In a polity ever more starkly divided, the truth about global warming was even less convenient to the left than to the right. The right’s denials were odious lies, but at least they were consistent with a certain cold-eyed political realism. The left, having excoriated the right for its intellectual dishonesty and turned climate denialism into a political rallying cry, was now in an impossible position. It had to keep insisting on the truth of climate science while persisting in the fiction that collective world action could stave off the worst of it: that universal acceptance of the facts, which really might have changed everything in 1995, could still change everything. Otherwise, what difference did it make if the Republicans quibbled with the science?
Because my sympathies were with the left—reducing carbon emissions is vastly better than doing nothing; every half degree helps—I also held it to a higher standard. Denying the dark reality, pretending that the Paris Accord could avert catastrophe, was understandable as a tactic to keep people motivated to reduce emissions; to keep hope alive. As a strategy, though, it did more harm than good. It ceded the ethical high ground, insulted the intelligence of unpersuaded voters (“Really? We still have ten years?”), and precluded frank discussion of how the global community should prepare for drastic changes, and how nations like Bangladesh should be compensated for what nations like the United States have done to them.
Dishonesty also skewed priorities. In the past twenty years, the environmental movement had become captive to a single issue. Partly out of genuine alarm, partly also because foregrounding human problems was politically less risky—less elitist—than talking about nature, the big environmental NGOs had all invested their political capital in fighting climate change, a problem with a human face. The NGO that particularly enraged me, as a bird lover, was the National Audubon Society, once an uncompromising defender of birds, now a lethargic institution with a very large PR department. In September 2014, with much fanfare, that PR department had announced to the world that climate change was the number-one threat to the birds of North America. The announcement was both narrowly dishonest, because its wording didn’t square with the conclusions of Audubon’s own scientists, and broadly dishonest, because not one single bird death could be directly attributed to human carbon emissions. In 2014, the most serious threats to American birds were habitat loss and outdoor cats. By invoking the buzzword of climate change, Audubon got a lot of attention in the liberal media; another point had been scored against the science-denying right. But it was not at all clear how this helped birds. The only practical effect of Audubon’s announcement, it seemed to me, was to discourage people from addressing the real threats to nature in the present.
I was so angry that I decided that I’d better write an essay. I began with a jeremiad against the National Audubon Society, broadened it into a scornful denunciation of the environmental movement generally, and then started waking up in the night in a panic of remorse and doubt. For the writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was seeing in this one. Why was I excoriating fellow liberals when the denialists were so much worse? The prospect of climate change was every bit as sickening to me as to the groups I was attacking. With every additional degree of global warming, further hundreds of millions of people around the world would suffer. Wasn’t it worth an all-out effort to achieve a reduction of even half of one degree? Wasn’t it obscene to be talking about birds when children in Bangladesh were threatened? Yes, the premise of my essay was that we have an ethical responsibility to other species as well as to our own. But what if that premise was false? And, even if it was true, did I really care personally about biodiversity? Or was I just a privileged white guy who liked to go birding? And not even a pure-hearted birder—a lister!
After three nights of doubting my character and motives, I called Henry Finder and told him I couldn’t write the piece. I’d done plenty of ranting about climate to my friends and to like-minded conservationists, but it was like a lot of the ranting that happens online, where you’re protected by the impromptu nature of the writing and by the known friendliness of your audience. Trying to write a finished thing, an essay, had made me aware of the sloppiness of my thinking. It had also enormously increased the risk of shame, because the writing wasn’t casual, and because it was going out to an audience of probably hostile strangers. Following Henry’s admonition (“Therefore”), I’d come to think of the essayist as a firefighter, whose job, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them. But I had a lot more to fear now than my mother’s disapproval.
My essay might have stayed abandoned if I hadn’t already clicked a button on Audubon’s website, affirming that, yes, I wanted to join it in fighting climate change. I’d only done this to gather rhetorical ammunition to use against Audubon, but a deluge of direct-mail solicitations had followed from that click. I got at least eight of them in six weeks, all of them asking me to give money, along with a similar deluge in my email in-box. A few days after speaking to Henry, I opened one of the emails and found myself looking at a picture of myself—luckily a flattering image, taken in 2010 for Vogue magazine, which had dressed me up better than I dress myself and posed me in a field with my binoculars, like a birder. The headline of the email was something like “Join Author Jonathan Franzen in Supporting Audubon.” It was true that, a few years earlier, in an interview with Audubon magazine, I’d politely praised the organization, or at least its magazine. But no one had asked for my permission to use my name and image for solicitation. I wasn’t sure the email was even legal.
A more benign impetus to return to the essay came from Henry. As far as I know, Henry couldn’t care less about birds, but he seemed to see something in my argument that our preoccupation with future catastrophes discourages us from tackling solvable environmental problems in the here and now. In an email to me, he gently suggested that I lose the tone of prophetic scorn. “This piece will be more persuasive,” he wrote in another, “if, ironically, it’s more ambivalent, less polemical. You’re not whaling on folks who want us to pay attention to climate change and emission reductions. But you’re attentive to the costs. To what the discourse pushes to the margins.” Email by email, revision by revision, Henry nudged me toward framing the essay not as a denunciation but as a question: How do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end? Much of the final draft was devoted to a pair of well-conceived regional conservation projects, in Peru and Costa Rica, where the world really is being made a better place, not just for wild plants and wild animals but for the Peruvians and Costa Ricans who live there. Work on these projects is personally meaningful, and the benefits are immediate and tangible.
In writing about the two projects, I hoped that one or two of the big charitable foundations, the ones spending tens of millions of dollars on biodiesel development or on wind farms in Eritrea, might read the piece and consider investing in work that produces tangible results. What I got instead was a missile attack from the liberal silo. I’m not on social media, but my friends reported that I was being called all sorts of names, including “birdbrain” and “climate-change denier.” Tweet-size snippets of my essay, retweeted out of context, made it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican Party, which, by the polarizing