Welcome back to Movement Mondays in which we discuss all things climate. Today I’m returning to Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility (edited by Rebecca Solnit & Thelma Young Lutunatabua) in order to offer my readers another lens to look at our climate reality while also imagining a better world.

At the start of the chapter “Different Ways of Measuring: On Renunciation and Abundance” (a conversation between Solnit and Lutunatabua), there’s this quote from Dr. Elizabeth Sawin:

“It is some very effective marketing that has convinced so many of us that getting off of fossil fuels is a sacrifice as opposed to a money-saving, peace-promoting, water-protecting, health-improving, technological leap forward.”

This jumped out at me because whenever I (foolishly) read comments about various climate actions (and it doesn’t matter if it’s folks politely demanding better of their government or Climate Defiance interrupting fossil fuel executives as they’re being celebrated), there are always people who ridicule the activists for imagining a world without fossil fuels. Those naysayers insist the many negative consequences  we’re experiencing in real-time are a given and that there’s no way forward that doesn’t include fossil fuels. A frequent commenter “gotcha” is “Did you drive your car to that action?” which reveals a complete lack of imagination in regards to our woefully inadequate public transportation, connected biking routes, etc.

Directly following Sawin’s quote, Solnit eloquently presents a different perspective that I’d love to copy and paste in reply to those cynical comments.

What if the climate crisis requires us to give up the things we don’t love and the things that makes us poorer, not richer? What if we have to give up the foul contamination around fossil-fuel extraction, the heavy metals people inhale when coal is burned around them, the oil refineries that contaminate the communities of color around them from the Gulf of Mexico to California? What if the people of Richmond in my own home region, the Bay Area, didn’t have emergency alerts where they were supposed to seal their homes because of a refinery leak? What if the incidence of asthma in kids went way down, and we stopped losing almost nine million people a year to pollution worldwide? What if that moment when the pandemic shut down so much fossil-fuel burning that people in parts of northern India saw the Himalayas for the first time in decades became permanent?   

Image by 🆓 Use at your Ease 👌🏼 from Pixabay

I don’t know about you, but reading those words expanded my mind and heart, while reaffirming my belief in a better world. Kicking our fossil fuel addiction won’t set us back, but will instead liberate us to live healthier, happier lives.

If you’re interested, here’s an article about the visible Himalayas, including grateful social media posts:  Peaks of Himalayas visible from parts of India for first time in decades as pollution drops amid lockdown. And if these quotations resonated with you and you’re interested in reading more, Not Too Late is available through Haymarket Books and is currently offered at a discount.

Thank you for reading this far and please know I welcome all thoughts and comments below (spoiler: no, I did not drive my car to this post). Until next time, solidarity! ✊🏽