Tonn tuili, mo thuile

I can't stop rereading and thinking about this essay by Arkady Martine, on climate change, grief, city planning, and work in the face of despair. It's just astonishingly good:

I am struck again by how much climate writing is all about grief. Is almost pornographic in its obsession with loss. It wallows in apocalypse.

I am not saying that we should not grieve. How can we not grieve for what we are losing, and what we have done to create that loss? But grief absolves us of action. Grief can so easily become despair, and despair creates inaction: what would be the point of trying, anyway? We will all die. Nothing we love will be un-dissolved, or remain un-drowned. All that is solid will melt into the heated air.

I reject this. I reject it as a planner and as a writer. I reject it because the apocalyptic is itself a form of denial. It is a place to hide within. It is also a kind of violence, inflicted on us—sometimes unintentionally, sometimes quite deliberately by agents—whether they are fossil fuel companies or simply people who cannot imagine a future different from the one which gives them some power and some control—to push us away from the work.

Exactly. Exactly so.