I walked out into the Vermont dawn this morning to walk the dog, and the normal silence of the woods was broken—and fairly sharply—by the clatter of a helicopter. That’s not that unusual: it could be a search for a lost hiker or (though not now, with the lakes frozen) a fish-stocking run. But for a moment I stood on the porch and considered how similar sounds must be creating terror in the minds of Ukrainians today, and Ethiopians, and Syrians, and all the other places where the most likely explanation for a helicopter is that it’s going to shoot at you.
As it happens, I’d been back and forth on email all week with a Ukrainian colleague, putting together an op-ed piece for the LA Times. Svitlana Romanko, who’s been working on the climate crisis for many years, was in Ivano-Frankivsk, a university town in the country’s southwest that had so far seen little fighting. Over night, though, Vladimir Putin had fired off a missile that landed near the city. So.
The piece we’d written was about the amoral banks that had funded Putin’s government (even after it had taken over Georgia and annexed Crimea) and Big Oil (even after the Arctic had melted). The essay, that is, was about time: time wasted. We’d been given more than ample warning about what kind of government Putin was building, and thirty years worth of shrill alerts about what we were doing to our climate. But the powers that be—bankers and politicians—had found it easier and more congenial to keep doing what they’d been doing than to make the changes necessary to put us on a new course. And now we—or, this month, Svitlana—were living amidst the result.
But she was living courageously. As we wrote:
What if we stopped believing that history determines today’s reality, that the future has to look like the past? Ukrainians are remaking their history in these tragic but remarkable days with their shockingly brave resistance to a war machine funded by oil and gas. Surely bankers safe in their peaceful offices can chart a new course. Or we can force them to.
And we will try, harder than ever, because we really are out of time. The climate scientists have told us we have until 2030 to cut emissions in half, and 2030 is now, by my watch, seven years and nine months away. So either we will use this crisis to make fundamental changes in the right direction, or we will use this crisis to entrench ourselves in the status quo. Big Oil, of course, is pushing us hard in that direction, demanding that we respond to Putin by drilling more. But increasing our dependence on fossil fuel will not only entrench despots who fatten on that dependence, it will also guarantee we run out of time. I’ve been heartened to see another strain emerging—people, right up to the White House, pointing out the obvious path forward. Here’s part of what the Biden administration tweeted out yesterday
When we have electric cars powered by clean energy, we will never have to worry about gas prices again. And autocrats like Putin won’t be able to use fossil fuels as weapons against other nations.
The administration is also considering the Heat Pumps for Peace plan discussed here a couple of weeks ago—it’s a small part of the kind of work required to meet the moment.
And a safe part. Because let’s be clear—apocalypses come in several flavors. Overheating the planet is one—but blowing it apart is another. It’s been some decades since most of us have felt real nuclear terror, and that shows in some of the rash declarations about NATO taking on Putin directly. I remember arriving at the New Yorker as a young writer, just as Jonathan Schell was publishing The Fate of the Earth, the single great account of what an atomic exchange would do to the planet. The End of Nature, my account of the climate crisis published a decade later, was in some ways designed to be its echo. Both are existential, systemic threats, from which past a certain point there is no rescue.
But if fighter jets might trigger a spiraling escalation, heat pumps and insulation seem less likely to set Putin off—and ultimately at least as deadly to his regime. We’re being called to a rare moment of high seriousness, when all games must cease, especially the game of pretending that apocalypse—climatic or nuclear—doesn’t haunt our world. We must not flinch, and we must work fast. We’re at a choice point, and it may be our last one.
A few notes from around the climate world
+Here’s the list of the Putin100, the banks that are financing his fossil fuel industry
+And here’s the Heat Pumps for Europe plan from Rewiring America—the meat on the bones, if you’re a carnivore.
+Department of the Utterly Predictable. Investment giant Blackrock has been making noises about being climate-responsible in recent years—but before things got out of hand, they had a meeting with Texas officials to explain it was all just window-dressing. After the meeting, the chairman of Texas’s oil and gas regulator wrote: “It was nice to hear that BlackRock didn’t mean – or no longer believes – many of the disagreeable things the company and its CEO Mr Fink have said about the oil and gas industry.”
+The world’s biggest rainforest is being beaten into submission, a new study finds. As the Times summarized the research
The Amazon is losing its ability to recover from disturbances like droughts and land-use changes, scientists reported Monday, adding to concern that the rainforest is approaching a critical threshold beyond which much of it will be replaced by grassland, with vast consequences for biodiversity and climate change.
+And some good news!—Dating app OK Cupid says 90% of its clients say caring about climate change is important in their matches, and that being a climate denier is the biggest dealbreaker out there. It’s hot to be cool!
Many new readers have joined in recent weeks; along with the other parts of this newsletter, each Friday features a new installment from The Other Cheek, an epic nonviolent yarn that we’re about halfway through. You can catch up on the earlier chapters via the archive.
Professor Vukovic had chosen to go with the last of the five groups, headed for a lonely set of Union Pacific tracks near Green River in Utah, where 10,000 barrels a day of crude rumbled west. So he waited at SGI till mid-week, watching the first day of the protest via Periscope feeds from protesters with smartphones. It transpired more or less the way he’d predicted: when the communications team informed reporters in the morning that a crowd of terminally ill people would be lying down on railroad tracks north of Albany, tv news crews descended. “’Vultures’ seems almost literally appropriate in this case,” he said to Cass, as they watched reporters interview each of the dozen people on the tracks. “But I’m glad they’re there.”
MK’s train liaison team had warned the CSX control tower about the protest even before the protesters arrived on site. The fifty-car train braked miles in advance; by the time it appeared in the distance it was barely making headway. The protesters watched it approach and halt about fifty yards from their small clot; the engineer climbed down from his cab and walked up to the demonstrators where he shook hands all around.
Even the police seemed moved by the scene: they took people into custody gently—in two cases they had to lift weak protesters from the track and on to waiting stretchers. They cuffed the dozen women and men, but loosely, and in front of their bodies, and instead of a paddy wagon they just helped them in the back of squad cars for the short trip to the police station, where a district attorney announced that after booking they’d be released on their own recognizance. “We’re aware that these are not criminals,” he said.
The news reports that began emerging were poignant. “I’d actually like to spend ten years in jail,” said a young woman with advanced leukemia, the sockets of her eyes almost black and her hair buzz-cut short beneath a scarf. She’d just come out of the door of the police station to cheers from a growing crowd of supporters; there was a wheelchair waiting for her to rest in as she talked to reporters. “I’d like to spend ten years anywhere. But since that’s not going to happen, I’d like to spend what little time I have left doing something useful. You don’t quite realize how beautiful this planet is until someone tells you that you won’t be seeing it much longer. Maybe this will help open people’s eyes.”
Two older ladies had been arrested with strings of photos around their necks. “I have 19 grandchildren, 42 great-grandchildren, and six great-great grandchildren,” said the woman, identified on WAMC’s early news cast as Louise Hanson, native of nearby Schenectady currently residing in Cypress Lakes Florida. “This is Pam, this is Katherine, this is Bennett, this is Callie, this is Pam also, this is Arjunder—he’s adopted, very special—this is Tricia, this is—“
“It’s a very long list,” said the reporter. “Very beautiful children. Could you tell us why it’s so important to you to stop climate change?”
“Absolutely,” said the lady. “This is Nate. This is Cassiopeia, we call her Cassie. This is Tremaine. This is Kevin. This—“
“Thank you very much,” said the reporter.
Perry had planned carefully for social media: on Facebook he released pictures of the old people blocking the tracks when they were young, and on Twitter he made sure that a few dozen accounts were constantly updating with photos from the arrests. The actor Mark Ruffalo, who lived nearby in the Hudson River Valley, not only made the trip over, he persuaded his co-stars in Avengers 6: Dead Earth to send out online messages. Since Scarlett Johansson, Robert Downey Jr, and Chris Evans had 181 million Twitter followers between them, hashtag #reallivesuperheroes was soon exploding. “What I want to be when I grow up,” said Johansson on Facebook, next to a picture of a tiny, wizened, grinning old lady in handcuffs being led to a police car.
When eight more protesters appeared at the railyard the next morning, a CSX public relations man was waiting for them. There’d be no need for further arrests, he said: the company had cancelled the rest of the week’s oil trains. But the protesters insisted, and indeed two city councilors and a state representative wanted to be arrested with them. “Being a politician may be an illness, but it’s not terminal,” one older gentleman with a walker told them, explaining why they’d need to wait.
An hour later, the second front opened outside the Marquis Terminal in Hennepin, Illinois, where BNSF unloaded 35,000 barrels a day of tarsands crude from Alberta. The scene was much the same, but the snarl of trains stacking up behind the stalled engine was much longer. And since there were now two examples separated by a thousand miles, national journalists decided it was a trend, and hence worthy of their attention. “Aged, Ill Campaigners Block Train Tracks in Climate Protest,” said the lead headline on the Times website by 4 p.m.; the story ran with a video of a centenarian named Mabel Thornton. “My husband Cal was a Pullman Porter on this very train line until 1973,” she said. “He met A. Philip Randolph many times—many times. We should bring back the sleeping cars—they were wonderful things. Trains should be used to carry people, not dangerous oil that could explode.”
The protests were drawing such widespread coverage that industry had no choice but to react. “Radical activists are exploiting the old and ill,” said a spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute. “These people are confused about America’s energy future.”
“I am not confused,” said Harold Traficante, 77, when a reporter read him the quote as he was led to a Illinois state police car. “I have a tumor in my heart, but that’s better than having no heart at all.”
“I think—this is an effective tactic,” Professor Vukovic said. He was in the passenger seat of the SGI Subaru, with Allie at the wheel and Cass in the backseat. They’d left the school an hour earlier, headed for Utah—students and faculty had lined the front drive to cheer as they left, and Maria and the professor had hugged for a long time, just staring into each other’s eyes. “We love you Marko,” she said, finally, and he slid into the front seat.
For the first few miles he’d stayed somber, but as Cass read the incoming texts from MK, his smile grew steadily broader. The third and fourth teams—one in California, and the other along the Washington coast—had deployed without incident, and the press coverage was only growing. Janice Two Rivers had been on CNN and MSNBC pretty much all day, explaining why dying people were risking ten years in jail; local prosecutors were issuing statements promising ‘humane treatment’ of those who’d been arrested. “I really don’t think a jury is going to want to convict people attached to IVs and oxygen masks,” one district attorney told NPR.
Warren Buffett, whose Burlington Northern and Santa Fe railroad was one of the biggest crude oil carriers, announced a temporary halt to shipments. “I’m an old person too,” he told a reporter for his hometown Omaha paper. “We’re used to people protesting things, but this is different.”
“I’ll tell you why I think it’s different,” said Professor Vukovic. “Goldfarb, perhaps you could write it down for the files.” Cass dug in her knapsack for a pen and paper.
“Point one, unexpected voices are always louder. Resistance movements always rely on students, young people, and of course that’s fine,” he said. “But when you can reach out to unanticipated groups, that is much more threatening to the system. Perhaps cross-reference the work of the German wives of Jews in Berlin in 1943, the so-called Rosenstrasse protests—their demonstrations actually got their husbands released. Remarkable. And so brave.”
“Point two,” he continued. “There seems to be something particularly potent about the involvement of older people. That surprises me, in our youth-oriented societies: I mean, many of the people we’re engaging seem to have been largely forgotten by societies, and ended up in age-segregated ghettoes.”
“I’m not sure that’s how they see it,” said Cass. “My grandparents live in Winding Creek Plantation in South Carolina, and the bylaws only allow children and grandchildren to visit for 48 hours at a time. My grandmother says she votes against the policy at the annual meeting every year, but I’m not so sure.”
“In any event,” said the professor, “seeing elders perform the traditional role of elders in a society—providing guidance and wisdom—seems to awaken some vestigial community impulse. Worth noting in any assessment.”
“And point three, the obvious one,” he said. “The crucial thing about non-violence. Salgado, any idea?”
“It . . . obstructs things?” she said. “It makes it hard for the trains to get through?”
“No,” said the professor. “That’s almost never the point. When you’re up against big systems—British rule, the fossil fuel industry—there’s no way to stop it one place at a time. Bigness is the definition of the system: it’s like trying to kill an octopus one arm at a time, if it had a million arms. Non-violence is almost always useful symbolically. It calls attention to a problem, it underlines the moral urgency. And here’s the reason: Unearned suffering.”
Allie was staring straight ahead, driving carefully. She nodded, but tentatively. “People know that they don’t want to suffer,” he said. “So they figure that if someone is willing to, it must be important. To suffer—not to inflict suffering. To go to jail, not to send people to jail. That’s real strength, even though the powerful never understand it.”
“I don’t really understand it,” said Allie. “I don’t want to suffer. When—I mean, I hated suffering.”
“Of course,” said the professor. “You didn’t choose it. It was chosen for you. But when you choose it, it has unique power.”
“Which I don’t completely understand,” said Cass. “I mean, I get that it works. But I don’t quite get why. The world seems to like strength, so why is weakness—I mean, why wasn’t Gandhi a loser?”
“Goldfarb, you’re a Jew, and I’m an atheist. Which is why it’s good we have a Christian with us. Salgado, what is the key event of your religion?”
“Um, the crucifixion?” she said.
“I would think so, since there’s a cross on every church,” the professor said. “And what was the crucifixion? Was it about strength?”
“Um, not really,” she said. “Or sort of—I mean, Jesus chose to be weak.”
“True,” he said. “And his unearned suffering—his agony, as they say, which he voluntarily took upon himself—became the central event, the hub, of western civilization for two thousand years. Walk in any museum. Goldfarb, you’re the story expert. Isn’t it the key story of our culture.”
Cass nodded guardedly, thinking the professor was sounding old—old-fashioned, maybe. She was more inclined to think Harry Potter was the key story of her culture. Or maybe Star Wars. But she also felt like Dumbledore, or maybe Obi-wan was in the front seat. And in any event, he was continuing to talk.
“It’s not just Christians,” said the professor. “It’s universal. It worked as powerfully in India. It’s the man standing in front of the tank in Tiananmen Square. You think that didn’t scare the Chinese? That scared them far more than if the man had had a tank himself. They’ve spent the last thirty years desperately trying to make sure it never happens again. Unearned suffering is the key.”
“Speaking of which,” said Cass, who was reading her phone, “MK says that two of the protesters, one in New York and one in California, have died in the days since they were on the tracks.”
“That doesn’t surprise me,” said the professor. “It means they were holding it together until they could act. It means that we gave them something to live for.” He seemed, all of a sudden, very tired. “Could I have my pills please,” he asked Cass, who gave him the pain meds the hospice oncologist had insisted he keep with him at all times. He took two, and then shook a third into his hand, and closed his eyes and was soon asleep, snoring lightly.
By the time he woke, almost six hours later, they’d reached the access road to the Utah protest camp. Cass was driving now, and Allie was taking pictures to post as soon as she got a signal—they were in a very remote stretch of desert, and the last phone service had been an hour ago when they stopped for gas, dropping off I-70 in the town of Brown River. They’d only come a couple of dozen miles since, but they’d been slow—dirt track, crossing cattleguards, along barbed wire fence in wide-open country, overseen by hawks.
They’d known they were getting close when they started seeing banners hanging from some of the fence: “Trains for People, Not for Oil,” and “Stop Railroading the Climate.” They rounded a turn, and could see a line of willows and shrubs in the distance, marking what must be the river bank. A pair of state police cars stood by the side of the road, with officers who waved them on; when they reached the main camp, they saw two ambulances waiting, and a gaggle of tv satellite trucks. A young woman with a clipboard asked Cass for their names, and directed her to a drop off spot, where two nurses in white coats waited to help the professor out of the car.
“Would you like a wheelchair?” one asked.
“I’d like . . . a chair,” he said, and they led him to a small shaded circle, where a dozen other older people sat in a circle—some on the ground, some on cots. A young man with his hair pulled back in a bushy knot, greeted him. “Everyone is explaining why they came,” he said.
Professor Vukovic still seemed a little groggy, but he looked around the small circle and smiled. “I’m Marko Vukovic, from Colorado most recently, and I’m here because I have pancreatic cancer, and also an affection for the things that I began my life on this planet alongside. I like ice caps, also coral reefs, also snow. If we used to have them, I think we should have them still. So here I am.”
“You’re the professor that thought this up,” said a woman who was reclining on a cheap chaise lounge, her arm attached to an intravenous drip. “Being a professor would explain why you’re wearing a vest and tie in the desert.”
“It’s what keeps me together,” said the professor with a smile. “Untie the tie and I might just flow out on the ground.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” said the woman. “I’m a little scared. I’ve never done anything like this before. You must have lots of experience.”
“Actually,” said the professor, “it’s been a number of years since I’ve been . . . practically engaged. My research has taken most of my time since, um, the 1980s.”
“The 1980s barely seem like yesterday,” said the woman. “I saw a sign on a store the other day that said ‘Serving You Since 1982,’ and my first thought was how dumb it looked. Like, what they were boasting about. But then I did the math—more than 35 years.”
The young man with the hair bun seemed a little distressed that the conversation was wandering. “Would anyone else like to discuss their motivation for being here?” he said.
“What I’d like to discuss is how it’s actually going to work,” said another older woman. She looked stronger, if frail. “What are we supposed to do? How far do we have to walk?”
“You don’t have to walk at all if you don’t want to,” said the young man. “We can get everyone over to the tracks in wheelchairs—it’s just over there. The train won’t come till tomorrow morning at 8, and so at about 7:30 we’ll just head over and do a ceremony on the tracks. I know some of you have brought objects from home?”
“I’ve got a picture of my dogs,” said one. “Toby and Tyler. They’re sheepdogs. Very smart. They can catch Frisbees, but they stop after two or three because, why bother? That’s how smart they are.” She passed around the pictures.
“I’ve got some sand from Great Salt Lake,” said a man, holding up a little vial. “When I was a kid there was water where that came from, but it’s been drying up for years.”
“I brought these tasbih, Muslim worry beads,” said the professor. “They were given to me by a man you’ve never heard of, Badshah Khan, but he was a very great man. And if he were still alive I have no doubt he’d be with us today, or doing something similar.”
“Time for supper,” said a smiling young woman, who appeared at the edge of the circle. “We’re having vegetarian franks and beans, and for dessert, Green River is famous for its watermelons. And then we’ll help you get into tents for the night.”
Professor Vukovic ate just a few bites, but he did sip an entire bottle of Pilsener from the Bohemia Brewery in Midvale Utah. “I visited Pilsen once when I was a young man,” he told Cass. “And Budvice too, where Budweiser was born. Real Budweiser, not the American kind.”
He was sitting behind an improvised desk Cass and Allie had constructed for him from a pair of packing crates and an overturned backboard for neck injuries borrowed from the ambulance crew. He was listing a bit to one side in his chair, and Cass knew his back was hurting again, but he’d asked for paper and pen, and to be left alone for half an hour. She sat against a rock in the warmth of the waning sun, and watched him writing with his careful elegant hand, pausing rarely except to rub his stomach. When twenty five minutes had passed, he sealed the pages he’d written in a pair of envelopes, and beckoned Cass over.
“Goldfarb,” he said. “These are important, at least to me. Since you’re my collaborator in all things archival, I’ll trust you to open then in the event of my death.”
“You’re not going to die tonight,” she said—though as she said it she realized it was coming out of her mouth bent into a question.
“Probably not tonight, but some night soon, or some morning,” he said. “I have enjoyed your companionship these past months a great deal—a great deal, more than you can imagine—but not quite enough to put up with this pain very much longer, if I am telling the truth.”
He watched her swallow, and raised his voice a little. “Anyway, the important task is before us—we have a train to block.”
“And you have an interview to do, if you’re strong enough,” she said, still swallowing. “CBS News is here, and they’re very eager to talk. They keep calling you the ‘architect of this movement.’”
“I haven’t done an interview in a very long time,” he said. “Because I was too busy. But I can’t think of any reason not to right now.” So Cass fetched the tv crew, and while they were setting up lights she straightened his tie and fussed with his hair, using her fingers to press one unruly white curl into place.
“Professor Vukovic, what did you have for breakfast,” asked a sound technician, swinging a boom mike over his head.
“Three pills—I believe they’re called Vicodin,” he said.
“Okay, the sound is good,” said the engineer, and then an attractive young woman in a shearling jacket layered over a blue silk shirt sat down on the packing crate beside him. “Professor Vukovic, I’ve been doing some research,” she said. “You’re one of the world’s great historians of civil disobedience and social movements,” she said. “Can you put these extraordinary arrests over the last week in some kind of context for us?”
“Well,” he said. “On any given day around the world there are people standing up to power. Very few of them, if you’ll pardon me saying so, get much media attention. Most reporters—most people—are fascinated by wars and explosions, but most social change comes non-violently, when people use whatever they have at hand to demand attention. And this is a good example. I am old and dying, and hence useless for almost anything. But that fact means I don’t have to worry about attempts by the federal government to intimidate me. The fossil fuel industry obviously has enough leverage on the president to get the Justice Department to announce absurdly long sentences—ten years for a peaceful sit-in. Think about that. But since that sentence has no leverage on me, it means I have leverage on them. Me and the rest of these people; we all thought our useful lives were long since done, but we were wrong.”
“Does it scare you?” she asked.
“That’s the other thing,” he said. “Usually it takes real courage to engage in actions of this kind. You risk not just the penalties, but you have to separate yourself from your culture—you have to break the rules. But dying is all about separation anyway. I feel like I’m three-quarters of the way there. The fear is very small. It almost feels like cheating.”
“Final question, Professor. What will you be thinking about as you sit there on the tracks tomorrow?”
The professor faced the camera, and said calmly, “I’ll be thinking about the town where I grew up, and my mother, and my brother,” he said. “I’ll be thinking about the first train I ever saw, and how excited I was. It was a steam engine, of course, smoke pouring out the top. I thought it was alive. I’d never felt smaller.”
“Thank you, professor, and good luck.”
The woman shook his hand, and the technician unpinned the microphone from the knot of his tie, and then the professor let Cass lead him to the small tent with the cot where he’d spend the night. “Allie and I are right next door,” she said. “If you need anything, just say our names.”
The professor clicked off the small solar lantern once she’d gone, but he didn’t take off his shoes. He just sat on the edge of the cot and looked out the tent flap at the falling night. When he’d been finishing dinner the sky was a rich royal blue; when the tv lights clicked off it had deepened towards purple; and now it was so dark that stars were visible, and yet there was still some velvet blue, just at the edge of the visible, toward the horizon. He reached in his pocket and found his bottle of pills, and took three more, washing them down with water from a plastic bottle by the cot. He lay, and for a while he slept.
Outstanding!!!
excellent eye-and- mind opening article.