The week I moved to California for college was hot. Vision-blurring, mind-bending, late-summer desert hot. My mom and I drove the thousand miles from Fort Collins to Redlands, California in a single day in late August, and even with the AC on, driving through Vegas and the northwestern corner of Arizona on I-15 in the late afternoon felt like a test. It was hot and I was hungry, and the car strained against the high temperature. At rest stops, I got in and out of the car, exchanging one temperature for another, and looked over chain-link fences at the baked, flat desert. By the time we hit San Bernardino county that evening, the temperature was still over 100.

I’d been to California before, but it was up north, or to my uncle’s house in San Diego, where the ocean dominated the weather. Inland, everything felt heavy, shimmering with the smell of ozone and oak trees baking in the sun. The first few weeks I lived in Redlands, my curiosity was ravenous. I had expected that moving to a different state would be disorienting, but I didn’t anticipate the landscape, the air, and the sky as sources of disorientation. It was hot in a way I had no experience with, constantly sunny. What was too dry? What was too hot? When was it supposed to get cool? Was the air supposed to look like that? How long was it supposed to stay green? All I wanted to know was weather and air quality and plant names–which plants on campus were native, which were not, what the weather was usually like, whether the pollution was mostly ozone or particulate. I wanted the landscape to give itself up to me, to allow itself to be read and deciphered.

Part of my disorientation came from the fact that I grew up mostly within a hundred mile radius of where I was born in Denver and knew the landscape so intuitively that it seemed inevitable. The facts of prairie and forest, seasonality and snow felt absolute and unquestionable. By the time I moved to California, I had spent years trying to divine the climate apocalypse, one season to another, one weather event to the next in Colorado. My sense that I knew the landscape, knew what it wanted, knew what it was about fed my dread: all kinds of weather, some normal, some not, became signs of doom. In California, for the first time, I had too little knowledge to try to interpret the weather or seasonality as the dreadful mark of a changing climate, to be dreaded and worried over.

At this point, in climate writing, the apocalyptic turn, the dread that confines you to your bed, the crippling self-punishment are tropes, not unusual or isolated moments. Greta Thunberg stopped talking, and like me, stopped eating. Ash Sanders wrote for the Believer about turning off the heat in her house in the bitter cold of Utah winters. Maggie Nelson describes experiencing “somatic freak-outs” while researching mass extinction, climate dread, and the apocalypse for her own essay on climate. This preparatory dread is symptomatic of a particular genre of climate writing, and the despair itself seems to be a mounting issue. Between 2014 and 2021, the American Psychological Association has released ever-longer and more dire reports on the impact of climate on mental distress. As the climate problem gets worse and more people begin to experience its consequences, it also becomes increasingly difficult to cope with its scale and scope. As Maggie Nelson pointed out, “The inverse relationship between the scale of the climate problem and our difficulty in engaging with it emotionally isn’t just a cruel irony, or another opportunity to squabble over the proper traffic between the personal and the political. It is one of the structural features of the crisis.”

I grew up knowing about climate change and dreading it but not totally understanding it. For a while, I hoped that the adults would deal with it, but pretty early on, everyone around me started to seem unreliable, less worried than I was. When I finally realized how bad things were, I was thirteen, in my fluorescent-lit, linoleum-floored eighth grade science classroom. My teacher exaggerated: “This is a huge problem, and it’s going to be up to your generation to solve. We’ll be lucky if it even snows this year.” This was 2016 and everything seemed to rupture. Later that same week, I started panicking about the apocalypse and started having trouble sleeping. When it snowed for the first time that year, it felt like an unexpected miracle, and as the flakes came down in clumps outside my window, I was grieving already. The climate problem seemed incomprehensible, its mouth open, poised to eat through everything. This feeling ballooned, became the only thing I could think about: Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? Is it going to be okay? I asked, and asked again in whatever ways I could. At the time, this dread felt preparatory, like dreading the loss of the landscape I loved was going to prepare me for it when it happened. Besides, in a world with so much loss, to not feel anxiety seemed reprehensible.

…

Through most of my middle and high school career, I tried and failed many times to express the degree and extent of my suffering to various people and I mostly faced varying degrees of incomprehension. Almost no one seemed to understand that when I said I was worried about the end of the world, I meant I was worried about the end of the world. That I was worried that the end of the world was closer than anyone thought. Ash Sanders wrote of their own experience, “I went to therapists who stared at me quizzically. I was sad about what? ‘The end of the world,’ I said, again and again. Finally, at a loss, they diagnosed me with depression.” The end of the world was an issue no one seemed to be able to face in a way that satisfied my sense that everything was wrong, everything was upside-down.

Living in California so disoriented my sense of what counted as grounds for distress that,  after several months of trying to determine what to direct my dread toward, I gave up and gave into learning to love a place I didn’t yet know how to dread. This reprieve helped me to realize the extent to which my own despair and anxiety about the environment were based on a series of irresponsible generalizations. The first week I lived there, I started a running list of native plants in my head, tried and tried again to remember them–live oak, manzanita, California rose, white sage. To love a place, suddenly, required me to engage in a kind of specificity that had always evaded me. In theory, I knew the difference between a lodgepole and a ponderosa pine back in Colorado, but in practice I knew very little about either tree. I knew them better through my dread about their deaths in fire and beetle epidemics than I did through what they were and what they did.

On campus, I started to notice things. The bark on different eucalyptus trees peeled differently, exposing different colors and softnesses of bark. There were trees that lost their leaves in November and other trees that lost their leaves in January. The first time the Santa Ana winds kicked up fiercely and dustily to 60 miles per hour, I was at the airport in Ontario, watching little dust devils form in the lobby. After it rained, meadow mushrooms exploded on the quad, almost overnight. I learned that most of the plants on campus were not native. Of course, the grass lawn wasn’t, but many of the other plants were imported as well–eucalyptus was from Australia, most of the palm trees were not regionally native, the water-hungry oranges that used to be the region’s main industry were from from Southeast China, crape myrtles with their fluttery pink flowers were from southeast Asia and Australia, some of the cypress trees were Mediterranean imports. I learned, too, about real estate and indigenous land use in LA. Local environmental crises came to my attention, one after the other–urban sprawl, freeway politics, strip malls, terraformed cemeteries, warehousing. One night, toward the end of the year, my girlfriend drove me out to the desert, complained about Desert Lawn Cemetery, pointed out the massive warehouse complexes studded with trucks in Calimesa and Beaumont:

“It’s huge, just warehouse hell,” she said.

I nodded, looked out the window, “Maybe Amazon?”

“Probably.”

…

In this context, I started to wonder if my own apocalypse and the apocalypses of so many other people casually worried about the climate crisis were a way of generalizing this patchwork of specificity. It’s very hard to refute the apocalyptic visions many people conjure when thinking about unchecked climate change if the only possible alternative is weak, inactive optimistic platitudes ranging from “everything is going to be okay!” to “we’ll figure it out someday!” Faced with this disheartening binary, it is easy to move on to fatalism or grief, usually expressed as “even if human beings don’t survive, life on Earth will probably go on.” Jonathan Franzen, who has remade his name in the past couple of years promoting this way of thinking, began his controversial New Yorker essay, What if we stopped pretending? breathlessly quoting Kafka: “There is infinite hope, only not for us.” While fatalism and unthinking optimism are both legitimate emotional responses to a horrifying situation, neither of them offer a solution that goes beyond feeling a particular way at a particular time.

In her essay, Why Climate Despair is a Luxury, Rebecca Solnit writes that “When you take on hope, you take on its opposites and opponents: despair, defeatism, cynicism and pessimism. And, I would argue, optimism.” Genuine hope, for Solnit, is different from simple optimism, which makes it both more useful for the climate movement and more challenging. Indeed, many people involved in environmental movements are involved precisely because they are concerned about the fate of the planet, and engage in action because they are possessed of both great hope and an understanding of the horrifying possibility of failure.

Solnit’s diagnosis of the despair problem also feels urgent and accurate. Of her time touring her book Hope in the Dark, which argues among other things that movements for change tend to overstate their failures and understate their successes, Solnit says “I met with many kinds of response – relief, joy, good questions, powerful stories, and sometimes rage. The rage, to my surprise, came largely from middle-class white people. They seemed to see despair as a form of solidarity and hope as a betrayal. Underneath this was, so far as I could tell, the assumption that whatever the cause in question, it was doomed and so we could start mourning right away.”

For me, climate anxiety offered dread as a balm for a history of inaction, because worrying about a worse future than I had previously imagined felt better than doing nothing. The deceptive power of climate despair was that it felt like the opposite of denial. Because the problem had touched me and I was desperate not to be complicit, the despair felt active and ethical. Anxiety tends to overstate the problem, and overstatement feeds failure to act by becoming a goal in itself. For years, I would search “climate change” every few weeks and consume as many dreadful-sounding articles as I could. This was an incredible, seductive waste of time.

Both denial and total optimism about climate are positions often borne from the privilege it takes to ignore the problem as it unfolds. Despair requires a different but very real privilege that knows and feels like it cares. Solnit says, “For those of us whose lives are already easy, giving up means making life even easier, at least in terms of effort. For the directly impacted, it means surrendering to devastation. Giving up on behalf is not solidarity.”

To live in Southern California that first year, then the second and third was to be forced, finally, to dread specific losses instead of an all-encompassing catastrophe. In the midst of the inland urban sprawl, I felt, strangely, closer to nature than I ever had before. I thought the first landscape I loved and wanted to protect was the forest, the ocean, the beautiful blue-and-green, nature-looking-nature because I worried about them the most. But in many ways, the nature I was closest to and protected most actively was closer to home–the garden I convinced my dad to build, the enormous eastern cottonwood in the back field at my elementary school, the patchy green-brown remnants of wetland and shortgrass prairie that dot the Front Range.

I have tried to write about this story so many times and in so many different ways that it has begun to feel impossible to tell the story in a satisfying way. To enter into an extended discussion of my own bad feelings feels like a way of stalling or avoiding the issues actually at hand. On the other hand, the apocalyptic feeling I had was very real, and continues to haunt me. It’s been seven years since that day in my middle school classroom, and I’m twenty one. When I began this project, I wondered if I would have finally developed the emotional fortitude to read so much about the reasons for despair, but when I finally sat down with the sources I feared, their rhetoric wasn’t anywhere near as formidable as I thought it was. The case for despair is messily argued. Nonetheless, despite its flaws, I don’t think the emotion itself is entirely invalid. In many cases, despair is a legitimate emotional response to a bad situation. Solnit says that “Despair can be true as an emotion but false as an analysis. Even when it is realistic as an analysis, many still stand up and resist on principle.” The problem continues to escalate, but I have entered a much stranger state. The dread hasn’t left me, but it has become more specific and I am learning better what to do with it, trying to develop a more genuine kind of hope– a hope informed by doing something. I am disappointed that it took me this long, but I am finally learning how to deal with the dread it takes to confront genuine problems and crises.

This is work that can take many forms–lobbying for policy change, talking to your neighbor, advocating for better resource management, sending emails, lending your voice and story to the choir of people already worried about what is happening.

Last year, in a class on environmental writing, I volunteered at an oak woodland preserve–sitting in the sun, pulling grass and storksbill out of the ground, watching my classmates shovel mulch, weed, and plant cacti and California roses, I felt like I had arrived in a place and a moment that a few years ago had felt impossible. I learned about serpentine soil, which nurtures only plants that can handle extreme conditions. I added more plants to my California repertoire, both native and not–storksbill, foxtail barley, new types of oaks and oak shrubs. There, in the spring sunshine, the fields and oak trees were glowing bright green. I felt like I was there, really there.

To be outside right now, in the present, seems important, as does involvement, finding ways to act now, in the present. Sonit wrote in Hope in the Dark that “Political awareness without activism means dedication, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at the center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at your edges or at your side. These ideas of hope are deeply disturbing to a certain kind of presumptive progressive, one who is securely established one way or another.” For me, and others, walking away from despair has been a process of growing up, and it seems that in this moment a lot of people are trying to grow up, to become more responsible and resilient enough to live in the present instead of a distant past or a distant future. In an interview with the Guardian, Greta Thunberg said “I know lots of people who have been depressed, and then they have joined the climate movement or Fridays for Future and have found a purpose in life and found friendship and a community that they are welcome in.” Friendship, community, a constantly shifting position adaptable to both great despair and great hope is also what I am seeking, what I’ve found working with 350 Colorado this summer, revegetating sand dunes in San Bernardino, exploring built wetlands and patchwork scraps of prairie where humans and wildland communities meet. To have come close to the edge, the limit of my own ability to comprehend the world around me has made me more open to coming to incomprehensible conclusions. Thelma Young Lutanatuba wrote “The crucial thing to remember is that we do this work not because we are assured that all will be okay. No, we do this work, because we must.” To work because you have to, to hope not because you are particularly optimistic, but because the present demands it is difficult, but it also seems to be a better path than doing nothing.

The summer after my freshman year of college in California, I was in San Jose. It was hot that week, the entire bay area wrapped in a stifling summer heat wave, and I took the light rail to the interactive tech museum downtown and bought a student ticket, mostly to have a place with AC to wander around near the light rail stop. I sat on benches in the museum, watching school groups and summer camps walk by, drifting from exhibit to exhibit, not spending much time anywhere, except for an exhibit in the AC-chilled basement called “Solve for Earth.” I decided I didn’t like the exhibit because of its distinctly techno-utopian, vaguely libertarian bent and its intense corporate sponsorship. An exhibit about the climate sponsored by Ford Motor Company! Yipee! I thought.

But I stayed, because I was transfixed, watching all of the children, younger than me, cheerfully turning dials and clicking tablets. Data reflected up from screens onto their faces. I walked through projector beams and data rippled, light and dark across my skin. I stood in front of a dial–turn the dial forward, and you get closer to the present. Turn the dial backwards, and you get closer to the past. I turned the dial all the way backwards, then forwards again and again, as far as it would go. I turned it to landmark years in my family history. For every year, there were numbers I knew without knowing–lines, emissions and temperature averages rising together since 1850. I got disoriented turning the dial, but ended up back in the present.

Later, I remembered a Kurt Vonnegut quote from Slaughterhouse-Five I copied into my journal during the record-breaking fires in the summer of 2020. He says “We went to the New York world’s fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like according to General Motors. And I asked myself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was mine to keep.” I spent most of that summer casting myself forward into a horrifying future–Vonnegut’s quote felt like a distant possibility. Now, I understand it more as an imperative. The present feels horrifying, but it also has begun to feel like an opportunity to figure out how much I owe other people and the world around me.