The Two-Body Climate Problem

“You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your life. You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales."

A case for personal climate action from someone who has overthought it to infinity

I.

Who knows how climate anxiety chooses what to cling to. For me, at one time, it was mouthwash.

Every time I lugged my oversize bottle of Listerine home from the drugstore, I imagined its journey to me. In some factory, workers or machines mix large volumes of water in vats with sugar and alcohol and colorant. This liquid is then deposited into plastic bottles and shipped all over the country. Innumerable trucks filled with heavy, colored water for us to swish around in our mouths—the weight of it unimaginable, as is the amount of fuel needed to transport it and the planet-warming gases released in the process, for how many millions of customers over how many decades apiece.

The vision haunted me. Every morning when I swished, I saw trucks and pollution dancing in the mirror. So, as with any good haunting, I decided to exorcise it. I did some research and started buying tablet mouthwash. Every morning, like a little chemist, I put my tablet in a teeny glass, add tap water, and watch it fizz up into colored liquid perfect for swishing.

Every morning I start my day fighting climate change! All by paying a different company to sell me a different form of colored water, which is also delivered to me on a carbon-emitting truck! I am a true climate hero and warrior.

I mock myself. But it’s an argument we hear all the time. The emissions reductions by this personal decision, compared to the global load, are practically nil. The mouthwash tablet makes me feel better. The question is: Does it make a difference?

Make a difference to whom or what, is the question.

II.

When I first set out to write this essay, as a list of suggested climate new years resolutions, I cringed. I was so socially horrified by my own dang self that I stopped writing for weeks. We are all dependent on the fossil fuel machine, so fully captured that it is a faux pas to acknowledge it. Yes, we all see the grim reaper standing in the corner of the room. But we pretend he isn’t there!

I don’t want to preach. I don’t want to make anyone feel badly for living inside of systems we can’t control. I didn’t open a coal plant, and neither did you (but someone did and someone else continues to run it). I didn’t build an electrical grid that lets a select few extract profits by providing a basic life necessity while polluting shared resources (though someone did, and many someones profit today). None of us here spent millions/billions of dollars on public “education” campaigns to spread lies about the causes of and solutions to climate change to entrench our deadly product’s market power (but some people did), fomenting a culture of denial, confusion, and inaction. I can’t hold myself responsible for these things. I certainly can’t hold you responsible!

And yet, are there not decisions I can make that increase or decrease my impact? Why should I feel embarrassed about making them and talking about them?

III.

To be alive today, aware of climate change while relying on fossil fuels, requires us to live in two realities. In her book-length essay The Second Body Daisy Hildyard writes: “You have an individual body in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day-to-day life.” This is the body that swishes mouthwash. “You also have a second body which has an impact on foreign countries and on whales”:

Your first body could be sitting alone in a church in the centre of Marseille, but your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city, it is inside a freight container in the docks, and it is also thousands of miles away, on a flood plain in Bangladesh, in another man’s lungs. It is understandably difficult to remember that you have anything to do with this second body—your first body is the body you inhabit in your daily life. However, you are alive in both. You have two bodies.

And more:

Dead whales have something to do with you, the disorientation of the waxwing is indirectly your problem, the freak storm and the changing seasons are consequences of actions performed by your body. Meanwhile, in the human world, there are car bombs going off in Baghdad every day. Does this have anything at all to do with you? Moreover, a teenager in Kolkata is missing a thumb and you are wearing a pair of inexpensive gloves. Is there any connection there?

The human mind didn’t evolve for the second body. Our mind, absorbing information and running past and future scenarios, helps us survive here in animal body #1. We look for clues to find resources and avoid danger. We run simulations in our minds in often vain attempts to predict the consequences of our actions. This is beneficial, evolutionarily, up to a point. (The point in which our mind’s predictions are no longer beneficial, and instead self-harming, we call “anxiety.”)

It’s pretty clear, though, that the human mind was not build to grasp a problem as massive as climate change. You mean, my plane trip is the cause of my colleague having to evacuate her house due to wildfire? That’s not my intention! And wait, it’s worse: Even if I don’t take that plane trip, the plane is still going to go up and help burn her house down anyway?? So, I may as well take it! And thusly we accumulate guilt and terror in the second body while in pursuit of survival in the first.

Hildyard:

The things I know to be true, in an abstract sense: satellite images, shots of chromosomes, hydrocarbon spreadsheets—they don’t always feel real. Meanwhile, the real, fleshy, living bodies, going about their business, cleaning their kitchens or trying to get at their seed, falling off their buckets—they don’t feel like they have much to do with the complicated truth about what is happening to life on earth. I find it hard to make myself much interested in this truth—it feels far off. I don’t want to hear about climate change or the biosphere, I want to hear about real people and real creatures. But there is a sense that the sky is getting dark and the horizon is moving nearer—that I should be paying attention, because one day the distant ice shelf will come ripping through the tissue of my body—through every body—even if it appears, for now, that the bodies all around me are intact.

This double awareness or two-body problem results in our experience of living inside a horror film. Or, as Liz Weil wrote in New York: “We’re all, at least to some degree, participating in our own death. The fossil-fuel industry and other forces of destruction put us here. But we’re stuck in the machine nonetheless.” This naturally produces significant anxiety.

This is the anxiety I attempt to address with my tablet mouthwash.

IV.

Earlier this week I sat down to eat pizza on the New York City sidewalk in February. It was sunny and 58 degrees. We sat in the shade; we removed our jackets. “I know this is the most cliché take ever,” my friend said, “but I feel really guilty and also am really enjoying this at the same time.”

Classic two-body-problem thinking. Perhaps, I thought, this friend could help me solve the problem that had given me writer’s block for more than a month.

I confessed to him about the mouthwash. I hadn’t spoken it aloud to anyone before, haha, aren’t I weird, I do this little thing that has meaning to me but makes no sense. “I know that using a tablet doesn’t have any measurable impact, climatically,” I said. “But it’s important to me. I start every single day with this little offering. I say: Not today, you won’t get me via mouthwash today. I resist!”

My friend flashed a smile. “It sounds almost religious.” Yes, hahaha, YES! It was like a lightning bolt! It is religious. It is a spiritual ritual. My friend and I know a thing or two about ritual: He’s a rosary-toting Catholic, I’m a candle-hungry Jew.

We unpacked. One of the most important things about my ritual is that I do it first thing in the morning, we decided. I rise from bed, go into the bathroom, and immediately drop my little tablet to fizz in my teeny glass of water (a special dark blue glass I bought for $2 at a junk shop specifically for my mouthwash).

Because I do this every day, first thing, I remind myself of what is important to me. It is my way of living my values in my daily life. It pierces through my two bodies—it brings the world of swirling emissions into everyday practice. It is a commitment I make to myself. And because of this single commitment, I feel better able to make other kinds of cringe-worthy climate commitments. I don’t keep paper towels around, I show up to parties sweating with a bike helmet crease on my forehead, I pay a little extra to buy wind power through my utility instead of relying on their fossil fuel mix (although the electrons inside my wires are of course just like everyone else’s). Each of these decisions becomes easier because I have already committed myself to living differently than I did before, via mouthwash.

Not that I’m perfect. I fly on planes, sometimes I take a car, I have emergency paper towels in the back of the cabinet. I’m not trying to be perfect—this isn’t an all-or-nothing game. I’m not trying to not be a hypocrite. We are all climate hypocrites! It’s a game of ‘every little bit counts’ and ‘take the first step before you take the second.’

V.

We must live every day with multiple truths. On the one hand, my life has no impact. I arrive, I go about, I expire. I deal with the realities of mortality through my little rituals, as people have done through all of history.

And yet isn’t it also true that my life has a greater impact, carboniferously, than just about any other life on Earth?

Not all people on Earth inhabit both bodies—the personal and the systemic—at once. If you’re reading this newsletter, you are likely part of the lucky subset who gets to experience our daily lives and also our global impact. A 2020 report from Oxfam found that anyone who makes more than $38,000 a year is in the global 10 percent; if you make more than $109,000, you’re in the global 1 percent. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but while the problem is the ultra-rich who have private jets—their everyday decisions could have massive positive impacts—it is our problem, too.

So, I encourage you to try just one thing. Whatever your tablet mouthwash is— whatever your mind chooses to cling to. Like I said, I still fly, I am guilty. I have several flights planned for the first half of this year. I am ashamed of them! And that is a good thing. That shame is progress. I’m not saying you need to stop emitting all carbon today; we have some runway, so to speak. But why not start with one thing?

I think some of the climate campaigners have it wrong. Over the past few years the message has shifted from “take responsibility for your carbon footprint” to “yell at the fossil fuel companies and billionaires, they are the baddies!” And, to be perfectly clear, they are the baddies. But constantly pointing the finger up at the ultra-rich, we avoid looking at ourselves. Waiting for other people to change to avoid examining our own complicity is a cop-out. Expecting systems to change while ignoring that we are a part of systems is willful denial and a dereliction of responsibility.

Because even if we do manage to get all these wind turbines and solar panels up, we won’t be able to keep consuming energy at the same level we are now. We will have to change. I prefer to make those changes voluntarily, at my own pace. We are all particles in the wave. Outside of voting and activism, I can’t control the shape of the wave. But I can change my behavior within it. One mouthwash tablet at a time.

I am curious: What is your one weird climate thing you do? Hit reply.