Heather Kerley's Reviews > I Want a Better Catastrophe: Navigating the Climate Crisis with Grief, Hope, and Gallows Humor

Essential reading.

A few of the headlines today, the day I finished reading this book:

“Blistering Southwest heat wave to expand across the U.S. this week”

“Greece Wildfires: 'climate crisis will manifest itself everywhere with greater disasters’ says Greece PM”

“New North Sea oil and gas licenses could produce emissions equivalent to 14 m cars.”

June 2023 was the hottest month ever on earth until July became the hottest month ever. It’s clear we are in a climate crisis and yet our behaviour has not changed. We have barely begun to do what we needed to do 30 years ago to avert this catastrophe. In this book, Andrew Boyd, who has been an activist for decades, faces down this reality and asks the question, now what? Knowing that we have lost the battle to avert the true catastrophe of 1.5+C warming, what should we do, how do we keep fighting and for what, exactly, do we keep fighting?

This book doesn’t necessarily give you the answers to that. You have to figure that out on your own. But it presents you with many different available approaches and philosophies ranging from the most pessimistic view (we are doomed and there’s nothing we can do about it) to the most realistically hopeful (there are many exit ramps and we still have time to get off at the next one). It is is arranged around eight interviews with “doomers” like Guy McPherson and “hopers,” like Joanna Macy and is peppered with funny, poignant and quirky essays by Boyd about his own struggles with our current predicament that go so far as to get to the heart of what, exactly is a “predicament.” Along the way, he examines the current crisis through the lens of a range of Western philosophers and thinkers like Albert Camus, Arthur Schopenhauer, Antonio Gramsci, Marcus Aurelius. He also quotes some non-western and indigenous thinkers as well, like Arundhati Roy and Joao Ubaldo Ribeiro. (If I had to quibble, I wish there were more non-western views in this book but it is still well worth reading and that lack is made up for in the interviews.)

Ultimately, we face the most challenging test humanity has ever faced and it has many possible outcomes. He comes to the conclusion that the climate crisis is like a Rorschach test that tells you who you are when you look at it. If you are predisposed toward pessimism, there is plenty there to reinforce that belief. If you are an irrepressible optimist, there is plenty of uncertainty upon which to paint a fantasy of rescue. He finds himself somewhere in between and bouncing back and forth between pessimism and hope. He concludes, as long as there are things we can still save, like a more livable future, or a few more species that would disappear otherwise, we must keep fighting. We must keep going even if we no longer believe it will work. This is what he calls grounded hope, a hope that fights because it is the right thing to do, irrespective of the outcome.

The thinkers whose interviews I appreciated most in this book were Gopal Dayeneni, Joanna Macy, adrienne mae brown, and Robin Wall Kimmerer. These interviews offered the best guidance for finding not just hope but beauty in this world we’re trying to save, though all are totally clear-eyed about how bad things are and are likely to get. Joanna Macy urges us to “Be of service not knowing if you are a hospice worker or aa midwife.” Kimmerer asks, “What do you love too much to lose, and what are you going to do about it?” The interview with adrienne mae brown asks “how do we partner with the apocalypse? … How do we survive the end of capitalism? How do we fall as if we were holding a child on our chest?”

This book, like the title states, is about how to make this catastrophe the best possible catastrophe it can be. What is the best possible outcome all of this? For the reader, where do you belong in the fight - as healer, engineer, policymaker, rebel, artist? Most importantly, Boyd urges us, “let’s bring to this fight all the courage, kindness, and wise planning we can muster, so we can get the least terrible and most compassionate catastrophe still available.”