One of the side effects of the climate crisis is perpetual grief
Grieve comfort. Grieve blissful ignorance. Grieve faith in your fellow humans to do the right thing given the chance.
In 2017, under an orange sky and warnings about perilously poor air quality, I wrote about the gutting reality of wildfires, specifically in Oregon. At the time, I wrote about my frustration, about feckless politicians who had waited several decades too long to act on climate change — and about how now, they were paying for it, too:
These fires stand to impact the statewide economy, both in the immediate and the long-term, in ways that are both unimaginable and also perfectly easy to imagine because Oregon has been struggling through it for decades; it’s a state built on dying industries. It’s a cycle that many of the depressed and sagging towns up and down the service roads know well.
Jobs will be lost. Prices will rise. Stores will close. Evacuated towns may or may not return to their previous population. Maybe in a few generations they’ll see a revival. Maybe they won’t.
This is the economic catastrophe that climate-change deniers and anti-regulation crowds warn of then they decry spending for forestry services and tighter controls over logging and water supplies. This is the fire-and-brimstone that they warn about.
Except now it is literally fire. It’s economic Hell. And no amount of free-market power can undo what’s been done.
Which is why first thought when I read about the fires in California wasn’t “oh my god,” it was “already?”
Whether the rest of the nation realizes it, the West Coast has been feeling the effects of climate change in the form of fire for about a decade. There is an entire “fire season” in the Northwest now — there didn’t use to be, but there is now — and most of us just expect, at this point, that numerous weeks out of the summer months will render otherwise ordinary towns into postapocalyptic hellscapes of people in gas masks and clouds the color of bile.
January, though, is unseasonable. And unreasonable.
My second thought was “maybe now that it’s happening in a state that people care about, something will be done.” But I know that’s not the case.
Climate change has already cost us so much and yet we are more than willing to keep paying more and more just to retain some semblance of a normal life. And while we nice little lefties cut every six-pack ring and recycle every aluminum can, our meager efforts are being thoroughly erased by corporate greed — and our peers. The general unwillingness by most consumers to experience even a moment of discomfort in order to reduce the overall impacts of climate change have never been clearer.
I’m not speaking about the people who are living one day to the next, who count every dollar spent and live in places where Dollar General is the only place to buy staples. Poverty is absolutely abysmally unsustainable, from a climate standpoint, but god knows we can’t address it head-on for…reasons.
I’m talking about the middle-class white ladies who can’t imagine downsizing to a hybrid vehicle, the upwardly-mobile millennials who buy shit from Shein knowing it’s both a climate and a human rights debacle. I’m talking about the tech execs who spent more money than there are stars in the sky to develop AI tools that no one wants and the college students using ChatGPT to write their term papers without regard for the enormous environmental impact of their laziness.
Which brings us back to the climate grief that we’re all feeling and should get comfortable with. Because it’s not just about burning structures and flooded towns. Within a few years, we’ll be grieving a lot of the things that made life feel “normal” and routine. It will be a perpetual state of grief for what there was.
Your Starbucks run. Your Amazon Prime same-day deliveries of assorted pieces of plastic. Your Temu hauls. All of the things that we not only should have given up ages ago, but that we should have been pressing our lawmakers to heavily regulate in the interest of real, authentic climate policy. Because, if the November election has shown us anything, Americans cannot be trusted to make good decisions when given the choice.
This is one of the ultimate tragedies of the way we’ve talked about climate change, though. We have put it on personal responsibility almost exclusively. And while we do all share the burden, we are also responsible, through our actions, for showing lawmakers, corporations, and other powerful entities what we want and need.
Again, what I wrote in 2017:
In all of my Oregonian schooling about trees and greenery and fauna, never once did we link science to civics. Never once did we discuss the role of government in preventing forest fires.
Never once did I think that only I could prevent forest fires by doing more than ensuring all of the embers were out.
Never once did I think…that one way to feel more connected was to vote more often or become more active in policy changes.
As a child, my mother instilled in us that we vote with our dollar. And it turns out that a lot of Americans aren’t just bad at the regular kind of voting. They’re bad at the “with your dollar” variety, as well.
Trucks don’t get bigger and more deadly because manufacturers want to make them like that — they get bigger and more deadly because people (mostly men) who have never hauled a load in their life want a big deadly truck. And because they vote for the kind of dipshits who bristle at any and all climate- (and human-) focused policies.
Corporations will do whatever makes them the most money. And consumers know that corporations are the biggest polluters. Which means that consumers will buy the absolute cheapest good instead of those that are more sustainable because they believe it’s the corporation’s job to bring them sustainable goods at a lower cost. But again, corporations will do whatever makes them the most money. And the cycle continues.
Many of us have already begun to think about every move we make in the framework of climate. But clearly, many more aren’t at all.
What they’ll grieve — if they haven’t already — will be a lifestyle that they’ve been allowed to live for too long. They’ll grieve the feeling of doing things without being forced to think of how they impact the air and water and forests.
Climate change denialism has persisted for too long and we’re not, collectively, doing enough to demonstrate the very real, human causes. We must not be, because the denial continues.
The can has been sufficiently kicked and we are out of road. And yet, in the name of comfort and profit, people keep trying to kick it further.
So we also grieve the feeling that our neighbors (literal and figurative) are decent people who are able to connect the traumatic, lethal impacts of climate change to their own actions, both in the home and at the polls. We’ grieve the idea that people are able to take accountability and maybe, just maybe, put the requirements of survival over their own desires.
Because sooner rather than later, the climate crisis will come for you. It will be in your yard, forcing you to evacuate. After watching so many other crises unfold far away, one will almost certainly go from something you’ve seen in your phone to something you’re recording with your phone to warn others.
Eventually, we’ll all find ourselves choking on ash or plucking our belongings out of a sodden swamp of mud and fetid water. And when that time comes, some people will recognize their role in it and the role of their elected officials and the role of policy. And others, high on the taste of boots and the warm blanket of cognitive dissonance, will be unable to see their own part. And they’ll point the finger not at the people whose greed has put us in these disastrous conditions, but at the ones who have been trying to send up the signal all along.
And in that moment, the greatest sense of grief won’t be over the family photos or the heirloom armchairs, but for the tiny, shivering glimmer of hope that maybe once the floods and fires and famines and plagues come to their own living rooms, they would feel compelling to do things differently.