The Climate Activists in Your Life Need Your Help

How Pleasure Activism Relates to Social Acceptance

Hi everyone, I’m still deep in the process of writing a book proposal, but I haven’t forgotten about you. I was writing my chapter outlines and came across this unfinished article I wrote in 2020 at probably the lowest point on my climate journey. I had just read some adrienne maree brown who speaks of pleasure activism, and we had started the farm and I knew that important to my activism was that I was having the best time, that my activism was enriching and aspirational. The reality was, I was having a horrible time. I felt isolated and trapped, I felt the weight of hundreds of years of momentum crushing my attempts to resist it. It’s when I wrote a poem about the sweet allure of giving up inspired by the actual story of a climate activist giving up in a symbolic way. I share this with you because I think it’s not necessarily how I feel now, but it’s how I felt along the way, it was the valley of despair I had to pass through (and perhaps many will have to pass through), and reminds us of the importance of how we hold each other up. Love you.

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Hemingway suggests if you’re stuck to write “the truest sentence that you know.” Okay, let’s try it: I’m trying to write a creative essay about reimagining transportation in America and I can’t write today. That’s the truest thing I know. I can’t write today. I couldn’t write yesterday or the day before. I’m at an impasse. I’m dissociating. I’m procrastinating when all I feel is urgency. [If you haven’t read it, I did finish that essay, it took me a year and it’s one of my favorite things I’ve written].

Back in March, when COVID was new and the climate crisis was more abstract than an orange sky and never-ending fires, I read a New York Times article that explained procrastination as a form of rewarding self-harm. That’s why it feels both rotten and irresistible. Professor Fuschia Sirois explains, “People engage in this irrational cycle of chronic procrastination because of an inability to manage negative moods around a task.” If a task has negative emotions associated with it, we get an immediate dose of dopamine for avoiding it. We then further the negative consequences for delaying the task, and inversely increase the reward for momentarily avoiding it further. 

In the article, they explain the solution is to address why the task brings about a negative mood. Okay, let’s try it: I can’t write today or the days before, because it is in direct response to a conversation I had with my two brothers who I love deeply yet fear I may lose through my activism. (Oof that already feels better). I feel—or perhaps more accurately, fear—a widening gulf between us. I fear that there is a widening gulf between me and reality, or at least the reality my family sees. I am reminded of the internal Exxon memo that divulged that they would achieve victory when they got uncertainty in people’s mouths, when they’ve painted those concerned with climate change as liberals and hippies, and when those promoting climate regulation “appear to be out of touch with reality.”

I was trying to weave a spell of wonder into my brothers around how cool it would be to use the existing infrastructure of our mega-freeways and run public trains down the middle, with distributed last-mile solutions at every stop. As the eternal younger brother, I waited in anticipation of their approval, and was instead crushed by their rejection. 

They took the moment to not do the work of creative re-imagination of our broken world, but to instead play Devil’s advocate. They invoked the oft-scapegoated “single mother of four” that couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of public transit as proof that the system I was describing wouldn’t work. They concluded, pessimistically, effortlessly, that nothing would change unless more convenient options catered to an assumed inadaptability. 

As adrienne maree brown wrote, “Sometimes I think we put up the critiques to excuse ourselves from getting involved, and sometimes I think we do it to protect our hearts from getting broken if it doesn’t work out. Critique, alone, can keep us from having to pick up the responsibility of figuring out solutions.”

As a popular meme has put into words, playing devil’s advocate is a favorite pastime of the privileged because other people’s problems are purely theoretical to them. It takes no emotional energy to poke holes in theories that to others are essential solutions. Playing devil’s advocate is excused as ‘constructive’ criticism, but it almost always serves to exhaust and dishearten the ones doing the heavy-lifting of challenging the status-quo through ideation. 

But mostly, their resistance drags down my spirits because I know it to be representative of a larger, societal resistance to change. Those concerned about climate change feel this overwhelming inertia as a Goliath chained to us who weighs on our hopes and whose shadow darkens our hearts. 

I lay here distraught, knowing full well that my work as a climate activist and artist is to “make the revolution irresistible,” as adrienne maree brown and Mary Heglar relayed to me the words of Toni Cade Bambara. They know, in order to be successful, “we will need to make justice one of the most pleasurable experiences we can have.” In his 1974 Pulitzer-prize winning book of poems, Turtle Island, Gary Snyder named what was needed a “revolution of consciousness”. 

“Since it doesn’t seem practical or even desirable to think that direct bloody force will achieve much, it would be best to consider this a continuing “revolution of consciousness” which will be won not by guns but by seizing the key images, myths, archetypes, eschatologies, and ecstasies so that life won’t seem worth living unless one is on the transforming energy’s side.”

And here we come to my impasse. The transforming energy is hard to maintain without the people that sustain you. For me that has always been my family. And that’s the evil brilliance in finding ways to discredit and undermine those concerned with the climate crisis. Isolate them: divide and conquer. 

That’s when I realized the problem. The narrative of climate change is too dominated by an idea that it requires sacrifice. Inventor and engineer Saul Griffith explains, “I think our failure on fixing climate change is just a rhetorical failure of imagination. We haven't been able to convince ourselves that it's going to be great.”

Climate journalism Kendra Pierre-Louis puts it her way, “What if, instead, the story we tell about climate change is that it is an opportunity? One for humans to repair our relationship with the Earth and re-envision our societies in ways that are not just in keeping with our ecosystems but also make our lives better? If this doesn’t sound possible, ask yourself: Why not?”

Climate scientist and communicator Katherine Hayhoe, in her many consultations with climate deniers, walked away with an astute insight: “The entire politicization of [climate change] boils down to solutions... climate deniers are so opposed to the solutions they can’t accept that there’s a real problem. They insist it can’t be real because they can’t tolerate the solutions.” 

I realized that I’m trying to write about our transportation infrastructure as sparked by a conversation I had with my two brothers who I love deeply and I feel I am being pulled apart from by climate. As I understand it, and as it is understood in the scientific community, action on climate change is an urgent existential threat. Yet, people are still going about their normal lives and I feel like an outsider trying not to panic. There is way too much inaction, way too much waiting around for someone or something to save us. And my brothers play devil's advocate and say people won’t change until the alternative is better. 

They couldn’t see that the current system is better because someone else is paying the price. We have to understand that everything that we’re doing comes at a cost and the only reason it’s better is because someone else is paying for it (even if that someone is our future selves). How do you beat that? And so, inherent in climate justice is the idea that we can no longer keep passing the buck - the bill is on the table, in the atmosphere, and it can no longer be ignored.

The point is, Hemingway, I can’t write because it's all painful to process this as it strains my relationship with my family. I am processing the threat of losing my family (metaphysically, emotionally). They represent my community, my home, the place I feel safe. Solastalgia—the emotional distress of environmental change, the homesickness you have when you are still at home—doesn’t just apply to the land we call home, it applies to the people we call home.

Your family, your community, your home is where your biases start sending you toward doubt because you will accept any alternative where your inclusion in your tribte isn’t the price that needs to be paid—where I don’t need to lose my family. So then you start doubting yourself and you think, maybe the climate thing is a little overblown, maybe we’re overreacting, maybe we’re climate bedwetters. But as a trained scientist who has read the reports, I don’t believe that at all. I will never be able to escape from “climate goggles” - the reality you see once you start to accept the science. There isn’t recourse in that for me.

So instead, I have to sit with this pain where I’m trying to hold my tongue most of the time and enjoy the time I have with my family and try not to push them too much, and it’s heartbreaking. I feel like I’m a crazy person. I don’t want to be the archetypal “hippie of the family”. There’s all these tropes in popular culture about the self-righteous youngest child or family member that is almost proselytizing and saying they need to be doing things better, and that was the whole point of the article I wanted to write. I am not trying to moralize you. I’m just deeply mourning the predicament we’re in, where all of our biases (especially optimism bias) are going to force us away from accepting the reality, from recognizing the problem.

I believe loud, self-righteousness is almost always ego-driven and ignores the reality of how behavior change is achieved, and undermines the goal. I am very goal-committed, so I expend an enormous amount of energy not falling down the path of least resistance: boring self-righteousness. I think it would be un-strategic to get to the point where I can be othered, be called a hippie, be called an alarmist, because once you are othered, you can be dismissed. And I think I bite my tongue a lot because I’m very careful with what I say because I understand the strategy. I want to be effective. 

So in conclusion Hemingway, I think I’m incapable of doing my work because I’m stuck trying not to lose the things I love most. 

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A lot of people ask what they can do. One thing they can do is provide the least resistance possible to those attempting to usher in a new way of living. If it also behooves you to put your weight behind the cause thats even better.  

Pleasure, and a mission free of anxiety will be difficult until we have full buy in from our loved ones. This is the power of emergence. Every single person that becomes a climate advocate matters. When there’s enough of us, the social norm will start to bias us in the opposite direction: anyone not concerned with climate are the one’s disconnected from reality.

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Copying the poem I wrote below, on this rainy sad boi Sunday:

Here is the context:

@ashsan82 wrote this amazing article called “Under the Weather” where she chronicles her mental health struggles as a climate activist. She tells a story about her friend Chris, a zealous climate activist and BYU professor who was burnt out by the weight he put on himself to be perfect. In what became for me the ultimate metaphor of resignation and burn-out, Chris allowed himself a lawn in the suburbs of Utah, where previously he would’ve let it go to seed instead of watering it.
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Early on in my journey, I, too, saw this as defeat. But now I understand that the problem was not with Chris, but with the disconnection he felt from society at large. As Ash later explains in her article, “if we are sick because our society is sick, shouldn’t society be treated alongside the patient?”
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When I say the world will be cradled by the weaving of your love. I mean that isolated individuals can’t do this alone. The more people that join in on this cause, all connected by a mutual love for each other and the planet, the stronger and more joyous we can all be.

The Lawn

Somewhere in the thirsty highlands of Utah

A perfect patch of lawn haunts me. 

It floats disembodied in my forebrain

Portending a doomed fate to resignation. 

These vibrant and thirsty blades

Belong to a man named Chris

Who was at one point, I gather,

Some sort of environmental Atlas

Punishing himself with

The weight of the world.

As I persist on the edge of defeat

The lawn mocks me—

“It’s only a matter of time.”

One day, I may too, 

Nourish my patchwork yard, 

Scorched under an indifferent sun, 

Into a defeated oasis. 

When asked why he no longer

Let the summer sun claim

His verdant vanities—he professed

“I have been sad my whole life,

Sometimes I just want to sit 

on my green lawn with my wife

And feel love.”

One day, I may too, understand

A node is only as strong

As its connections. 

The world will not be moved

With your misery. 

It will be reconnected

With your love.