Is it too late to save the world?
Jonathan Franzen on one year of Trump's America
‘As the ice shelves crumble and the
Twitter president threatens to pull out of the Paris accord’, Franzen reflects
on the role of the writer in times of crisis
by Jonathan Franzen
Saturday 4 November 2017 08.06 GMT
If an essay is something essayed – something hazarded, not
definitive, not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s
personal experience and subjectivity – we might seem to be living in an
essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, how you were
treated by a flight attendant, what your take on the political outrage of the
day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective
micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of
sharing with other people. The US president now operates on this presumption.
Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like the New York Times, has
softened up to allow the I, with its voice and opinions and impressions, to
take the front-page spotlight, and book reviewers feel less and less
constrained to discuss books with any kind of objectivity. It didn’t use to
matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable, but the question of
“likability,” with its implicit privileging of the reviewer’s personal
feelings, is now a key element of critical judgment. Literary fiction itself is
looking more and more like essay.
Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by
Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious
first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell
you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit
the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation,
even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of
narrative is autobiography.
Meanwhile the personal essay itself – the formal apparatus
of honest self-examination and sustained engagement with ideas, as developed by
Montaigne and advanced by Emerson and Woolf and Baldwin – is in eclipse. Most
large-circulation American magazines have all but ceased to publish pure
essays. The form persists mainly in smaller publications that collectively have
fewer readers than Margaret Atwood has Twitter followers. Should we be mourning
the essay’s extinction? Or should we be celebrating its conquest of the larger
culture?
A personal and subjective micronarrative: the few lessons
I’ve learned about writing essays all came from my editor at the New Yorker,
Henry Finder. I first went to Henry, in 1994, as a would-be journalist in
pressing need of money. Largely through dumb luck, I produced a publishable
article about the US Postal Service, and then, through native incompetence, I
wrote an unpublishable piece about the Sierra Club. This was the point at which
Henry suggested that I might have some aptitude as an essayist. I heard him to
be saying, “since you’re obviously a crap journalist”, and denied that I had
any such aptitude. I’d been raised with a midwestern horror of yakking too much
about myself, and I had an additional prejudice, derived from certain
wrongheaded ideas about novel-writing, against the stating of things that could
more rewardingly be depicted. But I still needed money, so I kept calling Henry
for book-review assignments. On one of our calls, he asked me if I had any
interest in the tobacco industry – the subject of a major new history by
Richard Kluger. I quickly said: “Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I
want to think about.” To this, Henry even more quickly replied: “Therefore you
must write about them.”
This was my first lesson from Henry, and it remains the most
important one. After smoking throughout my 20s, I’d succeeded in quitting for
two years in my early 30s. But when I was assigned the post-office piece, and
became terrified of picking up the phone and introducing myself as a New Yorker
journalist, I’d taken up the habit again. In the years since then, I’d managed
to think of myself as a nonsmoker, or at least as a person so firmly resolved
to quit again that I might as well already have been a nonsmoker, even as I
continued to smoke. My state of mind was like a quantum wave function in which
I could be totally a smoker but also totally not a smoker, so long as I never
took measure of myself. And it was instantly clear to me that writing about
cigarettes would force me to take my measure. This is what essays do.
President-elect Donald Trump speaks at his election night
rally in New York in November 2016.
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President-elect Donald Trump speaks at his election night
rally in New York in November 2016. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/Reuters
There was also the problem of my mother, whose father had
died of lung cancer, and who was militantly anti-tobacco. I’d concealed my
habit from her for more than 15 years. One reason I needed to preserve my
indeterminacy as a smoker/nonsmoker was that I didn’t enjoy lying to her. As
soon as I could succeed in quitting again, permanently, the wave function would
collapse and I would be, one hundred per cent, the nonsmoker I’d always represented
myself to be – but only if I didn’t first come out, in print, as a smoker.
Henry had been a twentysomething wunderkind when Tina Brown
hired him at the New Yorker. He had a distinctive tight-chested manner of
speaking, a kind of hyper-articulate mumble, like prose acutely well edited but
barely legible. I was awed by his intelligence and his erudition and had
quickly come to live in fear of disappointing him. Henry’s passionate emphasis
in “Therefore you must write about them” – he was the only speaker I knew who
could get away with the stressed initial “Therefore” and the imperative “must”
– allowed me to hope that I’d registered in his consciousness in some small
way.
And so I went to work on the essay, every day combusting
half a dozen low-tar cigarettes in front of a box fan in my living-room window,
and handed in the only thing I ever wrote for Henry that didn’t need his
editing. I don’t remember how my mother got her hands on the essay or how she
conveyed to me her deep sense of betrayal, whether by letter or in a phone
call, but I do remember that she then didn’t communicate with me for six weeks
– by a wide margin, the longest she ever went silent on me. It was exactly as
I’d feared. But when she got over it and began sending me letters again, I felt
seen by her, seen for what I was, in a way I’d never felt before. It wasn’t
just that my “real” self had been concealed from her; it was as if there hadn’t
really been a self to see.
Should we be mourning the essay’s extinction? Or should we
be celebrating its conquest of the larger culture?
Kierkegaard, in Either/Or, makes fun of the “busy man” for
whom busyness is a way of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up
in the night and realise that you’re lonely in your marriage, or that you need
to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the
next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you
have another million things. As long as there’s no end of little things, you
never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an
essay isn’t the only way to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what
your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably
unbusy Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those
subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don’t seem so essayistic. They seem more
like a means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days
reading, on screens, stuff we’d never bother reading in a printed book, and
bitch about how busy we are.
I quit cigarettes for the second time in 1997. And then, in
2002, for the final time. And then, in 2003, for the last and final time –
unless you count the smokeless nicotine that’s coursing through my bloodstream
as I write this. Attempting to write an honest essay doesn’t alter the
multiplicity of my selves; I’m still simultaneously a reptile-brained addict, a
worrier about my health, an eternal teenager, a self-medicating depressive.
What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved
identity acquires substance.
One of the mysteries of literature is that personal
substance, as perceived by both the writer and the reader, is situated outside
the body of either of them, on some kind of page. How can I feel realer to
myself in a thing I’m writing than I do inside my body? How can I feel closer
to another person when I’m reading her words than I do when I’m sitting next to
her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness.
But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible only on
the page.
Former FBI director James Comey testifying before the US
Senate select committee on intelligence in October.
Former FBI director James Comey testifying before the US
Senate select committee on intelligence in October. Photograph: Saul
Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Here I might mention two other lessons I learned from Henry
Finder. One was Every essay, even a think piece, tells a story. The other was
There are only two ways to organise material: “Like goes with like” and “This
followed that.” These precepts may seem self-evident, but any grader of
high-school or college essays can tell you that they aren’t. To me it was
especially not evident that a think piece should follow the rules of drama. And
yet: doesn’t a good argument begin by positing some difficult problem? And
doesn’t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold
proposition, and set up obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments,
and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but
satisfying conclusion?
If you accept Henry’s premise that a successful prose piece
consists of material arranged in the form of a story, and if you share my own
conviction that our identities consist of the stories we tell about ourselves,
it makes sense that we should get a strong hit of personal substance from the
labour of writing and the pleasure of reading. When I’m alone in the woods or
having dinner with a friend, I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of random sensory
data coming at me. The act of writing subtracts almost everything, leaving only
the alphabet and punctuation marks, and progresses toward non-randomness.
Sometimes, in ordering the elements of a familiar story, you discover that it
doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Sometimes, especially with an argument
(“This follows from that”), a completely new narrative is called for. The
discipline of fashioning a compelling story can crystallise thoughts and
feelings you only dimly knew you had in you.
If you’re looking at a mass of material that doesn’t seem to
lend itself to storytelling, Henry would say your only other option is to sort
it into categories, grouping similar elements together: Like goes with like.
This is, at a minimum, a tidy way to write. But patterns also have a way of
turning into stories. To make sense of Donald Trump’s victory in an election he
was widely expected to lose, it’s tempting to construct a this-followed-that
story: Hillary Clinton was careless with her emails, the Justice department
chose not to prosecute her, then Anthony Weiner’s emails came to light, then
James Comey reported to Congress that Clinton might still be in trouble, and
then Trump won the election. But it may actually be more fruitful to group like
with like: Trump’s victory was like the Brexit vote and like the resurgent
anti-immigrant nationalism in Europe. Clinton’s imperiously sloppy handling of
her emails was like her poorly messaged campaign and like her decision not to campaign
harder in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
I was in Ghana on election day, birdwatching with my brother
and two friends. James Comey’s report to Congress had unsettled the campaign
before I left for Africa, but Nate Silver’s authoritative polling website,
Fivethirtyeight, was still giving Trump just a 30% chance of winning. Having
cast an early ballot for Clinton, I’d arrived in Accra feeling only moderately
anxious about the election and congratulating myself on my decision to spend
the final week of the campaign not checking Fivethirtyeight 10 times a day.
I turned on my phone to confirm that Clinton was winning the
election. What I found instead were stricken texts
I was indulging a different sort of compulsion in Ghana. To
my shame, I am what people in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that
I don’t love birds for their own sake. I go birding to experience their beauty
and diversity, learn more about their behaviour and the ecosystems they belong
to, and take long, attentive walks in new places. But I also keep way too many
lists. I count not only the bird species I’ve seen worldwide but the ones I’ve
seen in every country and every US state I’ve birded in, also at various
smaller sites, including my back yard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I
can rationalise my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within
the context of my passion. But I really am compulsive. This makes me morally
inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.
It happened that by going to Ghana I’d given myself a chance
to break my previous year-list record of 1,286 species. I was already over 800
for 2016, and I knew, from my online research, that trips similar to ours had
produced nearly 500 species, only a handful of which are also common in America.
If I could see 460 unique year species in Africa, and then use my seven-hour
layover in London to pick up 20 easy European birds at a park near Heathrow,
2016 would be my best year ever.
We were seeing great stuff in Ghana, spectacular turacos and
bee-eaters found only in west Africa. But the country’s few remaining forests
are under intense hunting and logging pressure, and our walks in them were more
sweltering than productive. By the evening of election day, we’d already missed
our only shot at several of my target species. Very early the next morning,
when polls were still open on the west coast of the States, I turned on my
phone for the pleasure of confirming that Clinton was winning the election.
What I found instead were stricken texts from my friends in California, with
pictures of them staring at a TV and looking morose, my girlfriend curled up on
a sofa in a fetal position. The Times headline of the moment was “Trump Takes
North Carolina, Building Momentum; Clinton’s Path to Victory Narrow.”
There was nothing to be done but go birding. On a road in
the Nsuta forest, dodging timber trucks whose momentum I associated with
Trump’s, and yet clinging to the idea that Clinton still had a path to victory,
I saw Black Dwarf Hornbills, an African Cuckoo-Hawk and a Melancholy
Woodpecker. It was a sweaty but satisfactory morning that ended, when we
re-emerged into network coverage, with the news that the “short-fingered
vulgarian” (Spy magazine’s memorable epithet) was my country’s new president.
This was the moment when I saw what my mind had been doing with Nate Silver’s
figure of 30% for Trump’s odds. Somehow I’d taken the figure to mean that the
world might be, worst case, 30% shittier after election day.
What the number actually represented, of course, was a 30%
chance of the world’s being 100% shittier.
Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measured
speech is punished by not getting clicked on
As we travelled up into drier, emptier northern Ghana, we
intersected with some birds I’d long dreamed of seeing: Egyptian Plovers,
Carmine Bee-eaters and a male Standard-winged Nightjar, whose outrageous wing
streamers gave it the look of a nighthawk being closely pursued by two bats.
But we were falling ever further behind the year-bird pace I needed to
maintain. It occurred to me, belatedly, that the trip lists I’d seen online had
included species that were only heard, not seen, while I needed to see a bird
to count it. Those lists had raised my hopes the way Nate Silver had. Now every
target species I missed increased the pressure to see all of the remaining
targets, even the wildly unlikely ones, if I wanted to break my record. It was
only a stupid year list, ultimately meaningless even to me, but I was haunted
by the headline from the morning after election day. Instead of 275 electoral
votes, I needed 460 species, and my path to victory was becoming very narrow.
Finally, four days before the end of the trip, in the spillway of a dam near
the Burkina Faso border, where I’d hoped to get half a dozen new grassland
birds and saw zero, I had to accept the reality of loss. I was suddenly aware
that I should have been at home, trying to console my girlfriend about the
election, exercising the one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is
the propensity to laugh in dark times.
How had the short-fingered vulgarian reached the White
House? When Hillary Clinton started speaking in public again, she lent credence
to a like-goes-with-like account of her character by advancing a
this-followed-that narrative. Never mind that she’d mishandled her emails and
uttered the phrase “basket of deplorables”. Never mind that voters might have
had legitimate grievances with the liberal elite she represented; might have failed
to appreciate the rationality of free trade, open borders, and factory
automation when the overall gains in global wealth came at middle-class
expense; might have resented the federal imposition of liberal urban values on
conservative rural communities. According to Clinton, her loss was the fault of
James Comey – maybe also of the Russians.
Admittedly, I had my own neat narrative account. When I came
home from Africa to Santa Cruz, my progressive friends were still struggling to
understand how Trump could have won. I remembered a public event I’d once done
with the optimistic social-media specialist Clay Shirky, who’d recounted to the
audience how “shocked” professional New York restaurant critics had been when
Zagat, a crowd-sourced reviewing service, had named Union Square Café the best
restaurant in town. Shirky’s point was that professional critics aren’t as
smart as they think they are; that, in fact, in the age of Big Data, critics
are no longer even necessary. At the event, ignoring the fact that Union Square
Café was my favourite New York restaurant (the crowd was right!), I’d sourly
wondered if Shirky believed that critics were also stupid to consider Alice
Munro a better writer than James Patterson. But now Trump’s victory, too, had
vindicated Shirky’s mockery of pundits. Social media had allowed Trump to
bypass the critical establishment, and just enough members of the crowd, in key
swing states, had found his low comedy and his incendiary speech “better” than
Clinton’s nuanced arguments and her mastery of policy. This follows from that:
without Twitter and Facebook, no Trump.
After the election, Mark Zuckerberg did briefly seem to take
responsibility, sort of, for having created the platform of choice for fake
news about Clinton, and to suggest that Facebook could become more active in
filtering the news. (Good luck with that.) Twitter, for its part, kept its head
down. As Trump’s tweeting continued unabated, what could Twitter possibly say?
That it was making the world a better place?
In December, my favourite Santa Cruz radio station, KPIG,
began running a fake ad offering counselling services to addicts of
Trump-hating tweets and Facebook posts. The following month, a week before
Trump’s inauguration, the PEN American Center organised events around the
country to reject the assault on free speech that it claimed Trump represented.
Although his administration’s travel restrictions did later make it harder for
writers from Muslim countries to have their voices heard in the United States,
the one bad thing that could not be said of Trump, in January, was that he had
in any way curtailed free speech. His lying, bullying tweets were free speech
on steroids. PEN itself, just a few years earlier, had given a free-speech
award to Twitter, for its self-publicised role in the Arab spring. The actual
result of the Arab spring had been a retrenchment of autocracy, and Twitter had
since revealed itself, in Trump’s hands, to be a platform made to order for
autocracy, but the ironies didn’t end there. During the same week in January,
progressive American bookstores and authors proposed a boycott of Simon &
Schuster for the crime of intending to publish one book by the dismal
right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The angriest of the bookstores talked
of refusing to stock all titles from S&S, including, presumably, the books
of Andrew Solomon, the president of PEN. The talk didn’t end until S&S
voided its contract with Yiannopoulos.
The most likely rise in temperature is six degrees. We’ll be
lucky to avoid a two-degree rise before the year 2030
Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing
the buttons of the politically correct, but it only works because the buttons
are there to be pushed – students and activists claiming the right to not hear
things that upset them, and to shout down ideas that offend them. Intolerance
particularly flourishes online, where measured speech is punished by not
getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you towards
content you agree with, and nonconforming voices stay silent for fear of being
flamed or trolled or unfriended. The result is a silo in which, whatever side
you’re on, you feel absolutely right to hate what you hate. And here is another
way in which the essay differs from superficially similar kinds of subjective
speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best – the
work of Alice Munro, for example – invites you to ask whether you might be
somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else
might hate you.
Three years ago, I was in a state of rage about climate
change. The Republican party was continuing to lie about the absence of a
scientific consensus on climate – Florida’s Department of Environmental
Protection had gone so far as to forbid its employees to write the words
“climate change”, after Florida’s governor, a Republican, insisted that it
wasn’t a “true fact” – but I wasn’t much less angry at the left. I’d read a new
book by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything, in which she assured the reader
that, although “time is tight”, we still have 10 years to radically remake the
global economy and prevent global temperatures from rising by more than two
degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Klein wasn’t the only leftist saying
we still had 10 years. In fact, environmental activists had been saying the
exact same thing in 2005.
They’d also been saying it in 1995: We still have 10 years.
By 2015, though, it ought to have been clear that humanity is incapable in
every way – politically, psychologically, ethically, economically – of reducing
carbon emissions quickly enough to change everything. Even the European Union,
which had taken the early lead on climate, and was fond of lecturing other
regions on their irresponsibility, needed only a recession in 2009 to shift its
focus to economic growth. Barring a worldwide revolt against free-market
capitalism in the next 10 years – the scenario that Klein contended could still
save us – the most likely rise in temperature this century is on the order of
six degrees. We’ll be lucky to avoid a two-degree rise before the year 2030.
In a polity ever more starkly divided, the truth about
global warming was even less convenient to the left than to the right. The
right’s denials were odious lies, but at least they were consistent with a
certain cold-eyed political realism. The left, having excoriated the right for
its intellectual dishonesty and turned climate denialism into a political
rallying cry, was now in an impossible position. It had to keep insisting on
the truth of climate science while persisting in the fiction that collective
world action could stave off the worst of it: that universal acceptance of the
facts, which really might have changed everything in 1995, could still change
everything. Otherwise, what difference did it make if the Republicans quibbled
with the science?
Because my sympathies were with the left – reducing carbon
emissions is vastly better than doing nothing; every half-degree helps – I also
held it to a higher standard. Denying the dark reality, pretending that the
Paris accord could avert catastrophe, was understandable as a tactic to keep
people motivated to reduce emissions; to keep hope alive. As a strategy,
though, it did more harm than good. It ceded the ethical high ground, insulted
the intelligence of unpersuaded voters (“Really? We still have 10 years?”), and
precluded frank discussion of how the global community should prepare for
drastic changes, and how nations like Bangladesh should be compensated for what
nations like the United States have done to them.
Dishonesty also skewed priorities. In the past 20 years, the
environmental movement had become captive to a single issue. Partly out of
genuine alarm, partly also because foregrounding human problems was politically
less risky – less elitist – than talking about nature, the big environmental
NGOs had all invested their political capital in fighting climate change, a
problem with a human face. The NGO that particularly enraged me, as a bird
lover, was the National Audubon Society, once an uncompromising defender of
birds, now a lethargic institution with a very large PR department. In
September 2014, with much fanfare, that PR department had announced to the
world that climate change was the number-one threat to the birds of North
America. The announcement was both narrowly dishonest, because its wording
didn’t square with the conclusions of Audubon’s own scientists, and broadly
dishonest, because not one single bird death could be directly attributed to
human carbon emissions. In 2014, the most serious threat to American birds was
habitat loss, followed by outdoor cats, collisions with buildings, and
pesticides. By invoking the buzzword of climate change, Audubon got a lot of
attention in the liberal media; another point had been scored against the
science-denying right. But it was not at all clear how this helped birds. The
only practical effect of Audubon’s announcement, it seemed to me, was to
discourage people from addressing the real threats to birds in the present.
Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens) in flight, silhouetted
against colourful dusk sky. Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, USA, November.E465HB
Snow Geese (Chen caerulescens) in flight, silhouetted against colourful dusk
sky. Bosque del Apache, New Mexico, USA, November.
Snow Geese in New Mexico, USA. Photograph: Nature Picture
Library / Alamy/Alamy
I was so angry that I decided that I’d better write an
essay. I began with a jeremiad against the National Audubon Society, broadened
it into a scornful denunciation of the environmental movement generally, and
then started waking up in the night in a panic of remorse and doubt. For the
writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was seeing in this one.
Why was I excoriating fellow liberals when the denialists were so much worse?
The prospect of climate change was every bit as sickening to me as to the
groups I was attacking. With every additional degree of global warming, further
hundreds of millions of people around the world would suffer. Wasn’t it worth an
all-out effort to achieve a reduction of even half of one degree? Wasn’t it
obscene to be talking about birds when children in Bangladesh were threatened?
Yes, the premise of my essay was that we have an ethical responsibility to
other species as well as to our own. But what if that premise was false? And,
even if it was true, did I really care personally about biodiversity? Or was I
just a privileged white guy who liked to go birding? And not even a purehearted
birder – a lister!
After three nights of doubting my character and motives, I
called Henry Finder and told him I couldn’t write the piece. I’d done plenty of
ranting about climate to my friends and to likeminded conservationists, but it
was like a lot of the ranting that happens online, where you’re protected by
the impromptu nature of the writing and by the known friendliness of your
audience. Trying to write a finished thing, an essay, had made me aware of the
sloppiness of my thinking. It had also enormously increased the risk of shame,
because the writing wasn’t casual, and because it was going out to an audience
of probably hostile strangers. Following Henry’s admonition (“Therefore”), I’d
come to think of the essayist as a firefighter, whose job, while everyone else
is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them. But I had a lot
more to fear now than my mother’s disapproval.
I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother
having hope for the ice caps
My essay might have stayed abandoned if I hadn’t already
clicked a button on Audubon’s website, affirming that, yes, I wanted to join it
in fighting climate change. I’d only done this to gather rhetorical ammunition
to use against Audubon, but a deluge of direct-mail solicitations had followed
from that click. I got at least eight of them in six weeks, all of them asking
me to give money, along with a similar deluge in my email inbox. A few days
after speaking to Henry, I opened one of the emails and found myself looking at
a picture of myself – luckily a flattering image, taken in 2010 for Vogue
magazine, which had dressed me up better than I dress myself and posed me in a
field with my binoculars, like a birder. The headline of the email was
something like “Join Author Jonathan Franzen in Supporting Audubon”. It was
true that, a few years earlier, in an interview with Audubon magazine, I’d
politely praised the organisation, or at least its magazine. But no one had
asked for my permission to use my name and image for solicitation. I wasn’t
sure the email was even legal.
A more benign impetus to return to the essay came from
Henry. As far as I know, Henry couldn’t care less about birds, but he seemed to
see something in my argument that our preoccupation with future catastrophes
discourages us from tackling solvable environmental problems in the here and
now. In an email to me, he gently suggested that I lose the tone of prophetic
scorn. “This piece will be more persuasive,” he wrote in another, “if,
ironically, it’s more ambivalent, less polemical. You’re not whaling on folks who
want us to pay attention to climate change and emission reductions. But you’re
attentive to the costs. To what the discourse pushes to the margins.” Email by
email, revision by revision, Henry nudged me toward framing the essay not as a
denunciation but as a question: how do we find meaning in our actions when the
world seems to be coming to an end? Much of the final draft was devoted to a
pair of well-conceived regional conservation projects, in Peru and Costa Rica,
where the world really is being made a better place, not just for wild plants
and wild animals but for the Peruvians and Costa Ricans who live there. Work on
these projects is personally meaningful, and the benefits are immediate and
tangible.
In writing about the two projects, I hoped that one or two
of the big charitable foundations, the ones spending tens of millions of
dollars on biodiesel development or on wind farms in Eritrea, might read the
piece and consider investing in work that produces tangible results. What I got
instead was a missile attack from the liberal silo. I’m not on social media,
but my friends reported that I was being called all sorts of names, including
“birdbrain” and “climate-change denier”. Tweet-sized snippets of my essay,
retweeted out of context, made it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the
effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican
party, which, by the polarising logic of online discourse, made me a
climate-change denier. In fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t
even bother having hope for the ice caps. All I’d denied was that a
right-minded international elite, meeting in nice hotels around the world,
could stop them from melting. This was my crime against orthodoxy. Climate now
has such a lock on the liberal imagination that any attempt to change the
conversation – even trying to change it to the epic extinction event that human
beings are already creating without the help of climate change – amounts to an
offence against religion.
I did have sympathy for the climate-change professionals who
denounced the essay. They’d been working for decades to raise the alarm in
America, and they finally had President Obama on board with them; they had the
Paris accord. It was an inopportune time to point out that drastic global
warming is already a done deal, and that it seems unlikely that humanity is
going to leave any carbon in the ground, given that, even now, not one country
in the world has pledged to do it.
President Barack Obama Speaks On Paris AccordWASHINGTON, DC
- DECEMBER 10: U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement on the climate
agreement in the Cabinet Room of the White House on December 12, 2015 in
Washington, DC. Obama desribed the accord as the best chance to save the
planet. (Photo by Dennis Brack-Pool/Getty Images)
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In 2015, President Barack Obama described the Paris accord
as the best chance to save the planet. Photograph: Pool/Getty Images
I also understood the fury of the alternative-energy
industry, which is a business like any other. If you allow that renewable
energy projects are only a moderating tactic, unable to reverse the damage that
past carbon emissions will continue to do for centuries, it opens the door to
other questions about the business. Like, did we really need quite so many
windmills? Did they have to be placed in ecologically sensitive areas? And the
solar farms in the Mojave desert – wouldn’t it make more sense to cover the
city of Los Angeles with solar panels and spare the open space? Weren’t we sort
of destroying the natural world in order to save it? I believe it was an
industry blogger who called me a birdbrain.
As for Audubon, the fundraising email should have warned me
about the character of its management. But I was still surprised by its
response to the essay, which was to attack, ad hominem, the person whose name
and image it had blithely appropriated two months earlier. My essay had, yes,
given Audubon some tough love. I wanted it to cut out the nonsense, stop
talking about 50 years from now, and be more aggressive in defending the birds
that both it and I love.
But apparently all Audubon could see was a threat to its
membership numbers and its fundraising efforts, and so it had to negate me as a
person. I’m told the president of Audubon fired off four different salvos at me
personally. This is what presidents do now.
And it worked. Without even reading those salvos – simply
from knowing that other people were reading them – I felt ashamed. I felt the
way I’d felt in eighth grade, shunned by the crowd and called names that
shouldn’t have hurt but did. I wished I’d listened to my panics in the night
and kept my opinions to myself. In a state of some anguish, I called up Henry
and dumped all my shame and regret on him. He replied, in his barely legible
way, that the online response was only weather. “With public opinion,” he said,
“there’s weather, and then there’s climate. You’re trying to change the
climate, and that takes time.”
It didn’t matter if I believed this or not. It was enough to
feel that one person, Henry, didn’t hate me. I consoled myself with the thought
that, although climate is too vast and chaotic for any individual to alter it,
the individual can still find meaning in trying to make a difference to one
afflicted village, one victim of global injustice. Or to one bird, or one
reader. After the online flames had died down, I started hearing privately from
conservation workers who shared my frustrations but couldn’t afford to express
them. I didn’t hear from many people, but there didn’t have to be many. My
feeling in each case was the same: the person I wrote the essay for is you.
A woman in New York protests Trump’s decision to pull out of
the Paris climate accord deal, in June 2017. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty
Images
But now, two and a half years later, as the ice shelves
crumble and the Twitter president pulls out of the Paris accord, I’m not so
sure. Now I can admit to myself that I didn’t write the essay just to hearten a
few conservationists and deflect some charitable dollars to better causes. I
really did want to change the climate. I still do. I share, with the very
people my essay criticised, the recognition that global warming is the issue of
our time, perhaps the biggest issue in all of human history. Every one of us is
now in the position of the indigenous Americans when the Europeans arrived with
guns and smallpox: our world is poised to change vastly, unpredictably, and
mostly for the worse. I don’t have any hope that we can stop the change from
coming. My only hope is that we can accept the reality in time to prepare for
it humanely, and my only faith is that facing it honestly, however painful this
may be, is better than denying it.
If I were writing the essay today, I might say all this. The
mirror of the essay, as it was published, reflected an angry bird-loving misfit
who thinks he’s smarter than the crowd. That character may be me, but it’s not
the whole me, and a better essay would have reflected that. In a better essay,
I might still have given Audubon the rebuke it deserved, but I would have found
my way to more sympathy for the other people I was angry at: for the climate
activists, who for 20 years had watched their path to victory narrow
sickeningly, as carbon emissions mounted and the necessary emissions-reduction
targets grew ever more unrealistic, and for the alternative energy workers who
had families to feed and were trying to see beyond petroleum, and for the
environmental NGOs that thought they’d finally found an issue that could wake
the world up, and for the leftists who, as neoliberalism and its technologies
reduced the electorate to individual consumers, saw climate change as the last
strong argument for collectivism. I would especially have tried to remember all
the people who need more hope in their lives than a depressive pessimist does,
the people for whom the prospect of a hot, calamity-filled future is unbearably
sad and frightening, and who can be forgiven for not wanting to think about it.
I would have kept revising.
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