Propublica published an article last week describing the fear of a committed climate activist.
It’s rare for an article to highlight the real point in the first five words, but this is a good example, emphasis mine.
Peter Kalmus, beside himselfstumbled back to the car. It all happened. All the stuff that he tried to make others see and didn’t make others see – it was all here. The day before, when his family began 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 “big mammal self”, as Peter called his body, was more than overheated. He melted together. Everything felt wrong. His brain felt wrong, and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on the planet felt wrong, wrong.
Near the starting point, Peter’s death turned around: What will the next summer bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed that the temperature would only rise a few tenths of a degree Celsius per decade. But those tenths would add up and the extreme temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s huge mammal body could handle 100 degrees, 110 drove him crazy. It just wasn’t a friendly climate for a person. 110 degrees was hostile, a strange planet.
Poor Peter, nobody is listening to him.
For years in articles in Yes! Peter had asked in the Los Angeles Times magazine in his book “Being the Change: Live Well and Start a Climate Revolution” on social media for people to be aware of the global emergency. “Is that my personal hell?” he tweeted this past fall. “That I have to desperately try all my life to convince everyone NOT TO DESTROY% $ # ^ @ ^ EARTH?”
Apparently his transformation and descent happened relatively quickly.
He had met Sharon at Harvard. They had moved to New York to do an apprenticeship. Before Peter returned to school, he had made good money for a while writing code on Wall Street. Now, for the first time, he really heard that the planet, his son’s future home, was about to roast. Point.
This was a disaster – a physical, physical disaster, and here he was, a physicist about to have a son. He left the lecture hall dazed. “I was like, ‘Are we just going to pretend this is a normal science talk?'” He told me, remembering his thoughts. “We are talking about the end of life on earth as we know it.”
For the next eight months, Peter was walking around Manhattan and “freaking out on my brain,” he said, like “one of those people around who have sandwich boards.”
His poor wife and children.
Four years after the climate awakened and acted, Peter felt that he had almost reached zero. One night, frustrated with inactivity and disgusted with fossil fuel consumption, he was sitting at his computer calculating the sources of all of his own emissions so he could reduce them.
In the morning he handed Sharon a pie chart.
What led to …:
Next was dumpster diving (which eventually – and thankfully – turned into an arrangement with Trader Joe’s to pick up their unsalable food every other Sunday night). Peter’s move – “seven or eight boxes,” says Sharon; “Three boxes,” said Peter, contained dozens of eggs, only one of which was broken. Apartments with (mostly not moldy) strawberries. Bread after the expiration date. Peter did his best to put things away before he fell asleep because waking up in the mess was driving Sharon crazy. But … it was a lot. Low carbon life was a lot.
They stopped using the gas dryer. They stopped shitting in the flush toilet and started practicing humanures and composting their own dung. Sharon had lived in an outhouse in Mongolia, “that was something I was used to,” she said. To be honest, she liked the local, organic, anti-capitalist politics. “Marx writes about this in ‘Capital, Volume 1’ that one of the reasons Europeans started using chemical fertilizers is because people are moving to the cities and the countryside … and people have stopped moving to the countryside poop became less fertile. “The main problem for Sharon was that her bathroom was small and the composting toilet was inside. They used eucalyptus leaves to cover up the smell, but then there were small leaves all over the bathroom. After a while, Peter moved the composting toilet outside.
His wife had patience that most of us could only dream of. His children got on in their own way.
Sharon staged little riots to keep a feeling for herself – little things like using a lot of hot water to wash dishes, and bigger things like sometimes stopping talking. Braird and Zane also absorbed and responded in their own way to Peter’s passionate Cri de Coeur. Zane, the younger, started his own regular Greta Thunberg style climate strikes in front of the town hall. Braird, the elder, meanwhile, entered his youth, differentiated and became nihilistic. When asked what he wanted to do with his future, Braird said, “What future?” When asked what he thought of climate change, he sank a dagger into his father’s heart, as only a child can. Braird said, “I don’t really think about it.”
Read the full sad, sad article here.
HT / Larry grief
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