This week I’m sharing a sobering but life-affirming message that I got this week from New Orleans.
(Over the years, I’ve learned more from this City than from any other in America, so I’m always on the look-out for another one of its smoke signals.)
For as long as I’ve visited New Orleans, it’s been contestng with its water-borne environment and, even harder, with its efforts at continuous renewal. You hear it in the music, taste it in the food, see it in its melting pot of faces. Honesty. Bravery. Resilience. I’d also call it Love.
It’s similar with a beloved, century-old house like mine. Like a massive clock with a thousand parts, there is always something to strengthen or abandon or repair to hold the mess-of-it-all together. But your love for your home enables the next thing that needs doing.
It also reminds me of the drudgery and joy of having a a body that keeps getting older, along with a wonderful dog who’s aging alongside. Someday neither of us will be here, although our timer bells are probably set differenly. We get through our drudgery and find our joys in no small measure from the urgency of those clocks and the love we find in spite of their wind-downs.
That’s true of relationships too, particularly the most difficult ones. You always keep a door open for repair and strengthening (even when you’re apart) so there’s love stored up for spending again before the time you have together runs out.
Finally, I’m thinking about the relationships that we have with our democratic ways of life, which we also say we love but whose survival we take for granted and rarely consider honestly. These too are complex, fragile, interconnected systems, always breaking down a little (yesterday) or a lot (today). Still, it’s through glimpsing these experiments in collective governance with practical, caring eyes that we can recognize their terrible fragility and mobilize our efforts to maintain, repair and evolve them before the inevitable comes.
This week, the message from New Orleans is about clear-eyed love for a place that’s slowly but truly dying, and the daily living such a realization requires.
t’s been said that the perspective Nathaniel Rich brings to his essays and books gestures towards a new kind of ecological writing—and I think his readers are right about that.
Different from most of the writing about the climate crisis, Rich’s words hits you in the face with the reality that (as he writes in “Second Nature”): “no rock, leaf, or cubic foot of air on Earth has escaped humanity’s clumsy signature. The natural world [as we’ve known it] is gone.”
Rich begins his rallying cries with the recognition that we’ve already changed the Earth in such fundamental ways that we can never return it to its prior state, however heroic our efforts or romantic our intentions. But that doesn’t mean that love is abandoned. Instead, it’s the same kind of love that we bring to our own lives, when we truly face the reality of our own deaths every day.
Most of us don’t say, “it’s useless to truly live because death will just take it from us.” Instead, we choose to live in spite of (and in some ways) because of the inevitability of our ends. Limited time makes each of the moments that we do have more worthy of filling them to the brim.
Rich’s new kind of ecological writing moves from this same acceptance to the quality of our actions in the meantime. It’s a more sober but less disappointing future because we’re clear-eyed about it from the start.
Instead of wanting to return to a world that we’ve lost forever, it pointedly asks us: “What world do we want in its place?”
Groceries will never again be as cheap as they were before the pandemic. Our politics will never heal itself because our politicians will rarely be better than we are. The world order that we imagined we had 30 years ago is dying because we failed (as a human race) to maintain “this clock with its thousand parts” in the ways that we might have, Yet in these many “deaths”—and in the one that’s on-going in New Orleans—we have the building blocks for life in the meantime, where we refuse to cower in the face of these inevitabilities.
(It’s why I named my post today “A Place That Looks Death in the Face, and Keeps Living.” In all likelihood, it’s the same title that Rich gave his essay when he first submitted it for publication. It’s the title the Times editors used in the print edition of their paper and the title they should have kept when they shared it with me, but I’m happy to give it another run.)
Rich begins his essay by noting that nowhere is safe from climate change but that New Orleans is “atop the list of unsafe places,” giving it a point-of-view that distinguishes it from almost everywhere else.
I’ve never met a New Orleanian who feels safe from climate change. Living here, rather, engenders hurricane expertise — and hurricane fatalism. You become your own disaster planner, insurance adjuster, land surveyor and roofer. You know how many feet your neighborhood is above or below sea level, which storm drain on the block must be cleared by hand before the rain starts, which door sill needs to be bolstered with a rolled-up towel and where water is most likely to pool, with what appalling consequences.
The National Hurricane Center advises those in the path of a storm to have an evacuation plan. Most New Orleanians I know have three plans: one if the storm lands to the east, one if to the west and a third if the evacuation lasts longer than a week. We don’t wait for a tropical storm to form. We track every depression and cyclone advisory with grim scrutiny. There are storm shutters on every window, a hammer in the attic, candles and matches and gallons of bottled water in the pantry. Local news organizations track how many of the city’s drainage pumps, steam and combustion turbine generators and frequency changers are operational at any given time. We are as prepared as anyone can be with the certain knowledge that one day a storm will come for which no preparations will be sufficient.
Imagine you’re living with a sword like that over your head when you turn on the weather forecast everyday. Well, the length of that imaginative leap may reveal the cloudiness of (and romanticism behind) your future vision about the State of Nature.
I would have thought Rich was exaggerating, but I was visiting New Orleans in 2016 when a storm was approaching, and the weather guy or gal was actually talking about the repairs that had or hadn’t been made to certain key storm drains in recent months–like everyone would know exactly what they were talking about and where these drains are located.
Rich quotes with favor Saul Bellow’s comment that:“no one made sober decent terms with death,” but goes on to note that cities can and that New Orleans has, before asking:
What does it mean, for a city, to make sober decent terms with death? It means living in reality. It means doing whatever it can to postpone the inevitable. It means settling for the best of bad options. But it does not mean blindly submitting to fate. (italics mine)
Rich references several of New Orlean’s forward-looking plans, but it was his disclosure that one of them (called the Coastal Master Plan) or “Louisiana’s grand unified theory of coastal restoration, land creation and retreat” automaticallly renews, every 5 years, rendering it “a 50 year plan in perpetuity.” Rich says the most impressive part of it “is its honesty. For the authors of the plan freely acknowledge that, even in the best-case scenario, the plan will fail” but that their work will continue until it does.
Yet despite a future where New Orleans will literally be washed out to sea, its inhabitants are buying a “grace period” for themselves, which (through building and restoring marshland, levees and barrier islands) is “the difference between deliberate, gradual retreat over generations and a sudden one marked by chaos and excessive suffering.”
It’s also worth noting that these efforts are being taken despite the fact (as Rich acknowledged in an interview around “Second Nature”) that Louisiana is sinking, losing a football field of land every 100 minutes. He added: “Were this rate of land loss applied to New York, Manhattan would vanish in less than two years.”
Unless you’re reading this from somewhere around St. Charles Avenue, you know that your city or town doesn’t live like this. “But,” says Rich, “one morning , not very long from now, they will.” It may be too many fires instead, too many 100-year storms, or at the other extreme, not enough rain to fill the local reservoirs. “On that morning, everyone will be a New Orleanian.”
Rich agrees with Torbjorn Tornqvist, an ecology professor at Tulane, that the worst for New Orleans is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes, but that neither the timing of his City’s death nor its inevitability will disable its residents. In this regard, he mentions that Tornqvist said something to him about “value” and even “love” that he’ll never forget:
People find it very hard to accept that a city like New Orleans at some point will not exist anymore. But why don’t we think of the life of a city the way that we think about the life of a human being? Just because our lives are finite, doesn’t mean that they’re worthless.
Rich concludes his essay with a call to arms that rises from his illusionless view about our degrading environment. At the same time, what he urges us to do seems applicable to nearly everything else that feels like a lost cause these days.
The knowledge of our own mortality does not condemn us to fatalism or nihilism. It does not mean that we give up on self-improvement, on reversing injustice, on re-examining our history, on celebrating our culture, on behaving with moral purpose, on setting a positive example for our children. If anything, we love best what we most fear losing. We cherish what we have because we know it won’t last forever. It might not even last beyond the next hurricane season. But for now we live.
I took this picture at the end of the St. Charles trolley line, where a massive, tree-topped levy (and commitment to the future) is temporarily holding the mighty Mississippi back from inundating this part of the City.
Those of us who have never lived in New Orleans have (by definition) spent far less time with the certainty that Nature can’t and won’t regenerate itself to the state where we remember it. Yet even when our daily experience of a degraded Nature “calls out to us,” how fervently and foolishly we cling to our hopes that “everything will turn out just fine” in the long run.
Our blindness may be this willful because our own ways of living continue to be at odds with Nature’s mechanisms and rhythms. A century and a half of our extraction (“Drill baby drill”), pollution and waste continues to throw Nature out of balance, disabling it from regaining the old equilibrium that we pine for and slowing down its “life-will-find-a-way” quest for a new one.
Nathaniel Rich reminds us that we need to face the reality of this death in order to do what we need to do in the days before The End finally comes—and that the death of Nature as we know it is not so different from all those other things that we cherish, like our own lives.
Recognizing Nature’s tragic limits liberates us to reappraise, in a radical way, the different kinds of environmental work that are waiting for us to do–work that New Orleans is already doing and living. Because as Einstein famously said in the course of Rich’s interview: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
This post was adapted from my December 8, 2024 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
Is having a child today—or a grandchild—an expression of fervent hope or an involuntary invitation that you’re handing down to someone who’s unable to refuse it?
It’s a fair question, relating to what are (perhaps) our first jobs: as parents, as caregivers, as either believers or non-believers in the world to come.
Because every newborn is an embodiment of hope, our answers make us grapple with the future as we see it today.
These days, Tomorrowland is no longer the Jetsons flying cars from their open-to-the-sky houses with friendly robots inside, impossibly dressed as maids. Today, it seems closer to Cormac McCarthy’s survivalist The Road or last year’s best picture contender, the farcical Don’t Look Up–harsh and cruel on the one hand, shallow and in-denial on the other.
I’d briefly thrown this question out to you before. That post was in the summer of 2017, years before a pandemic disrupted daily life, environmental collapse was something other than science fiction, or we had a 24/7 view of annihilation in a peace-loving country that often looked surprisingly like our own.
Even if you keep shutting off the news for the sake of your sanity, the brain still completes its gloomy pictures. But then we’re reminded, there have been victories too: those nurses in the terrible breach, that rebound in the numbers of whales plying our oceans, those Ukrainians serenading their fleeing breathern with folk songs and accordions in train stations. Bleak with shafts of sunlight I’d call it, but as the tribulation (a biblical word) piles on, still bleaker than it seemed only five years ago when people were already asking: “What if you decide to bring a child into this world? What do you owe her?”
Before reaching for the bottle, perspective helps. This is neither the first nor will it be the last time that the future looks bleak. In 1891, almost 25 years before the catastrophe of World War I, Oscar Wilde did what great artists always do. He looked out and realized that something was tragically missing in a world that was already marching off to war amidst destructive new technologies and social upheavals, with callow leaders and millions of oblivious bystanders along for the ride. As far as Wilde could tell, no one seemed to be envisioning a better world any more, even though that’s the only world any sane person should want to be heading towards. As he said at the time:
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always heading.
Isn’t utopia the future that we want for our children? Not some nostalgic past that never really existed but a sustainable place with wiser leaders, where humanity is enhanced by its technologies instead of subjugated by them, where we flourish by celebrating our common humanity instead of preying on one another. But none of us will ever reach such of place unless we can imagine it first.
One of my favorite writers is Michael Chabon (check out his marvelous Moonglow if you’ve somehow missed it) and I happened upon an essay of his this week where he (like Wilde before him) looked around, shortly after the turn of a different century, and noticed that something was terribly missing. His queries around “what that was exactly” were prompted by his discovery of an audaciously hopeful scheme that had been launched some time before. It was called the Clock of the Long Now. A tee-up to Chabon’s essay on Longreads described the powerful response that a few visionaries had made to “a disappearing future”:
One of the grandest gestures toward imagining the future is the Clock of the Long Now. Originally conceived by inventor, computer scientist, and Disney Imagineering fellow Danny Hillis, and expected to cost in the tens of millions of dollars, the clock is designed to keep time for 10,000 years. Besides being a tremendous feat of engineering, it’s also a tremendous statement of faith — building it is a bet that there will be humans around over the next 10 millennia to hear its bells ring.
To Chabon, the Clock of the Long Now seemed a utopian commitment, not to a destination on a map but to something that feels just as bold today: that we, our children and our children’s children actually have “a Long Now” stretching before us.
As Chabon quickly understood, the point of this invention was not to measure our passage of time into an unknown future or to celebrate the strange race of creatures that built it. No, it had little to do with our time-keeping or technical wizzardry. “The point of the Clock,” he writes, “is to revive and restore the whole idea of the Future.”
‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without….
Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?
No, we probably can’t—or think we can’t. But the Clock of the Long Now wants to recover that loss, quite literally, as an emblem of belief in horizons that extend beyond the screens that we’re holding in our hands and their always-in-the-present diversions.
Chabon laments that Americans (as a culture and a country) are no longer caught between the poles of “the bright promise and the bleak menace.” Now (and he wrote this 15 years ago) we seem to have mostly the latter and little of the former. I think it’s one reason why we’ve been so gobsmacked by the nobility of Ukraine’s resistance in the face of barbarism—all of these people (where did they come from?) so full of “the promise” in spite of “the menace.”
Asking similar questions, he ends up thinking about his young son, with a tremendous sadness, given how different Chabon’s own speculations about The Future had been when he was that age:
If you ask my eight-year-old about the Future, he pretty much thinks the world is going to end, and that’s it. Most likely global warming, he says—floods, storms, desertification—but the possibility of viral pandemic, meteor impact, or some kind of nuclear exchange is not alien to his view of the days to come. Maybe not tomorrow, or a year from now. The kid is more than capable of generating a full head of optimistic steam about next week, next vacation, his tenth birthday. It’s only the world a hundred years on that leaves his hopes a blank. My son seems to take the end of everything, of all human endeavor and creation, for granted. He sees himself as living on the last page, if not in the last paragraph, of a long, strange and bewildering book. If you had told me, when I was eight, that a little kid of the future would feel that way—and that what’s more, he would see a certain justice in our eventual extinction, would think the world was better off without human beings in it—that would have been even worse than hearing that in 2006 there are no hydroponic megafarms, no human colonies on Mars, no personal jetpacks for everyone. That would truly have broken my heart.
So in response, Chabon tells his son about the Clock of the Long Now, and while he did so his son “listened very carefully” before asking, “Will there really be people then, Dad,” ten thousand years from now? “’Yes,’ I told him without hesitation, ‘there will,” [although, to himself] I don’t know if that’s true.” Chabon confirmed this Truth to his boy because he felt that he didn’t really have a choice in the matter. “[I]n having children—in engendering them, in loving them, in teaching them to love and care about the world—parents are betting, whether they know it or not, on the Clock of the Long Now.”
Just think about that for a minute. What you believe, what you hope, and how you’d answer that child, who embodies “a far longer now” than you do, when she begins to wonder about what lies ahead.
Doomsday scenarios around climate catastrophe have lent a powerful sense of urgency to questions around giving birth or refusing to do so. If what’s ahead are more devastating floods, wildfires, famines, mass migrations, ferocious competitions over scarce resources, and increasing strife among nations, it sometimes appears that all we have to look forward to is an even more Hobbsian world of tooth and claw–and no place for children.
In my own travels through this quandary, I couldn’t help but notice that there are hundreds of articles out there trying to find the “fairness” to future children in our having them today, with most concluding that we should forego childbearing altogether. In particular, these debates have been catnip for philosophers, with one in The New Republic (“Is It Cruel To Have Kids In the Era of Climate Change”) beginning his take on it this way:
In one of his early works, the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche relayed an Ancient Greek legend about King Midas pursuing the satyr Silenus, a wise companion of the god Dionysus. When Midas finally captures Silenus, he asks him what ‘the best thing of all for men’ is. ‘The very best thing for you is totally unreachable,’ Silenus replies: ‘not to have been born, not to exist, to be nothing.’
If that were in fact true it would simplify matters enormously, not only for those of us who are here now but for all the rest who might be coming. But is it really this black and white?
In a different essay, another philosopher (who specializes in the “ethics and metaphysical issues regarding birth, death and meaning”) invites us to weigh the plausible (as opposed to existential) risks that are facing both us and that future child.
Against “the near-certain” threat of a “global warming apocalypse” today, she recalls the failed predictions of Thomas Malthus in 1798 that a human population boom would outstrip the world’s food supply (“Imagine if everyone decided to stop having children back then to avoid the ‘inevitable’ famine?), and somewhat more humorously, The London Times’ prediction in 1890 that by 1940 there would be so much manure piling up after the horse drawn carriages that “every street in London would be buried in nine feet of manure.” (“Imagine if people had decided it was wrong to create a child to wade through the muck?”). As a result, her analysisconcludes more equivocally than Silenus’s. Her “tipping point” for the question ‘Is life a worthwhile risk?” is whether or not you happen to believe the climate-related forecasts.
And I suppose to some extent that’s true. But it leaves us (unhelpfully) in the middle of the climate believer/denier debates, when I think what we need is a sign post that will get us to a more enabling place, to help us decide the matter “in our hearts” (if you will), that brings us to a stand that’s more embedded in human nature than in risk analysis as we consider whether “bringing a child into a world like this” is justifiable.
Which brings us back to Nietzche. Because, as the New Republic essayist eventually tells us, the great German philosopher didn’t agree with the answer that the satyr Silenus gave to King Midas. In Nietzche’s worldview, you should never wish that you hadn’t been born, nor should you refuse to bring children into the world because of the miserable state in which you currently find it.
To some extent, this is because living has always involved both tragedy and triumph. Only today, amidst the cosseting and complacency of a society as rich as ours do we seem to have forgotten this basic tension in our existence. (Before Nietzche and long before Amazon and the Metaverse believing people called these deeply human realities “sin” and “grace.”)
So the Nietzche readers among you will also recall his “Will to Life,” his “triumphant Yes” to the question of human existence, his “affirmation of life even in its strangest and sternest of problems.” To be human is always to struggle to find ways to affirm the force of our lives in the full knowledge that death is also roaming among us.
That’s maturity. That’s what every parent who should be a parent understands.
As they make it “their own work” to fight against what’s unfair and unacceptable, these parents teach their children by their examples, standing right there alongside of them as their kids learn how to do the same thing.
These parents believe in The Future, which is why they answer “Yes” (without hesitating) when they’re asked, “Will there be a future ten thousand years from now?” even though we can never be sure. That hope is always tentative, contingent, and we’re big enough to handle its uncertainties.
All that good parents can be sure of is that they’ll be standing next to that child while he or she begins to claim his or her part of it, that no child in this family will ever have to face The Future alone. Likewise, it’s a standing-on-shoulders legacy that can continue as long as the young and their nurturers are giving a “triumphant Yes” to whatever tomorrow holds in the overlapping work of their lives.
Yes!, even when our streets are clogged with nine feet of sh*t and the warm sun of springtime has just come out.
This post was adapted from my April 24, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning and sometimes (but not always) I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe and not miss any of them by leaving your email address in the column to the right.
I recall the strikingly clarity and vividness of that morning as if it were yesterday. A storm had swept the Northeast the day before, giving rise to a rare meteorological phenomenon known as “severe clear.” I remember looking up while I was walking Rudy and just diving into its photorealism, inhaling everything that was rejuvenating about it. I know where I was standing when it hit me.
But then, like a punishment, the clarity and wonder almost got dashed by the weeks and haunting years that followed, but still I remembered the daybreak that started it all, and how different its offering was.
Maybe because both branded me so powerfully, both have stayed—conjoined in my head—down to this morning. Promise then punishment. Hope then pain.
Has that ever happened to you, where opposites find themselves standing side-by-side and it becomes impossible to forget their inevitability?
That you should never fall for the one because there’s always the other.
As it’s turned out, there was another terrible prophecy in that cerulean blue sky 18 years ago, and it’s two-part disharmony is proving equally indelible. It’s the daily splendor I see outdoors together with all that our failures of stewardship have wrought, as Greenland melts into the sea and hot spots pop up in Rhode Island and now, right across from me, in New Jersey.
I live in a kind of arboretum that frequently astonishes me with its beauty–whether it’s Rudy or now Wally who lets me stop and look up at it, down and all around at it every morning.
In my mind’s eye, I refuse to harness the promise of “severe clear” or even of more dappled mornings to the degradation that almost daily seems to be marching my way.
When I see the one I no longer want to see the other. But it takes daily acts of faith, hope and love to break them apart.
A Deeper Future Than Man Can Make On His Own
When I read Robert MacFarlane’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey last summer, I responded to it with notes, markings on the page and, at least twice, with a “Wow” and exclamation point. The book chronicles MacFarlane’s intrepid wanderings through caves, excavations, sink holes, labyrinths, the quietest tunnels of bedrock, and some of the world’s remotest places. I regularly wondered “why” he was seeking out these claustrophobic and often dangerous destinations and his answer always seemed to be: because he was somehow drawn to them.
For more than 15 years now, I have been writing about the relationships between landscape and the human heart. What began as a wish to solve a personal mystery — why I was so drawn to mountains as a young man that I was, at times, ready to die for love of them — has unfolded into a project of deep-mapping.
These “relationships” between landscape and the human heart are richer and more complicated than Nature gives, on the one hand, Man takes or Man destroys, on the other. In ways he couldn’t always explain, MacFarlane was convinced that there was more toit than that, and whatever was calling out to him might be found if he climbed higher, probed deeper and kept better maps. He described his current motivation this way:
Our ‘flat perspectives’ feel increasingly inadequate to the deep worlds we inhabit, and to the deep time legacies we are leaving
With his “why-question” in mind, my first Wow came towards the end of a chapter called “The Understorey (Epping Forest, London)” about the extraordinary subterranean connections that fungi make to unite the trees into the organism of a forest. MacFarlane finds the modern words that we have—our human-centric words–inadequate to describe what the trees and the fungi have accomplished here, so he looks to a Native American language. (“In Potawatami, not only humans, animals and trees are alive, but so too are mountains, boulders, winds and fire.”) Acknowledging the life around them and their almost intentional roles, native language always made humans integral to the world but never at the center of it because all these other intentionalities have their priorities too. If we’re to restore the relationship between landscape and the human heart, we need to look deeper than the language-based understandings we have today.
The real underland of language is not the roots of single words. but rather the soil of grammar and syntax, where habits of speech and therefore also habits of thought settle and interact over long periods of time. Grammar and syntax exert powerful influence on the proceedings of language and its users. They shape the ways we relate to each other and to the living world. Words are world-makers—and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene [or Age of Man].
As we consider the underland of today’s language amidst the trees of Epping Forest, MacFarlane suggests that we can reshape, with words, the world that we experience into one of interdependence or symbiosis—create what one philosopher has dubbed “the Symbiocene”—instead of furthering a language-driven age that is dominated by human imperatives alone.
Another Wow came towards the end of a harrowing rite of passage. It delivered MacFarlane to an ancient cave on a remote Norwegian island that had been decorated with paintings of people dancing in the fire that had by brought by pilgrims since the dawn of time.
His Norwegian hosts, only too familiar with the environs, ask him why he is so driven to travel there alone in a dangerous, storm-tossed season, but his “reasoning” seems “weak” to explain it, so he doesn’t even try. It’s likely because the pull of a “thin place” like this, where “the borders between worlds or epochs feel at their most fragile,” is deeper than either reason or emotion, buried in heredity, like some instinct to find a better way to survive. And indeed, it’s the very different life force of our ancestors that MacFarlane manages to encounter deep in a cave in Lofotens, Norway.
At first, depleted by the penitential route, he can’t even see the cave paintings. But in his battery’s light:
when I open my eyes and look again, there is—yes, there, there—the flicker of line that is not only of the rock’s making. The line is crossed by another, and joined by a third, and there, there, yes, is a red dancer, scarcely visible but unmistakable, a phantom red dancer leaping on the rock. And there is another, and another, here, a dozen or more of them, spectral still but present now, leaping and dancing on the rock, arms outstretched and legs wide, forms shifting and tensing as I blink.
Their red is rough at its edges, fading back into the rock that made it, blurred by water and condensation, and all of these circumstances—the blur, the low light, my exhaustion, my blinks—are what give the figures their life, make them shift shapes on this volatile canvas in which shadow and water and rock and fatigue are all artists together, and for once the old notion of ghosts seems new and true in this space. These figures are ghosts all dancing together, and I am a ghost too, and there is a conviviality to them, to us, to the thousands of years for which they have been dancing here together.
MacFarlane’s story–about risking your safety to see what ancient joy and celebrating life might have looked and even felt like–ends with a modest claim about its significance. He even lets someone else make the necessary comparison.
Shortly after the Nazi death camps were liberated during World War II, the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux, France were discovered: an extraordinary counterpoint about the nature of humanity. Fifteen years later, when an escalating nuclear arms race was foreshadowing a different kind of doom, philosopher George Bataile went down into the Lascaux caves. When he returned to the surface, MacFarlane quotes him as saying: “I am simply struck by the fact that light is being shed on our birth at the very moment when the notion of our death appears to us.”
MacFarlane’s job as a writer is to connect the underland of his instincts and intuitions with his readers’ world. As we’re pressed each day with the “inevitability” of a dying, unsustainable planet, he shows us that there are deeper ways to envision our future in the language that we use as well as in the ways we can recapture our truer natures beneath the cerulean sky.
It’s embedded within us. We’ve done it before. There are maps that can help us find it.
A Modern Photo Arc and Additional Irrational Acts
Joel Sartore is a National Geographic photographer who has been documenting the world’s captive animal species. Many of them are on the verge of extinction or are endangered or may soon be. He’s already photographed around 9,000 out of around 12,000 in captivity, and his pictures—which are taken in special sets to highlight each animal’s unique characteristics (a story in itself)—are strikingly beautiful at the same time that they engage us with their plight.
To Santore, the zoos where he takes his pictures are no longer warehouses or curiosity shops but conservation centers providing hopeful bridges from where we are today to where we may be headed. As Sartore recounted in a 2017 interview, by the turn of the next century we could stand to lose half of the earth’s current species and many of his photographs could merely be reminders. Or maybe far more than that.
His project is called the Photo Arc. His photos are featured in a series of books, in magazine articles and on his website. They glow like votive candles.
More than a documentarian, Sartore is also a storyteller with an eye for the funny or moving details that make his critters come alive when he talks about them. (He is the man that you hope will bring out the armadillo to meet your children at the zoo.) But as wonderous as the Photo Arc project—his protecting on film these animals that may soon be lost—it was not nearly as compelling to me as what he and some of his fellow naturalists are also doing right now to sustain the animals that still remain.
As Sartore heralds in his interview, one of these Noahs is Tilo Nadleer, who was an electronics specialist but now runs a primate center in Vietnam. Nadleer noticed that the police who were capturing animal smugglers had nowhere to put the animals they also recovered (baby primates, mostly) so they would euthanize them. It seemed unthinkable, but what could he do? So he took on the job of caring for these orphans himself, eventually building huge enclosures, feeding them with native vegetation from an adjacent national park. Nadleer tried to release them back into the wild but his primates kept getting shot, eaten or captured by smugglers again, so he now has successful breeding colonies, with a big percentage of the world’s population of three or four species. Sartore calls him “a time capsule.”
He started a project that he knew in his lifetime would never be complete. He is buying time for many of these animals, hoping that people will quit shooting them and people will leave the forests intact,
His work is an act of faith, hope and love.
Don and Ann Butler’s work at Pheasant Heaven in North Carolina is too. They’re breeding species of pheasant that are extinct in the wild. And then there is Santore himself, call it his second job. He bought land in Nebraska, where he lives, that included “alkaline wetlands and really steep uplands” where a rare breed of bird (long-billed curlews) along with other migrating species, like avocets and sandpipers, happen to breed. “I just wanted to save a little piece,” he said, “to save a little corner, protect something,” not really knowing whether it would make a difference, but feeling that he had to anyway.
These aren’t coins in a wishing well, but counter-testimony that Nadleer, the Butlers and Santore are giving (without breast-beating or fanfare) so that their actions are also recorded in the record of degradation and destruction around them. What else could they do? Well, they could do nothing because there is no assurance that their work will even begin to turn the tables. But they’re doing it anyway.
As Robert MacFarlane might put it, they’ve chosen to deepen the relationship between landscape and the human heart. And that, just that, might end up making all the difference.
This post was adapted from my October 20, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.
Too few of us believe that climate change will happen here or will affect us personally if it does. But these misperceptions are only one aspect of the problem.
Too many decision makers–and too many workers caught in the cross-hairs of the debate–still believe that the costs of changing how we consume, digest and expel the world’s resources are too high for the benefits that might be realized once we start paying for them. They don’t see “the benefit of the bargain” I see (and maybe you see) so clearly, only their share of an unacceptable price tag.
And indeed, the high costs of changing how we do things today tend to crop up everywhere in the climate change debate.
If we want to stop over-fishing, there are the costs to the livelihoods of the fishermen. If we want to reduce our reliance on carbon-based energy, there are the impacts on those who build and maintain today’s energy infrastructure, and on the communities that depend on those workers and suppliers. It’s dismantling one economy—the lost jobs and abandoned investments—for a new one whose economic upsides often seem to be worth less than the high costs of changing how we do things now.
In market-based economies, the challenge is proving that these transition costs will be justified by the long-term economic gains. A rough apples-to-apples type exchange between likely benefits and likely costs needs to be argued, presented and accepted by enough stakeholders for “the human family” to “voluntarily” undertake the expensive steps that are necessary to confront climate change.
Put another way: will the “value” of a healthier planet tomorrow cover the “costs” of ensuring it today? Perhaps the biggest challenge facing those of us who are alarmed by climate change is filling in the “quotation marks” in this cart-before-the-horse equation so we can convince the many hold-outs who still need convincing. But until now, we’ve mostly failed to do so.
Only quite recently have the number crunchers begun to calculate the cost benefits of a healthier planet that will, over time, offset the costs of ensuring it today. It’s the dollar-spent for dollar-earned scenario that is essential if we’re to turn climate change advocacy into meaningful action.
In the places where we work, most supporters that we’ll need to realize our visions start out skeptical if not flat-out opposed to the better worlds we can often “see” so clearly, so we need to translate our versions of both the problems and solutions into stories they can understand. Like it or not, that’s usually the economic story where we trade tangible costs for tangible benefits as we undertake the often painful changes that will be needed along the way. It works almost every single time, but until now that story has not been properly told in the struggle to confront climate change.
Well the time to start telling it is now.
The Economic Benefits of Whales Versus the Lobstermens’ Costs to Protect Them
According to a recent story, there’s been an on-going showdown between lobstermen and environmentalists off the coast of Maine. The point of controversy is right whales that environmentalists argue are dying when they get caught in the lines that secure local lobster pots. The whales are threatened with extinction. The lobster industry, which is already undermined by warming waters, will be further crippled by putting down fewer pots or otherwise reducing the number of lines that secure them.
Is there a way that the value of having more whales in this ecosystem might cover the high costs that lobstermen, their families and their coastal communities will have to incur to protect them?
Until quite recently, I would have said “no.” But before finding a better answer, it might help to have some additional background about the Gulf of Maine controversy.
The right whales got their name because they were the “right” whales to push towards extinction with our commercial activities, first with the harpoons of whaling boats and more recently by accidentally slaughtering them with boat propellers, fishing nets and lobster pot lines. These bus-sized mammals are slow moving and “built by evolution to be oblivious forage feeders,” according to a NOAA Fisheries’ official. It makes these whales unusually susceptible to getting ensnared and killed.
NOAA estimates that today’s population of right whales is only about 400, with fewer than 95 breeding females remaining, which means that the entire population is jeopardized by a single death each year. But more than 30 of these whales have been found dead since 2017. While the reason for these fatalities isn’t always clear, it does not appear that they are dying from natural causes according to investigators.
To address the problem, NOAA has proposed new regulations to clear fishing lines from the whales’ path. While the regs will cover all New England waters, Maine lobstermen, who “dangle more than 800,000 lines from buoys to ocean-floor traps in their busiest months,” clearly have the most at stake. To satisfy the proposed standards, they will need to remove at least half of those lines from the water. Says one lobsterman in blunt response: “We don’t want to go extinct either.” In addition to 4,800 harvesters working these waters, the lobster industry supports thousands more jobs on shore while contributing $1.5 billion a year to the state’s economy.
During the rule making period that we’re in today, scientists will be arguing about whether the proposed regulation goes far enough to protect the whales while those alarmed by its likely impacts will be making their case for reasonable accommodations or to reject the new restrictions altogether.
As tensions escalate, and opponents refine the dollar amounts that are likely to be lost if NOAA’s regulation goes into effect, it seems a useful time to ask whether anyone in that debate is calculating the economic benefit that is provided to Maine (and indeed to all of us) by the survival of these whales.
Is anyone enabling an apples-to-apples comparison of costs and benefits so that both sides in this controversy are (more or less) in the same ballpark, with the opportunities for tradeoffs and compromises that “speaking the same economic language” might allow?
And beyond that, is there a way that the “value” of preserving these whales can cover the costs that will have to be borne by these communities if they can ever come together to protect them?
The Startlingly High Value of a Whale
In the past week or so, I came upon another whale story. This one involved a team of visionaries at the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
As is often the case, I overheard bits of the story in a Morning Edition segment on NPR, which took me to a story that had been published that day in National Geographic, and eventually to a much deeper analysis in an IMF publication. It was worth getting to the bottom of the story.
As far as I can tell, what the IMF team discovered about whales and ended up proposing for the sake of both nature and industry was not in response to the Gulf of Maine controversy, but it could certainly help to resolve it.
The IMF’s approach considered all the whales in the world’s oceans. Because of its boldness and breadth, it could make a significant enough dent in species degradation, at a rapid enough pace, to reduce the number of ocean-based harms that we can no longer repair. At the same time, its approach would utilize the whales’ enormous environmental “value” to help compensate the global fishing and transportation industries for the costs of adopting “whale saving” practices. Here in a nutshell is their argument (although I urge you to read the entire IMF article and to enjoy the visualizations they’ve included in it).
Essentially, the IMF team realized that a whale’s economic value comes from its extraordinary ability to capture and then sequester carbon. “When it comes to saving the planet,” they write, “one whale is worth thousands of trees.”
In building their economic analysis, the team relied on 2014 research about how whales remove (and help others to remove) carbon from the environment as well as upon international programs that have developed mechanisms to fund the preservation of carbon capturing eco-systems. The team’s signature innovation may be focusing on a particularly helpful as well as beloved animal to support this kind of cost-benefit analysis on a truly global scale.
According to prior research, a whale sequesters as much as 33 tons of carbon dioxide per year on average compared to only 48 pounds per land-based tree. Whales eat phytoplankton, which not only contribute at least 50 percent of the oxygen in the earth’s atmosphere but in doing so also capture 37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide or 40 percent of the entire amount that is produced globally each year.
Whales have what the IMF team call “a multiplier effect” on the phytoplankton when they eat them and produce waste products (primarily iron and nitrogen) because these waste products are precisely what is needed for more plankton to grow. As they dive and rise again to the surface, whales “pump” these minerals to the surface across their vast migration patterns, increasing both the amount of plankton and the whale populations that feed on them as long as the whales can do so in relative safety. Moreover, when whales die, the carbon they have sequestered in their enormous bodies from eating plankton in the first place descends to the ocean floor and (according to the National Geographic’s coverage of the IMF plan) “is taken out of the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, a literal carbon sink.”
Of course, whale populations would need to recover significantly to produce the greatest benefits. Continuing their “if-then” analysis, the IMF team notes:
If whales were allowed to return to their pre-whaling number of 4 to 5 million—from slightly more than 1.3 million today—it could add significantly to the amount of phytoplankton in the oceans and to the carbon they capture every year. At a minimum, even a 1 percent increase in phytoplankton productivity thanks to whale [pumping] activity would capture hundreds of millions of tons of additional C02 a year, equivalent to the sudden appearance of 2 billion mature trees. Imagine the impact over the average lifespan of a whale, more than 60 years.
(To put these benefits in a slightly different context, National Geographic cites economists’ calculations showing that these great whales alone could either capture or help more plankton to capture 1.7 tons of C02 per year, which is more than the annual carbon emissions of Brazil today.)
The question, then, is how to restore whale populations to pre-whaling levels. Those causing the current threat include nations that still allow whale hunting, industries (like fishing and ocean going transport of people and goods) that jeopardize migrating whales, as well as the actions of individual fishermen. Without covering the very real costs of changing these practices, it is nearly impossible to imagine that the necessary changes will be undertaken voluntarily.
With the aim of meeting these costs, the IMF team made “conservative estimates” of each whale’s value. For the largest so-called “great whales,” they used science-based estimates of how much CO2 each one sequesters directly or indirectly in its lifetime along with CO2’s market price. To this base number, they added value for a whale’s other economic contributions, including fishery enhancement and ecotourism. The IMF team concluded that the value of the average great whale is more than $2 million and that the current value of the global stock of great whales alone “is easily over $1 trillion.”
By using this “value” essentially as collateral for raising the necessary funds, monies would become available (from environmentally oriented companies, non-profits, consumers and even countries) to compensate those who are likely to suffer economic losses by changing their current business practices to protect the whales. “For example,” the team notes, “shipping companies could be compensated for the cost of altered shipping routes to reduce the risk of [whale] collisions.”
What is perhaps most noteworthy about the IMF team’s “good work” is the change in mindset that their cost-benefit analysis invites to help resolve one of our most challenging global problems: the seemingly irreconcilable conflict between nature and industry until now. The team recognized that the necessary changes will never be made unless those incurring those costs can be paid and the world can unite around sufficient compensation mechanisms to ensure that they are. Finding new ways to “value” and “leverage” nature (or “earth-tech,” as they call it) is the key they have identified.
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What the IMF team proposes doesn’t fit into a tidy package as yet, and a myriad of details still has to be worked out. In other words, the economic benefits from nature and the costs to industry of protecting it are not quite apples-to-apples yet. But this proposal boldly offers a new approach to balance the needs of both nature and industry on a global scale.
While it’s a financing mechanism that’s aimed only at whales, it introduces a framework for thinking about other carbon-rich ecosystems like sea grass beds or the forest elephants of the Congo River basin.
Proposing an earth-tech solution instead of an artificial, man-made one is inspired for another reason. When I worked in the energy industry, I studied carbon sequestration plants that were being developed at the time and know first-hand about both the technology challenges and the prohibitive expense of these man-made solutions. By contrast, nature can perform much of the same work “naturally,” if only we’d let it.
And for the on-going battle between the right whales and the lobster industry in the Gulf of Maine, there is now a rudimentary framework that, with imagination and a sense of urgency, may actually be able to serve both of them.
Good work often achieves its loftiest objectives by finding new ways to confront the dollars-and-cents obstacles that are right in front of it.
This post was adapted from my October 13, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.
We bring our priorities into our work–making it more purposeful and satisfying–by using our capabilities more deliberately and by demonstrating our values when we do our jobs.
Our basic “capabilities” include our personal autonomy (or the drive to realize our gifts) and our generosity (or encouraging the autonomy of others who are touched by our work, from co-workers to bosses, customers, suppliers and the broader community that supports our efforts).
Our “values” are moral intuitions (or feelings) that frame our experiences and help us decide how we should respond to them. Examples include freedom, fairness, equality, personal security, an ordered life or the sanctity of living things. For each one of us, some values more than others provide quick, intuitive signals that guide us as we try to figure out how to interact with the world around us.
Work is more satisfying when it engages our capabilities and serves our values, because they are among our most basic priorities.
When talking about these ideas, people often ask me: “On a practical level, how do I align my priorities with the work that I do everyday?” It’s often followed by a second question: “What if my employer’s priorities are different from mine—won’t this put us at odds with one another?” My quick answers are as follows.
Alignment of personal priorities with job priorities usually comes down to your mindset: how you see yourself in that job. Is it doing the bare minimum, “staying within your lines” and keeping your eye on the clock so you can leave for home after you’ve put in your time OR do you pour yourself into that job, finding opportunities for your priorities either within or right along side the priorities of whomever you’re working for? In other words, how hard are you trying to find more satisfaction in every job that you do?
Sometimes these alignments are nearly impossible, as in my recent post about gig-economy workers at Uber and Amazon. At each of these companies, the capabilities of their ride-hailing and delivery drivers are being exploited instead of respected. Uber’s and similar companies’ business models depend on offloading as much risk and cost onto their workers as possible. These workers’ recourse? They have to look to governments (like California’s) to safeguard their basic priorities on the job, leave those jobs altogether, or tamp down these basic drives because their economic necessities override the personal costs.
On the other hand, in many jobs it is both possible and desirable to align your priorities with those of your employers and others who benefit from your work. It is what organizational psychologists have called “job-crafting.” When you bring a suitable mindset to your job—when you ask, “how much instead of how little can I make out of it?”—many jobs become opportunities to build more satisfaction, and even fulfillment, into your hours spent working.
After elaborating on job-crafting and my own take on it, I’ll share some fateful testimony from two practitioners of “this highly practical art” from an interview I overheard while on the road earlier this week.
The Opportunity to Job-Craft More Rewards Into Your Work
Amy Wrzesniewski, a psychologist at Yale’s School of Management was talking about job crafting on a terrific podcast called Hidden Brainthis week. I hadn’t heard this episode, but a regular reader wrote me about it (thanks Joe!) and listening reminded me of how long so-called industrial psychologists (who study our behaviors and expectations around work) have been tinkering with the boundaries of our jobs and the perceptions we bring into them.
Take (as Wrzesniewski did) a janitorial job cleaning a hospital. Let’s also assume two different men filling that job: I’ll call them J and B. Both were hired to show up at regular times and keep the floors and available surfaces in their parts of the hospital clean. With the tools and working hours available, they can clean everything they’re responsible for in their 5-day workweeks. The following Monday, J and B each start the same circuit over again.
Let’s assume that J always does what’s expected of him without complaint, but rarely does more than is required. Viewing his job as a paycheck, he’s hardly fulfilled by it. Instead of satisfaction at the end of a workday, he’s more likely to feel a tinge of resentment, that it’s beneath him to clean up after other people, but he needs the income so he puts up with the indignity and has done so for twenty years. J rarely interacts with the hospital staff or patients, although he understands that keeping the place clean contributes to the overall mission of the hospital, which is to help people to stay alive and hopefully get well.
B couldn’t see his job more differently. Feeling that he’s part of a team improving patient outcomes, B regularly makes a point to give a cheerful word to patients he’s noticed have few visitors, will go the extra mile to clean parts of his area that no one else seems to be getting to, and gives staff members he’s known for much of his working life words of encouragement when he senses that they’re feeling down. Unlike J, B connects his job to something bigger than himself—promoting the health of everyone who is around him everyday—and goes home with both satisfaction and pride that he’s contributed to the hospital’s mission along with a paycheck from it.
B accomplished this by “job-crafting” the way he sees his work and the importance of it in the broader scheme of things. From my perspective on work, he has also engaged both his capabilities and his values when it comes to service and community in order to gain additional rewards from it. As podcast host Shankar Vedantum put it, there are people who quit their jobs when they win the lottery and others who still want to work. B might keep working because the rewards he brings home aren’t just monetary ones.
After 25 years of studies in the psychology journals—from scholars like Arnold Bakker, Maria Tims and Justin Berg as well as Wrzesniewski—there seem to be three different approaches that workers take when “crafting their jobs.” Sometimes they rearrange how they characterize their job responsibilities, emphasizing certain aspects over others. Is a chef simply cooking a meal that her customers will keep paying for or is it far more important to her that she’s creating plates that are pleasing to the eye and producing delightful experiences for friends who keep coming back? One is a successful economic exchange while the others are more than just that.
A second approach focuses not on the end product but the interactions that help to produce it along the way. Instead of B deriving meaning from making the floors shine, he finds it in those interactions with patients, visitors and staff along the way.
The last approach is how you see yourself on the job. J would say, “I am a janitor” or define himself apart from this job altogether if asked “what do you do?” B on the other hand might say proudly, “I am an ambassador for the university health system, creating an environment that promotes the healing process,” and really mean it.
In a postfrom last February, I made an argument that uses terminology from economics and ethics instead of psychology to try and prove a similar point. When you take responsibility for your job satisfaction and don’t expect somebody else to provide it, you act like a stakeholder instead of an employee. Because job satisfaction is important to you, you collaborate to solve work-related problems that involve everyone (co-workers, suppliers etc.) and everything (like the communities and environments) that your work impacts. The compensations that follow are always more than the paycheck attached to your job description, because you’re consistently investing your effort into yielding a more satisfying job experience by addressing what’s important to you and to others.
I’m Bringing You More Than Tomorrow’s Weather
In a week that was dominated by students demanding that older generations take bolder steps to ensure that they have a livable planet in their future, it’s worth noting that most people still fail to recognize that rapid global warming is one of the most important problems confronting them. Until a proper majority engages with this problem politically, policy makers will simply avoid taking the necessary actions. Perhaps no American workers see the need to engage more of the public—while also having the ability to engage people effectively–than the men and women who bring tomorrow’s weather to millions of people who have little scientific background or knowledge in their communities.
When I overheard on the radio a conversation with two meteorologists a couple of days ago, it was clear that these weather reporters (along with increasing numbers of their colleagues) are engaging the public on the imperatives of climate change by grounding their daily reports or 5-day forecasts in statistical evidence that goes back (or extends forward) 20 or even 100 years where they and their viewers live.
They might ask: how many unusually hot days did we use to have in July or unusually destructive storms in September, and how many are we having now–before providing the relevant numbers. These men and women are accustomed to explaining climate-related information to non-scientists—so they’ve already developed more skills and gained more trust than perhaps anyone, in any other line of work, when it comes to placing the recent developments involving weather and climate in a meaningful, scientific context. Moreover, by sticking to hard data and avoiding political “calls to arms,” they are building audience knowledge and engagement while maintaining their impartiality.
When these meteorologists make the deliberate effort to locate today’s weather in a much larger story (instead of just sticking with whether their listeners need to bring umbrellas to work tomorrow), they are “job crafting” or “taking responsibility for common, work-related problems” far beyond the media contracts that they’ve negotiated. In other words, they could easily “get by with less” but refuse to do so. Both interviewees made clear how much providing a broader context for their weather reports was enhancing their job satisfaction. It was also clear how much of an impact they and a growing number of their colleagues are having when they engage the public with a problem that has long been too difficult for most non-scientists to understand.
Mike Nelson, the chief meteorologist at ABC 7 in Denver, and Amber Sullins, in the same role at ABC 15 in Phoenix, both see themselves as providing this bridge. Each realized that they needed to locate their weather reports in a climate-change context when they were confronted with new generations (Sullins having a daughter and Nelson a grand child). Nelson explained that even with only a few minutes on air, telling a broader or deeper story than tomorrow’s weather “is not as difficult as you might think.” If he knows in advance that his producer has a story about the fire season or current drought, he can work in an “explainer” about the 2-degree increase in temperatures in Rocky Mountain National Park over the past century or how ,at this rate of increase, the “climate in Denver in the next 50 to 70 years will be more like Albuquerque, New Mexico.” Sullin does much the same for her viewers when she explains the 115 degree day today by noting that prior to 1960, there were only 7 days this hot every 20 years, while in the current 20-year period, there have been 42 of them. They’re providing viewers with some relevant facts and leaving it to them to figure out what to do about the picture they paint.
Nelson says there is occasional blowback even though he sticks “to physical science instead of political science.” But he adds that for every complaint or attempt “to bully him,” there are 20 audience members expressing their gratitude. Since people are inviting him into their living rooms, he feels it’s “his responsibility” to tell them the whole story. Sullins also feels she is building an additional level of trust with her audience, explaining how the positive feedback she gets from emails and Facebook posts are continuing and broadening the conversation. As viewer’s grapple with the issues, she sees “more wheels spinning in their heads” and their pursuit of even more information. Both Nelson and Sullins are actively working with new meteorologists too so they can learn how to provide this broader context in their weather reports and avoid having their new careers derailed by a political backlash. More than “weather reporters,” Nelson and Sullin see themselves as “educators” of both their audiences and their younger colleagues.
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In a postof mine last May called “How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate,” much of the answer seemed to depend on how much those hearts and minds trusted the messenger who brought them the information. According to one poll I cited, that need for trust comes from the fact that only 60% of Americans think that global warming will affect the US, only 40% believe that it will affect them personally and 2/3rds never talk with anyone else about what lies ahead. Addressing climate change is still not on most people’s list of priorities, but letting trusted people “in their living rooms” to talk about it could change that.
As long as a group trusts you enough to ‘give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,’ you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.
Meteorologists are “job crafting” their weather reporting and “taking responsibility” for educating their viewers who have found “what’s at stake” and “what can be done about it” difficult to understand until now. They are bringing their already trusted voices to a broader definition of their current jobs because it’s filling them with pride and they know that by doing so they could be making all the difference in the world.
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Notes: I just started publishing some of my weekly posts on Medium, an on-line opinion network, and my recent post on Uber drivers and Amazon packages was featured by its Business and Economy editors this week. Stories on Medium are usually available behind a paywall, but it you want to see my post or check out the site, here is a link that will get you there for free. (Of course, it would be much appreciated if you give it a quick read and check out the new pictures when you visit!)
This post was adapted from my September 22, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.
