This is a shortened version of an essay I finished in early 2024. I am penning a new version for 2026, but this piece does accurately capture my thinking a few years back.
“The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
There he was, my then-six-year-old son, laying naked on his tummy in our bathtub while I scooped warm, soapy water into a whale-shaped bath rinser. It was the summer of 2023.
As I rinsed the soap off my son’s back, he played with his toy orca and giant squid. While the deep-sea creature wrapped two of its enormous tentacles around the orca, it dawned on me that my son was playing with toys of oceanic animals that may become extinct within our lifetime.
That is, depending on how long we manage to live.
* * *
My wife and son sat in the backseat of our car as I drove us home. I stopped our Prius at a red light to turn left. As we waited, I absentmindedly stared at the small strip mall on the corner; a bottled water supplier was scrunched between a Togo’s and a run-down donut shop. I watched a man enter the store holding two empty five-gallon bottle jugs.
The store is about a half-mile from our house. That’s not too bad, I thought. It’s the nearest one. I made a mental note of this.
If local public utilities departments cease to provide potable water to businesses and residences in our East Bay region, this may be a place to quickly descend upon to ransack and plunder.
* * *
The best advice I’ve ever seen scrawled in a public restroom was found in a café in San Francisco’s Richmond District. It read: “Emergency preparedness is knowing where to loot.”
* * *
Donning a KN95 mask, I sat at a semicircle of desks in a hotel conference room with seven of my administrative colleagues from The Nature Conservancy. We stared at a projection screen. A PowerPoint slide displayed answers from a questionnaire we anonymously answered before our retreat to help us get to know one another. We all read the five questions and answers to help us guess which team member provided them. One of the questions read: “If you could travel back in time, what era would you visit and why?”
Our Director of Finance and Operations answered the question different than the rest of us. He said he would like to time-travel a hundred years into the future to see what it’s like. Behind my mask, I grimaced. I didn’t want to tell him what I was thinking: that he’d probably find himself in a scorching wasteland bereft of humans. Bereft of ice. Bereft of life.
On our late morning hike through the beautiful Santa Fe Canyon Preserve the following day, he told me he and his wife had thought about moving from the Midwest. We all had remote jobs; he could work for the Conservancy and live anywhere in the United States. He and his wife were in their mid-thirties with no children but their families were rooted in Nebraska, so they were inclined to stay. I could relate. Nevertheless, I wanted to tell him now is the time to leave, that the Midwest may become a desert due to aridification in the coming decades.
This process is already underway.
This past summer, an unprecedented heat dome descended upon the continental United States and shattered temperature records. On August 20, 2023, the heat index reached 134°F in Lawrence, Kansas. Last year, the state of Kansas—perennially the largest wheat producing state—experienced their smallest wheat crop in fifty years. In 2015, a NASA study found that carbon emissions could dramatically increase the risk of megadroughts in the U.S. Southwest and Central Plains. The study warned that if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase along current trajectories there is an 80 percent likelihood of a decades-long megadrought in the Southwest and Central Plains between the years 2050 and 2099.
By nature, most climate scientists are conservative with their projections.
I doubt we’ll have to wait twenty-six years to see a mega-drought take a withering hold of the Midwest and Southwest.
* * *
Per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), “The annual rate of increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases, such as those that occurred at the end of the last ice age 11,000 - 17,000 years ago.”
Carbon dioxide levels today are higher than at any point in human history. The last time atmospheric carbon dioxide amounts were this high was more than three million years ago. Global surface temperature was 4.5 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than during the pre-industrial era. Sea level was at least sixteen feet higher than it was in 1900 and possibly as much as eighty-two feet higher.
* * *
When I was thirty-two, I read Ben Wallace-Wells’ 2011 Rolling Stone article, “The Vanishing Ice Sheets.” The perspectives of the glaciologists he interviewed was enough to alert me to the fact that our species is in serious peril.
Now I can see that article converted me into a low-grade doomer. Back then, I thought the catastrophic effects of climate disruption were decades away.
I was naïve and overly hopeful to believe this.
* * *
After I read that essay, I felt hesitant about bringing a child into this world.
* * *
On February 25, 2016, on the last day of an artist residency in southern Wyoming, my wife texted to ask if I had read her last email. It wasn’t like her to be cryptic, so I immediately opened my inbox. I found a picture of a ClearBlue pregnancy test that read: PREGNANT.
My jaw dropped. My eyelids rapidly blinked and I peeled them open and leaned toward the laptop screen to confirm what I thought it said.
She was pregnant!
HOLY SHIT!
My immediate reaction was joy and excitement with a tinge of disbelief. See, back in 2009, at the age of thirty, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. At our first meeting, my oncologist told me there was a small chance my chemotherapy regimen could cause infertility. I subsequently read up on sperm banks and decided to roll the genetic dice and not cryogenically freeze my sperm. Then, a few months after I was declared cancer-free, I took a sperm test at the behest of my then-girlfriend; my sperm counts were low. I wasn’t quite sterile, but I wasn’t far from it. The doctor who shared the results told me that in time my body could naturally heal from treatment and my ability to produce sperm could improve.
I had left it to chance if my seed would take root in the future.
Years later, through a pixelated image on my laptop screen, I received my answer.
* * *
In the end, despite my apprehensions about our collective future, my wife and I decided to bring a life into this world. I wanted to know how it felt like to love a child of our own. I knew it was a love unlike any other, and I knew my wife would be a great mom.
That was it.
Those were my reasons.
* * *
Near the end of 2019, before we had ever heard the word “coronavirus” or the acronym “COVID-19,” my wife and I gathered in our living room after she put our two-year-old son to sleep. The calendar year was coming to a close; we were in a reflective mood. Somehow or another, we brought up the wildfires that had affected our region for a third consecutive year. In late October, the Kincaid Fire broke out in nearby Sonoma County. Ashes and soot and wildfire smoke hovered over our region for days on end. Outside, the air smelled like perpetual campfire. It was unsafe to be outside for long without a respirator mask, and it was hard to stay indoors. Our son loved playing outside. By the end of the week, we were all tired, frazzled, and irritable.
My wife and I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her parents have lived in the region since the early 1970s. In their experience, wildfires had never been a regular occurrence.
It was clear something was profoundly awry.
Climate change was accelerating—in real time.
That night, my wife and I both separately agreed that we would have not brought a child into this world had we known what we knew then about climate change. It was validating to know our concerns were mutual, but it left us feeling morose. This pit inside. Our poor son. This turbulent world we had brought him into.
* * *
This knowledge is difficult to bear. In the past few years, I’ve had periodic depressive spells like I’ve never experienced before. I used to be happier before I ingested all this research.
Being a climate doomer has caused rifts in my life. At times, I have never felt so alone; by nature, my wife is a person who often acts on a sense of anxiety so I can’t talk to her about what I’m reading, nor the climatic disasters I’m witnessing online.
During this ongoing pandemic, I can sense myself distancing from others. I try not to get too attached to people, and I know others—including family—are cautious about freely speaking with me because they know I’m not an optimist about our present, which unfurls into this theoretical plane we call “the future.”
In a way, this knowledge has poisoned me.
* * *
So how the fuck do I keep going on?
That’s a good question. I’m figuring it out.
What I do know for certain is that I’m committed to staying alive and not becoming disabled by Long COVID so I can be here, as fully as possible, for my son and my wife.
* * *
I have a wellness program. I haven’t detailed its parameters; maybe someday I will. But for now, I occasionally get stoned—per my wife’s encouragement—so I can chill out and withdraw into a more blissful ephemeral state. And so, I light up, put on my headphones, crank up the volume, and gyrate and quietly rock out around our tiny abode as I listen to the music I am blessed to have stumbled upon during this long strange trip. Music is magic. A spell cast; humans at their finest. (Well, when the music is good—and of course that’s subjective.)
I am trying to engender gratitude as much as I can. Historically, I’m not very good at this, but like I tell my son, over and over again, the more you practice something the better you get at it. So I seal my lips, I still myself with a breath and I give thanks when I see something beautiful. I give thanks when I eat delicious food, when I turn the faucet to produce water that is clean and safe to drink. I often grin in awe when I see one of our animal brothers and sisters. I give thanks for having had the opportunity to share this planet with them, the abundant beauty and magic we all are, but I also grieve for them. I grieve a lot. If one of our human cultures hasn’t already invented a word for holding grief and gratitude in one moment, that term should be created because that’s what I’m doing every day until my light goes out.
* * *
Here’s an example of my wellness program in action:
My son wants a toy from Target. I take him to the store. It’s sometime in 2023. A weekday when there are less shoppers. We cross the parking lot, hand in hand. Before we step into the store, we stop to put on our KN95 masks. We’re basically the only ones masking. It’s not easy being the nail that sticks out, but we’re used to this.
We head down a main aisle toward the toy section. There aren’t many people in front of us. I ask him if he wants to run to the toy section. He loves to run at any opportunity. Of course he says yes, so I count us off…three, two, one, and we dash down the aisle, past a couple of Latinas checking out shirts by an endcap. I’m cartoonishly pumping my arms, my son right beside me. Behind my mask, I grin as I hear him laugh. We’ve had so many of these kind of moments in our time together but I still haven’t forgotten that life could have taken a different turn at multiple junctures and these moments between us may have never happened. We’re almost there! I say, as we turn a corner.
Life is hard.
It’s only going to get worse.
I just want to give my son as much love and joy as possible with the time we have left.
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