Denial sucks — A conversation with Margaret Klein Salamon
Welcome to the inaugural edition of What Do We Do Now That We’re Here. This is the first of a monthly Q&A series available to paid subscribers of this newsletter. But because it’s the first one, everyone is getting it for free. If you’re on the free list, the emails will revert back to the regular monthly editions after this. If you want more like this, please consider updating to a paid subscription here.
I first had this conversation with Dr. Margaret Klein Salamon about ten months ago, and I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Margaret is a “clinical psychologist turned climate warrior,” and the executive director of the Climate Emergency Fund.
Margaret’s book — which cleverly bills itself as a self help book for the climate emergency — was the first climate book I ever read that made sense to me. It made me realize I’d been looking at the issue all wrong. The reason it was so hard to get my head around it, to stay invested in it, to not look away at every opportunity, was because my entire life was set up for me to avoid it. As usual, the way to change my outer reality was to look inward.
Another thing Margaret’s work has done for me is shift my language: It’s not climate change or global warming or global heating. It’s a climate emergency. Something changes when you start using that in conversation and in writing. It becomes more real. I’ve noticed that people’s eyes flinch slightly when you drop it in conversation. Her Climate Emotions Conversations — guided online chats with strangers about your feelings around climate — are a really powerful way to start to allow that truth into your life.
Speaking to Margaret was an intense experience; she does not mince words. But I think there is something about this conversation that’s rather hopeful. Because the strange thing about entering “emergency mode,” as Margaret puts it, is that your daily life has the capacity to become better. Once you put this reality front and center in your life, the mechanisms that keep you burned out, addicted to work, obsessed with superficial markers of success and wealth etc., start to make very little sense to you. In my experience, you begin make different, better, and truer choices about how to live your life.
Obviously, not everyone is going to become a full-blown climate activist — however here is a helpful list of ideas to start small — but I do think we can all take steps to start adapting our lives away from what we know is a profoundly broken model. We can all reassess where we are putting our values, our time, our money, our energy, and see if it’s in line with this future reality, or not. We can start unraveling the internal mechanisms —shame, trauma, not feeling enough — that keep us addicted to habits and systems that are ruining the fucking planet. I’ve started doing this in my own life in the past year, and I have to tell you, it feels pretty damn good. Turns out, living in denial sucks.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. It’s been lightly edited for clarity and length.
R: I’m very interested in this idea that the problem with the climate emergency is not one of facts or science. It’s an emotional problem people can’t seem to take on. The pandemic made me realize that my obsession with my own personal success was the thing that was distracting me from what I know to be true: In my lifetime, life’s probably going to get worse, and we should start adapting to that now, rather than further enriching ourselves with prestige and plaudits.
M: It should redefine or have a huge impact on how everyone thinks about themselves, their future, the meaning of life. What this world is. And who we are. The system and all of us as individuals need to change a lot. It’s so much more than just, you know, ride a bike rather than drive. That’s really hard. And people don’t want to look at it, they don’t want to recognize it, and they don’t want to recognize the level of responsibility that is implied.
R: It’s like when you can see someone really needs to go to therapy, something is really standing in their way in life. And in order for them to get past it, they need to see it, to feel it, to face it. That is going to be hard, but once they get on the other side of that, their life will potentially be better.
M: Yeah, totally. I think another way of putting it is, how do we conceptualize ourselves? Where do we draw those boundaries? In the US — and a lot of other places — the mindset has become “it’s just me, my family” maybe my community or religion. What the climate emergency shows is that you and your family are not going to be able to make it [on your own]. We need to expand that net so far out if any of us are going to be safe.
R: It seems like grief plays a role here. I think we’ve seen this with Covid: Our culture does not have any kind of model for shared or public grief. Do you think there’s a process of grieving we have to go through before we can boldly reimagine our lives for this new context?
M: Yes. I do. Definitely on the individual level but I think also on the larger cultural and societal level.
R: What does that grief look like? On a personal and societal level?
M: People need to follow their feelings. Some people, for example, feel so connected to animals and have such deep grief at the animals that have already gone extinct. Other people, maybe they’re connected to people who have already died because of the climate emergency.
But what everyone needs to reckon with is that their life is not what they thought it was going to be. For me growing up in the 90s, I was told the future was bright. There was technological progress, social progress — I could be anyone I wanted to be! That’s what my mom and teachers told me.
It’s just not true. The future is not bright. The future is horrifying. And it’s falling apart. So what people need to grieve is the world they thought they were living in, the future they thought they had. It’s terrible, it’s such a horrible loss to realize that everything is falling apart and the things you wanted and thought you could have, you can't. So the process of grieving is very tied up in the process of reckoning.
R: Do you think, on the other side of that process, there’s something, not better — because that’s just this American impulse to be optimistic — but something truer? I wonder for people you’ve seen go through this, how has that worked? Once they’ve reckoned with that, what has been their life on the other side?
M: It’s different for everyone, but people make some big moves. [In doing this work, I see] all kinds of people say, “Oh I want to volunteer.” But I really I only get interested and think about somebody when they start to say things like “I’m reducing my hours at work so I can work on this more” or “I’m moving in with my parents.” [It takes] just looking at the basics of your life and how you’re spending your time, and readjusting.
What grief does — not just climate grief but any grief — it’s a process of adapting to a new reality. And a process of memorializing what has been lost. But it’s hard. Nobody wants to grieve. But it is actually a really healthy and critical emotional process.
R: I think it’s kind of clarifying too. You really put to bed the life you had, and made space for it, so you can start something new.
M: Living in dissonance — you know something is true but you’re blocking it out, or you can’t apply it to this major area of your life — takes a lot of energy. Every day, you are having to actively not look. And so after you actually reckon with and feel the feelings associated with that, one of which is grief, you get a more authentic, mission-oriented life.
I think there’s relief in dropping your defenses and attempts not to look at it. I think there’s tremendous value in having a mission in life.
R: Maybe that’s what separates this single-minded capitalist ambition and that more holistic, mission-driven life. It’s not that you’re not ambitious — you are, you want to make things to happen — but it’s not just on this linear trajectory that only services yourself and your family.
M: Yes. Personally speaking, I was so ambitious, especially about going to Harvard. Like, I was going to go to Harvard. And good for me, I did. But one thing about going to Harvard is that you see wow, this ambition is really bad for people. (Laughs.) Now, I feel so glad, so deeply relieved, to have a mission that I care about so much more than that.
I had my come to Jesus moment when my good friend said to me, “Don’t start a blog, discourse isn’t enough. What could you do to actually solve this problem?” That’s an insane idea, right? To actually solve the climate emergency. But I’m that ambitious, so it’s perfect! So it’s not like “Oh stop trying to succeed or work hard,” certainly not. Just orient those drives and all those talents and everything you learned in service of your career and ambition towards this struggle.
R: One of the things that came to me during Covid is I don’t have any practical skills. All I know how to do is be a journalist and a person on the internet, and it just feels so useless in this context. I agree we each need to think about what we can do to help solve the climate emergency, but do you think a good on-ramp to that is gaining a more diversified skillset, knowing your community more, knowing how to interact with your local environment and earth more? It’s hard for me to imagine a person quitting their corporate job to become a climate agitator if they don’t even know what foods are in season where they live. Perhaps building that kind of resilience is part of adapting to this new world?
M: Yes, I would add the idea of organizing for power into that. Those two things go together perfectly. I’m just a huge believer in social movements and their power to change everything, and so I just think that’s a really key piece of the puzzle. Once you realize what’s going on, you grieve, you have to make it part of the climate emergency movement. So absolutely working in your community, getting to know your neighbors, talking to them about reality. That’s what it is. It’s not some radical political agenda. It’s, “Hey, maybe we should look at what’s actually happening in the world, and what’s going to happen, and make decisions based on that.”
R: You said you don’t really take people seriously until they change their hours at work. Do you think work and personal ambition are a form of avoidance?
M: I wrote this paper in 2016 called “Leading the Public into Emergency Mode,” where I outlined two kinds of psychological functioning. You have normal mode, and you’ve got emergency mode. So if you know that there is a near-term threat to your life or your family’s life, and you just keep going about your life without changing anything, something is wrong, something is not getting through there.
How can you tell when someone is in emergency mode? It’s about how much you’re willing to put on the line, and for most people, what you have to offer is time and work. It’s not work exactly that’s the barrier, it’s normal life — of which work is a huge part. To me, weirdly, one of the key enemies of this fight is normal life. Because as long as people are acting normal, they are both clearly not getting it themselves, and they are also broadcasting the information to everyone else that things are normal. They are not.
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If after reading this, you feel discouraged, I encourage you to start small. Commit to reading one book. (Suggestions coming in next week’s tip for paid subscribers.) Have one honest, open-ended conversation about your climate fears with a friend. Plant some locally-appropriate flowers to attract pollinators—whatever. Just start. You can download a free chapter of Margaret’s book, Facing the Climate Emergency: How to Transform Yourself With Climate Truth, here. You can register for one of her (free, excellent) Climate Awakening conversations here.
Thank you for reading. And thank you, deeply, to all the readers who subscribed after my announcement last month. The response exceeded my expectations. As a result, I’m really excited about working on this project, which is something I haven’t felt in a while. So thanks.