How to Live In a Catastrophe

In search of a way to think clearly about the planetary crisis.

- By Elizabeth Weil

Hello, excuse me, are you lost? Not in physical space or in your personal life-just kind of cosmically unmoored? It seems like we're in a catastrophe. I mean, obviously, we're in a catastrophe. Our clown-car democracy. Our warm embrace of surveillance capitalism. Dobbs. Just days ago, Elon Musk bought Twitter and the fascists openly rejoiced. Six months ago, a teenager killed 19 kids and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas, while hundreds of law-enforcement officers stood around. Plus the big granddaddy catastrophe of them all, the planetary crisis. The planetary crisis what a term. Your life is still stable enough that you're reading magazine articles. You've got that huge lucky fact going for you. But even so, how could a person possibly stay sane and oriented? How could a person think straight and well in a moment such as this?

You try. You really do. You're an A-minus person, maybe B-plus. You sweat out the record-high temperatures this summer in Shanghai or London or Anaheim or Salt Lake City or Sacramento.

You watch CNN correspondent Clarissa Ward reporting from the floods that cover one-third of Pakistan. There she is, in her pink tunic, blonde hair pulled back, getting bumped by oxen; interviewing dazed, desperate families streaming down the road to get to higher ground; visibly baffled by her own journalistic relationship to noninterference. And you see she's doing her best, too. Working with what she's got. "What is so pronounced here, John ... is you don't see any aid workers," she says to her anchor back in his air-conditioned tower in New York. "It's interesting when you talk to people. There's a lot of resentment, too ... And they're asking for repara s-money."