It’s a fine August evening here in Oakland. Out here on the hot deck, a bumblebee buzzes by. Bright sun lights up our neighbors’ old redwood tree. From inside the house, my son narrates his toy train games. There’s only a light haze of smoke in the sky.
It’s the sort of day that makes it easy to disbelieve in change and crisis. It’s the sort of day we steal from our own heavy uncertainty about what is coming.
Still, it’s a work day for me, and my work is trying to learn the shape of change — which is to say, the ways the sky and distant forests and flowers and bees and my son’s future are all in flux, all caught in the upheavals many of us feel and some of us know from experience and few of us want to look at, straight on. It’s another day in the Planetary Crisis.
It is generally, even now, considered a bit pushy — a bit much — to begin any conversation with an acknowledgment of that crisis. It’s part of the nature of this moment that we find a way to live together by hiding from when we are. Never mind that the fate of our societies and of the natural world around us are distinguishable only through self-deception.
It is not even that humanity “depends” on the Earth: we have no existence outside of it. Not a single thing we do or are is not embodied, physical, strung together with strands of causality and relationship and interdependence with every living being and chemical and geological process on the planet. You and I, sitting at our tables, are only notionally separate from viruses and volcanoes, whales and water tables deep underground. That is reality, planetary reality, the kind actually grounded on facts.
Planetary realism is the only kind that matters right now.
It is still considered appropriate, normal even, to believe that the biospheric convulsions wracking our planet are some kind of interesting fact, something we can care about or not, like baseball or Beyoncé. Climate stuff, ecological stuff, we’re told, is an “issue.” An important one, maybe, but still one of many.
But the heating of the entire planet is not an issue. The melting of its ice caps and glaciers; the chemical souring of its seawater and soils; the cleaving away of innumerable lineages of living beings (tossed forever into the pit of extinction); the mowing down of ancient forests and creation of catastrophic wildfires; the sudden collapse of ecosystems in jungles and on reefs that have evolved over millennia; the fouling of rivers and lakes and the spread of megastorms and megadroughts and megafires and global pandemics and complex, cascading phenomena we’re still trying out new words to describe: all of this, taken together (as it actually all is interconnected) is not an issue.
To believe that the sudden upheaval of the natural foundations upon which all our lives are built is an issue is to make oneself a fool.
We have hurtled through a change of eras, before we’ve even had time to decide to see the threshold coming. (All of this was foretold, of course, loudly and truthfully and often. Many just couldn’t be bothered to believe it.)
The geological term Anthropocene gets at it, but for the purposes of thinking well and usefully about when we are, it gets the directionality of impact wrong.
We certainly have been (and still are) transforming the Earth on vast and pitiless scales, in ways that will go on unfolding for millennia. But what is far more pressingly true for us is by altering the planet, we have made our lives no longer what they were.
We have set a fire we no longer control, and the transformations blazing up will be many times greater than assessments of climate impacts and ecological losses by themselves suggest. Because we mistake ourselves and our planet as distinct, we cannot recognize that the most powerful effect of planetary crisis erupting everywhere around us is that we, ourselves, are changed, changed utterly as the man said, and we are severed from all that came before.
We live in a world managed by those with expertise. Indeed, in a world as complex as ours, our societies can no more get by without expertise than they can survive without agriculture.
The airy surreality of outdated expertise has left us spectacularly unprepared for the scale of our own unreadiness. We find ourselves unprepared for what has already happened. Indeed, we’re not yet ready to confront the scale of the gap between our assumptions about the world and the events unfolding around us.
Our current forms of expertise are anchored in the conviction of continuity. They echo with the idea that this crisis deserves our concern, but is in practical terms an externality that can be safely ignored in the next quarterly report, general election, or board meeting; one that can be addressed after other important matters are settled; one that can be subsumed into supposedly more urgent fights for development, security or claims to justice. A crisis that will matter for someone else, some other time, while experts today attend to the important business of operating the status quo.
This notion floats in fragility, like a soap bubble drifting through the bright summer air.
The failure of cultural elites, in particular, to engage reality — in the media, the arts, academia, religion, institutional advocacy and the professions — looms so massive it has become hard to even see.
Our cultural expertise industries and their expert managers largely set the ways we decide what subjects are important to talk about, what kinds of things are interesting to say, who we want to hear from, what forms of expression most deserve our attention, and (above all else) where our urgency, outrage and desire should focus. How we see things is framed almost entirely by the professional efforts of people with expertise in framing the world.
And while it may seem strange to say so — when cultural leaders daily invoke the critical importance of climate action — we hear almost nothing about the most important realities of this moment.
That’s because most of the work that’s trying to focus us on the planetary crisis consists of bringing climate change and ecological collapse and human upheaval into the foreground of our framed attention. It says, “Look, this is important, too!”
But this change of era is not the image, it’s the frame itself.
Everything else we concern ourselves with has changed as our entire context has changed. Yet we continue to try to explain a new context with expertise formed in the old one.
Indeed, experts in every industry expend enormous efforts to convince us (and themselves) that the ways we got used to doing things in a more stable former world are the best ways to manage the challenges of this fearsome discontinuity. Incremental adjustments to our ways of working will, it’s claimed, sooner or later enable us to master the work needed in the coming decades. We see this manifest in everything from climate triangulation strategies designed to protect corporate priorities to climate fiction that repaints rusting apocalyptic narratives with heat waves and rising seas.
But the work needed is to step into discontinuity. To know that nothing is unchanged. To know that much of what we took as a given is now swamped by deep uncertainty and the loss of predictability. To grasp that this time we’re in is not like some other time, but different in some describable way. To see that we are in something far more unsettling, which is a time unlike other times, not just different, but alien to our understanding.
Most jarringly, we will have to admit that we have left behind the entire narrative of climate action that served us with an explanation for more than three decades — that, through collective action we could bring on an orderly transition to a sustainable society, using adaptation and solidarity to make whole the harms unleashed in the meantime. That’s over.
We are in now in a catastrophe of broken continuity that we cannot resolve (even if we limit its further severity) and that will not be made whole by any action within our power. There is no going back.
We’re not yet ready to discuss what that means. We not ready to grasp the enormity of these changes — they escape comparison to our previous experiences — but we’re no more ready to recognize their intimacy, the host of small threads tying all we love and hope for and fear to sets of all-encompassing transformations whose end we cannot know.
To make ourselves at home again within this unknown and unprecedented world is the great task of this moment.