Hello, Again

Movement Monday 5/15/23

Hello dear readers,

Well, it has been a minute since the last time I wrote one of these, but it’s nice to be back – and I sure do appreciate you being here as well.

While our content output may have slowed down over the past several months, we’ve been working on some exciting things behind the scenes, from Climate Action Explorer updates to bringing on a new team member for the summer – more to come on both of these. Plus, crazily, life marches on outside of On the Level, and our team has some cross-country moves and new jobs to prove it. Thanks for sticking along for the ride.

Speaking of sticking along for the ride, what’s happening in the climate change movement at the moment?

It has always been a challenge to try to boil everything happening down to a few or several bullet points, but in what I believe to be an overall positive development, it seems harder than ever to do that, since media outlets everywhere seem to be paying much more attention to climate change. And there is actually more stuff happening in climate-world with more money being poured into climate mitigation and adaptation strategies, which both causes and is an effect of increased coverage.

So, it might not be that realistic or helpful for me to attempt to review everything that’s happened in the climate movement over the last five months, but I would love to share some climate-related/adjacent book recommendations that I’ve read over the last five months, as well as promise some more timely, climate-movement-related content coming at you in the future. In the meantime, if you’re really hungry for climate-movement updates, both Bill McKibben and Amy Westervelt have been releasing consistent, high-quality content in The Crucial Years and Drilled. But for now, the books:

• The Nutmeg’s Curse by Amitav Ghosh

• Wild Souls by Emma Marris

• The High Sierra by Kim Stanley Robinson

• Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit

• Inconspicuous Consumption by Tatiana Schlossberg

In their own way, each tease out physical and ethical complexities of how we treat the non-human world and other humans. Notes of sadness, injustice, and loss run through each, but in the end, they all rest on love of one sort or another – a combo of realism and hope to strive for as we face climate change and other socio-environmental challenges. I recently heard John Green (author) say something about how having hope is just about the most punk rock thing you can do these days, and while I’m not convinced it’s totally true (being your resident skeptic), I love the general sentiment of it. Might be time to find some new punk rock bands to tune into…

On that note, thanks for reading and see you all next time!