We Are the Weather

In keeping with the idea that seeing is not always believing, Foer talks about the smell of his home. He can’t smell his own home, just like some people who live near a construction site don’t hear the noise. Sensory adaptation applies to all senses: hearing, seeing, smelling, etc. Foer says home is the place we all feel safest but also the one we can least accurately perceive. 

The only way to see the entire Earth is by traveling 20,000 miles into space. “The Blue Marble” is the iconic picture of the Earth as seen from space. Taken by astronaut William Anders, it has become the most common image of the Earth. Astronauts have felt profound awe and beauty when seeing the Earth from space, and many of them made dramatic personal changes when they returned home. One became a preacher; one became a devotee of transcendental meditation; another founded an organization that researches human consciousness. To view the Earth from that distance, Foer argues, is to be powerfully moved. This emotional response is called the “overview effect.” Astronaut Ron Garan talks about his contradictory emotions about the Earth when he first saw it. He was first flooded with emotion and awareness, but his second thought was to feel sad when he realized how the planet has spent its life protecting humans from space, and yet it is such a “stunning, fragile oasis” (115).

Foer begins by discussing an experiment in which a mirror was placed in the forest. Most of the animals did not seem to recognize their image. He returns to this theme several times throughout the chapter.

There was a time in the United States and elsewhere when we took global warming seriously. In Canada, the Montreal Protocol effectively rid the country of chlorofluorocarbons, which healed the ozone layer. In the era of Reagan and Bush, both presidents spoke about climate change. Both political parties voted on a resolution to impel President Reagan to establish an international treaty modeled on the Montreal Protocol. But after investing in climate change for over a decade, things changed. Shell Oil slashed its budget dedicated to learning ways to reduce emissions that damage the planet. The auto industry also went back on its pledge to investigate ways to stop climate change. President George W. Bush retracted his promise to regulate emissions from coal. Obama failed to push climate change forward. Donald Trump actively increased the emissions that pollute the climate. Foer ends this chapter by saying that even if you recognize yourself in the mirror, it doesn’t mean you reflect on yourself and your actions.

Stephen Hawking once said that humans will need to leave the Earth to survive: “The Earth is becoming too small for us” (123). Foer compares the relatively small output of emissions and waste of the Bangladeshis to that of Americans. If everyone lived like Americans or continued to reproduce like the Chinese, we would need four Earths to sustain us. Since the end of the 1980s, Foer says, the Earth can no longer sustain us. He calls this phenomenon “ecological debt” (124). We are mortgaging our children’s future lifestyles because our own lifestyles will lead to climate change. Foer mentions how his great-grandparents lived in a one-room house without heating or indoor plumbing. It would be difficult for them to comprehend all he has today: a car, a pantry stocked with food, a home with rooms that are not even used on a daily basis. Debts in the form of infrastructure, tax issues, and even many forms of climate change can be fixed, but with respect to greenhouse gas emissions, mortgaging doesn’t make sense: “no one, no institution, no god would give us a loan so wildly out of proportion with our means” (126).

Stephen Hawking said we need to start colonizing space. Elon Musk is already attempting to colonize Mars. Foer says the questions aren’t can we and should we do it, but what do we do in the meantime? Why won’t government tax fossil fuels in proportion to the amount of carbon released or institute an ambitious cap and trade program? The problem, Foer says, is that climate change isn’t just about what we can legislate, it’s about social issues like overpopulation, income disparities, and our consumption habits. The four most effective strategies, according to an organization called Project Drawdown, are reducing food waste, educating girls, providing family planning and reproductive healthcare, and shifting to a plant-rich diet. The point is that change will require collective action. Leaving our home to save our lives, Foer argues, means that people think our home is dispensable. The cycle will never stop. 

Foer discusses the Hubble Space telescope, which was almost a total waste of money because the mirror that allowed scientists to see was ground too far down, about the size of one-fiftieth of a human hair. It was saved by an optical component that was the opposite of the same degree of miscalculation on the mirror. The Hubble Space craft was essentially saved by a pair of glasses. In this chapter, Foer discusses the choice about the things we look at. Once, in school, he couldn’t see the moon because he wasn’t looking for it. Likewise, collectively, we don’t see or believe that our planet is in danger. If we could somehow see the danger we are in, then we’d know what we were looking at and would try to solve the problem. He talks about the number of people who jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge, almost all of whom died. Of the ones who didn’t die, all of them reported changing their minds the minute they jumped. In other words, hindsight is 20/20. Foer implies we need to look now before it’s too late.

When Americans collectively turned out their lights during World War II, they weren’t protecting their houses; instead, they were protecting their homes. Foer makes the distinction between houses as buildings and homes as sacred places of family and community. Thus, in solidarity, they were protecting their families, their culture, their safety, and their freedom. Foer quotes Stephen Hawking, who was making a public service announcement for a Swedish nonprofit, as saying that because of obesity, “humanity faces a major challenge and millions of lives are in danger” (138). Foer adds that humans are in danger because they eat too much, but each human life is in danger because we all eat too much meat. He argues that we must reach solidarity by making small collective sacrifices, one of which is to stop eating meat.

Foer sits by his grandmother’s deathbed. Foer loves his grandmother. When he looks at her, he feels something like the “overview effect:” Everything in the home feels vulnerable, fragile, and beautiful. He realizes his grandmother needs and deserves protection. He reflects on having children. He realizes that both his sons need him in certain ways, but they benefit most when he doesn’t hold on. He transitions to discussing climate change: “Whether or not we address climate change, we will need to learn to let go” (140). He quotes from an article written by Roy Scranton titled “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene” that ran in the New York Times. The message of the quote is that we are already a dead society regarding climate change. The good news: If we can only recognize we are dead, then we can finally get down to work to save ourselves.

He understands there is nothing he can do to save his grandmother. Foer then turns dark, claiming that it is too late to save the Amazon, coral reefs, and coastal cities. He acknowledges that if this is the case, it would seem futile to try anything. But Foer has a streak of optimism and claims that we can save things that matter to his grandmother and to us. Foer returns to the mirror that appears frequently in these pages. He says, “We must force ourselves to face the mirror and force ourselves to look” (143).