Preheat to 180°C
Climate change has stopped feeling like a real word. It feels more akin to a plastic bottle that you don’t realise is actually very dishwasher unsafe; it has become something warped and half beaten to death. I've been so consumed by its presence that most of my time is now spent running away from its existence (no, not in a climate change denier sorta way).
Every time a new year rolls around, I try to read “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells1. The furthest I’ve gotten is to the 60ish% mark and then the unending sense of doom hits. Through every reading of that book, the common denominator is that I come away feeling shit about my inaction. Most of the time, it isn’t even future anxiety, it's just that some part of the world will always be up in flames. It feels like every year the forest fires in California get worse. I’m sure that people are making a dent in these annual climate catastrophes (furnace and flood), but just as a girl sitting in LIC, my fear is being so desensitised that I’ll only care once I see the smoke. One line that I’ve quite mercilessly highlighted in the book reads “Those more panicked are often hardly less complacent, living instead through climate fatalism as though it were climate optimism. Yes, the whole “If a tree falls in a forest…” grinds my gears when it becomes a prophecy of my life.
Enough of me waxing poetic about my insecurities.
I started on this spiral because of a reel (yes, I’m the type of Gen Z that finds their news in snippets on social media) about global temperatures crossing 1.5°C in 2024 2. If you’re even remotely worried about climate change, 1.5°C was the big number for a decade.Even though I knew that the 1.5°C benchmark set at the Paris Agreement had become a fairy tale, I still mourned when we crossed it. That number was one I stared at for a year.
Between 2022 and 2023, I attempted to make a game, Tridal, about climate change and land use. I never finished it. I suspect that I’m going to spend this decade struggling to make some version of this game. Especially because, for all that I’ve said in the first two paragraphs about my struggle with inaction, making this game were the only times I could escape that inadequacy 3. In Tridal, the game starts at 1°C and as you keep making moves temperatures rise.
If you reach 1.5°C, sea levels rise for the first time. They engulf 1/5 th of the land (exaggerated game mechanic compared to reality). So now, 1.5°C is linked, in my mind, to that loss of land. A fictional map with tiny tiny pixels of land use data are ingrained in my mind now. If this incomplete attempt at making a game about climate change can alter my brain significantly I want to follow through and see what a successful implementation of the game could do for me.
If climate change is a ‘hyperobject’ so large that it can not be comprehended, I need some help parsing through it. So, I’m going to deal with this nagging climate anxiety as I know best– read, watch, play, and create for climate action.
P.s., if this felt a bit rambly to you and not particularly insightful, you would in fact be correct. I think this essay was more about me voicing my fears. It serves as a receipt of my attempt to jolt me back into being a concerned, energised member of our burning planet. Because it’s getting harder to bear but easier to look away…
Yours anxiously TM
highly recommend this book if you’re feeling even remotely good about the world and want to quelch it↩
Earth breaches 1.5 °C climate limit for the first time: what does it mean?↩
“As conditions of environmental degradation become more universal, it may, perversely, require more imagination to consider their costs” - David Wallace-Wells.↩