rapid transition, deep transformation

january 2025

Some of our most talented climate thinkers rarely stray from clean energy. They are laser-focused on wind, solar, and batteries. Maybe hydrogen, or even nuclear, if they're willing to go there. I don't fault them, and I am immensely grateful for their work. Technological solutions are critical safeguards against catastrophe. But we can't stop there.

Someday I want somebody to scan my brain while I walk around in my neighborhood. I'd like to see what lights up in there as I walk past vegetable gardens, staircases, homes with solar panels, hummingbirds, and electric cars. Then I want to compare my scans with those of my neighbors, to see if we're on the same page.

In my brain, I expect that the stairs, solar panels, and cars will all elicit the same response on the scans, probably a small purple dot over the dark blue brain shape. The same purple dot will also show up when I look at the vacuum my neighbor left on the boulevard, the fence across the street, and the truck that delivers chips to the corner store. I don't know much neuroscience, but I'm imagining that the lifeless, human-made objects will all occupy the same small corner of the gray mass inside my head.

When I see a hummingbird, there will be a giant orange and yellow blob, dancing across both hemispheres as I follow the bird's flight. When the hummingbird reaches the nearby vegetable garden, a pink semicircle will show up, this one in the center of the scan and spreading outwards, slowly and rhythmically. More pink circles will appear when I say hello to my neighbor and their kids.

These predictions are probably wildly inaccurate, but here's my point: we as a species have been paying attention to the rhythms of life on earth, human and otherwise, for hundreds of thousands of years. We're wired for it, metaphorically and neurologically. No matter how far removed we feel from the more-than-human world, no matter how much of a technological barrier stands between us and the rest of life, we can look back in time and see that our ancestors were directly aware of their interdependence with the whole biosphere. We are all descended from hundreds of generations of people who spent their days hunting, growing, or gathering food and water, building shelter, and making clothing and tools, and they had to be intimately attuned to the activities of the plants, animals, and waters around them. Many Indigenous communities today still hold ceremonies and gatherings to mark cyclical events like the return of salmon, which has held critical spiritual and practical roles since time immemorial. Those of us who are less immediately attuned to the web of life are still profoundly affected by our more-than-human surroundings. Have a look at the science on forest bathing, the prices of homes near city parks, and the way we chat about the weather with absolute strangers. Proximity to green space can even alleviate psychotic symptoms.

Much of the human species today is woefully out of tune with the more-than-human world, thanks in part to a handful of wealthy individuals. Sixteenth-century European landowners put the axe to animist traditions and replaced them forcibly with a doctrine of human superiority and separateness, because peasants whose beliefs prohibited the exploitation of other beings were reluctant to carry out the labor of an extractive economy. As Jason Hickel explains in Less is More, “because animists draw no fundamental distinction between humans and nature, and indeed in many cases insist on the underlying relatedness - even kinship - of all beings, they have strong moral codes that prevent them from exploiting other living systems.” Fast forward a few centuries, and many of us are even further isolated from more-than-human life, spending our days within the confines of houses, buildings, and vehicles, staring at screens and consuming bizarre concoctions of plant, animal, and chemical nutrients.

Our highly industrialized way of life is a teeny blip in human history, but right now it's eating us alive. It’s killing off our fellow species and driving us closer to extinction every year. In 2023, nearly 48,000 people died of heat in Europe; in 2024, Hurricane Helene cut off the food and water in towns previously considered climate havens. It’s the second week of 2025 and we’ve already got catastrophic wildfires in Los Angeles–in January. At this point it's only a matter of time before a heat wave coincides with a spike in humidity and kills tens of thousands in a matter of hours, as portrayed in the first chapter of Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future. Beyond humans, we're losing over 150 species of life on a daily basis. Many of us can't even name 150 species. If we weren't so wildly out of tune with the life systems that include and sustain us, we wouldn't dream of carrying on with lifestyles that are destroying the biosphere and killing off the entire web of life, ourselves included.

At some point down the line, either we'll change our ways voluntarily, or the earth will force us to do it. The former wouldn't be easy, but we could find joy and solidarity in the process of crafting new ways of living. The latter would be harder, and much more violent. Obviously this isn't an either/or situation. We're already facing life-threatening climate events, and in some small cases, institutions are responding. After the 2021 heat dome killed hundreds in the Pacific Northwest, my home state of Oregon dedicated millions of public dollars to subsidize cooling appliances for low and moderate-income homes. Millions of Oregonians still don't have access to cooling in their homes, so we're not out of the weeds just yet, but it's a start. People in the industrialized world are writing and talking about concepts like "underconsumption core" and "degrowth," and a very small group of folks are experimenting with communal living in arrangements like "eco-villages." But at the societal level, those of us who live in wealthy, developed nations are still eons away from embracing a lifestyle that is even remotely compatible with the earth systems that keep us alive and well.

Sometimes, in an emergency, the most compassionate option is an imperfect solution. If we are being treated for cancer, the chemotherapy wreaks havoc on our bodies, but it also gives us the chance to keep on living, sometimes for many years. Similarly, renewable energy is not without its downsides. Producing, installing, and recycling solar panels and gigantic batteries requires mining, building factories, and converting large swathes of land into utility-scale facilities. If we were living in true harmony with the whole web of life we would do none of that. Still, the alternatives - either go on burning fossil fuels until the world goes up in flames, or forcibly shut down all of our energy infrastructure, inciting chaos and death - would be much harder to justify, the loss of human life would be catastrophic, and we would bring down millions more species along with our own. We've been hearing about the dangers of climate change for three decades, yet our carbon emissions have only increased, and if we want to avoid permanent disaster, we have five years to cut our emissions by forty percent. Given the slow and unpredictable nature of behavior change, we can't reasonably expect a forty-percent decline in emissions to happen in five years through radical and voluntary changes in individual lifestyles. We thus have a clear imperative to buy some time for human and more-than-human beings by rapidly switching to renewable energy, and the technology we need is already available. And when we use clean energy, we can take a moment to appreciate the forces that produce it. For example, solar panels capture sunlight, which has always been the foundation of life on earth. We often forget that all of the energy in our bodies can be traced back to the sun. Whether we work in hospitals, offices, forests, or fields, we are fully dependent on the “light eaters” who turn solar energy into food. Perhaps as we reconnect with the rest of the natural world we’ll come to see the solar panel not as lifeless technology, but as a new bridge between us and the same sun that has always sustained life on earth.

We can't stop at renewables. We need to open our hearts and minds to deeper shifts, far beyond technological patch-ups. Short-term fixes and long-term transformation can be fully compatible, if we allow them to be. They can unfold simultaneously. The more we relax our drive to control every step of the process, the more space we make for creative evolution to unfold. Whereas the energy transition is already underway, with a fairly clear roadmap to completion despite an abundance of hurdles, the idea of changing our relationship with the earth and living in harmony with nature can sound nebulous, especially if we've been brought up in a wealthy, industrialized country. In the westernized world, especially in the domain of policy and politics, we are trained to demand timely, quantitative solutions. We're going to have to grow to operate outside of that narrow lens on life. We need to evolve as a species, to embrace our role as one of many life forms, and find joy in a lifestyle that is compatible with the basic properties of our beloved planet. Only when we learn to honor and appreciate our relationships with all of the living world will we be able to transition to ways of life that protect us from extinction. Unlike purely technological fixes, which can be imposed through the hammers of policy and finance, a shift in the direction of right relationship with our planet needs to happen outside of the halls of power, within our own hearts and minds.

I'm an American, born and raised in a city, who graduated from public high school, attended a liberal arts college, and went on to complete a master's. Which is to say, I've got some specific and deep-seated delusions about the workings of the world, one being the idea that everything has a solution. Broadly speaking, I have full confidence that yes, we absolutely need to cultivate a harmonious relationship with the planet; at the same time, without much of a polestar in the culture that raised me, I sometimes spiral into desperate craving for a tangible idea of what that could possibly mean.

During his short time on earth, Rainer Maria Rilke encouraged a young poet-cadet who was mired in existential confusion to "live the questions," without attachment to the timeline of the answers’ arrival. With the energy transition as our first climate imperative, we can take Rilke's advice as our second: to live our lives guided by the question of, what would it look like to live in right relationship with the entire web of life, with earth itself? We can normalize this aspiration by talking about it with our friends and families, and being honest about the fact that it doesn't always feel entirely clear. We can't all go back to living in the forest, at least not today. There's not enough healthy forest left for everyone to inhabit, most of us don't have the requisite survival skills, and we'd be encroaching on the current homes of Indigenous peoples who still live off of the land. Instead, to quote the visionary Buddhist nun Ayya Santacitta, we need to "come full circle," rekindling our ancestral sense of connection with the entire web of life, and create "islands of sanity," also known as, groups of friends, family, neighbors, and colleagues who are opening their consciousness to the sense that transforming our relationship with all of life on earth is possible. It's already happening, this transformation, and it needs our nurturing. We can't be attached to any specific outcome, because none of us can control whatever happens next. We're each just one node in the immense web of relationships that connects all of life.

Like some of our world’s most revered artists, we might create something that is profoundly beautiful without receiving any recognition in our own lifetime. Yet we can be inspired by noticing that many of our fellow humans are already curious about relinquishing human dominance over life on earth. Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass, which explores both tensions and connections between Kimmerer’s Indigenous ecological knowledge and the dominant culture’s ways of knowing, has sat quietly near the top of the New York Times’ nonfiction bestseller list for nearly five years. Each of us can cultivate the conditions that allow a better relationship with the biosphere to unfold on its own time, whether we’re reading, writing, chatting, drawing, observing plants, observing animals, meditating, praying, or gardening.

Books

Braiding Sweetgrass – Robin Wall Kimmerer

Less is More – Jason Hickel

Letters to a Young Poet – Rainer Maria Rilke

The Light Eaters – Zoë Schlanger

The Ministry for the Future – Kim Stanley Robinson

Articles

Can forest therapy enhance health and well-being?

Exposure to green spaces and schizophrenia: a systematic review

It's not really the right time for nasty California fires. What are the factors that changed that?

‘Nowhere is safe’: shattered Asheville shows stunning reach of climate crisis

Oregon brings back rebates to add heat pumps in rental homes, but funds are limited

The impacts of heat on health: surveillance and preparedness in Europe

Meditations

"Not Going Back But Coming Full Circle" – Ayya Santacitta