A post by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich

The world is on fire, we have been told again and again. The seas are rising, the storm clouds are gathering. But who can fix a planet? We look outside and for most of us, most of the time, the weather is fine—maybe a little hotter, a little drier than the year before, but there is no catastrophe visible out the window. Because the climate crisis happens at planetary scale, on a timeline of seasons and years and eons, it is hard to see.

At the same time, many people are exhausted by the climate debates, which have been stretching on now for decades. Scientists are exhausted in their unceasing efforts to sound the alarm and provide further data on the likely consequences of human carbon emissions. Activists are exhausted by the trench warfare of policy reform and incremental political progress, where every yard of gain is seemingly offset by a reactionary rollback somewhere else. Climate anxiety can feel ubiquitous, but after years of blaring alarm bells, the dire warnings threaten to become background noise—a dispiriting drone for anyone paying attention, but too quotidian to catalyze change.