We Are the Weather

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Americans gathered around their radios and listened as President Roosevelt explained the challenges that all Americans would face at the start of World War II. People would be taxed 90% of their income and endure food rations. Those on the coasts, where German planes might fly, would be asked to conform to blackouts, but even those in the Midwest participated in turning out their lights after dark. The author argues that without the full cooperation of every American, we may not have won the war. He quotes Roosevelt at length and repeats the last line of Roosevelt’s speech: “When, at the end of this great struggle, we shall have saved our free way of life, we shall have made no sacrifice” (10). This quote is an important part of Foer’s argument: What he asks is not a sacrifice if, in the end, we have done the right thing.

The author compares Claudette Colvin and Rosa Parks, both of whom defied Jim Crow-era laws and sat in the white section of the bus. Colvin did it first, but, Foer argues, no one remembers Colvin’s name because her’s wasn’t a “good story.” She was 15, pregnant with a child fathered by an older man, and poor. But Rosa Parks was attractive, married, and from a respectable family. This comparison helps him make his point that global climate catastrophe, like Colvin’s, is not a good story. The Rosa Parks story is captivating, elevating it to the memorable status of an American fable. But climate change, Foer argues, is the opposite. “The planetary crisis—abstract and eclectic as it is, slow as it is, and lacking in iconic figures and moments—seems impossible to describe in a way that is both truthful and enthralling” (15). It is nothing like the story of Rosa Parks or, for that matter, Jesus. He asks the reader: If Jesus had been killed in a bathtub rather than on a cross, would Christianity have spread? He also asks whether Anne Frank’s diary would have become a classic if Anne had been a middle-aged woman. The implied answer to these questions is “no.” Foer calls the climate crisis a “crisis of belief” (19). This is the main theme to which he repeatedly returns.

Twenty-eight-year-old Jan Karski, a Polish Catholic working in the Polish underground during the Nazi’s murder of the Jews during World War II, makes his way to America, where he tells Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter what’s happening in Germany. Frankfurter knows Karski is telling the truth about the systematic murder of the Jews, but he can’t believe it. He does nothing to help stop Hitler, and six million Jews die. Foer argues that Frankfurter had a crisis of belief. Many marketing studies show that certain “sympathy biases,” like using prominent names in ads or the ability to identify victimization, help sales. But the climate crises have what Foer calls “apathy biases,” meaning while the effects of climate change are vivid and personal, climate change as an issue is not. So, he argues, the details of climate change “feel abstract, distant, and isolated” (20). We may know they are true, but we can’t believe the forecasts of doom and desolation.

Foer’s family, who were Jewish, stayed in Poland during the war because they didn’t believe the Nazi annihilation of the Jews would happen to them or that it would get worse, but his grandmother left. She said goodbye to her mother and grandmother, the latter of whom would be holding her stepdaughter while they were shot by Nazis at the edge of a mass grave. Another Holocaust survivor, Raymond Baron, was asked if he knew what was coming. His answer: “I knew, but I didn’t believe it, and because I didn’t believe it, I didn’t know” (23).

A man pulls a 4,000-pound car off the body of a boy because he would do the same if it were his own son. But during the accident, many other people cleared cars to make way for the ambulance. Both one single man and the many who helped afterward, Foer argues, were needed for the boy to survive. (He did survive). Foer defines the word “emergency” as coming from Latin, meaning to arise and bring to light. The word “apocalypse” is Greek, meaning to uncover and unveil. The word “crisis,” also of Greek origin, means decision. Foer explains that the word “ambulance” is written in reverse so that people can read it in their rearview mirrors. Foer talks about the climate catastrophe and wonders what will happen. What kind of people will we be: those who work together to stop the climate crisis or those who do not? He wonders if we will reveal ourselves to be people “who put flashing lights atop our vehicles to avoid traffic but won’t turn off the lights in our homes to avoid destruction” (28).

Studies about sports indicate that the closer fans are to the field, the more they inspire a sense of “home,” thus giving athletes that home-field advantage. This has to do with the emotional current at the game coming from home-field fans. The issue with climate change is whether it can generate that kind of emotion. Foer admits he has a hard time feeling moved by the crisis: “When I was moved, the feeling was transient, and it was never deep enough or durable enough to change my behavior over time” (31).

When a hurricane threatens and Foer is on the road, he can’t get a plane home. He rents a car and battles the storm to drive to Brooklyn so he can be with his sons. His mother tells him he’s a good dad, but being there doesn’t change the fact that he wouldn’t know what to do if a hurricane actually hit. Still, he says, “doing nothing felt good” (33). Once home, he wonders if anyone who sees an ambulance, with its lights flashing and horn honking, needs to see the word “ambulance” in writing to understand it’s an ambulance. He posits the rhetorical question, “Isn’t it like a boxer writing the word ‘fist’ on his boxing glove” (33)? This thought leads him to examine his own position regarding climate change. He wonders why he is so indifferent to climate change—the subject of his own book. Then he realizes that “it’s because you have overestimated your commitment while underestimating what is required” (34). He concludes that the truth about climate change must be that we don’t care.

Rachel Maddow, Foer says, makes liberals feel better, but he warns that its dangerous to feel better when things are not getting better. He uses electric vehicles as an example of something that makes us feel better about climate change but isn’t helping thwart it because the damage to the environment to make electric cars far exceeds the benefit they provide. He writes, “[…] an inflated sense of accomplishment can relieve the burden of doing what actually needs to be done” (38).

When it becomes clear that a shortage of bees means less fruit is pollinated, farmers invent a laborious technique that uses humans to pollinate the flowers. A photographer watching the process is wowed by the ingenuity and efficiency. But Foer laments this conclusion and argues that having humans do the work of bees is anything but efficient.

Foer argues that people who annually put in great effort to share Thanksgiving dinner with their families don’t do it because they feel especially close to their families. He wonders how many people actually decide to celebrate Thanksgiving with their families or whether they just do it as a habit, the same way they allow an ambulance to pass or participate in a wave at a baseball game?

Green arrows directing grocery shoppers to the fruits and vegetable sections, Foer says, produced skyrocketing sales in fruits and vegetables. Mandating organ donation results in less organ donation, yet making organ donation voluntary results in more organ donations. The point of these examples is to prove that for change to take place, the architecture of the event itself needs to change. To that end, Foer says, for people to take climate change seriously, we have to change the way climate change is presented: “Building a new structure requires […] dismantling the existing structures in the way, even if we’ve grown so accustomed to seeing them that we no longer see them at all” (46).

Foer writes that when a social norm changes quickly, it “releases” people to act. As an example, he discusses the rapid change in cigarette-smoking habits in America. Social change, he says, is the result of many chain reactions that happen at the same time. Likewise, this is what happens with climate change because social change and climate change, Foer says, “Both cause, and are caused by, feedback loops” (51). This would also be true of the baseball wave. The people next to you do it, and so on and so on, which is why you do it. But where does the wave begin? “Just as social movements like polio vaccination, #MeToo, smoking cessation, and environmentalism are advanced by concurrent forces, they are also hindered by concurrent forces” (50).

One example of a successful social movement was a 2018 walkout by Google employees regarding the company’s treatment of female employees. “In less than a week, an international protest was organized. A week later Google changed its corporate policy” (52). Foer asks the rhetorical question, who cured polio? His answer is that no one did and everyone did; it happened because people across the globe assented to the vaccine.

Foer talks about the movie made by Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth. He applauds the movie and lists various actions we can take to help stop climate change. These suggestions include everything from planting trees, to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, to praying. But Foer says that Al Gore left the most important climate destroyer out, and he believes Gore did so because the industry he didn’t mention is so powerful. Foer says, “It is impossible to explain this omission as accidental without also accusing Gore of some kind of radical ignorance or malpractice” (55). Foer doesn’t tell the reader what this omission is in this chapter. He explains that the Paris Climate Accords propose to reduce warming by two degrees Celsius, but Foer says this is woefully low and will result in major destruction. He provides a list of the things that will happen if we only reduce emissions by 3%: Sea levels will rise by 1.6 feet, creating massive flooding; 400 million people will suffer from water shortages; and half of all animal species will face extinction.

This one-page chapter begins with a quote from General Eisenhower in which he pre-emptively says that if D-Day is a failure, it won’t be the fault of the millions of men in the air, on land, and at sea; it will be his failure alone. Foer then quotes Neil Armstrong discussing the moonwalk’s success: “When you have hundreds of thousands of people all doing their job a little better than they have to, you get an improvement in performance. And that’s the only reason we could have pulled this thing off” (63).

Foer finally reveals his thesis: The most devastating impact on the planet regarding global climate change is factory farming. He discusses why, like Al Gore, he avoided saying it up till now. “Conversations about meat, dairy, and eggs make people defensive” (64). He then confesses that while he was on the road promoting his previous book about food and the environment, Eating Animals, he was sneaking cheeseburgers and eggs on the side, hiding the fact that he wasn’t eating like the vegetarian he claimed to be. He talks about confronting his hypocrisy, and he does so in order to admit to his audience that he knows how hard it would be to stop eating meat.

He speaks about two critical areas in the Bible, the only two, where God asks people where they are. The first time is after Adam hides following the moment he ate the forbidden fruit. God asks, “Where are you?” The second time God poses this question is just before he asks Abraham to kill his son. Foer says that God doesn’t want to know where in space they are—he is God, he already knows that. What he wants to know is something deeper: Where are they in relationship or connection to the events? What is in their soul, their being?

He speaks about God and our deeper connections as a prelude to his greatest question: “But future generations will almost certainly look back and wonder where we were in the Biblical sense. Why on Earth—why on Earth—did we choose our suicide and their sacrifice” (69)?

He claims that the information we’ve been relaying about climate change is inaccurate, and he sets up the next section of the book as the one and only time he will offer statistics related to farming and climate change. But first, he wants his readers to ask themselves, as he has done, what is their position regarding climate change—where are we?