Is Climate Change Your Fault? Or Mine?
Plus, the DNC deserves a new Twitter hashtag: #DNCcluelessonclimate | ISSUE 18, June 8, 2019
QUICK/READ: Yes, do your thing to recycle and reduce your/our monstrous carbon footprint as much as you can. But also mobilize, agitate, protest and vote for candidates and policies that take on the fossil fuel industrial complex, whose fingerprints are all over the Case of the Poisoned Planet. And, hey, Democratic National Committee: Are you really that clueless on climate change? Plus, save the whales. But save the hedgehogs, too.
ONE | ‘I Don’t Care If You Recycle’
Will the circle be unbroken? From a series of swirled photographs by DAVID IMBROGNO | cowgarage.com
I think maybe I caused climate change. Or maybe it was your fault. All I know, is in the mid-1970s, when recycling was next to godliness, I recycled maybe half my Christmas wrapping paper. I sorted plastics only when feeling virtuous (not often enough). All my waste is probably still mouldering inside what locals call Mount Rumpke (elevation 1,075 feet), one of America’s largest landfills north of Cincinnati, Ohio.
But wait.
Climate justice essayist Mary Annaise Heglar, doesn’t give a damn how green you are. Well, she puts it more politely in a (really, truly) must-read Vox article. The headline sums up her points: “I WORK IN THE ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT. I DON’T CARE IF YOU RECYCLE: Stop obsessing over your environmental ‘sins.’ Fight the oil and gas industry instead.” Heglar writes:
When people come to me and confess their green sins, as if I were some sort of eco-nun, I want to tell them they are carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes. That the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder. And that blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.
But that doesn’t mean we do nothing, says Heglar. Climate change is a sprawling, complicated problem, which means the answer is complicated, too, she says.
“We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become many Davids against one big, bad Goliath.
Heglar is not saying to do nothing at the personal level. In fact, she writes: “The worst thing you can do about climate change is nothing.”
(Excuse me, for a sec. I have to text CCT’s MemeWorks. Back in a moment….)
TWO | Go Big
So, then. What can we actually do about climate change? Heglar again:
Climate change is a huge problem, and to face it, we have to be willing to make personal sacrifices we can feel. It’s our responsibility not only to future generations but also to each other — right here, right now.
But climate action and environmentalism too often get dumped—manipulated, even— into just what we can do as individual consumers. To be ‘good,’ Heglar adds, it seems we must convert to 100 percent solar energy. Ride bikes. Forgo flying the friendly skies. Go vegan. Never use Amazon Prime again, among other purity tests. That won’t cut it, she says:
I hear this message everywhere: the left- and right-wing media and within the environmental movement. It’s even been used by the courts and the fossil fuel industry itself as a defense against litigation… And all this raises the price of admission to the climate movement to an exorbitant level, often pricing out people of color and other marginalized groups.
Heglar goes on to make an essential point in the ping-pong match about what to do in response to a climate emergency the entire planet faces. After all, the fate of a million species lie in the balance, one of them being us:
The more that we focus on individual action and neglect systemic change, the more we’re just sweeping leaves on a windy day. So while personal actions can be meaningful starting points, they can also be dangerous stopping points.
As you can tell, I think a lot of this essay. It makes me want to throw in the towel, forget this newsletter business (is anybody reading this?), and just say: ‘Her. What she said!’ But I—your humble curator and climate scribe—have one more excerpt before I urge you to, again, read Heglar in full. We need, she urges, to broaden out our definition of “personal action” beyond what we buy in the marketplace or use:
Start by changing your lightbulb, but don’t stop there. Taking part in a climate strike or showing up to a rally is a personal action. Organizing neighbors to sue a power plant that’s poisoning the community is a personal action… Voting is a personal action. When choosing your candidate, investigate their environmental policies. If they aren’t strong enough, demand better. Once that person is in office, hold them accountable. And if that doesn’t work, run for office yourself — that’s another personal action.
Take your personal action and magnify it into something bigger than what kind of bag totes your groceries.
THREE | ‘And the Horse You Rode in On..’
Yo, Democratic National Committee! Read my lips as I utter some Latin at you (I’m not so well-tutored as to know Latin, even though I’m a retired Altar Boy. All praise Google search):
“Te futueo et caballum tuum.”
What the hell is he talking about now?! A presidential debate on climate change, is what. As Jay Willis writes in GC on June 7, 2019:
At a time when the Democratic Party should be coalescing around general strategy, it has made yet another unforced error. Earlier this week, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) informed Washington governor and long-shot 2020 presidential candidate Jay Inslee that it would not, despite his requests, host a climate change debate during the upcoming primary season.
Even worse, according to Inslee, DNC representatives told him if he took part in any “unauthorized climate change forum” convened by any other entity, the DNC would bar him from its officially-sanctioned debates as a consequence.
Willis then proceeds to righteously kick DNC butt, if not a direct kick to the rumpus of main DNC headman Tom Perez (a fellow with whom I am generally cool). He encourages a climate debate insurrection by Democratic presidential nominees:
The DNC can only stifle debate for as long as the candidates allow it to do so. Given the stakes, every Democratic candidate who thinks climate change is a global emergency—which should be all them—should put their heads together and call the DNC's bluff. Set up a renegade town hall, and put it on Facebook or Twitter or YouTube. Go through each individual's plan in detail, and remind viewers at every opportunity that the GOP brain trust—which will be in charge if Democrats are not—thinks climate change is just liberalese for bad weather.
PS: Yesterday, I launched a new Twitter hashtag: #DNCcluelessonclimate. Share away.
FOUR | It’s a Hedgehog Thing
I pass on the following PEOPLE article link aware that someone might respond, ‘Yeah, but Queen’s guitarist is a gazillionaire who can afford to save thousands of hedgehogs.’ (You will, I hope, appreciate the fact you’ll never again read such a sentence in your life, so savor it). As Brian May says of his hedgehog rescue op on his estate in Surrey:
To see these animals come in hurt, poisoned, dehydrated and see them taken care of and then let out for another chance in the wild, to me it’s one of the greatest joys that’s ever come into my life.”
What has this to do with the climate crisis? May’s hedgehog rescue operation echoes what CCT’s favorite writer of the week, Mary Annaise Heglar, is pointing to: Take personal action, but also go big. Saving one hedgehog = good. Modeling saving thousands of them to the world = better.
Not all of us can return a thousand wounded hedgehogs to the wild. But May’s efforts model what millions of us are challenged to do as we attempt, individually and collectively, to wake up into full and active participation in rolling back the unfolding climate catastrophe.
To paraphrase another musical pop-god, Canadian singer-songwriter Bruce Cockburn, we have torn holes in the way the world works. They need repairing immediately. Here is how Coburn puts it in his prescient 1989 song “If a Tree Falls” (video here and lyrics here), a tune which should be featured on any anthemic, climate-crisis music compilation:
But this, this is something other.
Busy monster eats dark holes in the spirit world
Where wild things have to go
To disappear
Forever
+++
So, yeah, save the whales. But save the hedgehogs, too.
FIVE | You Promised Cartoons
I did. Check out more of Cartoon Ralph’s work on Twitter.
PS | Spread the Times
Help grow The Changing Climate Times audience. Subscribe for free and read past issues at changingclimatetimes.substack.com. And pass the link forward. Feedback/content ideas welcome. Be well | Changing Climate Times Concierge and Curator Douglas John Imbrogno | douglasjohnmartin AT icloud.com