I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

There’s a line in the Oedipus Tyrannus which I translated, where Tiresias the prophet says “Damn, damn. How terrible it is to understand where understanding is useless.” Andrew: How terrible it is to have signal anxiety when the signal is useless?

Mortality is a given; it’s not some sort of shameful error.

Andrew: You’re convinced we’re definitely going down, and fast. You’ve shut the door. Joanna Macy still holds that door open. She thinks we might make it through, though we very certainly may not. I pressed her on it. Was she just hedging her bets? No. And she’s designed her work to prepare us for both possibilities. I sum up her existential invita

The moment we’re in is asking our right brain to seriously step up its game. Jamey: It most certainly is. Andrew: How? What does Jamey the psychotherapist have to say?

Jamey: Exactly. Ralph Waldo Emerson says, “Our moods do not believe in each other.” When you’ve coped with depression, you know how enveloping it can be, and how seductively it can convince you that the darkness which it discloses is the sum total of reality. Then it passes. Andrew: Yep. Been there enough to know that. Jamey: I figured. Andrew: Go

The awareness that we’re heading towards imminent collapse puts us in a predicament. It puts us in an impossible situation. The way to live with it, and in it, is to embrace the whole paradox. Jamey: The right brain has this capacity for paradox; the left brain regards it as mere absurdity, as a mere contradiction in terms.

entailed, nor any of the other five mass extinction events. The sixth one, however, is happening while I am on the scene. I am participating in it by occasionally flying back to New York maybe once a year to see my family. I’m implicated in it. I’m vulnerable to it. It affects me in a way that the previous five extinction events don’t. But from the

“My heart is on fire; but my eyes are as cold as ashes.”

book, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, which speculates about just how the seemingly “permanent” infrastructure we’ve created is likely to decay in the absence of our maintenance of it. That book adds a beautiful piece to our puzzle, because once you realize how fucked we are, the next thing you often wonder is whether the biosphere will be ab