I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

He identifies four broad possible responses to this situation: Growth, Continuity, Descent, and Collapse.

All of them. Our future is going to be a contest between Gray, Green, and Gaia, between those three paradigms, those three sets of forces. Which is exactly what we’re experiencing today. The Right vs. Left, climate-is-a-hoax vs. climate-is-real argument, which unfortunately still absorbs so much of our energy, is an irrelevant conversation to what

Could it be that we [environmentalists] are undergoing the five stages of grief in reverse? We began with acceptance — of the science, and of what the science means for us. Then came depression, since the future is a place we would not wish to bequeath to our worst enemies let alone our children. In defense against depression, we entered the bargai

Whether these other apocalypses happen or not remains to be seen, but the climate apocalypse is already happening, and happening

Meanwhile, the vast majority of people are still sitting on the sidelines.

I kept coming across a similar pattern: events, well-documented in the historic record, that showed how rising and falling precipitation levels contributed to the increase, decrease, and sometimes the complete removal of populations — and ultimately species — from the planet. This was some of the earliest work of its kind.

The way we are going to mitigate the worst impacts of climate change is not by stopping the climate from changing, but by reorganizing our relationships to each other.

I’m going to tell people exactly how bad it is. Good for you. I mean, doesn’t everyone have a right to know what’s what? They certainly do. Then they can decide for themselves what they want to do, or not do, about it, right? OK, so tell them. Because, who am I to decide what other people can and can’t handle, right? Like I said, tell them. But won

Even after eight years of horrible conditions — and powerful evidence that the Dust Bowl was a human-created disaster (the result of humans plowing up arid plains and grasslands not suited to agriculture) — many persisted in their belief that it was just God’s will, and what they needed to do was behave better.11 Others continued with a ghoulish bo