(EE) How to Feel about Climate Change

Elizabeth Kolbert makes the point that it matters less whether we care than that we do something about climate change. This is fair; ultimately ethics is about action. But of course the two are not unrelated – ethics is also about relationships, and feeling deeply about something is often a precursor, and a goad, to acting vigorously and effectively. Our actions generally follow our feelings, so learning how to feel is elemental to becoming ethical. Hence this meditation by Zadie Smith, one of the leading essayists working in English today, about how we ought to feel about climate change: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/apr/03/elegy-countrys-seasons/?insrc=hpma

 There is an echo here of what Bill McKibben was trying to do in the first general-audience climate change book published, The End of Nature (1988) -- imagining how we should relate affectively to the planet we now inhabit, utterly and permanently transformed by us. Back then it was a little hard to credit, and some of his critics thought he was simply being idiosyncratically sentimental. Either Zadie Smith says it better, or perhaps now we're more prepared to hear it.