On Inurement to Disaster
On Inurement to Disaster
Warm Feelings is back. Let's start to process feelings of inurement to climate disaster and the genocide of Palestine.
Just over a year ago, I started a new job. I am lucky and grateful to do paid work that means something to me; at the same time I resent how much paid work shapes our days and therefore our lives. One change — who pays me to edit magazine articles — and I was jerked jarringly from familiar routines and meaningful working relationships. Most important to this newsletter, it changed what I spend most of my time thinking about.
Instead of thinking about climate change day in and day out, now I think about biology. Cells, brains, microbes, evolution. What life is, the strange forms it takes, and the ways we’ve figured out how to stay alive on this rock floating in space. This subject isn’t irrelevant to climate change: Life is about survival. Climate change presents an enormous threat to organisms’ ability to stay alive. It is our present and future evolutionary bottleneck. It undermines humanity’s (infra)structures as well as many ways other creatures’ adaptions. Life typically evolves on the scale of thousands and millions of years; our fossil emissions are turning up the heat much faster than that. In that sense, I have always been a biological climate change writer.
It’s taken me about a year to draw the above conclusion, though. When I first started the new job, I felt a loss of identity as a climate change journalist, and no longer felt I had the authority to write this newsletter. But as time has passed, I realized that is not true. Anyone can write about climate change; authority is bunk; we all have a stake in the future. As I’ve learned over the years, there are no true experts on the climate and certainly not on what might happen next. So I’ve decided to come back with a refreshed perspective and again devote some part of my mind to the massive challenge that is facing down and adapting to an ever-warmer climate.
I intend to pursue this project in a slightly different form. Instead of longform essays, I’ll publish more of a news digest with little ditties enclosed. And the subject matter will extend more frequently beyond climate change per se into other interests of mine — biology, power, organizing, history, art, etc. But hopefully it will still feel of a single piece: aiming to understand how humanity and climate change are reshaping life on Earth and how to live with these facts.
Inurement to Violence // on Helene and Gaza
We now know that inland, mountain towns can get pummeled by a hurricane. That warming ocean waters can generate so-called “1-in-1,000-year” storm systems that stretch from the coast hundreds of miles inland, dumping water onto places that never had to deal with tropical storms before.
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It scares me, how quickly we get used to disaster. The brain registers novelty — when something out-of-the-ordinary happens, we’re wired to place our full attention on it, to learn as much as we can. Meanwhile our run-of-the-mill routines fade into the background. As we witness more climate-fueled hurricanes, they become routine. We learn to tune out scenes of desperation and loss as the same cycles play out.
To stay human, we must learn how to tune in and pay attention even when information novelty declines.
It can be hard to find new words. I recently revisited a conversation between novelists Isabella Hammad and Sally Rooney about how to keep writing (and therefore living) as we become inured to the violence in Israel, Gaza and now Lebanon. I share some snips of that conversation as it reminds me of what is occurring with climate change.
SR: On a few occasions recently, when I’ve been feeling almost inured to the imagery of violence, some particular report or photograph or video has suddenly left me speechless, lost, unable even to think. I had one of these moments yesterday, seeing footage online of a mass grave. The footage showed a rough trench in which dozens or maybe hundreds of bodies had been laid, bound in blue cloth, and a mechanical digger was shoveling earth into the trench. … This is our world, the world in which soil is shoveled over the unmarked bodies of the dead. I’m at a loss to understand this. Nothing can make sense of it. Everything in me rebels against what I’m witnessing. … It makes everything I have to say feel absurd and disgusting. In these moments I lose faith in language, in conversation, dialogue, everything. The only word that means anything to me at such a moment is the word: No. And all I want to do is repeat it to myself again and again, seeing these images of devastation and suffering. No, no, no.
IH: A few people have asked me versions of this lately — the question of what artists in particular are supposed to do at this moment. I wonder if the question is partly a way of expressing horror not only at the sheer tremendousness of this violence, which is being enacted on an industrial scale — a scale that brings humanity so close to inhumanity that I think that for many it shakes the very sense of what we, as humans, actually are — but also at the way violence can make art-making seem quite futile and feeble, something easily crushed. Basically, it’s easy to feel useless, and from there it’s a short leap to despair. But I don’t believe we can afford to despair, nor do I think despair is ethical. … Artists and intellectuals are just people of the world. We need to hold on to the very basic democratic principle that the exercise of individual agency becomes powerful en masse. … Language is not small, even though, in our hearts, of course, what actually matters most is this terrible brutal waste of human life.
It strikes me, the similarity in the cognitive dissonance — the struggle to live in a world where climate disasters and genocides happen and in fact are knowingly enabled. Catastrophes aided and funded by the U.S. government, which remains non-responsive to their true causes and unwilling to confront actual solutions. The struggle to find words and enact change in a world overseen by people committed to doing nothing.
I wrote the above on the morning of October 6. The next day, on October 7, Hurricane Milton has accelerated into a Category 5 storm zooming toward Florida as I attempt to mourn a year of war in Israel, Palestine, and beyond; the death and displacement of Palestinian people (a genocide); a bottomless well of trauma and pain; now an American proxy war against Iran waged in the name of Jewish safety and Jewish trauma against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians. Tens of thousands of lives extinguished in a parade of power.
On October 7, I attended a vigil organized by Jews to memorialize the occasion at Union Square in Manhattan. I wanted to feel something. If Israel’s war is still expanding with no end in sight, then at the very least I want to feel the horror of it the way I felt the horror of Hamas’s attack, its violent exposure of Palestinian dehumanization, and Israel’s swift, bloodthirsty retribution that continues today.
Instead I felt nothing. I felt numb, inured. The speeches sounded the same, I had heard it all before. (What is there left to say except: Please, stop this?) Then, I felt depressed about the repression of appropriate feeling, all we are being asked to deny and ignore.
I am a writer; I wish I could lead you to some better place. I wish I had something more useful to offer. But right now I can’t get myself there. So I’ll refer back to the interview I shared above, if you just scroll up a bit. Today I can’t do anything to stop the war, or to stop our climate-charged present and future, except to say: No, I do not accept this. To insist that despair is not ethical. And to commit to paying close attention to the war, and also to Milton, and to not forget Helene quite yet.
And to send out this little newsletter, even though I don’t have the answers.
More next time,
Hannah
If you obscure intention, if you hide it in executive edict or legislative will or partisan imperative, you can justify an endless war. If you tuck it in a prophet’s cloak, you can call it holy.
Elizabeth Willis, Liontaming in America
Bring on the ditties! 🔥🔥🔥