To be able to see change is to be able to make change. I’m an advocate for slowness, not in the sense of dragging your feet or delaying your reaction but in the sense of scaling your perception to to perceive the events unfolding, because I’m an advocate for making change.
There’s a wonderful scene in *To the End* in which Alex O’Keefe, then creative director of the Sunrise Movement, declares as he unloads a station wagon, “People who do nothing, people who have not even canvassed or anything, they start critiquing your strategy to win. ‘But how are you gonna win, what’s your strategy, is it realistic, can we win?’ Who cares if we can win, man? We’re just unpacking boxes. You do things step by step.” His patient commitment reminds me of Greta Thunberg’s famous 2019 declaration “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” It’s an analysis that says, as I understand it, two important things. One is that addressing the climate crisis is a longterm project calling for many kinds of labor. The other is that we must work toward a post-fossil-fuel world knowing that the solutions continue to evolve—for example solar and wind were expensive, wholly inadequate technologies early in the millennium and are now cheap, effective, and being implemented at a dizzying rate while battery storage and materials are evolving at dazzling speed.
