Considering how central oil is to our daily lives, it’s easy to forget that most of us rarely see actual oil. Maybe on a paper towel if you check your oil before a long road trip or in the rainbow sheen on the water surface by a boat launch. Our engine oil is dealt with by mechanics who dispose of it for a fee. We hardly ever see the gasoline (an oil derivative) that goes into our cars since it goes from the pump to our tanks; if it sees the light of day, it’s because we’ve been clumsy. Even before we get to the gas station, gasoline is pumped from tanker trucks into the ground tanks below. Unless your job regularly requires it, if you’re looking directly at oil or gasoline, it usually means that something has gone very wrong.

It is easy to forget that time exists differently for people than it does for other species and ecosystems. (If you’re not following me, think about dog years. A human day is like a dog week; a human year is like 7 dog years.) It doesn’t help that our man-made economic systems are the most prevalent keepers of time today—and also the most destructive force on the planet. 

Even if you’re unfamiliar with the term liminality, you’re definitely familiar with the experience. French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep’s concept of liminality is an experience of existing simultaneously on both sides of a boundary–existing inside of a transition.

Historically, capitalists claim that a free market economy promotes ingenuity. That the competition and consumer demands of capitalism inspires creativity, but regulations hamper the development and exchange of these creative goods and services. 

And maybe that was true in the earlier stages of US capitalism, back when corporations were project-oriented. Back when they applied for individual government charters whenever they wanted to develop something new and then disbanded once that project was completed. Those long-ago days before they were behemoth entities with religious freedom and 1st amendment rights.  

Except Goliath is a multinational corporation with more sovereignty and a bigger economy than most countries, and he uses that power to grow global inequality while simultaneously making the planet inhabitable to most living creatures…but yes, just like David and Goliath

When we pathologize protesters–dismiss them as mentally unstable–we give ourselves permission to stop thinking about them.

Writing off their demonstrations as crazy is an attempt to detach their actions from their message. Especially when their message reminds us of something we’d rather not think about.

Like the climate crisis itself, it’s difficult to make this comprehensive graph small enough for social media platforms, but the small font on the left lists the states in alphabetical order. 

Louisiana is easy to spot even if it’s hard to make out the text. 🎶 One of these things is not like the other, one of these things doesn’t belong 🎶

This past week, Louisiana’s new Governor Jeff Landry made the unilateral decision that the state would not participate in the EBT program that feeds 600,000 food-insecure children over summer break. Landry is opting out of the federally-funded program that would help feed Louisiana children in order to save the $7 million dollars his office claims it costs the state to run the program.

For the last two years, I’ve been working on a climate fiction novel set along the Lowermost Mississippi River. It is difficult to stay in a fictional narrative space when I’m writing about the very real climate crisis. It’s hard to world-build a place in my imagination when the real world seems to be burning and drowning, and dying around me.

My favorite moment when I’m hiking or kayaking is the moment when the landscape seems to pull me in and swallow me up. If I’m in the woods, it feels like the trees have closed up behind me. It’s such a palpable feeling that I’ve even looked over my shoulder a few times to make sure the path is still clear. It’s the moment when I imagine I’ve stepped away from society and have entered the wild. It’s similar to that moment on a plane when you get just high enough off the ground that there’s a feeling of separation; you’ve entered a different kind of space and time, an otherness that removes you from your usual existence.

When major oil companies talk about cutting carbon emissions, they aren’t technically lying. But they also aren’t telling the whole story—in fact, they are usually leaving out about ⅔ of the story.

To better understand what these major oil companies are promising, we must first understand what’s called the Emissions Accounting Framework. This structure separates a company’s carbon footprint into three categories known as the Burn, Buy, or Beyond scopes.

During an on-going crisis, the power of storytelling cannot be overstated. While facts and statistics can be shocking, they don’t always stick with us like names, faces, and individual experiences. It is usually the human impact pieces that stop us in our tracks and stay in our collective consciousness (and conscience). But when there’s a crisis too large and horrific to comprehend, storytelling often feels incongruous because our language simply can’t keep up with the devastation.

Nurdles are tiny pellets of pre-production plastics, which are created from crude oil or recycled plastics and then shipped to factories around the world where they are melted and molded into the countless larger plastic items we use every day. Nurdles are one of the most widespread forms of microplastic pollution threatening our waterways today, with over 11 trillion or 250,000 tons of of them ending up in the oceans annually.

In Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild defines an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding…[of] those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.” Empathy walls cause us to “feel indifferent or even hostile” towards those who are politically, culturally, or physically different.

Louisiana ranks 25th in U.S. population yet it always makes the top 10 list of CO₂ emitters no matter how you slice the information—per unit of GDP, per person, and in total amounts.

How is that possible?

Without context (and based on my kids’ latest fixation), Panamax sounds like a rare Legendary Pokemon with high base attack stats. In actuality, it’s a class of shipping vessels specifically designed to fit through the Panama Canal. In 2016, the Panama Canal’s third set of locks opened, allowing larger and heavier vessels to access the shipping shortcut. Enter NeoPanamax vessels, ships designed specifically to fit these expanded canal locks.

We rarely see the plural of apocalypse. We’re so comfortable with the singular form that hearing and seeing it written as apocalypses makes us do a double take because it looks and sounds strange in its plural form. It also sounds strange to say an apocalypse instead of the apocalypse. Our tendency to attach a definite article (the) instead of an indefinite article (a/an) also implies that we view the apocalypse as a single, specific event.

The climate crisis is a great example of what design theorists Rittel and Webber would call a wicked problem (1973). A wicked problem is difficult to solve because there are so many variables; many of these variables are confusing, constantly changing, misrepresented, or assigned diverging values based on a person’s interests or politics. The size and complexity of these moving targets makes formulating a plan of action difficult.

Resiliency is a term that gets thrown around a lot along the Gulf Coast, usually to describe communities that have been near-destroyed by hurricanes, flooding, and other industrial disasters. It’s also been a buzzword in the disaster recovery and environmental planning world for a while.

Outside the context of the climate crisis and disaster recovery, the word resilience describes something’s elasticity, durability, and toughness. It’s the capacity for something or someone to recover from difficulties. And the climate crisis, and all of its unprecedented-ness, is stretching resiliency to its breaking point. Many of these communities’ resiliency banks are depleted after decades of overexploitation.

I came across the concept of open cognitive loops and cognitive closure through the work of psychologist Robert Cialdini. As a professor, Cialdini would start class with questions that he’d answer at the end of his lecture. One day, he ran out of time and was surprised that his students refused to leave without the answers; they’d rather be late for their next class than be stuck with an unresolved question looping in their minds for the next week.