Hi friends,
In her 2020 novel The New Wilderness, author Diane Cook tells the story of a world transformed by climate change. Set in the Western United States, the country has been carved up into different zones, including the City, the Wilderness, and the Private Lands, but the action centers on a community of folks who have been sent to the Wilderness as an experiment to see how this tract of undeveloped land would fare with humans on it.
It’s a survival tale, and a mother-daughter love story that asks some big questions about how humans will adapt our lives in this fast-changing world. How will we live? How will we love? How will we grieve our losses? When our actions are changing the world in such dramatic ways, these are some good questions to be asked.
Last week, a new IPCC report came out. No new news, but a louder alarm emphasizing the irreversible damage brought on by inaction on climate change. My big takeaway was this:
“The choice is not between if we transform or not anymore,” said Edward R. Carr, a professor of international development at Clark University and an author of the report. “The choice is, do we choose transformations we like? Or do we get transformed by the world in which we live because of what we’ve done to it?”
Transformation: the act of radically and dramatically changing the form or appearance of something.
Usually when we think about transformation, it’s in terms of individual behavior. Transform your life by losing 30 pounds with this diet! Transform your life by taking this course that will help you earn six figures! Transform your life by practicing deep self-acceptance (ok, that one I can get behind)!
It’s an exciting idea, dramatically changing your life and hurtling into a new one, with all of its unknowns. But our constant emphasis on the individual isn’t suited to the vastness of transformation. Instead, maybe we can transform our lives by radically and dramatically changing this world. But how?
In The New Wilderness, set roughly 30 years in the future, transformation happened to the characters and their society. They were forced to adapt to a world that didn’t change for the better. The city they called home was uninhabitable; the wilderness they once retreated to for solace or recreation was now equally beautiful, scarred, and life-threatening.
If we have any hope of choosing transformations we can deal with, lets, as Rilke wrote, live the questions of how we can transform society to be more equitable, more resilient, more interconnected, safer. But how?
The IPCC report talks about the need to transform the ways people build homes, grow food, produce energy, and protect nature. It’s more than that, though.
In her essay, How to Build a Rugged and Resilient Society, Anne Helen Petersen suggests the need to rebuild every social structure and institution we’ve created - from marriage to childcare to higher education to healthcare - to better fit a world where we’ll need to be much more openly interconnected and interdependent.
On the family/neighborhood/community level, I’ve been thinking about it a lot, two years into the pandemic when family life feels more insular than it once did, and when public life in community feels less expansive, too. How can we structure our lives to feel less isolated, to extend ourselves more toward neighbors, share more work and more play, and generally expand our understanding of what weaving community more closely together looks like in practice. It takes a mindset shift, first, as well as a reallocation of time and other resources.
It sounds obvious: thinking and acting more interdependently will set us up for when our communities face climate-related crises, because we’ll have more experience asking for and offering resources. But it will take some collective effort to get there.
In a recent New Yorker profile of Wendell Berry, whose writing about nature and rural America never fails to inspire me, he observes,
“The deal we are being offered appears to be that we can change the world without changing ourselves.”
Maybe it does come down to transforming our lives first, and walking the path toward living those bigger questions will lead us to transforming the world, so nature - including humans - can continue to exist. IDK! What do you think?
XO
Leigh