Confinement and Commitment in the Climate Crisis

In the two years since the pandemic brought “lockdown” into our everyday language, I’ve thought a lot about confinement. San Francisco and five other Bay Area counties announced a “shelter in place” order on March 16th, 2020, the first of its kind in the nation. At the stroke of midnight, my wife, month-old daughter and I entered the Stay-at-Home world, which was not that different from our postpartum, new-parenting world—save for the sense of an entire way of life hanging in the balance. On one side: a devastating pandemic surging across a divisive, distracted country ill-prepared to confront a healthcare disaster. On the other: an accelerating climate crisis threatening to destroy any gains in health and wealth we have made.

With thousands of people dying of Covid-19 each day, the coronavirus stress tested an already stressed-out nation. Nurse, doctor and mental health worker burnout and shortages soared; U.S. life expectancy fell for a second year in a row; the working poor, especially poor communities of color, were forced onto the front lines, providing for a country which has left many of them behind. Meanwhile, the wealth of 704 U.S. citizens—our infinitesimal billionaire class—surged by 1.7 trillion dollars over the pandemic, with billionaires now controlling one-third more wealth than the entire bottom half of Americans, some 65 million households.

In its Latin root confinia, confinement is the experience of being with limits (con- ‘together’ + finis ‘end, limit’), which was the subject of my last post. As I watched the pandemic unfold from my home and the hospital where I work, there was also no escape from the persistently inconvenient truth about climate change. The algorithms controlling my Instagram, Twitter and TikTok social media use delivered me endless opportunity to doomscroll through the climate and health topics that best keep my attention locked onto their apps. As I was scrolling through 2020, the U.S. was battered by twenty-two separate billion-dollar climate and weather disasters that year. The temporary dip in carbon emissions at the start of lockdowns didn't have any discernible effect on the “relentless” intensification of climate instability, with extreme wildfires raging through the western U.S., Australia, Arctic and Amazon.

In the parlance of climate speak, further warming and devastation is “locked in.” Regardless of how quickly we reduce heat-trapping pollution from this day forward, the science comprehensively demonstrates that the world will keep warming until at least 2050, meaning for the next 30 years the heat waves and fires will be stronger, the droughts more intense, and the storms and flooding more destructive.

Six months into the pandemic, these locked-in consequences merged with my lockdown life. My wife and I awoke to our daughter’s morning cries on our third wedding anniversary, September 9th, 2020. An eerily thick San Francisco fog morphed into a Martian sunrise as we went about our morning routine. In what’s now simply called “The Orange Day” by Bay Area residents, smoke from wildfires north and east of the region transformed the region into an amber chamber, entire cities preserved inside. The sky was fire instead of water.

Days earlier, my daughter and I were forced to shelter in a conference center with industrial air purification and A/C to escape noxious ash and stifling heat in our apartment. On The Orange Day, the temperature and air quality were better despite the apocalyptic lighting, so we ventured into its twilight-zone strangeness.

Scenes from routine life were accompanied by a soundtrack of disoriented birds singing overhead. We were outdoors yet shut into an atmosphere-sized theater, projecting the climate crisis in sepia tones onto every building, street, tree and person. Narration was unnecessary, the message was synesthetic: “Look. It’s here. We’re in it.”

Walking through the orange tint of this simple truth, I thought of these lines from my favorite author, David Abram, in his book "Becoming Animal": “air is not a random bunch of gases... but an elixir generated by the soils, the oceans, and the numberless organisms that inhabit this world… and we, imbibing and strolling through that same air, do not then live on the eairth but in it.” (Abram adds an “i” in into earth’s spelling, “in order to remind ourselves that the ‘air’ is entirely a part of the eairth, and the i, the I or self, is wholly immersed.”)

Whether eairth strikes you as contrived or poetic (depending on my mood, it elicits either), the portmanteau doesn’t go far enough to describe the experience of The Orange Day. It still stresses the individual within the world, whereas the collective predicament of climate change—how it colors the experience of whole cities, regions and communities—was on display in an unsettling yet not life-threatening way for San Francisco’s residents. Like a crystal ball, we could stare into the colossal fires raging over our world without getting burnt. I was interviewed by the Financial Times, and remarked that it was like “God’s Instagram filter came down to show something visually evocative to us.”

Orange Day was a viral moment for climate in my social circles in a year when those circles were twisted out of shape by a virus. For some days after, there was a surge in shared climate angst and anxiety amongst friends, colleagues and neighbors. It was okay to talk about climate change in casual conversation. It was okay to admit in passing, as our neighbor did as she met my wife in our apartment’s stairwell: “This is not normal.” People checked in on each other in ways akin to the earliest lockdown days. We were confined not only by COVID, but by our climate reality, living with a shared sense that a limit had been breached, even if we wouldn’t all agree on how to define it or reassert it (some are still more comfortable laying the blame on CO2 in our air rather than the growth imperative of capitalism and the corporate capture of our governments).

The moment eventually passed, but the science remains crystal clear: we are locked into climate disruption for our lifespans. We are living in a time on Earth when corporate and shareholder interests hold more sway on policy and political decision-making than irrefutable science, unprecedented species and landscape loss, and the wishes of the majority of world’s population. Each year of predatory delay confines us to smaller windows of opportunity and exposes more of us to an ever-expanding frontline of ecological catastrophe.

With widespread vaccination and exposure, and less severe variants, the acute pandemic is starting to ebb. Weddings are happening (I officiated my sister-in-law's last week!); music festivals are back in full swing; Broadway is filled with the sound of applause; offices and happy hours are once again abuzz with workers.

My wife and I are still often housebound, though, immersed in the domestic intensity of naps, bedtimes, meals and storytime that raising a toddler entails. It is hard, and indescribably rewarding, and our choice. We committed to it. Hundreds of friends and family blessed this intention at our own pre–pandemic wedding in 2017 (which, like The Orange Day, occurred in the wake of a heat wave, one where San Francisco logged its highest temperature ever recorded: 106 degrees).

As COVID becomes a baseline reality, the baseline itself is drooping in the heat, dragging down our expectations of our future. Summer is approaching the Northern Hemisphere, having already brought devastating floods to Australia and South Africa, and creating a heatwave in India and Pakistan this month that led to shuttered schools and deserted streets. Our world is locked into warming, a euphemism in the searing, scorching, burning places where people are dying. My nerves rattle at each passing thought about California fires and infernal skies driving us inside this summer, a season that was synonymous with open air during my childhood. My home now has air conditioning units and air purifying towers for each room, ready at a moment’s notice for smoke and heat-related Stay-at-Home orders.

Because we are locked into climate disruption for our lifespans, we need our collective attention span to lock onto climate solutions and movements. We cannot rely on the virality of disaster news stories to briefly capture our attention, or wait for deranged weather days to inspire neighbors and friends to have climate conservations. The popular mental health journalist Johann Hari writes about The Orange Day and the climate crisis on the final page of his recent book, Stolen Focus, saying “We can only solve the climate crisis if we solve our attention crisis.” He includes a quote from the tech ethicist James Williams: “I used to think there were no great political struggles left… How wrong I was. The liberation of human attention may be the defining moral and political struggle of our time. Its success is a prerequisite for the success of virtually all other struggles.”

A focus on restabilizing the climate system can draw attention to the social, political, economic, and environmental injustices that comprise it. To wear orange-colored glasses is to eschew rosy and grim polarities of the imagined future for a close attention to limits to economic growth, consumption and private wealth in the present. Within these confines, there are the Boundaries I’ve named this newsletter after, defined previously as “places that leverage life’s inherent uncertainty to forge relationships between things that can evolve together rather than fight for survival.”

COVID lockdowns may be a thing of the past, but unless we all commit to the life-affirming struggle to end the global fossil fuel regime’s death grip on our policymaking and our storytelling, they are a preview of climate-related lockdowns and breakdowns (including another pandemic) that will color our whole existence.

We are confined, but not trapped. The only trap is thinking your contributions do not make a difference or that they can wait for another day. Your Orange Day may come tomorrow, may come in a decade, or it may have already passed. Your attention and intentions form your commitments, regardless of the circumstances. Commit to leveraging your life in the uncertainty of our times to weave boundaries and set limits that protect all this earth gives birth to. You are an i in eairth. Together, we are the us in focus.

Two Commitments to Make This Week:

1. Commit to switching your banking to a local credit union or another climate-friendly bank.
2. Commit to getting out the vote for November 2022 midterm elections. Donate or volunteer with high-impact voter mobilization campaigns: the Environmental Voter Project and the Movement Voter Project.