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

Meg began by acknowledging the central place of hope in our lives and culture. “The idea that history moves forward, the idea of progress, is one of the building blocks of Western civilization. Part of the bedrock we stand on. But we made it all up. We think our technology will save us, but it actually traps us. Our activism is fueled by similar no

Guy: I’m 100% certain that our species, like every other, will go extinct. I no longer put a date on when our species will go extinct. I just say, “in the short term.” It will be “faster than expected” because that’s the tag line for almost every newspaper article I see these days with respect to climate change: basically, fast things happening qui

So, we’re at this key point. Where our challenge is not just to reduce emissions...but now we have this other challenge: of maintaining our humanity through whatever lies ahead. Maintaining our humanity through that period of ugliness and desperation that we are inevitably on track for.

Yes, the situation we find ourselves in is far worse than we think and maybe worse than we can imagine. . . . And yes, the actions offered by our governments amount to “too little too late”. . . And yes, the promise of technological salvation delivered via mystical “market forces” is complete nonsense . . .Yes, that may all be true. And that should

We can. We must. We won’t.

worry that those same gut-check crisis moments might just as easily kick folks into an even darker me-mine, go-it-alone, might-makes-right attitude.

Everything I know about capitalism, bureaucracy, denial, habit, how much slower our psyches move than our machines, says — and it breaks my heart, and my shoulders slump as I write this — we won’t.

Tim: I think optimism is the expectation that things are going to be OK. That we’re going to get a good outcome. Hope is much more about meaning; hope is the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty. Optimism is one kind of hope, a rather flimsy sort of hope. What we need now is a more resilient kind of hope, one not based on an expe

“hope is the will to hold on to our values in the face of difficulty” — then, so long as we can keep rising to that spiritual challenge, there will always be hope.