"Being a single-issue voter is supposed to be a bad thing, but climate is the single issue that is everything else. It’s the economy and jobs, health including mental health and contagious diseases, agriculture, and food. It’s racial justice, immigration and human rights, energy and environment (of course), national security, (un-)natural disaster, housing, and standards of living.
Climate is also a lot of more incalculable but no less important things, like hope and vision and confidence and whether we look at the natural world as a source of joy rather than existential dismay. The climate is the set of conditions in which all else that concerns human life on earth takes place, and changing it changes everything else.
We’re writing to urge to make sure you do vote. It’s easy to find reasons not to. In a culture that focuses on individual achievement, being part of a greater whole gets disparaged. One vote is a drop in a bucket, and being a drop doesn’t get celebrated a lot, even though you can fill a whole bucket with them...
...Voting also gets disparaged because it’s making choices on a menu that isn’t necessarily the menu you’d choose. Being involved in other ways means that a vote isn’t the only means of political expression you have. The ballot is a menu, but it’s not the menu that is your whole life and your options of being involved as a donor, an activist, an organizer, a marcher, a person who advocates for the importance of climate through all or any of the available means right now: that matters too.
About this time four years ago, I said to a friend of mine “Voting is not a valentine; it’s a chess move.” By which I meant that it’s not a tender personal expression of your deepest desires; it’s a strategic engagement with the public good, and who you vote for is a means to that end. Of course sometimes it is a valentine — sometimes we get to vote for someone we adore and utterly agree with — but mostly it’s thinking about the consequences down the road. Sometimes it’s about picking who we can fight effectively, or who we don’t have to fight on this, so we’ll then have more energy to fight on that.
And one thing is clear: no matter the outcome of this election, there’s plenty of work ahead to fully address the matter that has only grown more urgent since climate scientists in 2018 told us we have only one decade to get it right.
So please vote and get ready for what comes next."
