After the Tap, Admit and Adapt

Don’t envy me my acrobatic skill, but since an early age I’ve managed to carry more than one conflicting thought in my head at all times. These opposing ideas resolve when I focus, and that track record perhaps led me to want to work in helping groups harmonize competing claims amid climate stress. And they swirl in my head (and outside it) everywhere these days.

To illustrate: on a lucky two-week stretch of vacation along Rhode Island’s oceanfront this summer, I’d work out in the mornings by running along low stone walls past cliffs to the coast. I’d think: This place will inspire people for centuries. And an SUV would bellow past, and I’d think: This can’t last another decade.

The path we face contains the road between those realities. People, even when we rely on code to find our way and categorize our memories, rush to the horizons and coves that my biophilic friend Bill Browning calls “prospect and refuge.” And people will not prosper for long in the triple-wide cars or the quadruple-width houses on which I and other fortunate ones have grown up. The storms and fires and heat unspooling from the overcarbonized atmosphere guarantee a redesign covering the whole world. Even if you wanted to set up a fortress where you could order all your Pinots and chia seeds and stream all your inputs into the palm of your hand, the cost of transportation and insurance and human suffering would soar too high and would likely make you feel yucky.

And don’t take my word on that: consider the rolled-up newspaper that greeted me at the end of one of my more humid morning workouts.

So what to do? An instant switch looks unfair. People drive the cars they drive because they think they need them, and real estate occupies its reality thanks to a mix of design ideals, controlled-market enthusiasm, and sometimes dubious zoning laws. You can’t and shouldn’t level a vacation town and gin up a commune, and you shouldn’t begrudge people their time near the ocean or in the mountains, away from the concrete mazes we mostly know. The overriding task collapses to a word that’s coating investment and policy decisions as fully as foamy saltwater coats the shore: adapt.

Adaptation means, for government budgets, investing billions in capital to help people move when their homes no longer stand above water or can no longer stand heat. It also means reorienting trade routes, and fuels, and trip lengths, and ideas about personal prerogative, to a reality where everything is aflame or flooding or might be nearing one of those extremes.

Adaptation also means training mental muscles to sleep well at night knowing that knowledge and context change both gradually and suddenly. I’ve gotten used to the tap, in my vacation time and my parenting time and my organizing time. You likely have too. You tap to correct your way on a drive, learn where you can find coffee, grok what world leaders have decided to do about a given conflict. But codes only yield facts and imminent steps. Adapting the way you live, invest, vote and argue means admitting that sometimes you need to explore strange physical and psychological places, step by step. Doing that shows you where both the crevasses and the anchors sit.

And last, perhaps it means a call to ease off lightswitch narratives in which things are OK or not OK. A year ago, I read the Inflation Reduction Act as it became law and whistling air filled my chest. This year, I read about how local landowners’ misgivings about projects and a lack of thorough dialogue stalls deployment of clean energy projects, and a rock plunged in my stomach. But if you’re adapting, then you can balance your proverbial feet on the law’s ambition and the polity’s ambivalence. You can commit to thinking up ways to discuss, advocate, invest in and redesign solutions that bring carbon pollution down without bringing mistrust to new heights. You want a sense of peace, you lose it - and as you adapt, you do work to define the addressable problem.

And you recalibrate your demands, perhaps, of public servants. Demanding that the American president “get climate done” carries the same weight as demanding that coal mining continue as it did before renewable energies gained a cost advantage. Public servants should assess accurately, address honestly, and adapt constantly. We’ll have to carry conflicting costs in our heads as we invest and work and vote to demand that sort of attention from politicians. But here’s a secret - anyone can carry thoughts that way. If you couldn’t, few would feel romance in looking at an ocean that can swallow them.

The ocean needn’t swallow anyone who has a guardian or who knows how to swim. Our loneliness, brittle debate, and scorched climate needn’t swallow anyone either. The carbon weight bearing down on the town I love has to change, like the ocean does.

That means any number of conflicting impulses and thoughts to carry at once into the future. I’m wishing us all courage, patience and glimpses of beauty along the way.

Crunch and Crunch, and Then Start Crunching

Two things sting in my head as I face a future where megastorms are everyday things and where spontaneous conversations are rare. I have tried since 2001 to whip myself, alone, into stronger physical condition. And I have tried since 2001 to write about how collaboration across banking, engineering, and politics could physically prepare the world for lockdown.

Both endeavors came up short in 2020. That was when I learned that to confront the swirl you can’t fathom and to connect with folks you don’t know, you can do worse than to learn to do a few things over and over and over again, in a circle, in public.

You see, Covid found me having spent many years thinking about climate change, and always looking for the gleaming portal away from landslides and heat strokes and war.  I used to write magazine profiles about architects who sketched silent cities where everyone glided around on hovercraft. 

Now I want to help you vote, and know where to find a higher-quality stove, and knock on your neighbor’s door when the power fails. Again and again and again. 

Thank the change in my exercise routine that fall 2020 impelled. I had been working out, alone at 5 am for decades, counting on these morning runs to nourish the illusion that I was helping the city wake up. By September 2020 the city was thrashing through a nightmare. I was watching empty elevated trains rumble past, making Pavlovian grabs at my neoprene mask when a runner passed in the other direction.

Around that time, I spoke with a neighbor who I had seen around in the gym before lockdown. He has little kids and I have big ones, and he told me that another neighbor named Minh Duong would teach a kids’ workout class once a week after “school.” 

The class got our kids outside, and got them pulling tires down the street, and got them repeating knee-tucks. At a November kids’ showcase with kids swinging kettlebells and dancing with styrofoam noodles, buzz began among parents. And one adult at a time, we started taking his class in the very early morning. 

Photo courtesy of minh duong

Nearly five years on, a group of six remains in Minh’s class, building our leg strength on Wednesday evenings and our backs and midsections on Saturday mornings. What we’ve learned is that reality never runs out of capacity for chaos. When we do the same task again, even when it’s the jumping-jack-pushup blast known as a Burpee, we’re setting our composure and our command against whatever new fractal form the world has presented for itself. Habits habituate you to love a world where danger and silence seep everywhere.

This love of habit, regardless of medal or posted time or trophy, shadows a smarter way to think about the climate crisis. We got into climate chaos by repeatedly pouring extra carbon to hang heavily in the air while repeatedly hoping that someone - a physicist! A celebrity! Al Gore!- would unroll a ladder to lift us above our habits. And we will get out of it by repeatedly leaving things on the supermarket shelf, repeatedly leaving the car at home (maybe to charge), repeatedly reading the electric bill to see where using power from the sun would pay off at once, repeatedly asking our insurance agents and our town councilmember what’s going on with the floodline. Too much carbon has built in the atmosphere for anyone to erase it. We can instead hold it in place and shrink its effect, day after day after day after day, sometimes clumsily but always again. 

One thing you learn from repetition is attention. Minh’s instructions speak to a specific, rather than issuing a catchall “you can do it.” Sit down a lot more…elbows behind your ears…both feet at the same time.  The balm of repeating things involves the specificity that becomes clear when you’ve reached your nth act. When you become more aware of where you’ve placed your elbow - or how you’ve sprinkled your salt or trimmed your cactus’ spores or purled your stitch, or whatever - then you become more aware of how your decisions play out in the material world. You also see where listening to others leads you.

Changes in who’s in power come from repeated phonebanks, walks around neighborhoods, votes.  And changes in how we vote comes in repeated changes to how we define success. The future depends on how routinely and correctly the vast majority of us do many things differently -  again and again and again. 

The rest of the Group is off-camera as I (again) try to flex my calves correctly.