“It is good to speak up, good to recycle, to plant trees, lots of trees […] According to a 2017 analysis, recycling and tree planting are among the most often recommended personal choices to combat climate change, they aren’t ‘high impact’ — they are feelings more than actions. Among other actions that are considered to be important but aren’t high impact: installing solar panels, conserving energy, eating locally, composting, washing clothes with cold water and hang-drying them, being sensitive to the amounts and kinds of packaging, buying organic food, replacing a conventional car with a hybrid. People who make those efforts — and only those efforts — are saying the word ‘fist’ to an object they want to punch.”

What are those high impact actions? The author, Jonathan Safran Foer, spells it out when the book switches into list mode during part two of five: “eat a plant-based diet, avoid air travel, live car-free, and have fewer children.”

Asking someone to take high impact actions is dangerous. Safran Foer waffles on this, and he just wrote an entire book trying to argue for one of them. As soon as he asserts what needs to be done, he offers up excuses people can grab onto — as if anyone needed help explaining away their stasis — for not taking environmental action. And, lest anyone think the author is being radical by arguing in favor of veganism: don’t worry, he’s not. Your status quo is perfectly safe. He has dialed down his ask for people to only change what makes up two of their three daily meals.

Let’s back up. We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, is not a science book. It’s a philosophy book, with bits of science dropped in. It’s not an argument for veganism. It’s creative non-fiction. It’s literature. It’s not a how-to.

It’s necessary to say this because the title, and all of the book’s marketing — to date — have been way off. Maybe it has compelled people to grab a copy and read, but from the comments I have seen online, there have been plenty of judgments passed before anyone so much as cracked the binding.

The author is, in terms of age, my peer. Too much of what exists on this subject has been penned by generations’ older, and too often takes the shape of inoffensive, let-us-not-rock-the-boat incrementalism, which as we can see, has not solved the fucking problem. It’s one thing to rob younger generations of full-time work, health care, and the possibility of retirement; it’s another to slide their habitat right out from under them. No need for me to pen one of those cliched “I’m leaving Connecticut for Boca” op-eds. (1) Retirement is as mythical as the Loch Ness Monster, and (2) Even if it were attainable in another thirty years, so what? I’d head up north.

We Are The Weather is a stream-of-consciousness with edits. It’s layered. Woven. It’s not for the impatient who want it all spelled out, though the author does this when he simply restates the findings of a 2017 study from Sweden and Canada. It’s hard to know this — even though end notes and bibliography are present, there are no notes indicated by stated facts in the text, if that makes sense. Basically, you have to read through the entire end section and have the benefit of pre-existing knowledge.

So, if you want the info delivered to you straight, go see the Wynes and Nicholas study on the climate mitigation gap. If you’re down for a longer read with some flourish, get yourself to the library and snatch up a copy of We Are The Weather.

While I want to shake the author and ask him why he thinks switching up the ingredients of two meals every day goes anywhere near far enough, I have to admit how on the mark he is, so often.

For one, the climate deniers, as he says, are not the biggest problem. We know this. The author puts it this way: “There is a far more pernicious form of science denial than Trump’s: the form that parades as acceptance. Those of us who know what is happening but do far too little about it are more deserving of the anger. We should be terrified of ourselves. We are the ones we have to defy.”

How can I argue with that? Most of my private rants are about self-proclaimed environmentalists who drive (without carpooling) to events and don’t even recognize this as an issue.

The book is bleak. It has to be. The adults in the room need to stop wanting for hopefulness and good vibes. As the author writes, “while humankind might feel too big to fail, no one will bail us out.”

There are positive expressions of that, of course. Things like “you are the change that you have been waiting for,” and all that, but Safran Foer won’t be the one to deliver it to you.

What he does provide are ideas to unpack. Many of them. Too many to do justice to in a brief review.

I’ve been bristling lately at this mindset that we can just tech our way out of this big mess. Simpler is often better. Safran Foer brings this up in respect to food: “Sometimes, even the most vast and complex problems can be solved with a simple correction, a balancing. We don’t need to reinvent food but to uninvent it. The future of farming and eating needs to resemble the past.”

We don’t need Impossible Burgers.

A friend tossed a question to social media recently. It’s the same question I see raised by friends two or three times per year. They want to either become vegetarian or closer to it. This can be complicated for people who have loads of dietary restrictions, sensitivities, and allergies. But for everyone else, there’s no need to overthink it. Have a meal. Omit the meat. Make pasta, but don’t put beef in the sauce. Have vegetable noodle soup, minus the chicken. It’s not rocket science. Overprocessed junkfood (faux meats) might be tasty now and then, but there’s no reason to treat it as some central need to changing one’s diet.

We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, either. Uninvent it. Find more efficient ways to travel, which often have either a communal or non-sedentary aspect to them. I’m not worried about the exceptions — those who have disabilities and require a gas guzzler. I worry about those who use more than they need, just like those without multiple food allergies who find excuses for maintaining harmful habits. Our problem is that we all manage to find excuses because we have conflated want with need.

Even if we all convert two of our three daily meals from milk or meat to vegan, the forecast is not sunny. It’s not like we get back the glaciers that have melted. The author writes: “We cannot save the coral reefs. We cannot save the Amazon. It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to save coastal cities. The scale of inevitable loss is almost enough to make any further struggle feel futile. But only almost. Millions of people — perhaps tens or hundreds of millions — will die because of climate change, and the number matters. Hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions, will become climate refugees. The number of refugees matters. It matters how many days per year children will be able to play outside, how much food and water there will be , how many years average life expectancies will shed.”

This book does not guide you through dietary choices. There are ample other resources for that.

It does lead you through levels of discomfort.

We should feel uneasy. We should have angst.

In the midst of a long, winding inner-dialogue, Safran Foer poses this:

“Is there anything more narcissistic than believing the choices you make affect everyone?”

“Only one thing: believing the choices you make affect no one.”

The Hartford Public Library has in its collection a copy of We Are The Weather: Saving the planet begins at breakfast by Jonathan Safran Foer.