Is This a Today Thing?

Weathering climate change in a sea of urgencies

Photo by Oleksandr Sushko on Unsplash

WHEN I WAS chief of staff at a nonprofit organization, one of my roles was to funnel information and action items to my boss’ desk. This demanded constant recalibration based on new developments, but the question was always the same: Is this a today thing? What can wait, what cannot? What exactly, at any given moment, is most urgent?

It’s a question at the center of Jenny Offill’s novel Weather, published in 2020. We meet Lizzie, a harried university librarian with an unfinished PhD. She’s managing the daily demands of life with a husband and son, as well as a beloved brother who we fear will relapse at any moment. Money is scarce, so Lizzie accepts a side hustle answering email for her old thesis advisor Sylvia, putting her in touch with listeners of Sylvia’s environmental podcast Hell or High Water.

There are many climate fiction novels these days. A number are speculative, dealing in near-futures where climate change has created a clear departure from the earth we know today. One is Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins, where after a years-long drought, a desert has fully engulfed the American southwest. Many have evacuated to the east, but the novel stays with those left behind. In other dystopic climate stories, save-civilization-or-at-least-our-humanity plots keep us riveted – see Mad Max, Snowpiercer.

Weather offers something different. The novel is aggressively contemporary. Troubling election, increase in hate crimes, Starbucks. Alarm is ambient, but mostly not acute. There is dinner to make and a kid to get to school and a commute and a job with all its bureaucracies.

When I come in, the dog is sleeping under the table. Eli is folding a piece of plain white paper. “Don’t look,” he says. “I’m inventing this. No one will ever know what I have done except me.”

I don’t look. I put out kibble and water, peer open-heartedly into the fridge. The window is open. It’s nice out. The pigeons aren’t on the fire escape. There are some pots left over from the tomato experiment. “Whoosh,” my son says.

My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel it.

I look at my daughter, the smallness of her, her little voice just beginning to make sentences, and I swear I can, too.

***

I texted a friend attending COP27, the annual international climate change conference. For the past two weeks, 35,000 delegates from 197 countries have been in Egypt trying to secure commitments to fulfill the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit overall global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius over preindustrial averages.

The problem is that the planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees over those averages. And, according to a recent U.N. report, under current country-by-country policies we’re on track to heat up 2.1 to 2.9 degrees this century. With every half-degree increase, tens of millions more people are likely to experience life-threatening heat, floods, and water shortages.

The 27 in COP27, by the way, refers to years. This gathering has been held since 1995, when the unsustainability of the planet’s rising temperatures was already apparent.

“So what’s the takeaway?” I asked my friend. “Are we doomed?”

“We are!” came the response.

***

In The Art of Fiction, James Salter writes:

Certain writers have the ability to put one word with another or together as a sequence that causes it to bloom in the reader’s mind or to describe things so well that they become for the reader something close or equal to reality. It’s not simply that they are well observed; it’s also in the way of the telling.

Weather, a slim 5”x7” hardcover, is delivered in fragments and slices of life. This is not a sprawling novel giving us epic paragraphs and long, comma-filled sentences. Lizzie doesn’t have time for all that. She’s a mom jotting things down as she can; we might as well be reading actual backs of envelopes. There’s a lot of white space on the page, which feels like it’s holding everything Lizzie can’t bring herself to think about. But the what-ifs of a too-warm world keep cropping up, unbidden.

Eli is at the kitchen table, trying all his markers one by one to see which still work. Ben brings him a bowl of water so he can dip them in to test. According to the current trajectory, New York City will begin to experience dramatic, life-altering temperatures by 2047.

Later, at a bar:

It is important to be on the alert for “the decisive moment,” says the man next to me who is talking to his date. I agree. The only difference is that he is talking about twentieth-century photography and I am talking about twenty-first-century everything.

At dinner with Sylvia:

On the way back, she meets me in the city for dinner. I tell her that I’ve been thinking that we should buy some land somewhere colder. That if climate departure happens in New York when predicted, Eli and Iris could—

“Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks. I look at her. Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this. She orders another drink. “Then become rich, very, very rich,” she says in a tight voice. 

How many times have I mentioned in conversation that Buffalo, my husband’s hometown, is purported to be a climate refuge city? Access to fresh water, I tell people. Relatively affordable. Temperate weather. Maybe that’s where we’ll go, I say, even as the idea of actually doing so remains abstract.

***

Between 2011-2021, 90 percent of U.S. counties experienced a flood, hurricane, wildfire, or other calamity that overwhelmed local resources and demanded a federal disaster designation.

Those statistics don’t include the flood that cost my grandparents their home and wiped away their neighborhood; that happened in 2008.

The Cedar River, a tributary of the Mississippi, was high and rising. A police officer knocked on my grandparents’ door in Cedar Rapids with an evacuation order and said, “Folks, you about ready to leave?” They said yes, put two suitcases and their dog into their car and drove to my aunt’s house 30 miles away. This had happened before. They didn't think they'd be gone long.

My grandparents’ home sat five short blocks from the river. In the 24 hours after they evacuated, hundreds of volunteer sandbaggers and city forklift operators made a desperate effort to save Time Check, the modest neighborhood my grandparents had called home for 40 years. In the end it wasn’t enough. We watched on television in panic as the water rushed in. My grandparents’ little blue bungalow was submerged to the roof for three days.

It feels like so long ago now. The sewage and mold and ruin. A lifetime’s possessions in a wet mountain on the curb. The dread of not knowing what would become of the lot, if my grandparents could pay off an unasked-for mortgage on a new house, or when my grandmother would be able to retire from her job as a college janitor.

Now when I tell people about the flood, I find myself shrugging and saying: climate change. In a way it’s a relief – a terrible, burdensome relief – to have something tactile for which climate change is to blame.

How does the story end – Lizzie’s? Our own? How can we reconcile the demands of our daily lives with the fact that this problem, so much larger than any one of us, is growing by the day?

I suppose this is why people go to public policy school and take on largely underpaid careers in Washington. That’s why I did those things. Systems change was the goal. To transcend the limits of our individual power and fix the structures that govern our lives. I can’t count the meetings I was in where we talked about scale. Everything was about scale – how to get there, how to pay for it.

And yet progress is incremental, people intractable, and political will for change elusive. I’m not mad at Lizzie for not making it beyond vague doomsday prepping; someone has to run the libraries. And someone has to write the books that go in them.