One afternoon in December, I took the 4 train from my home in the South Bronx to an apartment near Union Square. I had been invited to lead a conversation with a handful of artists about the climate crisis and their place in it.
What I found was an intimate gathering of six or seven people. After some milling about over plates of cake and mugs of coffee, we started remembering Hurricane Sandy. We marveled at how much our experiences differed based on the borough or neighborhood we lived in. Sandy turned the Lower East Side—which was originally built for low-income communities but is now fairly affluent—into a place where police cars were submerged and electricity was scarce. Meanwhile, the South Bronx, originally built for the affluent but now the poorest congressional district in the country, came out of the storm relatively unscathed, since it sits on higher ground and is connected to the mainland of New York state.
We wondered how long before another Sandy—or something much, much worse, perhaps something we don't even have language for yet—pushed the masses from Lower Manhattan into the South Bronx. Then where would my neighbors go?
From there, the conversation naturally spiraled into the undercurrent of terror that comes with being alive today. Australia was ablaze, and the embers had barely cooled in the Amazon. A typhoon was encroaching on the Philippines. And that wasn't counting the countless other disasters underway in Africa and Latin America that never made the headlines. Even on our way in, we couldn't help but notice that it hardly seemed like December outside.
I could tell that it felt good to talk like this: open and honest about the experience of watching the world fall apart in front of our eyes. To say our fears out loud and have them, and ourselves, accepted and understood.
It was almost like I could see the weight lifting from our shoulders. But as that weight lifted, it only rose so far. It hung in the air, just above our heads like a heavy ominous cloud, until someone finally popped the question that brought the weight back down on us:
“But what can we, as individuals, do?”
Something remarkable has happened to the climate conversation in the past two years. It's finally found its way out of the academy, oozed out of the Big Green groups and expert circles, and landed in the streets and on everyone's lips. I hear it everywhere: on the street, in the subway, in the airport, in the changing room at my yoga studio, in the checkout line at the grocery store. It's not niche anymore. It's mainstream.
It's beautiful.
For me, it's also bewildering. I am what the meteorologist and journalist Eric Holthaus calls a “Climate Person”—someone whose whole life is bound up in confronting the reality of the climate crisis. I joined the environmental movement in earnest in 2014, when I began working for one of the biggest green groups in the country. About a year ago, I also began speaking out on my own—in essays, on panels, and in Twitter rants. This made me not just a Climate Person but a Public Climate Person.
We Climate People are used to being a small group. Marked by our intimacy with one another, our knowing glances across rooms. We're used to being mocked and sidelined as the killjoys, the bummers. In public places, we intuitively gravitate toward one another, carving out our own little corner of the party or our own sliver of the internet known as #ClimateTwitter, where we can rant and rave and scream and grieve together.
But our cover has been blown now, and the doors of our clubhouse have been torn off the hinges by hordes and hordes of brand-new Climate People. If I had to guess what did it, I'd say it was the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which spelled out in brutal and unequivocal—but most importantly, honest—terms the consequences of a runaway addiction to fossil fuels.
Finally, the general public got a glimpse of what we Climate People stare in the face every day. Once you see it, as we well know, you can't unsee it. And when the shock finally passes and you find your feet again, you're overcome with the urge to do something—anything—to wash as much blood off your hands as possible.
Suddenly, Climate People are popular! Where we used to quietly lament our lack of dinner party invitations and hold our own parties in secret, we're now the belles of the ball. Before, people rolled their eyes, smacked their teeth, and backed away when I mentioned my work. Now they lean in close. They ask questions and actually listen to my full, uninterrupted answer—men included!
And no question is more fervent, more persistent, more desperate than the one that weighed us all down in December: “But what can I do?”
There's probably no question that Climate People hear more, and fear more, than those five words. The askers get more and more frustrated, their newfound sense of urgency threatening to burn a hole in their throats.
They know it's about more than recycling, “buying green,” and turning the lights off when they leave the room. They've gotten the memo that we need structural change in addition to individual change. They've processed past the shock. They're ready to get to work. Why, they demand to know, can't I give a simple answer to such a simple question?
Here's why: Because if you want a real answer—one that won't leave you with tiny solutions that will ultimately disempower you and burn you out—you have to understand that the question is profoundly complicated.
Believe me, I understand why that question seems so cut-and-dried. But that's just an illusion conjured by several fallacies. And perhaps the first thing a new Climate Person can do is understand them.
Let's start with the first fallacy: that climate action is an individual thing. Almost every time I hear people struggle to find their place in the climate movement, it's because they feel unable to do enough to make a difference. They know that the world needs to essentially bring fossil fuel production to a screeching halt, not just now but RIGHT NOW. And they know that no one action they take can bring that about. So then what?
Well, what if your power in this fight lies not in what you can do as an individual but in your ability to be part of a collective? What if you broadened your perspective beyond what you can accomplish alone and let yourself see what you could do if you lent your efforts to something bigger? Yes, it's true that you can't solve the climate crisis alone, but it's even more true that we can't solve it without you. It's a team sport.
Another fallacy: the expectation that a single, neat behavior change will be enough. I've done a lot of interviews, sat on a lot of panels, and I've often heard the question “What can I do?” boiled into an even more maddeningly and damningly simplistic form: “What's the one thing people can do?” There's no such thing. I wish there were.
Especially now, at this critical stage, we have to accept we're all going to have to buckle down for the long haul. Responding to this crisis is going to have to become part of who we are. All the time. Once you understand that, you understand that this isn't about climate action at all. It's about climate commitment. Climate action is recycling or going vegan. Climate commitment is bigger. It's a framework. It's asking yourself: What can I do next? And always next.
Then there's that other alluring fallacy: the idea that if we do the right thing, we can put an end to this madness. That there's a stop button somewhere.
As the climate scientist and brilliant writer Kate Marvel puts it, “Climate change isn't a cliff we fall off, but a slope we slide down.” The climate has already changed, and so what's been done, sadly, cannot be undone, at least not in the near future. But there's real good to be done by not letting it get worse. Limiting the damage is good, noble—valorous even.
By now, you're probably becoming either consciously or subconsciously aware of the heartbreaking truth at the core of the climate crisis: It's so unfair. It is. That's probably the simplest thing about climate change—the injustice. It's apparent at the macro and micro scales. The parts of the world that contributed the least to the crisis will suffer first and worst. Mere children have been thrust into positions in which they have no choice but to fight for their lives, for their right to see the stable planet they were taught about in storybooks and science books but have never seen in real life.
No, it's not fair.
But now that you're aware of that truth, it's crucial to remember one thing: It's not enough to be right. The facts have been on our side for a very long time, but we're still losing. Why? Because this isn't a spelling bee or a standardized test. This is a fight for justice.
The climate crisis is, in more ways than I can count, the ultimate culmination of a centuries-long run of exploitation and extraction, including slavery and colonialism and all of their offshoots. Those horrors were all justified by some measure of pseudoscience that could have been—and was—easily disproved. But that wasn't enough. So it is with the climate crisis.
The scientists and experts have studied the problem and the solutions and presented their findings ad nauseum. But it wasn't enough. Because this isn't just about science or facts. This is about power. And it's going to take an army. That's where you come in, new Climate Person.
I know it might not sound like it, but there's a lot of good news in there. For one thing, you don't have to do this all alone. In fact, you can't. Because we're talking climate commitment and not a single climate action, that means you don't have to worry about nailing it. This is a practice, which does away with the need for perfection. The fact that every fraction of a degree of warming—Celsius or Fahrenheit—matters means that you're never too late or too small to help.
The right time to start your climate commitment is always right now.
But the question remains. “What can I do?” Well, now that you understand that the question is complicated, the answer actually emerges as quite simple: Do what you're good at. And do your best.
If you're good at making noise, make all the noise you can. Go to climate strikes, call your representatives, organize your neighbors. Vote. Every chance you get. Join something bigger than yourself because this is so much bigger than any of us alone. It's about all of us, together.
If you're raising children (and they do not have to be your children—nieces, nephews, and play cousins all count!), teach them to love the Earth and to love each other, teach them the resilience that shows up as empathy. If you're good at taking care of people, take care of the legions of weary climate warriors. If you're a good cook, cook. Make it as sustainable as you can within your means, but more than anything, share it, build a community around it.
The artists I spoke to in December lamented the fact that they weren't engineers or scientists or some other type of “expert.” But as I told them, it is not their job to design the policy plans for rapid decarbonization, to decide which coal plants to shut down first, and what exactly to replace them with. We have people on that. As the writer Toni Cade Bambara once put it, the role of the artist is to “make revolution irresistible.”
Severing ties with fossil fuels is nothing short of a revolution, a rebirth. The truth is our world was built on fossil fuels. It never should have happened, but it did. There's no reversing it. That's why we need a whole new world, and we all, every single one of us, has a powerful role to play as a midwife in this rebirth.
Taken through that lens, you begin to see that you're not powerless at all. Far from it. The world is not falling apart in front of our eyes so much as it is falling into our hands. What will happen if we're brave enough to catch the falling pieces?
That's why it's so impossible for any Climate Person to tell any other Climate Person, new or old, what their own climate commitment should look like. We don't know that special thing that you bring to the movement—only you know that. And we can't wait to see the magic that will happen now that you're part of our world.
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR (@MaryHeglar) writes about the intersections of climate, justice, and emotion.
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