An uncanny thread
Hello. Hi. So nice to see all of you. Wow.
As a lot of you know, I spend much of my time coming up with (or failing to come up with) new ways to tell stories about climate change and environmental degradation. Sometimes these stories are about grand, sweeping developments, like massive changes to the Indian monsoon that are already transforming the speed and ferocity of rainstorms that affect more than one billion people. Sometimes these stories are far smaller in scope, like the one I wrote about farmers in northern India who live in a self-perpetuating cycle of debt and groundwater depletion from which they cannot escape. No matter the scope, I try to write about people, is what I'm saying, but of course journalism works such that the people I write about are almost always in crisis, facing a near-future crisis, or doing something novel to get themselves the hell out of a crisis. These people obviously deserve any attention they get, but I don’t think these stories can capture the way many of us experience climate change and environmental degradation: as an odd, unsettling, annoying, sometimes dangerous thread that hums a bit too close to the foreground of our daily existence.
Sometimes the street between you and the little grocery store is under a foot of water, but still you must buy milk and bread, and probably you should get some toilet paper now in case the flooding gets any worse and tomorrow you're forced to swim before you can poop. Maybe you were going to do some gardening on what looked like a lovely Summer day but actually Jesus God it's hot out, and also all your plants seem to have suddenly smoldered into straw-colored husks. Or it could be that the air outside has overnight begun to look and smell like cigarette ash and now you're frantically googling air purifiers. Climate change is even fun every now and then, if you don’t allow yourself to really think about it. Every New Yorker reading this has vibrated with pleasure on those 80-degree October Saturdays, and in Bangalore, where I live, the ridiculously small amount of rain we had until late May meant that I almost forgot what it was like for that my morning basketball games to be canceled on account of a morning drizzle.
A few months ago I started...I guess you'd call it journaling about these daily interactions with our rapidly warping world. What I wrote about was often small and random, sometimes not, but either way it felt real and notable – not because it was newspaper-worthy, but because I think there is now an uncanny feeling traveling alongside us that we have little time to acknowledge. After a while I thought maybe other people have felt something similar, consciously or not, and that maybe by sending out my little lightly edited journals to the (incredibly small) masses, some of you might say, hey, yeah, me too, I remember feeling like that, or experiencing that, and it was weird. I think that acknowledgement has some value, because collective experience is only collective if we recognize it as such. There's a lot of strange going on, so I figured it could be good (certainly for me, maybe for you) to occasionally sit down and look at that strangeness for what it is.
Some of these posts will be put up in a purposeful chronological order, others will be one-offs from somewhere in the recent past. Some will be journalism-y, many will not be. No matter what they are, I hope they’re worth reading, even sharing.
Thank you for being here. I promise not to, uh, flood your inboxes.
<3
Colin