That Way Madness Lies

Propublica ran an article last week describing the anguish of a committed climate activist.

It is rare that an article makes the actual point in the first five words, but this is a good example, emphasis mine.

Peter Kalmus, out of his mind, stumbled back toward the car. It was all happening. All the stuff he’d been trying to get others to see, and failing to get others to see — it was all here. The day before, when his family started their Labor Day backpacking trip along the oak-lined dry creek bed in Romero Canyon, in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, the temperature had been 105 degrees. Now it was 110 degrees, and under his backpack, his “large mammalian self,” as Peter called his body, was more than just overheating. He was melting down. Everything felt wrong. His brain felt wrong and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on the planet felt wrong, off-kilter, in the wrong place.

Nearing the trailhead, Peter’s mind death-spiralled: What’s next summer going to bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed that the temperature would only rise per decade by a few tenths of a degree Celsius. But those tenths would add up and the extreme temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s big mammal body could handle 100 degrees, sort of, 110 drove him crazy. That was just not a friendly climate for a human. 110 degrees was hostile, an alien planet.

Poor Peter, no one listens to him.

For years, in articles in Yes! magazine, in op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, in his book “Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution,” on social media, Peter had been pleading, begging for people to pay attention to the global emergency. “Is this my personal hell?” he tweeted this past fall. “That I have to spend my entire life desperately trying to convince everyone NOT TO DESTROY THE %$#^@^ EARTH?”

Apparently his transformation and descent happened relatively quickly.

He’d met Sharon at Harvard. They’d moved to New York so she could earn a teaching degree. For a while, before returning to school, Peter had made good money on Wall Street writing code. Now here he was hearing, really hearing for the first time, that the planet, his son’s future home, was going to roast. Full stop.

This was a catastrophe — a physical, physics catastrophe, and here he was, a physicist about to have a son. He exited the lecture hall in a daze. “I was kind of like, ‘Are we just going to pretend this is like a normal scientific talk?’” he told me, recalling his thoughts. “We’re talking about the end of life on Earth as we know it.”

For the next eight months, Peter walked around Manhattan, “freaking out in my brain,” he said, like “one of those end-is-near people with the sandwich boards.” 

His poor wife and kids.

Four years into climate awakening and action, Peter felt he had accomplished nearly zero. One night, frustrated with inaction and disgusted with fossil fuel use, he sat at his computer and calculated the sources of all his own emissions so he could go about reducing them.

In the morning he presented Sharon with a pie chart.

Which led to:

Next came dumpster diving (which eventually — and thankfully — morphed into an arrangement with Trader Joe’s to pick up their unsellable food every other Sunday night). Peter’s haul — “seven or eight boxes,” according to Sharon; “three boxes,” according to Peter — included dozens of eggs with only one broken. Flats of (mostly not moldy) strawberries. Bread past its sell-by date. Peter did his best to put things away before he fell asleep because waking up to the mess drove Sharon nuts. But … it was a lot. Low-carbon living was a lot.

They stopped using the gas dryer. They stopped shitting in the flush toilet and started practicing “humanure,” composting their own crap. Sharon had lived with an outhouse in Mongolia, “so that was something I was used to,” she said. Plus, to be honest, she liked the local, organic anti-capitalist politics of it. “Marx writes about this in ‘Capital, Volume 1’ that one of the reasons Europeans started to use chemical fertilizers is because people started to move into the cities and off of the land, … and people stopped pooping out in the countryside, so it became less fertile.” The main problem, for Sharon, was that their bathroom was small and the composting toilet was inside. They used eucalyptus leaves to try to cover up the smell, but then little bits of leaves got all over the bathroom, too. After a while Peter moved the composting toilet outdoors. 

His wife had patience most of us could only dream of. His kids coped in their own way.

Sharon staged minor rebellions to maintain a sense of self — little stuff, like using lots of hot water when she did the dishes, and bigger stuff, like she stopped talking sometimes. Braird and Zane, too, each absorbed and reacted to Peter’s passionate cri de coeur in their own ways. Zane, the younger one, started doing his own regular, Greta Thunberg-style climate strikes in front of city hall. Braird, the older, meanwhile, was entering his teens, differentiating and waxing nihilistic. When asked what he wanted to do with his future, Braird said, “What future?” When asked what he thought about climate change, he sunk a dagger into his father’s heart like only a child can. Braird said, “I don’t really think about it.”

Read the full sad, sad, article here.

HT/Larry Kummer