[✔️] March 10, 2022 - Daily Global Warming News Digest

[👀 Richard Pauli]

/*March 10, 2022*/

/[ it's called GLOBAL warming ]/
*Climate change will fuel greater displacement*
What can we do to reverse the trend?
Alexandra Bilak Director, Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre
8 Mar 2022
For the first time, there is high confidence among scientists that the 
impacts of climate change are increasingly driving displacement in all 
regions of the world. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 
(IPCC) latest report, published on February 28, recognises that climate 
change is one of several multi-dimensional factors contributing to 
forced movement today, and that “peace and mobility” are at significant 
risk from its effects. Without global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas 
emissions and better adapt to the effects of climate change, say the 
authors, the number of people displaced will grow in the coming decades...
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Solutions exist but more reliable and robust data is needed to focus our 
actions. The number of people forced to flee, their conditions, needs 
and aspirations, the duration and severity of their displacement and the 
risk of future forced movement must all be better quantified so that 
governments and the international community can plan and respond 
accordingly.

As we look ahead to COP27 later in the year, when leaders will be given 
a final chance to act before it’s too late, we hope that this report 
inspires urgent, renewed commitment. As the authors conclude: “The 
scientific evidence is unequivocal: climate change is a threat to human 
well-being and the health of the planet. Any further delay in concerted 
global action will miss a brief and rapidly closing window to secure a 
liveable future.”
/The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance./
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2022/3/8/science-says-climate-change-will-fuel-greater-displacement



/[ follow your stock money ]/
*Shareholders asked oil giant Chevron to cut emissions. Now some want 
the chairman ousted.*
A shareholder advocacy group announces that it will campaign to block 
the reelection of the chairman and a director.
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Environmental groups and scientific reports say emissions cuts are 
critical to thwarting climate change and to the broader health of the 
planet. But some shareholder groups say companies also have a narrower 
financial reason to move away from fossil fuels: Eventually, governments 
will impose stricter limits on their use, they say, and even if they do 
not, alternative energy sources eventually will become cheaper and 
shrink the demand for oil and gas...
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More than 60 percent of shareholders sided with the reformers.

Today, much of the case against Wirth and Sugar turns on that resolution 
and the company’s conduct since then. Van Baal said the company had 
ignored the will of the shareholders, calling its actions over the past 
year “a snub.”

Even so, the case against the directors faces some head winds. Both 
withstood a similar effort last year. With gas prices rising, so are 
Chevron share prices, and that might make some shareholders less willing 
to force a change on the board. Moreover, the Russian invasion of 
Ukraine has led to calls for companies in the West to produce more oil, 
not less, to reduce dependence on Russian resources...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2022/03/08/chevron-shareholders-climate/




/[ Opinion in the Atlantic,  yikes! ]/
*On Top of Everything Else, Nuclear War Would Be a Climate Problem*
Even a “minor” skirmish would wreck the planet.
By Robinson Meyer...
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   If you are worried about rapid, catastrophic changes to the planet’s 
climate, then you must be worried about nuclear war. That is because, on 
top of killing tens of millions of people, even a relatively “minor” 
exchange of nuclear weapons would wreck the planet’s climate in enormous 
and long-lasting ways.
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And even before that, climate science and nuclear-weapons engineering 
were twin disciplines of a sort. John von Neumann, a Princeton physicist 
and member of the Manhattan Project, took interest in the first 
programmable computer in 1945 because he hoped that it could solve two 
problems: the mechanics of a hydrogen-bomb explosion and the 
mathematical modeling of Earth’s climate. At the time, military interest 
in meteorology was high. Not only had a good weather forecast helped 
secure Allied victory on D-Day, but officials feared that weather 
manipulation would become a weapon in the unfolding Cold War.

The worst fears of that era, thankfully, never came to pass. Or at 
least, they haven’t happened yet. It is up to us to make sure that they 
don’t...
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2022/03/nuclear-war-would-ravage-the-planets-climate/627005/



[ a Mongabay report ]
*In destroying the Amazon, big agribusiness is torching its own viability*
by Sarah Brown on 7 March 2022

    -- A new study has found that the transition zone between the Amazon
    and Cerrado in the northeast of Brazil has heated up significantly
    and become drier in the past two decades.
    -- The research points to deforestation in the Amazon and global
    climate changes as factors prolonging the dry season and warming up
    the region, leaving it susceptible to severe droughts and forest fires.
    -- Ironically, the changes being driven by the intensified
    agricultural activity are rendering the region less suitable for
    crop cultivation.
    -- The authors of the new study say there needs to be a balance of
    sustainable agricultural solutions and an environmentally focused
    political agenda to protect the region’s ecosystems, its economy,
    and its people.

The transition zone between the Amazon and the Cerrado, where the 
world’s greatest rainforest melds into its largest tropical savanna, is 
heating up, posing severe threats to both biomes, a new study warns.

The combination of agriculture-driven deforestation and global climate 
change are prolonging the dry season in this mixed landscape of open 
grasslands and closed forests, the study says, aggravating the risk of 
severe droughts and forest fires in the Amazon and across the Cerrado.

“This is the only region where increasing temperatures, reduction of 
rainfall, and increase of the number of dry days ‘collide,’” study 
co-author Juan Carlos Jiménez-Muñoz, an associate professor of remote 
sensing at the University of Valencia in Spain, told Mongabay in an 
email. “We noticed that when all the trends were combined, the worst 
scenario was observed in the Amazon-Cerrado transition zone...
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The impact of climate change
Previous studies warned that large areas of the Amazon could transform 
irreversibly into a savanna-like region under increasingly warmer 
conditions, destroying critical habitats for species adapted to jungle 
life. It could also affect the productivity of agriculture in the 
region, which would impact food security, livelihoods, and the economy.

“[Droughts] will have a huge impact on agribusiness, as it’s one of the 
key reasons for the economic growth in Brazil,” Marengo said. “If the 
climate continues the way it has been over the last 40 years, it could 
result in a collapse in the region.”

Arthur Bragança, a researcher at the Climate Policy Initiative at the 
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, told Mongabay by phone 
that “there is accumulated evidence that deforestation of the Amazon 
impacts the climate of Brazil and affects the soybean production in [the 
Matopiba] region.”

But Bragança, who was not involved in the recent study, said agriculture 
there has had a significant boost on the local economy, a key reason for 
its continued expansion.

Past droughts in northeastern Brazil have shown just how much damage 
they can wreak. According to the National Confederation of 
Municipalities, droughts between 2012 and 2017 affected nearly 28 
million people in the region and caused more than 100 billion reais ($19 
billion) in damage...
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Solutions to regional climate change
Both Marengo and Ribeiro said that slowing down the temperature rise 
will take a combination of minimizing deforestation, improving water 
management, and assisting small farmers implement low-resource technology.

Marengo also called for sustained global efforts to reduce global 
warming and, in Brazil, political incentives in place to conserve the 
environment.

He said the key is to find ways that reconcile both the need for 
economic and societal growth and the protection of the environment. 
“It’s necessary to have an environmental agenda that doesn’t think 
[only] about profits, but taking care of the environment,” Marengo said. 
“It doesn’t need to be radical conservation, but sustainable 
conservation that secures food security and leaves something for the 
next generation.

“The climate is maintained by vegetation,” he added. “If you change the 
ecosystem by deforestation, be it the Amazon or Cerrado, to another that 
is more agricultural-like, it’s not sustainable in the long term.”
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/03/in-destroying-the-amazon-big-agribusiness-is-torching-its-own-viability/


/[   The Boston Globe likes to print numbers ]/
*It’s worse than we thought: 15 numbers that show we’re not prepared for 
climate change*
By Dharna Noor Globe Staff,  March 7, 2022

The United Nations’ latest landmark climate report is a tome more than 
twice the length of the Bible. To compile it, hundreds of scientists 
from all over the world pored over thousands of studies, summarizing the 
latest authoritative scientific information.

Though its contents are complex and often difficult to parse, the 
assessment’s key message is simple: The climate crisis is upon us and 
that the world has utterly failed to prepare. It’s also peppered with 
alarming facts and figures that illustrate that urgency. Here’s a taste 
of what the report includes:

    Percent of the world population currently exposed to potentially
    deadly heat for 20 or more days a year: 30

    Percent that could be exposed to deadly heat for 20 or more days a
    year by 2100 if greenhouse gas emissions continue growing at the
    present rate: up to 76

    Number of people globally who could face chronic water scarcity by
    2100 if temperature rise exceeds 2 degrees Celsius: up to 3,000,000,000

    Number of people globally who will be at risk of hunger due to
    climate change if greenhouse emissions continue to grow at the
    current rate: 80,000,000

    Number of people in low-income countries expected to become
    undernourished if greenhouse emissions grow at the current rate:
    183,000,000

    Surface area, in square kilometers, of glaciers on Africa’s Mount
    Kilimanjaro in 1912: 12

    Surface area of glaciers on Mount Kilimanjaro forecast to remain in
    2040 if emissions continue at their current rate: 0

    Number of people in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
    who could be displaced by weather extremes by 2050 if greenhouse gas
    emissions continue growing at the present rate: 143,000,000

    Number of times more people killed by droughts, floods and storms in
    the world’s poorest coastal countries than the richest nations: 15

    Percentage of all land species that will face a high risk of
    extinction if the world warms by 2 degrees Celsius by 2100: 18

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2022/03/07/science/its-worse-than-we-thought-15-numbers-that-show-were-not-prepared-climate-change/


/[    great conversation  ] /
*Peter Ward: “Oceans - What’s the Worst that Can Happen?” | The Great 
Simplification #08*
Feb 23, 2022
Nate Hagens
On this episode, we meet with author and paleobiologist Peter Ward.

Ward helps us catalogue the various risks facing Earth’s oceans, how the 
Atlantic Ocean’s currents are slowing due to warming, what happened in 
Earth’s history when ocean currents stopped, and why a reduction in 
elephant poaching is contributing to the destruction of coral reefs.

Peter Ward is a Professor of Biology and Earth and Space Sciences at the 
University of Washington. He is author of over a dozen books on Earth's 
natural history including On Methuselah's Trail: Living Fossils and the 
Great Extinctions; Under a Green Sky; and The Medea Hypothesis, 2009, 
(listed by the New York Times as one of the “100 most important ideas of 
2009”). Ward gave a TED talk in 2008 about mass extinctions.
//https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw/
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/[  When we know, we have to act  - now this brief article ]
/03-05-22
*How to get past despair and take powerful action on climate change*
There’s no denying human activity has driven climate change. But our 
actions can also change things for the better.

BY THOMAS S. BATEMAN AND MICHAEL E MANN
Our species is in a race with climate change, and a lot of people want 
to know, “Can I really make a difference?”

The question concerns what’s known as agency. Its meaning is complex, 
but in a nutshell, it means being able to do what you set out to do and 
believing you can succeed.

*How well people exercise their agency will determine the severity of 
global warming—and its consequences.*

The evidence is clear that people are changing the climate dramatically. 
But human actions can also affect the climate for the better by reducing 
fossil fuel burning and carbon emissions. It’s not too late to avert the 
worst effects of climate change, but time is running out.

Despite abundant technical agency, humanity is alarmingly short of 
psychological agency: belief in one’s personal ability to help. A 
10-country-survey study in The Lancet, a British medical journal, found 
that more than half of young people ages 16 to 25 feel afraid, sad, 
anxious, angry, powerless, and helpless about climate change.

As professors, we bring complementary perspectives to the challenges of 
taking action on climate change. Tom Bateman studies psychology and 
leadership, and Michael Mann is a climate scientist and author of the 
recent book “The New Climate War.”

*BELIEVING “I CAN DO THIS”*
Human activities—particularly relying on coal, oil, and natural gas for 
energy—have dramatically affected the climate, with dire consequences.

As greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuel use accumulate in the 
atmosphere, they warm the planet. Rising global temperatures have fueled 
worsening heat waves, rising sea levels, and more intense storms that 
become increasingly harder to adapt to. A new report from the 
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change describes some of the 
dangerous disruptions already underway, and how they are putting people 
and the environment at risk.

Just as humans can choose to drive gas-guzzlers, they can also choose to 
act in ways that influence the climate, air quality, and public health 
for the better. Scientific knowledge and countless opportunities for 
action make that agency possible.

A key part of agency is one’s belief, when faced with a task to perform, 
a situation to manage, or a long-term goal like protecting the climate, 
that “I can do this.” It’s known as self-efficacy.

This may be the most important psychological factor in predicting how 
well people will cope with both climate change and COVID-19, recent 
online survey data from Europe indicate. People feeling adequate agency 
are more likely to persevere, rebound from setbacks, and perform at high 
levels.

With climate change, a high sense of self-efficacy strengthens a 
person’s willingness to reduce carbon emissions (mitigation) and prepare 
for climate-related disasters (adaptation). Studies confirm this for 
actions including volunteering, donating, contacting elected officials, 
saving energy, conserving water during extreme weather, and more.

*HOW TO BOOST YOUR SENSE OF AGENCY*
To build agency for something that can feel as daunting as climate 
change, focus first on the facts. In the case of climate change: 
Greenhouse gas emissions cause the most harm, and people can help far 
more than they realize.

Successful agency has four psychological drivers, all of which can be 
strengthened with practice:

*1) Intentionality: *“I choose my climate goals and actions for high 
impact.”

Deciding to act with purpose—knowing what you intend to do–is far more 
effective than thinking, “My heart’s in the right place, I just have to 
find the time.”

In the big picture, one’s highest climate efficacy is in participating 
in larger efforts to stop fossil fuel use. People can set specific 
ambitious goals for reducing personal and household energy use and join 
others in collective actions.

*2) Forethought:* “I am looking ahead and thinking strategically about 
how to proceed.”

Once you know your goals, you can think strategically and develop an 
action plan. Some plans support relatively simple goals involving 
individual lifestyle changes, such as adjusting consumption and travel 
patterns. Wider-reaching actions can help change systems—such as 
long-term activities that advocate for climate-friendly policies and 
politicians, or against policies that are harmful. These include 
demonstrations and voter campaigns.

*3) Self-regulation: *“I can manage myself over time to optimize my 
efforts and effectiveness.”

Worrying about the future is becoming a lifelong task—off and on for 
some, constant for others. Climate change will cause disasters and 
scarcities, disrupt lives and careers, heighten stress, and harm public 
health. Seeing progress and working with others can help relieve stress.

*4) Self-reflection: *“I will periodically assess my effectiveness, 
rethink strategies and tactics, and make necessary adjustments.”

It’s difficult to imagine a greater need for lifelong learning than as 
we navigate decades of climate change, its many harms, and efforts by 
fossil fuel companies to obscure the facts. Reflection—or, more 
precisely, keeping up with the latest science, learning, and adapting—is 
vital as the future keeps presenting new challenges.

*PERSONAL AGENCY IS ONLY THE FIRST STEP*
Even seemingly minor first steps can help reduce carbon emissions and 
lead to paths of greater action, but individual actions are only part of 
the solution. Big polluters often urge consumers to take small personal 
actions, which can deflect attention from the need for large-scale 
policy interventions.

Individual agency should be seen as a gateway for group efforts that can 
more quickly and effectively change the trajectory of climate change.

“Collective agency” is another form of agency. A critical mass of people 
can create societal [tipping points] that pressure industry and 
policymakers to move more quickly, safely, and equitably to implement 
policies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Helping to elect local, state, and national officials who support 
protecting the climate, and influencing investors and leaders of 
corporations and associations, can also create a sense of agency, known 
as “proxy agency.”

Together, these efforts can rapidly improve humanity’s capacity to solve 
problems and head off disasters. Fixing the world’s climate mess 
requires both urgency and a sense of agency to create the best possible 
future.

Thomas S. Bateman is professor emeritus of organizational behavior, 
University of Virginia; and Michael E. Mann is director of Earth System 
Science Center, Penn State.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90727977/how-to-get-past-despair-and-take-powerful-action-on-climate-change

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/[  Writer discusses ] /
*An Interview with Roy Scranton*
Amy Brady
This month, I have for you an interview with Roy Scranton, the 
award-winning author of five books, including Learning to Die in the 
Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization, the monograph 
Total Mobilization: World War II and American Literature, and the novel 
War Porn. Roy, who is also an associate professor of English at Notre 
Dame, has published in more magazines and newspapers than I can count. 
In the interview below, we discuss one of his most recent projects, the 
“climate crisis” issue of the Massachusetts Review, which he co-edited 
with Noy Holland.
- -
*Let’s turn from grief to pessimism. In a recent talk on “the virtues of 
pessimism,” you write that “focusing on a future that could be rather 
than on the actual history that got us where we are” fosters “a 
dangerous complacency.” Would you elaborate on what you mean here?*

In one respect, this goes back to my previous point about apophatic 
futurism, or the idea that we are committed existentially to a future we 
not only don’t know, but we cannot know. We act necessarily with 
incomplete knowledge of our situation, and in total ignorance of the 
consequences of our actions – and yet we act on the world, and indeed 
cannot escape acting this side of death – withdrawal, silence, and 
forgetting are not the opposite of actions but actions themselves, which 
cannot help but affect reality – even suicide, as anyone who’s had a 
friend or family member do it can tell you, is an action with consequences.

The question then is what, in our obscurity, should inform our 
decisions? Is the mere possibility of an event sufficient to make it 
worthy of attention, and if so, what kind of possibility, under what 
conditions, and what kind of attention? Take for instance the idea of 
rapid and systemic decarbonization of the global economy, which is 
certainly imaginable and could even conceivably be planned, but which is 
so unlikely in the framework of contemporary national and international 
politics that it should be grouped with the kinds of dreams we 
categorize as utopian, like the end of war, poverty, or hunger. If mere 
possibility is insufficient for convincing us to take such a desideratum 
seriously as a factor in our decision making, as I believe is the case 
here, then we need some kind of evaluative mechanism for considering the 
likely probability of different possible future events, which in the old 
days they called judgment, or wisdom. This is, I take it, the core value 
of historical, cultural, and philosophical reflection, or what we call 
“the humanities”: abstracting general principles of action and ethics 
from the accumulated salvage of the past. So my point is more or less 
the banal one that we should be making our decisions based on likely 
outcomes, arrived at by careful consideration of historical evidence, 
rather than by clinging desperately to the outcomes we’d prefer without 
regard for their actual likelihood.

On the other hand, sometimes mere possibility is enough to warrant 
significant attention: the possibility of nuclear war, for instance, or 
the chance that rapid permafrost melt could trigger catastrophic methane 
release. While the latter event is currently considered unlikely by many 
leading scientists, and indeed often denounced with an insistence 
bordering on the pathological, there is enough evidence to suggest that 
it cannot be ranked as wholly impossible. Since the possible 
consequences of such an event, however unlikely, include the extinction 
of the human species, any responsible consideration demands we take it 
into account. This point is made very well by the philosopher Hans 
Jonas, who called for a “heuristics of fear.” As Jonas writes in his 
opus The Ethic of Responsibility:

Even at its best… an extrapolation from presently available data will 
always, in certainty and completeness of prediction, fall short of the 
causal pregnancy of our technological deeds. Consequently, an 
imaginative “heuristics of fear,” replacing the former projections of 
hope, must tell us what is possibly at stake and what we must beware of. 
The magnitude of those stakes, taken together with the insufficiency of 
our predictive knowledge, leads to the pragmatic rule to give the 
prophecy of doom priority over the prophecy of bliss.

In your talk, you bring this up in a wider context of philosophy and the 
fact that climate change “is hard to talk about.” Would you expand on 
this as well?  How would “the virtues of pessimism” change climate 
discourse?

Pessimism is a form of heresy in a country which insists with childish 
stubbornness that it deserves a happy ending. Even more than the market, 
even more than the flag, even more than their own eternal innocence, 
middle- and upper-class white Americans believe in optimism: the faith 
that things can get better, indeed that they will get better, and that 
the right combination of hard work, reason, and moral outrage can solve 
any problem – whether its Making America Great Again or Building Back 
Better, it’s the same fatuous bullshit. As W.E.B. DuBois wrote in his 
1940 “autobiography of a race concept,” Dusk of Dawn, “The greatest and 
most immediate danger of white culture, perhaps least sensed, is its 
fear of the Truth, its childish belief in the efficacy of lies as a 
method of human uplift.” And since the United States has been a white 
supremacist culture for so long, this fear and belief – this cruel 
optimism – is baked into the ideological framework of major cultural 
institutions, largely through narratives of progress, the notion that we 
live in a meritocracy, and a mawkish tendency toward salvific moral 
fables (which I’ve critiqued elsewhere). As a consequence, pessimism 
tends to be derided and confused with nihilism, a “counsel of despair,” 
hopelessness, and fatalism.

But when we look closely at the histories of these conceptual schema, 
which we tend to naturalize as “dispositions” but which in fact are 
fairly modern phenomena, emerging only in the 18th century, we find that 
they are distinct and contrasting philosophical approaches to modern 
ideas of time, suffering, and progress. In the words of political 
philosopher Joshua Foa Dienstag,

The optimistic account of the human condition is both linear and 
progressive. Liberalism, socialism, and pragmatism may all be termed 
optimistic in the sense that they are all premised on the idea that the 
application of reason to human social and political conditions will 
ultimately result in the melioration of these conditions. Pessimism… 
denies this premise, or (more cautiously) finds no evidence for it and 
asks us to philosophize in its absence.

Progressivist optimism is deeply entwined with the histories of 
racialized expropriation, instrumentalized rationality, and imperial 
expansion that I talked about before, and indeed cannot be extricated 
from them: it is the moral and teleological axis that sustains the 
transformation of European Christian universalist metaphysics into 
secularized liberalism: a faith in the power of rational human free will 
to overcome “brute” matter. Pessimism, which emerges first out of the 
rigorous skepticism of Pierre Bayle and Voltaire, then develops through 
the anti-progressivist ethics of Thomas Malthus, Schopenhauer’s 
encounter with Buddhism, and Nietzsche’s attempts to synthesize the 
philosophical implications of Darwinian evolutionary theory – and can be 
seen more recently in the work of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Frank 
Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Achille Mbembe, to name just a few examples 
– is a fundamentally empirical rejection of such self-serving narratives.

When it comes to climate change, there are good empirical reasons for 
being pessimistic about our prospects: on top of the science, which 
seems to be consistently warning us that things are moving faster than 
predicted, we can point to more than forty years of total failure from 
climate change politics and communication; fossil fuel industry capture 
of ruling elites (indeed, the idea of capture may be redundant here); 
complacency among voters; genuine structural difficulties in narrating 
climate change as a salient threat; moralizing and divisive tone 
policing from overzealous activists; competition between states; a 
refusal to reckon with the real costs of decarbonizing the global 
economy; and the probability that as the planet’s transition to a warmer 
climate system speeds up, it will only exacerbate existing political 
challenges, increase political pressure to deal with short-term crises 
rather than long-term transformation, and motivate elites to shore up 
their fortresses of wealth and privilege, leading to what Daniel Aldana 
Cohen and others have called “eco-apartheid.”

Recognizing these challenges may lead some to despair. Fine. That’s 
better than a false or complacent optimism. And maybe despair is where 
some of us need to go in order to realize how profound the problem is, 
how deep we’re in it, and how immense are the stakes. But more 
importantly, I believe pessimism can, through its very negativity, open 
up new ways forward, new ways to think into our future, new 
possibilities for imagining what it means to live in the new world that 
fossil capitalism has unleashed.

Moreover, consciously choosing to consider the worst case helps us 
prepare for it, and if the worst doesn’t happen, so much the better. As 
Jonas put it, “The prophecy of doom is made to avert its coming, and it 
would be the height of injustice later to deride the ‘alarmists’ because 
‘it did not turn out so bad after all.’ To have been wrong may be their 
merit.”

But if the worst does happen and we’re prepared, then we’ll be ready to 
act, rather than being paralyzed by our shock and disbelief, as so many 
liberal optimists were for so long after Trump’s election in 2016, for 
instance. Indeed, as I talked about earlier with Fanon, a pessimistic 
approach demands that one conceive of the future as a realm of action, 
even if that action must necessarily be taken in ignorance and 
obscurity, since one can in no sense depend on hope, a complacent 
optimism, or the arc of history to create a just world for us.

What action is next for you, then, either as a writer or teacher?

I’ve got a cli-fi novel with my agent. It’s about a young woman who’s 
displaced by a hurricane, and how she survives and copes with her 
trauma. The manuscript is titled Pilgrim, and it’s more narrative than 
my other novels – it’s kind of an adventure story, but I also tried to 
squeeze in what philosophy I could. I think of it in the tradition of 
Camus, maybe, though I tried pitching it as Jane Eyre meets The Road 
Warrior. I’m also working on a book about eco-pessimism, climate change, 
and narrative, which goes more deeply into a lot of the things we’ve 
talked about here.

The writing is going slowly, though, because much of my time is taken up 
with trying to build institutional structures at Notre Dame, where I 
teach, to help address the climate crisis. I’ve started an Environmental 
Humanities Initiative, and am working with other folks at the 
Environmental Change Initiative, the Kroc Institute for International 
Peace Studies, and the Keough School of Global Affairs to establish some 
kind of center on campus in the spirit of Pope Francis’s Laudato Si’. 
Despite being one of the leading Catholic universities in the country, 
if not the leading Catholic university, Notre Dame has been slow to 
respond to the ethical and intellectual mandate in Laudato Si’, and has 
so far rather shamefully shirked its responsibilities on the issue.

Institutional inertia is paralyzing, but there are motivated people 
across campus working to roll that boulder up the hill, and I’m glad to 
be working with them. Part of my effort, related to that, is developing 
a new, large, writing-intensive course on “Witnessing Climate Change,” 
which I hope will inculcate wave after wave of Notre Dame undergrads in 
heretical strains of ecological thought, ethical adaptation, 
action-oriented pessimism, and the techniques of creative nonfiction.

I’m not hopeful that any institution is going to save us, but I do 
believe we can carve out spaces and build structures that might actually 
help people, and I’m not without hope that we can embed ideas within 
institutions in ways that may turn out to offer ethically transformative 
possibilities. I realize that’s not as sexy as blowing up pipelines, but 
frankly I’ve seen enough dudes saying we need to blow shit up – and have 
seen enough real explosions – to last me a lifetime. In any case, the 
real work isn’t tearing the system down. Any teenager can start a fire, 
and the system is going to collapse on its own soon enough. The real 
work we need to do is to prepare for that collapse, work to mitigate 
human suffering, and plant seeds that might grow in the ruins.

This article is part of the Climate Art Interviews series. It was 
originally published in Amy Brady’s “Burning Worlds” newsletter. 
Subscribe to get Amy’s newsletter delivered straight to your inbox.
https://artistsandclimatechange.com/2022/03/07/an-interview-with-roy-scranton/



/[The news archive - looking back]/
*March 10, 2014*
   On MSNBC's "Ronan Farrow Daily," Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) discusses 
the all-night climate-change symposium Democratic and independent 
Senators will hold that evening.

http://on.msnbc.com/1fkoDvA


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