In July 2024, I read Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future and it had a profound effect on me. It appealed to lots of long-time personal and professional passions: rationality, sustainability, technocratic solutions to social failings, saving the world. It triggered one of my hyperfocus periods - where I become all-consumed by a topic and obsess over it and adjust my life around it. These are always very educational periods.

It is now exactly one year later from that Goodreads review - and I spent a lot of time trying to apply the book’s green fire to my daily life. Let’s do a retro and see how I did, and what I’ll change or keep going forward.

What I was trying to do

#

Climate nihilism

#

For context: as Alan Tudyk’s alien would say, I am a basic bitch educated liberal. Pre-the book, I most certainly believed that human-caused climate change was real, but I was also suffering from spoon-fed NYT climate anxiety and climate nihilism (“it’s too late”, or “individual action is pointless”). I was aware of “greenwashing” and knew that I should be mindful of it, I liked the bag tax at the grocery store, but - good Lord - do not give me another tote, please!

I didn’t look too deeply into climate science or the state of climate change work in 2024 because it just made me depressed and anxious. Also I felt overwhelmed. I didn’t know where to start. I didn’t want to think about it too much, though I definitely thought that someone should think about it (please?). Indeed, it took me months to get the courage to read KSR’s book!

All that definitely changed with the book. After reading it, I felt inspired and empowered. I loved KSR’s repeated notion that it will take a multitude of actions - large and small - to bend this curve of climate disaster. There was no one, true way, no “perfect” silver bullet. Just a lot of work! I loved how characters repeatedly talked about “putting [their] shoulder to the wheel”. I loved how the book portrayed this multitude of actions, and was ambivalent on which were actually effective: knee-jerk geoengineering following a murderous Indian heat wave, violent eco-terrorism, multilateral cooperation akin to Bretton Woods, regenerative farms and rewilding. It all felt very believable (something KSR has spoken about - writing “optopias” (best case realistic scenarios) versus dystopias or utopias). Indeed, a lot of it is real!

So! Given all that! What did I want to do?

Guiding principles

#

Basically, I was guided by two principles:

1. “Be part of the solution, not the problem.”
2. “Be on the right side of history - aka, what will my descendants think of me?”

Vague - but that was the idea. Instead of climate nihilism, I decided to give it my best shot - specifically on reducing carbon emissions and plastic waste, as much as I could, from where I sit.

How to apply the principles

#

I then spent a LOT of time musing about the most impactful ways to reduce carbon emissions and plastic waste. (Well, the latter is pretty straightforward - more on that below.) Should I protest? Chain myself to an oil rig? Write my legislators? (ha ha sob) Never fly again? Buy an EV? Donate to a climate change group? Go zero waste? Bike a lot? Be vegan?

The world was my oyster! KSR gave me tons of ideas! And, finally diving headfirst into the world of climate change activism, I saw that - well, a LOT is going on. But I wanted to be impactful. I have a full-time tech job and full-time domestic/childcare work, so I knew I didn’t want to exhaust myself on peanuts. I also recognized that I was “doing” a lot of stuff already - buying plastic when I could avoid it, etc - and so maybe I could start changing the underlying systems of my life. What were the passive ways in which I was “part of the problem” and could I switch those out?

🏭 Taking stock

#

I also realized, pretty quickly, that quantifying all of this would be a bit of an art. There are a ton of online calculators for individual carbon emissions - I mostly relied on Earth Hero and UC Berkeley’s CoolClimate Calculator - but I tried several, and my estimates had a pretty wide range. Nonetheless, they gave me a sense of scale - and the main takeaways were: (1) the American lifestyle is not sustainable (per capita emissions are bananas), and (2) flying and food waste are big problems. Also, I waffled a bit on whether I should measure my individual vs. household emissions?

Quantifying plastic use was, again, more straightforward. The city where I live collects paper recycling, compost, and everything else in 3 distinct bins. I just wanted to minimize that last bin. So I could weigh it. I… could. I did not.

Okay, what I actually did (– and whether I think it was a hit 🎉 or miss 😖)

#

📚 Learning:

#

• 🎉 In gathering info on WHAT to do, I ended up using the Earth Hero app as my anchor. Tons of great ideas in here, highly recommend.
• 🎉 I discovered and subscribed to a ton of excellent climate reporting: Grist was an amazing discovery, as was Resilience and Yale Climate Connections. The Mothers of Invention podcast was also great and got me regularly fired up.

🏠 ✈ House + movement:

#

• 😖 Signed up for community solar. It’s one year later and we are still waiting for our solar array to get set up.
• 🎉 Cargo ebike! This replaced a TON of car rides (e.g. daily commute with kids), and we rode it all year round. Big success!
• 🎉 Replaced all shampoo, conditioner, hand soaps with bar soaps. Easy. Done!
• 🎉 Replaced toothpaste with toothpaste tablets.
• 🎉 Replaced household cleaning supplies (laundry, dishes) with zero waste alternatives. Quite onerous to do - you have to hunt for your local specialty zero waste shop, mamma mia.
• 🎉 Got composting back online! Fetid stink yey.
• 😖 Reused those damn tote bags. Sometimes?
• 😖 I seriously investigated alternatives to flying. I remember meeting a climate activist in Berlin in 2017 who told me he attended some workshop in NYC… by boat. At the time, his behavior felt extreme, overly zealous. Now, it seems perfectly rational. The “flight shame” movement has picked up a bit of steam - mostly in densely-connected Europe. My two big flying commitments are (1) business trips every ~4 months, and (2) family trips twice a year. I didn’t think I could drag the family on a transatlantic sea voyage, but maybe I could find a transcontinental train route to get to the work meetings? Nope. Amtrak does have a way to get across America by train - but the options are very limited, mostly geared towards tourists (not work travellers), and THREE TIMES THE PRICE of flying (if you want a private room… and I did, for 3 days’ worth of travel!).

🥦 👚 Consumption:

#

• 🎉 Damn, I think I had beef only like 2-3 times this year? Good for me. But!
• 😖 BUT WELL ACKshually, cheese and chocolate are worse than prosciutto (!), and I cannot bear to give those up. I half-heartedly tried to only eat eco chocolate, but my beloved Lindt - even with its cadmium and lead - still reigns supreme on my taste buds!!
• 🎉 Reduced online shopping to a bare minimum. I mostly bought digital items (books, etc) and second hand stuff.
• 🎉 Didn’t buy any new clothes, only second hand! Discovered the vibrant world of online thrifting, glory be.
• 🎉 Successfully ruined everyone’s Christmas by insisting that we do no gifts - everyone got a World Wildlife Fund animal “adoption” instead. YOU’RE WELCOME.

💰 Wealth:

#

• 🎉 Moved money out of climate chaos-causing mainstream banks and into institutions that are more sustainable, per Bank.Green. See also this amusing Yale Climate Connections piece.
• 😖 Retirement accounts are still invested in fossil fuel industries.

✊ Activism:

#

• 😖 Started a green club at work. My idea was - I can use my leverage as an employee to steer the company towards, e.g., reporting its emissions, investing in advance market commitments(a la Frontier), offering regenerative ag CSAs as a wellness perk, etc. Unfortunately, I just did not realistically have the bandwidth to lead this actively. So, for now, it’s just a collection of eco colleague-stragglers and we send each other articles every month or so. It’s very sad.
• 🎉 Became a monthly donor to my local climate activist groups. Most of these are pretty mainstream political advocacy groups, not the spicier, civil disobedient ones. I was deemed too old for my favorite one lol, and apparently Europe is where all the cool old people activism is (even one just for me!).
• 😖 Attended a civil disobedience climate group, but didn’t stick with it. Again, a lot of this is time. I think Gandhi, MLK Jr. and Mario Savio were right - sometimes you have to put your body onto the gears of the machine to make it stop - but I just couldn’t find a way to plug in here that actually worked for me.
• 😖 Similarly, volunteering with my local “mainstream” climate activist groups also didn’t work: I tried plugging in as a tech volunteer, but that fizzled out. I did some pro bono work for a friend’s biodiversity startup. I attended lots of Zoom intro calls, as well as a couple calls with local legislators (yay). But nothing seemed to click, nothing felt impactful, it felt like I was trying to climb a slippery slope and all I could ever concretely do was sign a petition. There must be a way in that is sustainable for the busy working parent?!

Conclusions from a year of attempted sustainability

#

After a year of this work, how would I rate it? What will I take forward?

Climate nirvana is painful

#

I think most educated people in the world accept that human-caused climate change is (a) happening and (b) bad. When you don’t pay attention to it, though, you don’t really know how bad. My vague, unsettled, NYT-driven climate anxiety was unhelpful. I would swing between fairly big extremes: either fearing apocalyptic, civilizational collapse, or trying to reassure myself that “science would fix it somehow, surely it’ll be okay”.

So, well, THANK YOU so much to KSR - one of my top 2 living sci-fi authors! - for presenting a believable prediction for this century. It was scary, sometimes horrifyingly so. But it was also informative - and galvanizing. Humanity will be OK, we are resilient. Which is another way of saying that humanity can bear a lot of suffering. So let’s try to minimize that suffering!

After reading the book, I did spend a couple weeks in a haze - similar to what Richard Feynman described after working on the Manhattan Project. I looked at everyone as mindless sheeple. I was living encased in a fuzzy bubble of cosmic perspective - who cares about this work deadline when our society is hurtling towards disaster? Did you just buy a pack of toothpaste tubes from Amazon - are you trying to kill us all?! Not a good way to be. But also: the natural part of internalizing something quite stark!

Several climate activism resources - Peter Kalmus comes to mind - speak about this being a normal part of the process. First, you have to grieve. I really agree with that now.

We are going to hit a wall of ecological reality sometime this century. We can either hit the wall going full-speed, causing massive suffering, or we can navigate this change on our own terms, skillfully. We have the knowledge and the resources! We just need… okay, we need global collective action. Which is not looking too hot right now, to be fair.

And individually, trying to live with this reality in mind - just the practical aspects of living within Earth’s limit, as an individual/household - was sometimes massively difficult. And always for quite stupid, irrational reasons. You find yourself pushing against enormous systemic forces. Seriously, have you tried finding toothpaste tablets with flouride? It is a challenge! And why don’t we have way more overnight trains, hello?! Reducing emissions and plastic can become a full-time job. Just like living free of Big Tech is almost like opting out of modern society, living a carbon neutral and zero plastic life was basically impossible.

That said - climate nirvana was oddly joyous?

#

Basically, even though my actions were a drop in the bucket, when things clicked - they really, really clicked!

Cory Doctorow (my other top 2 living sci-fi author, surprise!!) has this quote about fighting a fight that you don’t “win”, you just fight. Joanna Macy also had some stuff to say about this on the We are the Great Turning podcast - a sort of Buddhist non-attachment to a particular outcome, even as you work for… a particular outcome. And I think that’s healthy: balancing the grief with joy and optimism - and pragmatism!

I noticed how, as I dove very deep on the climate change activism reading, I found some doomerist strains - dark and scary nihilism, death culty stuff about how we’d all be living in a Mad Max hellscape by 2100. These would be written by authoritative voices - scientists, etc. Brrrr, I shudder. And just not for me. To paraphrase Kant, being optimistic is a way to stay sane and keep plugging away. (Plus, history is littered with catastrophes and, as far as I can tell, these people cannot see into the future!)

Anyway, on the practical side: the parts of my solarpunk lifestyle that worked really worked. The joy of e-biking was just - chef’s kiss. (And you can park anywhere!) The ease of shopping less: having less junk, less cardboard boxes, less plastic bags. Less clutter! The fun and sensible-ness of thrifting. Not giving or receiving a bunch of stuff at Christmas! LESS STUFF. Mamma mia, we can BREATHE again. And regenerative ag fruit and vegetables! Very good.

Future plans

#

The one thing KSR’s book also brought home was the importance of imagination. I discovered solarpunk through him, and just having access to a positive vision of the future was so, so valuable. It gives you something to work towards. My go-to utopia has always been Star Trek - specifically, The Next Generation - but that’s very far future (and does include, okay, a sentient AI war and major societal collapse between them and us). Solarpunk is much more accessible! Why, I feel like most of the Netherlands is living the solarpunk life right now (all those bike lanes!!!!).

So, given that, I’m going to:

1. Keep cultivating a positive, solarpunk framing through fiction, art, essays, whatever. It’s important to imagine how things could go right.
2. Keep doing the 🎉 good stuff.
3. Pick one “collective action”-y activity and try to really understand how I can plug in and be impactful. There must be something between “sign online petition” and “spend hours during your workday in a local legislator’s office”, right? Right????