Living with instead of living from
I listened yesterday to Nate Hagens’s conversation with Xiye Bastida. Bastida is a climate activist who, though only in her early 20s, has already spent years seeking to motivate others to do what we can to avert a climate disaster. She organized an environmental group at her NYC high school and later worked with others to organize a NYC climate protest involving 300,000 people. She also wrote “Calling In,” the introductory essay in the book All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis. One of the points from that essay that I find particularly compelling is that, while young people see climate change differently simply because they will be living in a decaying world longer than we older people will, the response to the challenge must be intergenerational:
It’s true that the climate-strike movement is organized and led by young people, but we need to work intergenerationally if we want to impact every sector and every industry. To me and a lot of other young people, it feels like we’re rooted in awareness while the adults around us live in obliviousness. This is where “Okay,Boomer” comes from, a phrase designed to describe the intergenerational disconnect of the movement. But that’s not right. First, the world is not okay, Boomer, so we will shake those who need to be shaken out of their comfort zone. People in developed countries and big cities are too comfortable, and nothing changes if we stay in a state of unbotheredness. We need to be uncomfortable about the system to change it, and the youth are bringing the climate crisis to attention precisely to channel action out of uneasiness. Second, we cannot let phrases like “Okay, Boomer” divide us. The fossil fuel industry wants us to be divided in order to slow down the push for climate justice. But we refuse to let attempts at division affect our purpose (p. 5).
Speaking of our divisions, Bastida insists that it’s no accident that the four countries whose populations are most polarized on climate change, in large part because of obfuscations and lobbying by the fossil fuel industry, are also the four nations whose emissions have grown the most since the 2015 Paris Agreement. Of course the United States is at the top of both these lists.
There’s a lot to digest in Bastida’s conversation with Hagens. But there’s one simple phrase that stood out to me:
…instead of living from the earth, we should live with the earth (emphasis added).
It’s a simple phrase, but it packs a lot of power.
I think it jumped out at me as much as it did because of a Henrik Karlsson essay I’d read earlier in the day. The essay is about political power as manifested in such figures as Lyndon Baines Johnson and Robert Moses. (Yes, the essay is US-centric; and yes, the essay draws on biographies written by Robert Caro.) Karlsson uses the metaphor of fracking to talk about political power as it’s understood, mined, and used by people like LBJ and Moses. Before reading Caro, Karlsson says, he was inclined to think of political power as something that politicians attained after they were elected to office, power that they had and could execute because of their political position.
In Caro’s biographies, it is clear that the real political operators don’t think about it like this at all. To them, power is something you frack, something you force out of the stone by pumping fluid into the cracks. If you pay close attention, you will discover that there are drops of power everywhere — in the good feelings someone’s mother holds for you, in being able to get your college friend a job, in knowing embarrassing facts about your mentor, in having someone’s trust, and so on. To any normal person, these drops are so small that they barely register, and anyway, it feels wrong to treat someone’s mom as a reservoir to frack. But Caro’s subjects are willing to do anything to win, so they will, so to speak, pump fracking fluid into the ground. They will press it into every little crevice, forcing drops of power mixed with sand to the surface. And as it turns out, if you extract all the small things and pool them together, it can be a massive reserve of power, indeed.
According to this view, political power is something that one gets by living from other people, rather than by living with other people, by treating another person as “a reservoir to frack.” Obviously, this approach didn’t stop with LBJ and Moses. Donald Trump’s approach to governing — and, for that matter, to life more generally — has been characterized as transactional. I agree that it’s transactional, but I think it’s more than that. It’s treating people as objects to be used and thrown away. It’s a vampire-like living from other people. Or, recalling Kant, it’s treating people merely as means to one’s own ends rather than as ends in themselves. I think it’s no accident that Trump’s approach to the natural world is in line with his approach to people.
Perhaps I’m naive, but I’m coming to think that we won’t muster an adequate responses both to the climate crisis and to threats to democracy until more of us — perhaps especially Boomers like me who live in privilege — learn to live with rather than from both the natural world and the people with whom we share it.
