Welcome to the day after Earth Day 2024. Earth is having a hard time these days. Despair and retreat are tempting refuges. Energies and events around the world seem to be merging, creating a vortex of climate destabilization, war-terrorism-genocide, authoritarian politics, massive migration, undermining any certainty about where we are headed. Astrologers, my friend Rita tells me, are forecasting a time of revolutionary change and cataclysmic events this year.
Global climate change is upon us as weather patterns disrupt life in every nation. Right now, a human catastrophe is slowly but surely descending on the planet. Speaking in 2022, one scientist noted that carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere continue to rise. According to Peter Tans, NOAA scientist. "This last decade, the rate of increase has never been higher, and we are still on the same path. We're going in the wrong direction at maximum speed."
These climate changes have been forecast for decades. The surprise is the absence of a coherent, effective, global response; the destructive chips are simply falling wherever they may. Governments around the world are kowtowing to the political and economic power of the carbon economy.
Climate, impoverishment, war, criminal and gang enterprises, and authoritarian repression combine to set off massive displacements of people. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, by the end of 2022, there were 108 million refugees in the world, 65.5 million of them displaced in their own countries and another 41 million displaced into or asylum seekers in countries other than their native lands. By September 2023, that number had risen to 114 million, before another 2 million were driven from their demolished homes by Israeli military operations in Gaza.
Needless to write, wars seem to surround us, with the Russians advancing in Ukraine and the Israelis about to assault Rafah. The war in Ukraine was briefly misplaced behind the side show of the American political battle over military assistance, but the savage Russian attempt to re-arrange its borders continues. Ukraine lacks the manpower and equipment it needs to confront the Russians, while Russia can call on deep reserves of convicts, “volunteers.” and women to throw into the unremitting house-by-house assault that is destroying life in Ukraine. The Russians have also expanded their interventionist web of cyber activity, determined to destabilize democracies.
Gaza, need I even say it, is experiencing a slaughter only matched by the two world wars of the past century. The desperate but overwhelming used of Israeli military force seeks to provide a security for Israelis that guarantees them generations of insecurity. Authoritarian Iran, exploiting the cataclysm, stretches its trouble-making tentacles into Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza.
Meanwhile, the United States continues its long history of global intervention, explained as benevolence. The era of US domination of the globe’s security and economic systems is coming to an end, as I wrote a number of years ago. Its benevolence is often questioned in the Philippines, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Chile and many other countries. Restraint is not always an American strong suit.
Dark forces of reaction are on the move. The AfD right wing in Germany threatens political stability with a surge toward authoritarianism. In the Netherlands, one of the most progressive countries in Europe, the right-wing zealot Geert Wilders triumphed on a platform of hatred for immigrants. Hungarian authoritarian president Victor Orban stalls and stymies decision-making in NATO and the European Union.
The same forces have emerged in the United States bearing eerie echoes of Hitler’s rise to power in the 1930s – a business elite that cast its lot with a charismatic, authoritarian leader they think they control, supine politicians who are busily cowering before the influential “leader.” The media amplifies his every word in a sad repetition of the 2016 campaign; they can’t resist even when they call his words out as lies.
The authoritarian tide at home includes assaults on human rights and lives across the country, targeting women (reversal of abortion rights), immigrants (Texas defending its own borders; how Texan is that??), the Queer and trans community (seemingly endless assaults on trans medical care, education on gender, sport access, even bathroom access).
I feel some days like I am in Middle Earth, with the dark forces of Mordor rising in front of me, a feeling exacerbated by my current re-reading for the sixth time of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. It is a powerful piece of story-telling. While mythical, his tale of cataclysmic, systemic change vibrates in harmony with today. I don’t want to assign good guy/bad guy roles. Politicians love to do that – Putin as Sauron; Biden as Gandalf. Too self-righteous to be objective; too binary for a fluid reality.
I don’t need astrology to tell me we are in deeply dark times. Finding the counter-trends that I advertised in February is hard. And yet…
I don’t want to overstate the evidence, in fact, I am not sure any of these constitutes a trend. While some states, like Arizona, adopt a draconian approach to abortion, carting women back to the dark ages, blue states respond with laws and programs that protect choice or embed it in a state constitution, or propose protecting medical services for out-of-states MDs to come and practice.
Four states this year have adjourned state legislatures, allowing anti-trans legislation to expire without a vote. (Of course, six others have passed oppressive anti-trans bills.) The adoption of renewable energy technologies promises a different path from the carbon road. Campus activists are expanding demonstrations calling for an end to excessive Israeli punishment of innocent Palestinians in Gaza as part of the Israeli effort to crush Hamas. Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic political analyst cheer-leads for what he sees as a likely Biden victory in November, countering pessimism among some Democrats.
Some of these counter-trends coincide with my preferences. Others, like campus demonstrations, appear to have included some unacceptable anti-Semitic messages. But they have all arisen in response to the dark trends I described. Are they harbingers of the counter-trend? I cannot say. As Danish physicist Niels Bohr is said to have said: “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it is about the future.”
What is interesting to me is that the counter-trends generally do not emerge from leaders changing their minds. They often threaten existing views, processes, and institutions, witness the concern that the reaction to Gaza could impact Biden’s support in November. They emerge from below, from reactions to events, from people organizing themselves in different ways.
I know that sounds naïve. I have earned this naivité the hard way, as a striving, masculine person with some success in the hard-knock world of politics and policy-making and enough experience of academia to know how nasty campus politics can make life as miserable as it is for anyone in the political arena.
So, in my naivité, I am searching for the threads of sanity, justice, generosity, joy, compassion, and open-hearted love in a cataclysmic time. For the equanimity that will put to rest not only mine but the world’s trouble spirit. Not in withdrawal into meditation and internal peace, though that is part of the journey for me. But in engagement with these troubling forces, speaking my own truth, joining with others, like my trans community, not only to defend, but to be part of the answer.
This reaction to, well, “reaction,” needs to grow one well-intended peaceful warrior at a time. I am somewhere between the “people gonna’ rise up,” and “joining hands.” Frank Bruni, a columnist I always appreciated, has called for “humility” in response to the politics of “grievance” that drives so much of American politics these days. I agree. For me, the sentence “I don’t know,” is one of the most powerful in the English language.
In reaction to the dark trends, we need stories, strong, compelling ones, of a different world being built, one community or one nation at a time. Stories are the life-blood of consciousness, the way we will build community out of discord. While we defend and assert, we also need to start to open doors. These narratives are our hope in the cavalcade of despair.
I agree, stories can save us. It's nice to start with yours here.
Hi Abby, I find some solace in your writing, if only to see that others are experiencing similar feelings about the world as my own. In case you haven't seen them, I wanted to share with you two future fiction (vice "science fiction") books that provide a bit of solace and also some degree of hope that plausible pathways exist that could help arrest our current precipitous decline. The first is called "the Deluge" by Stephen Markley, and the second is "Ministry of the Future" by Kim Stanley Robertson. Both detail the interplay between climate disaster and society, and both posit that at some point humanity as a whole comes to its senses albeit quite late in the game and is able overcome collective action problems in last ditch attempts to avert a die-off of our own species not to mention others.. Both also pose somewhat of a paradox: radical efforts to address and mitigate the consequences of climate change require a good degree of top down direction both in terms of what is done and also in terms of addressing intense income equality that prevents us from mustering adequate resources and incentives to address the crises at hand. At the same time, both posit that overcoming the collective action problem requires small scale democratic decision making and established universal rights. As some democratic socialism models might indicate, these two eventualities are necessarily incompatible with one another. However, both books leave me a bit mystified as to how we might establish a consensus surrounding the urgent need for climate change-related action and/and the imperative that doing so requires income and social equality. In both books, society has somehow has also overcome both the oligarchs and their political patrons. (Indeed, both books posit that these constituencies will push back to prevent reform by whatever means necessary. (In fact in both books, violence comes from rightist pushback on emissions and societal equality from leftist terrorists seeking to disrupt carbon emitting activities). In any case, while societal reactions to widespread disaster are the superficial causes for reform in each book, neither narrative really explains how intense feelings of alienation on the right and left. are overcome to such an extent that a public consensus can be established that changes forms of governance of society and the main outlines of global finance in such a way as to muster the resources required to pull back from the brink. Still, both books at least establish what an attempt to achieve survival might look like, which is something seemingly lacking in most of today's public discourse. Here's hoping that these two stories might provide you with a ray of "hope" and the inspiration we all so desperately need so that, as you put it at the conclusion of your essay, we are at least able share our own stories as a first step towards figuring out how to proceed. Best, Todd. PS just love your writing as always as well as the way that you document your own journey in relation to the broader societal changes take place. Thank you!