What to do about the loneliness of climate change?

I'm building a baseball diamond in a corn field here, people.

Sometimes, when I wake up to pee at four in the morning, a voice in my head says, “But what about climate change?” 

It’s a good question. One I keep returning to, not just in the middle of the night but also when I am cooking or working or when I am sitting on the couch with two toddlers on my lap, reading that one Berenstain Bears book where the Bear family takes a submarine all the way to the deepest depths of the ocean. 

I am often tempted to tell my children that the Bear family would almost certainly be crushed by the intense water pressure in that rickety submersible of theirs. (I’m a fun mom!) But I am never tempted to tell them that the coral ecosystem the Bears visit—their favorite page—is already under threat from rising ocean temperatures and some of those species won’t exist much longer. It’s too heartbreaking. 

Why is it this shape?? Why do so many members of the Bear family wear overalls?

It’s not just that it’s hard to talk about climate change with my kids (though I am trying, little by little), it’s that it is hard to talk about it with anyone. At all. 

It’s weird that I spend so much time thinking about this one thing and so little time talking about it. But I suppose the reasons are obvious: I don’t want to be that person—the one who steers an otherwise pleasant conversation toward apocalypse. I worry I’ll sound self-righteous and judgmental if I start prattling on about my enthusiasm for plastic-free bar shampoo and solid dish soap (but fyi I am enthusiastic! Call me if you want to discuss!). Or I’m afraid that someone might point out that I’m not well-informed enough to talk about climate with any real authority, which is of course true; I'm far from an expert. It all comes down to the same thing: a fear of being judged or disliked. I will never stop wanting to be liked. 

I was thinking about all of this a couple weeks ago, before a hurricane hit the mountains of Virginia and Tennessee and North Carolina, devastating the places I still call home. Now my social media feeds are full of photos of washed out roads, roads that were always dangerous on icy mornings or during August thunderstorms, but which felt like an immovable feature of the landscape. I guess nothing is immovable. 

My friends and family back home are okay, but stories keep coming in every day—from acquaintances and friends of friends—and it’s clear that we’ve yet to comprehend the scope of this loss. I am feeling very far away. Very helpless. Scared, if I let myself think about it for more than a moment, of what storms will look like in another ten or twenty years.

I didn’t know this could happen—that a hurricane could wipe out the infrastructure of an entire region hundreds of miles from the coast. But that’s because nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. And in the face of this kind of destruction, with another category five hurricane hurtling toward Florida, not talking about climate starts to feel pretty silly. 

Back in June, I spent a week at a Climate Wayfinding retreat with the All We Can Save Project. These retreats are really about helping people find their place in the climate movement. I applied to attend because I wanted to be someone who did something—anything—about climate change. I wanted to be able to look at my kids in twenty years and say that this had mattered to me. 

I didn’t think much about the retreat before I left because all I could think about was how overwhelming and exhausting it was to put two two-and-a-half-year-olds to bed every night. And how terrible I felt about the fact that, while I was gone, Mark would have to do it himself six straight days in a row. (My in-laws came to help, bless them, and actually everyone was fine. But convincing two 2.5 year olds to stay in their new big-boy beds long enough to actually fall asleep is a task I would not wish on even my enemies.) 

On the plane, I started to worry that a week-long climate retreat might actually be the worst possible use of the very little time I get to myself. Would it fill me with a sense of dread and overwhelm I was too exhausted to manage? Would it throw me into a state of irremediable grief about the world my children have to face? Would I get swallowed up with worry for my family members who live in flood zones? 

But none of these fears materialized. Instead I felt joyful the entire week. 

It’s not like I didn’t encounter any difficult feelings that week. I had lots of those. But over the course of just a few days, we made a community together. And within that community it felt possible to respond to this big, existential threat in big, imaginative ways. 

For a long time, I thought about climate change in terms of my own individual actions. I took the responsibility of reducing my carbon footprint to heart. I resented people who drove giant SUVs and made shame eyes at anyone who couldn’t bother to bring a reusable bag to the grocery store. But, over time, I started to see climate as more of a systemic problem: we didn’t need people to drive less; we needed governments to regulate the fossil fuel industry. I vacillated between these perspectives, feeling paralyzed by the responsibility of making every action count and then paralyzed by anger about the limitless greed of the oil and gas industry and the complacency of our leaders. None of this paralysis was useful. 

It’s true that this problem requires both individual action and meaningful policy change. But, even more urgently, it requires community. At least that’s what it requires for me. 

At the retreat, I came to understand what is already obvious to so many of the people doing this work: addressing climate change can’t be a lonely pursuit. Despair breeds in isolation. So does powerlessness. Yes, I can keep buying my plastic-free bar shampoo and I can be psyched about it. But that’s not going to stop me from waking up in the middle of the night, worrying about the state of our ecosystems and the fate of our species. 

When I returned home from the retreat, I was immediately plunged back into the chaos of the toddler bedtime circus. And all that joy felt far away. I could not imagine making the time or space to find a similar community here in Vancouver. The powerlessness was creeping in again.

I spent the summer living with this problem, which is something that writing has taught me to do. You invite the problem in, make it some coffee, go about your day, check in on it occasionally. Eventually the problem gets bored. It solves itself. 

After a few weeks, I realized that this particular problem rested on a faulty assumption: the assumption that climate community was elsewhere, that it was something I needed to go out and find or create—when actually my life was already full of people who cared about climate. This was a loneliness problem, which made it easy to solve. 

I did not need to go find a climate-minded community, I just needed to start talking about it. 

Some scientists have argued that talking about climate is one of the most important actions an individual can take. Because we are inherently social, we copy one another. Our behaviors are contagious. A fact that I love is that a study found the biggest predictor of whether someone would install solar panels was having a neighbor with solar panels. 

But it’s more than that too. In my own life, I’ve noticed that pretty much any time I’m in a group of people talking about climate, my sense of powerlessness ebbs away. It’s not that the problem of climate change feels any smaller. It’s that the future starts to take shape in mind. It starts to feel like a place I could go, like a place I could have some part in creating, alongside people I love and trust. 

In the past few months, since I’ve been talking more about climate, all kinds of possibilities have opened up in my life. A friend is writing a book about climate action and I’m helping her with revisions. An editor reached out about writing a column on climate change in BC. A colleague invited a climate writer to come to talk to students and faculty in our creative writing program. Talking about it feels so much better than not talking about it. I’ve started putting climate-related essays on my syllabus and having conversations with students. And I’m working on designing a climate writing course for next year. 

It wasn’t that long ago that I learned that the individual carbon footprint calculator was created as part of an ad campaign for an oil company. Sometimes I think about all the loneliness and powerlessness and anxiety I’ve felt—that a lot of people have felt—as a result of this campaign. Isolating and shaming people is a pretty effective strategy if your goal is to avoid accountability.

This week my eyes are on the hurricane that’s barreling toward my mom in Florida. I’m scared (still, again) about the future—tomorrow and next year and the next decade and the decades after that. But I can manage the fear when I feel less alone. 

I’m still not an expert in climate. I’m learning, slowly. But I have plenty of useful expertise: I know a lot about writing, about relationships, about care and community. And these things matter when it comes to addressing climate change. Every skill matters.

It turns out that all those people who were like, “just start right where you are” were right. I don’t have to find a new community of climate people. I only have to start using the skills and the relationships I already have. I’ve never been a big if you build it, they will come kind of person. But maybe I’m becoming one. Because isn’t this exactly how we inch our lives toward the things that are important to us: by doing one thing that matters and then, a few days later, doing another? 

Let’s talk about climate! Call me!

Yours, 

Mandy

PS: There are many worthwhile organizations you can donate to to support those impacted by Hurricane Helene. If you haven’t chosen one yet, here’s an option that’s close to home for me. Damascus is the town next to my hometown, where I spent a lot of time as a kid. They were hit hard and I’m donating once a week for the next little while. If you can join me, please do!