Look to your neighbors
LAST SUMMER, Bill McKibben wrote about a question he often hears from people worried about climate change: where should I live? McKibben acknowledges the privilege that accompanies such a query—a great many people have no ability to choose where to live, and must face whatever the climate throws at them wherever they happen to be. But it’s also not an unreasonable thing to consider. For those of us with the means to move, there are good reasons to choose some places over others, to begin to accept that climate change is already asking us to cede some land to the sun and the sea.
And yet, he quickly quashes the notion that there’s anywhere we can go to just ride out what’s coming, to experience climate change only from a distance. “There is no safe place,” he says unequivocally. What matters isn’t so much where we end up but with whom. He continues:
We’ve come through 75 years where having neighbors was essentially optional: if you had a credit card, you could get everything you needed to survive dropped off at your front door. But the next 75 years aren’t going to be like that; we’re going to need to return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around you.
This has been on my mind as I talk to folks who are contemplating a change in their work, and wondering about a related question: where should I work? Most people can name a few places where they know enough about the ground conditions to dismiss it as a possibility—places that are too hot or too toxic or where the risk of floods and storms is far too high. But then I watch as they scan all the other locales and contemplate if any of them are safe, or see their face fall as they imagine how to evaluate the relative safety of one place over another.
We’ve all either lived long enough to experience more than one unsafe workplace, or else we’ve heard the stories from our elders. Even the seemingly healthy places aren’t immutable, aren’t immune to the rigors of capitalism and investor brain worms. You might find that the flexible, friendly atmosphere evaporates the moment the c-suite sees clouds in the market. You might show up one day to discover that your boss has been replaced by three interest rates in a trench coat mumbling about declining productivity. You might find that you are the boss reading from a script about severance while your soul scrambles to exit your body. (I know, because I’ve been there.) You might suddenly realize that the product you were eager to work on is actually doing more harm than good, or that the fundraisers are using your org to launder filthy reputations. You might despair when you realize that the path to changing things for the better is guarded by a coterie of demons cloaked as financial instruments.
I’m inclined to agree with McKibben: no place is safe.
And yet. We can return to the basic human experience of relying on the people around us. We can get to know our neighbors and colleagues and users; we can orient our work and our lives towards them and away from the inhuman and unliving systems that want us to behave like machines. We may not be able to stop a storm from coming, but we can get together to line up sandbags and buckets, to organize mutual aid, to create places for people to talk and share their needs, to laugh and cry and howl at each clap of thunder. We may not be able to stop a layoff or exorcise the CFO but we can sure as hell take care of each other.
This is where I’m wont to say you deserve a union, and that’s true. But even more than that, you deserve to be fully human, interdependent with the people around you and the more-than-human world. The greatest lie that capitalism ever told was that risk is a solitary affair. But we can never bear the risks of work (or climate change) on our own, because we have never actually been alone.
What I’ve learned, over and over in my own work and with the people I work with, is that the only thing that saves us from uncertain and capricious futures is each other. This is not to say that you shouldn’t contemplate where you want to work, any less than you should consider where you want to live. It is to say that with whom is the more important question. It is to say that asking how do you want to be? may be the trick that gets you past the demons at the head of the path. Those demons are expecting you to show up head bowed and alone, because alone they know how to deter you. But just watch what happens when you show up with a crowd.