Chapter Six: The Founders of One Point Five Degrees C

How many times have they gathered together in the hope of changing the world? 

Kfir arrives first, of course he does, arrives early in fact, as Jen knew he would, and she buzzes him up, and they hug, and “Love the shirt,” he says, she’s wearing her Climate Summer tee, a memento from their first campaign, “Still fits!” she says, and he follows her to the kitchen to chop veg while she spoons dips into bowls, they ask the usual questions, how are Lizzie and the boys, how’s Mel, has she popped the question yet; they make the usual complaints, the heat, the fascists, the halting pace of progress; she arranges three cheeses on a board and he slices the baguette and they carry the lot into her living room where, “Candlelight?” he asks.

“Candlelight,” she says. 

With his Zippo he goes from each to each. All her tea lights and votives and tapers. It’s still light outside, in the city, but it won’t be for long. This will ease them into night. This will remind them of old times. 

She hands him a glass of the Lambrusco she’s opened, and they clink and drink, and he sits in the middle of the couch—which is the same couch they thrifted for the house on Snake Mountain, where they lived together their senior year, the year before they founded One Point Five; she’s had it reupholstered, but the feeling that it belongs to the group, that it belongs, even, to the movement, persists. Perhaps it’s the reason they’ve chosen her apartment for this meeting. Glass in hand, nothing left to prepare, she stands by the window and they wait. 

In Shalani’s Prius the energy is opposite. Interrupting one another at will, she and Mike are talking about as fast as she’s driving. One question—“How the fuck have you been?”—launches a thousand narrative ships, some sink, none take a straight course, many merge and others cease to be ships, become birds with beating hearts and wings and wills entirely their own; they swarm and scatter, dazzling fragments: Picture him amidst the flotilla of kayaks barricading the world’s largest coal port in Australia. Picture her rallying again and again and again against the Keystone XL pipeline, trying to keep that narrative fresh for the press. He fell in love with a French journalist in Ho Chi Minh but it didn’t last. She experienced a similar disappointment with a Chilean botanist. He visited the Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi. She saw an indigo bunting in Central Park. He spent twenty-six days in silence at a monastery in Chiang Mai. Oh yeah? Well she was pregnant for nine months and then she gave birth. Top that motherfucker. Try to find a religious experience its equal anywhere on Earth. He wouldn’t dare. How old is Priya now anyway? Seven. Fuck. Right? That is an accomplishment, but it can’t be forgotten, he did found an expat bluegrass band. She’s not surprised. They aren’t half bad either; played a friend’s wedding just last month. Is that so? And how dare he have found other friends?! Slipping last minute into the exit lane, Shalani interrupts them both. “You dirtbag,” she says. “I’ve missed this.” So much has happened, but nothing has changed. 

“She’s picking him up?” Kfir asks.

“She’s picking him up.” 

“Hmmmmm!” 

“Right? She didn’t have to pick him up.” 

Mike has been living in southeast Asia these past nine years, visa-hopping—Vietnam to Thailand to Cambodia to the Philippines. Mike has always been a bit of a mystery to the group. He was the one they thought might drift away, especially when he and Shalani broke up that third time. The final time, they swore. When they called it quits and he bought his one-way ticket, winged east with that well-worn rucksack and Mandy his mandolin. All signs pointed to the end of the road. 

But, no. For all his gypsy wandering, Mike’s devotion to the movement has remained steadfast. Far from a feather on the wind, he has been their rock. Indeed, he has talked each of them down from the proverbial ledge at least once. “Doubt is an equal part of faith,” he has said to them all.

“I think Z might be needing one of his talks,” Jen says. 

“I hadn’t picked up on that.” 

If, in their cohort, Mike seemed Most Likely to Drift Away, Z has always obviously been Most Likely to Go Down with This Ship. Most Likely to Give All to the Cause. Ergo, Least Likely to Need One of Mike’s Talks. Though, famously, it did happen that one time, in the early years, when Copenhagen’s non-binding resolution came as such a blow.

“But, that’s just the trouble,” Jen says. “The work is their whole world.” 

Waiting for the F train to inch through a work zone, Z glances at their phone to find Shalani’s boomerang of Mike emerging from baggage claim. Walking back, walking forward, walking back, walking forward, walking back, walking forward. They watch it again. A loop of a loop. A fitting metaphor, in the face of this reunion. 

Things happen. But does anything change? Progress is at least as halting as this ride. To pass the time, they scroll through their various feeds, hating most of what they see, so they stop, and turn their attention to the men in the tunnels. What are they fixing? And does the work feel vital to them? Are they empowered by their own proficiency? By the way their city needs them? Or do they get the sense they are interchangeable cogs in an indifferent machine? Have they considered the nature of their existence or the politics of their labor? Probably they haven’t got the time. Probably no one has ever asked them to. Or, hey, they’re more radical than Z, secret anarchists doing the least they must to get by inside the capitalist skeleton still housing us, striving for zero-waste, practicing mutual aid, community gardening, feeding the gift economy, showing up for all the protests Z organizes and more. 

Certainly this glimpse through the laminated safety glass can’t reveal their souls to Z. And, anyway, who are they to judge? 

“Your driving hasn’t improved,” Mike says. “I’d have thought, with a daughter to think of…” 

Shalani speeds up to ride the bumper of the Yellow Cab ahead of them. “I’m in perfect control.” 

“Yes, famously.” 

She sticks her tongue out at him and eases off the gas. “So, spill. How long are you in town?”

“Oh, you know. As long as the city feeds me.” 

“That fits. And you’re staying—?”

“Crashing at Jen and Mel’s tonight. After that…at mercy’s whim.” 

Shalani rolls her eyes but smiles. “And are you finally going to confess what you’re doing back in the States?” 

None of them fly when they can help it. And, though the interview will certainly be more fun—and, likely, easier for Ann Tsing—with all of them in one place, it wasn’t necessary. She never requested it. 

It shocked them all when Mike said he would be there for it in the flesh. He didn’t explain, and it surprised no one when he then went radio silent until his flight numbers appeared in their Signal group thread. 

Now he says simply, “I missed y’all.” 

It’s funny, isn’t it funny? Aside from Mike, the four of them see one another often enough. One Point Five still keeps a small office in Gowanus, where they find themselves in twos and threes; all together at least a few times a year, not to mention in the streets, in front of the White House, in police vans, in jail cells. And of course they’re still friends. There are still, if on ever less frequent occasion, evening drinks, picnics in Prospect Park. There was that weekend they took off together, to the Adirondacks, without significant others, without Kfir’s boys or Shalani’s daughter. But that was years ago now. And so, to Z at least, the night feels rare. 

Emerging from the station at Smith and First, they take a deep breath of aboveground air. Jen and Mel’s place is only two blocks to the west, but they want to collect themself, shake off the veil of their subway thoughts, so they detour a block north into Carroll Park. 

Dating to the 1840s, this is one of the borough’s oldest parks, and its oldest elms, so awesomely vast, five feet in diameter, are perhaps even older than the park’s incorporation. Are perhaps as old as America herself. Z knows this because they have done the math, but you need no math to feel the profundity of their presence. 

Friends, Z thinks. Hello, my friends. What do you know when you have lived so long in one place? What is your sense of being? They hop up and sit cross-legged on the bench beside the most majestic, the most wizened. Grandmother Elm, they think, lamenting that American culture can’t see kinship in nature. Bringing their attention to their breath, they begin to quiet their mind, but they keep their eyes open, letting the universe before them—the trunk of this tree—become the focus of their meditation. 

I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark

chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down

Z recalls these lines from A.R. Ammons’ “Hymn,” a poem about love and what it demands of us. A poem Z committed to memory back about the time of One Point Five’s founding, in fact. Back when their ambitions were so simple: just to protect the Earth and all her children. When did that mission grow so complicated? And where has that old reverence gone?

“Jen, you forgot something,” Kfir says.

“Did I?” She scans the room.

He taps her speaker, and she sees where he’s going: “Nonviolent Direct Action #1!” 

They burst into a fit of giggles and Jen pulls up the playlist on her phone. The playlist they made back when the iPod was a revelation, songs of power and protest sung by the greats—Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Gil Scott-Heron, Patti Smith, Tracy Chapman, Nina Simone, Malvina Renyolds, Buffy Sainte-Marie…a mix they’ve returned to many times since, though no time in recent memory. 

Jen queues it up and bids it ‘shuffle.” 

“Talkin’ Bout a Revolution” is just giving way to “People Have the Power” when Z walks through the door, and the three of them have linked arms and are fully belting along to “Chicago” by the time Mike and Shalani make their appearance. Together, the five founders of One Point Five Degrees C sing it loud, a line they’ve been insisting upon these past two decades: 

We can change the world!

“Well fuck me up!” Mike says, laughing. “What a way to come home.” 

It’s been twenty years now since the creation of “Nonviolent Direct Action #1.” 

Amid the ranks of their campus’ sprawling environmental group, Green Pieces, they found one another in subcommittee. They were the five to volunteer to risk arrest to shut down the paper mill across the lake—to the west, where the weather came from—which was poised to start burning tire scraps for fuel. 

Never mind the danger of pumping heavy metals into the air! State lawmakers had tried to stop the burn. There had been petitions signed, letters to the editor written, even a peaceful picketing of the plant. But the usual pressures weren’t sufficing, and time was running out. 

To keep the rest of the Pieces innocent, they had met after hours in the Gamut Room, the student-run social club where Z worked, and so held the keys. They would disappear into the kitchen to mix up a batch of Annie’s Alfredo Mac and Cheese, pass the pot and a cheap bottle around their circle while they ran through contingencies, perfected slogans, practiced cuffing themselves, hammered out their press release and memorized phone numbers to call when they were, inevitably, arrested—“Nonviolent Direct Action #1” playing always in the background. 

“What optimists we were,” Z says. “What absolute fucking innocents.” 

“Just kids.” 

“Do you think we’d have pulled it off?” Mike says. “You know, if we’d gotten the chance?” 

They’d been three days from making their stand when Global Paper announced it was scrapping the burn, bowing to public pressure after all. 

“I mean…” Jen says. 

“It wasn’t a perfect plan.”

But it had felt like a perfect plan! They’d done their recon, drawn their maps, noted the guards’ number and activity. They’d devised a plan of misdirection whereby Jen would pretend to break down on the side of Route 9 to draw the guards away, allowing Mike, Shalani and Z to rush in and chain themselves to the gates through which the trucks were supposed to be—

“Wait,” Kfir says, “it was four! Didn’t we have four to barricade the gate? There were six of us! Remember Kate?” 

“Oh shit. What ever happened to Kate?” 

None of them knows. Kate joined the group because she was in love with Z, a not-so-subtle infatuation they had, as kindly as possible and perhaps too kindly, rebuffed. She’d clearly been holding out hope, eager to make this grand sacrifice to prove her commitment to the cause, but she’d had little interest in the drudgery, the grunt work it takes to sustain a movement. She’d stuck with them through Climate Summer and then drifted off to San Francisco to write fiction, keeping in touch with none of them for very long after that. 

Hers is a type they have encountered often enough since. There for the mugshot, gone when it’s time to file taxes. 

The movement is like any relationship, really. You’ve got to be able to put your ego aside or it won’t last. The cause always has to come before the individual. They understood this, and that’s why they built One Point Five to be truly egalitarian. Leaderless; directed by the collective. They were resolved, they would have no Gandhi, no MLK—someone to follow, but someone who could fall—they would stand together, none above the others, changing their world from the inside out. 

This is one reason the interview feels strange. One Point Five was never supposed to be about them. Who they were, their histories, their personalities, none of that was meant to enter the narrative. 

“I guess,” Jen says, “she’ll want to know it.” 

“I would think so, yes.” 

“I mean, it’s not a bad story. Shades of David and Goliath…” 

“Jesus,” Z says. “We can’t let this devolve into some sort of congratulatory, feel-good ‘how the kids banded together to save the world’ type deal.” 

“Exactly,” Shalini says. “This is supposed to be their ‘saviors’ issue? That word’s got to set off alarm bells. We’ve got to make it clear up front: we don’t condone that language.” 

“But, Shal, like, on the one hand, yes, obviously, ‘saviors’ is problematic. But let’s keep perspective. This interview is a means to an end. If that’s the frame Ann Tsing is coming in with, if that’s how The Magazine needs to label us to get their readers’ attention, what’s the harm? I mean, we are literally trying to save something here. Heck, we’re trying to save everything! Maybe we don’t jettison the word. Maybe we reclaim it.” 

“Says the white guy.” 

“Fair point. So, we don’t reclaim it. But—I just don’t want us to get hung up on semantics, right? Or to, like, go in guns blazing, attacking the nice journalist when she’s just trying to help.”

“Is she trying to help?”

“I mean, why else would she be bothering to talk with us?” 

“Say she is trying to help. That doesn’t mean she knows how. You have to admit we have to give her some guidance.” 

“Sure, yes. Of course we need a messaging strategy. I just know how you can get—” 

“Oh, do you? And how’s that, exactly? How can I get?” 

“Dudes,” Kfir says.

“Defensive,” Mike says. 

Shalani pulls a face, which Mike mirrors expertly, and then all of them are laughing. 

“Alright, alright,” Jen says, putting her chuckle away, pulling out her whiteboard. “Enough fun. Let’s get to work.”

“To capture what it’s like to devote your life to such an essential but really difficult cause,” was why Ann Tsing said she wanted to profile the group, when she wrote with the proposal. “We see your work in headlines about marches, protests, divestment campaigns, but we never get to hear about the struggle and triumph and disappointment that goes into making those headlines.” 

“We could use the attention to rally support for the North Slope blockade,” was what Jen said when she suggested to the other four, and then to One Point Five’s Press Committee, that they should say yes. “That story isn’t breaking through.” 

Ann Tsing will be with the group in Brooklyn for a week, coming in to headquarters to observe the larger organization at work, but also shadowing each of them as they go about their days, rounding out her picture of the life of a climate activist. After which she will fly with them to the farthest reaches of Alaska, 250 miles north of the Arctic Circle, to watch them stand with the Iñupiat elders who are leading the fight to stop what Shalani likes to call “Joe Biden’s third-worst decision.” 

The purpose of this meeting is to plan Ann’s schedule—when she will be with who and which meetings she should sit in on—as well as to solidify their messaging. 

In the early days of One Point Five, raising awareness was their whole goal. And their message was simple: keep the global temperature from rising more than one-point-five degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, or it’s lights out for humankind. 

It didn’t take them long to realize that doom isn’t the best motivation to action. And, ever since, they’ve taken a two-pronged approach. “Stop and Go,” they call it. First, make the peril clear. Then, reveal how this crisis is also an opportunity. 

“Alaska is such a prime example of both sides of the coin,” Kfir says. “There’s something poetic about it, really, that someone like Ann Tsing—” 

“I have to interject,” Z says. “I’m listening to us talk and I just…the truth is I feel a little sick about it, hearing how familiar it all is. This pitch would’ve made sense twenty years ago. Or ten! Maybe five, even. But, now? I don’t think our messaging has caught up with the moment. Like, how are we still talking about opportunity? The opportunity’s gone! We know this. We passed one point five two years ago. So, why aren’t we being honest? At this point, salvation really is a myth.” 

“Come on, Z. Where’s this coming from? That line in the sand was for the public. For the fucking politicians. Salvation isn’t all or nothing. It’s a continuum. It’s a matter of degrees, and it always has been.” 

“Always has been. But it won’t be when we hit the tipping point. When we pass the point of no return.”

“None of us knows where that line is.”

“We don’t need to! It’s obvious. People haven’t got the guts to make a change. I mean, coming over here I’m seeing everyone just going about their lives like it isn’t do or die. Like the good job and the nice apartment and the fancy suit and the perfect marriage are going to do shit to protect them from what’s coming. There’s no will to change. There’s no appetite for sacrifice. Not at a critical mass. My friends, it is too late to save the world.”

“No. We never get to say it’s too late. As long as we’re alive, we fight. That’s how it is! That’s the fucking deal. If we can’t protect everything, we protect what we can.” 

“I don’t know,” Z says, standing to pace between the bookcase and the couch, the couch that has been with them as long as they’ve been activists. “I know I always believed that. But now? I just feel like I’m sitting at the foot of the deathbed of the person I love most, and all around me everyone’s scurrying this way and that, searching high and low for some, I don’t know, like, elixir of life, some potion that doesn’t really exist, and they’re so busy at this impossible task they’ve made up for themselves, they’re missing the last moments they could be spending with the love of their life! They’re not seeing what’s here! What’s here and about to be gone. I mean, shouldn’t we stop? Stop pretending that what’s happening isn’t happening. Stop pretending we have any control. And sit down and just, I don’t know, just love what is while we have the chance.” 

“Respectfully,” Kfir says, “that’s easy to say when you haven’t got a family. You can wander off and meditate on death if you want, Z, but I’m going to keep searching for a cure.” 

“You think it’s frivolous.”

“I think it’s frivolous, too,” Shalani says. “I think it’s pretty fucking privileged, is what I think.”

“Shal—”

“No, it is, Mike. It’s bullshit.”

“Doubt is an equal part of faith, right? Let’s respect what Z is feeling.” 

“We can’t make this about our emotions,” Jen says. “We can’t make it about ourselves. What’s at stake is so much bigger. The greater good!” 

“I don’t know,” Z says again. “All these things I used to believe…I don’t know anymore. But, man. I’m sorry. This is my crisis. I recognize that. I’m sorry it spilled out like this. I really didn’t intend it. It just fucking overtook me. Mike, I’m sorry I brought this cloud to your homecoming. It’s good to have you back. I love you all. And, Shal, maybe you’re right and I just need to snap out of it. I just, I’m realizing something I can’t even believe I’m saying, but, right in this moment, I don’t think I can do what we do anymore. I’ve got to figure that out. If that’s true or just… So, I think what I should do is… I’m going to step out now. But I love you all.” 

Before anyone has time to gather themself to protest, it’s happened. Z is gone. 

All the wile they’ve been talking, “Nonviolent Direct Action #1” has been playing quietly in the background. Now, in the silence that follows Z’s exit, “We Shall Overcome” begins to play. Sung by Pete Seeger, this is a live recording, and he prefaces the song with these words: 

“If you would like to get out of a pessimistic mood yourself, I got one sure remedy for you. Go help those people down in Birmingham and Mississippi or Alabama. All kinds of jobs that need to be done. It takes hands and hearts and heads to do it. Human beings to do it. And then we’ll see this song come true.”

How many times have they heard those words? How many times has the song been sung? For better and for worse, so much has happened, and nothing has changed.