Burning Questions

Summer in Tahoe this year — now that it has finally arrived after a historically epic, long winter — has brought its customary splendor: verdant aspen leaves flutter in the breeze; hardy alpine flowers glow in vibrant hues of mustard, crimson and violet; the lakes move and murmur in shimmering rhythms, beckoning and mysterious. It's glorious and delightful… and I feel oddly guilty for being able to enjoy this bounty; to be beneath skies that aren't choked with smoke — and a little nervous knowing it's only a matter of time before the dangerous haze returns to the Sierra Nevada.

If you're fortunate enough to be breathing clear air as you read this, do you struggle with a tinge of guilt and dread, like I do? Or, if you're looking out your window at yet another dusky, gritty sky in the midwest or east coast… or the inescapable heat in the south… do you feel that creeping sense of unreality, like one of those unsettling Netflix series has started to seep into your real life, tainting it inch by inch, hour by hour?

An April 2023 article for the American Psychological Association cites many significant mental health impacts proven to result from the severe hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and heat events in recent years, including increased incidents of PTSD, suicide, aggression, anxiety, and gender-based violence. According to that APA article, 'Even some Americans who have not been directly affected by a climate disaster are experiencing climate anxiety — an overwhelming sense of fear, sadness, and dread in the face of a warming planet or anxiety and worry about climate change and its effects.'

Whether one 'believes in' the effects of greenhouse gas emissions or not, our collective future on this planet will feature more disasters with every passing year; more days of gritty, dangerous air; more battles with insurance companies over flood or fire coverage; and more struggles with mental health issues like depression and anger, domestic violence, and substance abuse, as people are forced to change how they live in order to stay safe.

An October 2022 New York Times story on the effects of climate change on mental health noted that 'millions of Americans now brace for seasons with a sense of heightened worry. Will children be able to play outside without smoky skies? What storms will shroud the Atlantic Coast? Will the house survive another wildfire season?'

So, as we gaze into the future, how do we keep these grim likelihoods from coloring our experience, painting it apocalyptic orange even when the skies — for the moment — are clear? For one thing, I think we will become more and more adept at compartmentalizing experiences. I think we'll have to. Like what I'm doing today as I write this: I breathe the crisp mountain air and look at the (seemingly) endless blue sky, and I think: Today is beautiful. The smoke and fire may come — will come — but not today. Today is beautiful.

I often think of it this way: Humans have been metaphorically smoking cigarettes for the last 150 years and have now discovered we've got Stage 3B lung cancer. It's already got us coughing up blood. If we pretend it's not happening, the cancer will kill us. If we act decisively now, we may yet have a chance to survive, albeit not in the pink of health as we once were.

So today, I'm taking a deep breath, and another… Enjoying the clear air in my lungs and the soft blue skies above. And I'm thinking of everything I can do to join the chorus of reasonable, frightened people who see our global home destabilizing more and more every day, calling out to take action now.

Picture this: You're a passenger in a car, driving happily along at a rapid clip (Bob, the driver, is a bit of a speed demon), and suddenly something in the distance catches your eye. You squint and see what appears to be a plummeting cliff ahead. You're headed straight for it. You lean toward the driver and say, 'Hey Bob, do you see that?' Bob glances at you and asks, 'See what?' 'That,' you say, pointing ahead. 'It looks like we're headed for a cliff.' 'Nope,' Bob says. 'There's no cliff. I know this area really well. No cliffs around.' He keeps his foot on the gas, and you continue barreling ahead.

You start squirming, more anxious by the second, because you're pretty sure the car is barreling toward a fiery crash at the bottom of that cliff, despite what Bob says. At this point, you have an uncomfortable choice: Stay in the car and hope Bob is right despite all appearances to the contrary, or open the passenger door and bail out, hoping you don't break your neck as you roll through the bushes.

Introducing the dilemma faced by many workers in today's rapidly climate-changing world: Continue with business as usual despite the looming cliff of ever-worsening climate change impacts, or engage in something known variously as 'climate quitting' or 'conscious quitting.'

A February 2023 article in Yahoo Finance quoted Jeremy Campbell, CEO of the performance improvement consultancy Black Isle Group: '[The COVID-19 pandemic] has made many people think entirely differently about work… Merge that shift with the realization that we are killing the planet and you bring together two powerful forces which have reprogrammed the mindset of people about the way they work and what they expect of the companies they work for.'

More and more people, it seems, are beginning to see themselves as the passenger in Bob the Speed Demon's car, considering whether to sit tight or bail out. I recently heard a fascinating podcast from the BBC called The Climate Question, in which the staff interviewed several people around the world who had changed their careers to move away from carbon-intensive jobs and into work that helps the planet and makes our kids' futures brighter.

Among those interviewed was a man identified as Donald who quit his job as an engineer at Exxon Mobil in 2018. 'Over the course of my career,' he said, 'I grew more and more disillusioned. My concerns were really coming to a head around 2013… that the company was going in the wrong direction, that… there weren't any concerns about the greenhouse gas and climate change impacts…. It was glaring to me how hypocritical we were.'

It only makes sense to bail out of a car that's clearly barreling toward disaster, but the difficulty of a decision such as this is powerful. We all need to make money and feed our families. But the great quandary is how to balance short-term needs (and let's face it, wants) with long-term factors, including mental health.

To conclude the allegory with Bob the Speed Demon, our best choice is to convince Bob to slow down and consider rerouting away from the cliff. Many people are starting to find alternate routes, both for themselves in their own work and individual lives — and as part of a growing chorus demanding action from employers and governments. Those of us who see the cliff owe it to Bob, and to ourselves, to speak up.

If you're anything like me, you grew up somewhere in the United States over the last few decades with a set of givens nestled inside your brain like cozy birds: That ours is the greatest country in history and the answer to the millennia-old question of how humans should best govern themselves; that God created the earth and put man (and, peripherally, woman) in charge of it; that if you save up and go to college you'll have a long, successful career; that human progress is inevitable and without significant cost. And — most importantly — that there is no reason to question any of those givens.

Well, what if some — or even all — of those cozy nested givens were mistaken? What if the way we all grew up thinking about ourselves and the world turned out to be only a tiny sliver of reality, and a misguided one at that? What if, rather than masters of our domain, it turned out that we humans were just a small part of an enormous network of systems that is beyond our ability to truly understand?

Timothy Morton is an English professor at Rice University and a philosopher who coined a delightful and mind-bending term called 'hyperobjects.' Morton's definition describes them as 'things that are massively distributed in time and space relative to humans.' They are things too vast for us to really get our heads around, and likewise too vast to touch or see in their entirety… but they are fully integrated into our existence, as we are into theirs.

Morton had this to say in Hyperobjects: 'You are walking out of the supermarket. As you approach your car, a stranger calls out, "Hey! Funny weather today!" With a due sense of caution — is she a global warming denier or not? — you reply yes. There is a slight hesitation. Is it because she is thinking of saying something about global warming? In any case, the hesitation induced you to think of it. Congratulations: you are living proof that you have entered the time of hyperobjects. Why? You can no longer have a routine conversation about the weather with a stranger.'

The term inspired prolific filmmaker Adam McKay to create a production company named after it (Hyperobject Industries), and the first film produced by the company was the wildly successful 2021 disaster comedy Don't Look Up, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence.

Laura Hudson, writing for Wired Magazine, expands on the concept: 'The word hyperobjects offers a useful shorthand for why threats like global warming are so difficult to understand or accept: They threaten our survival in ways that defy traditional modes of thinking about reality… Hyperobjects speak to the immense, structural forces all around us, and even inside us, that we cannot see with our eyes but strive to comprehend through data or computer modeling.'

The concept of the hyperobject not only points to the confounding 'super wicked problem' of climate change, but also to the expanded thinking that the grasp of the concept requires. While the concept of hyperobjects is disorienting and even unsettling, it can also be powerfully freeing and exciting. It can open one's mind up to the possibility of a world — or worlds — yet to be explored and understood… and, strangely, it also opens up the possibility of a mutual intimacy with everything and everyone around us. It is a humbling, and exciting, prospect to contemplate.

Rupert, our family's favorite backyard Aspen, was standing listlessly in the melting snow the other day, enduring my conversation with the cat, who was stalking some poor small creature along the concrete pad next to the house (where — finally — there is no more snow), when something about his movement in the warm spring breeze stopped my chattering for a moment. I leaned in closer to his slender branches and listened. But he was still and quiet and said nothing… at least nothing I could understand. But that's the problem right there: a human leaning into a tree, waiting for spoken English to emerge.

Trees communicate, but not in any of our human languages. Why do we expect, always, to be met where we are, whether by other people or by other creatures that we may not understand? Like Rupert, for instance. Which brings me to the second of two innovative thinkers featured in this column so far: the late British chemist James Lovelock, who produced the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s and expanded on it over the ensuing decades.

A 2022 Economist article about Mr. Lovelock shortly after he died at age 103 described the Gaia hypothesis as capturing 'the imaginations of the scientifically minded and mystically inclined alike with its proposal that life on Earth behaves like a mega-organism…. Researchers now know that bacteria on land and the oceans alter the chemistry of the atmosphere and the soil, regulating global temperatures. Algae produce airborne, cloud-seeding chemicals. Forests generate atmospheric rivers, and their own rain.'

Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis was — and remains — controversial; in a 2013 article in New Scientist, Michael Bond wrote, 'Gaia may have been rooted in genuine science, and its originator a well-regarded chemist, but when the public lapped it up with the enthusiasm they had shown for mysticism or faith healing, many scientists pulled up the drawbridge.'

As with Morton's hyperobjects, much of the argument supporting the Gaia hypothesis is over my head and much of it is controversial, but I am fascinated by the groundbreaking — and at the same time, strangely intuitive — worldview that both concepts present. Both concern themselves with entities, or systems of entities, that are vast in scope, beyond humans' conventional realm of understanding, and at the same time powerfully interconnected with human life.

In a 2022 article about Lovelock after his death, Australian scientist Tim Flannery wrote about Lovelock's first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979): 'Portrayed as a sort of hippy, flower-power view of the world, the book is in fact a rigorous, numbers-heavy analysis of Earth function at the highest level.'

Lovelock, like Morton, was an intellectual of far-reaching and eclectic accomplishments and interests. In an interview at Exeter University on Lovelock's 100th birthday, a young man asked, 'You are famous for thinking outside the box… How do you do it?' Lovelock sat for a moment or two before replying: 'What box?'

The concept of Gaia — an integrated view of the Earth and all the creatures on it — is foreign to the way most of us were raised to view our planet, and ourselves. But we are seeing, more with each passing day it seems, how interconnected we are: Global supply chains, our food systems' reliance on honeybees, the increasingly complicated chemical interplay of heat and moisture in our weather… the list goes on. Rupert knows this, I think. He's just waiting for us to learn his language, so he can tell us.

After nearly half a year writing Burning Questions, the time has come to turn the focus inward. So this week's question is: 'Who am I?' More specifically in this context, 'Who is this introverted middle-aged suburban mother and wife who suddenly decided to start writing a column in the local newspaper that often swerves into the topic of climate change like a magnet drawn to an iron pipe?'

There are quick, easy answers to that question, but they're not very interesting. When asking who a person is, we are often asking a coded sub-question. With adults, identifying what they do for a living is a quick shorthand for personal identity. As in, 'Who is that guy?' 'Oh, that's my kid's music teacher / That's the town mayor / That's the guy who works the deli counter and makes a mean ham and Swiss on rye.'

I think some people would happily self-identify as their job titles. Those are the lucky folks who found a career that aligns well with their skills, values, and what they find meaningful. I'm happy for those folks. For me, on the other hand (and I suspect for many others), job titles have not been a source of pride or even a reliable marker of selfhood. I've been a teacher, an office manager, and other iterations of those jobs, none of which particularly reflected my skills, values, or what I found meaningful.

But that has unsettling implications: If you change jobs a lot or never find a fulfilling career, does that mean you've never really found yourself? Does it mean that who you are changes every time your job does? Surely selfhood is deeper than that, more intractable. Perhaps it is… But then again, selfhood itself might be an illusion.

'The nature of self,' Robert Lawrence Kuhn wrote in a 2016 article in Live Science, 'is one of philosophy's perennial and persistent questions.' He goes on to quote British philosopher Colin McGinn: 'Our grasp of the concept of the self is very limited because we experience it from our first-person point of view when we say "I," but we really don't know what that thing ["I"] is at all… Our imaginative adventures with the concept reflect our ignorance about what the self actually is and what it constitutes in the brain.'

So who is a person, then? An accumulation, perhaps, of experiences, memories, and a mishmash of thoughts, emotions, and sensations, all of which blend together into a sense of 'self.' And for most people, that sense of self endures throughout the years, despite a lack of real understanding of what that enduring self might be, in any way that science or reasoning can reliably identify.

In my case — as you might already have guessed, if you've read some of my columns — the sense of 'who I am' weaves tightly to the practice of writing and cogitating. I have always lived my life in my head: reading, writing, wondering, hypothesizing, adjusting the hypotheses, re-hypothesizing. I do some of my best thinking when I am running or hiking, when I'm outside, moving and breathing the fresh air and listening to the trees stirring in the wind.

Which brings me to a paradox: I am, and you are, a knotty network of cells, some of which make up a 'body' we can sense as solid, and some of which make up a 'mind' which can think about the body (and itself)… but neither of which would exist without the other. Who is that, then?