I’m at my friend’s birthday dinner when an all-too-familiar conversation unfolds. I introduce myself to the man to my left, tell him that I work in the environmental field, and his face freezes in terror. Our handshake goes limp.

“You’re gonna hate me …” he mutters sheepishly, his voice barely audible over the clanging silverware.

I knew what was coming. He regaled me with a laundry list of environmental mistakes from just that day: He’d ordered lunch and it came in plastic containers; he’d eaten meat and he was about to order it again; he’d even taken a cab to this very party.

I could hear the shame in his voice. I assured him that I didn’t hate him, but that I hated the industries that placed him — and all of us — in the same trick bag. Then his shoulders lifted from their slump and his eyes met mine. “Yeah, ’cause there’s really no point trying to save the planet anymore, right?”

My stomach sank.

Sadly, I get this reaction a lot. One word about my five years at the Natural Resources Defense Council, or my work in the climate justice movement broadly, and I’m bombarded with pious admissions of environmental transgressions or nihilistic throwing up of hands. One extreme or the other.

And I understand why. Scientists have been warning us for decades that humans are causing severe and potentially irreversible changes to the climate, essentially baking our planet and ourselves with carbon dioxide. A 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that we had roughly 12 (now 11) years to make massive changes that could stop the worst impacts of climate change.

Once upon a time, perhaps, we needed a strong grasp of science to understand climate change, but now all we have to do is look at the daily headlines — or out our windows. From the Camp Fire, a devastating California wildfire that was exacerbated by dry, hot weather, to Hurricane Michael, a storm that rapidly intensified due to increased sea temperatures, climate change is here.

I don’t blame anyone for wanting absolution. I can even understand abdication, which is its own form of absolution. But underneath all that is a far more insidious force. It’s the narrative that has both driven and obstructed the climate change conversation for the past several decades. It tells us climate change could have been fixed if we had all just ordered less takeout, used fewer plastic bags, turned off some more lights, planted a few trees, or driven an electric car. It says that if those adjustments can’t do the trick, what’s the point?

The belief that this enormous, existential problem could have been fixed if all of us had just tweaked our consumptive habits is not only preposterous; it’s dangerous. It turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined as sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold these ethics. When you consider that the same IPCC report outlined that the vast majority of global greenhouse gas emissions come from just a handful of corporations — aided and abetted by the world’s most powerful governments, including the US — it’s victim blaming, plain and simple.

When people come to me and confess their green sins, as if I were some sort of eco-nun, I want to tell them they are carrying the guilt of the oil and gas industry’s crimes. That the weight of our sickly planet is too much for any one person to shoulder. And that that blame paves the road to apathy, which can really seal our doom.

But that doesn’t mean we do nothing. Climate change is a vast and complicated problem, and that means the answer is complicated too. We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become many Davids against one big, bad Goliath.

Greener than thou

When we think about climate change, we’re almost never looking at the whole picture. Generally, we talk about the impacts at a scale so macro, it’s almost impossible to fathom: rising sea levels, melting ice caps, acidifying oceans. In some perverse magic trick, it becomes both atmospheric and far, far away. Everywhere and nowhere.

But when we talk about the causes, the conversation suddenly narrows to our navels. In the aftermath of the 2018 IPCC report, the internet was awash in story after story after story about “what you can do about climate change.” Change your lightbulbs. Bring reusable bags. Cut back on meat.

If the answers are all in our hands, then the blame can’t be anywhere but at our feet. And where does that all lead?

A population beset with shame so heavy they can barely think about climate change — let alone fight it.

This is where the victim blaming takes hold. All too often, our culture broadly equates “environmentalism” with personal consumerism. To be “good,” we must convert to 100 percent solar energy, ride an upcycled bike everywhere, stop flying, eat vegan. We have to live a zero-waste lifestyle, never use Amazon Prime, etc., etc. I hear this message everywhere: the left- and right-wing media and within the environmental movement. It’s even been used by the courts and the fossil fuel industry itself as a defense against litigation. In fact, industries have redirected the environmentalist narrative to blame consumers since the ever-so-problematic “Crying Indian” ad campaign of the 1970s. I hear it from my friends and family, strangers on the street, random people in yoga class.

And all this raises the price of admission to the climate movement to an exorbitant level, often pricing out people of color and other marginalized groups.

While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into. In fact, fossil fuels supply more than 75 percent of the US energy system.

If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence.

Renowned shame researcher Brené Brown describes shame as the “intensely painful feeling or experience of believing that we are flawed and therefore unworthy of love or belonging.” This is not to be confused with guilt, which can actually be useful because it holds our behavior against our values and forces us to feel psychological discomfort. Shame, on the other hand, tells us that we are bad people, that we are beyond redemption. It paralyzes us.

As Yessenia Funes, a reporter at Earther, wrote, “I refuse to believe people should be shamed for living in the world we’ve built.”

Consumer actions aren’t enough

So what can we actually do about climate change? Well, to be crystal clear: I’m not advocating for any throwing in of towels. The worst thing you can do about climate change is nothing. Climate change is a huge problem, and to face it, we have to be willing to make personal sacrifices we can feel. It’s our responsibility not only to future generations but also to each other — right here, right now.

Furthermore, given the United States’ outsize contribution to global warming, we have an ethical obligation to shrink our carbon footprints. The United States is the world’s second largest emitter, only recently having fallen from first place. And our historical contribution is even more appalling. The United States is responsible for more than a third of the carbon pollution that has warmed our planet today — more than any other single nation.

Given our enormous footprints, Americans’ personal consumption choices are some of the most powerful in the world. So for us as Americans to say that our personal actions are too frivolous to matter when people died in Cyclone Idai in Mozambique, a country whose carbon footprint is barely visible next to ours, is moral bankruptcy of the highest order.

At the same time, though, the more we focus on individual action and neglect systemic change, the more we’re just sweeping leaves on a windy day. So while personal actions can be meaningful starting points, they can also be dangerous stopping points.

We need to broaden our definition of personal action beyond what we buy or use. Start by changing your lightbulb, but don’t stop there. Taking part in a climate strike or showing up to a rally is a personal action. Organizing neighbors to sue a power plant that’s poisoning the community is a personal action.

Voting is a personal action. When choosing your candidate, investigate their environmental policies. If they aren’t strong enough, demand better. Once that person is in office, hold them accountable. And if that doesn’t work, run for office yourself — that’s another personal action.

Take your personal action and magnify it into something bigger than what kind of bag totes your groceries.

I don’t care

Here’s my confession: I don’t care how green you are. I want you in the movement for climate justice.

I don’t care how long you’ve been engaged in the climate conversation, 10 years or 10 seconds. I don’t care how many statistics you can rattle off. I don’t need you to be all-solar-everything to be an environmentalist. I don’t need you to be vegan-er than thou, or me, for that matter. I don’t care if you are eating a burger right this minute.

I don’t even care if you work on an oil rig. In some parts of the country, those are the only jobs that pay enough for you to feed your family. And I don’t blame workers for that. I blame their employers. I blame the industry that is choking us all, and the government that is letting them do it.  

All I need you to do is want a livable future. This is your planet, and no one can advocate for it like you can. No one can protect it like you can.

We have 11 years — not to start but to finish saving the planet.

I’m not here to absolve you. And I’m not here to abdicate you. I am here to fight with you.

Mary Annaïse Heglar is a climate justice essayist and the director of publications at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. Find her on Twitter or Medium.

The National Climate Assessment released a report last week with a startling warning: climate change could cause more damage to the American economy by 2100 than the 2008 Great Recession. It’s the second report in the last few months with dire predictions for our planet’s future due to global warming: In early October, the revered Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued an equally damning report —  more like a prognosis  —  on our impending climate crisis.

It’s bleak, y’all. The planet has already warmed by 1 degree Celsius. We’d actually passed that threshold right around the time of the Paris climate agreement in 2015. The Paris agreement was meant to keep us from surpassing 2 degrees, and to make best efforts to keep it below 1.5 degrees. Between every single fraction of a degree lies untold levels of death and disease and generalized destruction.

America is warming fast. See how your city’s weather will be different by 2050.

Things are already bad. They are already getting worse. This report reveals  —  and, for many of us, confirms  —  that we’re not doing nearly enough to stop things from getting damn apocalyptic.

Many people who don’t think about climate change on a daily basis, or who thought it lived on some distant horizon they would never have to face, are now coming to terms with its terrifying reality. I get it. I’ve worked in the environmental field as a policy editor for nearly five years now.

People like me, and others in “the climate-verse” —  activists on the ground, experts in the field, professionals at big greens —  have all had that moment when we had to face the reality of climate change. For most of us, that moment hurt. I know it did for me.

I started working in the climate change advocacy world somewhat by accident when I got a job editing policy for an environmental advocacy organization. I cared about the earth, of course, but I wasn’t a hardcore environmentalist.

I spent my first year deeply immersed in detailed reports on climate policy. No detail was spared. Day in and day out, I read about the reckless course we were on and all the foolish ways we were digging our hole even deeper. It was terrifying.

I had known climate change was real. I had an inkling that it was not far away. But I didn’t know just how bad it was. I didn’t know how many innocent  people were already suffering hideously. Pick a natural disaster — wildfire, hurricane, mudslide, or heat wave, many of which research shows have already been exacerbated by climate change — it’s always the people with the least to lose who get hurt the most. I didn’t know how many people had been marked as allowable casualties because they were born in the wrong places under the wrong circumstances. Right at that very moment.

I knew I would see bad things accelerate in my lifetime, but I didn’t know it was going to happen before I turned 50. Nor did I realize how many of them I’d actually already seen. After all, I was with my mother in Mississippi during Hurricane Katrina and here in New York during Sandy. And if you’re thinking that climate change and hurricanes aren’t related, they’re not exactly divorced either.

My stages of grief

I didn’t know it then, but that first year I spent reading policy papers, I went into mourning. I skipped denial and went right to shock. I floated around on a dark, dark cloud. I frequently and randomly burst into tears, and I’d refuse to admit to myself that I knew exactly why I was crying.

When I was around bustling crowds of people, I saw death and destruction. When I walked on dry land, I saw floods. I imagined wild animals, especially snakes, getting out of the zoos in the aftermath of natural disasters. I worried about how we would treat each other in the face of such calamity. I doubted it would be kind. (I still doubt that, actually.)

I kept editing, but I tried to dissociate, pretending that none of it was real, as ridiculous as it sounds. That didn’t work either. The craft of editing demands empathy. You have to be present.

Then I went into depression. My social life turned into fits and spurts of intense engagement followed by equally intense withdrawal. I was deeply afraid of telling even the people closest to me what I knew and why I was so scared. I couldn’t sleep. The crying fits continued. They didn’t become more predictable.

I’d silently been asking myself: What am I fighting for? What am I trying for? Why am I paying my student loans? Hell, why am I saving for retirement? I was heading into a desperate space.

What are we fighting for?

One day at work, I came across the book that saved me: What We’re Fighting for Now Is Each Other, a book by environmental journalist Wen Stephenson that chronicles his transformation from reporter to climate activist. The prose was beautiful, and each page oozed with compassion without layering the issue with coats of sugar. It looked climate change squarely in the face.

One of the many, many things that book taught me was that I was not crazy. That my broken heart was normal. I was not the only one feeling it, and the best thing I could do was get out and talk to people who had already stood in front of this same emotional abyss and found the nerve to carry forward.

Then I moved from depression to anger. And I’m still in anger because, in this context, acceptance is bullshit.

We’re all in mourning

Whether we admit it or not, we’re all in the middle of one big, giant mourning process. We’re mourning our futures. We’re mourning the children we’re afraid to have. Our bucket lists. Our travel plans. Some of us are mourning homes already lost to fires or flood, or savings accounts wiped out helping relatives recover from hurricanes. Some of us are mourning our todays, even our yesterdays.

Denial is part of the traditional mourning process, but we have collectively spent way too long there. It’s time to snap out of it.

Given the sheer enormity of climate change, it’s okay to be depressed, to grieve. But please, don’t stay there too long. Join me in pure, unadulterated, righteous anger.

The dominant narrative around climate change tells us that it’s our fault. We left the lights on too long, didn’t close the refrigerator door, and didn’t recycle our paper. I’m here to tell you that is bullshit. If the light switch was connected to clean energy, who the hell cares if you left it on? The problem is not so much the consumption — it’s the supply. And your scrap paper did not hasten the end of the world.

Don’t give in to that shame. It’s not yours. The oil and gas industry is gaslighting you.

That same IPCC report revealed that a mere 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global climate emissions. These people are locking you and everything you love into a tomb. You have every right to be pissed all the way off. And we have to make them hear about it.

It’s time to grow up

I grew a lot during that first year. And that’s why I say this with no intention of condescension: In order to face climate change, to truly look it in the eye, we have to grow up.

We can’t pretend this isn’t happening anymore. Especially for us Americans, our general privilege and relative comfort compared to so many in the world can make it easy to turn a blind eye. But we can’t pretend that some unnamed cavalry is coming to save us. We are the adults in this room. We have to save ourselves.

It’s not our fault, but it is very much our problem. It’s dire, but we have to dig in our heels and fight — for each other.

This essay is adapted from a Medium post.

Mary Annaise Heglar is the senior policy publications editor at a prominent environmental advocacy organization. She is based in New York City. Find her on Twitter @MaryHeglar.

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