Living at the End of Our World (w/ Daniel Sherrell & Dorothy Fortenberry)
Added 2021-09-03 00:27:36 +0000 UTCThis is a slightly different kind of Know Your Enemy episode—a conversation about hope and despair as the effects of climate change bear down upon us. At the center of that conversation is a brilliant new book, Daniel Sherrell's Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of the World, that focuses not on the facts of climate change or how to stop it, but what it feels like to imagine and live into the future in the knowledge of its existence. Matt and Sam are joined by Sherrell and Dorothy Fortenberry, a playwright and television writer currently working on Extrapolations, an upcoming limited series for Apple TV+ that focuses on climate change.
Sources and Further Reading:
Daniel Sherrell, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin, 2021)
Pope Francis, Laudato si' ("On Care for Our Common Home"), May 2015
Dorothy Fortenberry, "Can't Fight This Feeling Anymore: What Donald Trump Understands about Politics Today," Commonweal, November 5, 2020
Sam Adler-Bell, "Beautiful Losers: The Left Should Resist the Comforts of Defeat," Commonweal, March 11, 2020
Comments
this episode inspired me to read the book with some comrades for our reading group — it sparked a lot of great discussions and was also a beautiful work of writing. Would love more episodes about the history of conservative thought about climate change and nature.
Cavan Bonner
2021-10-30 07:02:01 +0000 UTC“Hope is an act of humility” reminds me of the capitalist version of that statement, “Pessimists sound smart, optimists make money.” I’m so glad to have found a more reasonable mantra for the same sentiment.
Nicole F.
2021-10-23 22:19:39 +0000 UTCWhy did Matt feel like he had to resist bringing up Bernie?
Avery Griffin
2021-09-20 16:46:29 +0000 UTCGreat episode. One thought on parenthood (note, I’m the father of two): family formation is the main driver of travel behavior, residential choice, and often, political preferences. I have a number of Millennial friends who moved to Detroit after college, then got married and moved to the suburbs. I’ve seen this pattern over and over, with people living in NYC or SF during their twenties and then moving to the Midwestern or Phoenix suburbs when they decide to have families. These changes are tightly bound up with climate change, and the policy sphere supports it, from residential segregation based on school district pricing in real estate to highway expansion to accommodate forecasted exurban population growth.
Chad Bailey
2021-09-05 15:28:58 +0000 UTCOn loving those you don't know: "Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset." "Hence arose the saying, 'If I love you, what is that to you?' We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, *Love*
Mark K
2021-09-05 00:39:21 +0000 UTCHi Marya, this episode is unlocked! Due to numerous requests from listeners, we've started putting all episodes, bonus or not, in this feed so that our subscribers can access everything here. — Matt
Know Your Enemy
2021-09-04 17:27:15 +0000 UTCGuys, please unlock this episode. I think it should be shared widely. Also, this brought to mind other books/writers/projects which merit attention: Dark Mountain Project, and the continuing career of its founder, the writer Paul Kingsnorth ("Confessions of an Ex-Environmentalist," "The Wake") ; Amitav Ghosh's "The Great Derangement," which is fantastic...
Marya Hart
2021-09-03 23:18:47 +0000 UTCSo many thoughts. I'm a leftist atheist photo editor for a large green non-profit. The first week I started this job, Trump was elected. There was a lot of crying at work. I had come from WIRED, there was no crying in that newsroom (except hidden in the bathroom). I feel so relieved that this was "allowed" culturally at my work. At our staff meetings there is crying, and righteous anger; it is uncomfortable and good... The organizational struggle is difficult work, beyond the having the highest stakes imaginable, a climate crisis. My work is to scroll through photos of disasters, and produce shoots in disaster areas, daily... Then my activism outside work looks at education & labour. My non-spiritual frame is checking in on mental health, being flexible with those around us; and relying on others (ie: community). I'm seeing a cultural shift, thanks to younger people. Activist personalities can be disagreeable to say the least. But I feel like that "masculine left" [Dan mentions] thing I was used to before has moved. I'm not into hippie-shite, because it looks like self-indulgent inaction, but I am for taking turns, when you have the energy you push, you tap out to rest and use that time to think creatively. Many atheists doggedly work on the climate crisis. Deep empathy is my MO, and that is enough for some of us.
Sam Murphy
2021-09-03 18:42:21 +0000 UTCI am extremely grateful for this episode. It speaks a lot to my feeilngs of climate grief, and the vision it offers for squaring that grief with resilience is something I needed to hear. I just want to add that while listening to the talk, I was reminded of the concept of nativity, so central to the entire political project of Hannah Arendt. For her, each birth was a miracle, not because of some inherent sanctity (which is not something she put much stock into) of life, but rather because it represented an entry of something radically new into the world; for Arendt each of us (and I think you can stretch it beyond the human, and say: each that is new in the world) is unprecedented and thrown into the world without being fully determined by it. As such, our mutual obligation rests on this sense of our shared singularity, and of the demand that we each meat each another as someone different and separate, someone who does not have to be like us to be of us. The demand to embrace the uncertainity of the newness, instead of clinging to increasingly genocidal practices of trying to preserve the sameness, was so very key to Arendt, and I think it remains relevant also in the struggle for climate justice which, as you aptly say, is a struggle for keeping a world that can be a home for our newness to keep appearing without reaching some kind of a pre-set goal.
JSzpilka
2021-09-03 14:19:32 +0000 UTC
