Hypertext Magazine asked Grace Agnew, author of Sanctuary, “What is the point of writing about climate change when there is nothing one person can do to change the catastrophe we are hurtling toward?”

By Grace Agnew

When I realized the publication date for Sanctuary was looming, I set up an Instagram account and asked two friends who are accomplished writers to edit my first post.  They gave me excellent notes, but I was taken aback by the distaste they couldn’t hide. Both said they would buy the book to support me, but they didn’t plan to read it.

Why not?  Too depressing.  It’s too late.  Unless we take drastic measures, and we’re not going to, there is nothing to be done. There is no point in even thinking about it. One friend said, I feel like you’re going to tell me to recycle.

Of course, she already does recycle.  We all recycle.  We do what we can.  And the world just keeps sliding toward the hell mouth of a climate changed world.  The daily news is grim.  It appears that the Gulfstream, which regulates so much of our weather, may be permanently disrupted.   Might as well live for today, because tomorrow is going to be—well, you know.   What can one person do to face that down?

A lot.  The power of one should never be discounted.  Great movements start with one. Greta Thunberg a schoolgirl from Sweden, not a climatologist, refused be shamed into silence, but instead, by speaking up, shames others into action.  It starts with one, but the real progress happens when one joins with one who joins with one, until there is a crowd of us, not just clamoring for change but making change happen.

The old bumper sticker “think globally, act locally” makes me rueful when I see it, tattered, barely legible, usually on a car in the same condition. Whatever came of that?  Not much, it appears.  But if the message seems cloudy and trite, the principle behind it remains true. There is power in acting locally. My neighborhood has given over to growing your own vegetables.  This already has an impact on grocery shopping.  It will reduce the size and number of grocery stores and ultimately of local gas stations.  The ripple effect will move outward.  Not as powerful as the climate change effects from our consumption of fossil fuels, the factory farming of cattle and chickens, but a lasting counter measure that starts as a statement but becomes a way of life.  Turns out it is not that hard to grow your own vegetables, and they taste so much better.  When actions become lifestyles, society evolves.

The COVID lockdown decreased our carbon emissions but not to statistically meaningful levels. This is a disappointing outcome, but the lockdown demonstrated something important.  We could change our behaviors, eliminate one of the substantial personal contributors to climate change—the daily commute—and our lives could persist. Many COVID changes worked with our natural rhythms, a species partnering with our planet rather than being its conqueror and adversary. We will never fully return to our pre-pandemic ways.

When we had time to think about our lives, it turned out we wanted time with family and friends and a more relaxed and understated lifestyle, rather than empty achievements and stuff—boatloads and planeloads and carloads of stuff.  There have been permanent lifestyle disruptions from a year and a half of COVID that will be a powerful undercurrent that even a changed Gulfstream can’t entirely obliterate. The 2020 election in the United States was as much about COVID life lessons as it was about COVID death count.  Individual changes had a global impact. Sanctuary explores facing our fears about climate change and pushing through them—as ordinary people, not superheroes–because we are a species capable of thinking beyond our individual lives and our families. We are capable of the love that results in the sacrifices required for the survival of the generations that follow us.

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