70: Conspiracy Theories Conceal a Burning World (w/Daniel Sherrell)
Daniel Sherrell is the author of an extraordinary memoir and prayer book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, in which he recounts how, as a climate activist born in 1990, he has fought to manage, digest, and even celebrate the desperate tasks of the only age he’s known: the Anthropocene. The book is his homage to the resources that help him meditate on weaning ourselves from the dissociations of Twitter and doing the hard work of transforming climate grief into climate integrity.In our feature interview this week, Matthew sits down with Daniel to discuss the real conspiracy of climate denialism, and how conspiracy theories provide relief to those who cannot contemplate our condition.We start the show with Derek’s contemplation of Amitav Ghosh’s “The Great Derangement” and Julian’s notes on climate denialism dwarfing the disinformation we typically interrogate in the wellness world.Show NotesWarmth by Daniel SherrellSherrell and Dorothy Fortenberry on Know Your EnemyWhy Grief can be Strength in a Warming World | Daniel Sherrell |Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene – ScrantonLaudato si’ (24 May 2015) | FrancisTucker Carlson on Military Vaccine MandateDr. Wilson (Debunk the Funk) on Mike YeadonBig Oil’s War on ScienceUCSA Climate Skeptic Disinformation ListThe Climate Disinformation PlaybookDesmog DatabaseSteven Koonin, the “Obama Scientist”Daniel Sherrell’s Reading ListDucks, Newburyport — EllmanThe Summer Book – Jannson
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Conspiracy theories conceal a burning world with Daniel Sherrell.
Daniel Sherrell is the author of an extraordinary memoir and prayer book, Warmth, Coming of Age at the End of Our World, in which he recounts how, as a climate activist born in 1990, he has fought to manage, digest, and even celebrate the desperate tasks of the only age he's known, the Anthropocene.
This book is his homage to the resources that help him meditate on weaning ourselves from the dissociations of Twitter and doing the hard work of transforming climate grief into climate integrity.
In our feature interview this week, Matthew sits down with Daniel to discuss the real conspiracy of climate denialism and how conspiracy theories provide relief to those who cannot contemplate our condition.
We start the show with Derek's contemplation of Amitav Ghosh's The Great Derangement, and I'll be noting how climate denialism actually dwarfs the disinformation we typically interrogate in the wellness world.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
In August, I posted an aside on Instagram about too many people inhabiting the planet.
And though most commentators focused on the main content, a few pointed out that the overpopulation myth is rooted in racism and xenophobia.
They linked to articles about fitting the entire 8 billion of us on a small patch of land and still having enough resources to survive.
And in an ideal world, such an existence might very well be possible.
But we don't live in an ideal world.
And the longer we pretend that changes in supply chain and resource management will set everything right, changes that sound great on the screen but are logistical nightmares that are handcuffed by capitalist strongholds that require actual legislation to change, well, the more we're going to suffer.
This segment, and really the entire episode, isn't about overpopulation.
It's about what we're doing to our environment and what we've done for generations now.
I want to point out, however, that overpopulation, in terms of how we actually live on this planet, is not a myth.
In fact, without checks and balances, given the opportunity, every animal will overpopulate and destroy their surroundings.
Right now, that animal just happens to be us.
Our journey as a middle-of-the-food-chain animal persisted for a few million years, with some 350,000 with roughly the same cognitive architecture as we have now, until we actually reached a population of 1 billion.
200 years later, and we're approaching 8 billion.
Let's be realistic, we can't fathom such numbers and so instead we generally ignore them.
And to believe the world can handle such strain is to confuse this relatively peaceful moment in our long existence with the arduous path it took to arrive here.
Humans are dreamers, not realists.
And this is often an honorable quality.
Our imagination is what propels societies forward.
Yet more and more, dreaming seems to be a convenient way of avoiding the reality of our situation.
In his lecture-turned-book, The Great Derangement, the Indian writer and one of my favorite novelists, Amitav Ghosh, highlights a number of uneasy truths.
They're not easy to read or to comprehend.
And this segment is not easy either, to write, to listen to, but I don't see any value in avoiding it.
At the beginning of his talk, Gauche puts the uniqueness of this moment in history into perspective.
Quote, The humans of the future will surely understand, knowing what they presumably will know about the history of their forebears on Earth, that only in one, very brief era, lasting less than three centuries, did a significant number of their kind believe that planets and asteroids are inert.
Now, inertia wasn't exactly the sentiment I experienced for decades inside of yoga studios or readabout on wellness blogs.
The American spiritual community is much more ambitious.
If anything, the take on reality inside of these closed environments is even stranger.
The notion that the planet is beneficial or that the universe is ready to bestow abundance on us only if we seek it properly.
With humility, in earnestness, with prayer and mantra, by rolling beads around 108 times, around our anxious fingers.
The problem is that's not who we are outside of those spaces.
In general, we act like the friend who drops in and raids the fridge while refusing to wash the dishes, and pretend that the cupboards will always be filled.
We don't seem to recognize how short this period of excess that we have lived through really is, or that it's coming to an end.
Yet we've mercilessly exploited it and continue to demand more.
The endless stream of Amazon packages.
The cars that transport us to grocery stores.
Jet-setting on a gypsy lifestyle lived out on Instagram with the promise that everyone can tax the environment without paying a toll.
So Derek, Just to interrupt for a second, isn't the overpopulation argument, isn't that really about inequality of consumption as you're speaking about Amazon and you know cars and grocery stores that like somehow if we could get the global north to downsize everything there would be no resource issue?
I mean, not that we shouldn't work at that or dream about it, but does the math not work out on that idea?
Mother Jones did a report about eight or nine years ago, I remember reading, where they said that if everyone lived a middle-class American lifestyle that The entire continent of Africa and all of Asia could not actually, there weren't enough resources to support that type of lifestyle.
So, if you're looking at the middle-of-the-road American lifestyle, you're talking about $62,000 a year for a family of four, and you're talking about indoor climate control, having AC or heating, you're talking about having cars, one or two cars.
If that is the model you're working with, then it is true there are not enough resources in the world to accommodate that.
So what you're actually asking for, by saying it's a myth, is you're actually saying the entire, the predominant number of Americans would have to downsize, lose the cars, lose Perhaps some of the refrigeration, the processes, the supply chain management, you would have to lose indoor climate control, which is a big one.
So that would be a real sort of downsizing.
And I'm generally going to think that a lot of the audience that talks about this is a myth.
Well, they don't vote for austerity.
I mean, we know that.
So you have to wonder if they are really truly willing to sacrifice that to see through their philosophy.
Well, they don't vote for austerity.
I mean, we know that.
But yeah, what about, so wait a minute, you said, what did you say?
You said, gypsy lifestyle?
Is that a, that's not, that's like in air quotes, right?
Or is that, are you quoting influencers?
I am quoting the words that are gypset lifestyle.
Yeah, it's, it's, this actually is, I, that was ironic.
Absolutely.
And because, uh, To put it mildly, the term gypsy is basically if you're in parts of Europe or in South Asia, it's like using the N-word in America.
But in the American wellness community, it's not treated like that at all.
It's often seen as this ambitious, glorious, nomadic lifestyle.
It's a derogatory slang.
Yeah, bohemian.
Yeah, bohemian.
It's a derogatory slang.
And what's funny is I will sometimes notice people Talking about, let's just, I'll put this in air quotes too, but certain cancel culture sort of topics.
And in their blog, they call themselves a gypsy without realizing they were actually talking about the Roma people who came, probably came from India and then traveled up through the Balkans and throughout Asia.
I mean, I'm sorry, throughout Eastern Europe predominantly.
The Roma exist in Italy, Spain.
They're all over Europe.
And part of that reason is because they've been oppressed in so many different societies.
Now, to be fair, some of the Roma call themselves gypsies in the same way that American hip-hop, we'll use the N-word, as embracing that term.
But overall, if you're going to use that term, it's actually a derogatory word against the Roma and a lot of people take it seriously, but you know, that's a high bar for entry for a lot of American wellness practitioners.
Well, and a lot of those people take it really seriously because of the history of genocide and oppression and discrimination throughout Europe, yeah?
Oh, yeah, throughout Europe, throughout Asia.
I mean, the Roma have been oppressed pretty much everywhere they go, and it still continues to this day.
There are active genocides of Roma attempting to, you know, occurring.
And the same with the Tuareg people in North Africa.
Like, this is not something that is in the past.
It's happening right now.
I really liked what you said about, you know, we have this idealized vision of holistic life that exists inside the studio and that's not who we are outside that, you know, we're going out to the parking lot and we're getting back into cars after doing spiritual stretches and all that.
And I often have the impression that we create those interior environments as part of a kind of It's like a very efficient way of soothing a particular kind of anxiety to be able to take the same materials that you would build your whole foods out of or even an upscale strip mall or something like that and you build a yoga studio and then you call that
a holistic space.
I think it's a way of sanctifying the means of production that are already in full flow, already destroying the planet, but, you know, without really having the same punch, or at least convincing yourself that you've blessed or at least convincing yourself that you've blessed them otherwise, like this is a sacred space.
I'll never forget a little studio here in Santa Monica that was on the second floor of sort of an office building, and they built it with this heating system that was environmentally friendly, because it had little channels of water that ran through the wood of the wood floor, and it would send water because it had little channels of water that ran through the wood of the wood floor, and it would send water that was being heated up by the water heater through the little channels, and so it was,
Did they run hot yoga in that studio?
No, not super hot yoga, but that was sort of their heating system and then they had some kind of very fancy, obviously quite expensive air circulation mechanism above that was also sort of made of hemp and repurposed wood or something.
Bamboo, wood, correct?
Yeah.
I mean, if you think about that basic aesthetic that you see on the cover of any yoga journal magazine, we have these appeals to minimalism, to rustic finishes, but also neat finishes, and this feeling that this is not a consumer exercise.
And that these are not consumption heavy environments.
I think we're always stretching for a kind of minimalism in the way in which wellness is presented that gives this kind of 19th century glow to things as though we're not actually taking jets to get to the places where we, you know, do these very simple, you know, pre-modern practices.
I think it's a very, very efficient way of inhabiting a dream, actually.
The hot yoga one gets me especially because we know that that's environmentally unsound.
So when it's put forward as a spiritual practice, it's always, it's always been sort of a just trigger for me.
But, you know, the bigger picture, we, it's because I think partly we imagine ourselves communing with nature.
On ayahuasca retreats, in our neighborhood garden, on the playa.
But as you said, we return to climate-controlled homes.
We purchase what we can't grow, which is usually most of our food.
And those RVs take a hell of a lot of gas to power for a week of radical inclusion.
I'll never forget my very first night on the playa in 2008, looking around and just seeing A city that appears for a week a year and being like, this is not environmental friendly.
So I think that year that the theme was like green earth and it was the exact opposite.
Are they bringing?
I've never been.
The whole thing just feels like feels like it would give me the, I don't know, the hives, but like spiritual hives.
Yeah.
But are they bringing like did they bring generators out there and stuff?
Are you kidding?
There are hundreds of DJs going on and it's in the middle of it.
Matthew, when you're there, you are in a desert.
Just think of any photo of a desert you've seen.
There is nothing there.
So there's got to be hundreds of gas generators going.
- So there's gotta be hundreds of gas generators going. - Thousands, thousands.
Because you're not even talking about just the DJ sound systems, You're talking about all of the RVs and the people, like all of the food has to be brought in, all of the showers and everything like that.
I mean, there is so much gas and diesel going on there.
You couldn't even imagine.
Was there any rhetoric around like the Burning Man itself being a kind of, I don't know, Tantric ritual that would cool the planet because it was the right kind of fire or something?
Like, how did they, did, was, was there talk about that?
You know, I honestly, I've been twice.
I've never gotten too into the culture.
So there, one of the things though, is that there are a lot of sessions there and all the camps can plan out sessions, talks and things like that.
There are tons of talks on sustainability in the middle of this generator powered Well, that's a form of carbon offsetting, really, isn't it?
Spiritually.
Workshops, right?
So workshops.
Yes, and there are first-time orgies that happen in the middle of the playa.
What do you mean first-time?
Like for beginners or something?
There are beginners, there are probably expert-level ones, but I remember my first year there, it's called first-time.
Let's move on.
I just want to say, I don't know enough about the culture, but my impression gathered from talking to lots of people who've gone is that it's much more of a sort of artistic, hedonistic spiritual experience, then then they would be sort of claiming that, oh, by doing this ritual, we're going to save the planet or something like that.
Absolutely.
And there may be some there may be some groups who have that attitude, but the overall zeitgeist is much more like, oh, burn the man, like just intense pagan kind of celebration.
When I was in college, a friend of mine dated a woman who was at the very first one, which was on a beach in San Francisco with 50 people.
And they had a small effigy of a burning man and they burned it.
And it was, you know, it was what it was.
She had a VHS tape.
So we watched it.
This was in the mid 90s.
And I was like, oh, OK, cool.
And then it went through capitalism.
And now you have what it is.
It used to be Burning Dude.
It was just Burning Dude.
Yeah, I mean, I'll say this and move on.
When the man burns, there is a moment of real communal, you can call it a spiritual transcendent moment, but that moment collectively of 50,000 people together focused on one object when it's happening was very powerful both times.
I'm not going to, you know, for all of the other stuff that...
It's anything you can imagine with a ritual.
I don't plan on going again, but I understand the experience.
But as with the rest of this segment, I just wish people could call it what it is and don't pretend that it's not something that it isn't.
As Gauche notes, the whole climate crisis isn't only a crisis of culture, but also of imagination.
And Burning Man is perfect to To put forward the idea that our imaginations are just out of control.
And for the listeners, this isn't to chastise you if you enjoy this.
I'm part of this too.
But the problem is the environment doesn't care about what we believe.
It responds to our actions.
And we're witnessing that in real time.
As little of an impact as each of us believes to make in our daily lives, Gauche reminds us that this isn't about individual endeavors but collective action.
Here's another quote.
"Every human being who has ever lived has played a part in making us the dominant species on this planet.
And in this sense, every human being, past and present, has contributed to the present cycle of climate change.
Becoming an apex predator has consequences.
We think we kill 80 billion land animals for food every year, and when we get to sea life we're in the hundreds of billions.
And I said we think this because we can't really imagine such an extraordinary number, just as we can't really imagine the millions of years when we couldn't send meaningless thoughts to a satellite and have them return to millions of phones around the world.
And we should also note that phones are one of the most non-renewable devices that we've ever created.
This is how you're probably listening to this right now, though.
So there's our conundrum.
It's a good thing, too, that you won't need a new one anytime soon, right?
14, 13, whatever.
Yeah, yeah.
The myth of overpopulation might be rooted in racism, but the reality of overpopulation is destroying every ecosystem in existence.
And that's the price we're paying for modernity.
We think our time and era is unique, and it is, but not how we think it is.
In fact, Gauche only finds one feature truly distinctive, which is our enormous intellectual commitment to the promotion of our supposed singularity.
Hashtag best life ever.
And I know we want to put the blame on the corporations and the politicians they purchase, and they do deserve to be called out.
But as Gauche writes, any individual who believes they can make a real impact is merely perpetuating a neoliberal fallacy.
The only way climate change is really addressed is through legislation, which requires the will to write those bills and our will to vote for people who will write those bills and then put them into law.
And sure, we're going to look back at the billionaire class with disdain for their extravagant jaunts into orbit.
But Gauche actually holds artists and writers equally culpable.
The role of creatives is to imagine a better future, he says, and so little of our art addresses the environment, and so much feeds the pleasure machine of the ego.
I really love how Gauche, and I think all good climate contemplations do this, he really elevates the discourse out of blame and acrimony in really key ways and it reminds me of, I just heard this fantastic interview of
Science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson on Chapel Trafthouse, and he was talking about how, yeah, we can talk about Elon Musk and Branson and the rest till we're blue in the face, but the celebrities are not where the story is, really.
Anybody, the way this has been set up, would have risen to the top of They're not particularly special.
Anybody could be in that place.
They're not really doing the interesting work.
They're expressing what a system becomes.
And so, it's just this kind of depersonalization that I really appreciate in Gauche's work.
And Daniel Sherrell does it as well, as you'll hear in the interview.
I thought about climate change for a long time.
I used to actually write about it for Big Think often, but eventually my editors told me to cover other subjects because readers just didn't care.
The analytics weren't, the SEO juice wasn't enough for environmental catastrophes.
Yeah, every morning my Apple News Feed is definitely going to feature a top article about 15 dogs doing something absurd or 38 Gen X memes on BuzzFeed.
So really we don't crave nature, we crave the appearance of being natural.
You simply can't get your hands dirty when you're living clean.
And you can't be weighed down by a pound of flesh when you're meditating on your place in eternity.
Near the end of his career, it made me think of Carl Jung, who wrote a slim volume called Flying Saucers, in which he posited the idea that the UFO is a collective mandala that humans were seeing as a symbol of transcendence.
But now we have dick rockets launched into space, while the mediums that we cover on this podcast are promising eternal souls caravanning through the cosmos.
But all the while, the world around us burns and floods and is exhausted because we're an exhausting creature to deal with.
And Gauche really nails it with this quote, freedom came to be seen as a way of transcending the constraints of material life.
of exploring new regions of the human mind, spirit, emotion, consciousness, interiority.
Freedom became a quantity that resided entirely in the minds, bodies, and desires of human beings.
I don't want to be a downer the entire time here, but this is a heavy situation we're dealing with.
But I'm currently reading Begin Again by Eddie Glaude Jr., which is an absolutely incredible book that investigates the life and writing of James Baldwin as told through today's lens of Donald Trump as a response to Barack Obama and the resurgence of white nationalism that has followed.
He looks at it in terms of baseball.
America had a civil war, which was followed by Jim Crow, which strike one, you know, made some progress, got pushed back.
We had civil rights, and then we had Nixon's war on drug and Reagan's institutionalized racism.
So strike two, there again, progress, push back.
And Glaude Jr.
doesn't want to call a third strike just yet, because Black Lives Matter and the emergence of critical race theory are powerful responses to the Trump era that we should actually really embrace.
So he holds out hope for institutional change.
And I too want to hold out hope for the environment, but that's really hard as an Angeleno knowing where our water supply comes from.
Okay, so non-Angeleno here, where does the LA water supply come from?
Well, some of it from Los Angeles.
It comes from some of it from the groundwater that's recycled and trapped, but most of it comes from north, which is The Owens Valley, which is the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers, and also the State Water Project, which also comes from part of the Sierra Nevada River system coming down.
And then as well as we bring in water from the Colorado River, which is also experiencing historic drought right now.
But none of it comes specifically from here, except a very small amount from the groundwater.
Most of it is brought from hundreds to thousands of miles away.
Or not.
And, well, that's a whole other segment, but yeah, my wife and I are really thinking about where we want to live, because do we want to be water refugees?
That's coming down the pipeline, like, not metaphorically, but yeah, exactly.
But as you'll hear later in Matthew's wonderful interview with Daniel Sharrell, many people are working on amazing climate-based projects right now.
And we know that technology will not bring about a utopia, but it can impact part of the damage we've done.
Desalination efforts in Israel, we can try that here.
I know on the pod we have mixed feelings about Bill Maher, but Recently, he suggested taking the floodwaters from the east and creating pipelines.
If we can create pipelines for oil that go across continents, why can't we work on public resource water-based pipelines?
It's totally possible.
But in order for all of this to work, we have to sacrifice Including, not just physically, but this notion that we're really just transcendent angels temporarily bogged down in meat bodies navigating a heaven on earth.
We're really a bunch of chimps that grew in imagination and the ability to work together to manipulate the environment in such a manner that provided a brief period of comfort and success.
And if we want that to continue, we'll have to keep collective action at the forefront of our imagination and tamp down the incessant desire for more that ravages the environment we claim to be blessed by.
Because really...
As Gauche concludes at the end of the lecture-slash-book, change is harder than we think, but it is always possible.
I'll end with a quote from him.
Climate change is often described as a wicked problem.
One of its wickedest aspects is that it may require us to abandon some of our most treasured ideas about political virtue.
For example, be the change you want to see.
What we need instead is to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped.
Science-adjacent propaganda. - Yeah.
There's a game that should be familiar to all of us here that all conspiracists play if they're deeply invested in their claims.
It involves the marshalling of science to demonstrate that they are in fact the true skeptics, the rational ones.
They are really looking at the evidence.
And typically they'll use a gish gallop of links to lots of studies, then they'll home in on cherry-picked data from those studies, and then they'll rely on conspiracy explanations when you point out that these studies have been rejected by those who hold the consensus view of whatever the topic is.
Now, as part of this routine, contrarian scientists are often also paraded out.
Their bad takes usually come complete with heroic backstories as marginalized whistleblowers.
But the scientific credentials of these conspiracy experts tend to be adjacent to the topic at hand, rather than squarely in its domain, rendering reference to their qualifications more of a fallacious argument from authority than anything else.
We have, for example, architects and engineers for 9-11 Truth, which sounds very science-y, but the guy who helped remodel your family room isn't really an expert on skyscraper construction.
Or we have Pierre Kory and the various motley crews of fringe doctors who are not epidemiologists, who oddly all identify the word frontline as key to their online branding, right?
And they'll be pushing bad science and failed COVID cures.
Then we have Heather Haying and Brett Weinstein, everybody's favorite couple, who tout their evolutionary biology PhDs as a basis for their anti-vaccine content and promotion of ivermectin.
And then there's Mike Yeadon, who's touted as a vaccine expert based on having once been allergy and respiratory research VP at Pfizer.
Even as every prediction he's made as a private citizen about COVID over the last year has failed.
And I want to give a shout out here to our friend Dr. Wilson of Debunk the Funk fame, who did an excellent video called Mike Yead and Just Can't Stop Being Wrong.
I'll include that in the show notes.
Debunk the Funk!
Debunk the Funk!
The thing is, though...
Scientific credentials are just a starting point, not unlike intuition and uninformed opinions.
We all have them, but where do we go from there?
On any given weekend before the pandemic, hotel conference rooms across the United States hosted a non-stop gaggle of credentialed experts at fringe conferences on everything from vaccines causing autism, to the history of UFOs visiting our planet, to the dark truth about 9-11, the reality of paranormal powers, or the universe itself being merely a computer simulation.
All of which is obviously true, but being suppressed by the mainstream media.
I mean, all of those presenters have PhDs.
And as an aside here, have you ever noticed how, for conspiracists, science, academia, and the news media are all absolutely suspect, except when they trot out one of these contrarian experts.
Then, their scientific, academic, or journalistic credentials suddenly become very, very important.
Or have you noticed how all of a sudden these people are claiming to be Nicki Minaj fans?
It's so ridiculous.
I always wonder what it feels like to be at those strange conferences because there's going to be a whole social element to them as well.
Is going to, you know, involve, you know, people making new friendships and, and, you know, people cheating on their spouses and stuff like that.
A lot of drunkenness.
So, so there's all of that going on as well.
Yeah.
But the focus being around, you know, here's our sort of transgressive weekend, uh, where we discuss and I suppose like these conferences too in the 19, 80s and 70s and into the 90s, they didn't have the benefit of automatic streamability either.
So now the conference can actually be somewhere, but then it can be everywhere at the same time.
Yeah, I'm sure there's just as much interesting behavior going on behind the scenes.
And I'm sure there's a group of people who, not unlike Grateful Dead followers, are traveling from town to town and conference to conference to keep up with the latest breakthrough.
and whatever their fringe topic is.
We've talked a lot about Imran Ahmed and his Center for Countering Digital Hate, identifying the 12 individuals responsible for disseminating the majority of anti-vax material on social media, famously dubbed the Disinformation Dozen.
Half of that group lay claim to some kind of medical credential, but as with all propagandists, they have their own ulterior motives.
And that's not really science.
Whether they completely believe their own bullshit or not, their ensuing charismatic fame, as we talk about, and influence, generate downlines for alt-health products, services, and networked cross-marketing that is simply not available to the uncontroversial and humble commentator on science.
So follow the money, indeed.
Now, the most cynical grifters play their role regardless of what they really believe, with little concern for hypocrisy or consequence.
Case in point, all of the Fox hosts who've been railing against vaccine mandates and quarantine measures are subject to that organization's requirement to present proof of vaccination or be tested every day, and even to wear masks when in close quarters.
Fox News Corporation boasts that 90% of their employees are vaccinated.
But that didn't stop Tucker Carlson from opening up his past Monday show on Fox by calling the Pentagon's decision to mandate vaccines for military personnel a purity test that would separate the obedient from the free.
He claimed it would identify sincere Christians, free thinkers, and men with high testosterone levels and make them leave the military, calling this a Biden administration power grab.
It's just fantastic.
He also made bizarre references to a US Army PowerPoint presentation he claimed to have obtained that he said was doing PR for Satanists.
He then pivoted to concern trolling about suicide rates in the military, saying that this was much more statistically threatening than COVID.
So this is all Tucker Carlson, this is not Alex Jones.
You got the name right.
You're talking about Fox News.
That's all Tucker Carlson and it's all in one segment in the A Block of this particular, you know, moment of his show.
Right, okay.
Yeah.
So, there's another contrarian stance that Tucker and many at Fox News take.
They deny that climate change is caused by humans and is playing a role in the escalation of extreme weather events.
A frequent Fox guest is Stephen Koonin, who recently sat down for an extensive interview with Tucker Carlson on his daytime show called Tucker Carlson Today.
Koonin is the author of a climate denial book titled Unsettled, and he's usually introduced on right-leaning media as the Obama scientist, because he served as a Department of Energy Undersecretary for Science during that administration.
You're watching a lot of Fox News, Julian.
Are you okay?
Have you noticed it's having an effect on me?
I'm going to try and mellow out on that.
A Scientific American article from this past June that I will include in the show notes points out that Coonan was hired under Obama precisely because of his contrarian views, so as not to have a homogenous agency all marching in locksteps.
A weird idea, but there you go.
The article also points out that the climate denial arguments Kunin has been making since at least 2013 have all been roundly debunked as cherry-picked distortions of the data.
But hey, he's a former professor of theoretical physics.
Here you go again with the contrarian adjacent expert, which leads another host on Fox, Larry Kudlow, to introduce Kunin as his mentor on climate science.
Now dig a little deeper into any of this and you'll find that there really is a climate disinformation industry here in full swing.
It's heavily funded by the Koch brothers, oil companies, and others, often using dark money tactics to hide where it's coming from.
If they can create a public perception that climate science is an unsettled question, well, then how could the mean old government impose environmental regulations on the biggest job creators, even as half the world floods and the other half is on fire?
The big fish in this climate disinfo sector is conservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute.
They've so far received $380 million from the Kochs to spread messaging that downplays climate science so as to keep those short-term profit margins booming.
As an example of how this works, Mark Theisen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote a Washington Post article in May touting Steve Koonin's distortions of climate science as he promoted that new book.
Right before Coonan's June appearance on Tucker Carlson Today, the Washington Post headline from Thiessen read, an Obama scientist debunks the climate doom-mongers.
Is this just Charles Koch?
Because David died in 2019, so I know we reference the Koch brothers often, but are there other family members involved, or is it just Charles?
Do you know who's funding it?
As far as I know, it's just Charles, but I'm referring to them as the Kochs so as not to have people think I mean Coca-Cola.
And also because they have multiple companies and subsidiaries and shell corporations.
There's a whole thing going on there, but yeah, fair comment.
In 2007, the American Enterprise Institute was exposed by The Guardian as having sent letters soliciting scientists at $10,000 each plus travel and accommodation expenses to critique the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report.
This was a massive endeavor that gathered 6,000 peer-reviewed studies from 130 countries over the course of six years, and The Guardian quite rightly characterized these actions by the American Enterprise Institute as a form of bribery.
I'll also share a link here to the excellent DSMOG database, which identifies the legion of think tanks, lobbyist groups, and individuals responsible for worldwide climate disinformation.
This extensive database is divided into the following sections.
They have a climate disinformation section, an agribusiness section, air pollution lobbying, and then an entire area of the website dedicated just to the Kochs.
So, compared to this incredibly coordinated actual conspiracy, our anti-vax disinformation dozen are minnows in the shark pool.
There's a website by the Union of Concerned Scientists that lists the top 10 offenders, including American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute.
And in every single case, they found that huge funding comes from the Kochs and from ExxonMobil to keep climate skepticism pumped into the public conversation.
The Union of Concerned Scientists also has an eye-opening disinformation playbook that they've identified through their analysis.
I'll let interested listeners read further via yet another link in the show notes, but here's a quick overview.
This is really nicely done.
Number one, the fake, passing off counterfeit research as legitimate.
Number two, the blitz, harass scientists who speak out.
And I should say for each of these steps in the playbook, they have several case studies that they link to.
The diversion, manufacture uncertainty about science by just asking questions where none actually exists.
Number four, the screen.
Buy credibility through alliances with legitimate organizations.
Number five, the fix.
Manipulate public officials and processes.
There's got to be another one called the rapture because there's an acceleration movement that actually wants things to burn isn't there isn't that part of it or is this is this but but this playbook is it doesn't cover that that religious territory does it doesn't cover that but there's definitely an intersection there bill morris wrote an incredible article about this quite a few years ago about this idea that if we can accelerate towards some kind of apocalyptic doom it will hasten the appearance of our lord and savior right before recording
i tweeted something just to the effect of do the young people who are part of the my immunity is strong i'm young and healthy it doesn't really bother me do they think they'll never age or Or that they won't need healthcare down the road, say during another pandemic, when they can't get some other form of healthcare because there's an overburdened system at that time?
And that's why we keep referencing collective action.
Segment here made me think of the along parallel lines of those photos that came out this week of the border patrol guy on the horse chasing down the Haitian immigrants and it's he's grabbing a guy who's holding two plastic bags and if you put that into perspective That's all he has in his life.
He has escaped an island and then traveled hundreds of miles to try to live somewhere he can actually live.
And you got this guy and the imagery was just stunning.
But my question is, along those lines, what happens when Americans For them to start to recognize that we're going to be those refugees at some point, at least in certain areas of the country.
And when that happens, does the recognition ever happen that our habits, every one of us has created that, or is the blame just going to be pushed off somewhere else?
Where does that blame go?
And not only are we all in this together, but One way or another, we do get to change roles with one another in ways that are often unexpected and unpredicted by the kind of privilege that makes us think we're sort of floating above it all and immune to that.
I want to reiterate something I said earlier, which is this is not a fun topic to talk about because we are all implicated and because it's going to affect all of us.
And I know we'd rather look away from this topic and not really address it.
And I know it's a heavy topic, but especially with, again, Matthew's interview with Daniel that's coming up and the resources we're including, the links, there are a number of people who are working on solutions.
If there's anything that I am hopeful for from the younger generations, as much flack as they get for perhaps their social media practices or Tied pods, or the latest one I just found out about today, which is swallowing magnets and then they have to have their intestines cleaned out.
For all of that flack that happens on social media, there are a number of people who are born into this world and being like, what the fuck have I been born into and are trying to do good things.
So we'll link to some of them.
There are charitable organizations, there are places to direct your time, effort, money that could actually make an impact.
And I want to Again, point out that looking for representatives that are going to try to enact either the Green New Deal or something like it rather than getting caught in these ground wars that are happening all the time is going to be what Where our hope lies.
Because if it's not there, if it's not done through legislation, we are not going to hold the corporations accountable.
We have no say in what they do.
If they're private corporations, it has to be done legislatively.
And until we start actually supporting people who are trying to make that change, then these conversations are going to keep becoming more dire and more pessimistic.
And I personally don't want to have those conversations a year or two from now on this podcast.
We are ad-free and listener-supported here at Conspirituality and plan on remaining that way.
That said, occasionally we have an opportunity to do a trade with a podcast that is like-minded and speaks to many of the same topics.
Last year we did one with Pushkin, which was founded by Malcolm Gladwell, which I'm a huge fan of.
And we had another opportunity, and I'm only interested in talking about podcasts that I actually listen to.
So when Crooked Media contacted us, I was like, of course, because I listen to most Crooked Media podcasts.
The one I'm interested in right now has been talking about the COVID-19 pandemic, which showed us how a microscopic virus could upend our lives and how unprepared our society was for it.
Let's face it, there's so much more out there that we need to understand about the pandemic and society in general, which is why on Crooked Media's America Dissected, former Detroit Health Commissioner Dr. Abdul El-Sayed sits down with doctors, scientists, culture makers, and policy leaders to ask questions such as how new genetic discoveries change our relationship with our own genes,
How addiction to social media changes our brains, something I've talked about on our podcast, and even how climate change could make the next pandemic even more likely.
Just yesterday I listened to Abdul's interview with Tony Fauci, the second time he was on the podcast, catching Americans up about where we are right now with the variants and vaccines, and I highly recommend that one.
So to hear discussions on topics like these and more, check out America Dissected, which drop every Tuesday on your favorite podcast provider, including Apple, Spotify, wherever.
Just like you find us, find them.
Daniel Sharrell, welcome to Conspirituality Podcast.
Thank you so much for taking the time to do this.
Thanks for having me, Matthew.
I'm going to start with a review of your extraordinary book, Warmth, Coming of Age at the End of Our World.
I'm doing this not only because I appreciate the book so much, but so that it Take some of the legwork or 101 intro work off of your hands.
I think you probably do have to do a lot of that.
But I'm going to go through this.
If you object to anything, if you want to add anything, please interrupt me.
I'll just go for it and then hopefully we can jump right into the weeds.
And just to our listeners, hopefully this review will really encourage you to go and buy the book immediately.
Okay, so, you know, the reviews that you've gotten really just return to a single drone, which is that this is a new type of climate collapse writing.
And I think they're right about that.
It's not a book about the data we already know.
It's about how we desperately need to both open ourselves up to what it means while also creating the kinds of resiliencies that we need to not let that meaning destroy us.
And I find that you are utterly persuasive in this book that it's way past time for the truth of the problem.
So that's capital T, capital P. It's kind of cryptic, but it's also a little bit mystical, the way you've phrased it.
It's way past the time for this to be argued about or even really discovered.
It can't be ignored, escaped.
We can't, like, doomscroll it away in some kind of dissociative haze.
We can't spiritually bypass it.
So the task now is a type of mature realization.
And not just for those who, you know, are asleep to it, but for those like you who've made it their life's work, because you really make the argument that the terror it invokes Can't even really be managed by those who work hardest to push it back with their bar graphs and their international meetings and, you know, the kind of dogged activism that you've spent a decade grinding out.
But the way you frame this task is really subtle and it's difficult to summarize, but my crack at it is this, that I think you argue that we have to fully commit to a spectrum of emotional engagement that will continue to render sustainable meaning and preserve and even enhance our capacity to nurture ourselves and each other.
And so this memoir, which you wrote in your 20s, so let's just flag this accelerationism a bit, it's a prayer for the development of rage without nihilism, hope without naivety,
Fear without paralysis and a kind of love that I think you position as being free from sentimentality or you dream of it that way and and specifically without the need to control a love without the need to control.
But those are the themes but then there's the method which I think is just As important, if not more so, because we're living in such a media-intensive environment, and it feels like the primary task, perhaps as an activist but also as a communicator, is to figure out, like, how are you going to actually break through?
How are you going to be heard?
And so in the penultimate chapter, You describe being on a delegation that's learning from the Gullahribulu Indigenous folks of Western Australia, and you're invited to participate in one of their traditional 10-day songline walks by which the people rejuvenate their interdependence with the earth.
And they both feed and are fed by what they call the Dreamtime, which is a place where past and future converge in a kind of You know, all-encompassing present that is immediate but also relaxed.
And I think the chapter is a really good reveal for your own process because expanding out from the indigenous wisdom that you glean from the ritual, you also use this image to kind of encapsulate the necessary form that any worthwhile meditation on the climate would have to have, that it will have to live in all times at once.
Because as you repeat a number of times, the Anthropocene is this time in which the biological clock and the geological clock have merged.
And so you've got these time loops in your narrative.
They tumble us from, you know, your childhood at synagogue to playing in the rivers and streams of New Jersey.
And, you know, then you're in New Orleans post-Katrina, and then you get lost.
We get lost in your iPhone.
And we also get paralyzed in these black holes, like the Trump election and the US pulling out of the Paris Accords, and there are these rich literary echoes here.
You know, it's T.S.
Eliot, there's a lot of 20th century poetry, there's the reflexiveness of French literary theory, and there's also magical realism.
But what's new is that you're taking all of those skills and you're applying them to the problem.
And I'm not sure, except in novels, if that is being done at all.
So it's not a fantasy, it's not fictional, it's not a LARP.
It's as if Gabriel Garcia Marquez is still alive and writing policy copy for the IPCC or something like that.
And you do this slowly, and in these episodic takes, these short sections.
I don't know if this was a formal constraint that you decided upon beforehand, but I don't think there are any of those sections that are longer than about seven paragraphs.
Does that sound right?
But for a few exceptions, I'd say that's true, yeah.
The brevity, that quality, and the rhythm that it gives.
I think it mirrors the tech addled brain, but it also soothes it.
You know, you can't, there's one point where you're referring to Swan's Way, and I'm like, it's very difficult for people who, anybody at this point, to dive into 19th century literature
with that kind of attentional demand and so you've you've written something that is as rich as as as older forms but it's also and it's an anti-facebook book in that way but it's also for it's also forgiving with like uh a kind of anxious brain And then it occurred to me also that, like, you've managed to both cancel and reinvent romanticism.
You're canceling it in the sense that you really pick apart the bankruptcy of how You know, the 19th century intelligentsia reifies nature with a kind of poetry that conceals, you know, colonialism and the acceleration of, you know, environmental destruction.
And, like, you show how this extractive mindset that's trained to view forests and animals as containing some kind of mystical essence that can bless and center humanity is that it's just too sad to bear, given the extinction rates and given what we know.
You also, however, reinvent a kind of romanticism while you're hanging out on the traffic islands of New Jersey parking lots.
Um, you know, and and you're trying to figure out what the what what is beautiful about them and you're finding it so you create this way of looking at, you know, things that are also kind of haunted because they are either isolated or they are signs of things passing away, but they're resilient at the same time.
And then the last thing is that there's an urgent intimacy that drives the form of this book because it's an epistolary book.
You're pouring out your thoughts in a letter to a hypothetical child that you may have one day.
And this is a real narrative gamble that I think could veer into like a model in territory but you repeatedly strike these ironic and humble notes that like where you're confessing this is an artifice and and and you also confess that you actually don't have any idea what parenting will be like for you um and that's very honest because i think that's just true for everybody um
But you also say that while you're writing to this hypothetical child, you know that there is no real child and that the conceit is that you're writing to yourself, really.
That You know, even though your parents are alive and loving and supporting and, you know, mom is calling you or, you know, trying to take care of you by suggesting a particular thing on Netflix that might be, you know, soothing to your grief.
Um you know the what what you come to is this kind of compulsion to parent yourself and to love yourself in a way and and this is where I realized that when I read some of the reviews of the book I hear these these notes of guilt and shame and I realized that they're you know the reviewers are people my age and because I feel like
A lot of us Gen Xers will read this book as though we're reading the journal of an orphan or something like that.
Like somebody we have abandoned to their own devices.
But at the same time, you know, as all good books do, I think this can be a really powerful intergenerational connective work.
I think you've contributed to a song line, and I know that I'm going to be able to hand this book to my own sons who are now five and eight, but you know, growing up faster than I can even describe.
So it feels like a book that I can dialogue with, and I think that's going to be true for a lot of readers.
So that's what I'd like to do.
And how's that?
If you wanted to respond to any of that, I'm happy.
Well, first of all, thank you, Matthew, for that incredibly generous review and also the deep engagement you gave to the book.
And I think everything you said resonates with me about the book's intent.
But I also want to talk about what it meant writing it for me.
Yeah.
I think when you describe this as a process of writing outward but also writing to myself, it absolutely was that.
I think I decided to write this book because I felt like I had no other options.
I needed some sort of autotherapeutic method To metabolize the often overwhelming and so large to a seems abstract metaphysical and ontological weight of the climate crisis that I often kept in a little compartment sort of resting in the back of my head and that I wouldn't, that didn't come out very much or that I wouldn't let out for fear that it would wreak havoc in my inner world.
So, but I also felt that if I didn't do that engagement and actually sit down and try to take the climate crisis as real and not just a set of facts that were present in the headlines and always emitting a low frequency of anxiety, but if I actually tried to engage with what was happening, unless I did that, it felt but if I actually tried to engage with what was happening, unless I did that, it felt like I wouldn't be ready to live the rest of the remainder
And I think now having people I love dearly, acquaintances, fellow organizers in the climate movement, my own family, read this and respond to this, it's sort of redoubled my sense that a lot of people, it's sort of redoubled my sense that a lot of people, increasingly many people are struggling with feelings of grief and overwhelming confusion and rage about the climate crisis a little
alone in a personal silo of Twitter or hand-wringing and not seeing the cultural avenues by which they can articulate those feelings and process them in community.
When I talk to folks, including the folks listening to this podcast, I mean, I wrote this book to feel less alone myself, and I hope it can be a conduit for that for other people as we face down this century of what's going to be upheaval.
And I'm not, this is a stridently anti-fatalistic book, but I don't think it's any secret at this point that climatologically things are going to get worse before they get better.
And it is both our responsibility to steer the helm of politics so that they get better eventually, but also To know how to put one foot in front of the other for these decades, where they'll continue getting worse.
And frankly, that might be the remainder of my lifetime.
You know, if the climate movement is successful in turning the car away from the cliff's edge, and I guess it's an electric car at that point, then the benefits of that in terms of Decreased storm surge and mitigated extreme heat waves might not be felt until my children or their grandchildren's lifetimes, if by then.
Well, I'm glad to hear that you're getting validating response.
I mean, that's got to be very helpful.
And as far as the process of becoming more lonely goes, I think that, you know, you're probably finding your mark then and that's some good evidence for it.
Our podcast focuses on conspiracy theories and how they wreak havoc, they melt brains, they disrupt discourse, they torch public health.
And I realized that I wanted to interview you because in the way in which you frame and talk about the problem I realize that we're encountering something of a real conspiracy.
That for the past 50 years, the captains of the industries that contribute most to carbon emissions have known exactly what's going on and have moved heaven and earth to keep the money burning.
And so I wanted to open by asking whether you view the bad actors that you've dedicated your life to pushing back against as having engaged a conspiracy and how conscious are they of it?
That's a great question and one that I struggle with a lot.
You know, I talk in the book about the Pruitts, which is the eponym I use for Scott Pruitt and all of his ilk, who are the people responsible for doing everything in their power to prevent our political system from addressing this crisis.
And I think on the one hand, obviously, yes, they have engaged in a conspiracy.
I mean, ExxonMobil's own scientists, since the 70s, Have had the basic research required to predict what was going to happen in terms of the climate crisis if they kept on burning fossil fuels.
And then they spent, they waged the most expensive propaganda campaign in human history to bury the conclusions that they had helped to produce so they wouldn't have to change their business model.
Even if it meant sacrificing the lives and livelihoods of millions of mostly poor people, mostly in the global south.
So on one level, If a conspiracy is powerful people working in concert to disguise certain information so they can get away with evil acts, absolutely that is what has happened.
And we have to be very clear-eyed about that, I think.
It is sort of mystifying to me sometimes, the level of sociopathy on display when we think about people who, and they're not dumb people, right?
They've seen the science, they've seen the research, they know the cataclysmically destabilizing effect that their business model is going to have on life on planet Earth.
And it's not a 1 in 10 chance, it's like a 99 out of 100 chance that that's going to happen.
And they choose to continue anyway.
They double down.
I think it's probably the greatest challenge of empathy I've ever encountered in my life, to figure out what the fuck could be happening inside their heads that allows them to make a choice like that.
But I also want to distinguish between Climate denialism as a conspiracy, and like QAnon as a conspiracy.
Because I think there's a way that, and I'm not an expert, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
You know, QAnon and the like, there's a totalizing quality to them.
Where the conspiracy explains absolutely everything, and the actors behind it have a sort of omnipotent quality.
And they're hiding behind every facade.
And they're manipulating every dynamic.
And if that's what a conspiracy is, then I don't think this is a conspiracy.
I think the people behind this are very much human.
Like, we're human, and this dynamic has proceeded through a probably disorganized series of, like, conference calls and meetings and random dynamics and happenstance and history.
Is the other word for that.
Um, so I don't, I don't think there's like a weekly conference call between Darren Woods of ExxonMobil and like whoever of BP and Shell and Aramco saying, okay, like, how are we going to fuck the planet today?
Like, ma ha ha.
On that conference call, for them to really escalate to QAnon level, they would have to be invested in the three basic conspiratorial principles of, you know, we are going to take advantage of the fact that everything is connected, and we are going to make everything You know, look not as it seems, and we are going to make it look as though nothing happens by accident.
There's going to be some sort of coherent endgame that is a little bit larger than protecting a corporate brand or protecting a profit margin.
Totally.
And this version is completely banal in contrast with that.
It is like gallons of money being poured on Congress.
It's like sleek lobbyists dining at whatever steakhouse in DC.
It's just like fucking the banality of evil incarnate at the largest scale we've ever seen.
And I think that what I do, what I have, a thought that's been difficult to digest for me over the past few years, but that I have begun to consider is that there are people but that I have begun to consider is that there are people driving And all of these people, for the most part, the leaders, the fossil fuel corporations, are all in the top 0.1% or 0.01% of global wealth distribution.
I'm not, I'm not going to make the claim, because I can't presume to know what they're thinking, that they had dastardly intention, like their primary intention was to fuck up life on planet Earth.
I think their primary intention was, again, extremely banal and what they'd been taught at, like, fucking Wharton or whatever by the Chicago school, that, like, a monomaniacal pursuit of profit to the exclusion of all else.
But I do think, and this, this, You know, I had an interesting conversation with Dorothy Fortenberry about this.
I do think that...
For some of the rich people that have been complicit in the exacerbation of the climate crisis, that same crisis is perhaps coming to the fore for them as a means of, if they calibrate it right, maintaining hierarchies in the world and driving a further wedge between rich and poor people in terms of political power, in terms of economic power, in terms of life expectancy, in terms of everything.
And that, to them, seems like not perhaps a very bad outcome, and maybe even profitable, especially in a world where human labor is obsolescing.
Again, I don't think that that's written down anywhere, that that's even consciously in anybody's head.
But I do think, I don't know if this is conspiratorial so much as opportunistic, but I think there are, I imagine, I can't imagine other than that there are very rich people who see this not as a crisis, but as an opportunity to double down on their own power if they don't bring themselves but as an opportunity to double down on their own power if they don't Right, and invest in real estate in New Zealand and so on.
Exactly, and go long on like malaria medications and desalinization plants.
I mean, this is great because, as I said, the reason that I wanted to invite you on was to compare the real world conspiracy such as we, you know, define it or hedge it, and indeed something like QAnon And COVID-related conspiracy theories.
And I have this speculation that I want to run by you, which is that I imagine that everyone, even the deniers, and perhaps even particularly climate deniers, feel that something is wrong and that collapse is in the margins of experience.
And that something like QAnon or the conspirituality mythologies that we cover, actually they're not banal.
And they provide relief in the sense that they allow people to displace a kind of real terror by inventing a cultural or a political problem that they can actually solve and they can be heroes of.
So what do you think about that?
As you finished this book and then watched things like QAnon explode?
I absolutely think that some of the dynamics we're seeing, especially on the political right, about diminishing trust in social institutions and the conspiracies born out of that, are a sublimation of a finger to the pulse on very real systemic problems.
The systemic problem of skyrocketing gilded age wealth inequality, the systemic problem of just a feeling of cultural and economic powerlessness by a lot of working people in this country and the systemic problem of the climate crisis, which nobody at this point in the United States has been unaffected by, including in red states.
But the story of the climate crisis is a complicated story It's a prolonged story.
It's a story with no easy resolution.
And it's a story that you can actually intervene in and very sort of like practical policy with very practical policy mechanisms.
And I think None of those things are true of the QAnon story, which I think is extremely sexy, not simple in that it has many crazy elements that I feel like I'm only seeing the tip of the iceberg, but it is sort of reductive and mysterious, and in a way, I don't think it's meant to be resolved.
The QAnon people aren't like, OK, let's save the children by passing paid family leave.
The point of the problem is not to be solved, it seems, or redressed in any way.
The point of the problem is to provide some sort of moral and narrative lightning rod to give coherence to people's lives.
People whose lives just don't feel very coherent because of the very real problems that are like a slow tug underneath all of society.
And so, and the right especially, although not exclusively, has been very adept at Meeting the very justifiable anxiety, justifiable but inchoate anxiety about life in the 21st century with basically narratives in pill form that sort of sedate rather than promote real political action.
And that's a very scary thing.
But it also, to me, God, if I were in QAnon, I'd try to put myself in their shoes.
I mean, it would feel horrible, right?
It would feel so horrible, because it's unclear, based on the conspiracy theory, how you even begin to change it.
I guess the re-election of Donald Trump is one way, but it all seems sort of hazy.
With the climate crisis, it's like the fact of its banality, the fact that we have the technological and policy mechanisms available to us right now to keep the car from going off the cliff, Is like an immensely grounding thing and incredibly different than these like red herring stories that a lot of the population I think is falling prey to.
Right, and there is a banality to the Pruitts, but it's not as though they are hiding or promoting or facilitating some kind of transformational societal change.
That's not their product.
Their product is to simply facilitate the present rate of consumption so that the wheels keep turning.
So even from the perspective of what the conspiracy charlatan or what Ron Watkins or the QAnon founders want, you know, You know, Scott Pruitt actually doesn't want disruption.
QAnon wants disruption and then it offers a kind of spiritual salvation.
But what's especially banal about the Pruitts is that he wants business as usual.
Absolutely.
And I think, you know, when I was talking about the goal of the climate movement being to build enough political power to discipline the fossil fuel industry into the ground, It is, this is not a status quo movement.
I mean, the climate crisis needs to be a crucible for creating a more just and equitable world, because as the climate crisis is proving, if we don't create that world, the civilization we've built over the past thousands of years may not survive.
And so there is, I think there is a compelling story to be told here, right?
Like, I think there's, and I'm going out on a limb here, but I actually think there's deep truth.
The Pruitts can be compared to a sort of suicide bomber.
Somebody who is willing to jeopardize, maybe not their own life, but the lives of their grandchildren and many people around them for the pursuit of some abstract glory, whether that's the glory preferred to you by a CEO position or by the accumulation of capital.
Our responsibility is to take away the detonator.
All of which is to say that's an immensely reductive view of the problem, but I do think there are real conflictual narratives that are not at all wrong that can be used to describe this.
I think still the lizard people in the QAnon and etc.
are sexier, they're easier to digest, they're more like mystical nooks and crannies that you can sort of remain in and without having to take any real action in the real world.
But I also want to say that the right has worked really hard, as hard as they possibly can, to prevent The true narrative around the climate crisis from becoming the dominant narrative.
And they're losing that battle, but they've delayed that transition by probably 20 to 30 years, and those were crucial, crucial decades.
You know, one thing that occurred to me as I kept reading capital T, capital P, The Problem, is that, you know, you have honored your subject with a kind of gravitas and mystery that is itself You know, worthy of how totalizing it is.
And, in a strange way, you know, it's the same way that the language of conspiracy theories work, because QAnons will speak of the Great Awakening, or the Storm, or the Cabal, and conspiritualists will daydream about Ascension or 5D Consciousness.
So, why did you settle on something that was so evocative, so poetic, and so Yeah, I suppose transcendent.
First and foremost, it's that my choice there was the old writerly trick of defamiliarizing something that will be very familiar to most readers.
And I think it is an indication of my dissatisfaction sometimes with the narrowness of climate discourse in this country.
When the words climate change come up, Oftentimes, it's sort of immediately shoehorned into, oh, environmental issue, that's a bullet on a list of many long issues to be solved by the technocrats and the scientists.
And it has a very narrow discursive bandwidth.
Yeah.
But actually, this is a massive forcing that is going to change most of how we live on this planet increasingly for the next century or centuries.
And that is going to leave basically no one untouched.
And to me, if we're going to engage seriously with a problem of that magnitude, it had to be broken out of the box that had been limbed for it by the words climate change, which felt to me a bit dry and too narrow and overplayed.
Which isn't to say that they're inaccurate and important scientific term, but I wanted people to be able In the way that I was trying to have a real encounter with the thing, rather than see the word and immediately slot it away into a schema of like, oh, that's the shit that I read about every day in the newspaper with the wildfires.
Very scary.
Not going to think about it.
Right.
And so that's what's happening on the one hand.
But also I think with the problem, I mean, this is not, this is not merely a problem of increasing parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, though it is that.
I think in some ways,
Climate change is more of a symptom than a problem, and the problem lies in the way that we as humans have chosen to live in the world, or at least, I shouldn't say we as humans, like mainstream late capitalist society has chosen to live in the world, and what it's chosen to attend to, and what it's chosen to blind itself to, and I think the narrowness of our cultural attentions
has produced the thing that is rattling the cage of the entire globe right now.
So I both wanted to like, yeah, I wanted to defamiliarize it, but also sort of reveal the many ways in which it implicates our patterns of thought and not just the emissions coming out of a tailpipe.
And this is another message that the formulation of the problem carries with it, which is the also mystery of possibility.
And, you know, in the content that we study in Conspirituality, the basic technique of the influencers that we cover is to describe the world as a terrifying place that demands this spiritually heroic response And then, of course, some charismatic person, and they might be well-meaning or they might be abusive, they pop up to sell some sort of fix.
But, you know, when we shift that mode of thinking into your framework of the problem, we really see nothing less than a call for, like, a real spiritual renewal, not, you know, more turmeric powder or mantras or something.
So, I just wanted to ask the open-ended question of, you know, given how broad a net the formulation of the problem casts, what is the role of spirituality in your vision of living with it?
Yeah, that's a great question, and one that I definitely don't have a prescriptive answer to.
I think this, the book, if the book has any take, and I tried to resist it having a take, because I think that tends to be a sort of winnowing form of thought, but to the extent that it has one, I suppose it's just that You know, I think people will need to develop their own relationship to this crisis that transcends just above mutely digesting static facts coming to you through your news feed.
I think for me, what spirituality has offered, and I'm defining that extremely broadly.
As you'll probably glean once you read the book, my spirituality includes such practices as swearing off Twitter for the rest of my life and trying to take a long walk without my phone every day and just like look at a fern or something.
But I think what spiritual practice helps do for me is I think creating something that is daily and mundane but also seeks to make contact with something like the eternal can, at least in small moments, make you feel like you can step out of the temporal maelstrom
that is the climate crisis, this thing that's like jostling and mixing and making turbulent the intersections between geologic, historic, and biographical time. - Yeah.
There are still ways to find solid ground under your feet, even if you're in the middle of an earthquake, if that makes sense.
of the dream time as aboriginals have it, or step below that into just whatever's happening in front of you, there are still ways to find solid ground under your feet, even if you're in the middle of an earthquake, if that makes sense. - Well, I mean, if that makes sense. - Well, I mean, I came across your work on a Know Your Enemy episode where you were in a panel discussion with Dorothy Fortenberry, who you referenced earlier.
She's a playwright.
She writes for Handmaid's Tale, and she's still a practicing Catholic.
And she gave this great review on that podcast of Pope Francis' Laudato Si.
A phenomenal document.
An incredibly radical document.
Yeah, now she said something that I want to talk with her directly about, so please check your emails, Dorothy, which is that for her, weekly Mass and ritual is not narrative-driven.
I'm ex-Catholic myself and I remember that there was this difference between the liturgical calendar and the school year, for example.
So you can eat the transmuted body of Jesus every week, but it's not a magic pill.
You're going to come back the next week.
And so for her, she was saying that the church didn't offer answers so much as a space for relationship and contemplation.
How about for you?
You've described the long walks and the Fern and swearing off Twitter, but do you still go to synagogue at all?
I do sometimes, not as much as my mother would probably want me to, but I'm going.
Yeah, I'll be in synagogue all day on Thursday for Yom Kippur, which is the holiest day on the Jewish calendar where we meditate on and try to atone for our sins, which is a very heavy And perhaps modeling, but sometimes useful process I find.
But my religious as opposed to spiritual practice is not nearly as consistent as Dorothy's.
I think She's totally right in that these spaces are one form of feeling like the social fabric is still intact, which is a feeling that I think is getting more and more rare in the 21st century for a lot of people.
But I also think that my Judaism, and again this is less of a practice, but you know, I grew up in a household and I was taught from a very young age about the concept of tikkun olam, which basically means that the reason you're alive is to help heal the world.
That's the literal translation.
It's like similar to the seventh generation concept in American indigenous cosmologies.
And that's really been an orienting force for me and contributes to My anti-fatalism, because as I said in that other conversation, I think, you know, the climate crisis is going to get worse before it gets better.
But every single increment we manage to mitigate how bad it gets, We save or preserve the lives and livelihoods of millions of people whose lives are of equal and inherent value to ours.
And I sometimes, I don't want to use the word lucky, because that's really not what the feeling is like.
I feel kind of unlikely to be born right as the climate crisis came into public consciousness.
But I do feel that it's sort of strange that in our lifetimes If we so choose, we get to engage in the social movement, the meaning and consequence of which is almost indescribable.
The stakes are really hard to fathom.
You know, a part of me feels like I can't imagine, or that is one version of the best human life in my respect, from a vision of like Tikkun Olam.
So I wouldn't say, I think Jewish religious frameworks have really helped orient me and keep me motivated.
And yeah, you can ask my mom, I still go on the high holidays.
Well, I mean, given that that's your background, I gotta say, I'm not quite sure of the sound I made when I read that your therapist handed you a copy of Eckhart Tolle.
Because it was like something between a sigh and a little bit of a choke.
Because in my world, he's just the worst kind of dissociative.
Numpty who like melted the brains of an entire generation on being in the moment and also helped to depoliticize them.
And then you write really eloquently about how much the book helped you and so I had to eat my words a little bit.
Was that your first exposure to modern versions of non-dual philosophy, and what did it offer you that the Torah and Talmud and, is it Tikkun Olam?
Tikkun Olam, yeah.
Yeah, what did it offer that those things didn't?
Hmm, that's a good question.
You know, I mean, I guess I'll start by saying that Eckhart Tolle, I think, He presents his particular version of non-dual philosophy as a kind of panacea, which I just really don't think it is.
It was, for me, useful in very specific ways in a very specific point in my life, which was basically, I was feeling like the Great Acceleration was this giant treadmill that was continually speeding up, and by the Great Acceleration I'm using, you know, this is the term that various postmodern theorists use to describe the era of surveillance capitalism and the climate crisis and technological, incredible technological innovation and uptake.
That thing was just exhausting me on a daily basis and constantly yanking me into the future against my will.
And the most beautiful parts of my day were the parts where I could step out of that slipstream and have a direct sensory experience with some set of stimuli.
It's hard to describe, but you know, for example, looking at a fern on a walk.
And you know, Tola offered some frameworks to think about how to be more intentional about that stepping when it felt needed.
But I also felt, especially when I engaged more with aboriginal cosmologies, that the now is such a thin It's such a thin concept of time, and kind of ungenerous in that it retracts ontological weight from people that have come before us and people that come after us, and as you say, it's very depoliticizing, because if you always live in the now,
It's unclear how you bend the long arc of history towards justice, because history doesn't exist, it's just a series of moments.
And so I found the everyone much more helpful.
You know, but I also, I just, I'm resistant to the idea of any one body of thought having the silver bullet here.
I mean, I think we're all kind of creating this patchwork emotional and philosophical vehicle that we're going to use to try to get through a crisis that we can't quite fathom.
Another part of that patchwork for you is that you described going on a 10-day Vipassana retreat.
And this is an IMS, right?
God, I forget the center's name.
It was in Massachusetts.
So that took me back as well, because it's another zone of new spirituality that we cover.
And we cover it mainly because as a business, as an industry, it's really good at promising things, but also really good at covering up the fact that meditation at that intensity can really injure people.
But then you got a lot out of it.
And it seems like you still meditate for 15 minutes a day, as you say.
It feels like you have brushed up against the things that we watch people get just sort of sideswiped by and you've been able to grab the cream or something like that.
And I think you're lucky that way, but also it seems that you also weren't going to Yeah, I think, I don't know, I don't know why I was able to grab the cream and not get sucked in, but I was never, all of this, the Tola, the Vipassana retreats, various arrestable sit-ins and lobby days and engagements with
Proust or Ta-Nehisi Coates or all these things were just a form of experimentation to be able to live with the weight of the climate crisis.
And I think I didn't go into any of these experiences feeling like, okay, now this is going to give me the answer and the whole answer and I won't have to inquire after that.
I didn't, I wasn't looking for that, nor did I think I could find it.
But I also think that like my grounding in just like hard knuckles political work is incredibly important.
Because at the end of the day, you know, There are many parts of me that see a lot of value in Buddhist concepts of conceptual non-duality.
But I also am adamant that any system of changing the world needs a compelling theory of change.
Like, how are you going to realign power to achieve certain policy ends at a systemic level?
I think that's really important.
The climate movement for me, which I see as a predecessor to the AIDS movement and the civil rights movement and the women's suffrage movement, and any time an organized block of society has demanded and compelled over decades a set of policy changes that improved the lives of millions of people, and that's what we're trying to do now, that was always where my heart and soul was.
That work sometimes felt a bit Could feel numbing, honestly, because I think politics, though absolutely necessary, is a numbing business at times.
And so I was trying to find ways to live a political life, live a life oriented towards power politics and a life oriented towards beauty and meaning and have those things interweave with each other.
But at the end of the day, it's like, how do we get fucking Josh Gothheimer and Kirsten Sinema to sign this fucking reconciliation bill so that, like, we can spend the billions of dollars we need to start building out the renewable energy economy?
Like, there's no question to me that there's, like, some alternative path to salvation.
There's never been any question.
And so I think that was a major counterbalancing force for me that didn't, you know, I was never going to go to an ashram.
It also just, it seems to me that you never got demoralized enough to buy into checking out.
That perhaps you had enough good feedback or enough camaraderie and enough sense of forward movement despite Just brutal failures and setbacks year upon year upon year.
It sounds like it never made sense to you to just stay at the Vipassana retreat and become one of the staffers there.
Never ever.
One, because I think the interpretation of the climate crisis as a fait accompli, like we're fucked and there's nothing we can do about it.
I want to be generous towards people that feel that way, because coming to the climate crisis de novo can be an incredibly overwhelming experience for people, but also it's just an incorrect assessment of where we're at.
In fact, it is a spectral problem, by which I mean it's not binary like nuclear war, it's not like you either press the button or you don't, and then the world explodes.
There's a whole range of outcome, and the only thing that is going to determine where we land on that range of outcomes is what our governments do, and how they act, and how they respond to the will of the people to save our civilization from unraveling.
It would be impossible for me to feel like there was nothing to be done on the climate crisis, because there's always something to be done.
I also do think that the camaraderie of being in a social movement is incredibly important, and a social movement that involves actual meetings with actual people rather than anonymous forums on the internet, because then you're accountable to community, rather than just going down a YouTube rabbit hole.
But I also think hope is a discipline.
I have had to work to maintain it for myself, and when I say hope, I don't really mean that it's not the same as optimism.
Hope is basically for me equivalent to indeterminacy.
Meaning we don't know how this is going to go and we do retain the power to shape it.
I am very appreciative of what you said about it being a spectral problem because one of the things that we point out again and again with some of the
really noxious New Age spiritual ideologies that we cover is that they are, I'm not going to use this word in a diagnostic or an ableist sense, but they're bipolar in the sense that the world is either going to be saved or you have to leave it.
Uh and there's almost this you know sort of black and white thinking on off switch um as you said you know it's not like nuclear war that that it will either happen or it won't um but in many forms of That's the choice on offer, is that you succeed and you transcend and you become greater than yourself and you self-actualize or you perish.
Yeah.
Maybe you saw through that as well.
Maybe you got hints of that.
Yeah, and I have a section in the book where I talk about I think what those stories offer that is incredibly appealing to me, people, including to me and I've had to learn to live without, is an ending.
You know, these millenarian stories end.
They either end in salvation or they end in annihilation, generally.
But people, you know that at some point things are going to get wrapped up and you'll know what has transpired.
And I think part of living under the climate crisis is knowing that this is never going to end.
The narrative, we are in meteorites in a narrative that will just keep going, and just keep being contingent, and that is the narrative of history, arguably the narrative of geology.
It's the narrative of the Jews, too, isn't it?
What do you mean by that?
I mean, it's the narrative of, we have these laws.
We have this way of doing things come hell or high water, wherever we have to go, we will carry this process of being in relationship with each other and with the Most High intact.
We will carry We will carry tradition.
It's not going to end.
It's not going to end.
I mean, I understand that there are ideas of Messiah, but the culture doesn't yearn for it.
I mean, this is so interesting because I'm thinking now about what does the Messiah do as a narrative technology, right?
What the Messiah does is offer an ending And then move it, like move it forever, keep it forever at the horizon.
Right, right.
And so you get the satisfaction of anticipating an ending, but that ending is never going to come, because, you know, unless you're, you know, think that the second coming is like a real, like a literal event that is forthcoming.
But, you know, people do kind of yearn for it.
You know, Mashiach Now is like a big slogan you'll see on bumper stickers in ultra-Orthodox communities in Williamsburg and to Jerusalem.
The genius of that is that it gives the satisfaction of an ending without actually ever having to end.
But I think what we have to do with the climate crisis is know, like, we won't even get that.
There's not going to be a messiah and we can't keep him or her or it eternally on the horizon.
We just have to keep riding this eternal wave and doing our best to bend it towards justice and bend it towards the undeniable truth by the lights of many religions that every human life is of equal and inherent value and that the thought of a very few people Profiting immensely from the suffering of millions is abhorrent by basically any belief system.
Okay, so speaking of millenarianism, speaking of those who come into climate change or collapse awareness and they are immediately kind of sucked into Apocalypticism and this kind of light black and white non spectral outcomes.
I'm a cult survivor and this has That experience, that fact about me, has intersected with my own climate fascination and obsession in two ways.
So, early in the aughts, I got very interested in deep green resistance.
And speaking about, like, final solutions, they had this theory called decisive ecological warfare, where they were going to create, you know, eco-terrorist cells and, you know, and take down modern civilization.
Anyway, I went to a meeting in Toronto, where I live, where Derek Jensen was giving a talk and the room was like 110% cult vibes.
Wow.
And I stayed away.
Fascinating.
Well, because he's incredibly charismatic, the room was just lit and buzzing with the promise of everything is going to change and it's going to change because we're going to, you know, recruit enough people to create enough Sells to, you know, realize the truth of what must be done right now.
Now, more recently, it's been plain to me that there are charismatic organizations that I would characterize as charismatic anyway, like Extinction Rebellion, that are riding high on, like, a ton of emotional charge, perhaps manipulation.
I went to a meeting in Toronto here where there was meditation, there was a lot of circle work, there was kind of a faux group therapy, and then I raised my hand to ask a question about, like, pragmatic goals and tactics.
for the upcoming action and I was told oh this isn't really the space for questions and I was given a phone number to call somebody later so like huge red flags like I wanted to ask a pragmatic question about like what's the end goal here what do you expect to happen for the young people that get arrested at this action you know what's the support network and all of that stuff so anyway right now I'm concerned that cascading world crises are an assembly line for cults in
In the absence of clear answers, people will default to prophecy.
In the absence of clear leadership, people will default to demagoguery.
In the absence of social bonds, people will default to dominance hierarchies.
Or they can.
That might be a little bit cynicism, cynical.
And, you know, I know of one climate doom-ish prophet who makes apocalyptic predictions that never really come through, and he seems to create very tight bonds of questionable health with his followers.
So, have you seen this type of thing in climate movements?
And if so, how do you envision them staying healthy?
Honestly I don't that much because I've oriented my life around what I would describe as the healthy political movement around climate change that actually has like a theory of change of how it's going to strategically impact the political system to compel policy change.
I haven't engaged that much with Extinction Rebellion, but so I say this not to cast shade on anybody who's involved, but from afar it has sometimes felt like Some of their activities are much more an expiation of emotion than they are a strategic political intervention.
Which isn't to say those things are mutually exclusive at all.
But if I were to array it on that spectrum, and I think for the climate movement to stay healthy it has to, it has to stay strategic.
Like honestly that is like, and what strategy really is, is like Not allowing an ounce of magical thinking to enter your... to enter... er... yeah.
Not allowing an ounce of magical thinking To enter your theory about how you're going to change the world, to prevent it from collapsing.
And I think there's going to be a lot of red herrings, there's going to be a lot of snake oil, I think you're completely right.
And I think that's even more impetus to build a strong, intersectional, politically grounded, strategically minded, disciplined, but also emotive climate movement.
That can be the flame around which, that's a bad metaphor, that can be the default to people who want to take action and not some of these more nihilistic or just frankly anti-pragmatic, even anti-politics instantiations which, you know, and to me the basic kernel of that is like,
In a way, strategy is the highest form of ethics, I think.
Or a very high form of ethics.
Because you're being dead serious about your responsibility and your desire to improve the material lives of everyday people, especially poor people.
And if you take that deadly seriously, then you won't allow your thinking to flit off into something that looks more cultish.
You know, I also think there's a risk that, like, If our political systems, if we fail to make our political systems address this problem at scale, people will not unreasonably lose faith in those systems entirely.
And that's what really scares me, because I do think, given the timeline we have to solve the climate crisis, the apparatus of government is the only institution we've created that's large enough to affect the kinds of changes we need to affect in the time that we have left to us.
Yeah, I think strategy, strategy, strategy, and I think we should take as our, if we're going to deify anyone, we should deify Bayard Rustin, who was Martin Luther King's sort of right-hand man, and just an incredible strategist, but also an incredible moral thinker, and not somebody like Darren Jensen?
I don't even know.
It was Derek Jensen.
Derek Jensen.
Yeah, so did you miss all that?
Was that earlier in sort of... I missed that.
Okay.
I was really lucky in that my entree into the climate movement was the student fossil fuel divestment movement, which was like, which was really grounded, knew what the demands were, knew what the theory of change was, has been massively successful.
I mean, we started this, the Brown's divestment campaign in 2012, back when nobody knew what the fuck that was.
And finally, you know, nine years later or something like that, Harvard has finally divested.
Of course, they're the most conservative of the Ivies, but it's had a massive impact.
I'm starting to wonder whether the rise of, I would say, charismatic but also somewhat nihilistic eco-activism with a poetic bent coincides with also the rise of
4chan and the underbelly of the internet where, you know, there's no real sense that there will be a political solution to the horrible problems that are by now well known.
But yeah, that is extraordinarily lucky that you missed that.
I'm kind of shocked that you don't know his name because I think I'm about 20 years older and it was so central to my ecological awareness and formation.
But it just wasn't strategic and it didn't give me any sense that I mean, literally, their movement was built around, are you going to be willing to invest in one or another level of a kind of guerrilla movement to stop the machinery of civilization?
Which is interesting.
I mean, and I was, again, lucky that there were leaders, for example, like Bill McKibben, who were sort of at the forefront of the American climate movement when I came into political consciousness, who are just like learned, strategic, humble people who have no interest in being, humble people who have no interest in being, becoming a godhead.
Right.
And so I was lucky in that respect.
You know, about property destruction writ large as an answer to the climate crisis.
I mean, it's not like I've stayed away from this body of thought altogether, right?
I read the Swedish Marxist Andreas Malm just put out a book called How to Blow Up a Pipeline.
The more accurate title would be Why to Blow Up a Pipeline.
He makes the case that, you know, the climate movement can't limit itself to nonviolence and has to start using property destruction as a tactic.
And, you know, I read it because I was like, okay, I'm going to keep an open mind.
If he makes a compelling strategic case for how blowing up pipelines is going to get us to net zero by 2050, like, You know, it would be hard, honestly, for me to avoid the realization that, ethically, I had to, you know, that was something I needed to engage in.
But his strategic case was incredibly anemic.
In fact, I came away from that book feeling like, what that would mean if we actually did start destroying fossil fuel.
...infrastructure with like whatever, C2 or Molotov cocktails.
What that would in fact do is hand on a silver platter to the Republicans the term eco-terrorists, which they've been trying to make a real thing for decades.
Suddenly they'd have the moral high ground and the climate fright.
Many dedicated activists would go to jail for decades.
Right.
And it would actually set us back by years and years and years, and I've met lots of people, especially, like, radder than thou white men who really want to blow shit up, who have tried to make the case to me that we have to do this, and not one of them has come close to being strategically convincing.
You know, I'm still open to that case being made, but I think, you know, and I'm not familiar with deep green resistance, but it sounds more like a performance of politics than the actual thing.
Well, I'm wondering strategically whether the ideas worked in Sweden somehow and not in an American political context.
Maybe, but they have to work in a global context, you know?
And there's no way that the destruction of pipelines could ever be allowed to get to a scale where it would outpace the decarbonization allowable through systemic policy change.
Just like, no way.
Especially given that states still have the monopoly on violence.
I really think there's a good dose of magical thinking in there.
So the math just doesn't work out?
Yeah, you know, by my lights, it doesn't.
And that's why I've chosen the strategic path I have, which is right now trying to get this potentially historic bill through Congress that really would mark a watershed in how we're investing in tackling the climate crisis.
And also, it would probably keep you out of jail for the child that you may or may not have.
I want to turn to that as we bring this home.
Turning to parenting now, I got the sense, I spoke about it before while reading your book, that the child you were imagining writing to is not only you.
and that the writing was a form of soothing internal dialogue, but that inner child also would be a kind of lifelong companion.
So I wonder if you still talk with him in your head now that the book is done.
I think it's hard to distinguish sometimes in my own head whether the very vulnerable and open person I'm establishing a discourse with around the climate crisis to feel whole and to feel sane in this century,
Whether that person is my hypothetical future child or a vulnerable early life version of myself or in my highest moments something much different than me.
Maybe a member of another species, maybe an inanimate object, something with whom I want to establish a solidarity in a world of increasing upheaval.
It's not always clear who the interlocutor is, but I think I very much do still take quiet moments to myself.
To feel my own feelings around the climate crisis, or to try to feel them, because sometimes they're hard to access, and to bounce those off, yeah, somebody in my head who feels sympathetic and open to having that conversation.
But I will say that if I sound crazy after saying that, I think also the benefit of writing this book and taking this knot of overwhelm out of my chest and putting it down on paper, it's meant that more and more that conversation can actually happen in my life.
With my partner, with my parents, with my friends, with people in the climate movement, like, this, the book has been an impetuous conversation sort of beyond my wildest dreams and I'm, in a way, I've sort of...
I tried to bring to bear the emotional infrastructure I wish existed around this problem 10 years ago and make it manifest in my life.
Well, you also provide a kind of accessibility by choosing that interlocutor because it's very vulnerable and it's very personal and it shows that you are re-enchanting yourself as much as you can with The writing is really all about close attention.
world, even as you are lost in legislative actions and the pinging of your phone.
The writing is really all about close attention.
I've got this passage here where you're obsessing with grass islands and parking lots.
So you write, Stopping in front of one of the islands, I tried to imagine that I was a very small inhabitant, stranded there in an asphalt ocean, how each of the few objects that composed my world would take on a commensurate importance.
An unusual duting of sand toward the southern edge, a splintered field of mulch on the eastern, not to mention the oblong shrub itself, which would, in my new ontology, assume an almost unspeakable significance.
I imagined familiarizing myself completely with the island, every gradation of soil, each small bit of bark and trash, until its contours became like those inside my head, private and rote, wholly a part of me.
I can't explain it much more than this.
I wanted to live there, to contract my horizon until I resided, not in a world of redundancy, but in one of utter uniqueness, an island so buoyant with meaning that it would never, ever be submerged.
And then there are other passages where you are meditating on, like, the wood grain on your bookshelf.
And I wanted to ask if, has anyone pointed out that part of what you're doing, I think, is you're describing self-care in the form of a kind of regression.
As you're writing to a child, you're doing a very childlike thing.
Like these, you're describing things that my five-year-old does.
And even, you know, younger children squatting down, getting close to the grass.
And it occurred to me that, like, this granular attention is a way of relieving you from the vastness of the problem.
But I also wonder if you ever feel like you might get stuck there.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Nobody's brought me up to that, brought that up to me, but I really do see it.
But I also, I think that I might question that framework a little bit.
Not so much that I'm getting in touch with my inner child, but that I'm trying to preserve things that the modern conception of adulthood, I think, has to its own detriment relinquished.
And that there's nothing, I don't think, I mean, who knows, I'm not a developmental psychologist, but you know, I don't think there's anything inherent about close attention
to the physical world that is inherently childlike, but I do think it's something that, whatever you want to call it, capitalism or the Great Acceleration or something, basically demands we lay aside in order to enter adulthood in the 21st century.
Yeah, I guess that's me trying to hold on to that.
And as you say, step outside of the enormity to see the specific.
It is immensely soothing to me.
I don't think I'll get stuck there, because I'm also a person that likes to get shit done.
You know, that's why I'm an organizer, and that's why I'm involved in this movement.
I've seen my efforts and the efforts of the people that I'm in community with, the many, many people far from just me working on this problem, literally at this point, probably hundreds of thousands of people in this country actively engaged in the climate movement.
I've seen their collective efforts result in real sea changes.
You know, like just yesterday, you know, my current job, I'm the campaign director for something called the Climate Jobs National Resource Center.
So I support labor unions in taking more aggressive and strategic action around the climate crisis and to make quote-unquote climate jobs a reality on the ground.
And our coalition of labor unions in Illinois just successfully passed a historic clean energy bill that's going to decarbonize the entire economy by 2045 and attaches some of the strongest labor standards in the country to those dollars, as well as prioritizes investments in low-income communities and communities of color.
It's a thing.
Yeah, it's incredible.
And I see that shit happening and I want more of it.
you know it's It's incredibly motivating, and it's why I'm in this work.
For me, it's always about a balance, because I've felt sometimes when I'm veering too far into politics and letting it consume my life entirely, it can become like a game.
That is divorced from the emotional and philosophic reality of the climate crisis we're actually dealing with.
On the opposite side, if I were to sink completely into Eckhart Tolle's preferred life, where I just stare at a flower on my porch for the remainder of my days, to make somewhat light of what he's proposing, I would be giving up on
The opportunity and the responsibility, the grave responsibility, to contribute to the most consequential social movement of my generation, and potentially of the century.
So I just wouldn't give that up for anything.
I've got a question about whether you're willing to hear a little input from me as a parent about how this book might have been different if a baby had arrived, like, say, during the second draft.
Is that cool?
Yes, please.
Okay, so you have this great
Moment where it's one of my favorite parts of the book actually where it's the day after Trump has been elected and you are desperate for solace and meaning and your sister who I don't think we've heard from in the book since you were fishing stones out of the river invites you down to Brooklyn to hang out for the day and you are
Lying on the floor, trying to recover, and she's babysitting baby Joanie.
Joan, yeah.
And Joan is climbing all over you, and then when it's time to take her for a walk, she is pointing her chubby little finger at all of the things in the world that haven't changed, even though Trump has been elected.
And that was such a prescient kind of account of exactly what happens when you have your attention focused through the attention of the baby and But then the thing that maybe you didn't have space to speak about is that Joan comes with a lot of business, right?
Joan is pointing at things that are real, but she's also filling her diaper, and there's a lot of food to get, and there's a lot of...
The parent has to be nap captain and figure out when that's going to all work.
And so there's this great, amazing relief of that's a job now and it makes you give up on other jobs in a way.
And so I really loved, I really loved that.
And I was like, I was like, oh yeah, and wait till this happens.
And then the other thing, the other thing is that You know, you very sweetly anticipate all of the flaws that the hypothetical child might see in your reasoning or might question you about, you know, how did you act and so on.
I think what I thought about when I'm reading about this sort of longing to be intelligible is that whoever the child is, what they'll most remember is probably the basic stuff around You know, how well did you listen and how well did you facilitate me, you know, in this difficult moment?
And, and, you know, how was, how was, how was the handoff at school?
And there are all of these sort of very small moments that are way less, they're smaller, they're, they're, they're, they're like the island, uh, the, the traffic island in comparison to the problem of climate change, you know?
Um, and so, and then also, also I thought, um, Uh, what's absurd about parenting, perhaps at all times, but especially now, is that One will still fail in very basic ways emotionally and, you know, relationally.
One will be an asshole.
One will lose one's temper.
One will, you know, and even that will happen.
Even all of that will happen despite the enormity of the circumstance and the stakes.
And there will be absurdities about that as well.
You know, that one will No, and be meditating upon the problem or they will feel it.
And they'll also be like puzzling over how much Lego to buy.
A lot, a lot is the answer to that question.
A lot of Legos.
Right, a lot of Lego, and then I'm as depressed by the problem as I ever have been, and I'm thinking about all of those little red bricks just sitting at the bottom of the ocean, and not being able to dissolve, and
It's just, there's no answer to this collision between the world of small intimate needs and the vast world of this existential problem.
And so, just because there is no baby in the book, I wanted to share with you like, Yeah, that's beautiful.
I really appreciated that.
at least with these babies feels or remembers as I was going through it.
Yeah, that's beautiful.
I really appreciated that.
And I mean, part of what this book was trying to do was to break down some of the artificial barriers, I think, that have been constructed between the stratosphere of the climate crisis and the intimacy of a family.
But I think it's also to recognize those distinctions and just to say that the mundane will go on, you know?
And thank God for that.
It's almost hearing you talk about the endless and detail-oriented work of legislative change.
That is like parenting.
I mean, yes, some of these legislators are children, it's true.
Well, they're children, but also just the process of making everything happen is so grindingly... Oh, this is what I wanted to say, is that especially before becoming a parent, I had no clue Of how incredibly boring it could also be.
And so that also is humbling in a sense that the project of saving the world, which you overtly describe in your book, is probably going to be contrasted with Oh my god, I've got to watch Paw Patrol.
And it's going to kill me to not look at my phone while I'm watching Paw Patrol.
Yeah, that is a particular challenge I'm not ready for.
And I think, how could you be, honestly?
How could you be?
Last thing I want to do is, I just want to pick out one of the hundreds of paragraphs that just Stunned me.
And so here it is.
And soon the Earth's pace will draw near to your own, and there will be no distinguishing the two.
Rivers will run their banks, and mountains will slide down themselves, and baby teeth will wiggle loose, and fires will leap from their rings, and rings will be fitted to fingers, and the smoke will ruin the photos, and the glaciers will wind up their gullies, and the videos will play on fast-forward, and the cat will lie down on the carpet, and the ocean will rise from its knees, and you will wake up exhausted, listening for rain.
And I just wanted to say that, tragically, it's passages like this that burn, like, seemingly endless reserves of literary fuel as they light up the world, so your literary footprint, I think, is just too big.
And, you know, I don't know how you feel about leaving the rest of us choking on your exhaust.
Jokes aside, it's incredible and I kind of wonder, you know, are you going to be able to keep working, you know, without the burden of having to do something like this again without, you know, having to do the next book given how deep this one went?
I think I'm pretty clear that my dedication, first and foremost, is to the climate movement and the work entailed in making it successful and making it beautiful.
And I don't, I didn't intend with writing this book, nor do I intend now, to become a professional writer in the sense that, okay, now I gotta think up my next book.
I think the next book will probably come, in the sense that writing is a way I process reality, and some gorge is going to make its way up my throat at some point.
But I think I'm, you know, for now I'm waiting for it to come to me, then feeling like I have to pump an additional salvo out the door.
But I really appreciate your words, they're immensely generous.
They're all meant.
And the one very, very last thing is that, and a happy thing, is that, you know, you're a real reader and the reading list you generate throughout the book is extremely rich.
And I'm just wondering, for the benefit of our listeners, if you can, like, rattle off your top 10 books, especially novels.
Oh my god, this is like a candy in a candy store.
Wait, what's the expression?
This is like a kid in a candy store kind of question for me.
You're right, I do read I would say 80-90% novels.
I find that on average I just learn a whole lot more from fiction than I do from non-fiction.
It's true, which is not, you know, non-fiction books can be incredibly edifying and important, but fiction is about inhabiting another person's subjectivity, and I think what could be more edifying than that?
So, a few books, and I'll just list them in no particular order, that I deeply love, although I won't claim these are necessarily my top ten favorites, but The Plains by Gerald Murnane.
He's a genius, little-known Australian author, perhaps going to win the Nobel Prize in our lifetimes.
I had the gift of spending a day with him out in Australia.
I was actually, I wrote most of this book in Australia on a fellowship and I spent a day in his bunker-like home in the middle of the outback.
And he is a, he is a, it was one of the best days of my life, but he's a deeply strange man in, in ways that really come clear on the page.
So The Plains by Gerald Murnane, a book I mentioned on Know Your Enemy, but The Passion According to G.H., by Clarice Lispector, who is a genius.
I'm going to describe a lot of these people as geniuses.
It might get corny eventually, but she's a Brazilian writer from the mid-20th century who is really just a phenom.
The book Pond by Claire Louise Bennett, a British writer.
The book The Mushroom at the End of the World, which is, in fact, non-fiction, if you had to go on one side of that divide, although it's probably the most fictive non-fiction book you'll ever read, but it's the anthropologist Anna Tsing, who is really just An unbridled thinker and creator, and I just admire her intellect so much, and she lets her thoughts roam in very productive ways.
That book is sort of about the supply chain of matsutake mushrooms as a metaphor of, but also a real instantiation of, life in the rubble of capitalism.
I'll leave it there.
The novel Ice by Anna Cavan, who's a British writer who tragically died of a hair A heroin overdose in mid-century but produced probably the best piece of climate fiction I've ever read and it doesn't have to do with global warming, it has to do with global icing.
There's a giant sheet of ice making its way across the face of the planet and society has to react to the fact of its imminent doom.
But it's also potentially a metaphor for heroin addiction.
It's just an incredible book.
And it was written decades before the climate crisis was a thing that she would have known about.
The novel Stoner by John Williams.
Just gorgeous.
Leave it at that.
The Undying by Ann Boyer.
That is also sort of nonfiction.
A just lashing and poetic criticism of the Anti-cancer industrial complex.
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson, who's a Finnish writer who also wrote children's books, but this is a book for adults about a summer spent with a young girl and her grandmother on an island in the Finnish archipelago that, I don't know, taught me a lot about growing old, even though I haven't done it yet.
Anything by Rachel Kusk or Lydia Davis.
The book Duck's Newberry Port.
I'm just going to go on and on.
There are only three left.
The book Duck's Newberry Port by Lucy Ellman that is incredibly long.
It's like a thousand pages, but I swear to you it's a page turner, even though it only includes eight sentences, eight periods in the whole book.
I know it's very crazy, but it's the best encapsulation of, I don't know, what it was like to be alive in the Trump years that I read.
The book Counter Narratives by John Keen, which takes a lot of sort of traditional rubrics for
like slave narratives and flips them on their head and queers them in really interesting ways and finally the book Carpentaria by the indigenous aboriginal novelist Alexis Wright that includes the most satisfying scene of fictional fossil fuel infrastructure destruction that I've encountered in letters and if that's not inducement I don't know what is.
So that was way more than you asked for but that's I love talking about books and those were a bunch of them.
