I recently attended my regional Climate Meetup for the year (the event had the year in its name) and found a surprisingly well-staffed event at the park. I go to these things expecting to have to do the networking myself, but climate nerds are all there for the same reason: Their own reason.

In circles by our county, we did introductions and learned what brought us to the cause. There was arguing before I got a turn to introduce myself, about nuclear power. The other circle was for discussion about energy.

There are a lot of good efforts out there, and not all efforts look the same. Some crave a culture of dance and ritual that can occupy space in us to think about the entire system and how to care for it. Some mock it as ineffective.

I learned about Nature’s Calendar, electric homes strategy Go Electric Colorado, because they know they can’t stop the fracking (Texas alone, amirite). There were many with connections to Citizens’ Climate Lobby Colorado. Some had dour opinions of nuclear energy and had to be right, right there in Centennial Park on a Sunday, to settle the issue for good in their mind.

I knew I could only stay for the first couple of hours, and I still had the opening welcome talks on my mind as I listened and took my notes.

When I had arrived to the event, they were speaking the same zombie hopes completely unmodified, insisting that this dark time for climate work and grants and federal science was Momentary. They thought Gen Z was harder to engage with academics and so recommend getting them in hands on endeavors. (This was moderately funny to me, as though the academicism was working all along but not for Gen Z.)

I heard a self-deprecating joke in the mic that they were almost out of money, followed by their own nervous laughter.

They celebrated together that somehow one org or another was “overlooked” for defunding by the federal government.

I heard them coping, telling each other that it was temporary, momentary, a phase or anything but new ground-level reality.

Several in my greeting group professed their virtue by summarily stating that “We work with All the orgs.” The metrics of our success are about contact book sizes, and everybody’s met everybody. They’re doing good work, and I’m not putting it down.

I would rather have heard about the work than the affluence.

I am deeply sympathetic on the plight of climate change, but I am persistently underwhelmed by the lack of organization and measurable change. Groups look for money to keep doing what they’ve done. Sponsors are shy now. We all know climate events are changing, but we appear to be leaning into the wind now, banking on the prophecy of American Exceptionalism to get us through. (I loathe the concept, but they have a better point.)

Sadly, at the climate meetup, I saw little going on. I’d heard them encourage us to encourage others with their ideas, because we had none. A few were legitimate ideas, but get run over by We Should Protest More, or Nuclear Is Far Fetched.

We were all under this spell. I departed as a gentleman stood over the seated group and told them their ideas were all too disagreeable, but that his was very agreeable.

“Who could disagree with that?” he said after giving it, and I let that be my cue to walk away from the group with my silence.

Some of the attendees were right that disaster is coming, that we can’t prevent anything on the ground level except for what takes place at ground level. I can leave it to powerful super-scientists to prevent some climate change, but we individuals have to do something for ourselves.

Resilience is our armor when fire, flood, displacement and ruined resources make us strain ourselves to continue. Resilience is not abandoning your spot, by forethought and planning. Resilience is not about making China use less coal.

When disasters unfold for any reason, when water vanishes from our basins and reservoirs, there will be no honor for you if you stand up and shout that it Climate Change Did This. Even if you were precisely right, you don’t matter anymore, academic. Roll up your sleeves and throw those sandbags faster.

Put on your boots and build. Shut up about recycling laws and go recycle something, weenie. Shut about about the tampered efficacy of recycling and make a business that doesn’t generate those materials. Be loud about what your laws don’t allow you to do, not which color buckets your neighborhood gets for amenities.

We know it well, and we are told it by some, that our efforts amount to very little. Were it a war of academic perspectives, then perhaps so.

I should very much like to not hear disagreements unless it is with data and claims. Short that, let us be busier at the tasks themselves. Be accountable to our own ideas and workshop them and find inspired help.

We keep coming looking for leaders, but there aren’t any for us. We’re blind leading blind. Anyone who can speak at length about a subject is only one facet, no more special than another.

Don’t think about the world ending. Think about you and everyone next to you waking up to evacuation alerts.

What Would You Need?

You can reach Autumn Ryan to be heard about this subject at [email protected]. Do not transmit sensitive or private information if it’s unsuitable for others to have.