Re-entry

Well, partial re-entry. Arriving in Europe was a return to the familiar, the easy, and the predictable. Suddenly, the trains were all equipped with toilet paper and the tickets were QR-coded on my phone. Suddenly everyone spoke English perfectly. It was a bittersweet not-quite-homecoming: the Great Adventure felt in some ways finished — despite the two continents + an ocean I had yet to traverse — but I couldn’t yet kiss my partner or scratch my dog.

I basically rushed through Europe: Finland, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, the UK, Germany, and Italy in just under a month. I ended up having to limit myself to places I had to go by virtue of my overland route, great capital cities I’d always wanted to see but had never quite made it to, and my very oldest friends, who probably wouldn’t have let me get away with ghosting. My apologies to anyone who I’d originally hoped to visit a year ago, when all of this was very abstract, but didn’t actually manage to see in the final accounting!

I opted to take the northern route through Scandinavia, since most of the Eastern European trains are routed through Belarus, and that would have required a separate visa.

The train from St Petersburg to Helsinki was modern, brisk, and less than four hours. In Helsinki I walked along the docks, ate fried herring, and visited a unique church built into the bedrock. Despite the steady trickle of tourists coming through, the church had a sort of inherent stillness — a needed respite, as this was also the day that Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh testified before Congress. I was feeling all the feels and finding it hard to look away from US news.

I took a strange one-night quasi-cruise from Helsinki to Stockholm. In Stockholm I walked through the old town and hip Sodermalm, and visited a museum built around an intact 16th century sunken ship, trying to think about malnourished sailors from the 1530s instead of a would-be rapist in the Supreme Court.

The train from Stockholm to Copenhagen was another quick, easy hop. In Copenhagen, I spent a wet, gray day wandering the leafy back lanes of the squatter collective, Christiania, which I loved madly, and continued my unsuccessful effort to *not* check the news. I also visited an art installation set in an abandoned water cistern under a city park. It was all reflective disks, fire, and Tibetan singing bowls — disorienting, damp, perfect.

Between Denmark and Germany — omw to Amsterdam, via Hamburg — they put the whole train on a boat to cross the channel. (Get it together, Amtrak, jfc.) In Amsterdam, I spent most of my time just walking that city’s impossibly gorgeous streets, with a brief detour into the Rijksmuseum to see some Rembrandts.

In Amsterdam, I also had what felt like my first social re-entry: a dinner party that the friend I was staying with hosted, which was attended mostly by ex and current Greenpeace and Avaaz people — aka one particular corner of the climate movement, aka denizens of the professional world I’d been doing my best not to think about for a solid six months.

This was followed in quick succession by similar social/professional reentries: drinks in Brussels with old work friends, lunch in London with the woman who took my old job, an overnight in Oxford with an old team member. Suddenly I was talking and thinking about movement strategy and organizational politics again. It was startling and unsettling, although not — if I’m honest with myself — entirely unpleasant.

Here’s the thing though: It felt like visiting a problem, or set of problems, that no longer belonged to me. I care about the outcomes, of course. I still think climate change is one of the defining issues of our time — inasmuch as it can be isolated from so much from which it’s ultimately inextricable — and I do think that people who work on the issue deserve to be paid for their labor. But I no longer feel much personal investment in the inner workings of the international NGO world through which many of those people route said labor. I guess I’ve decided what I *don’t* want to do, work wise, when I get home. (This question, of course, is one I’m increasingly fielding as I near the end of my trip.)

The broader climate movement isn’t limited to environmental nonprofit professionals, of course. The movement’s heart is in the grassroots, largely uncompensated, impacted-community-led resistance — from the swamps of Louisiana, to Germany’s Hambach Forest, to the Ecuadorian Amazon. Those battles are live and being fiercely fought as I write. But, personally, I’m no longer being called to that macro-level professional effort that seeks to unite those battles on the international level under the banner of the climate movement *as such*. Today’s political reality is so different from the yesterday’s, and I’m not sure it still makes sense to organize in that way right now. **

I could probably write a whole post about this, but this here is a Travel Blog. Suffice to say that when I get home, I don’t think I want to do what I did before. I don’t intend to throw up my hands and disengage — this long, weird trip has been a rest & reset, not a giving-up — but I do know that both the activism and professional parts of my life are going to have to look pretty different.

After my ex-coworker-heavy swing through Belgium and the UK, I headed for Germany. In Berlin, I stayed with a German friend from high school who I hadn’t seen for over ten years, toured lots of gardens, and loitered by the canal like the cool kids in Kreuzberg. In Munich, I stayed with my high school foreign exchange “sister”; when we were 16, we spent a year living in each other’s houses, sharing all our secret and not-so-secret crushes, having long late-night chats, getting occasionally annoyed with each other, and generally behaving like family. She’s now a social worker, married with two kids, and lives in an award winning green co-op housing development, which I was pretty smitten with (read: kinda jealous of). We spent lots of hours chasing her kids around and having long late-night chats on the living room pull-out.

I took a train through the alps from Munich to Rome, where I met up with my oldest friend, who has been living in Italy for many years. She wrapped up some work and meetings while I ticked off some Roman landmarks, and then we headed for the Tuscan countryside… which brings me pretty much up to date.

Right now I’m sitting in my friend’s little house in Talamone, a tiny town perched on the western coast, about two hours north of Rome. I’ve spent the past couple days reading on sunny cafe patios while she worked, eating pasta, drinking wine, trying to decipher Italians’ complex norms around what is appropriate to eat when, harvesting olives, and going on walks with her huge, sweet dog named Pickles. We’ve been having long meandering conversations about politics and people we hung out with when we were nine. What a singular blessing to have friends in my life who knew me in my very earliest iterations.

Yesterday I found some narrow cliff-side stairs down to the water and a rocky little beach. I put my feet in the Mediterranean and watched the Tuscan afternoon turn pink until Pickles found (and tried to tackle) me.

On Sunday, I will get on a cruise ship (!) and head back to the States, albeit slowly (I won’t get to Miami until November 11th).

I think my next blog post is going to have to be about privilege. Obviously, that’s been the bedrock that this trip has been built on, and I want to talk about that more explicitly. It’s been such a privilege to take this time away, to break with my old professional life, to even get to *choose* what I want to do. To sit on a deserted pebble beach in Tuscany with my toes in the sea.

I’ll write that post from the cruise ship — stay tuned.

** A united, muscular mass movement to combat the climate crisis and stop fossil fuel development, even on the scale we’ve been striving for and building toward for years, would still find itself hard pressed to leverage that mass power into international level change in today’s world of rising nationalism, entrenched autocracy, and increasing distrust in international institutions, IMO. Climate needs to be part of a multi-issue resistance movement, yes, but if those trends hold, then I don’t think that making it *the* banner issue is likely to be effective.