The Purgatory of the Polycrisis
On LA, climate grief, fascism and building from ashes
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The embers of what feels “normal” burned out and went cold a long time ago, but like a frog already boiled and rotting in the pot, we seem to have lost the plot of the polycrisis we’re facing.
We are tired, so very tired, after years of “resisting,” surviving a pandemic that never really ended, surviving Fascism Round One, and now staring down the barrel of a second and possibly permanent round of MAGA while facing a potential new pandemic, the end of bodily autonomy, mass deportations and book burnings — our metaphors are as exhausted as our bodies.
Through it all, our climate anxiety thrummed under our skin like an insistent pulse, even if we weren’t fully conscious of it, but nothing stopped the billionaires from wrecking the planet for their pleasure, and here we are at the moment of too late. It has now fully transformed, at least for me, into wholesale climate grief. I have often written about my relationship with climate anxiety and grief, how it changed my life trajectory, and how it informs my work.
After LA, I am in a new stage of navigating this anxiety/grief continuum with so many others who’ve long been on a journey to mitigate it. Now we welcome millions of those who were not paying attention into tacit acceptance that it is indeed real, because who can look at the scorched earth of Southern California and continue to believe we’re not in dire straits? I know that right-wing lunatics are trying to blame DEI and some will believe them, but frankly, people that stupid do not count. I want to save the rest of us from them.
After 14 months of watching Gazans flee American-made bombs, using their hands to save loved ones from the rubble of collapsed buildings, seeing children with missing limbs living in tattered tents, starving, fleeing one “safe zone” only to encounter another bomb, left with nowhere to go, the echo of “nowhere is safe” rung out again and again. This is what ties Gaza to LA in my psyche. Cataclysms vastly different in scope and scale and privilege and cause, yet watching these crises unfold from afar, taking in the trauma of other humans in pain — I’ve often said in the last week, “This reminds me of Gaza.” Footage of Gaza evoked images of a flattened Hiroshima, and footage of LA since the wildfires looks like images of a flattened Gaza. Nothing is left in some parts of Altadena and the Palisades. Both, in their way, are manmade disasters that could have been avoided if people in power cared at all about the welfare of those without power.
As fires broke out from the Pacific Palisades to Altadena, from Malibu to the Hollywood Hills to Glendale to the Valley, I kept hearing stories about those who fled their burning homes to stay with friends or family in another part of town, only to be evacuated once again. “It feels like nowhere is safe” is something I heard more than one person say as I watched coverage and received texts from friends.
“Nowhere is safe” is, I’m afraid, something many more of us will whisper to each other in the coming months and years. Nowhere is safe, but we are made safer when we care for each other, and we must — because no one else will protect us but our communities.
I remember the first time I visited my parents in Long Beach after Superstorm Sandy ravaged New York and the metro area in November of 2012. Driving through the small city by the sea from west to east, the debris of home after home after home was piled on the sidewalk. Sofas, children’s toys, bedframes, rugs, TVs, desks. Entire lives drowned in five to ten feet of water where the ocean met the channel. The houses were still standing, but the devastation was staggering. Yet we had days of warning before the hurricane, unlike our brothers and sisters in LA this last week, who had to flee their homes in minutes.
I first heard the phrase “mutual aid” after Sandy, when Occupy Wall Street organizers called on New Yorkers to help those who’d been left in the dark in Far Rockway and other parts of NYC where those with the least privilege had been flooded out of their already neglected apartment buildings.
We have failed to stave off the climate emergency. I had so much hope after Sandy that we would do it, that we would fix this planet. There was Naomi Klein’s seminal book This Changes Everything, which I read on the subway on the way to the 2014 NYC climate march and the Flood Wall Street marches in the days after. We tried so hard. We didn’t give up. Now all we can do is mitigate, protect each other, and build resilience into our communities. This is how we survive the future that is now.
Here’s some of what I wrote about climate grief for this newsletter in August of 2023:
Forgive me if I think, talk, emote, and write about climate grief a bit more than you asked for, but boy oh boy is it coming up right now through the planets. If you missed my last post a few days ago, I went there about our untapped rage. And if you’ve been reading my work for a while you may know that I published a book about a decade ago that aimed to ward off our inevitable grief with a dive into ecosexuality, which is another way of being with the Earth in pleasure even as she is dying. I thought this work would stave off the quickening of the climate emergency, or even stop it, at once time. I was desperately naive. (The book was called Eco-Sex: Go Green Between the Sheets and Make Your Love Life Sustainable.)
It feels, right now, like my comrades in the ecosexuality movement are becoming death doulas of Gaia as she transmutes into a place that we no longer recognize. For me, as an astrologer, this always deeply resonated with Pluto’s journey through Capricorn, starting in 2008 and peaking with America’s Pluto Return building for a long while into a peak last year, and coming into its very last moments in the next few months, at least for another 250 or so years.
I led a panel of performance artists at Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephen’s amazing Ecosex Symposium earlier this summer. Early in the movement, ten years ago, it mostly felt fun and light, even though it always felt important. Now as we tend to these wounds, it’s harder to find the levity and joy, so I mostly remind people that finding pleasure in their body, and in their body’s connection to the Earth, is still possible - and it’s essential. We did find this during the weekend of the symposium —these fleeting reminders of joy in loving nature. I offer that to you now as we figure out what comes next, and as Pluto arches through these last few degrees before stationing direct in October.
In this last summer of Pluto in Capricorn, a summer of endless and yet sudden storms, days-long floods, flash floods, deadly wildfires, smoke blanketing half the country, relentless, dangerous, never-before-experienced heat, the hottest summer on record for the ENTIRE Earth since the beginning of time, we must find space to grieve even as we escape the next crisis. There was a line in the first few pages of that book that said something like, “If we don’t deal with this now, we’ll be too busy dodging hurricanes and wildfires to find time for fucking.” I hate that that time seems to have come.
As we wait for a hurricane to bear down on SOUTHERN MOTHERFUCKING CALIFORNIA, I need to address the apocalyptic elephant in the room. We need to deal with our many, many sources of grief and loss from the last few years or else we’ll be too paralyzed to do anything about any individual, unique problem. As we said in Occupy: all of our grievances are connected. And so it is for our grief.
Earlier this evening the Full Moon perfected in Cancer, the sign of home and family. Cancer is neediness and nurture. Cancer is feeding and being fed. Cancer is emotional overwhelm. Cancer is where the ocean meets the shore, constantly ebbing and flowing and as a cardinal water sign, always in motion. Cancer is the mother, the carer, the helper showing us how to mother, to care, to help. Cancer is emotional anguish and release, release, release. Let the pain of this past week, this past year, this past decade wash over and through you until you feel cleansed, baptized, renewed.
Allow yourself to be angry at the oil barons and the politicians who enabled these horrors. Only when your body is ready, when you are wrung out like that proverbial sponge, return to the work of caring in the way you do best. Rest when you need to, and know that someone will step in to carry you.