After spending the first twenty-three years of my life in Brazil, I moved abroad in early 2018. Five years and many blows later, I felt like it was time for that experiment to come to an end and decided to move back home.
It’s been five months now, and it’s becoming increasingly clear to me that the home I left is not the place I found when I came back last May. I’d wager the whole country is different. Saying that Brazil has gone through a lot in those five years I’ve been away is an understatement: it most definitely has and it shows, in so many ways. The recent years haven’t been easy on anyone but billionaires, I know, but the difference between their effect in Germany and in Brazil is immense in a way that feels insurmountable.
As if that weren’t enough – and if you also come from the Global South, you’ll know that it never is –, I’ve also noticed another kind of change.
We've experienced more thunderstorms since May than I've cared to count. The Brazilian south has had several episodes of extreme rainfall, floods, landslides, and cyclones in recent months. In western Paraná, where I live, the severe and most recent string of thunderstorms started just over a week ago – right as I started an online sustainability course offered by the University of Edinburgh on Coursera, Learning for a Sustainable Future. As I started writing this, thunder rumbled above me and there was a cyclone warning.
A few years ago, I googled ‘climate change effects latin america’ and found an article on a popular Brazilian news website that read, ‘increases in average and extreme precipitation have been observed since 1960. … the intensity and frequency of extreme precipitation, as well as flooding caused by rainfall, will increase if the global temperature rises by 2°C or more.’ I was saddened but also somewhat relieved that it didn’t sound so bad, further deluding myself into thinking it would take a while for me to see any of that. Oh well.
Cut to 2023. Any chance of maintaining that illusion is wearing thin. Now, every time anyone talks to me about how much it’s raining this year, or that the weather’s so weird, the waterfalls are so full!, I do what I can do well and often effortlessly: I bring people down. I am become the destroyer of moods. Yep, I say, and we have to get used to it, going on to talk about what I've read about the causes, consequences, how the Global North was found to apparently be responsible for 92% of global emissions (I'm angry again just thinking about it), preventative measures. As you might imagine, people love that I do that and, yes, I'm so much fun parties.
Our farm is far enough from the nearest river that we're not in danger of flooding, but we are not getting off scot-free either. To me, personally, the change in routine and the sensory overload of thunderstorms put me in a constant state of anxiety and stress until it's over. Apart from that, thunderstorms in the countryside mean frequent blackouts. Too much rain causes erosion and can potentially spoil the crops. Worse than that, gales have become more frequent too – one afternoon this past July we came home to see broken roof tiles, fallen electricity cables, a beautiful, huge tree fallen on a shed, more than a dozen trees on the ground, all because of a cyclone.
At the exact moment that cyclone passed through our town, we were driving past a part of the land that is home to dense riparian vegetation on the one side of the road and a plantation of non-native trees on the other. We couldn’t see anything because of the rain, but we could hear heavy tree branches falling on the roof of the car. For a few seconds I was sure I was going to die on that dirt road on an embankment that slopes down to the motorway, near the eucalyptus plantation under which I’d lived in a tent as a child (don’t get too attached to this information; it’s a story for another time).
A few minutes later, still alive, we drove by fallen trees, branches, a lot of water and mud. The roof of one of the houses on a neighbouring farm had been almost completely destroyed. That same evening, another neighbour who lives further away from our farm sent us a video of the moment parts of their house and their entire cowshed were destroyed by the wind. A large part of their income comes from milking their many cows in that cowshed, with expensive machinery whose purpose is to make the daily work not so hard on the body. In the video, you could hear our neighbour’s despair. ‘What are we going to do now?’, she cried repeatedly. (Some positive rural gossip: their digital influencer daughter managed to get enough donations online for them to start rebuilding already a few weeks later, thankfully.) It was heartbreaking, all of it, including the fact that it'll probably happen again.
Still, and as weird as it is to write it, that was still lucky in many ways. No one on or near our farms lost everything they owned, was seriously injured, or died. Hooray?
Before I go on, I feel like I should first say that I’m not sustainability- or climate change-literate by a long shot and definitely not in a position to teach anyone about it – which is fine by me, there are a lot of experts working hard on this, a few of which I’m extremely proud to call my friends –, so that's not what this is about. I'll let you decide what it's about.
Sometimes I’ll hear people react to climate change the way I did when I read that article many years ago, and I’ll find it funny in a sad way. Frogs in boiling water, am I right?
I can’t help but think about how big on denial we seem to be. It might be one of our favourite collective past-times. Like that memed Top Gear gif where Jeremy Clarkson goes ‘Oh no! … Anyway’ after hearing something I couldn’t care less about (it was probably about cars?): something bad happens, we find out, it affects us for a second, we move on. Sometimes we’ll feel a little guilty about it, then forget it again. Rinse, repeat.
It might sound like it, but I don't blame us, and I think I get why we’re like that. The news make it sound simultaneously inescapable, urgent, and distant: there's nothing we could do, it seems, but if there were, we don't need to do it right now. Besides, bogged down with work, bills, personal problems, who has the time and energy for that?
If you think about it, in a world like ours, filled with powerlessness, stressful jobs, bills, mental health issues, poverty, crises, war, indefensible suffering, knowing that we also have some responsibility and power, even more so when together, should be a reason to celebrate, not a reason to feel guilty, pressured, bad.
It's hard to know what to do and hard to do it when we know, but there is more than enough space to not beat ourselves up for it. There's more than enough space for nuance and balance, too; to acknowledge that it's only going to get worse and we need to do something, but that we can't solve everything individually, so it's on all of us, collectively.
Personally, sometimes I just don't feel like I can take any of the steps I can think of. Then there are smaller steps I feel I could, others that feel too big: my autistic brain dreads even just the thought of a meeting, people, loudness, crowds, for instance, so I choose not to push myself too hard in that direction, even though I do see it as a necessary course of action. I might be able to do more if I felt much better (that'd be nice), but I will often have to make the executive decision to only engage in ways that work best in my case, and I'm fine with that. I still know it's necessary, but also that I'm not Superman.
The day I wake up to be miraculously ‘cured’ or to find I am the personification of Shell or Vale or Don Blankenship, I’ll think about giving myself a harder time. Until then, I’ll take on the load I can safely take on, as I imagine many others do, as I'd recommend you also do if you were to ask me, and doesn't that just sound… fair?
In that sense, I think we should also remind ourselves that things are as they are by design. It probably isn't a coincidence that we all seem so keen to let important issues fall through the cracks until the next crisis hits, or that we’re all too tired all the fucking time to do anything, or that most of the things we’re told to do that will supposedly stop climate change are small individual sacrifices, many of which will mean buying something different or new. It also doesn't help that the poorest of us are the ones who will suffer the most, while simultaneously being the ones who are more often asked to do something about it.
Buying H&M’s greenwashed t-shirts or taking shorter showers or not eating meat may have varying degrees of success and, okay, if a lot of us do some of these things, the results might be great, even. While I personally don’t think it’s the fairest and most efficient way of tackling climate change, it might still be a first step and one that doesn’t feel overwhelming. But in my book, individual action will never beat collective action, even more so when it involves giving more money to corporations who already have way too much of it. Our collective action should also take in consideration who's actually causing these problems, in a disproportionate amount, before we ask someone who has very little to give up on the little they have.
I've been thinking about it a lot, thinking about what to do – things that won't place all the blame on me as a way to get more of my money. It's not an easy thing to figure out, not even for experts, so why would it be easy for little old me?
But I’m finding my way, I think. With time I've come to believe and also find that there are other smaller and bigger things we can do to move forward and towards pressuring the people in power to do what they should’ve already done, and that they are within our reach.
Now that I think about it, maybe writing this can be one of those things too. Wouldn't that be nice (read: convenient)? Maybe you reading it is one of those things as well. Maybe not, how would I know? I wouldn’t: by my own admission, I know very little. But writing this feels like something already. Because I've decided to write this, here we are now, talking – and hopefully it doesn't just feel like a monologue to you.
There’s nothing I want to ask of you and there’s no lesson I want to impart. There’s too much of that out there already, I feel. More and more, I just feel the need to talk about this seriously (and by that I mean I’ll still make jokes along the way, because why the fuck not?) and to do so in terms of reality, of what’s happening to literally billions of people right now. To connect over the fact that if you’re reading this, chances are you’re human, and if so, you share this earth with me and with everyone else, and that's beautiful. Yes, I have my issues with people, but I love all of you, even the shitheads. Talking about this, doing whatever big or small thing we can, it's in all of our best interests – even the shitheads’.
If you've come this far, it would be remiss of me to not thank you for your time, so thank you. This definitely counts as reading, by the way, so go you, you reader! Set a timer next time – it counts as time away from doomscrolling and social media, too!
Take care of yourself, of your loved ones, of anyone you can right now – even more so if ‘anyone you can right now’ means just you.
See you next time.