What’s the Weather?

Abstract

What’s the Weather? Kyle Bladow (bio) We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast Jonathan Safran Foer Farrar, Straus and Giroux https://us.macmillan.com 288 pages; Cloth, $25.00 We Are the Weather is a book cleverly aware of the fact that facing the compounding and accelerating challenges of climate change requires nuanced approaches, and that conventional styles of argumentation are often not enough to motivate behavioral changes that would decrease greenhouse gas emissions. As studies and publications demonstrate with increasing frequency, the “problem” of climate change is as much psychological, philosophical, even spiritual as it is economic or political. Although Foer embeds in the book a proposal as clean, pragmatic, and reasoned as any you’ll find — stop consuming animal products — he does not fail to attend to the psychological complexities of effectively advocating for such a position. Environmentalist discourse has advanced enough that most people can now recognize the folly in the old refrain, “If people just knew the science, they’d change their behavior.” This misconception that knowledge alone changes action is longstanding, and especially frustrating in the face of the climate crisis. We Are the Weather revises that refrain from knowing to believing, as Foer probes his own conscience, wrestling with resignation and astonished at his own inability to believe with conviction. The result is a quasi-jeremiad that manages to be more compelling for its honesty. Foer attends to the difficulties of addressing climate change as much stylistically as he does narratively: short sections rapidly change topics, matching the frenzied shifts in attention to which the internet has acculturated its users, yet these different topics harmonize throughout the book in ways that ultimately reveal a precise architecture crafted to arrest and to stir emotional resonance in readers. Foer carefully arranges and deploys data from his research within the book; he demonstrated his skill at exploiting the sublimity of scale in his earlier book Eating Animals (2009), to which We Are the Weather seems a successor or an update. Akin to looking at the artwork of Edward Burtynsky or Chris Jordan, Foer’s nonfiction immerses readers in staggering figures and artful comparisons. He correctly points out the recurrent omission or underestimation of animal agriculture’s role in climate change, including an appendix detailing two significantly different findings of the percentage of total greenhouse gas emissions for which animal agriculture is responsible, one published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (14.5%), the other by the Worldwatch Institute (51%). Foer argues for the higher end of this range, and his findings align with more recent estimates (e.g. Nicholas Carter’s 2019 thesis, Animal Agriculture’s Contributions to Climate Change, which also reviewed the FAO and Worldwatch figures and arrives at an estimate of 37%). Foer condenses his evidence for the necessity of ending current systems of animal agriculture into a series of bulleted lists in Part II, “How to Prevent the Greatest Dying.” No stranger to formal experimentation with textual arrangements, Foer here uses negative page space alongside concise statements to further invest the striking statistics he presents with a sense of rational, straightforward urgency: if information alone were enough to change behavior, this is how it might be best presented. Part II’s form also calls to mind such inventions of digital journalism as the listicle or the abbreviated bullet points increasingly posted above news stories to accommodate this distracted era of tl;dr. One of the points that stand out from this presentation of data (culled from a bibliography of over three hundred sources) is the calculation that eating vegan for two out of three meals has a smaller carbon footprint than the average full-time vegetarian (from the article “Country-specific Dietary Shifts to Mitigate Climate and Water Crises” by Brent F. Kim and colleagues, which echoes Mark Bittman’s dietary recommendation to be “vegan before 6:00”). The book invokes many of the historical moments commonly compared to the present climate crisis, especially World War II. Yet the most compelling instances of such moments that Foer includes are not those hortative examples of human bravery, sacrifice, or even ingenuity (e.g...