Lauren Markham on Reckoning with Future Loss from Climate Change
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Watching the fire sweep across LA or waking up here on that orange sky day, there are moments when you realize we're living in a new climactic reality. Things can happen now that could not before and much of our present world, living things, shorelines, weather patterns, will be lost.

Do we have the language and rituals to memorialize the world we have had? That's the topic of journalist Lauren Markham's new book, Immemorial, a short, sharp book on memory, grief, and global warming. She's coming up next, right after this news. Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Lauren Markham's new book, Immemorial, opens with a feeling without a name.

Looking down out of an airplane window as she flies home across Europe from a reporting trip, she sees the snow of the Alps, and it reminds her of previous work trips gazing down on the glaciers of Greenland, on the Arctic that will no longer be at some point in the future. And while the icy landscapes elicit awe and appreciation, there's another concept that

lying under her appreciation of this living world, a knowledge of her own complicity, or at least her own participation in the global human systems that are deranging our planet.

And from that feeling and the search for its proper label, her book sprints off across fascinating terrain, chasing down the unexpected connections between memory and grief, future and past, ritual and collective action. Immemorial comes out today from Berkeley's Transit Books as part of its honestly thrilling series, Unpublished Lectures. Welcome to Forum, Lauren. Thank you so much. It's so nice to be here.

So I thought maybe you could read a little bit for us, kind of from that moment of looking down on the Alps and sort of what you did with it. Sure. The snow-dusted Alps, I posted on Instagram for my layover in Switzerland. What's a word for the simultaneous enchantment of beholding this breathtaking world from above and the feeling of complicity for its destruction? Guilt-chantment, my friend Holly replied.

"Blissenance is our most popular term for this very real phenomena" posted someone from an account called the Bureau of Linguistical Reality. The Bureau of Linguistical Reality is sounded both ominous and spellbinding, like a trapdoor situated deep in the forest. How could one help but fall through?

And indeed, you did fall through by sending them an email saying, I am in need of a word that expresses the desire to memorialize something that is in the process of being lost. A landscape, for instance, or a species or a bird song to erect a memory temple or shrine or lyric monument of sorts to the feeling of losing something as it is going. Yeah.

Did you complete the quest? Like, did you actually find the word that you feel like nails that feeling? I would say not quite. There were a number of... So I worked with this artist group called the Bureau of Linguistical Reality who sort of coins these neologisms and the kind of concept of their work and the sort of ordering principle of their work is that the world is changing at such a rapid pace in...

in the age of climate catastrophe that like our if language exists to describe the world the world is changing at such a pace that like our language needs to catch up and so that's the sort of work of these neologisms and so I would say that I went I mean the what you just read the line that comes after it is like I was struggling to find the word

even, you know, it's a very bumbling sort of definition that I was offering. I was struggling to find the words for the word that I needed. And I would say that actually the quest itself, it was sort of one of those, like, the journey is the destination kind of deals. It was the friend you made along the way. Yes.

Exactly. No, but it was like the process of I mean, I was it was the process of reacquainting myself with language and falling back in love with language again. And that's something that this quest really helped me with. I was really in a crisis of words where words sort of ceased to mean anything to me, which is a problem if you're a writer. So I was falling back in love with language again. Yeah.

I mean, they did give you a word, though. They did in the end, like through this iterative process, they gave you preemation. Yeah. Right. A desire to create, hold or cultivate a memorial, memorializing a loss that's still ongoing and unfold.

Yeah. And the word is great. And it wasn't just, you know, I had sort of imagined that their process was they would, you know, I would tell them what I needed and then they would go into some inner chamber and like inhale a pneuma, you know, and like come back with my word. But they actually made me work

for it and we like looked at etymology and we looked at root words and we looked at word play one of the things about neologisms is they kind of tap into play and the resonance of meaning so what words not just mean but what they sound like or the kind of feeling that they evoke and so primation is a great word I don't think it

fully did it, but also, you know, it got me to a new place of thinking around my quest. Yeah. And immemorial is also something that you came to in that process, too, of trying to kind of put your finger on what you were searching for. Yeah. And it's funny because sort of a separate quest, and this isn't in the book, was figuring out how to title this book. And memorial was definitely not, it didn't feel right. Memorial didn't feel right. So there's something about immemorial that, of course, has memorial in it

The im- prefix both can mean within something and it can mean outside of it. And then there's this, you know, speaking again of wordplay, there's this connotation, you know, when we hear the word immemorial, I think it's almost impossible not to think of the phrase time immemorial. And of course, all memorials are about time and grief is about time too. Yeah.

We're talking with writer Lauren Markham about her new book, Immemorial, coming out today. It's on finding kind of the language and rituals to memorialize our climate losses.

We want to hear from you. I mean, what's a novel feeling in this world of climate crisis that you think needs a name to kind of bind it together? I will say for me, it's that feeling of going outside on a beautiful, like unusually warm day and the kind of one, two of loving the sun and heat followed immediately by the question of whether it's ethical to kind of bask in the beauty of a day like that.

You can give us a call with your feeling 866-733-6786. You can email that feeling in need of a name to forum at kqed.org. Of course, social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, we're KQED Forum, or there's obviously the Discord community as well. I will say that I feel like I've been a bit of a... People who work with words, I think...

we always come to this conclusion, hey, you know, the words are really important. But increasingly, I feel like there is a kind of cognitive reality that we need labels for these experiences that people are having in the world, mostly so that we can communicate them to each other. So when you started talking with people about this desire to memorialize ongoing climate loss, did people go like, oh, yeah, I know what you're talking about? Or did they feel like it was your quixotic adventure? Yeah.

I mean, I think probably a combination, but I think that's the exciting thing about this word making is that you sort of find your brethren in it. And I think a lot of people right now, I will say what resonated with everybody is a feeling of deep climate grief and a feeling of, I mean, kind of connected to that feeling that you just...

described of that sort of one-two feeling, that split feeling of feeling like, can I enjoy this? Or, you know, am I allowed to enjoy this because this is maybe like a symbol of something bad happening? Like a lot of us are living in a deep state of grief that is either like so extremely felt that it shuts us down or so extremely buried that, you know, it's working at us on like a cellular level.

And then something like the L.A. fires happens and it kind of awakens it for us. And so I think the grief really resonates with a lot of people. And so you go kind of like looking for other examples of, you know, kind of memorials, but it's sort of different, like a war memorial or something or the memorial of a genocide is kind of different from that.

Yeah. So I had a lifelong fascination and I have a lifelong fascination with memorials and I've worked in human rights, both as a journalist and kind of in the field of human rights for a long time. But it's true that most memorials are built to some sort of atrocity, often committed by humans against other humans. And so there's something a little bit more...

borderless and porous and ineffable about trying to create a memorial to climate change in part because it's often not such a concrete loss. You know, yes, X number of people died, you know, 3000 people died in the Tubbs fire. And actually Sonoma County is building a memorial to the Tubbs fire, but climate change itself, it's like, where are the edges and the boundaries of climate change? Like even the LA fires, like they're, they're sort of separate and connected fires. So our,

Are we actually building a memorial to the specific place, to the people or to like the changing landscape itself? So part of the problem with memorializing climate change is that you're in certain ways memorializing something that has been lost and hasn't yet been lost. It's in the process of being lost. So it's like a syntactical problem and a little bit of a design problem as well.

Well, and it's also, you know, like with the L.A. fires, we, I mean, you hear weather people and fire specialists kind of struggling to couch things the right way. And so they end up saying things like,

Well, we know that it wouldn't have happened without climate change, but we can't attribute it directly to climate change because, of course, the world is complex and it's stochastic and all this stuff. And I think that's one of those things that's very tricky because we know that climate change is a part of so many things. It doesn't attach to them, but we don't.

But it's not like it's a match. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. Everything that is burning. Yeah. Yeah. The other thing that seems tricky, too, right, is there is the collective component of memorializing climate change. But then there's also the like personal sort of like what role are you playing in this larger system? Yeah, totally. I mean, the thing that I really love about, you know,

you know, memorial spaces that are not without their political issues, certainly. But the thing I love about most memorial spaces is that they invite people together to come together to memorialize. But actually often the experience of being at a memorial is a very singular internal one where you are sort of, there's this like quiet solemnity where you are there with other people, but feeling your feelings and attending to the grief in the past and thinking toward the future, like on your own. And I think that that is,

In a state where I have felt, like, concerned about my...

role as a wordsmith and the power of words and like, you know, this, this feeling of like a linguistic where that I keep writing the same thing again and again, or how to effectively describe the changing world, you know, feeling like, what are, what do we even do? Words do. There's always been something really dynamic to me about stepping into a space that is like before and beyond language and the, and allowing the feeling to be there and then trying to name that afterward, as opposed to sort of having the words be, um,

the sort of genesis of feeling. Yeah.

And we're going to talk about some of the specific memorials to climate that you discovered. But you kind of use as kind of the canonical example of memorial this Vietnam War memorial by Maya Lin too, right? Because you had that kind of experience with it, right? Yeah, when I was a kid. And it's sort of level of abstraction was also kind of shocking the kind of power it can have too. Yeah, yeah. When I was a little kid, my dad sort of dragged me and my brother. We grew up in San Francisco and he dragged us to Washington, D.C. because he got like...

And I was just so grumpy and it was cold. It was around Thanksgiving and I was just like, I don't want to be here. And then I sort of stepped up to the I had no sort of scaffolding for understanding and I stepped up to Maya Lin's Vietnam Veterans Memorial and I was like, I don't want to be here.

and just was like completely overcome. And I was like 12 years old. And I knew nothing about the history of that memorial, which is like quite profound, which is that it was incredibly controversial. And really it was one of the, she is the torchbearer for what is now considered the memorial

more the modern memorial, which is one that isn't figurative. It's not a statue of soldiers, right? It's not just, it's not a statue of sort of like the fallen. It's a much more metaphoric, symbolic space. And I think it's that metaphoric, symbolic space that evokes real feeling. We're talking with writer Lauren Markham about her book immemorial released today on transit books as part of their series undelivered lectures. We'll be back with more right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with writer Lauren Markham about her book In Memorial, out today from Berkeley's Transit Books. And part of this book is finding labels, finding new names for feelings that arise during the climate crisis. You can share yours at

forum at kqed.org. We can try and find a label for you. Or Lucy in San Rafael has her own new word. Welcome, Lucy.

Hi, thanks. I'm thinking a word to be hope-spiration, like a combination of hope and both desperation and inspiration, because you have to continue to keep the promise alive while having this feeling of nothing's going to change or there's nothing one person can do. So it's kind of like a combination of those three words.

Beautiful. I love that. I also love Rebecca Solnit talks a lot about, you know, the difference between hope and optimism and how having hope isn't just some Pollyanna thing of walking around the world being like, it'll probably be fine. You know, so I appreciate the inspiration and desperation kind of twin in your word. Yeah, yeah.

Why don't we talk a little bit about a couple of the memorials that you encountered that kind of shaped the way that you were thinking about memory and climate change? Yeah. So, I mean, there were a number of them. And I should say that not all of these are sort of billed by the artist or the creator as memorials necessarily. So they sort of fall into my memory.

broader definition and they kind of spoke to me in the way that memorials do. So one, um, is called ice watch by the, um, by the artist, Olifar Ellison and he, and another, um, another artist, Minik Rosen, I think is their name. Um,

somehow collected hunks of calved glacier and brought those hunks of ice into central squares one in Copenhagen outside they did it in a few places but one was in a kind of

square in Copenhagen outside of where the COP was meeting. And so it sort of forced this encounter and just people walking... COP meaning the climate, big climate meeting. Exactly. And so it sort of forced people both going to the COP or just people walking through their daily lives to encounter this often abstracted thing. We talk about the melting glaciers, we talk about sea level rise, but that's one of the things about climate change is that

it's often an abstraction. Like until your state is burning or your house is on fire, like it often can feel like an abstraction. And so I think one of the things that that, you know, what I'm sort of talking about in terms of Memorial did is force this like, oh, this is the specific ice that calved. And we are now in this Copenhagen square, like watching it disappear. Yeah.

So that was a really moving one. There's another one, too. You cite this sort of Icelandic glacier with this writer, last name of Snare Magnusson. Yeah, yeah. It really interesting. It kind of gives a eulogy to this glacier which had disappeared. And I'll just read it here. Something I have right in front of me. You know, in the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path.

This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it. Yeah, isn't that beautiful? He read that and then it's a plaque that sits on top of the Ak Glacier, which is the first glacier to lose its status as a glacier. And I think what I love so much about that is that it speaks really clearly to the work that a memorial does, which is beautiful.

speaking to the future as much as it is to the past, right? Like he is directly addressing the future. Only you, future people, will know if we did it. Memorials aren't just about the past. They're actually conversations about the past toward the future.

A couple of listeners with comments on glaciers in the Alps. One listener writes, I passed up the chance to go to the Alps as a child where I would have seen glaciers that don't exist anymore, from which I learned not to assume that anything is permanent. Martha writes, we were in Europe when Switzerland held a funeral for the Tisal Glacier that was lost to global warming. It's interesting, like the ice...

versions of this seem like they are almost easier to memorialize. I don't know. It's almost like the melting itself feels like it kind of

accords with this idea of loss. Yeah, like you can actually watch it happen and it's a slower, I mean, right, because if you're, that's a really interesting point because you can watch a fire burn but it's so shocking and so devastating and so swift that it's almost like, it's so devastating you almost can't hold it. Yeah, and its dynamics are different than the kind of slowness of losing. exactly. Let's bring in Susan in San Rafael. Welcome, Susan. Hi,

Hello, can you hear me? Yeah, sure can. Go ahead.

First of all, this is a wonderful conversation. Thank you, thank you. And I want to go to Lauren's comment about what is it before and beyond language? If we're talking about our grief for this enormity of this beautiful thing of which we are a part. And I was at a writing workshop at the beginning of the pandemic, and we were all with a poet on

on a stream, and we were trying to figure out how to describe the little floral lads, and we're playing with the words, which felt inadequate. And this 14-year-old boy walks by. We're on the bridge. He just goes down to the shore, splashes the water on his face. He goes, ah. And it was his direct... I'm like... I was like, I put my pencil down, and I'm like, well, I'm just done with the words, because it was...

That ritual of direct communion. And so you have memorials and you're talking about nouns. But I also think to metabolize our grief, we need to think about choreographies of what we do with our care. Absolutely. That's so beautifully put. And one of the things I talk about in the book is ritual and is the importance of having ritual and engaging people.

with both what is being lost and what is still here in a ritualistic way. That was such a beautiful moment you just described. There's the poem. I mean, it's almost interesting because you have a ritual poet in the book. Yeah. C.A. Conrad. Yeah. And it's interesting because C.A. Conrad, they do the almost opposite thing. They enter what they call the Walmart dimension. Yeah.

Right. This is this. They play the call of an extinct Hawaiian bird. Yeah. Or any animal. They do many animals. Many animals. And then go sit on the floor of a Walmart. Bathed in that song. And then they enter a trance state. So they allow the extinct animal to...

put them into a trance state. Then they sort of walk in that trance state into a Walmart and sit. They learned that if they lay down, they'll get evicted. But if they just sit there, people will kind of leave them alone. And then they kind of like download a poem or they like channel a poem. And that's in their book, Resurrecting Stink Vibration. Yeah.

And like, for what purpose, though? You know, like, sometimes in that kind of performance art, there's a part of me that's like, come on, man. Yeah. But but me. Well, I think clearly it serves a purpose for this person, you know, because what they talk about, they have a really beautiful interview with the with the

writer and reader and critic David Naiman, where they talk about this. But I think for C.A. Conrad, it's, you know, I think this is their version of going down to the river and splashing water on their face and saying, ah, you know, that they're feeling as though they are communing with through the sort of far out ritual, communing with both the creature that has gone extinct and the feeling and the loss like on

on a personal level and on a planetary level, like this species no longer exists anymore, you know, and I'm going to feel that thing and then see what kind of art comes through me. So maybe not to everyone's taste, but they're loving it. Let's bring in Jay in Livermore with a different perspective. Welcome, Jay. Hi, good morning. Hey, go ahead.

So I think, you know, I think this book is great. I think the more stuff that's out there about climate, the better. But like I think some of the other listeners have alluded to, I think there's this trend that we're mourning something that's just not dead. And I think that the media over the last 30 years has gone from.

ignoring climate change or saying it's not real to adaptation and sadness. And there's this enormous 99% gap in the middle that is, let's get off our butt and do something. It's not sexy for the media and authors to say at the end of every broadcast, oh, by the way, you should do this. You should do this. It's more sexy to adapt and be sad. But we're forgetting the part that's the most important part. And I think we should, and the media should in general focus on that. Yeah.

Jay, thanks. I mean, you actually talk about action in a couple of different ways in this book. And Jay, the first part of it is you essentially dive into action. Like, why am I even thinking about this? Like, I'm not allowed to have feelings. I should be acting. Yes. You know, like sort of impatience with feeling. So, Jay, I feel like we might be brethren otherwise.

And on this, like I tend to be someone who feels like I have no time for feeling because there's too much work to be done and very much agree that the case is not closed on climate change. One of the things, though, that I come that I sort of come to in this book is that ignoring the feeling and simply focusing on action is its own sort of there's that that's sort of thin ice and faulty territory as well.

I mean, let's talk a little bit more about that. I mean, you kind of go into it through a book called A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety. Yeah, yeah. This is the author, Sarah Jaquette Ray. She writes, the myopic focus on action at the expense of theorizing, cultivating collective and personal resilience, and also plain old contemplation is also kind of anti-intellectualism. I mean—

Maybe it's okay to be anti-intellectual, though. Yeah. I mean, I think though that I am someone who is so focused on action that, as I said before, it often happens at the expense of contemplation and of feeling. And, you know, I lost... My dad passed away a few months ago and I noticed a similar trend in myself in sort of like, okay, what needs to be done? You know, he's dying. What needs to be done? We need a caregiver. We need a hospital bed. We need this and we need that. And that stuff all did need to be done. I

I also just needed to sit there and feel the weight of the loss of my father dying. Like, both needed to happen. And in fact, one sort of relied upon the other. You know, in order to be an effective actor, I needed to really...

allow myself to feel the feelings of grief and the momentousness of what was happening. And that actually fueled and clarified my action. And meanwhile, you know, the idea of this book and the idea of feeling grief is not that we just sort of sit in a puddle and melt away into just, you know, grief land. But it's actually that and that's why I love the memorial so much is that it's like creating the space for the grief to be metabolized such that we can make use of it. And that's really like the focus of this book. Mm hmm. Mm hmm.

We are talking with writer Lauren Markham about her book "Immemorial," which is released today.

It's on finding the language and rituals and action, I'd say, to memorialize our climate losses. It's out with Transit Books in their Undelivered Lecture series. There's also a launch event tonight with Jenny O'Dell, friend of the show. It's tonight at 7 p.m. at Cellar Maker in Berkeley. And, of course, we also want to hear from you. We're trying to sort of name some of the sort of novel feelings that have arisen

during the climate crisis. I would say another one of the feelings that I discovered in myself would be the sort of choices, thinking about the choices that have accreted such that we need more wildfire for the health of our landscapes. And so therefore fire is sort of good, but we also have too much fuel built up by mismanaging the forest. And so the solution that we need is also one that we can't have and is dangerous. That's a good one. Or how to like understand when you see...

smoke and from a fire that not all of it is bad. Yeah. Um, the number is 866-733-6786. The email is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on blue sky on Instagram or KQED forum can join the, the discord community. Um, one of the interesting things, and this comes up in the book, uh, as well are the sort of similarities in grief between different kinds of, of mourning. Um, and,

For example, Holly writes,

And I have a similar feeling now of trying to cherish nature while feeling such pain over what is disappearing before our eyes.

I don't have a word for these simultaneous feelings, but there must be one in another language. Beautiful. God, that description of your experience of your mother dying is so resonant with me. And I'm sorry for your loss. And yeah, I completely agree. It's interesting, though, because I have experienced, I don't know if you, Alexis, or you, Holly, have experienced this, but...

you know, sometimes getting trapped in the grief such that you're just sort of walking around the world being like, and that's doomed and that's doomed and we're screwed here and this is horrible, you know, and I don't think that that is a way to live. I don't think that that's helping the climate cause. I went, this actually was in the book and then we cut it because it was just too much, but I went to, when I was like,

eight months pregnant and went to this meditation retreat at Spirit Rock. And it was all like sitting outside, you know, the whole retreat, we were like sitting outside and it was in one of those like unholy heat waves where it was like 100 degrees. And I was just so pregnant and it was so hot and we were outside and so much. So we would like do the sitting, you know, and then we would connect with nature and do our meditation. And then and then we could ask questions.

And there are all of these questions from everybody there being like, it's really hard for me to focus because I'm hearing the cars go by and I'm just thinking the cars are the reason for this heat wave. And I also have a car and I whatever, you know, and so this poor person is just trying to sit and meditate and is so carried away and so distracted. And then another person's like, I hear the bird songs. It just makes me so sad for all the birds that have been lost, you know? And so I think a lot, it showed me that so many of us fall into this trap of just being stuck in

Only in what's this is to Jay's earlier point, only in what's being lost and what's imperiled and not just in what still exists. And I think that love is the thing that allows us to act ultimately. And maybe that's why some of these things are coming up with parents and people thinking about those relationships and the things that they love. Let's bring in Tanya in Berkeley. Welcome, Tanya.

Hi, thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it. I am somebody who is very vigilant and I'm watching every little sign all the time of climate change. And I'm also comparing that to what I'm reading in the news and I'm feeling like they're not reporting on it in a way that makes me comfortable. And so I do feel.

very distracted by all of this all the time. And I just feel like the more we can talk about it and thank you to this radio show and to your book, I really look forward to reading it because I think it'll help me just to live in the present with, you know, this incredible loss that we're facing of a future that so many of us could have had, especially young people. I've lived in the Bay Area since 1969, and I just see so many changes that, you know, are just heartbreaking. Yeah. Yeah.

Hey, Tonya, thanks so much. I mean, I do think people, they do end up watching for the signs, right? And it ends up kind of coloring the way that they see everything. I mean, is that bad, though? It's kind of a...

Well, maybe it's that kind of like dual consciousness we need at the same time of sort of like the critical thinking to not just be walking around planet Earth sort of saying like, I mean, it's fine enough. It's, you know, it's not all burned. It's not, you know, like that's not a helpful stance, but also so we need to have that kind of critical thinking and looking at what's happening and looking at what's not being reported.

and looking at the effects. And I think a lot of it, it is this memory is sort of, you know, we need to look to science, but also just this like internalized memory of like, there used to be snow in Vermont when I was in college and there isn't as much snow anymore there, you know. But then also,

Also to not walk around just sort of looking at what is gone because we live on a really, really beautiful planet that is worth fighting for and is worth saving and still has like a tremendous amount of biodiversity and beauty. And I think sitting with that and appreciating that is really vital. We have some more kind of linguistic turns. You know, Joe writes in to say, you know, the author of the book says,

Mm-hmm.

It's interesting. I mean, these words and these labels for feelings, it's harder than it seems, I think. You think there would be easy extensions from the ways that we have of describing other grief, but it is kind of different. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, again, in part because

there are so many contours of the grief. Like part of it is you're grieving what already is lost. You're grieving what might be lost, but you don't know exactly what's going, you know, how that's going to shake out. You're grieving your own complicity in it. And really grieving the unknown is really complicated because there is something quite known about climate change. And then there's so much unknown about it. And partially the dimension of the unknown has these like other aspects

Other components, which is like it depends on what we do now. Right. And right now that I think grief is really up for people because of our current political landscape. Right. We're talking with writer Lauren Markham about her book Immemorial released today on finding the language and rituals to talk about and memorialize our climate losses. It's got a launch event with Jenny O'Dell tonight in Berkeley at Cellar Maker Brewing Company. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with writer Lauren Markham about her new book just out today from Transit Books in Berkeley. It's called Immemorial, and it's about trying to find the ways to talk about and memorialize what is being lost because of climate change. Let's bring in another call. Let's bring in Stephen in San Francisco. Welcome. Stephen.

Hi there. This conversation is so profound right now, and it's very personal for me because I've been caring for my mother with dementia for the last five years. And watching her slip away, yet she's still here. Wow.

I just put her in care. So there's another step there. And the thing I was touched by what you were talking about earlier is like, there's all this grieving going on, but then there's so much that we can do. And in my specific case, there's so much that I had to do. I mean, I had to, I, you can't stop caring for things. You can't stop.

paying the bills, you can't stop making coffee. I mean, we kind of have to do both. And that seems like such a brutal thing to say to everybody, but that's kind of where it's at. Absolutely. We have to do both. Absolutely. You know,

And then just, you know, grabbing onto everything else you've been talking about while I've been listening. So she's gone and she's moved out. And I'm cleaning the house and, you know, a lifetime of goods. And I found her old dollhouse furniture. I've got photos going back 150 years. I've got...

but it's wonderful because I still have it. Yeah. Right. Sounds like the house is almost a memorial. Yeah, right. Right. And I am packing things up and shipping them off to family. Distributing the memorial. Can't keep it all. Distributing the memorial. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, we can share it, you know, I mean, I don't know. I don't know what that is, you know, as a, as a bigger structure. I don't know how, how long the parallels will last in this metaphor, but I think it's actually, yeah. You know, Stephen, amazingly enough in this book, you talk about a particular memorial slash ritual that the artist, Jill Magid did, or I think that's how you say your name.

And she inscribed 120,000 pennies, right? With the phrase, the body was already so fragile during the pandemic. Mm-hmm.

But then put them into circulation, not unlike your mother's things, right? You made them active and real by putting them into the hands of people. Yeah, exactly. And there's also something like, actually one of the artists from the Bureau of Linguistical Reality spoke to this, like, not every memorial needs to be a building and a hulking thing that lasts forever. Like, some memorial experience can be ephemeral and can be, you know, the experience of what

visiting something once or holding a penny and then passing it on or going through your mother's belongings and figuring out who best will steward them, you know, and sending those out in the world can be like a memorializing ritual. And I just want to say thank you for sharing that. And I'm so sorry for, yeah, for your mother's dementia. And I think that's just like a completely beautiful metaphor for what we're talking about here. Yeah, absolutely.

Do you want to talk about one more memorial before we get into a couple of things, which is you mentioned at the top of the show that you had this kind of profound experience of Maya Lin's Vietnam War Memorial and then stumbled upon a climate change memorial called Ghost Forest in New York. Yes. Turns out Maya Lin was also the designer of that. So this what she did was she took 49. She visited.

The New Jersey Pine Barrens, right? Exactly. She visited the New Jersey Pine Barrens and had kind of, as she tells it, a pretty profound experience of grief and sadness there because it's this, you know, thousands of acres of forest that have been, because of sea level rise and salinization, have kind of bleached out and died out. And so they're called ghost forests and you kind of walk in and they're just these trees that are still standing, but they're dead because they've had to sort of suck up

salty water. So she took 49 of these and installed them in Madison Square Park in New York, in New York City. And it's just this, it was this incredible, then she called it ghost forest. And so these 49 dead trees are erected

among the living trees of this park. And so it is possible in the hubbub of New York, it was possible. She installed them there for a year. It was possible to walk through them and not even really like walk through the park and not even really notice them. But there was something like eerie and off about it, right? Because of these dead trees. But another interesting is she intentionally installed them there for a calendar year. So in the summer, the difference was incredibly stark, these dead trees and then these like living trees with all of these leaves. But in the winter, it was actually like

less perceptible, you know, because in their dormancy, you know, trees in the winter on the East Coast will kind of almost mimic death. That's interesting. Yeah. I wanted to talk about another component of this book, which is sort of how you try to

with the individual's kind of role in all these human systems because there is this issue in climate change where, you know, one car is not very meaningful, but all the cars are very meaningful. And you cite the English writer Daisy Hildyard who says that in these times it's almost like we have two bodies. I'm just going to quote from you quoting her in your book.

You have an individual body, she writes, in which you exist, eat, sleep and go about your day to day life. You also have a second body, which has an impact on foreign countries and Wales. While you sit somewhere, your second body is floating above a pharmaceutical plant on the outskirts of the city. It's inside a freight container on the docks and it's also thousands of miles away on a floodplain in Bangladesh in another man's lungs. Yeah.

I'm just, yeah, such a beautiful concept and quote. I mean, so what, so this is from her book, The Second Body, that actually, that is part theory, but it actually starts because her house is completely flooded out and she has to move out of her house. So it's sort of a, it's a short, it's a short book that sort of chronicles that and then her kind of reckoning with climate change. And so she says,

kind of has this theoretical framework that I find incredibly moving and incredibly useful to understand our impact, which is so diffuse and like climate change itself sometimes like so that can be an abstraction. And so she uses this abstraction, I think, in this metaphor to sort of say, look,

You have a body walking around, but you also have a body that's doing all of this stuff that is not good. I mean, it's contributing to all of these things. And that second body is that is the complicit body that we need to be kind of reckoning with, even as it had our second body has an impact that we might not even be able to specifically track because of all the entanglements and enmeshments of these complicated glutes.

global systems. Yeah, it's interesting because it's almost like that second body is just part of the sort of aggregate demand that sort of drives the world in all these ways. And as I was reading and I was thinking about that one answer to that is to find other ways to aggregate your other energies and thoughts and ideas aside from just your consumer demand, right? And that's channeling them into institutions and organizations that kind of work at that

level and on those larger levels i love it you're like suggesting a third body body yeah that's right yeah that like your first thinking feeling moral body can also have that kind of aggregate effect it's like channeled in the right way absolutely absolutely like it takes like as she's describing i mean it takes all these big infrastructural systems right to make that second body do anything exactly but what i appreciate though is that she's like making she's she's

Her theory, I love the third body. I'm really going to contemplate that idea. Next book, Alexis Madrigal, the third body. But I think what I appreciate...

in the second body metaphor in this sort of framework is that she's not sort of saying like gee whiz all these systems what can you do you know what I mean she's saying like no no no like you're in it you are in it and you might you might your complicity might not be fully in your control but some of it is in your control and it's certainly your responsibility yeah yeah

You know, one last memorial here, the climate chronograph. One thing I like about the climate chronograph, especially in distinction to the ghost forest, is that the climate chronograph is, as I understand it, a series of trees that are planted at sort of a distance from a rising shoreline, such that the more sea level rise that occurs, the more of them will die. Yes. The thing that's nice about this, though, is if we arrest the sea level rise... Yeah.

Totally. Then they'll live. This is exactly. So they've they've planted. They've this was a the not I think the National Parks wing of Washington, D.C., put out this call and they called it memorials to the future. And they were sort of like, we want a new memorial, you know, to be built. We have, you know, so propose something. And the one and it wasn't explicitly climate change, but the one that won this contest was called Climate Chronograph. I think it's back in 2017. This has not been built yet, but it will be.

And the designers kind of have planned this grove in such a way that the grade of the grove of cherry trees, these sort of iconic trees that, you know, bloom in D.C. in the spring, they're planted on the grade such that for every...

foot of sea level rise, four rows of trees will effectively die. The death will be slow, though, because like as the sea level rises, the tree doesn't die tomorrow. Right. It dies over time. So you'll kind of be able to see like almost like like an ombre of like, you know, of of of of change in the spring, because some of those trees will be the red, vibrant bloom, that pink, vibrant bloom. And some of them will be kind of grayed out and dead.

But yeah, like it does speak to agency. Right. It actually that that design sources from the nilometer, which was this, you know, ancient and ancient Egypt, this mechanism for tracking the water of the Nile and then kind of planning for crops and planning for the future. Such an interesting one. A listener over on the Discord writes, you know, any grief I have for future losses is

is matched by an equal or greater part of rage at prior generations for not solving this issue. Surely not everyone in the Gen X or Boomer or Millennials is responsible, but I've heard a constant refrain my entire life that Millennials and Gen Z should wait for our turn to change the world's political priorities. Any meaningful pressure to change...

met with patronizing dismissal, hand-wringing, or outright denial. In a democracy, we're collectively responsible for our political choices. Acquiescence is a form of cowardice and betrayal. And while I grieve the loss of the beautiful natural places I knew as a child, I grieve the failure of past generations to make the hard choices we needed 50 years ago.

Yeah, I totally, totally agree. There is certainly a sense that I don't know, I feel like national politics has demanded some like respectability politics of like, well, all in its own time. And, you know, patience, patience. And, you know, and I don't think that that tack has served us. I think that rage can be really generative. And I think that it can be really generative.

And I think and I also think it can shut us down. I'm speaking for me personally. So it's like rage being I like to think of rage in its most productive form as like a portal into something. And so I don't know. I wonder if we might take like a lesson from memorials here of sort of looking back toward the past and feeling enraged about what what in this case hasn't happened and what

wasn't done. And of course, yeah, the tsk, tsk, wait your turn, child, that didn't work out so well. And then sort of looking backward from a place of the presence and then alchemizing that rage and that grief into something toward the future, which I think is the work of Memorial. Let's bring in Arnold in San Francisco. Welcome, Arnold. Hi. Yeah, I think a word you might look at is...

Remorialize. Remorial. I love it. Because what that does is it acknowledges and celebrates what was, and it connotes and denotes continuation from here. Okay, that happened. Hmm.

What do we do next? So take a look at Remorialize. I just wrote that down in my copy of my book. She did. I can testify. She just wrote it down. I love it. Where were all you people when I was looking for my word? The Bureau needs more associates, although they do a great job in the book. They really do kind of a wonderful job. I do want to say for, you know, we had Rage, we had Action, we had these things. The book actually,

This book actually ends on quite an almost surprisingly hopeful note, I would say. Rebecca Solnit says you're choosing the future, you're having a kid. And I was really, you know, we've talked about parental grief at the beginning.

There is a certain way that kids' childhoods, we're the only ones, us parents are the only ones who are going to remember them. I mean, they are gone for our children. Like for your daughter or for my slightly older kids, they don't remember being two anymore. Only you remember that. And there's grief there, but there's also this kind of liberation too that they get to live their own life. And I was wondering if there's...

forgetting can be essential right i mean this this history we've had in the yeah in the 20th century of how we've built these systems like there's a way in which it kind of maybe we're too inscribed in our habits and memories of how the world has worked oh that's so interesting well i mean i

think the thing about my kid is that I can see like, oh, this is like a frequently unseasonable hot day or like there's no snow here anymore that you might have otherwise seen. My kid's two and a half. She's just delighting in the world that is, you know, and I think that that is something that children do that's so beautiful is like remind us to be in the beautiful elements of the present while also not, you know, sort of

Forsaking the facts that may be playing out on the difficult elements of the present. So I don't know if like to me the issue is like, oh, we need to be forgetting more. But it's perhaps more of like a demand of presence that forget. And we see this actually with people with dementia. I saw this with my dad when he was dying. There was like a profound presence that that induced for people.

my dad for all of us to like be in kind of a radical present. So interesting. Did you create new, any new rituals for yourself out of this? That's really interesting. Well, it's funny. I think all the time, I honestly think she might have talked about it on this very program, but I think all the time of what Jenny O'Dell does

said once which was like and she writes about this like capturing rainwater in a jar and then keeping that you know on her desk and sort of like holding a torrential downpour like with her she speaks much more beautifully about this I actually have like an altar pot

practice now where I put like flowers on my on my altar and I put like things that I find and little things that my daughter finds and I think there's something about kind of the collecting the ephemera of the earth and kind of like putting them this is getting really woo woo here but that is that is like a ritual because it

like a, because it looks beautiful and it, and it is sort of a catalog of little reminders of beautiful things. Um, but also it is like the ritual also requires a presence, you know, just like of the putting the altar together and, you know, looking at it. So what about action? Yeah. Have you, have you changed the way that you have approached certain,

behaviors your second body engaged in? Yeah, that's a really good question. I mean, I don't think that that was, you know, in certain ways, as we talked about before, like I almost over-prioritized action. And that is not because there's too much action to be done on climate change, but at the expense of feeling. There is always, always, always more to be done. I think one of the things that

that this book really grapples with is like, you know, as a writer is writing action, um, you know, is, is writing about climate change. Like how do we write about climate change in ways that is invigorating and enlivening? I really, again, love, love that point that was made earlier that like, if we're just writing doom and gloom stories, um, that's not actually useful. So I think it has changed, um, the way this book and writing this book has helped me change the way I think about writing about climate change. Yeah.

Martina writes, the book, I read an advanced copy, is an investigation into all the feelings around the simultaneous anxiety and grief many of us feel as we watch the world change, helpless to stop it. When emotional overwhelm is paralyzing and you feel useless and helpless, she shows us how turning toward people who are naming it, making art around us, and helping us to conceptualize and concretize this giant, all-pervasive feeling of dread.

That's a beautiful review. Put it on the back cover. Thank you. Yeah. And it is interesting how much people want to say, but we just need to act like we need... And then, of course...

All of the great policy work that's been done by the IRA to kind of deploy climate stuff could be swept away by a cultural movement. We have been talking with the writer Lauren Markham about her book Immemorial. It's just out today. It's on finding the language and rituals to memorialize our climate loss as part of Transit Books' undelivered lecture series today.

She's also got a launch event tonight with Jenny O'Dell, 7 p.m. at Cellar Maker Brewing Company in Berkeley. Thank you so much for joining us this morning, Lauren. Thank you so much for having me. It's been so lovely. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for another hour of Forum Ahead with Mina Kim.