Category Archives: The Grim Reader

The Grim Reader: Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger

Leave a Reply

 

Is Doppleganger the right book to add to The Grim Reader series? It has a breadth and scope that is deeply necessary. It is personal. It is political. It gives voice to all kinds of issues from our ecological crisis to rising fascism. So, yes.

On the surface, the book is about the unfortunate mix-ups Naomi Klein has had to endure between herself and Naomi Wolf. Wolf used to be a well regarded feminist academic, but at some point, she took a turn in another direction. The book that brought her widespread attention, The Beauty Myth, was good. Although it didn’t add anything new to the understanding of how beauty is used to hold women back (this was already well trodden ground), Wolf was a new, young, and welcome voice on the scene and gave the argument a new (and beautiful) face. I used her work when I taught Women’s Studies at the college level.

Meanwhile, Klein, became a well known feminist progressive, environmental activist, and political activist. She is the writer behind No Logo and The Shock Doctrine. She tried for years to shrug off the mix ups between the two Naomis. Although harmless at first, as the years wore on, Wolf veered into territory that was anathema to Klein and mix ups became more embarrassing. Over time, Klein became interested in (and possibly obsessed over) how someone like Wolf could change her world views so radically.

Klein’s exploration into Wolf’s transformation brings her to a profound book about mirror images, doubling, or doppleganging. In a way, Doppleganger is a book about how we all contain multitudes. If you’ve ever asked yourself how your Uncle Jim or your mom or someone who you used to know as a great helper-parent in your neighbourhood school or volunteer at the food bank became a FOX News watching, conspiracy-minded, MAGA hat wearing, flag waving, vaccination fearing, Pierre Pollievre supporting, maybe even gun-toting, freedom screaming, convoy supporter, this book is for you. It actually helped me understand how it happens.

I have to admit that even I mixed the two Naomis up, a fact that I am embarrassed about now. I had thought that the incredible foundational error that Wolf made in writing one of her books, Outrages, was an error Klein had made in one of her new books. Oops. But because, in my mistaken mind, it was Klein, I shrugged it off as an “everyone makes mistakes” moment. It did not, to me, change anything about the brilliance of her earlier books, No Logo or The Shock Doctrine. But now that I know it was the other Naomi, can I extend the same grace to Wolf and say that this big mistake she made doesn’t change anything about The Beauty Myth? 

Sure. I guess.

It’s definitely harder because of Wolf’s turn to the right and the new company she keeps, like Steve Bannon. But it is important to give people like Wolf a little grace. How else can they come back?

One of the things Klein finds is that the difference between herself and Wolf and their increasingly divergent ideas is the difference between having a world view that is community oriented versus one that is more individually focussed. As Wolf’s shine wore off, she was all about finding another platform on which she could remain a darling. And find it she did. As a sociologist, I appreciate Klein’s observation that individual goals lead to different outcomes than more community-minded goals. I might even rephrase it to say that the difference between being Naomi Wolf or Naomi Klein is that Klein has a sociological imagination (with thanks to C. Wright Mills) and Wolf does not, or at least, does not anymore.

Klein writes, “These doubles share one thing in common: all are ways of not seeing. Not seeing ourselves clearly (because we are so busy performing an idealized version of ourselves), not seeing one another clearly (because we are so busy projecting what we cannot bear to see about ourselves onto others), and not seeing the world and the connections among us clearly (because we have partitioned ourselves and blocked our vision). I think this, more than anything else, explains the uncanny feeling of our moment in history–with all of its mirrorings, synthetic selves, and manufactured realities. At bottom, it comes down to who and what we cannot bear to see–in our past, in our present, and inthe future racing toward us.” And in ourselves. We all have an authoritarian toddler within us screaming for control. Most of us learn to get past that and live with others in a society working towards mutual benefit.

It is that simple. And that complex. And the road Klein takes herself on to get herself and her readers here is fascinating. Quoting prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba, Klein reminds us “Everything worthwhile is done with other people.” And we are going to have to understand all kinds of people to do anything worthwhile.

On a personal note:

I read Doppleganger while in the midst of a critical health crisis. I started reading it at home, had it with me for a week in the hospital and finished it when I got home again. In that period, I had been told my illness was terminal. Then the doctors found a way to save me. I post this two months later, after three more hospital stays, one of which included open-heart surgery. The fact that I can be (hopefully) cogent again is promising. I have yet one more very difficult surgery ahead and my current hospital stay will not be my last.

All of this is happening in a time when SARS-CoV-2 has been allowed to run rampant, as though it isn’t a killer disease, a disease that can affect every organ of every body, a disease that is chronic for many, a disease that is the source of a mass disabling event. I navigate this while trying to deal with my own non-covid related situation. Mitigations have been dropped in favour of keeping a society looking “normal,” that is, like it is 2019. As though we can choose the changes that happen around us constantly and reject some of them. As though we can keep our heads in the sand.

As of April 8, there is no longer a mask mandate enforced in BC hospitals. Some of my own doctors don’t wear masks and it makes me wonder if I can trust their medical knowledge. But the demands of capital have won out over the needs of sick people. It all became political and public health is now a joke, existing in name only. This is also considered within the pages of Doppleganger.

What’s happening to me personally is life and death. What’s happening to all of us collectively is life and death. The trend towards authoritarianism, the casual eugenics, (well, it’s ONLY those with co-morbidities that are dying, it’s ONLY the frail and elderly, it’s ONLY the disabled) and the genocide(s) taking place across the world are all related. Klein knows this. She looks at Hitler’s Germany, and specifically the life’s work of Hans Asperger who went from being someone trying to help children who were a little different live full lives to someone who was selecting which “disabled” children would die within the Nazi’s genocidal machine. Klein  writes, “Asperger’s jarring career trajectory demonstrates that, in just a handful of years, the same institutions and some of the very same people can shift from an ethos of care and curiosity toward a vulnerable group to one of callousness and genocidal cleansing. As if a switch has been flipped.”

I’ve noticed this with a lot of people throughout the pandemic. So has Klein. The admittedly weak and nascent efforts at community protection we saw in the beginning of 2020 completely turned around. Now wearing a mask or getting a vaccine is thought of as a bad thing by an apparently vast swath of people. Or maybe they are a particularly loud minority. Whoever they are, they have won. Protecting each other is a long-gone ethos. She cites examples of people on the vaccine-feaing, invermectin-promoting side saying the weak should die. And as a person who is now one of the weak, effectively barred from participation in much of society because no one is willing to wear a mask anymore or put any effort or resources into creating cleaner indoor air, I can tell you, it sure feels eugenic to me. As I mentioned above, even my own doctors don’t always wear masks. I’m sure they care about me (at least abstractly) and they have put a lot of their skill and effort into keeping me alive, but they just don’t see how careless they are.

Caring and careless. At the same time. For example, I have no doubt that some of those same people who were banging pots and pans in support of health care workers in early 2020 wouldn’t deign to put a mask on to save the health and life of a health care worker today if they had to go into their doctor’s office or to the hospital. Nor will they wear a mask to save their own life. Or mine. In short, we are “both this and that.”

And this is the key realization of Klein’s opus. Both individual people and even states can be “victim and victimizer at the same time.” One of her most extraordinary and helpful conclusions is that what makes the difference between going “there” and not going “there” is one’s attachment to a sense of community or society and an understanding of class. My sociologist soul rejoices at this conclusion.

Klein writes, “The disability justice advocate and author Beatrice Adler-Bolton refers to the mindset that has animated so much Covid denialism as ‘deaths pulled from the future’–which she defines as the judgement laden posture that frames ‘deaths from Covid-19 as somehow preordained’ because the people doing most of the dying were probably going to die prematurely anyway. Covid just moved up the timelines a few years, so what’s the bid deal?” Klein states clearly, “this is fascist thought. More specifically, it is genocidal thought. It recalls the ways in which colonial massacres were rationalized because within the ranking of human life created by pseudoscientific racists, Indigenous peoples, such as the original residents of Tasmania, were cast as ‘living fossils.’ … Indigenous peoples were, in this telling, the pre-dead, with extermination merely serving to accelerate the inevitable timeline.”

I am not keen on being shunted aside as the pre-dead. I’d appreciate being able to keep every day I might have to experience this troubling body and all of the joy and love it is capable of manifesting.

The planet itself and our eco-systems are disabled now. Our work must be care-based in this “time of planetary shocks and layered disasters.” Our most prevalent state is “chronic impairment,” says disability rights theorist Sunaura Taylor. Klein quotes her saying, “As a disabled person I recognize this as disability… What we live with in the present and will for decades to come, even under the best-case scenario, is mass ecological disablement of the more than human world, a disablement that is utterly entangled with the disablement of human beings. Given this, it seems vital to consider what forms of care, treatment and assistance this age of disability will require.”

On the final page of Doppleganger, Klein writes, “Negotiating that doubling [that is, the doppleganger]–between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves–is part of what it means to be human.” My living, disabled self has a huge stake in all of it.

This is where Doppleganger lands for me. The mini-thesis inside the bigger thesis is about disability. I am in my age of disability in a world that is already disabled watching another mass disability event play out among humans during the sixth great extinction. I watch these events through wildfire smoke and sometimes through a hospital window. While there are still hospitals. There is something powerful and necessary about facing what’s real. I think constantly about words like accessibility and inclusion. I think about what they mean for me, for the forests. I think about what it means to truly respect every living thing, as it is, to know that it has an inherent purpose all of its own, even when damaged. Naomi Klein is still thinking about this. Her Doppleganger is not.

Read Dopplegnager. Tell me what you think.

 

Fire Weather by John Vaillant: The Grim Reader

Leave a Reply

What can I say about Fire Weather than hasn’t already been said? Grim reading, for sure. Vaillant is a brilliant writer. He could not be more clear and he surely deserves every accolade he has received for this book (and more). This is one of those texts that makes science accessible to the non-scientist, like myself. If you want to understand how our exploitation of oil and gas have forever changed our atmosphere, this is the book to read.

Cover of John Vaillant’s Fire Weather

Vaillant offers an account of the terrible fires in Fort McMurray in 2016 that saw the evacuation of an entire city. Fire Weather is almost excessively detailed, at times offering a house-by-house, heartbreaking and terrifying account of the destructive power of the fires that engulfed this northern outpost. The portraits drawn of the people in charge of the fire fighting efforts and of ordinary citizens are compelling. The fear is palpable, the losses almost inconceivable.

Irony is front and centre. Fort Mac is a city built for the express purpose of enabling the exploitation of the vast tar sands that ultimately falls victim to the destructive forces of all the carbon dioxide unleashed by the use of oil and gas. And it’s not just Fort Mac. Our whole society is dependent on oil and gas and will be undone by it.

Having lived in Alberta for a couple of decades and having a daughter who worked in the oil sands briefly as an engineer, I have an inkling of what life is like there, of what they do, of the indelible scars left on the landscape. I also know that I use products made from oil and gas every day. Our modern life is predicated on oil and gas, on plastic, on the burning of fossil fuels.

On a recent visit back to that province, I was shocked by how many people had never heard of Vaillant’s book when I asked if they had read it. Here is a “home town story” in a way, about Albertans, even heroic Albertans, a book that has been on everyone’s must read lists, a New York Times bestseller, and in my admittedly limited experience, few of the Albertans I talked to had read it or even heard of it.

But it also doesn’t matter. What happened in Fort Mac is a global phenomenon now. Maybe it is unfair to ask those most enmeshed in a deadly system to lead themselves out of it.

I’m probably wrong, but I always think change comes mostly from the outside of systems needing change. Sometimes, people with “outsider knowledge” get inside a system and try to work from there. Certainly the understanding that something is amiss is often pointed out by outsiders first. Unfortunately in this case, oil and gas companies have so much power that they can stifle almost any effort that might limit their profit. Vaillant describes how this happens in his book too, and the depth of the deception by oil and gas interests that he details is astonishing. They knew. They always knew.

I also have some limited experience with wildfire smoke. I lived in the southern interior of BC for a time and the smoke would roll into the valley every summer as the temperatures got higher and the ground drier. I know the inescapability of it. Last year, smoke seemed to be everywhere; Toronto, New York City, Vancouver. A section of Vaillant’s book had me remembering what it was like to sit in the back of my parents’ station wagon while they smoked cigarettes up front, windows rolled up. Our world is as closed an environment as my parents’ car was.

Vaillant writes, “Fort McMurray, founded at the dawn of the Petrocene Age, has grown into an unlikely flashpoint in this collision between the rapid expansion of our fossil fuel-burning capacity and the rigid limitations of our atmosphere. Here, in this city’s fire and the events leading up to it, can be seen the sympathetic feedback between both the headlong rush to exploit hydrocarbons at all costs, in all their varied forms, and the heating of our atmosphere that the global quest for hydrocarbons has initiated, and that is changing fire as we know it.” (P. 231)

In his epilogue, he writes, “The consequences of burning millions of years of accumulated fossil energy in a period of decades will be ongoing and dramatic.” He is stark in his assessments. “The willful and ongoing failure to act on climate science is unforgivable; recrimination is justified, but none will be sufficient. In this case, at the planetary level, there is no justice; the punishment will be shared by all, but most severely by the young, the innocent and the as-yet unborn.”

Yup.

Vaillant is echoing Thom Hartmann in his ground-breaking work, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, a book that was formative for me in understanding what we are doing to ourselves and the planet. Maybe that’s why I see echoes of Hartmann in so many of the books I read now. We are draining the bank account of the resources the planet has stored for millennia in only a few generations. We are like drunks on a lottery-win fuelled spending spree, and we won’t stop. Won’t stop until what? Until the bottle is empty? Until the inevitable crash? Until….

In fact, it won’t stop with us. In Vaillant’s work, I begin to realize that even after our society is gone, the fires won’t stop. We have changed the chemistry of the planet and the nature of fire itself. We have fire tornadoes now. Will we leave behind a new Venus? None of us will be here to know.

Nevertheless, Vaillant tries to end on a hopeful note, invoking another favourite of mine, Hildegard of Bingen, a twelfth century nun who was able to express the regenerative capacity of our world through her combination of acute observations and her poetic soul. Maybe all is not lost. Whatever regenerates though, I surely will not be here to see it. I will have to have faith, like Hildegard.

On Tyranny: The Grim Reader

Leave a Reply

Today’s entry into The Grim Reader is a slim little volume called On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder. And when I say slim, I mean it. It’s an essay, really. It clocks in at 126 pages but the book is only 6″ x 4″. Tiny. Yet, it has a lot to say.

I’m breaking the rules because On Tyranny is not about climate catastrophe. But tyranny will only add to the catastrophe we face, so I’ll allow it. Also, it’s my blog, and these things will happen from time to time. So today, maybe it’s “The Slim Reader,” not “The Grim Reader.” (That was a really bad joke.)

Many of us born and raised in Canada after WWII are reluctant to think we have been touched by tyranny. I spent decades living in Alberta, Canada. In the early 90’s, I was teaching in a small town where some of the leaders of the brand new Reform movement lived. I was a young thing from Toronto and not having any of it. The brand of politics that has flourished in Alberta since then, nurtured on a poisonous and steady diet of oil, gas, and exceptionalism is not anything I want to be part of.

Inevitably, the politics in Alberta have not stayed in Alberta. They affect the rest of Canada. And that’s not because Albertans are right (no pun intended). It is in our human natures to try to be reasonable and accommodating. We are social animals. We want to stay with the group and keep the peace. We want Confederation to work. No one wants to break up the family. We want to get along. We are people who compromise (in a good way). We want as much “normal” as we can get. And as “normal” shifts, very often, we shift with it. (See Overton Window.)

This might be especially true in Canada where the motto, “peace, order and good government” is one many of us grew up with. We believe in it so deeply, we can’t imagine losing it. Our institutions will protect us, we think. But as Snyder notes, it is the other way around. We have to protect our institutions.

It’s important to note that peace, order, and good government were never true for marginalized people. Indigenous people certainly wouldn’t have accused Canada of having valued peace, order, or good government. Maybe more like “colonization, suppression, and control.”

Anyway. Here’s another way into Snyder’s work. We all know that ridiculous uncle who comes to dinner and drinks too much and spouts off and ruins everything. Then dinner is over and we all have a bad taste in our mouths. But we pretty much get to forget about him until the next gathering, the next holiday, the next wedding, or the next funeral (which, with any luck, will be his but these people seem to live forever even if they drink and eat cheeseburgers every day).

But imagine if you had to have dinner with that uncle every night? Ask an Indigenous person about that. What was it like for them when settlers took over? Imagine if the drunk uncle takes over as host and he sticks you at the children’s table? What then?

Snyder’s advice on what to do when tyrants try to take over is wide-ranging. These are also history lessons. From a warning against “anticipatory obedience” to new authoritarian measures, to urging us to “stand out” in our defiance, these lessons are critical now. He writes, “The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.” One person can make a difference. This is the truth that people in power, that tyrants, don’t want you to believe, They want you to feel useless and depressed and despondent. They want you to go along with whatever it is they are doing because what’s the use in trying? We all know you can’t fight city hall.

But that’s not true. You make a difference. I make a difference. Stand up. Speak out.

Don’t worry about what that drunken uncle thinks of you. He’s ruining dinner for everyone, and we all know it. And it’s not his kids’ fault. Don’t blame them. Or his wife. It’s harder for them to stand up to him. They’ve got more to lose. The same is true for your average Alberta citizen who is kind and generous and would be the first to stop and help you if your car broke down, take you home while you wait for the tow truck and offer you a piece of pie and a cup of coffee.

It’s up to you. It’s up to me.

To be clear, Snyder does not talk about drunken uncles. He does talk about Churchill. Churchill stood out in WWII by refusing to give in to Hitler. He didn’t call Poland or France or Austria far away foreign countries that had nothing to do with him. He understood that the fate of those countries was tied to England’s. How did that end? Germany and Hitler were defeated. Churchill did not concede in advance, as others had done. (And please don’t reply with a history lesson. Just read the book and know that I am not doing Snyder’s argument justice with my brevity.)

Snyder also does not talk about Indigenous people and the history of white settler colonialism specifically. But, I feel certain that he would agree that it  was and remains tyrannical and that decolonization is an important means of acting against all tyranny.

Another of Snyder’s lessons is to “Be kind to our language,” by which he means don’t mindlessly repeat memes and clichés. Make an effort to say what you mean in your own way, if only to force yourself to think about it. (Thus, my drunken uncle analogy.)

Snyder’s lessons, while specific to tyranny, apply to all kinds of things. For example, he writes, “You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case.” The desire to retain “normal” at all costs has cost us all. The pandemic rages on, bringing with it more death and mass disability. We continue to fail to make adequate progress on a just transition away from fossil fuels. COP 28 was held in a petro-authoritarian state and pocked with oil industry lobbyists. Sigh.

What would Snyder do? There is so much good advice. Be in the real world, on the street. That’s where change happens. The real work is done in the real world, not on the internet. (I am aware of the irony. But he also says we have access to mass communication tools and we should use them.)

“Make eye contact and small talk.” Talk to cashiers and neighbours and the receptionist at the dental office. Ask them about themselves. Listen to learn. Don’t fail to listen because you are busy thinking about the next thing YOU want to say. Be curious. Connect. Care. What do you have in common? What is it that you both care about? Maybe some day you will talk to them about what they are willing to do to save something important to them and important to you. Maybe some day, you will work on that together.

Snyder’s grimmest moment is when he writes about the average guy, who under the thumb of a tyrant, finds it is his job to shoot people and watch them fall into a mass grave. Or maybe his job is to bulldoze the dirt over the bodies. In another world, he might have been a plumber or a cop. Hey, it’s happened before. It can happen again. He warns people to “Be reflective if you must be armed.” Police forces historically have been put into the service of tyrants with terrible results. Grim indeed.

But also inspirational. His last lesson is, “Be as courageous as you can.” He writes, “If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.”

On Tyranny is must read. I’d be interested to know what parts of it speak to you.

Late add: Thanks to a reader who let me know there is a newer graphic edition which is haunting. Look for it.

 

 

 

 

The Grim Reader: A Good War by Seth Klein

Leave a Reply

The Grim Reader (that’s me) continues with Seth Klein’s A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency. TBH, I was not expecting to like this book. I thought the metaphor was tortured, that the very idea that we could harken back to WWII and say, “Hey! Canada did it before so we can do it again!” was too much to bear. Maybe even jingoistic. I don’t ever want to look to war as an exemplary time. But I get it now. Sometimes you have to read the books you are disinclined to read. Klein has a point.

And I have to hand it to Klein for taking the most grim situation ever (climate catastrophe) and placing it against the mirror of World War II to give us exponential grimness. But it makes sense. It’s probably good to remind us all of the dangers of fascism and authoritarianism. Everything old really is new again. Klein reminded me of when we used to fight fascism. Those were the days!

I became engaged with Klein’s argument when he made the point that we are in an emergency, and we are failing to act like it. It’s like no one in charge wants us to know. But it’s time to spell it out. And lucky for us, Klein shows us that there is a play-book to follow. Another seemingly ineffectual government was similarly challenged and pulled itself together. It can be done.

Klein is not merely giving a history lesson, although he is giving a history lesson. He always comes back to the present with specific examples of how we could use the same idea now. It’s refreshing to read something so practical.

One of the many things I learned from Klein is that during the war, the Canadian government established Crown Corporations to do whatever needed to be done. I think they made 37 of them, but don’t quote me. I’m bad at remembering numbers. Let’s just say there were many. And these Crown Corporations got Canada ready for war. Now we have to gear up again. And sure, we should have done it thirty years ago, but here we are. Better late than never.

And not to get stuck on the Crown Corporation idea (there are many more in this book), Klein has a list of possible Crown Corporations that the Federal government could create now—RIGHT NOW—to manage us off fossil fuels. It’s a good list. I wanted to cut and paste it and send a letter to the Prime Minister.

The part that seems impossible to me is getting ideas like this through a polarized government where partisanship has taken the place of leadership. In times like this, can we get unifying messages out to create the kind of “All for one and one for all” can-do attitude that emerged during WWII? The obvious opportunity is to use the CBC. The CBC should be talking to Canadians about climate every day from Sea to Sea to Sea. Instead, our national broadcaster is facing even more cutbacks, and does anyone even care anymore? The public institutions that could be our helpers in this time have been made ineffectual and even dysfunctional. It feels purposeful. It saddens me.

(And yes, we are talking about a need for propaganda, by any other name. Messages of unity in the war were certainly propaganda. But if it works….)

There are ideas in A Good War that can help us in our quagmire. Nothing can help us out of it. It’s too late for that. But these ideas could ease the transition we are going to have to make whether or not we want to. They could make it less bad. And in the spirit of the book featured in the last Grim Reader, I Want A Better Catastrophe, being “less bad” is important.

Lastly, I think A Good War is a book that will speak to an older generation that many have almost given up on in terms of who might pitch in with our climate emergency. Too often, seniors are understood as the cause of the catastrophe and not part of the solution. There are a lot of seniors with energy, ambition, and time on their hands. Not to mention children and grandchildren that they love. Maybe Klein is on to something.

The Grim Reader—Climate Change Books

3 Replies

I’ve been reading about climate change. I’ve been reading so much about climate change I’m starting to call myself The Grim Reader. And of course, no one wants to talk about it. Or they do, but they don’t know how. So I’m starting a new thing. A book club for one. The Grim Reader. Come along with me. Comment. Maybe it will not be a book club for one after all.

Like most people, I’d like to leave behind a world that is recognizable for those who come after me. I have an adult daughter. I’d like her to live in some degree of security and comfort after I’m gone. And if she has children, I’d like their world to be safe, secure, and somewhat recognizable. And if that’s what I want, it’s time to get serious. If we keep going the way we are going, those simple wishes will not come true. Not for me, not for any of us. We hit the 2 degree mark last week—twice. That is, we were 2 degrees over our pre-industrial average. It’s what “they” have been telling us for years absolutely can’t happen. And it happened.

Meanwhile COP28 is being held this week in a petro-authoritarian state and was being called a failure before it even started. *Sigh*. I expect there to be a lot of sighing in The Grim Reader. But there is hope.

There are a spate of books about hope and climate change. All the behavioural psych research says we have to have hope. Why act if there is no hope? I am personally of a more existential bent. I believe we can face hard truths (for example, each and every one of us is going to die) and still find meaning, joy, and purpose in our lives. This is why I want to start The Grim Reader with Andrew Boyd’s, I Want A Better Catastrophe.

Boyd isn’t sugar coating anything. The premise of IWABC is that climate catastrophe is here. It’s baked in now. We’re in it. Welcome to the future. In his words, “We’re fucked.” But stay with me. He wonders, if we’re fucked (which we are), are we totally fucked or mostly fucked or a just little bit fucked. It matters. Because we want to find a better catastrophe.

A better catastrophe is still possible, although the window is closing by the second. There is hope here. But it’s realistic hope. It’s the kind of hope that doesn’t exist purely as a result of denial. It’s the kind of hope I can get behind. It’s a “roll up your sleeves” kind of hope.

In describing his own journey as an activist, Boyd talks to so many others about theirs. There is dark humour, which is something I really need. Maybe that is what inspired me to call this new part of my website The Grim Reader. 

IWABC is almost a compendium of everything everyone has ever said or thought about global warming/climate change/climate catastrophe. You can read it straight through or pick out pieces here and there.

There is even a little section on the right thing to call global warming/climate change/climate catastrophe. My own preference is climate catastrophe, but I think it turns people off. Too doomy. I’m currently throwing the term “climate insecurity” against the wall to see if it sticks. Because isn’t security what we all want? (Tangent Alert: If you think about security too, you might also want to listen to this year’s Massey Lectures by Astra Taylor.)

I also appreciate that after 352 pages, Boyd offers even more resources to turn to under the title “Stuff You Can (Still) Do.” It’s inspirational. You can reach the same information through his exceptional website, BetterCatastrophe.com.

If you do nothing else, check out his incredible flow chart. It’s a thing of beauty and a wonder of communication. It may change you. It changed me.

If you’ve read it, if you want to read it, if you have questions, please comment. I’d like not to be in The Grim Reader bookclub by myself.

(I review the occasional book on Goodreads, and IWABC is one of them. Some repetition, but also some other thoughts.)