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

Macy: “If we are going to go out,” she says, let’s “do it with some nobility, generosity and beauty.”

Because it feels like there’s so little I can do, but I also know there’s so much I could do, but some days I just don’t want to do any of it. I hate the burden of it all. I hate feeling like I should do something when it might already be too late to do anything. Because who wants to be played the sucker by History?

minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River

The runaway train that is industrial civilization has run away. It has not just left the station, but has gone over the trestle, off the tracks and now we’re negotiating about who gets the best seat for the best view on the way down. From my perspective, that’s no reason to act indecently. That’s no reason to push grandma out the window so she dies

“Well, there’s no hope in avoiding collapse,” he answered, but “I have a lot of hope in my generation’s ability to build a better world in the ashes of this one. And I have very little doubt that we’ll have to.”

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

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

Yes. Is the future going to break our hearts? Yes. But around the margins, there is much we could do — on both the resistance and resilience fronts — and it is essential that we do it. Not just for society and the future, but for ourselves. Because only by getting on that bicycle and riding it, can we find our own balance.

And try to be kind when we can. And maybe even