“We are living during a time of complex and alarming challenges: the reality of racism, the suffering and grief caused by a global pandemic, and the near-helplessness we feel in the face of the climate crisis – all made worse by an uncertain election.”

1/

I think this is the most important sentence in a new essay from Diana Butler Bass. https://dianabutlerbass.substack.com/p/our-days-of-fear

2/

Naming the crises we face is important. Naming that which evokes fear makes the crises a little more manageable, make the fear a little less “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified,” transforming it to a fear that inspires action.

3/

I suspect for many of us, the climate crisis is the crisis that is most difficult to wrap our arms around. There is a third response to fear: Fight or flight are most commonly named; there is also freeze.

4/

Freezing is the fear response that doesn’t even evoke the action of fighting or fleeing. Freezing is the ultimate non-action fear response. And when it comes to the climate crisis, “freeze” is a pretty typical response.

5/

The climate crisis seems so big, so complicated, so overwhelming that we freeze and do nothing.

6/

I invite us to name the crisis. I invite us to see the fires in the western USA as just one symptom of this crisis. There are currently a record-tying five tropical cyclones in the Atlantic at the same time.

7/13

One of them (Sally) has all but stalled out on the Louisiana/Florida panhandle coast. Though “only” a Cat-1 hurricane, the fact that it is barely moving makes it a huge flooding threat as it pumps water from the Gulf of Mexico into the atmosphere and drops it inland.

8/13

Meteorologists are talking about measuring the rainfall in feet instead of inches. And let’s remember that there are wildfires burning in the Arctic Circle, too. All of these are manifestations of the climate crisis.

9/13

I invite us to name this particular crisis, the climate crisis, in the hopes that by naming it, we will remember that we can all take small steps in our personal lives and that together ->

10/13

<- we can apply big pressure on our governments—local, state, and national—to take big actions that will actually mitigate the crisis.

11/13

[Written in Fremont, California, where the air quality is, at least for the day, finally in the “moderate” range.]

12/13

I meant to tag @dianabutlerbass in the first tweet of this thread.

13/13