Be the Alarm
By David Fore
The way we are living, timorous or bold, will have been our life.
~Seamus Heney
People were already on edge April 22, long before the warning came from the US Weather Service about another wildfire threat to Boulder, Colorado. One resident told NPR that the combination of record-high temperatures (28 degrees above the monthly average) and strong dry winds triggered familiar, unnerving sensations. "It just felt like, ok, can this really be happening again?"
Abnormal conditions have become commonplace along the Front Range of the Rockies, particularly since a series of terrifying winter and spring wildfires forced multiple evacuations across the region. One was called the Marshal Fire, which became the most destructive fire in state history. It was also the fastest, starting December 30th and ending with heavy snowfall before sunrise on New Year’s Day. It generated a firestorm driven by 115-mph gusts that inflamed embers, lifted them into the air, and blew them at the backs of families fleeing their burning homes.
Wynn Bruce was a Boulder resident. But April 22nd was also Earth Day, and he had something to say to the powers that be. So instead of Boulder, Bruce spent that day in Washington, DC. He walked to the grounds of the Supreme Court, climbed the steps, chose a corner away from the Saturday crowds, and sat in silence.
“Fearsome or not, the future is ours. We are alive, here and now, for a reason of our choosing.”
Why that day and why that place? The 50-year-old photographer was a committed climate activist. Just a few weeks earlier, a reactionary majority of the court signaled its intent to strip the Federal government of its role in enforcing regulations on any climate-wrecking emissions. If your hope turns on whether society can muster the will to avert its own annihilation, West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) might give you the sweats.
It did me. It was a climate wake-up call, sounding like the rude ring of an ancient alarm clock. Other climate wake-up calls have been quiet, cumulative, and menacing, like the sunrise slowly shedding its light across our beautiful, burning world. Both types of alarm deliver vibrations that seem tuned precisely to the frequency of my amygdala. Before I know it, I am swamped with urgent demands to act, to do something, to survive, to protect, to take off for the hills, to hit the snooze button.
These days sure are alarming. What happens when people hear it? For some, nothing. For others, everything.
~
Political protests have always been vital to society. They can also be pretty energizing. James Jasper’s research demonstrates how protests spawn affiliative emotions and generate powerful motivations among demonstrators. Recent research out of the Yale School of Public Health demonstrates how joining in collective action will likely reduce your climate-related anxiety and depression.
I hear that. Ask anyone in my family and they will say that I was literally born with a protest sign in my hand. Improbable, yes, but I am here to tell you, firsthand, that I feel really good when I join a demonstration, raise my voice with others, and march in a common direction. I love the thump and bump of it, and how, later on, I still feel deep inside the sound and motion. I feel more befriended, more focussed, more emboldened.
I becomes we.
Protests offer more than feel-good moments, of course. They have inflected history, and will again. Studies show that protests raise public support for climate action. Nonviolent civil disobedience actions are particularly effective owing to the moral clarity suggested by selfless action in the face of great risk. The Standing Rock occupation–led by indigenous folk with experiences of, and resistance to, threats of cultural annihilation–have been remarkably successful in their attempts to halt completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. These activists are now regularly consulted by others, including midwest farmers who want their families to survive and their land to be protected from the hazards of pipelines, fracking, and related carbon-fuel infrastructure.
"Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals,” United Nations Secretary General António Guterres said on Earth Day. “But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels."
This year many Earth Day actions took place on Zoom. But plenty of people masked up and braved the crowds to march, sing, listen to speeches, sign petitions, make art, and stage die-ins. Some put their careers on the line. Some went further still. Most were trying to make an impact commensurate with the boldness they felt.
"This planet is everything, and it's time we start acting like it," NASA scientist Peter Kalmus said to the gathered press after he and others chained themselves to the doors of Chase Bank in Los Angeles. "We're heading towards a fucking catastrophe, and we've been being ignored."
The purpose of the Chase action was to bring attention, if not shame, onto Chase, which has the biggest fossil fuel portfolio of any bank. It was organized by Scientist Rebellion–part of UK-based Extinction Rebellion–which mustered people for demonstrations around the world. Countless others staged peaceful actions including Youth Versus Apocalypse, the Sunrise Movement, and 350.org. Another organization, Fight For Our Future, held dozens of events including one at Lafayette Park, across from the White House.
“We’re here because in North Carolina we keep getting hit by hurricanes back to back, and we ain’t got nothing fixed,” Willett Simpkins said to the New York Times. “And it’s getting worse every year. It’s time for them to stop talking about it and do something about it.”
photo credit: David Fore
Earth Day has since passed and I find that of all the demonstrations that day, only one remains when I close my eyes, glowing like the ghost of a flash of light in the dark. That demonstration had neither a website nor a press release. Nobody was invited. And nobody participated. Save Wynn Bruce.
~
Court-watchers predict that the EPA case is just one of many rulings coming down the pike aimed at stopping the government from enforcing any regulation that seeks to protect our environment as well as our health, safety, employment, education, and civil rights. In addition to hobbling the executive branch, these court actions are designed to shift power from the Congress and to itself as part of an overarching political strategy to reverse democratic progress.
Here comes the night sweats again!
Do these sensations add up to a neologistic “pre-traumatic stress disorder?” Or is that feeling plain old human worry and woe? I don’t know. But it is a gut punch, one that can enervate or motivate. Enervation can lead to hopelessness, though, which is why activists often abide by the slogan attributed to labor leader Joe Hill: "Don't mourn, organize!" But while I’m foursquare behind the “organize” part, we should not undervalue mourning. My training as a bereavement counselor at a hospice leaves me in awe of the mysteries of grief, and the courage for those who go through it. Climate warriors and climate worriers alike would do well to study the grievers among us: how they learn to let go of the one they loved, how they learn to love their leftover world, how they amend their selves and their hopes to meet the moment, and how they accept a future they would never have chosen.
Mourning informs how we organize, how we array ourselves against wayward powers, who we join on a path to a livable future.
People must feel fear, anger, and hope to take to the streets. That’s the conclusion of Jochen Kleres and Åsa Wettergren, researchers who studied what drives people to join the climate movement.
Fear of threat to the world we love.
Anger at those who fail to protect ourselves and future generations.
Hope that our decisions will add up and turn things around or at least slow them down.
“We actually do not have all the time in the world, so I am going to be bold,” Wynn Bruce wrote in a letter to his friend David Loy, in 2019. He went on to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A man dies when he refuses to take a stand for that which is true.”
~
Most people today were not around for the first Earth Day. I was just a kid, but I still remember. Back then it was perfectly legal for factories to spew toxic smoke into the air, to dump waste into any river or lake, and to expose employees and neighbors to dangerous chemicals without their knowledge. Those were the days when oil spills set canals aflame, when endangered species were neither acknowledged nor protected, when businesses operated with impunity, and when neither fuel nor emissions standards existed.
Then came April 22, 1970, when more than 20 million people marched across America to express their love for the planet, their horror at its ruin, and their determination to restore nature’s life-sustaining capacities and life-fulfilling wonders. The largest single-day protest in human history, the inaugural Earth Day was co-chaired by two congressmen, a Republican and a Democrat. Funding came from the United Auto Workers. Television networks and local stations covered events live.
Now, that was a wake up call! And nobody heard the alarm more clearly than President Richard Nixon. Earth Day filled him with fear of an unfathomable future where he could fall beneath the wheel of the public’s passion and lose the next election. Consequently, by December of that year, he signed the order that established the EPA.
This single action by an otherwise notorious character set loose a cascade of new environmental ideas, laws, policies, programs, and legal remedies. They poured through national, state, and local jurisdictions. Funding arrived to safeguard what we imperiled and to clean up what we had fouled. Many species gained legal protections while entire ecosystems were set aside for future generations. Greener grade-school curricula flourished. New academic disciplines were established and critical scientific discoveries were made. People around the world, inspired by American leadership, turned out in huge numbers to pressure their home governments to clean up their act and to realize the value of healthy natural environments.
What a difference an Earth Day makes!
“Imagined futures are a blend of extrapolation, hope, and fear. They never pan out as foretold. There is time, there are resources, there are things we can do we haven’t even imagined.”
Earth Day really was the beginning of something big, beneficial, and beautiful. While every loss deserves its mourners, every advance deserves its advocates. You see them at your local library researching ways to improve their pollinator gardens. They work hard at school so they have the skills to design communities that are resilient as they are beautiful. They leave home for months at a time to occupy carbon infrastructure sites that threaten their health and heritage. They go to Washington with a redress of grievance.
Earth Day continues to keep the natural world on our political and social agendas, even as headwinds slow progress, sometimes even reversing it. EPA funding has flat-lined since the Reagan Administration which also politicized the agency’s leadership, goals, and operations. Regressive economic policy since that time has spawned a permanent sense of precarity that has diminished the clout of the unions once at the vanguard of the environmental movement. Green Republicans are extinct in every precinct, making effective climate legislation an exercise in Congressional futility. Marginalized communities still bear inordinate risks and displacement owing to environmental threats. President Biden makes impassioned pleas to save the planet one day, then signs executive orders to increase oil production. Conservatives quash conservation efforts as a matter of “principle.” Scientists, meanwhile, collect data that illustrates, in grave detail, the poor health and instability of our atmosphere, oceans, and biological systems. They signal a multi-systemic threat to all life on Earth, not just to the blameworthy bipeds.
If this all makes you feel “alarmed” and “concerned”, you are in excellent company. A recent study conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found nearly 60 percent of American adults the same. If you are a young person, your concerns might run deeper still. The Lancet recently published a survey of 10,000 people, aged 16 to 25, living in ten countries Some 45 percent believe climate change is already negatively impacting their lives. More than 75 percent believe their own “future is frightening.” About 56 percent fear that “humanity is doomed.” At least 40 percent are hesitant about having children.
“Burning fossil fuels for energy will be the end of us all,” Wynn Bruce wrote to his friend. “The children of the future are effectively being attacked by the existing power structure.”
In her book, Generation Dred, Britt Wray writes about a serious case of ontological insecurity she suffered in recent years, one that challenged the meaningful continuity of herlife. She was laid low not “because the stability of the climate is clearly breaking down but because I largely lost trust in other people’s abilities and determination to solve the problem. Our leaders have been either fully denying the crisis or promising paltry action that will only delay the inevitable.”
Listen to the fire chief laugh as he sets your neighborhood alight then shuts off the water that could save you.
So many species lost forever. So many landscapes burning, flooding, and blowing away. So many systems gone off kilter. So many communities at risk. So much for the future, say some.
Not so, say I.
photo credit: David Fore
Climate models visualize unimaginable damage to our earth and social systems. But those same models suggest where we can focus our efforts to make it through as best we can. Yes, the smell of smoke on the wind can trigger uneasy feelings, even outright fear that sends you running out of your house with photo albums tucked under your arms. But nobody knows the time or the day of their reckoning. Imagined futures are a blend of extrapolation, hope, and fear. They never pan out as foretold. There is time, there are resources, there are things we can do we haven’t even imagined.
Others have observed, with some evidence, that Western-style climate doomerism is another version of privileged anxiety about comforts and necessities that the vast majority of people, now and throughout history, never dreamed of having.
To those opposed to starting families, climate scientist Kate Marvel had this to say: “I unequivocally reject, scientifically and personally, the notion that children are somehow doomed to an unhappy life.”
“People have always been good at imagining the end of the world,” Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark. But don’t be fooled: the end of the world is “much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.”
All of which is to say that if a climate wakeup call stirs death terrors in us, it is senseless to get an early jump on death by doing ourselves in. Better to stick with it, I think. And, anyway, fearsome or not, the future is ours. We are alive, here and now, for a reason of our choosing.
~
Douglas Bruce told The Washington Post that his son always tried to put his life to purpose. Wynn Bruce grew up in Minnesota, where Lake Superior inspired a lifelong love of nature. He was captain of his cross-country team. He excelled at science. He planned to join the Air Force and serve his country. But he suffered his own ontological crisis soon after graduating high school in 1989. Bruce was riding in a car driven by a friend when they got into an accident that left the friend dead and Bruce saddled with a severe traumatic brain injury.
The trajectory of his life now changed, Bruce watched many possible futures collapse before him. Pauli Driver-Smith, a photography teacher at Boulder Community College, said that Bruce’s “only real regret in life was that he couldn’t be as productive as he’d wanted to be. He didn’t feel like he could be a good husband or have a good career. He had so much passion and so much to give.”
What I admire about Bruce, before his terrible choice on Earth Day, is that he lived in defiance of the Four Ds of Climate Inaction: despair, denial, disavowal, and dissociation. Instead of falling into despair he found purpose as a photographer who specialized in families and children, and he found joy as part of Boulder’s contact-improvisation dance scene. Rather than deny the risks of climate change, he schooled himself on its threats, which he faced as part of Boulder’s Ecodharma Retreat Center where he also cleared trails. Bruce would never disavow his responsibility for the climate problem. but instead reduced his personal carbon impact and did his part to care for the earth. Rather than dissociate to escape, he sharpened his sensitivities and joined climate activists to protest the loss of what he knew and loved most.
~
In my mind’s eye I imagine that space between the match and the gas and I wonder, did Bruce see himself as a simile?
As burns the world, so do I.
“No one can be sure about Wynn’s psychological and spiritual state in the months leading up to his action,” observed Kritee Kanko, leader of Ecodharma. “We don’t have to understand him completely to decide our own next steps.”
Wynn Bruce shared his plans with no one. A few days prior he spoke on the phone with his father, who would later say that he seemed fine. Douglas Bruce had seen his son in crisis before, of course, but not just after his auto accident. Bruce had attempted self-immolation in 2017, at the World Trade Center, but bystanders foiled his plan that day. His father was called and he came to New York to collect his son. The first thing he did was to get Bruce psychological support.
“It was the worst way I could think of ending your life.” Douglas Bruce said about that first attempt. Still, about his son’s actions on Earth Day he said, “Everybody gets to decide for themselves about how their end of life is going to take place. I honor that. I respect him for it. . . This is a deeply fearless act of compassion to bring attention to the climate crisis.”
Some climate activists want to lionize Bruce and his message, if not his means of expression. A recent Real News article gives voice to Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River reservation. “People will say this is a very extreme sort of protest, and that could be your opinion. But we’re going to need [to] sacrifice… a lot of things to be able to even curb the climate crisis. . . I’m not asking you—and I don’t think he would either—to do what he did. But I think, in remembrance of somebody who would do something as noble as this, that we owe it to them and future generations, to move out of our comfort zones. And to act.”
Apathy can feel anathema to existence itself. As more people respond to climate wakeup calls, political gestures will become more dramatic. Provocations are everywhere. Andreas Malm’s new book, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, calls for extreme action to avert ecological collapse. Famed writer Kim Stanely Robinson publically wonders why more people don’t sabotage our means of our destruction. Just don’t think that all protestors imagine the same outcomes as you. As insecurity rises, political opportunists amplify fears and differences, leading to what some refer to as an eco-facsist movement.
Yes, act. But relax, too. Nobody can do everything. Nor should anybody be shamed for doing nothing. Take a breath, connect with yourself and with others, take part in the rest of nature. Plenty of burned-out climate activists who will tell you that. I like what Britt Wray says to climate-aware folk, that we need to learn how to “fold” difficult climate emotions into our lives. This “internal activism,” she says, is “just as important as external activism—the more conventional kind. The trick is not to get lost in the dark places that internal activism brings us to—to keep moving—and to welcome the idea that we’ll cycle through the trenches again, because the climate and biodiversity crisis isn’t going anywhere for a long, long time.”
~
We each have our parts to play. When fear and uncertainty reigned at the start of the pandemic and hospitals filled up and society closed down, I looked for the helpers then joined them. I entered school and began training as a therapist for those in grief. Now I sit knee-to-knee with individuals or I facilitate groups of people who help one another. My main aim is to hold space for pain and change. They reveal their wounds of loss and I am there for them as they soak in those wounds. I am also there when they come up for air, when it can sometimes be possible to realize new reasons and ways to live.
If somebody intends to do harm to themself, I help them find safety and–importantly– to feel safe. I play this part not because I’m obligated to, though I am. I do so because I believe that where there is life there is the possibility of hope. Even here, especially now.
Whether somebody’s sorrow rises out of personal or planetary suffering, I might say to them, What’s the rush? Why don’t we give it some more time. Take a seat again. This heartbreaking world is also quite lively and lovely, you know. Take a slow walk outside. You may be surprised by what you find. You might catch sight of the flight of a robin or the fall of a leaf. Bear witness to what unfolds. You matter, you know. You matter to me. You matter more than you can see just now. Wake up early for the sunrise and bring someone along with you. There is warmth here, and beauty too. There is breath and there is light. Stay for that, stay for love.
photo credit: David Fore
If you or someone you know needs help, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-TALK (8255). You can also text a crisis counselor by messaging the Crisis Text Line at 741741.
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