Each dead house fly was worth a quarter, my mom told us kids, but I never earned any money. Every time I cornered a fly, I pictured goo marks left on the wall — spots splayed with tiny black guts and twisted legs. My half-hearted swats with an issue of National Geographic gave even the most sluggish fly time to escape.
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| Illustration: Amelia Bates/Grist |
That I genuinely couldn’t hurt a fly might have been something I picked up in church. I grew up attending a Mennonite congregation in Indiana. We weren’t the bonnet-wearing, buggy-riding sort, but we embraced some traditions, like the Anabaptist teaching of nonviolence. This sometimes expressed itself in an instinct for conflict avoidance. I took that further than most, tending to stay away from arguments, competitive sports, and eating meat.
So I was surprised when violence crept into my speech three years ago when I started working as a journalist covering climate change. Some ancient spirit took hold of me, and I found myself deploying the narrative of war. Carbon tax proposals were “battles” to be fought. Greenhouse gas emissions had to be “slashed.” As for climate change itself? Well, that was an issue to “fight” — and “eco-warriors” and “climate hawks” were leading the charge.
Read the Grist story from Medium by Kate Yoder - “The ‘War’ on Climate. The Climate ‘Fight.’ Are We Approaching the Problem All Wrong?”
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