I’ve been worried about global warming since I was eight years old. I don’t remember how I learned about it, maybe television or school, but I’ve been keenly aware of global systems since I essentially became sentient. Behind everything, I see the systems working, and I’ve always felt at odds with the fluorescent supermarket. There was something unnatural about the world I grew up in. I sensed it but I couldn’t name it. Not until later.
It was white supremacy.
As a general ruling principle.
I grew up in Huntington Beach, California, which boasted the Nazi rallies in 2016.
White supremacy is a faulty dualistic paradigm that pits White People against Everyone Else. That’s why white people were able to engage in such brutal enslavement and genocide of Africans and Native Americans. White people created a false separation between themselves and those they exploited. It’s similar to how we call animals “it” so we don’t think of them as living beings.
And it’s all related: my sneaking suspicion that “something wasn’t right here” all throughout childhood. There was a clear distinction between the white people, who were the majority, and the rest of us. While my mother is white, I occupy a space of ethnic ambiguity, as many mixed-race kids do. So I was surrounded by white people, but I didn’t look like them.
I didn’t like the gaudiness of South Coast Plaza, a massive indoor shopping arena. I fantasized about living on a ranch. I always had this strange sense like something was missing.
That something was my connection to nature.
White supremacy creates the duality of “me vs. them,” where “them” is the non-white population of the global world. Nature is also included in the category of expendable. Therefore, it’s not in white supremacy’s range to feel empathy for fellow humans, animals, and ecosystems. It’s all expendable.
The me/them split mirrors the society/nature split. White supremacy, capitalism, and ecological destruction all go hand in hand.
So fighting one is fighting the other.
I’d like to think democracy works. I’m getting more involved in environmental stewardship in the form of political organizing, and decided that I’d rather spend my life working to be part of the solution than living in chosen denial.
That’s the underpinning to my forthcoming collection, I’d Rather Be Lightning. I don’t say it directly, of course, but I’d rather know the despair that is possible and choose hope anyway.
That is the paradigm I choose to live in. Hopepunk.
I’m immersed in news and media about the approaching/current ecological crisis because I can’t un-know what I know. We saw how fragile and unprepared our systems were for the COVID-19 pandemic. Human activity is putting so much pressure on so many of the world’s natural systems that scientists think we might have around a decade left, if that, to drastically reduce the output of global carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to prevent serious, irreversible disasters that cannot be undone and could be civilization-ending events. We are approaching or have surpassed so many tipping points, such as biodiversity loss and desertification, that we as a society need to be thinking about how to make rapid changes in society. I mean, rapid. I mean, we need to move so fast and so clearly and so in alignment with each other.
I don’t believe there is any more important issue than this, and every aspect of society needs to realign with the parameters set out by the boundaries of our natural systems. That means we need to shift a culture of consumerism and competition to a culture of community and sustainability.
I think everyone has a role to play. I personally feel a spiritual calling towards writing and organizing. Others are botanists or farmers or arts leaders or visionary entrepreneurs or healers or teachers. We are all connected in the web of life, and it’s Western dualism that separates humans and nature so that it cannot see the obvious link between Antarctic ice sheets and the fragility of human life without the perfect condition of the Holocene. It does require a little bit of science, but basic science, to understand , for example, how melting peat bogs release methane, which is a greenhouse gas, which contributes to the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which causes global warming. And the warming that is already occurring is meting the ice caps, which means less reflective area to bounce back the sun’s rays, which means more warming.
One of the problems is that climate change is such a complex issue that it’s difficult to talk about. People don’t want to talk about it. We don’t want to think about it. We don’t even know how to talk about it because it’s either too depressing or too difficult. And many that I know have adopted an attitude of “fuck it,” which essentially equates to: We’re all gonna die so might as well live it up now! There’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway.
But I’m not resigned. What we need is people power and mass organizing to change the politics and the culture, which will be absolutely necessary if the human race is to survive. We need to work together, not in a dualistic framework of “us vs. them,” but in a holistic understanding that we are all in this boat together, and I’m worried for all of us. I have a biased attachment to humanity and would prefer that we don’t destroy ourselves.
Adapt or die. That is what the most brilliant scientists have been yelling at us now for decades. I think it’s time we listen.