We live in a crowded landscape of climate “-isms.” Techno-abundance enthusiasts promise innovation will save us; degrowthers insist salvation lies in contraction; growth-first advocates argue that prosperity will create the conditions for adaptation; geoengineers pitch planetary-scale interventions; multilateralists place their bets on fragile consensus; skeptics and denialists maintain the risks are exaggerated. Each camp is armed with data, conviction, and an unshakable determination to bring their preferred solution to the fore. And yes, I’ve spent much of my career advancing one or another of these -isms myself.
Who’s right? Who’s wrong? Everyone, at different times, in different ways. Even under the broad banner of helping people and planet thrive, there is no single axis of progress. We are all optimizing across multiple dimensions (needs, interests, contexts, constraints) that are constantly shifting, sometimes reinforcing each other and other times pulling in opposite directions.
Real-world change is messy business. Ideas that begin as fringe or politically impossible sometimes migrate—suddenly or slowly—into institutions, markets, or public norms. Others fade and then resurface decades later. Progress is shaped by timing, alliances, persistence, and the sheer chaos of human politics.
That messiness frustrates us because nature’s system is brutally unforgiving. The climate does not negotiate, nor does it care about our political constraints. It operates on its own complex logic that may never be fully knowable, and is ultimately indifferent to human preferences. And yet our human system—with its cacophony of interests, competing priorities, and bottom-up improvisation—cannot be wished away. Humility means accepting this tension: no strategy is sufficient, none is useless. Even those we disagree with have a place in this noisy ecosystem of change. Uneven progress and overlapping, sometimes conflicting, efforts are the terrain we must learn to navigate.
So maybe what we need is a different posture entirely. Not climate absolutism or pragmatism or realism, but climate humility. Humility to recognize we don’t control this process. Humility to welcome imperfect allies working on pieces we don’t fully understand. Humility to keep pushing on multiple fronts even when—especially when—the path looks uncertain and incomplete.
There is no silver bullet. But if enough of us keep hammering at our imperfect pieces of this impossible puzzle, maybe we can still hold something important together. There is no “saving the world” (and what hubris to imagine any of us could!). There’s just us, limited and fallible as we are, trying against many odds to make the world a bit less broken than it might otherwise be.
Humility all too rare these days, I'll echo a call for it anytime!
Such a poignant piece! Love it Rose!