mean, I hope I don't find out, but I don't know what it'll feel like when we reach the point where if we don't do our job well soon, what it really does just seals our trajectory. That's why I continue to fight hard, and why it seems urgent, why you know, I end up. I mean, I've been to jail now going on a dozen times, I think, which is not at all how I thought my life would turn out. But I will say that once or twice there in jail, I felt a certain kind of relaxation isn't the right word, but there was nothing more I could do. I was there. I couldn't do anything, couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't write an email, couldn't you know, write a story, couldn't do all the things I'm used to doing. Just my being there was going to have to be enough, and that was There was a kind of relief that too.

Yes, and that's why it's a great antidote to actually have a movement with campaigns that matter, that people you're working side by side with. For me, it's the most effective antidote to what is unavoidable grief, anxiety, all those things. But I don't know what I'll I mean, I hope I don't find out, but I don't know what it'll feel like when we reach the point where if we don't do our job well soon, what it really does just seals our trajectory. That's why I continue to fight hard, and why it seems urgent, why you know, I end up. I mean, I've been to jail now going on a dozen times, I think, which is not at all how I thought my life would turn out. But I will say that once or twice there in jail, I felt a certain kind of relaxation isn't the right word, but there was nothing more I could do. I was there. I couldn't do anything, couldn't talk to anyone, couldn't write an email, couldn't you know, write a story, couldn't do all the things I'm used to doing. Just my being there was going to have to be enough, and that was There was a kind of relief that too.

I got to say, I feel that there's a certain sort of rooted piece of being in knowing that you have taken the action you can take to this point, and at this point there is no further action right, knowing that that time to act will circle back again. This whole conversation I have Joanna Macy in my head, so you and I were talking is she's just the best. You and I were talking before we got rolling. You lived in Vermont, and I went to graduate school in Vermont, and a lot of my graduate studies were just deeply informed by Joanna Macy and friends. We'll link to Joanna Macy's work here so you know what we're talking about. But I remember back then I was doing a lot of women's rights work and reproductive justice work and just starting to get into some environmental activism, and Joanna Macy was the only one that I found at the time really talking about the grief inherent in activism. And her whole thing was that, like, if we don't let ourselves feel the grief that we feel, our social justice work can't be as successful as it needs to be. Totally paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?

I got to say, I feel that there's a certain sort of rooted piece of being in knowing that you have taken the action you can take to this point, and at this point there is no further action right, knowing that that time to act will circle back again. This whole conversation I have Joanna Macy in my head, so you and I were talking is she's just the best. You and I were talking before we got rolling. You lived in Vermont, and I went to graduate school in Vermont, and a lot of my graduate studies were just deeply informed by Joanna Macy and friends. We'll link to Joanna Macy's work here so you know what we're talking about. But I remember back then I was doing a lot of women's rights work and reproductive justice work and just starting to get into some environmental activism, and Joanna Macy was the only one that I found at the time really talking about the grief inherent in activism. And her whole thing was that, like, if we don't let ourselves feel the grief that we feel, our social justice work can't be as successful as it needs to be. Totally paraphrasing her, But how does that resonate for you?

I think that's probably very true. I mean, look, I'm a white male of a certain era. You know, I'm an old guy, so being open about things like grief doesn't come super easy to me. I'm always grateful for my friends and colleagues for whom that can help me with that. The person I often lean on is the great Western writer Terry Tempest. Williams. He was one of my oldest and dearest friends. But who's writing, especially in books like Refuge and if people are interested. She just wrote a piece. She's from Utah. She just wrote a piece in the New York Times about Great Salt Lake and drying up and what that felt like. And I know it took a lot out of her to write it, and you can see it on the page. Well, you know, somehow we need to come to terms with that grief. The thing that makes it hard is that the patient's not dead yet. You know, you're more like the doctor in the emergency room who's you know, it's psychologically easier to just keep running around, you know, thinking of the next trick you can try. And we're still very much in that phase. There's lots of important things we still can be doing, but there's lots of things we're not getting back too. So you know, one way out for me is to remind myself every single day that for all the insults that it's taken, the world we live on is still incredibly beautiful and that it's not going to be more intact than it is right now. And so one of our jobs as the creature with consciousness who can look around. One of our jobs is to be out there bearing witness to its great beauty. So if I'm home, I'm out in the woods some part of every day. Just for that reason.

I think that's probably very true. I mean, look, I'm a white male of a certain era. You know, I'm an old guy, so being open about things like grief doesn't come super easy to me. I'm always grateful for my friends and colleagues for whom that can help me with that. The person I often lean on is the great Western writer Terry Tempest. Williams. He was one of my oldest and dearest friends. But who's writing, especially in books like Refuge and if people are interested. She just wrote a piece. She's from Utah. She just wrote a piece in the New York Times about Great Salt Lake and drying up and what that felt like. And I know it took a lot out of her to write it, and you can see it on the page. Well, you know, somehow we need to come to terms with that grief. The thing that makes it hard is that the patient's not dead yet. You know, you're more like the doctor in the emergency room who's you know, it's psychologically easier to just keep running around, you know, thinking of the next trick you can try. And we're still very much in that phase. There's lots of important things we still can be doing, but there's lots of things we're not getting back too. So you know, one way out for me is to remind myself every single day that for all the insults that it's taken, the world we live on is still incredibly beautiful and that it's not going to be more intact than it is right now. And so one of our jobs as the creature with consciousness who can look around. One of our jobs is to be out there bearing witness to its great beauty. So if I'm home, I'm out in the woods some part of every day. Just for that reason.

Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing. There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing. My thirty Day Writing your Grief course is not like that. The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now, writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful. You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample prompt from the course and get writing your own words in minutes. My thirty Day Writing your Grief Course is still one of the best things I've ever made for you. Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken the Writing your Grief Course Refugeinggrief dot com, backslash WYG, or you can find the link in the show notes. I love that you brought up Terry Tempest Williams along with Joanna Macy. She was one of the people I considered mentors to me in those early days. I love her work so so much. We almost had her on the show. I should revisit that and see what happened to that. I think it was good. It was a scheduling glitch for us. And thank you for telling me about that article. Because I have not seen that. I will find that And I'm just I love her so much. To me, she straddles those realms of telling the truth about what she sees happening and what she's seen unfold in this really intimate, intimate way, this intimate relationship with her home and her landscape, and talks about actions to take, and talks about the beauty, and talks about the pain of seeing what's ahead, seeing what's already changed, what's already lost, and what is ahead on the chopping block. And I just I feel like it's for me. And again, because grief is my lens through which I see most things, I feel like being afraid of what it will feel like if we truly pay attention to the devastation that has already come and the devastation that is ahead. If we truly turned our gaze to that, the grief would overwhelm us and we wouldn't be able to act. And in the face of that's probably not a conscious fear, but like in the face of that, we say, it's not that bad. Too many things to fight, let me find like that, we deflect ourselves to something that feels less overwhelming because that emotional visceral response would be too big for us.

Hey, before we get back to this week's guest, I want to talk with you about exploring your losses through writing. There are lots of grief writing workshops out there with prompts like tell us about the funeral, that sort of thing. My thirty Day Writing your Grief course is not like that. The prompts are deferred, theremore nuanced. They're designed to get you into your heart and into your own actual story. Now, writing isn't going to cure anything, but it can help you hear your own voice, and that is incredibly powerful. You can read all about the Writing your Grief Course at Refuge in Grief dot com backslash WYG that is WYG for Writing your Grief. You can see a sample prompt from the course and get writing your own words in minutes. My thirty Day Writing your Grief Course is still one of the best things I've ever made for you. Come join more than ten thousand people who have taken the Writing your Grief Course Refugeinggrief dot com, backslash WYG, or you can find the link in the show notes. I love that you brought up Terry Tempest Williams along with Joanna Macy. She was one of the people I considered mentors to me in those early days. I love her work so so much. We almost had her on the show. I should revisit that and see what happened to that. I think it was good. It was a scheduling glitch for us. And thank you for telling me about that article. Because I have not seen that. I will find that And I'm just I love her so much. To me, she straddles those realms of telling the truth about what she sees happening and what she's seen unfold in this really intimate, intimate way, this intimate relationship with her home and her landscape, and talks about actions to take, and talks about the beauty, and talks about the pain of seeing what's ahead, seeing what's already changed, what's already lost, and what is ahead on the chopping block. And I just I feel like it's for me. And again, because grief is my lens through which I see most things, I feel like being afraid of what it will feel like if we truly pay attention to the devastation that has already come and the devastation that is ahead. If we truly turned our gaze to that, the grief would overwhelm us and we wouldn't be able to act. And in the face of that's probably not a conscious fear, but like in the face of that, we say, it's not that bad. Too many things to fight, let me find like that, we deflect ourselves to something that feels less overwhelming because that emotional visceral response would be too big for us.

I think, Yeah, if you're attuned to what's going on, then there are daily opportunities for worry and grief around the world. They also come, in this case with a added kind of dollup of a certain kind of guilt too. Pakistan last fall had the worst flood since Noah, the kind of flood you can only have in a globally warmed world where warm air holds more water vapor than cold. It just started raining in August and it did not stop. There were places, large places that got eight hundred percent of their annual rainfall in thirty days, so eight times as much rainfall as they get in a year, they got in three weeks. People that live in mudhouses they work great most of the time. They're smart architecture. When it rains for three weeks without stopping, they melt away around you. Thirty three million people were displaced. Well, the two hundred million people are so in Pakistan. They've produced way less than one percent of all the carbon in the atmosphere. The three percent of the world's population that calls itself Americans has produced about twenty five percent of all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's, you know, the good things in our lives, big houses, cars, airplanes, so on, that have you know, at some level, caused the problems that hit all of us, but that hit the people. The iron law of global warming is the less you did to close it, the sooner and harder you get hit. So there's some kind of guilt added on top of that. But we also don't seem very well built to figure out how rationally to deal with I mean, in the same way that people are you know, busy insisting that schools shouldn't teach about, you know, slavery or something because it's you know, makes us feel bad. We don't quite know how to handle the fact that we owe a real debt to much of the rest of the world, and so the good news is it's a payable debt. There's a lot of things that should be giving us heart right now. In the last ten years, scientists have engineers really have cut the cost of renewable energy ninety percent. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to generate power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That's Hogwarts scale magic. You know, I'm an occasional Sunday school teacher. That's water into wine kind of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress of decarbonizing the earth. But it would take a huge push to do it at the speed that we need to, and it would have to be a push against the extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us from You keep us locked for as long as possible in their business model. One of the things that's hopeful to me is that becomes less a kind of story about dread and despair than a story about real, hopeful and bright possible ability. I mean, we could get our energy from heaven instead of hell. And not only would we knock the worst edge off the climate crisis. You know, maybe nine million people a year on this planet die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one death in five. If you've been to Delhi or Shanghai recently, it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen what the air there is like. But really it's true in this country too. There's millions of cases of childhood asthma every year, mostly with black brown kids who have the ones who have to live near the highway, near the refinery, whatever it is. We don't need any of that. We can get rid of that, and in short order, not only that, depending on a resource that only is available in a few places, like coal and gas and oil means that the people who control those places get way too much power. So you know, in our country, that was our biggest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers, who took their winnings and used them to degrade our democracy. In Europe, it's Vladimir Putin who's used his winnings to launch a land war in Europe in the twenty first century. We don't need that the sun and the winder everywhere. After seven hundred thousand years of combustion, humans could give up their habit of setting stuff on fire and we'd be quickly better off. So that's a really beautiful story to tell.

I think, Yeah, if you're attuned to what's going on, then there are daily opportunities for worry and grief around the world. They also come, in this case with a added kind of dollup of a certain kind of guilt too. Pakistan last fall had the worst flood since Noah, the kind of flood you can only have in a globally warmed world where warm air holds more water vapor than cold. It just started raining in August and it did not stop. There were places, large places that got eight hundred percent of their annual rainfall in thirty days, so eight times as much rainfall as they get in a year, they got in three weeks. People that live in mudhouses they work great most of the time. They're smart architecture. When it rains for three weeks without stopping, they melt away around you. Thirty three million people were displaced. Well, the two hundred million people are so in Pakistan. They've produced way less than one percent of all the carbon in the atmosphere. The three percent of the world's population that calls itself Americans has produced about twenty five percent of all the carbon in the atmosphere. It's, you know, the good things in our lives, big houses, cars, airplanes, so on, that have you know, at some level, caused the problems that hit all of us, but that hit the people. The iron law of global warming is the less you did to close it, the sooner and harder you get hit. So there's some kind of guilt added on top of that. But we also don't seem very well built to figure out how rationally to deal with I mean, in the same way that people are you know, busy insisting that schools shouldn't teach about, you know, slavery or something because it's you know, makes us feel bad. We don't quite know how to handle the fact that we owe a real debt to much of the rest of the world, and so the good news is it's a payable debt. There's a lot of things that should be giving us heart right now. In the last ten years, scientists have engineers really have cut the cost of renewable energy ninety percent. We now live on a planet where the cheapest way to generate power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun. That's Hogwarts scale magic. You know, I'm an occasional Sunday school teacher. That's water into wine kind of miracle. So there's no longer a deep technological or financial obstacle to keep us from making very rapid progress of decarbonizing the earth. But it would take a huge push to do it at the speed that we need to, and it would have to be a push against the extraordinary power still of the oil industry to keep us from You keep us locked for as long as possible in their business model. One of the things that's hopeful to me is that becomes less a kind of story about dread and despair than a story about real, hopeful and bright possible ability. I mean, we could get our energy from heaven instead of hell. And not only would we knock the worst edge off the climate crisis. You know, maybe nine million people a year on this planet die from breathing the combustion byproducts of fossil fuel. That's one death in five. If you've been to Delhi or Shanghai recently, it won't come as a huge surprise because you've seen what the air there is like. But really it's true in this country too. There's millions of cases of childhood asthma every year, mostly with black brown kids who have the ones who have to live near the highway, near the refinery, whatever it is. We don't need any of that. We can get rid of that, and in short order, not only that, depending on a resource that only is available in a few places, like coal and gas and oil means that the people who control those places get way too much power. So you know, in our country, that was our biggest oil and gas barons, the Koch brothers, who took their winnings and used them to degrade our democracy. In Europe, it's Vladimir Putin who's used his winnings to launch a land war in Europe in the twenty first century. We don't need that the sun and the winder everywhere. After seven hundred thousand years of combustion, humans could give up their habit of setting stuff on fire and we'd be quickly better off. So that's a really beautiful story to tell.

Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right. If I have to give up my comforts, my transportation, autonomy, all of those things, I'm not going to be able to live well if I make choices that let other people survive. I didn't really say that very well, but it's like it's this binary right either or. And also like how I was talking about this with an investment broker, going over like you know, what things do you invest in? And I was like, it all comes down to how much of other people suffering are you willing to tolerate for your own gain? And that's like that sounds really crappy, but this really is sort of the equation that we have a lot right, like understanding the downstream effects of our choices and not that you're a terrible person for making those choices. And I think this is where it gets tricky. And you brought up how much communities of color are impacted by climate change. This is sort of true across the board, right, Like, if we start paying attention to the impact of our choices, then we're going to have to be uncomfortable. And we interpret that as like, if I do the work to make you safer than I am less safe. Right If I do the work to include you, that means that I'm excluded. Yeah, And there's just this, like such a scarcity model of community and existence and consumption, Like one of us has to win and the other one has to lose, and that's not serving us.

Yeah, I think we get trapped in the binary right. If I have to give up my comforts, my transportation, autonomy, all of those things, I'm not going to be able to live well if I make choices that let other people survive. I didn't really say that very well, but it's like it's this binary right either or. And also like how I was talking about this with an investment broker, going over like you know, what things do you invest in? And I was like, it all comes down to how much of other people suffering are you willing to tolerate for your own gain? And that's like that sounds really crappy, but this really is sort of the equation that we have a lot right, like understanding the downstream effects of our choices and not that you're a terrible person for making those choices. And I think this is where it gets tricky. And you brought up how much communities of color are impacted by climate change. This is sort of true across the board, right, Like, if we start paying attention to the impact of our choices, then we're going to have to be uncomfortable. And we interpret that as like, if I do the work to make you safer than I am less safe. Right If I do the work to include you, that means that I'm excluded. Yeah, And there's just this, like such a scarcity model of community and existence and consumption, Like one of us has to win and the other one has to lose, and that's not serving us.

The bigness is that technology has done some of this work for us. I mean, look, I live in a house that runs on solar panels, and I have a car that connects up to those solar panels and it works fine. You know, it's as good as any car I ever had, maybe better. I have an induction cook top in the kitchen. It doesn't cost any more than my guests to costs a lot less once you know, to operate. We have a heat pump in the basement instead of a furnace. It works just fine. So some of these changes are easy enough to make now, but you do have to be willing to make them. I think we also have to be willing to be honest about the degree to which we need to take some of our winnings that we've accumulated in the rich parts of the world by burning fossil fuel and let people in the rest of the world have some small share of them so that they don't drown whatever I mean. We are at a place where we have the first truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species? So far, the evidence is not overwhelmingly great, but you know, it's not hopeless either. It takes some solace from the fact that the only other existential crisis we've faced, the one that comes from nuclear weapons, we've actually avoided since we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one else has done it, and they knock on wood. But there's some sign that we're capable of sometimes rising to the occasion. But in this case, it definitely requires people working together, and that's why this movement building has been so interesting. One of the things that's interesting for me about this avoidance sort of stuff that we've been discussing a little is that most of the work has been done by young people. I started through fifty dot org with seven college students. We had this massive divestment campaign that was mostly run by kids in university around the world. When they got out of school, they wanted to keep working, so they formed the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green New Deal. The junior high and high school kids who kind of have followed Greta Tunberg, who is one of my favorite people to work with. I really really adore her, and her embrace of her autism as a kind of superpower has been ennobling to watch. And she'd be the first to say, look, there's ten thousand Gretas, and they really are around the world, and they have ten million followers. That's how many kids were out on school strike and twenty nineteen before the pandemic hit. So kids are doing their job. At a certain point, I'd heard one too many people my age say well, it's up to the next generation to solve these problems, which strikes me as nonsense of the highest order. I mean, look, they're doing the leading. Sure, you know they have a lot at stake, but a it's not their fault, so it's kind of ignoble to take the world's biggest problem and dump it on the lapse of junior high school students. But it's also highly impractical. For all their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need in the time that we have, which is why in the last few years my volunteer work has been organizing older people. We've started this thing called Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty for progressive action. And I'm really relieved and pleased to tell you that people have been lining up to go to work. And I think it has a lot to do with psychologies of various kinds. One of them is political Scientists have long said that people get more conservative as they age, and you could posit reasons for that. But if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now, your first act was in this period of epic social and cultural and political transformation. And you know you were around when we started taking women seriously in public life. You were there at the apex of the Civil rights movement. Probably you marched on the first Earth Day, because twenty million Americans were in the streets that day nineteen seventy and so there's a kind of muscle memory or a kind of collective people. When people look back on their youth, the thing that they're proud of is having been part of that. So that's half of it, But the other half seems to be and this is seems to me deeply psychologically healthy. As people get nearer the exit than the entrance, it really feels to me like they're beginning to take things like legacy and solidarity and things seriously in a different way. You know, your legacy is the planet you leave behind for the people you love the most, and people take very seriously the thought that they're leaving behind a planet that's shabbier than the one they were born onto. I don't know, it's a lot of fun to work with older people like me because there's a little less of the kind of you know, I have to be in front or kind of dominance what We did a big demonstration against these banks, the four big American banks, Chase, City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of America that are the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. We did about one hundred demonstrations. We shut them down for a day across the country with people doing sit ins and rocking chairs, you know, all over the place. And the big banner that we had where I was this big banner that just said fossils against fossil fuels. It was good to see people who could, you know, laugh at themselves a little bit and at the same time understand that they had an important role to play in trying to set things right. The whole thing has felt that the very least psychologically healthy to me and enjoin it a lot.

The bigness is that technology has done some of this work for us. I mean, look, I live in a house that runs on solar panels, and I have a car that connects up to those solar panels and it works fine. You know, it's as good as any car I ever had, maybe better. I have an induction cook top in the kitchen. It doesn't cost any more than my guests to costs a lot less once you know, to operate. We have a heat pump in the basement instead of a furnace. It works just fine. So some of these changes are easy enough to make now, but you do have to be willing to make them. I think we also have to be willing to be honest about the degree to which we need to take some of our winnings that we've accumulated in the rich parts of the world by burning fossil fuel and let people in the rest of the world have some small share of them so that they don't drown whatever I mean. We are at a place where we have the first truly global crisis we've ever been in, so the question becomes some can we actually cooperate as a species? So far, the evidence is not overwhelmingly great, but you know, it's not hopeless either. It takes some solace from the fact that the only other existential crisis we've faced, the one that comes from nuclear weapons, we've actually avoided since we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. No one else has done it, and they knock on wood. But there's some sign that we're capable of sometimes rising to the occasion. But in this case, it definitely requires people working together, and that's why this movement building has been so interesting. One of the things that's interesting for me about this avoidance sort of stuff that we've been discussing a little is that most of the work has been done by young people. I started through fifty dot org with seven college students. We had this massive divestment campaign that was mostly run by kids in university around the world. When they got out of school, they wanted to keep working, so they formed the Sunrise movement that brought us the Green New Deal. The junior high and high school kids who kind of have followed Greta Tunberg, who is one of my favorite people to work with. I really really adore her, and her embrace of her autism as a kind of superpower has been ennobling to watch. And she'd be the first to say, look, there's ten thousand Gretas, and they really are around the world, and they have ten million followers. That's how many kids were out on school strike and twenty nineteen before the pandemic hit. So kids are doing their job. At a certain point, I'd heard one too many people my age say well, it's up to the next generation to solve these problems, which strikes me as nonsense of the highest order. I mean, look, they're doing the leading. Sure, you know they have a lot at stake, but a it's not their fault, so it's kind of ignoble to take the world's biggest problem and dump it on the lapse of junior high school students. But it's also highly impractical. For all their energy and intelligence and idealism, young people lack the structural power to make change on the scale we need in the time that we have, which is why in the last few years my volunteer work has been organizing older people. We've started this thing called Third Act, which organizes people over the age of sixty for progressive action. And I'm really relieved and pleased to tell you that people have been lining up to go to work. And I think it has a lot to do with psychologies of various kinds. One of them is political Scientists have long said that people get more conservative as they age, and you could posit reasons for that. But if you're in your sixties or seventies or eighties, now, your first act was in this period of epic social and cultural and political transformation. And you know you were around when we started taking women seriously in public life. You were there at the apex of the Civil rights movement. Probably you marched on the first Earth Day, because twenty million Americans were in the streets that day nineteen seventy and so there's a kind of muscle memory or a kind of collective people. When people look back on their youth, the thing that they're proud of is having been part of that. So that's half of it, But the other half seems to be and this is seems to me deeply psychologically healthy. As people get nearer the exit than the entrance, it really feels to me like they're beginning to take things like legacy and solidarity and things seriously in a different way. You know, your legacy is the planet you leave behind for the people you love the most, and people take very seriously the thought that they're leaving behind a planet that's shabbier than the one they were born onto. I don't know, it's a lot of fun to work with older people like me because there's a little less of the kind of you know, I have to be in front or kind of dominance what We did a big demonstration against these banks, the four big American banks, Chase, City, Wells, Fargo, Bank of America that are the four biggest lenders to the fossil fuel industry. We did about one hundred demonstrations. We shut them down for a day across the country with people doing sit ins and rocking chairs, you know, all over the place. And the big banner that we had where I was this big banner that just said fossils against fossil fuels. It was good to see people who could, you know, laugh at themselves a little bit and at the same time understand that they had an important role to play in trying to set things right. The whole thing has felt that the very least psychologically healthy to me and enjoin it a lot.

Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. One of my favorite quotes from you is the human game as a team sport and finding finding ways to come together. And that's one of the things that that kind of irks me. Kind of is not a big enough word, but the inviting right between the generations. You've got the younger generation saying you created this world for us, you jerks, and the older generation saying it wasn't my fault. You know, I was part of the civil rights movement, Like it wasn't my fault. It was the corporations. And instead of coming together in our love for the world, in our care for the world, instead of joining together with that, we get into this you screwed up you are not doing enough.

Yeah, there's something so powerful in that community. One of my favorite quotes from you is the human game as a team sport and finding finding ways to come together. And that's one of the things that that kind of irks me. Kind of is not a big enough word, but the inviting right between the generations. You've got the younger generation saying you created this world for us, you jerks, and the older generation saying it wasn't my fault. You know, I was part of the civil rights movement, Like it wasn't my fault. It was the corporations. And instead of coming together in our love for the world, in our care for the world, instead of joining together with that, we get into this you screwed up you are not doing enough.

I think that's right. And on the deepest level, the key dividing line in my life and I think in the world was the moment when, in political terms, probably with the election of Ronald Reagan, when we decided that individualism was the most important thing, that markets were going to solve all problems, that your job was to get rich. It was his palm Maggie Thatcher he said, there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women. So two things happened as a result of that. One is that, you know, we melted the North Poole because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems. The second thing that happened was that people got more and more and more isolated and alienated and off by themselves. You're the one who really understands this stuff, but it strikes me powerfully. We are socially evolved primates. It wasn't that long ago that we were all sitting on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other's fur, you know, And just the command to go off by yourselves and good consumers just seems to have set us up for so much unhappiness and it's and one of it's not the reason we build movements. We build movements so that we can keep the planet from overheating or you know, keep black people from having to be killed by policemen or whatever. It is a nice side effect of building movements is that people end up working together, and that's what we're designed to do.

I think that's right. And on the deepest level, the key dividing line in my life and I think in the world was the moment when, in political terms, probably with the election of Ronald Reagan, when we decided that individualism was the most important thing, that markets were going to solve all problems, that your job was to get rich. It was his palm Maggie Thatcher he said, there is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women. So two things happened as a result of that. One is that, you know, we melted the North Poole because what do you know, markets didn't solve all problems. The second thing that happened was that people got more and more and more isolated and alienated and off by themselves. You're the one who really understands this stuff, but it strikes me powerfully. We are socially evolved primates. It wasn't that long ago that we were all sitting on the floor of the savannah picking lice out of each other's fur, you know, And just the command to go off by yourselves and good consumers just seems to have set us up for so much unhappiness and it's and one of it's not the reason we build movements. We build movements so that we can keep the planet from overheating or you know, keep black people from having to be killed by policemen or whatever. It is a nice side effect of building movements is that people end up working together, and that's what we're designed to do.

I think, yeah, it intersects really with SIGNA did a study I think it's twenty eighteen or nineteen. I should know because I cite it all the time, but they found that loneliness is a bigger public health risk than smoking, right, And you know where I go with that is like why are people lonely? And we're lonely because we can't tell each other the truth about what we're feeling or what's going on for us, because we're sort of hit with Oh you think you have it bad, other people have it worse, or I have it worse. And this really, like this shows up in what you and I have just been talking about, right, like in the climate catastrophe or that individualism and thinking that it's you against the world, and the flip side of that of you can't get help unless you've exhausted every possible aspect of doing it for yourself, right, God helps those who help themselves. This sort of rugged individualism lays the stage for cataclysm devastation on social, political, environmental fronts. And what I hear you saying, yay, is that community and connection is the answer.

I think, yeah, it intersects really with SIGNA did a study I think it's twenty eighteen or nineteen. I should know because I cite it all the time, but they found that loneliness is a bigger public health risk than smoking, right, And you know where I go with that is like why are people lonely? And we're lonely because we can't tell each other the truth about what we're feeling or what's going on for us, because we're sort of hit with Oh you think you have it bad, other people have it worse, or I have it worse. And this really, like this shows up in what you and I have just been talking about, right, like in the climate catastrophe or that individualism and thinking that it's you against the world, and the flip side of that of you can't get help unless you've exhausted every possible aspect of doing it for yourself, right, God helps those who help themselves. This sort of rugged individualism lays the stage for cataclysm devastation on social, political, environmental fronts. And what I hear you saying, yay, is that community and connection is the answer.

Absolutely, and it may be the answer to winning those fights, but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive at the tough moment. You know, it's what we want to do at some level. I mean, to the funniest degree. I now have lots of older people coming up and telling me that it's on their bucket list to get arrested and could I help you know and things. Sure, I know how to do that, but it's brush, it's powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do think that if we get through the next twenty years, which are going to be very tough, that humans will find far more interesting ways to amuse themselves going forward. I think that the chances that you know, seventy five years from now, all we can think of to do is, you know, go to the mall, or go shopping online, or you know, whatever it is. That seems slight to me. We're really interesting species. We wandered into this enticing called de sact of kind of high consumer consumerism, and it'll take us a little while, but eventually we'll get out of it. So my job, our job is to try and make sure we get through those twenty or thirty years so that the people who come after us have some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.

Absolutely, and it may be the answer to winning those fights, but it's definitely the answer to how to be alive at the tough moment. You know, it's what we want to do at some level. I mean, to the funniest degree. I now have lots of older people coming up and telling me that it's on their bucket list to get arrested and could I help you know and things. Sure, I know how to do that, but it's brush, it's powerful stuff. And I do think, and this is the place where I allow myself to be optimistic. I do think that if we get through the next twenty years, which are going to be very tough, that humans will find far more interesting ways to amuse themselves going forward. I think that the chances that you know, seventy five years from now, all we can think of to do is, you know, go to the mall, or go shopping online, or you know, whatever it is. That seems slight to me. We're really interesting species. We wandered into this enticing called de sact of kind of high consumer consumerism, and it'll take us a little while, but eventually we'll get out of it. So my job, our job is to try and make sure we get through those twenty or thirty years so that the people who come after us have some realistic chance at building a more interesting world.

I love that. I feel like you've answered my closing question multiple times, but I'm going to give it to you anyway. You wrote in Falter, a writer doesn't owe a reader hope. The only obligation is honesty. You've written about hope in a bunch of different ways. So for today, knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what does hope look like for you today?

I love that. I feel like you've answered my closing question multiple times, but I'm going to give it to you anyway. You wrote in Falter, a writer doesn't owe a reader hope. The only obligation is honesty. You've written about hope in a bunch of different ways. So for today, knowing what you know and living what you've lived, what does hope look like for you today?

Yeah, it's always a hard question because I don't There are days when I don't even have you know, when the endthing that gets me through the day is just, you know, anger at exon or something like that. Sometimes that's a reasonable fuel to get you going. But the hope is that we don't walk off this particular cliff eyes closed. You know, it feels to me like climate change the climate crisis is a really interesting test of whether or not the big brain was a good adaptation or not. It can get us in a lot of trouble, can it get us out? And my intuition is that it's actually going to be less the size of the brain that matters than the size of the heart that it's attached to. And we shelse I have hope in most of the people around me and the people that I know that they are of good heart. Sometimes that hope is strained and tested. It's been not such a great few years, you know, and I don't pretend to understand, you know, some of the things that we see in our society now. But that's where my hope was that in the end there are enough people of good heart that we will figure out how to work together through this.