The Real Enemy is Normal

There's a book for that.

Grandfailure

Here’s the thing:

A Yale study on climate change communication found that 70 percent of Americans are worried about climate change. More than 30 percent of them are deeply worried. And yet, only 9 percent are talking about it.

That’s a huge gap.

Margaret Klein Salamon puts her attention on that gap in the second edition of her book Facing The Climate Emergency. It comes out in a few days. (Yes, she asked me to write about it. No, she’s not paying me anything.) Last year, I wrote about the first edition of her book and how it changed my life. Salamon’s writing has been there for me in the same way that my readers tell me my work has been there for them. When I get dragged through the mud for spreading doom, her book reminds me that it’s healthy to express our sense of grief and especially our outrage at the inaction and sanguine complacency that surrounds us.

People need to hear it.

Most Americans aren’t doing enough, but that doesn’t make them evil. The toxic positivity that runs throughout our culture paralyzes them. They’ve been conditioned out of talking about their emotions, especially the negative ones. So “instead of collective political will, they perpetuate the illusion that ‘everything is fine,’ while feeling alone with their dismal knowledge.”

You don’t need to be afraid of talking about climate change. If 70 percent of Americans are worried about it, then we should be talking about it every day, and we should stop adhering to all of these rules about civility and politeness. Those rules were put in place by the elite, precisely to control the way we talk to each other. They know the best way to kill a movement is to get everyone to start policing each other’s speech. That’s what they’re doing.

That explains the backlash against “doomism,” which intentionally conflates any talk about our climate emergency with nihilism.

They silence us.

As Salamon makes very clear, we need to be talking and listening to each other about our fear and our despair. We need to be talking about the megafloods, the fires, the heat waves, and the droughts. We need to be talking about the crop failures and the pandemics. We need to be talking about all of it.

You can’t deal with a problem unless you talk about it. That’s what the fossil fuel industry wants. They want us to stay quiet and get back to work, at least until they can make a robot to replace us.

They also want us to pretend we can simply replace coal with solar panels, wind turbines, and natural gas pipelines.

That protects their profits.

It’s also a lie.

As Salamon also makes clear, this misplaced optimism and incrementalism has done nothing over the last several decades.

That was Climate Movement 1.0.

It failed ten years ago.

Climate Movement 1.0 lives on in the speeches of politicians and books by billionaires like Bill Gates, who give us sly smiles as they confess the “guilty pleasure” of private jets they fly to climate conferences while virtue signaling about carbon offsets. Solomon gives us the much needed permission to call bullshit on that. Green tech will play a role in our future, but it’s not enough.

The Bill Gates types aren’t trying to save the planet. They’re trying to sell us on the idea that they can have their cake and eat it too. They can have their guilty pleasure jets, their server farms, their power-sucking mansions, and most importantly their endless economic growth.

As Salamon declares, Climate Movement 3.0 is here.

It’s about urgent action. It’s about disrupting normal. It’s about blunt honesty and raw emotion. It’s about pulling together. When you see teens crying on TikTok, that’s not bad. It means they get it. It means they understand. What they need is moral support. They need to see that people are with them. We take them seriously. We’re urging action along with them. We’re doing it.

Here’s the truth:

The most serious climate activists know what we’re up against. We look at the reports. We know about 3C, 4C, and 5C degrees of warming. We know there’s three choices: We can give up. We can keep pretending everything’s fine.

Or we can give life a fighting chance.

The serious climate activists are going with the third option. We’re having the hard conversations with each other. We’re making personal sacrifices. We’re building lives that don’t require us to kill the planet. We’re finding joy, meaning, and purpose in more sustainable pursuits.

We’re doing our best.

Margaret Klein Salamon isn’t telling us to spend every day wallowing in doom and gloom. She’s telling us to engage with ourselves and each other. These won’t feel like fun conversations, but they’ll be fulfilling.

They’ll feel meaningful.

They require the actual grit that self-help gurus promote all the time. We have to ask ourselves if we’re doing enough.

We have to examine ourselves.

Even as we embrace our emotions, we have to ask if there’s something more we can be doing. We can’t sit back and comfort ourselves with the excuse that we’re not to blame, it’s really those mean corporations.

It’s a difficult balancing act.

Yeah, we have to be kind to ourselves. As I recently wrote, there’s going to be days where you just need to take care of yourself. We can’t beat ourselves up because we didn’t replace our shower heads fast enough. We can’t languish in guilt every time we use the dryer. On the other hand, we always have to believe we can do better. That’s the definition of personal growth.

That’s purpose.

You can only give Bill Gates the finger if you’re doing what you can on your end. You can’t complain about his private jets wiping out your personal contribution if you never made one to begin with.

Isn’t that right?

Salamon talks about the emotional benefits of living in emergency mode. You might think it leads to stress and anguish.

It doesn’t.

During emergencies, “communities strengthen and people come to each other’s aid. Paradoxically, it is often fulfilling to live through them.” Here, Salamon turns to Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, which describes in detail how human virtues emerge and triumph during times of crisis.

Ironically, communities who share a sense of urgency experience what psychologists call “the pull-together effect.” It’s what got Britain through WWII. It got the LGBTQ communities through the AIDS crisis. It also got us through the first year of the pandemic. Despite what the normalizers say, suicide rates actually dropped in 2020. If you remember, teens actually felt better.

Here’s what I remember:

We didn’t experience a mental health crisis until after the decider class tried to rush us back to normal. They conducted a prolonged assault on human values. They hired medical influencers to go on cable news and talk about “assessing your personal risk” and leaving behind the vulnerable.

That’s when everyone started to feel like shit again.

It shows.

I think a lot of us do miss the early days of the pandemic. It was one of the few times in our lives when we actually felt the pull-together effect. For once, we felt kindness and a sense of collective purpose.

The second edition of Salamon’s book drives it home:

Normal is the enemy.

Normal is what keeps us from talking about our problems. Normal is what persuades everyone to put their own self-interest ahead of everyone else. Normal is what makes us work 70 hours a week for starvation wages.

Normal is what tells us to spend money we don’t have chasing curated happiness all over Instagram. Normal is why you feel like you can’t have children. Normal is why you can’t afford a house.

Normal is why politicians keep approving massive drilling projects. Normal is why the police bulldoze homeless camps. Normal is why police officers won’t even confront a school shooter. Normal is Winnie the Pooh teaching kids how to sacrifice themselves during a gun massacre.

(Yes, for real.)

Normal is why the world’s rivers are drying up, and why crops are starting to fail. Normal is why cities are running out of water. Normal is why the Brazilian rainforest is turning into a savannah. Normal is why Spain is turning into a desert. Normal is why food is bankrupting people with full-time jobs.

Normal is making us miserable.

Normal is killing us.

A lot of people seem to believe there’s only one form of action—protest. That’s not true. As Salamon shows, there’s lots of ways to get involved. There’s lots of ways to disrupt normal. We all need to be examining our lives, but that doesn’t mean we have to feel a constant sense of guilt and shame because we’re not chaining ourselves to buildings or setting ourselves on fire.

You don’t need to martyr yourself for the planet.

The planet doesn’t need that.

You have time. If you don’t have time, you have money. If you don’t have money, you have skills. There’s something you can contribute. You know what that is better than anyone else. You just have to think.

We would be happier if we lived in a state of collective emergency. More of us would pull together. More of us would take care of each other. More of us would listen to each other. More of us would feel inclined to do something instead of pretending everything’s fine while secretly staying up all night. More of us would feel a sense of genuine hope instead of this silent, gnawing despair.

It would be good for us.

We need it.