Is it Possible to Hold Not One But Two Existential Crises?

How?

A girl is sitting on the bare ground. She’s twelve years old. She has long brown braids she hasn’t yet scissored in her wish to appear more grown-up. Her face is buried in her hands. The sound of her weeping is low like the sighing of the ocean on a hot day. Behind her lie the ruins of a house shattered, splintered, unrecognizable, a once grand house with white marble pillars and granite steps and wide windows. A house that was her home. She felt safe in that house, protected, proud to be living there. The house had a name. It was called America.

“It's gone,” the girl repeats over and over, “all gone.”

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

This girl has been my companion all week. She wakes beside me in the middle of the night, rises with me in the morning, tramps beside me on walks through the woods. She is sitting beside me now as I write.

In early January of this year, in the before time, the Steering Committee of Freeport Climate Action Now, FCAN, anticipating some hard times ahead for the climate movement, planned a Town Forum, our third, for last Wednesday night.

CARRYING
THE CLIMATE FIGHT
INTO THE FUTURE
GLOBAL GOALS AND LOCAL ACTIONS:
THE PATH FORWARD

It was my job to give the opening address and participate as one of four panelists trying to frame climate action in this time of the Great Shattering. I spent Wednesday writing my speech, all the while asking myself if it is even possible for any human soul, mine included, to hold not one, but two existential crises at the same time.

I had the radio turned on in the car on my drive to Meetinghouse Arts where we were to hold the event and heard the voice inside that box announce that Trump had just directed the Environmental Protection Agency to scrap the government’s 2009 landmark finding that planet-heating gases pose a threat to human health and, at the same time, freeze billions of dollars in climate grants, hundreds of programs and thousands of employees.

“Wednesday,” cooed the head of the Environmental Protection Agency the next day, was the “most consequential day of deregulation in American history… we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age.”

Hearing the news, I was heartbroken. The young girl beside me began to cry. Another pillar of safety toppled and with it another chance to save life on earth, our primordial home, from extinction.

What was I to say to whomever showed up for our Forum? What voice should I use? The voice of the grieving, frightened child, the voice of the leader of a grassroots climate organization? The voice of a therapist attuned to the body and brain’s capacity to hold trauma?

Inside the venue, four chairs were set up onstage for the panelists, bright orange flowers sat like sweet wishes in a vase on the podium; panelists and FreeportCAN Steering Committee members bustled about pinning nametags on one another.

A reporter from our local TV station, a tall young man with a big smile named Adam with a silver ring in his nose and purple and orange polish on his nails, arrived and asked to interview me. While he was setting up his camera and his microphone, I breathed deeply and bit my lower lip. Acknowledge the difficulty of “this moment” and find a way to give them some sense of agency in this time of so much helplessness I told myself. Don’t cry.

Adam’s questions were thoughtful ones about what everyday people can do about climate change. His questions assumed there is among his viewers agreement that climate change is real and dangerous. Though Republican leadership is wielding a dagger against forty years of science by declaring climate change a religion, surveys indicate that 72 % of Americans believe that climate change is real, 59% believe it is man-made. Adam was on pretty sure footing.

Two years ago, when I stood on that same stage and gave the introduction to our last Climate Forum, things were very different. The room was crowded with people. The mood was upbeat. Things were moving; people were talking about climate change. The Town was embarking on a Climate Action plan. We were in the thick of helping people get government rebates for solar heat pumps and electric lawnmowers. Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act included 142 billion dollars to reduce greenhouse gases. We were going somewhere…slowly but somewhere.

But all that feels like a long long time ago now. A lifetime ago. A whole world ago.

Looking out into the audience this time, there were so many empty seats. “Oh well, it is a busy night in town with other town meetings going on”, the panelists and organizers rationalized. While that was certainly true, I think it is more likely that people didn’t show up because they could not process one more frightening story about the uncertain future we are facing. It was all Just Too Much.

Even I wanted to stay home. Even I have been fixated on resistance to the evil chain sawing of the government and the cowardly leadership of most of the Democratic party. Even I moved my urgency about climate action ten feet behind me.

The face of climate change is veiled. Even before this crisis of democracy, it was for many of us all too easy to dismiss the urgency of our dying planet. Storms come and go, fires are somewhere else, the rising sea has not yet swallowed our town.

The face of climate change is not as immediate as the face of the ten year old boy from El Salvador who is your son’s best friend and is afraid to leave his parents to go to school because they could be taken by ICE, or the face of your neighbor who just lost her job at NOAA, or of the farmers at Wolfe Neck Farm who have been let go, or the woman who lives in a Freeport Housing Trust apartment whom you met a few days ago at a Freeport Emergency Resilience Neighborhood Hub meeting who cried because she is so afraid of losing her Social Security.

Nevertheless, I know that many people In this town care deeply about the life of our non-human neighbors: the eelgrass, the butterflies, the almost disappeared soft-shelled crabs, the hemlocks, and worry about what kind of future we will be handing to our children.

How much can a broken heart hold? Do broken hearts grow larger because broken hearts are bigger and hold more love, more care?

Care, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is a landing place, is a value and feeling, even a home, that no one can take away from us or declare by executive order that it should be cut out with a dagger.

And this is where I find my footing, my voice, where I can rise and stand with confidence before the thirty or so people brave enough to come out into the night.

“FreeportCAN and other grassroots actions like ours,” I tell the audience, “are vehicles for channeling the care that rises from our broken hearts. They are models for solidarity with neighbors, which is critical to this moment.”

For two reasons:

First it is important because we are the ones the burden of change falls on now. It is up to us not to let the issues we care about be erased from our consciousness, from our priorities, from our commitments.

And it is important for our own well-being because this kind of solidarity is one way for us to stay alive to this moment, to navigate this collective trauma, to keep despair and negativity and all the accompanying joylessness of that condition from overtaking our spirits.

Every day we have an opportunity, an easy one really, to care for the planet”, I tell the people before me. We can buy less stuff, dress in re-fashion clothes, limit our use of plastic, rewild our lawns, bike more, talk about climate change with our friends and neighbors, support local farmers markets.”

In these acts of care, we also have an opportunity to resist this government’s craven, evil, heartless denial of the fact that unless we lower our emissions dramatically and immediately, there will be no more Greenland for us to annex, no more Panama Canal to take over, no more use for Tesla’s, no more coastline for billionaires to build beachfront resorts in Gaza.

“Care is resistance”, I tell the audience. “Care for our planet is self-care. Care weaves us into solidarity with others who care about the same thing.”

I hope what I said was helpful to people who might, like me, have been unable to integrate climate action with actions to defend democracy. Now I see them as the same. Now I will see asking the server at The Met, our local coffee house, for an enamel mug rather than a throw-away plastic cup as an act of resistance and care. There are hundreds of these acts I can take every day, informed now by both my care and my fury.

The little girl beside me is feeling a little less sad now. She doesn’t cry as often. She has taken her hands away from her face. “What kind of home will we rebuild?” she asks me. “Let’s not build one like the other one. Let’s build something new, something with a stronger foundation, something not so grand. We don’t need all that marble and granite. Maybe we should build something small, something with solar panels and heat pumps and native wildflowers growing all around it. A place where people take good care of each other.

Indeed, what kind of home now?