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

He identifies four broad possible responses to this situation: Growth, Continuity, Descent, and Collapse.

The hope we associate with grace, redemption, deliverance; the hope, not that things will get better, but that we will simply, doggedly make it through to the other side.

predicament effectively forever, but all the while we’ll never agree on exactly what in fact it is or how best to resolve it. Finally, we have to accept that our predicament is a moving target that we are simultaneously causing even as we try to disentangle ourselves from it, and all our attempts to resolve it are irrevocable experiments done in re

In America, there’s this very strong need to be hopeful and comfortable. You get the message early on that if you want to get ahead, don’t talk about the really dark stuff. If you want to have friends, don’t tell them how bleak it is. But, inviting people into their honesty can be very liberating. And letting people know they’re not alone in all th

Bill McKibben has put some very precise numbers on our remaining carbon budget. You’re saying we’re going to need to safeguard some portion of that budget for some of these critical transitional steps? Gopal: We need to be very smart about how we use our carbon budget. We should absolutely not be expending any fossil energy exploring for more fossi

In our world of relative comfort and convenience, it’s easy to convince ourselves that we have created everything for ourselves, that we’ve earned all this. We’ve lost sight of the fact that this life is a gift, that all that sustains us is a gift. We’ve lost touch with that sense of gratitude, the same way we’ve lost touch with our mortality. The

I’m going to tell people exactly how bad it is. Good for you. I mean, doesn’t everyone have a right to know what’s what? They certainly do. Then they can decide for themselves what they want to do, or not do, about it, right? OK, so tell them. Because, who am I to decide what other people can and can’t handle, right? Like I said, tell them. But won

Another way to put it is to see that Climate Justice is not a “win-win.” It is not, “we can tackle climate and win on social justice.” Climate Justice is the only way to win, because it is from the injustice that the crisis has emerged.

Each of us has to walk our own path through the Five Stages of Climate Grief. Mine seemed to demand, first, that I admit that “My name is Andrew and I too am a climate denier,” then bargain with the terror of it finally being “now,” until, cleansed by despair, I can awake to my burdens. Along the way, the strange alchemy of gallows humor, that runt