10.15 | reconciling death and the immediacy trap

✉️ letter #68

It’s been a few weeks now since Jane Goodall passed away, the second major conservationist elder to leave us this Autumn. She, and Robert Redford (the first to go) are famous enough for me to not have to write out mini-bios here for them — there are more than enough eulogies all over the internet that encapsulate the work they did and the lives they touched much better than I ever could.

I personally hadn’t had the chance to meet either, but I was pleased to find out so many acquaintances had, and nobody seemed to have a bad story to tell.

• Not surprisingly, many Climate Film Festival folk have worked in or with the Redford Center, which is continuing to fund movies about climate change. In fact, several of the movies we featured at this year’s CFF were co-produced by the Redford Center, which I didn’t find out until after the festival itself. The advertising tradesperson in me is kicking myself for missing the marketing opportunity.
• Perhaps a little more surprisingly, Jane Goodall made frequent visits to China during her career, and her Roots & Shoots educational program has been taught at over 1000 schools in the country. I realized during the outpouring of tributes that several of my China friends had met her, had got to talk with her at length about conservation and climate change, and had even been invited for a whiskey drink so that she could get to know them. It’s been heartwarming to find out she was as kind as she seemed.

🎼 the soundtrack | SAD GENERATION, HAPPY PICTURES - Noga Erez

But as I read commendation after commendation, interspersed with breaking news headlines about the state of America today, I kept on returning to a really depressing thought:

Isn’t it horrible to pass away at a time when your life’s cause is being dismantled?

I felt the same way when President Jimmy Carter died just at the end of last year — at least he got his vote in; too bad Georgia still went Red. Or Ruth Bader Ginsberg — hanging on to dear life to her seat on the Supreme Court because, god, we could all see that the kind of person who would be getting it when she vacated would be her very opposite...

How frustrating must it feel to go out on a downward trend?

Was there a point to all that effort if it was going to get derailed so easily?

I got shaken out of those slumpy thoughts by, funnily enough, my own ranting about Ezra Klein and the Ta-Nehisi Coates dialogue over Klein’s courting of the American right. Because, I said to someone maybe a little too excitedly, at the heart of what led to Klein’s absolutely unnecessary op-ed about “practicing politics the right way,” or heck, most of Klein’s frankly cringey Abundance commentary over the last year, is that he wanted to be a Winner. More than that, he wanted to be the MVP who made us win.

And that’s a highly individualist trap that I guess we’re all somewhat susceptible to as Americans, given what our pop culture has been teaching us this entire time.

There’s a Hero to every story, and everything that every other character does is an assist to that Hero. The Hero has to learn some hard lessons along the way, but ultimately he gets to the final stage and he gets to deliver the final blow. When we end the legends of our history, it’s always with the defeat of the other side — and so we can justify the realpolitik of getting to that denouement.

But that’s not how things work. Life goes on after one battle is won, and oftentimes the life that goes on can be pretty cruel. Emancipation and Reconstruction was followed by Jim Crow and the KKK. Rosie the Riveter paved the way for stricter gender norms than before the War.

Man, remember when we were all excited about the first Black President? Like, some of us were iffy about his drone strike usage and installing that many Big Bankers to lead us out of the financial crisis their ilk had caused, but in general, we’d done it! We’d solved Racism! Never again would we have to worry about old white men codifying regressive policies that only benefit other old white men at the expense of everyone else!

It took that to remind me that the point to making the environment better, the human experience better, isn’t to point at it at the end and go, “See? We won? I did that.” In fact, we might need to get comfortable knowing that we might not win. That there is no such thing as winning, since the game never ends.

But just because we recognize that there is always work to do, that what work we do could be backtracked if we aren't vigilant, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. If we care about a more equitable future, about a vision of a world where everyone can enjoy healthy and meaningful lives regardless of gender or creed or where they happened to be born, we've got to take a long-term view.

All we can hope to do is nudge us all in the direction we want — and build the supports and ladders and platforms for people after us to nudge us all in the direction we want — enough that some day maybe another generation can take the nice things we fought for for granted.

Otherwise, we end up losing the plot.

🪢related threads

• Our current administration has lost the plot. Or at least that's all I can think, because I still don't believe the architects of America's destruction actually wanted to destroy America so much as they just wanted more money. And yet, everything they've done is going to leave us a former husk of ourselves, especially in the wake of any of a number of upcoming inevitable emergencies. And it's wild to me that they think they can somehow come out of all that destruction unscathed. [Hamilton Nolan]
• I guess you could argue we lost the plot decades ago though, when we pushed for globalization to China and completely gutted our own manufacturing and engineering training capabilities in order to only do the "high value" work here – only now we don't even have enough people to do the "high value" work here without China. Like say with AI science. [Rest of the World]
• And meanwhile, we have one of our biggest tech billionaires over here, Peter Thiel, preaching about the Antichrist, who is in his mind ** checks notes ** "regulation" and "taxes." [The Guardian]
• Honestly, the only hope I have right now is that the rest of the world is somehow a little more far-sighted. While it makes America's psychotic episode seem even more insane, at the very least we can now realize they aren't leading us all into oblivion. Multinationals are pricing in climate risk and strategizing for biodiversity. The transition to renewables is already underway. COP30 is going to happen, whether the USA attends or not.

✨enjoying: a piece of pop culture fun

Another person I was sad to see leave: Diane Keaton. Scott put on Annie Hall in commemoration but as much as I find her wardrobe in that iconic, a big bugbear for me is watching insufferable characters I already have to deal with in real life on the screen (see also: Girls), which makes seeing Woody Allen bumble his way around beautiful women pretty intolerable.

If you're the same as me, you'll probably enjoy these options more: Reds, Baby Boom, Father of the Bride, First Wives Club, and (my mom's favorite, because of those Nancy Meyers kitchens) Something's Gotta Give. Of those, for the fun, here's a scene from First Wives Club:

🗨️a final quote

It is only right, to my mind, that things so remarkable, which happen to have remained unheard and unseen until now, should be brought to the attention of many and not lied buried in the sepulcher of oblivion.
– Lazarillo de Tormes

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