Last year, I gleefully attended my third Hollywood Climate Summit, an annual gathering of folks in entertainment, science, and nonprofits, wearing a new-to-me Guess jean jumpsuit and orthopedist-approved secondhand sneakers, the perfect ’fit for a climate writer who walks the talk. It marked the first year I’d be attending as a sustainability journalist rather than an actor-writer-producer talking about ways to transform The Biz from the inside.

On day one I met Jim Greenbaum, founder of a foundation that funds high-impact animal welfare work and producer of vegan documentaries. With our shared love for showtunes and animals, we hit it off. The next morning, when we met up, Jim asked why vegan didn’t appear in my bio on my website, and I fell silent.

I’m a lifelong vegetarian and have been fully vegan since 2016. But, as my sister used to lovingly tease me, “Every vegan dish is served with a side of smugness.” All jokes aside, the v-word feels heavy—like a door slamming shut instead of swinging wide to welcome others in.

Research backs this up: shame doesn’t convert. It repels. While guilt can encourage accountability, shame often leads to withdrawal, deflection, or backlash. The animal rights movement, by and large, still relies on the ol’ shame playbook (cue Sarah McLachlan and a sad puppy). While it feels righteous, that kind of marketing doesn’t produce the long-term actions vegans ultimately desire.

But I didn’t always consider how my word choice landed, despite wanting others to live more compassionately. In elementary school, when a new friend would sit beside me at mealtime, thinking I was both giving them a lesson and a gift, I would turn and inquire, “Do you know you’re eating death?”

Unsurprisingly, countless children picked up their food and relocated elsewhere. Yet preteen me genuinely didn’t understand why my opening argument alone didn’t convince them. Given what I’d learned about factory farming, zoonotic disease, and animal cognition, I felt I’d barely scratched the surface!

I desperately wanted people to connect their food with animals, but what I offered—and, more importantly, how I offered it—didn’t feel like education. It felt like admonishment.

Thankfully, my parents didn’t flinch when I refused to eat meat or wear leather, not as a passing fad but as a philosophical stance. Others, too, saw my passion for animals as a virtue. When I was five, I gave a presentation in the adult sanctuary of our nondenominational church about why we must protect beaver dams, complete with a beaver puppet show. People found my story charming and compelling, teaching me that when you disarm your audience by entertaining them, they’ll travel far with you.

Mostly, though, my animal advocacy upset adults. Extended family whispered that this little tyrant held her parents hostage, forcing them to cook separate meals.

“You eat rabbit food,” my grandfather scoffed.

“We don’t have horse teeth,” my aunt—a dental hygienist and now plant-based herself—once said while slicing into a steak.

When I was around 12, on tour with the Colorado Children’s Chorale, my friend Charity and I were the lone vegetarians. We banded together to ask for alternate protein long before dietary preferences had reached the cultural mainstream. The choir director, unamused, snapped, “You’ll eat what you’re served. I’m Catholic, and if I have to eat meat on Fridays during Lent, so be it.” Apparently, she was willing to bend her ethics…and ours right along with them.

That same year, I discovered the Buddhist precept of ahimsa, or nonviolence. Entire cultures had believed for millennia that killing animals was wrong. I wasn’t broken for how deeply I felt; the problem lay in Judeo-Christian and Humanist frameworks of human supremacy.

Like most young people with unmyelinated brains (read: not yet developed) and fervent moral convictions, I universalized this concept to its detriment. I wore a “Die Yuppie Scum” T-shirt that my mom made me change. I protested with PETA and other eco-warrior groups. Instead of trying to win hearts, I only wanted to prove I was right.

A few years later, the Chorale was invited to sing for the Dalai Lama when he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Colorado in Boulder. I watched in awe as the Tibetan-born head of the Buddhist religion, who has lived in exile since 1959, recounted a story: Although he’s vegetarian, when someone invites him into their home and serves meat, he eats it out of respect for the host who sacrificed so much for him.

“It’s compassion in action,” His Holiness told a jam-packed Mackey Auditorium.

Hearing this cracked my fixed-mindset brain wide open. If the Dalai Lama, who has lived through so much, could have flexibility in his practice without abandoning his values, surely I could grow, too. His speech taught me that conviction isn’t just about what you won’t do; it’s also about decentering the label over the mission.

So I stopped trying to “inform” others and instead simply lived my beliefs. Deeds over proselytization. Whenever I made substitutions while ordering, I’d say, “I’m going to be your problem child today,” owning that identity instead of running away from it. If someone offered me a meatless option, I thanked them warmly. I no longer made a fuss when the only thing I could get at a restaurant was a boring salad—I just ate before dinner.

My college boyfriend told me he was certain one day I’d leave acting and become an animal rights attorney. “Good goddess, no!” I replied. “As Shakespeare said, ‘Kill all the lawyers.’”

I had already begun building my performance career around my evolving worldview, one that now included climate. I’d written about the ethical implications of factory farming and advocated for alternative fuels, all while penning my honors thesis, a three-woman play called High-Heeled Shoes.

Sustainability may not have been my chosen vocation, but it was my way of life.

By 2008, when my sister and I challenged each other to a year of buying nothing new, I began to see just how deeply interconnected animal welfare, consumption, and climate were. But as an actor working in musical theatre with no interest in alienating my peers or sucking up to moralistic adults, my life remained a quiet practice in harm reduction.

Fast forward to the pandemic.

Everything I’d been reading about and acting on for 20 years—public health, environmental collapse, and its connection to animal agriculture—was all over social media. The brokenness of our food systems was no longer a fringe topic. I didn’t have to convince people to join the conversation because people were turning to me for advice.

Amid this cultural shift, I shot what turned out to be my final full-time acting role. At the same time, a friend forwarded me a call for a freelance journalist position at Treehugger, the world’s largest sustainability website. I pitched myself as the underdog: a science communicator with a background in musical comedy—a callback to that puppet show on the pulpit.

I got the job. I spent a year there covering ecology, low-impact living, and, yes, plant-based food, making my old boyfriend’s prediction come true, at least in part: I left entertainment to pursue climate writing and to focus on my health.

If ever there were a time to proclaim my place in the vegan movement, it would be now. Yet here I was in a fabulous swapped and thrifted outfit at the Summit, assignment in hand, with no good answer for Jim.

Vegan went back into my bio.

Then I took it out again.

Instead, I replaced it with language that better reflects the ways I’m working toward a cruelty-free future. A world where animals aren’t treated as commodities or test subjects. Where the planet isn’t stripped for minerals. Where farm and factory workers are paid well and treated with dignity. Where everyone has access to healthcare.

Because anything hinting at moral purity or a politics of exclusion isn’t my objective; encouraging others to compassionately participate in an imperfect world is.

That’s why I start by acknowledging we live under systems we didn’t design and which force us to compromise. For example, I feed my cats sustainably sourced fish because the only insect-based food that meets their obligatory carnivorous needs isn’t available in the U.S. My conscious closet likewise includes secondhand wool and leather instead of non-animal (i.e., plastic) alternatives that will live for centuries in landfills. These choices don’t make me a hypocrite. They make me human.

I also love talking about how we belong to the vast, dazzling kingdom of Animalia and to the even bigger Gaia Hypothesis. Rooted in Earth science and biology, this idea proposes that our planet operates as a single, self-regulating system, collapsing any false divide between “us” and “them.” The more we embrace our place in the living biome, the more we’ll protect our fellow beings—not out of pity, but out of self-recognition and self-preservation.

My hope is that the words I use appeal to humanity’s pride in our big, mammalian brains—brains that evolved to care. Once we apply that emotional intelligence to understanding human oppression over animals, we can map that same injustice onto other structures like patriarchy, racism, and environmental destruction. Soon, those myths, too, begin to crumble like a poorly made vegan handbag.

What matters more to me than any single word is living in alignment with the ancient mantra that all beings everywhere deserve to be happy and free. The same research that shows how shame shuts people down also acknowledges that empathy opens them up. So if the plate in front of me looks different than yours, don’t read that as a judgment. It’s just one small way I honor the wild, wondrous world to which we all belong, no label needed.

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Gia Mora is a multidisciplinary creative who translates science into stories that spark joy, empathy, and climate action. Her bylines have appeared in Treehugger, Modern Farmer, Business Insider, Los Angeles Times, and more. She’s a Climatebase and Step Zero fellow, a decarbonization ambassador with Generation180 and The Switch is On, and a public health ambassador for the City of Los Angeles. Subscribe to her Substack, Animal Matters, for research-based guides to joyful living on a warming planet. Gia can help you make everyday choices that build a more compassionate, equitable, and sustainable world for all life on Earth.

As I drive around town, I keep noticing the signs: K20#MS. Oh, right, I think to myself. It’s been 20 years.

20 years since I cried, incredulous, into the phone, “You still haven’t left yet?”

“I’m waiting for the last load of laundry to dry,” my mom replied. “I promise, we’re leaving within the hour.”

20 years since the bizarre sleepover nobody wanted—eight adults, two kids, a dog and three cats crammed into my tiny two-bedroom Oxford apartment. My roommate and I did the best we could to keep our families sane. We ate Kentucky Fried Chicken and tried not to panic while Jim Cantore described the wind and the storm surge and the flooding on TV.

Twenty years since I waited days for news of my dad, who had refused to leave.

Has it really been that long since we crowded around my desktop monitor, scouring the internet for the first aerial photos of home?

Long Beach. Can you tell what neighborhood that is? That looks like the steps of the library. Is the church still there?

Gulfport. There’s the Grand Casino, pushed clear across Highway 90. Can you see Nannie Margaret’s house?

Biloxi. The hospital looks demolished. Oh god, where’s the bridge?

Bay St. Louis. They’re saying a 26-foot storm surge. There’s barely anything left. Have you heard from your dad yet?

It’s been 20 years since August 29, 2005, when Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the border of Mississippi and Louisiana—sowing chaos, demolishing everything in its path, and causing significant loss of life, property, and livelihood.

Twenty years since Hurricane Katrina claimed the title of “The Storm,” unseating 1969’s Hurricane Camille. During my childhood on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in the 1980s, Camille was The Storm spoken of, almost reverently, by the adults around me.

Be careful with that frame; it’s the only baby picture we have of him. The rest were all lost in Camille.

See that souvenir shop shaped like a boat? It is a boat. Camille pushed it up on shore, and they decided to leave it there as a reminder.

We never got to open our wedding gifts. We had to cancel our reception for Camille. We put all the gifts in the attic for safekeeping, thinking we’d open them when we got back, but The Storm took the whole house.

My cousins and I listened with respect and awe.

Today, my 7-year-old son asks for our stories of Katrina, and we are the adults speaking in hushed, serious tones. I tell him about how I was in college up north, about how Hunny and Papa and Uncle TJ evacuated and came to me. How they decided not to go home right away when they heard there was no town, no electricity, no roads, no jobs to go home to. How they went to West Virginia to stay with Papa’s family for a few weeks before deciding what to do next. How Paw Paw Tim watched the water come all the way to his doorstep, but no further. How lucky.

My husband tells him about the house he grew up in, before The Storm. How it sprawled as they added on rooms themselves. How they could walk to the beach whenever they wanted. How there was nothing left after Katrina but the concrete foundation. How they found their sailboat months later in a tree, two miles away from where it had been anchored. How glad they are that Mimi grabbed the baby pictures off the wall before they left.

I don’t tell him about the heartbreak, or the grief. The horror and sorrow of watching catastrophe unfold for our neighbors in New Orleans. The fearful unease as the National Guard rolled out razor wire, sectioning off the unsafe half of town. The frustration of fighting with insurance companies to make good on their promises. The exhausted disillusionment as the nation’s gaze turned toward the next spectacle, the next disaster.

The achingly slow progress. The donations, once pouring in, that slowed to a trickle. The friends who lost everything and never came back. The rock that now lives in my stomach for five months every year.

How could he possibly understand the guilt I felt for not just surviving, but thriving, at college upstate while my family dealt with the wreckage of home? How do I explain that shameful tension of wishing I could be in the mess with them, while secretly feeling relieved not to be? I finished my senior year, blessedly removed from the chaos back home. Meanwhile time all but stopped for my family. There was so much work, so much unknown, and so much waiting. We waited weeks for news of the hospital where my mother worked, for power to be restored to my grandparents’ neighborhood, for evacuees to return. Months for the high school to reopen, for the roads to be cleared, for the repairs to our childhood home so we could finally move back in. Years to feel normal again.

I don’t tell him these things. Not yet.

Instead, we focus on the good, the gratitude. The volunteers who came, year after year for a decade or more, to help us repair and rebuild. The ones who fell in love with our coast, chose to stay, and became our dear friends. The beach cottage we live in now, which we’d never have been able to buy before The Storm.

We remind him there’s always an after.

Mimi and Poppy bought the 3rd Street house, where you have sleepovers now, after Katrina.

You know your favorite restaurant, the one where Daddy and I had our first date? It was built after Katrina.

It’s really something to see how people come together after a storm—sharing gas and water, helping clear debris, cooking meals together. You’ll see one day.

Every June I read the annual Biloxi Hurricane Preparedness Guide that comes in the mail, as if there might be some new breakthrough about keeping your trees trimmed and stocking up on gasoline and batteries. I keep a mental list of the irreplaceable things I would grab if we had to evacuate: the hard drive with wedding and baby pictures, my great-grandmother’s engagement ring, my grandmother’s cast iron skillet. That’s it. That’s as far as I’ve got.

Maybe I should be better prepared. As if there’s truly any way to prepare. If Katrina taught us anything, it’s that control is a fantasy. In reality, we do our best to face what comes and find a way to live in the after.

I wonder, are we crazy for living here? For rebuilding our towns, our homes, our lives this close to the water? Sometimes I think so. But other times I drink in the delicious pinks and purples of a winter sunset over the sound, or watch my son triumphantly reel in a 24-inch red drum on a Sunday morning, and I think, I couldn’t live anywhere else.

Every June my son asks me, “What will we do if a storm comes?”

“If it’s small, we will ride it out together, like we did for Hurricane Zeta,” I say. “If it’s a big storm, we’ll leave. Either way, we will have each other. And we’ll be okay, no matter what happens to our home.”

It’s not entirely true. But after 20 years, it’s the only thing I know to say.

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Ashley Peterson is a freelance copywriter and project coordinator for nonprofit organizations working in the reproductive rights space. Based in Biloxi, Mississippi, Ashley writes for fun (and healing) about what it’s like to be a progressive white lady from the Southern U.S.

I wake with a jolt, eye mask still in place. As consciousness returns, I realize that my body is soaking wet, my cotton t-shirt sticking to my stomach at awkward angles. I remove the satin mask and breathe in through my nose. The cool air against my damp skin rouses me and I tap my phone to see the time. Two-thirty in the morning.

I haven’t slept through the night since having kids a decade ago. My body became programmed irreversibly to middle-of-the-night feedings, then their soft voices whispering Mommy as they peered over me in bed, needing me to soothe them after a bad dream or achy knee. But this is different. The alarm is coming from the inside. It’s like the heat is waking, not me. Sometimes it wakes in broad daylight and I’m overcome by the need to strip and stand under a hose. Instead, I stick my face in the freezer or roll ice cubes against my neck, water cutting rivulets down my sticky back.

It’s July in northern Indiana. The sweet-smelling viburnum and lilac blooms have given way to the hydrangeas—summer show-offs with their bushy bouquets of white. The air no longer light and sweet but hot and heavy, like it’s been trapped in a glass jar and held under a heat lamp. I take the dog out and am greeted by a blast of thick air, forcing me to suck in a short breath. I mentally prepare for the stamina needed to endure our walk.

This can’t be the summer from my youth. The one that meant long days outside and nights without end. Suntanning on a blanket on the lawn. Cut-off jean shorts and thin-strapped tank tops. Hot meant taking a dip in the pool to cool off then letting the sun dry my skin while flipping through the pages of Seventeen magazine. Now, the only way to keep from sweat pouring off my body, soaking the pages of anything I’m attempting to read, is to submerge myself in a tub of ice water.

As the dog sniffs every last bush and plant and piece of trash on the ground, I seek out patches of shade to duck under. The tree limb, the signpost, the stranger’s shadow. The season I most look forward to—the one I meditate on during the long, cold months of winter, when everything turns brown and bare, the ground hard and ice-cracked—has turned into an oppressive tyrant. Is it really getting hotter, or am I? Am I an ant under a threatening microscope of climate change or just an ant with shifting hormone levels?

Scanning the weather news, I read words like extreme, intense, and scorching. Already, California, Nevada, and Connecticut have set all-time record highs for their heat waves. On July 7, 2024, Las Vegas hit its hottest temperature ever recorded: 120 degrees. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicts above-normal temperatures for most of the United States this summer. Based on trends tracked by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the United States has gone from experiencing two heat waves per season in the 1960s to more than six in the 2020s, with their duration extending from three to four days. It’s not just me; the earth is getting hotter, too.

During a hot flash, a woman’s body temperature goes up by one to three degrees. Your chest, neck, and face become flushed, your skin blotchy and red. Your heart rate increases. You tug at the neck of your shirt, desperate to circulate the air trapped inside. You wave your hand in front of your face, feeling no relief but continuing despite the futility. You wonder about carrying one of those spray bottle fans in your purse. You hope to god you remembered deodorant.

As my temperatures rise, I know I’m reaching the end of my child-bearing years. My hormones shifting and depleting, no longer needed to sustain fertility. Menopause has long been framed as the end of womanhood. Dried up and infertile, crazed and irrational. The picture of a hunched-over hag, grey hair undyed and untamed, eyes wild and bulging. The aging woman now useless to a society dependent on her to sustain the species.

We call our planet Mother Earth, the Great Mother, Pachamama. While it’s true that the earth nourishes us like a mother, it’s also true that our patriarchal society has feminized her in order to make her subservient to their demands. She is the feminine, meant to be conquered and colonized. Exploited and expended. We dredge her oceans and rake her soil, siphon oil and water and minerals from her core. As her temperatures rise, we face hotter summers, rising sea levels, more destructive and frequent storms. What good is she if she doesn’t give us more and more and more? What good am I?

The dog and I reach the banks of the St. Joseph River. I look north across the water and notice how the maples, oaks, and sycamores create a wall of green. Their foliage arms wrap around me, tuck me in. Beneath my feet, the fleabane decorates the ground in perfect symmetry: white, yellow, white, yellow. The ironweed pricks the sky with purple. The pink-skirted coneflower and sunshine-bursting goldenrod join the summer palette. Their beauty, also medicine.

I look down at my legs, skin-stretched to reveal the veins underneath. My stomach, softer than it used to be. My hairline is damp with sweat and I wipe it with the back of my increasingly crepey hand. I move closer to the old oak towering above me, the top of which I have to crane my neck to see. Her arms are full of green veiny leaves burnt orange on the edges, her brown and purple skin is peeled back in long, jagged strips. I imagine she’s somewhere between fifty to seventy years old. I place my hands on her weathered body, lean mine against it. The dog lays on the grass kept cool by her shade. I notice how the muscles in my legs grow taut, how they contract to hold me upright. How my stomach keeps me steady. Our bodies still full of use, full of life.

A breeze lifts off the water and blows the hair away from my face. I inhale the sweet, loamy air. Thank you, Mother, I whisper to us both.

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Kristine Galli is a licensed therapist, writer, and mom. Born and raised in the Bay Area of California, she has been in the Midwest for almost two decades. She earned her Master’s degree at Northwestern University and has been published in Thrive Global, Wellness, and Family Education. She is currently working on her first novel.

“We can’t buy a Tesla. Only douchebags drive Teslas.” This had been my immediate response when it came time for my husband and I to buy a new car in 2020.

Long ago given the moniker “Captain Planet,” my husband is part owner of a renewable energy company, whose environmental activism is etched into his ancestral ethos. At the same time, the Tesla image went against his Chaco-wearing, composting, secondhand sensibilities. “Not flashy” doesn’t quite begin to cover Henry, who calls his personal style “normcore.” He would be thrilled if your party invitation included your living room’s paint color, so he could blend right into it. Though I’m far more keen to stand out in a crowd, his neutral fashion sensibilities strengthen his appeal, as a white cis man who understands he already takes up his share of space.

The only two Tesla owners I knew so far were the opposite: a superficial and pompous distant relative and some guy who cheated on my friend and verbally abused her.

Henry laughed at my douchebag argument. “Then we’ll be the first Tesla owners that aren’t douchebags,” he countered. He’d done his research. At that time Tesla was the only affordable choice with a decent mileage range and a large charging network. While Henry too was wary of the Tesla fanatics who we would later meet at charging stations around the country, taping Tesla vlogs for unidentifiable audiences and buffing their paint jobs with Tesla-emblemed microfiber cloths, nothing could stop him from the allure of never pumping gas again.

In 2020 there were only a few electric vehicles (Evs) on the market, and Tesla’s supercharger network had exploded, expanding rapidly across the country. As New Yorkers with family in Colorado, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Vermont during a pandemic era where gas stations and airports were hotspots for illness, Tesla was an amazing option for travel, and our best choice, ensuring we could charge no matter where we were in the country.

We weighed the two guilt trips against each other: the elitist optics of having a Tesla or having the privilege to be able to afford one while still burning fossil fuels. The Earth won out.

When we picked up the car—a grey model Y—its large interior screen first prompted us to name it. We chose “Ricki,” the first thing that came to me after discussing Ricki Lake with my sister the night before (where was she these days?).

I was emotional driving Ricki from the dealer. I was so proud that mere energy from the sun could now power my vehicle, and for the first time I wasn’t actively polluting the air as I drove. Maybe my future children would never even know how to pump gas, I thought. We were driving off into a greener future free of tailpipe emissions.

In 2021, I was still happy to have Ricki, when I drove to the Shenandoah Valley with my dog for a writing retreat. At the time I worried my Tesla with New York plates would make me enemies as I drove deeper into the conservative south. Now, in 2025, I worry my car will be vandalized in Brooklyn, where most of my neighbors share my same political convictions.

Having only made his allegiances clear in May of 2022, when we bought the car it was still a toss-up as to which side of the aisle Tesla owner Elon Musk would ultimately land. His abject evilness feels inevitable now, but when he was donating to organizations backed by both parties, I imagined he’d go down in history like Nikolai Tesla himself, an eccentric character who moved us forward despite his mental illness and aimed to make electricity a resource for people of all socioeconomic standings. Typing this, I realize that’s what Musk wanted me to think by naming his company Tesla. But where Nikolai was focused on bringing power to all people, Musk seems fueled by greed, ego, and fear of those he can’t understand.

Whether or not he was once in it for the environment, I of course now feel guilty for contributing to the unconscionable wealth that led to Musk’s moral undoing. In fact, when driving my Tesla now, I feel like the very douche I hoped to avoid becoming.

Whether facetious or not, the most overwhelming suggestion from strangers and acquaintances, including some of my own family members, has been to burn my car. “Are you going to set your car on fire?” has been hurled at me over the phone, in a group email, and on the street.

My car has become a symbol of hate because of the man connected to it, but it’s also my family’s only vehicle. While it’s true that I no longer want to drive it around because of the person it represents, it still evokes other memories, like the way it felt to zip past gas stations on a road trip for the first time, that feeling of doing something big to lessen my carbon footprint.

Coming into our lives during the first pandemic summer leading into our first years as parents, the car is inevitably imbued with a feeling of safety, too. Ricki kept me warm when I had to take my husband to the ER for a bee sting on a cold night and wasn’t allowed in due to COVID precautions. Ricki got my isolated best friend out of the house and took us to a drive-in theater during the reign of the Delta variant, keeping our aerosols to ourselves and our butts warmed during the whole movie. We drove my newborn daughter home from the hospital in Ricki, glad for all the safety cameras, which Henry monitored meticulously from the Upper West Side home to Brooklyn.

That’s all to say, it’s been a good car. To light it on fire might fulfill the same kind of moral duty putting down a dog who was aggressive might, but it would be a wildly and ironically environmentally unfriendly act to end this chapter of our lives that started for the opposite reasons. Since the beginning, many non-douchebags have come to own their own Teslas, and now, if not lighting them on fire, they’re scrambling to sell for half what they bought them for or are paying to break their leases.

In the grand scheme of groups who Musk has scorned in recent years, those of us who drive the cars he manufactured are certainly the lowest on the totem pole to feel sorry for, but still we represent yet another group of people ostracized and bullied because of him.

Recently, while he charged his Tesla at a mall charging point, a Black friend of mine was called both a Nazi and then the n-word by the same angry passerby, whose bigotry evidently made him both cruel and stupid. Last week I walked past a Tesla parked near Washington Square Park with a swastika scratched into its nose with a key.

Some of my friends who attended this year’s AWP writing conference bragged about cancelling their Uber rides from drivers who were coming to pick them up in a Tesla. I understand that we hope protest might bring us peace, help us avoid that feeling that I tried to avoid years ago when I picked out my Model Y online, the feeling of being a douchebag on the wrong side of history. But I couldn’t help but feel sorry for those drivers who thought they were making an investment in their business and our planet when they bought their cars in the first place. I couldn’t help but think of LA’s smog-choked air, and the bit of relief a few years of Tesla’s popularity allowed it.

The fact is I wouldn’t buy a Tesla now, but should that mean my environmentally conscious choice should have such demoralizing consequences?

I couldn’t have known it when I first drove through Brooklyn behind Ricki’s wheel, but in the end my biggest Tesla disappointments are so much deeper than being a douchebag. They are in realizing that recently, even my political peers seem to be choosing destruction over progress. We’re so fueled by anger at each other—and I’m well aware there’s a lot to be angry about. Believe me, I love that Tesla is now tanking as other electric vehicles and charging networks catch up to them. I’m relieved that we will soon need a second car, and I have more options to choose from than I did back in 2020. But to add to the din of hate speech seems to only give strength to the anger meant to polarize us.

Doesn’t waiting for a different Uber car only take money from that driver’s hand? Aren’t we only doubling our carbon impact? If anything, in this situation, Musk wins again, disenfranchising us from our core beliefs, having us turn away from the people and planet we would ordinarily be moved to protect.

Recently I pulled up to a meeting in Westchester alongside a new acquaintance’s own Model Y, hers black. We were quiet for a moment waiting for others to join us. “Nice car,” I quipped with a sympathetic smile.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” she conceded. “Didn’t it?”

Yes, the string quartet at this pity party should be a very small one, but the next time you see a Tesla with an “I bought this before he went crazy” sticker on it, remember that many Tesla owners are experiencing buyer’s remorse like we’ve never felt before. Thank you for your understanding as we replace our cars safely and ethically. Not so long ago it wasn’t about right or left, good or bad, it was just about team Earth. Musk called Democrats “the party of division and hate.” Let’s not let a car distract us as we prove him wrong.

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A Brooklyn-based writer and educator, Sammi LaBue is the author of the creative writer’s guided journal, Words in Progress (DK 2020), and the founder of Fledgling Writing Workshops, a generative writing community named one of the best writing classes in NYC by Time Out New York. Some of her other writing has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Sun, HuffPost Personal, Buzzfeed, Slate, Literary Hub, and many gracious others. Her current project is a dual memoir written in collaboration with her mother called Bad Apples.

The first week of summer I threw my three kids in the car and drove to Charlotte-Mecklenburg County’s Land Use and Environmental Services Agency. As we pulled into the parking lot adjacent to a nondescript government building, they finally piped up: “What are we doing here?” I suppose they were expecting a pool or an airconditioned trampoline park on that hot June day. “I’m picking up my chemical kit,” I told them.

I’d recently volunteered to monitor water with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Storm Water Services, a joint municipal/county utility which operated out of this particular building. As part of the gig, I committed to testing the same section of Little Sugar Creek, one of the area’s largest creeks, and sharing the results with Storm Water Services. No, I don’t have a science background, and yes, historically I’m a person who’s talked more about saving the environment than actually trying to do something about it.

My family and I moved to Charlotte five years ago. With mountains hours to the west, beachfront hours to the east, and no major body of water to anchor its skyline, the city has been described as lacking defining geographical features. Some have even gone so far as to wonder why Charlotte? Why did it spring up where it did? But others have argued that the city’s extensive creek system—approximately three thousand miles—defines Charlotte both in terms of neighborhood planning and the bucolic greenways that bring citizens out to jog and bike next to the babbling water. I tend to agree with the latter characterization.

We’ve spent a lot of time on the greenway trails—winding our way to playgrounds, walking the dog, and watching for the heron that sometimes shows up. But in a complete deviation from my own childhood experience, we don’t go into the water. Actually, I did let my kids wade in a few times, but that stopped when I was met with looks of such concern. “That water is filthy,” everyone seemed to say.

When my eldest entered third grade, she joined her school’s environmental club, The Green Team. That winter she came home with a flyer for a poster contest run by the North Carolina Association of Soil and Water Conservation Districts. The theme was “Soil and Water . . . Yours For Life,” and from the package’s educational material I first learned about stormwater runoff and the risks development poses to the health and safety of surface water. The issue is particularly troublesome in Charlotte, which is one of the country’s fastest growing metro areas.

To put it simply, the more we develop land with things like driveways and hardscape backyards, the less soil and vegetation we have to soak up and filter the rainwater. And at least in Charlotte, the water runs over many things—fertilized lawns, pet waste, and driveways with oil drippings—on its way out into the street and down the storm drains. The water then ultimately runs into the creeks. Not only does the stormwater bring more pollutants, it also flows in higher amounts and faster velocities, which fills creeks with sediment and mud. Between the pollutants and the sediment, aquatic life fails to thrive as it should.

Over the years my children participated in this poster contest, I learned about methods to soak up and filter stormwater, like permeable pavers and rain gardens, and I dutifully oohed and aahed at the resulting posters. Somewhere along the way, my casual interest in surface water health bloomed into a concern that my kids were missing out on an experience I loved when I was their age: playing in the local creeks. Growing up in Orchard Park, New York, my friends and I would run through neighbors’ backyards until we reached the water where we’d skip stones, jump from rock to rock, and find tadpoles and crayfish. Creeks were where kids played and explored their environment and one of a few places they ran into other kids out from under the watchful eye of adults. It felt like a distinct world, something separate from school, home, and the bustling human life beyond the tree line.

My kids’ childhoods differ from my own in more than just this one sense, and that’s not a problem. We live in a different area; their family is larger; they have iPads and better fashion sense. But something about the connection to nature is evergreen, and despite the pull of technology and urbanization, I don’t think we evolve beyond our need for it. In 2005, author and co-founder of the Children & Nature Network Richard Louv introduced the phrase “nature-deficit disorder” to describe what we lose by increasing the distance between ourselves and nature. Among other benefits, studies have shown exposure to nature positively influences children’s mental health.

Cleaning up public waterways for recreation is becoming a greater priority. From Paris to Baltimore, governments are investing in restoring and monitoring water quality so citizens can enjoy these communal spaces. We should include creek systems in this effort, because of their prevalence and ease of access for children. By exploring creeks, children can foster a sense of independence, work on balance and problem solving, and observe life cycles of animals like frogs, fish, and birds.

Now that we are more aware of things like water quality, I dance around this issue of balancing my kids' safety and healthy interaction with their environment. Sometimes it feels like I’m building a wall around them with just a few controlled and sterilized experiences allowed. The thing is, I’m confident there was pollution thirty years ago, too. Did it harm me? I sure hope not. With a bit of education on water quality sign—smell, discoloration, recent rainfall, etc.—I might encourage my kids to get into the creeks anyway.

I was nervous the first day I scrambled down the bank. For as much time as I’d spent walking next to Little Sugar Creek, I’d never stepped into the water. I left the kids at home in case the creek was full of copperheads as my Nextdoor app would lead one to believe. Or maybe I’d inadvertently lead them into a pool of acid rain and never live down the guilt. After setting my supplies on a large rock midway across the water, I filled my sample cup to measure the temperature. Next I tested for turbidity—basically water clarity—and then I submerged a small vial, added two tablets and shook until they disappeared. The resulting color provided a rough estimate of the parts per million of dissolved oxygen, the level of oxygen gas in the water. I finished up by measuring the pH, which thankfully clocked in at a nice and neutral seven.

Once I finished, I looked upstream, savoring the submersion in otherworldliness. Two weeks later I brought my family back with me, and I tried to restrain the concern in my voice as my girls stepped around stones, slipping in their rainboots and bracing themselves with their hands in the water. Ahead of us a duck plunged its head over and over. A woman rested creekside a few yards beyond. The daughter of a family far less bothered by the faint sulfurous smell walked all the way across the creek bed. This wasn’t the exact childhood I remembered—one of spotting tadpoles and splashing friends—nor did it need to be. We were all in the water, though, and that felt like a step in the right direction.

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Cate Stern is a recovering lawyer and writer living in Charlotte, North Carolina. She writes on Substack and her work has been published with The New Times’ Tiny Love Stories, Motherly, HuffPost, and more. She is currently working on a novel about a family that moves south for restoration—of a house, their marriage, and a local waterway—but finds themselves at the center of controversy in their new town.

I want to stop humankind from asphyxiating ourselves with fossil fuel exhaust, and I want to keep my beloved Minnesota winters cold, so I fill out a “Get Involved” web form on a climate justice organization website. I have a tiny amount of spare time that I can dedicate to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide. Exactly how I’ll mitigate carbon pollution? I’m not sure, and the climate justice organization’s volunteer coordinator isn’t sure, either.

On a follow-up phone call, she asks me about my particular skill set, strengths, and interests. I tell her that my interests include skimming news articles about record high arctic temperatures. I’m skilled at worrying about street gutter fish in Miami, desert creep in Central America, and wildfire rampages in Canada. My strengths include feeling guilty for eating meat, driving a car, and living in a home heated by natural gas. The volunteer coordinator takes my well-stocked climate change worrywart toolbox into consideration and invites me to observe a Policy Action Team meeting.

I’m in. Policy Action sounds virtuous and Hollywood-y, with the promise of forward momentum right in its name. Observe, though? Why just observe, I wonder? The volunteer coordinator says she wants to make sure the team and I are a good fit, which seems like an unfairly tentative commitment on her part. What won’t fit? They’re fixing climate change. And I’m like a polar bear on the last lonely iceberg, desperate to connect with other folks who are using their strengths and interests to wrestle man-made surface temperatures from creeping more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures. Of course I’ll be a good fit. They’ll love me and I’ll love them, and we’ll meet together on the second and fourth Wednesdays of every month in perpetuity, or at least until our efforts nominally cool down the planet like a box fan placed strategically behind a platter of ice cubes.

On the night of the observational tryout, I arrive at the climate justice headquarters. It’s just what a great fit looks like: a shabby old mansion that sits on a block north of Washburn Fair Oaks Park, two blocks from the Minneapolis Institute of Art. It’s part of a cluster of repurposed relics from the gilded age, enormous houses that have been converted to offices, retrofitted with particle board furniture, gunmetal gray filing cabinets, office chairs, and tables with faux wood surfaces and tacky soft edges, their hardwood floors covered in petrochemical synthetic wall-to-wall. I love antique properties and I can feel myself melding with the architecture like I’m the last interlocking piece in the Policy Action Team’s jigsaw puzzle.

As I walk down a hallway, hand-carved molding on the walls and low-pile carpet under my feet, I feel as thrilled as a starving polar bear floating toward a vulnerable seal family. This is where the world gets saved! And I’m going to help! Well, observe. Which is obviously just a formality. Of course I’ll fit right in with the Policy Action Team. I can hardly wait to discuss with them the Special Report on Global Warming published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is my favorite thing to read when I’m in a climate anxiety spiral. They’ll be so happy to hear my great ideas for regulating carbon emissions by banning cruise ships and plastic bottles, instituting a 150% tax on gasoline, and making a nationwide mandate for Meatless Mondays.

My new climate activist compatriots are a hodgepodge of well-meaning white people that includes the organization’s Executive Director, a woman whose prettiness is enhanced by her ornate, dangly earrings; the volunteer secretary, an older woman with unkempt salt-and-pepper hair; the organization’s entry-level employee, who keeps taking breaks to step outside and smoke cigarettes; an older male volunteer who has formed his entire personality around biking enthusiasm; and a younger male volunteer who sits at the head of the table and talks too much. I like everyone except for the younger male volunteer. He’s an amalgamation of every male co-worker I’ve ever had who talks over other people, full of entitlement and confidence. Not ideal, I think, but there’s always a guy who talks a little too much with a little too much bombast.

I can handle one irritating committee member for the sake of saving the atmosphere from ourselves. Lately, the weather fills me with horror movie trailer dread and jump scare anticipation. In a polar vortex year like this one, the way I understand it, arctic air moves in over Canada and the northern United States and sits, unmoving, because old jet stream patterns have changed with new, rising global temperatures. The air outside feels punishing and opposite of the term global warming. But I wonder if it’s the last truly cold weather I’ll ever experience. The lingering ice cubes at the bottom of a camping cooler. I’m not a scientist; I’m just a selective reader of dire climate reports and sensational newspaper articles. So I can’t really comprehend the timeline of climate consequences, but I know it’s getting worse, not better.

If the young male volunteer is here, like me, to save the world, he can’t be all that bad. Maybe his overconfidence is deserved confidence? Maybe he’s a real greenhouse gas-stopping powerhouse? I should do like the volunteer coordinator suggested and just observe.

The Team’s meeting agenda includes mostly strategic planning for the next calendar year. As the Executive Director runs a brainstorming groupthink exercise, I’m reminded of the futility of my old reference librarian job, when I worked in a grand building in downtown Saint Paul built by the railroad baron James J. Hill. My employer was a non-profit business library funded by a shrinking endowment that couldn’t keep pace with the building’s necessary upkeep. At that job, I earnestly scrawled my good ideas on giant sheets of paper as the library director squandered the endowment on a sequence of pricey consultants in a laughable attempt to make the library generate income. The whole sad situation was a good case study in how zero solutions emerged from team building exercises. Whiteboard brainstorming solves nothing. No one here in this shabby mansion-turned-office is going to solve climate change with a dry erase marker.

When are they going to get to the world saving part, I wonder? I listen to the team’s discussion about messaging, how they can convince a skeptical public to take action. They don’t talk about the actual action, like the ideas I was eager to share when I arrived. I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to add anything to this futile discussion. I sit still and listen. They’re not at solutions yet, not even at bringing reusable bags to the grocery store. They’re still stuck on convincing skeptics about our planet’s avoidable, fiery fate.

I’m disappointed that the greenhouse gas surplus is destroying the Earth while I’m still here. I was led to believe in a Gore-ian timeline, where the golf season extended into December and bathtub-warm oceans coddled vacation swimmers. This was supposed to be the sweet spot on the human history timeline, where we enjoy the spoils of post-industrial late capitalism, before car culture fully extinguishes all of the apex predators. I feel terrible about the polar bears. I didn’t expect to see photographs of them drifting off to their inevitable demise before the warranty runs out on my hybrid vehicle battery. I thought my grandchildren’s kids would have to deal with asthmatic air, underwater coastal cities, and uninhabitable equatorial zones. This was supposed to be a “them” problem, not a “we” problem—and definitely not a “me” problem. I feel complicit, but I also know that nothing I’ve ever done in this life could make a dent in the four hundred parts per million level of carbon in the sky.

At the hour mark, the young male volunteer stands on his ramshackle office chair and holds an industrial weight stapler above his head, then drops it onto the table, punctuating his final statement with an office supply version of a mic drop. The noise jolts me into realizing that what I’m observing is just like the brainstorming meetings that didn’t save my old library. It’s just that. Only that. A meeting. No polar bears will be saved here. This means that as long as they’re not really saving the white-furred beasts, I don’t need to tolerate the rhetorical antics of an overconfident Policy Action Team member. My excitement plummets, like January overnight temperatures in Minnesota used to. I’ve gone from eager would-be participant to a jaded quitter in under ninety minutes. If the Earth’s going to heat up because of human-based industrialization and, now, complete inaction on behalf of governments and global businesses, then I at least want to float the balmy seas on an iceberg with people I like. It’s very clear that this stapler-dropping conference table activist is not someone I’d invite onto my icy island.

That’s it for me and the climate justice organization. When the meeting adjourns, I gather my belongings and leave. If there’s ever a personal reckoning for my complicity in the climate crisis, if I’m ever interrogated about my role in carbon pollution, if anyone ever asks what I did to stop the oceans from becoming pasta-cooking water, the poles from going liquid, the temperatures from ratcheting up from summer to steam room, I’ll say, “I went to a meeting.”

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Deborah Copperud has been a reference librarian, stay-at-home parent, school volunteer, preschool choir accompanist, Democratic Party activist, rock band cellist, podcast co-host, and freelance writer. She lives in Minneapolis, MN, where she enjoys jogging around Lake Harriet in inclement weather. Her work has appeared in Glamour and The Rumpus, among other publications. She writes the Deborah Copperud Volunteers newsletter and co-hosts the It’s My Screen Time Too podcast. She is at work on an essay collection about volunteering.

We never used to have a smoke season. I was raised in the Inland Northwest and I can think of only a handful of times when the smoke clung in the air over the Mid-Columbia Valley where I grew up. In those cases, you could always pinpoint the source. The Horse Heaven Hills, just south of town, occasionally caught fire and burned clear, roughly ovoid patches on the normally brown-gold hillside.

Upon landing in the Pasco, Washington airport in 2017, the smoke was oppressive and sourceless. It was the first year of the smoke season. Fires in British Columbia were on their way to burning over three million acres of timber. They would blanket the entire Northwest corner of the North American continent in smoke for weeks.

My mother had had a stroke in early August, a month into the fires. She was recovering in a dreary in-patient rehab facility on the outskirts of Pasco. I remember standing outside in the hot, late-summer evening and watching the sun set behind the hills. It was blood red like the clot that had lodged in her brain. The whole desert smelled like Satan’s ashtray.

Exhausted and bereft, I remember thinking that the end of the world was more boring and depressing than I’d expected.

The next year, the fires were closer. Late snowpack and dry conditions meant that fires sprang up seemingly from nowhere. Washington State burned off and on all summer, the smoke swelling and receding like a chaotic tide. It lasted longer than one could reasonably stay inside for. Twenty-four days that summer had air quality bad enough that staying inside was recommended, at least for “sensitive groups”. “Sensitive groups” wasn’t defined anywhere, but being out in it day after day, it felt like merely having lungs put one in a “sensitive group.”

I bought masks, two years before COVID would make them compulsory. I came to find out later that all of my smoke masks were useless for COVID since they had filtered valves on them. I now have to stock two different kinds of masks for different threats to my health.

After the first few days my sinuses were inflamed and the back of my throat constantly itched. For an entire month I felt just on the verge of getting sick. It took a toll on my sleep and the constant irritation made me grouchy with friends and loved ones. I got cabin fever from staying shut up in my apartment. I only left to go to work or to get groceries. The small air filter I’d acquired wasn’t enough to keep the inside of my apartment from smelling faintly of smoke. Eventually the rains came and beat the smoke back down into the soil. My throat cleared up a few days later.

I don’t have any clear memories of smoke season the next few years. Between the pandemic keeping us indoors in 2020 and 2021, and the normal variations of the season, they don’t stand out in my memory. In the same way that some autumns or springs fix in my memory for the particular glory of their weather, some smoke seasons seem to stick in my mind (or, perhaps my lungs) with more clarity than others.

By 2023, my mother was living in her hometown of Spokane. I was making the commute out to help her from my job in Seattle when I could. Smoke season came closer to home that year. The Gray Fire, started by sparks from power lines, ripped through the small town of Medical Lake, Washington, destroying a large portion of it. They closed the highway.

For the first time in my life, I nervously checked my phone for evacuation orders. I didn’t have a car. I worried about fleeing on foot and made lists of what I would bring with me. I decided that, if it came to it, I would walk toward downtown with just a backpack full of journals, a laptop, and important documents. I agonized over the potential loss of the beautiful impressionist painting that my partner had gotten me for Christmas the year before. Fortunately, the fire never got close enough to risk coming down into the valley in which Spokane sits.

Spokane’s geography means that air sometimes gets trapped in the river valley. It produces beautiful fogs at times. Now it meant that I could smell the faint scent of smoke for days on end, even after the air looked clear. I squinted at the sunset every evening, trying to ascertain how much redder than normal it was, as if it were some primordial air quality meter.

Climate is inconsistent, even if its current arc is clear. We had a bit of a reprieve last year. When L.A. burned this winter, I reached out to friends in the area. One friend’s parents are safe, but a neighborhood she loved disappeared in flames. Another was woken up in the middle of the night by his phone telling him to evacuate immediately and then, a few minutes later, that it was a false alarm.

Climate change means paying the cost of anxieties large and small, even when your part of the world is not literally on fire.

A few weeks ago, I was drinking with some friends in North Seattle. It was a Friday night after an uncommonly cold and clear week. Normally the winter gloom, affectionately known as the Big Dark, settles in around mid-October and sticks around, like a bad house guest, until late spring. Combined with the short daylight hours, it can make winters around here beleaguering.

The unseasonable bright days, then, were a small relief. One of my friends mentioned that, apparently, more winters in the future would be like this. Brighter, colder, dryer. The snowpack in the mountains, key for greening the area as it melts in the spring and early summer, is about two thirds of what it normally is this time of year. Even our brighter winters contribute to smoke season, it seems.

In their book The Dawn of Everything, David Graeber and David Wengrow catalog some of the diverse ways people used to live in prehistory. One thing that struck me reading the book, which included accounts of people who lived in the Seattle area before Europeans arrived on the continent, was how adaptable they were and how much they changed to fit their environments. Cultures lived radically different lives from season to season, in some cases. As their climate changed, they moved up river valleys, or moved from tending and cultivating pre-existing wild patches of plants to full-on slash-and-burn agriculture.

I don’t think we’ll get that luxury. Barring the occasional volcanic eruption, our prehistoric ancestors never had to deal with a year that suddenly had a fifth, inclement season in it. Their climate changed only slowly, giving generations of people the time to learn and adapt.

For us, we pretty much have time to buy some masks, hope they’re the right ones, and text our friends to see if they need a place to crash for a while.

Until one day, our phone goes off in the middle of the night with an evacuation order that isn’t a bureaucratic mistake, and as we hustle through the glowing dark, we’re the ones being checked in on by friends smelling the smoke hundreds of miles away.

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Aaron M Brown is a writer and hacker living in the Pacific Northwest. His hacking has been featured at DEF CON and Hackers on Planet Earth. His writing is available online at his blog and newsletter.

The waves pick us up and drop us like they do the rafting gulls, like we too are made of buoyant feather and bone. The gulls are unfazed and judgy about our swimming. We’re cold and getting nowhere. But it’s winter and progress is not the point. We whoop as the waves slap us in the face, adapt our breathing, continue west toward the aquarium. The wind today, like most days here in winter, is westerly, which means we’re swimming right into it. The tide is coming in, and when it does here in this corner of the New York Bight, it flows into Jamaica Bay, sweeping east. So we’re swimming against both wind and tide. But we know that’s preferable to hitching a lift on our way out, then fighting to return. Always start against the tide in the colder months.

We make it to the last jetty before the aquarium, the part we call “the shark tank,” and race back, tide and wind shoving us along. With every passing minute, my fingers splay more on the pull, my muscles tense, my heart races in a futile effort to warm me. My little pod is mostly fine, acclimated winter swimmers that they are, but I stumble out of the water dizzy and confused—the first signs of hypothermia, nothing to worry about so long as you dress fast then chug tea and jog. Not so easy with the gusts of wind that mess with our changing, sending unattended plastic bags saltating down the beach, too fast to catch on numb feet. We picnic afterward, our little community of swimmers and polar bear old-timers, bundled into our parkas, hoods pulled down low over our eyes, like our own bird colony, sharing tea and donuts with shaking hands. The donuts are crunchy but we learn to surrender to the sand along with the cold.

Our beach has eroded as more intense winter storms encroach ever higher up the sand, carving out an elevated berm that cuts us off from the terrestrial world. The backshore has been reclaimed by colonies of gulls (laughing, herring, ringed) and terns (common). They stand facing into the wind. The still-warmer upper layer of the ocean is churned up by the wind and mixes with the thermocline, the colder deep water welling up from off the continental shelf. The overturning brings the last of the season’s nutrients to the surface, and the birds are here for it, dive-bombing for plankton and mollusks. Up on the Brighton Beach boardwalk, where it’s less windy, mostly elderly immigrants from various reaches of the former Soviet Union sit on benches sunning their faces. They’re a match for the gulls with their judgy vigilance.

This coastal ecosystem of shivering swimmers, rafting gulls, and ex-Soviets that speak my language: this place has become my home landscape, more home to me than anywhere else in my city.

I didn’t mean to become a cold-water swimmer in my late thirties, in New York City, far from the warmer ocean off Southern California where my family and I settled after our immigration from the Soviet Union. I grew up swimming competitively in the Olympic pools of suburban San Diego, a controlled environment of optimized water temperatures (78-79 degrees, ideally), exact lengths, smooth surfaces, gutters to reduce surface turbulence. And even when, years later, I ventured into the ocean, the goal still seemed to be, obviously enough, to swim. I wasn’t prepared for the cold or how it would undo me, my stroke, my definition and felt sense of swimming. I didn’t know about the wild at the heart of cold, or how this experience would force my body to surrender.

I wasn’t prepared either for the upwelling of eco-grief. The more I swam in the cold ocean, the more I thought about the ocean’s temperatures, what the cold means to life in the ocean—and what warming oceans means for life on our planet. I became not just an obsessive swimmer, but also an anxious post-swim researcher, trying to understand what I observed in my ocean swims. Mostly I wanted to know: What is the impact of the climate crisis on my ocean, this tiny sliver of it I’d fallen in love with off my home coast?

Bear with me for a short lesson on the ocean’s thermal capacity. The ocean is the largest solar energy collector on Earth, as well as the largest carbon sink, far greater than all the forests and rainforests combined. This means that the ocean absorbs tremendous amounts of heat without a large increase in temperature, at least not for a while. This ability to store and release heat over long periods of time gives the ocean a vital role in stabilizing our climate. Without this reprieve on paying our dues for the carbon we’ve already released into our atmosphere, the devastating heat waves of today would be far worse. The world would be even more on fire.

But the ocean is losing its resilience and its temperature is finally rising, the effects of global warming from several decades ago. The marine heatwaves of today are the result of our profligate burning of fossil fuels back in the latter half of the 20th century. Since 1970, the ocean has absorbed some 90% of excess heat added to our atmosphere by the combustion of fossil fuels and other human activities. That number scares me. Another way to put this: More than 90% of the warming of our planet since 1970 has occurred in the ocean. No matter what else we do from now on, we have committed to this additional warming. The oceans will give back what they have taken in—what we have put in them.

What my swimming body wants, which would reduce its pain and increase its pleasure, is warmer water, the very thing that is devastating for life in the ocean. Besides, it would do me no good. In a little over a century, temperatures have risen approximately 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the upper 2,300 feet of the ocean. That increase would barely register in my body (think dipping into 38 vs. 39.5 degree-water in January), but is more than enough to decimate corals and mollusks, who need cool water to build their shells. My body wants warmth in December but I’m grateful that it hasn’t come, not yet.

So I teach myself to surrender to the cold. It’s not there for me, but for the gulls and mollusks and krill. This gives me comfort. Bring on the shivers if the corals live.

Try it with me, feel the cold, the comfort. We walk in up to our knees, stop, feel the ache of cold creep up our bones. Walk in further, up to our hips. We gasp as the cold chills our groins and bellies, but it’s only the gasp reflex; we breathe through it. We dip our hands in, feel the sawing ache of cold rise up our wrists and into our arms. We pant some more, curse, holler, and thank the cold. We haven’t yet burned, mined, refined, and driven it away. Try it next time you dip on January 1st, or tomorrow. In a world growing hotter, we may all become polar bears, the human ones dipping off Brighton Beach, the animal ones whose home ground is melting from under them. The stern touch of cold feels increasingly like a reprieve, like a temporary extension of our lease.

A season passes, two, now going on eight, and I keep returning to the winter ocean long past when my body tells me to stop. The longer I swim into winter, the more my body learns to relax into the cold, to open into the ache. Swimming in the cold isn’t about swimming. It’s a cold study. You don’t swim despite the cold. You swim to know the cold, and the cold ocean. As the water temperature drops closer to 40 and then below, I stop swimming and dip. Let’s call it what it is.

Cold is like grief, I’m learning. It’s not one thing as I feel it in my body. It’s a process, a journey, an evolution of states, from initial shock to acceptance to searing, elating fire to a settling in the blood and organs to the body’s eventual breakdown. I can walk the stages of cold like descending a ladder. With enough time in the water, I know I will go down, it’s just a matter of how long I’ll last. Desire to last has nothing to do with it. The cold and my body’s reaction to it win over will, over longing.

Cold swimming begins and ends in pain. But in between is joy, the alchemy of cold in the body. After the initial acclimation, the cold turns to fire, a burn coming from somewhere deep inside, spreading and holding me in a sheath of flame as I swim, and for a while, I feel invincible. I catch the water, pull while my hands can still feel and haven’t splayed into limp rag dolls. Kick kick kick. Surrender to the water, to the fire within that will sustain me a while, to the rhythm of my swimming body. Watch the gulls bop by on the waves, watching me back unimpressed. Smell the water. It’s so clean it smells like ice, like air above the tree line. Rock and mineral and wind. And a bit of gull poop.

When the body is submerged in cold water, it knows to limit cold blood flow from the extremities in a process called vasoconstriction. This is the ache we feel in our feet and hands and neck when we first enter the water and our vessels contract. Our bodies know to protect our vital organs at the cost of our limbs. Our hands and feet grow tingly then numb and limp, but the core stays relatively warm, though that too is dropping. We lose heat about thirty times faster in water than air. Vasoconstriction is not a lasting solution. It buys us time, gives us a window in which to save ourselves. It is that window in which we burn. And it’s once we emerge back on land, seemingly safe, that our blood vessels expand and the colder blood from our extremities floods back in. That’s when the afterdrop comes for us and we start to shiver.

In that window of reprieve, I learn to slow down, explore. Most days after the new year, I have less than ten minutes in me, sometimes no more than five. The water in the winter is shockingly clear. Plankton needs sunlight to photosynthesize, and in the darker months, much of the microalgae that cloud the water have gone dormant, sunk to the bottom, or died off. But the apparent emptiness of cold water is also an illusion because the gulls still plummet into the waves, and mussels still cling to the jetty rocks, slick with green algae. “There is the promise of a new spring in the very iciness of the winter sea,” Rachel Carson writes in The Sea Around Us, “in the chilling of the water, which must, before many weeks, become so heavy that it will plunge downward, precipitating the overturn that is the first act in the drama of spring.” I like knowing that spring is coming, but I’m also learning to love the cold ocean on its own terms. Sometimes it’s when the ocean is least full of life that it feels most enlivening, and reminds me that on a rapidly warming planet, the cold is the promise of life.

I’ve learned to long for the cold. Every year now, I wait for summer to end so that this other swimming can begin. So that I can remember that we still have a window of time, short as it is, and rapidly closing. What will we do with this time before the afterdrop?

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Asya Graf is a writer, psychotherapist, and swimmer living with her wife in Brooklyn. Her essays and poetry have appeared in Queer Love Project, Cimarron Review, Vestal Review, Gulf Stream, and Santa Fe Literary Review, among other journals. Essays drawn from her memoir-in-progress, Everything We Lose: Reckoning with Athletic Girlhood, have appeared in Sport Literate, Aethlon, Underwater New York, and Ilanot Review. She has been supported by two artist residencies on Governor’s Island in NYC with Underwater New York/Works on Water, and has taught creative writing at Boston University as well as at the high school level in New York City. She received a PhD in Comparative Literature from Princeton University and an MSW from Hunter College, CUNY. She can be found at www.asyagrafwrites.com.