A letter to my young son.

Dear Rupert,

When I started writing this book, you didn’t exist. Now you do, and you bring me unimagined joy. I love you in ways I never thought possible. You have opened wide the tap of my full humanity, in all its frailty and love. Obama once described having a kid as having “your heart outside your body.” At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about other than it sounded unwise. I do now, and it isn’t. When your mom and I had you, I became fully human. You filled a hole in the center of my being I didn’t even know was there. Thanks, Little Monkey!

That happiness is tinged by a dark cloud. By the time you’re old enough to read this, it’s likely we will have committed our planet to at least 2°C of warming, perhaps much more. I do hope it’s not so much more — the 4°C or even 5°C that is the stuff of nightmares. Indeed, were I religious man, I’d pray we left your generation some optimistic glimmer of halting warming under 3°C. If we have not, then I’m afraid you and your peers will have to live through some fearsome times. I do not know how to equip you for what may be coming.

As you will know by now, I’ve been scared of climate disruption for some time. Before you came along that fear was tempered by a kind of intellectual and emotional distance. While I — like anyone who comes to terms with climate risk — went through a period of anger and grief, I was able to compartmentalize those feelings. What I saw happening all around me was experienced as a kind of anthropological catastrophe, not a personal one. Of course, I felt a deep empathy for the people affected — largely the world’s poorest — as they got pummeled by extreme weather, pushed out of their homes by rising waters, and as they fled across borders in search of security. But I could retreat behind a kind of philosophical screen to blunt the despair I now so often feel when I think of the future. It’s all so personal now.

Before you came along, I’d use mental tricks to keep the climate demons at bay. Most involved taking some ridiculously long view to visualize what we humans were up to in as broad a context as possible. I did that in order to diminish a sense of moral failure and loss. I understand some cultures are accustomed to thinking in very long time frames, the Chinese in 5000 year cycles, for example. On that view, perhaps we’re just doing what every creature does: bumping up against the limits of our ecological niche, like foxes who grow in number until there aren’t enough rabbits to eat. The population collapses, only to rise once again. But instead of a forest, our niche is the whole planet. Instead of teeth and claws, our tools are technology. Such an air of evolutionary inevitability masks a moral failure. We are destined to become lost in history, identified eons out as the Carbon People, whose lasting geological record can be found in the sediment under the civilization of some future peoples.

On an even larger view, human civilization itself is just one experiment among countless others. “Life will go on,” I’d say to myself in the days and years before you came along. “Humans screwed up in the here and now, but life continues here and elsewhere!” I found solace in Stuart Kauffman’s view, expressed best in At Home in the Universe, that the complexity of life is an inevitable outcome in a universe like ours, governed by the kinds of physical laws we’ve identified. Energy and matter necessarily entail life: we are not chance caught on a wing, but a natural expression of the universe. We are the universe conscious of itself, and our emergence was inevitable. If it happened here and now, it’s happening elsewhere and everywhere. How much can this human experiment matter in such a universal context?

These are the consolations of a philosopher, one who finds a necessary distance from the messy world in a place of abstraction, reflection. But none of this is happening at arm’s length anymore. It’s deeply personal because it’s your future, my son’s future, “The Rupe’s” future. It’s like before you came along, I was playing poker with fake money, plastic chips. Now the stakes are real. And it changes everything for me. But lots of people have kids. How could we possibly fail when we all might act on that deepest, most primal human force — to protect our children from danger?

As I look at you now, playfully banging a flute against the couch with a mischievous look in your eye, and try to visualize your world as you read this, the hard limits of my imaginative powers are laid bare. It’s either something like the world I live in with some added hardships, or it’s Mad Max. One a linear extrapolation of what I already know, corresponding to a childishly naïve view of climate risk. The other a movie’s portrayal of an apocalyptic world, complete with outlandish costumes and nightmarish violence. Neither vision is helpful. Neither is a guide to what I might teach you, give you, show you to help you on your way there, whatever “there” is.

Perhaps that’s one reason we have failed to keep the world safe: we can’t picture in personal terms what higher levels of warming mean to us, to you and your generation. Or we safely categorize what visions we can conjure up as dystopian movies, and hence likely fiction. Our minds’ imaginative limits filter out the most likely outcomes. Hence, we live in delusion. What we think about when we think about catastrophic warming are really the most optimistic scenarios — those which allow linear extrapolation from our world to yours. But this limited kind of collective worry is just the floor of climate risk. To unlock that most human of instincts to protect our children requires us to worry about the most likely climate risk, which is much worse. And that is precisely where our imagination fails us.

The temptation to retreat from the world is a strong one. With so much love in the house and so much chaos and fear emerging in the world, why not just pack it in? Put all those worries aside, move to the country with some goats and chickens. Play Nature Man with my little family in the Eastern Townships, let other people worry about this stuff. Just hunker down, prepare for the worst, put up walls, protect my own.

That time will surely come, Rupe, but it’s not now. I promise you today, as I write these words, that I will keep my shoulder to the wheel. I’ll do my best. I’ll keep trying to make this world a little less hot in all the ways I can: personal, political, and professional.

I wonder about your relationship with nature in a degraded world. Humans aren’t good at perceiving incremental change. Biologists call this shifting baselines. Each generation grows accustomed to a diminished ecosystem and thinks it’s normal. Your natural background is not mine. For me, it was a comfort. My mind always settled more easily on the rich, organic dynamics I saw in nature than against the universe of artifacts that is a city. The patterns I saw in a drop falling off a leaf amidst the smell of damp earth on Newfoundland’s East Coast Trail, or the play of air on water reflecting a skyline of trees from the shores of Algonquin, these were interactive poems that spoke of us as part of something bigger, universal, mysterious. But benign, supportive. Meditating on these small patterns often resolved my internal conflicts. But nature is part artifact now, and certainly not benign. My poet’s Gaia is gone, replaced by an angry one. That change happened so quickly in historical time — a generation, really. But so slowly we can’t see it.

Over the past few weeks, a brave sixteen-year-old Swedish girl, Greta Thunberg, has grabbed the world’s attention. Last year, she went on strike at her school — by herself at the beginning — because she didn’t understand the point of getting an education that couldn’t prepare her for the world she sees coming. She’s started something; a few months back it was tens of thousands of people, and last week over a million. Maybe this is where the real climate action is. Not economics, discount rates, or cleantech. But millions of young people taking to the streets and refusing to leave until we adults feel their panic. Perhaps people like Greta will be heroes to you as you grow up in a hot world. But I wonder: will they be heroes because they tried or because they succeeded?

An apology from one generation to another feels entirely inadequate. But maybe that’s a good place to start: I’m so sorry we couldn’t act decisively enough to keep the Climate Bear at bay. My only hope is we did enough that you’ve still time to avoid the worst. My fear is we did not. Please know many of us tried.

I love you, Rupe. It’s over to you and your friends now.

Lots of love,

Your dad