Better barnacles

When I began my nonprofit career, freshly minted out of Seminary and full of Big Ideas and Optimism, I felt ready to tackle climate change.

Really. I was willing to believe that my individual efforts as one human being on a planet of seven billion human beings would be consequential enough to make a contribution toward shifting the climate of the entire planet.

I did this with the mistaken emphasis that the environmental movement has long had on individual awareness and individual actions.

Of course I did. I’m an American.

Oddly, this approach has found some success. The emphasis on individual behavior raised awareness. At the same time advances in technology have made true low-carbon options available.

This battle is largely won, even if a few old men at fossil fuel companies don’t realize it yet.

Of course, like any other actual conflict, it’s done a lot of damage to the field where it was waged. The increases in temperature that are already baked in to the atmosphere will be catastrophic in places, or already are. People in low-lying ocean-front locations will be foreced to move elsewhere.

Our inability to have a decent face-to-face conversation, let alone to welcome strangers in large number will make the relocation process incredibly hard. Much harder than it needs to be. We could just scoot over, make a little room, share our stuff.

That’s always an option.

I am pessimistic about it being the predominant reaction when the trickle of movement already underway gets into the millions.

What I’ve learned in the decades since my bright beginning is that the world is a more tragic place than I’d imagined.

Time has darkened my outlook. Time and the experience of loss.

We live beneath the great waves of our eras, not on top of their crests, as I used to think.

We are all just barnacles on the side of a whale.

But by choosing to live my life in the sector that addresses itself to making the world a more hospitable place for all of its inhabitants, I have made common cause with other people who have also made that choice. And so I find myself surrounded by the most extraordinarily good people. The ones who are younger than I am are still crazily optimistic, too. It’s good to be around that.

They are the very best of barnacles, and I am happy in their company