Today, Explained - Fighting climate despair

Episode Date: July 29, 2022

Climate change has driven some environmental activists to extremes. We talk about overcoming despair with Terry Kaelber, whose husband David Buckel took his life to protest inaction, and Tim DeChristopher, who was imprisoned for his activism. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Mounsey with help from Christian Ayala, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Noelle King It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. I'm starting today's show with not a warning exactly, but a note that we will be talking about despair and we'll be talking about a suicide. In the spring of 2018, a man named David Buckle took his life at sunrise in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. David had been a successful lawyer, but he left the law to become an environmental advocate. Climate change made David despondent, the sheer bigness of it. And he decided that the way to force the world to pay attention was to take his life in a public and very unusual way, self-immolation. David set himself on fire. Here's what we're going to do coming up.

We're going to talk to David's husband about his despair, and we're going to talk to a climate activist who has also struggled with despair about how not to lose hope. Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connectsontario.ca.

Terry Calvert, you and David were together for 34 years, first as partners and then as husbands. Tell me what you can about David. What type of person was he? Oh, he was, of course I'm biased, but he was an amazing individual who kind of his whole reason for being was to work to make the world a better place. He was very goal-oriented to a fault. Once he decided he wanted to try to achieve something, he would study it, learn about it, become an expert, and then create a plan for what he wanted to achieve. And he pretty much achieved everything he set his mind to, but climate change, I think, was a much bigger issue. So he wasn't, you know, that was not an issue he could solve on his own. In his normal day-to-day life, what were some of the things he did that might telegraph to me,

this is a person who cares about the environment? Just all sorts of ways. He, you know, in his private life, he was very frugal. If he ran water in the sink to get it to a certain temperature, he would collect it and then use it to water plants. So he would never waste any water. Or when he took a shower, he would turn off the shower when he didn't need to have it on. He would soap up and then turn it off. He was very frugal in terms of his clothing, very basic clothing, did not try to buy a lot, was not a consumer. And those were all, I think,

for him, those were all choices about, you know, how to be in this world in a way that minimizes our footprint on it. And so he moved in that direction. A decade before he died, David left the law, his job at Lambda Legal, and started working in community agriculture in Brooklyn. He became quite interested because one of the strategies that a lot of older people were really interested in and took to was the community gardens that also became the backbone of urban farming in cities around the U.S. and also in New York. And he became really interested in that and discovered that there was a community farm within walking distance in Red Hook, Brooklyn, that was about a 20 minute, half an hour walk.

And so he went over there and started volunteering and discovered that when they would clean the urban farm, when they would have refuse like that, they were just kind of throwing it away. And he realized you shouldn't do that. You should be composting it. So he then, because of that, developed what eventually became the largest composting site in the nation that was run entirely on renewable resources. And that's what he was doing up until his death. Working with the earth that way gets you a lot less attention than being a successful lawyer, I'd imagine. Was he happy with the work he was doing? Oh, he loved the work he was doing. And actually, you know, he was never really into the specific tension as a lawyer. That was never anything that drove him. Really what interested him was the kind of impact he was

having on people's lives. Did you and David ever talk about the impact of the work he was doing versus how big the problem was? No, we never talked about that directly. I mean, we did talk. It's not that we didn't talk about climate change and global warming, of course. Really, what I think became such a tremendous barrier for him is he couldn't figure out where he would go next to continue to drive meaningful change. And there was kind of this sense that everything seemed so fragile with what he was trying to do. And I think that frustrated him deeply. Fragile in what way?

Well, I think you get tired of fighting, actually. I think that's what was going on later in life. You know, he got tired of it. It's like, how long can you constantly be the person who's trying to focus people on what the problem is and where the solution lies? And he would see it and know it, and was often the person who would speak out, but it often meant that it was uncomfortable for other people.

And, you know, after a while, you get tired of doing that. You get tired of always being the person who's reminding folks that they can do more, and why aren't they, given the crisis we are in the midst of. And yeah, that was I think one of his major challenges. He had a goal but he couldn't figure out where to go next. The status quo of society is so hard to move and change and here we need massive change at every level. I mean in some ways I would argue kind of the

fundamental ways in which our world is set up and the economy has to drastically change. We can't be a consumer economy anymore. The earth will not support it anymore. And yet we have, all of our systems are set up based upon consumerism. And we measure whether or not we're successful by how much stuff we make and sell. Anyway, that, I know that was part of David's frustration is trying to figure that out. Like, where do you go?

Eventually, David did make a decision, and I want to ask you about that decision, and I understand that this is very difficult. Do you feel that you know why David took his life in the way that he did and when he did? You know, I have to say, you know, no one knew that he was going to do this. It was a complete shock to everybody.

He had, you know, I found stuff afterwards that showed he'd been planning this for a couple of weeks. So it wasn't something that was a spur of the moment. I think he decided it was something he needed to do. And I think, and I didn't understand the degree to which this was the case, but, you know, for the six months up to this, he was in a very kind of dark time. I think he just was very, all I can say is frustrated. He couldn't figure out what he could do.

I felt like there were other times in his life where we went through this and we figured something out. Oddly enough, like the month before he died it was like he it must have been once he decided to do this he just he found comfort in that because he didn't he oddly enough seemed better but i think there are a number of things going on for him. He was getting older, and I think it bothered him that he, you know, this was, his sight ran on human labor, and that was the primary way in which they were able to compost the tons and tons and tons of material every year. And that was getting harder for him. You know, and I think also in his mind, in addition to, you know, he had been, we had traveled to areas of the world where Buddhism was practiced.

And he was aware of, of course, the Buddhist tradition of setting oneself on fire when you really wanted to bring attention to something. And I suspect, erroneously, he kind of grabbed hold of that and thought, if I'm getting old and I can't affect the change I want to change, maybe I can do something in how I die that will cause people to wake up. I mean, the irony is, it's like he knew this, but he, you know, all these things you're, you're in the news for 15 seconds and the news doesn't, they're not interested in really his message there. It's, it's the sensationalism of somebody

who set themselves on fire. And so, you know, I, you know, I know, I just think the whole thing's a complete waste and he lost his way. If he had been able to hang on, he would have had so much more impact. But I think, given his skills and talents, I'm not sure he could quite figure out how to, where that would be. And I think that probably was really, no, I think, I know that was

really hard for him. Because his whole reason for living was, if I can continue to contribute to make this a world a better place, great. If not,

time for me to go. I want to ask you lastly, I mean, I'm wondering if there's anything that you look around at today that you think might make David optimistic if he were still with us? I would say, I think the places he would put his hope in would be the people who are individually really driving change in their lives and in their communities. You know, he really believed at this point that change won't happen unless we individually decide what is it that we're going to do to participate and help drive the kind of change we need to save the earth. And that no matter how small the act, every act becomes important. It's like the ripples on a pond. I think he really believed that if everyone started thinking this way, the change would happen. And, you know, my fear about

the news right now is that the news focuses on how terrible things are getting. And it's too bad it's not balanced by all the various efforts that are going on. There's so many people now who are really trying to come up with solutions to reduce our carbon use, to change farming, to change kind of how we consume things. There's just so much going on, and I think he would find great hope in that. Coming up on Today Explained, how to hope and to fight when despair is real.

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It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. David Buckle's suicide was very rare, but it was not a wholly isolated event. This past April, a climate activist named Wynne Bruce self-immolated outside of the Supreme Court in what his friends and family told reporters was a protest against inaction on climate change. Tim DeChristopher remembers these stories. He remembers David's story well. Tim lives in Maine now, but a few days before David died, he had been walking in Prospect Park. It's something that had an impact not just on me, but with a lot of climate activists that I knew, and even a lot of relatively new climate activists that might have been going through kind of their first wave of struggling with despair and the kind of inevitable emotional and spiritual challenges

of doing this work, it's something that rattled a lot of people. A lot of us feel that inadequacy of our efforts and that hopelessness about being able to turn things around and that frustration with society's lack of response. And a lot of activists, including myself, you know, struggle with suicidal thoughts. So yeah, it's definitely something that rippled through the community. You've struggled with suicidal thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. You know, particularly for the past eight years, I've had a number of times where I was pretty close to taking my own life. I don't want to say it's an inevitable challenge of this work, you know, because it's a deeply personal and complicated

thing. Some of that is probably related to my climate activism and, you know, what's going on in the world. But it's also, you know, related to my own shame and loneliness and things like that. And I'm sure the same is probably true of folks like David Buckle and Wynne Bruce, you know, that did make it clear that their act of taking their own life was somehow connected to climate change, but I'm sure they had a lot of other stuff going on for each of them as well, which I think is always the case for folks who commit suicide, that it can be really complicated. I think it's something that unfortunately we don't talk about enough in the climate movement or in activist movements or in society in general. But, you know, I think it's important to be more open, both about the despair that a lot of us feel about climate change and about the personal, emotional, and spiritual struggles

that a lot of us are facing. I wanted to talk to Tim DeChristopher in part because he's made his own choices that edge into extreme territory, including one very dramatic act of civil disobedience that made him a household name for a few days back in 2009. The specific thing that was going on there was at the very end of the Bush administration, they were auctioning off oil and gas leases for lands right outside of arches and canyon lands, national parks. The next one would be partial number 884. The bidding was already underway when DeChristopher sat down, armed with a white laminated card with the number 70 in big black letters. He just watched it first,

then raised his card sporadically, simply driving prices higher. And then he kept the card high, actually winning a dozen bids in a row worth nearly $2 million. You are aware that you could get in trouble, right? Yeah. The Bureau of Land Management is not like, it's a federal organization, yeah? Yeah, and I knew that I would likely go to prison for that. And I kind of sat there. Once I saw the opportunity there in the auction room,

I kind of sat there and said, okay, well, if I went to prison for a few years, could I live with that? And thought, yeah, that would suck, but I could live with it. But on the other hand, if I see this opportunity to potentially make a difference and don't take it, and 20, 30 years down the road

as the climate crisis continues to unfold and I'm meeting young people that have been born into a broken world and I knew that I had a chance to potentially do something about it to reduce their suffering and I didn't take it because I was afraid of the consequences. Could I live with that? And that's what I ultimately decided that, you know, no, I couldn't live with that. And it was that long-term view that really motivated me to action. So I started just to drive up the prices and would get out before I won anything.

And then finally realized that I had to actually keep these parcels out of the hands of oil companies. And so I started bidding to win. And I won 14 parcels in a row before they finally stopped the auction and took me out and questioned me about what I was doing. And I made it very clear that this was an act of civil disobedience to stand in the way of this auction because it was a crime against the American people and a threat to my future. And so that kind of put things into chaos.

That was about exactly a month before Obama took office. And so it created enough confusion for long enough that things were still up in the air when he came into office. And the first act of his new Secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, was to invalidate that auction and acknowledge that they didn't follow their own rules in the first place. But of course, they still continued to prosecute me. You were sentenced to prison, yeah? Yeah, I was sentenced to two years in prison, served 21 months. Then I got accepted to Harvard Divinity School while I was still incarcerated and so went there shortly after I was released and have done a lot of different things since then. Spent some time

as a hospital chaplain, worked as a massage therapist for a few years, and am now a farmer. And I also started an organization called the Climate Disobedience Center and work with lots of other folks that are engaging in civil disobedience to defend a livable future. Would you call what you did in your 20s extreme? Is there any part of you right now that looks at your 20-something self and says, oh kid, you should have done that differently? In terms of disrupting the auction and other civil disobedience that I've taken, you know, I think that was very much in alignment with what was necessary and actually came out of kind of my most grounded moments. It's not the place that I'm at anymore, taking that level of risk or playing that role in the movement.

I think I am in a different place right now. But, you know, I'm glad that I took those actions when I did. I want to take us back to David Buckle and something that his husband told us. now. But, you know, I'm glad that I took those actions when I did. I want to take us back to David Buckle and something that his husband told us. He said David got tired. And so I wonder, as you consider his actions in the grand scheme of actions that people have taken to draw attention to what is going on in the world, is there anything that gives you hope? You know, that sense of being tired, particularly being tired of playing a certain role, is something that I can really resonate with. And that's something that was very true for me when I went through a really big period of depression and was pretty suicidal.

But part of what got me through that was, you know, realizing that there's still lots of opportunities to reinvent myself and to engage with the world in different ways, to step outside of that role. And, you know, that's where I pulled back from being a pretty much a full-time activist and engaged in lots of other different kinds of work. Like as a farmer, you know, I spent yesterday planting potatoes and weeding the garlic. And like, none of that is revolutionary. None of that is, you know, the job that climate activists assign to themselves of changing everything, changing our whole energy system and transportation system and agricultural

system and political system and economic system. You know, that's an incredible burden that we put on ourselves. The thing that perhaps not gives me hope, but gives me faith in and commitment to stick around is knowing that I am a part of this web of life that is far bigger and more complex than I could ever possibly understand. And that, you know, I'm 40 years old now and still have plenty of time left.

And with the way that our actions ripple out through others and through time exponentially, each day that we're here holds infinite potential for long-term impact in ways that we can't possibly understand. Tim DeChristopher, he's a farmer these days. If you or someone you know is having thoughts about suicide, there are resources out there. To reach the Suicide and Crisis Hotline in the United States, call

988. Today's show was produced by Hadi Mouagdi and edited by Matthew Collette. It was fact-checked by Laura Bullard and engineered by Paul Mounsey with an assist from Christian Ayala. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.