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

Invoke a strong sense of human agency and responsibility.

In his magisterial Lean Logic: A Dictionary of the Future and How to Survive It, British

Per Espen Stoknes distinguishes four kinds of hope: passive hope, heroic hope, stoic hope,

Climate catastrophe is coming. We know this. What we don’t know is how bad it will be. In the best case scenario, an unprecedented global Green New Deal rapidly transitions the world economy off of carbon, holding global temperature rise under 3°C.61 This causes large-scale polar ice melt, 12 inches of sea level rise by 2050,62 and major habitat di

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the non-binding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds

It was called existentialism. It argued—put roughly—that life’s only meaning is the one we bring to it, that its purpose is for us to determine, each for ourselves. And most importantly, it argued that in this absurd universe without purpose, meaning, or objective morality, in a world where nothing matters, the only principled alternative to suicid

but not in a way that is consonant with an objective understanding of the situation. And by “objective” I don’t mean a cynical, realpolitik, business-as-usual understanding of the situation; I mean the cold scientific facts of even the most optimistic scenarios. So, if you’re hanging your hope on preventing catastrophe, you’re hanging your hope on

We’re all going to travel the same shocks and slides; the question is how do we experience it and who gets to decide how it lands. That’s the contest. Credit: Developed by Movement Generation with Our Power Campaign; Updated May 2017 When folks say, “Catastrophe is inevitable,” I think: well, yeah, but change is also inevitable; transition is inevi

So, can I get my Buddhism with a side of strategy, please? I may not be smart enough to “be here now” at the exact same time that I’m making plans for the future, but I’m at least stupid enough to try.

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.