Each time I go into a ketamine treatment, I spend a few days beforehand trying to come up with pleasant ‘trips’ I can take which will keep my terror over climate change at bay during the hour-long session. This week, with the hurricane in Southern California hitting so close to home was more of a challenge than ever before. And I’m convinced that the only way through this often crippling anxiety about climate change is to remain active.
Last week, I wrote about how I rely on the hope Bill McKibben provides in his substack The Crucial Years. This week he writes:
My work on this newsletter—and the community we’re building here together—sometimes feels a little bit that way to me; one of my jobs is to open up the tangle of politics and technology and economics and science that surrounds the climate crisis and let the sun shine in, beaming on the things that matter the most.
Usually that requires just steadily beavering away. But in a moment as dangerous and dynamic as this one, we’re not actually going to win this fight the slow and steady way; we also need some dramatic change. This year has been high drama almost without cease—I started highlighting for you back in January the fear that we were going to see a truly horrific summer. Even I didn’t quite guess its extent—the hottest weather on our planet in at least 125,000 years, with all the chaos that implies.
McKibben, a co-founder of 350.org, shifted his focus maybe two years ago to creating and working with The Third Act, an organization formed for baby boomers and older folks to work together on issues involving climate change. The closest chapter to where I live is in Sacramento, which is a little over an hour away so I haven’t yet participated in any of their events. Some of you might be interested in looking into it to see if there’s one near where you live.
But in other personal news, I was fortunate enough to receive an invitation to join Blue Sky, a Twitter alternative for the climate community. It’s not open to everyone, you need to be invited to join, just like gmail was when it first started out in 1998. I’m really excited about the growing community there and the prospect of finally being able to totally abandon Twitter for climate news.
While the days of blogathons seems to be behind us here at DK, I feel compelled to remind the community about the upcoming climate march in NYC this September. As in previous years, there is a huge march planned for NYC to coincide with climate week and the UN Climate Summit. But there are actions around the country and around the world. Sign up today!
On September 15 to 17, millions of people around the world will take to the streets to demand a rapid, just, and equitable end to fossil fuels.
This wave of global mobilisations will include the March to #EndFossilFuels fast, fair, forever in New York City on September 17, as world leaders attend the United Nations Secretary General’s Climate Ambition Summit.
This historic mobilisation renews and reinforces the globally coordinated efforts focused on ending the era of fossil fuels. The scale of this mobilisation and the urgency of the moment underscore the devastating impacts of recent record breaking heat, deadly floods, and increased extreme weather events.
The climate crisis is escalating and in response so is the global movement for climate justice. Across the globe, we are coming together to fight back against the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.
Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share a virtual kitchen table with other readers of Daily Kos who aren’t throwing pies at one another. Drop by to talk about music, your weather, your garden, or what you cooked for supper…. Newcomers may notice that many who post in this series already know one another to some degree, but we welcome guests at our kitchen table and hope to make some new friends as well.