Remembering to resist

We cannot be ecological without confronting loss

✒️ Today’s newsletter features an essay by a member of The Grove. The Grove is a small writing collective I created to work with Anya, Rishab and Jess, three extremely intelligent, thoughtful and learned people in their mid-twenties. These pieces are the result of our reading and writing together over four months.

I tell myself that I am in an urgent battle for a better future by working in the United States’ climate change policy world. In 2026, the objective is clear: defend environmental regulations and policies that improve public health and protect our future. Our battle is not waged on the ground–it is waged in courtrooms and legal briefs, in white papers debating the future social cost of carbon dioxide and quantifying the damages of temperature rise in decades to come. This is how policies change; this is how we scale impact. But it is also how we hide from the present loss.

As fractions of degrees tick upward, as species disappear from our lands and our seas, as the foundations for our survival grow dimmer and less certain and the punishment from Mother Earth more vindictive, I’m compelled to act through fear for the future. I shake with fear that no statistical model, however informed with data on our emissions and our rate of deforestation, can translate into the ungraspable loss we will face from mass extinction and an unlivable climate. The relief of defended regulations is outweighed by the continual stress that no victory will ever overcome the inevitable destruction of more intense hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires.

But to truly mourn the loss we experience every day as human and non-human lives are lost to pollution and destruction is too damaging, too paralyzing. Mourning what we’ve lost means sitting in the reality that we’ve already lost irreplaceable beings with stories never to be recovered, that the walls of our biosphere are already crumbling around us and destroying the foundation on which we’ve built our histories. If I mourn loss, I have to accept that I’ve lost control of what is happening and am powerless to change what has already happened. For that reason, I anxiously look to the future, separating myself from truly experiencing the present moment.

Much of this comes from the inherent privilege of my position, the fact that living in the capital of the richest nation in the history of mankind affords a separation from pain where physical confrontations with the violence of nature’s wrath are replaced by the politicking of policy planning in air conditioned suites. But I do not doubt that the fear motivating me, my anxiety for the future, and my aversion to feeling the present is an opioid to avoid facing the pain of my lack of control over the loss we have already incurred. I tell myself that the worst is yet to come, and for that reason I must act to change what I can still change.

May we reach for the dead to show us that we are alive?