How Can We Stare at the Sun

or: how to confront the unimaginable

Yesterday morning, I woke up to a lackluster but beautiful dusting of snow. It wasn't deep enough for me to kick for Rintrah—his favorite game in this world is “mom kicks snow or leaves and I chase it.” It was enough snow to throw the world into majesty, though. On our morning walk, the sun broke from the clouds and it occurred to me why our ancestors rarely doubted the existence of the divine.

These days, every time the snow melts, it’s like leaving an elderly relative at the train station. Maybe, probably, you’ll see them again. Maybe you won’t. “For every thing there is a season,” they say, to comfort the living after the death of a loved one. But no one has yet given us the words with which to mourn the death of entire seasons themselves. Winter is dying. Not in a “spring is coming” way. The fundamental cycles of life are changing.

I spent the day reading about the Earth Liberation Front as research for my podcast. “The burning rage of a dying planet,” they called themselves. That group is gone now, most of its former members have already gone to and been released from prison. For five years or so, they burned millions of dollars of property in defense of the wild. Their actions—sometimes reckless, sometimes poorly targeted—divided the environmental movement, giving hope to some, undermining the slow legal work of others. There’s an argument they helped end the slaughter of wild horses in the United States, there’s an argument that the repression they inspired led to the faltering of a growing direct action environmental movement and divided the movement at a crucial juncture.

Whatever their immediate effects, if there are history books written one hundred years from now, the Earth Liberation Front will be spoken highly of. Hypothetical posterity does not make them good, nor does it make them bad. It’s just a fact (well, a guess). If there are people writing history books, then the Earth Liberation Front will likely be a positive footnote, a counterpoint to the argument that everyone of our era passively accepted the wholesale destruction of the ecosystem. They won’t be the John Brown of the environment, because their actions didn’t split a fundamental tension within American society into an all-out war. They’ll be remembered fondly, though, if anyone is around to remember much of anything at all.

That’s who I read about yesterday. Tomorrow, I’ll record an episode about them.

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Last night, in the middle of the night, I woke up—or thought I’d woken up—and looked out the window. The blue-black of the sky was gone, and in its place was a wine red, a blood red. I went back to sleep and dreamt a little longer, woke up again a little later, and the sky was still a wine-deep sea.

Awake now, with the sun up, I know that I had been dreaming—or perhaps it was some half-conscious half-dream.

I put a lot of stock into my dreams, but I rarely write about them. Just because I put stock into my dreams doesn’t mean that you should. Put stock in your own dreams, instead.

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I woke up this morning to a post going around social media, one that I’m sympathetic to. A beautiful photo of the night sky that reads: “there is a way out of this apocalypse.”

It’s possible that my problem with it is pedantic. I don’t think I have a problem with the people who posted it in the first place, and I certainly don’t have a problem with the people who reposted it, the people that it speaks to. It’s possible that I’m fundamentally on the same page as all of those people.

But still: there is not a way out of this apocalypse. There is a way through it. The difference matters.

We must look soberly at the actual magnitude of the problem. It’s terrifying. It’s almost impossible. It’s like looking at the sun. (Here you can draw metaphors if you like, about how the moon allows us to see the reflected light of the sun without going blind, that the night is not something to fear but to embrace.)

We must look at the problem. We must grapple with the problem. Then we must act, in the ways that suit our temperaments and risk analyses.

There’s no particular reason you should take my advice about how to act. But I will say, from my analysis of the history books I read for a living: clandestinity is often where movements go to die. Nighttime actions by individuals and small cells tend to happen once a thriving movement has begun to decline and the hardcore individuals in the center of that movement feel like it’s too late to turn back.

Clandestine actions do work sometimes, but primarily when when there is a large and active aboveground social movement that is not willing to condemn the underground. 

So I’m not telling you to go out at night and commit felonies. The hard, slow, patient, infuriating work of movement building is likely a better use of what time you have on this planet. I will say that we shouldn’t condemn the underground aspects of our social movements—it’s by tricking the aboveground into condemning the underground that the repressive forces do their work. It’s the first place they start with their divide-and-conquer.

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When I was a young forest defender, sitting in trees and blockading roads, I mostly worked out west, where the primary problem we confronted was clearcutting. It’s a pretty major problem. There are less than 4% of the original forests of the United States left, and the forest service is run by the department of agriculture—what we see as forests, they see as timber farms.

I knew about mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia, but it took me years to actually show up and try to help. Because it was too big of a problem. It was too terrible a thing to consider. Leveling thousand-year-old trees is a crime almost unimaginable. Leveling 480 million year old mountains is just beyond consideration.

Climate change, though, it’s beyond any of that. Islands and coastlines are disappearing under the ocean. Ice caps are melting. Entire seasons are missing. More species go extinct every year. Natural disasters are multiplying. Heatwaves beyond the limits of human tolerance are occurring in some of the most densely populated countries in the world. We’re blowing past every threshold we’d set. Every temperature chart is more erratic. Our ecosystem is a spinning top that has been thrown off balance and has begun its erratic spirals.

Meanwhile, our frustration is being channeled into useless non-solutions. On the left, we’re told it’s up to us to buy solar panels for our houses and that we can effect meaningful change through the electoral process. On the right, we’re told climate change is not happening, or if it is happening, we need to shore up our bunkers and our borders and shoot anyone who wants to join us on our liferaft. 

It’s not doomerism, or needlessly spreading fear, to announce the sky is falling. The sky is, indeed, falling. The systems that were in place to prevent such things have indeed failed us.

Step one is we actually have to acknowledge the problem. The entirety of the problem. The severity of the problem. The irreversibility of the damage. Step one might genuinely be the hardest step.

Take covid as a microcosm: there are those who want covid to be over, to go back to how things were before, when there was, for most people, very little risk in public gatherings. When ventilation systems and air filters weren’t too big of a deal. There is no going back. We cannot go back to a world that no longer exists. Covid is with us, and we need to accept that. Our risk models have to change. This doesn’t mean we can’t gather, but it changes the ways we should.

If we take covid as a microcosm, it’s hard not to feel a little lost, a little pessimistic. A little bit doomer. If most people wore masks indoors in public places and if effort was put into place to increase air circulation, there would be a night-and-day improvement. We would save lives. We would curb the mass disabling. This isn’t happening. This doesn’t mean it can’t happen. We have not lost—we’ve just lost the way things were before.

We cannot save the world, because it’s too late for that. Climate change is here and it’s going to get worse. If we were to stop all carbon emissions today, the earth would still get warmer—there is a notable lag between cause and effect. This doesn’t mean it’s useless to lower emissions. It’s more critical than ever. We will never get the old world back, but we have an incredible amount of agency in determining what the new world will look like.

There is no turning back. The only way out is through.

Winter is my favorite season, and I will miss it. Winter begins on the solstice. The sun and its light return to the world at the same time as the cold sets in. It’s not darkest just before sunrise, but it is coldest.

We are going to start this fight for a better world, or perhaps a better end-of-the-world. We’re going to start that fight and things are going to get worse before they get better. It doesn’t mean that the fighting is useless. Just that there’s a lag between cause and effect.

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I believe in hope as a discipline. Despair is not something to be ashamed of, it’s something to acknowledge in oneself and move past. We will fall into despair sometimes. All of us will. Then we will, like the great anarchist balladeers Chumbawamba told us to, get up again.

Navigating the future will require us to ride the edge between despair and hope. We have to stay close enough to despair to be able to stare over the edge of the cliff and see it, to be reminded of what’s at stake. Like surfing or something, propelled forward by doom, staying upright by sheer force of will, by sheer hope. Well, probably it’s like surfing. I don’t know, I grew up on the east coast and no one surfs over here. All we have over here is poorly mixed metaphors.

We can build something beautiful in the shell of the old world, but it will have a certain cemetery beauty. We will be surrounded by the dead, and we will find beauty in the mourning. We will be mourning ways of life, we will be mourning people. We will be mourning entire species. We will be mourning entire seasons.

Life is not easy. No one honest has ever promised us otherwise. Our generation will have to bear a level of mourning and loss that is perhaps unprecedented in human history—yet countless generations before us have born the weight of apocalypse, of unimaginable loss. Others, elsewhere in the world, carry that weight already.

Life is not easy, but it’s worth living. Movement building isn’t easy. It’s precarious work, thankless work. It’s worth doing.

As for taking fantastic risks against the destruction of the world, I can’t tell you to do that. I can’t even tell you it’s a good idea, strategically, because who fucking knows. I can only tell you that I’m committed to not condemning the people who take risky action to stop the destruction of everything living and beautiful in this world.

As for me, when I see the sun break through the clouds, I know that everything is changing, that everything is dying, but that’s always how it has been. That’s always how it will be. One day the sun, too, will burn out. For now, it lights the snow on the trees, and for now my dog is alive, and for now I am alive, and I will keep to my discipline.