“We get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have.”

– Hanif Abdurraqib

I’m obsessed with this quote from the poet and essayist Hanif Abdurraqib in a New Yorker piece last month. He somehow packed doom, hope, and obligation into those twelve words.

Abdurraqib is riffing on Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which eerily presaged this year’s L.A. fires, and the deep reality of owning our fates:

It’s not the fires or drug use or tumbling literacy rates that she invented—all of those problems were simply there for her to see. What “Sower” imagines, rather, is a future in which surviving the seemingly unsurvivable requires people to show some emotional dexterity, some ability to surrender whatever selfishness they’ve been harboring and see if they have something that someone else needs. This is the starting point of mutual aid: What do I have that someone else may need? Butler’s work is outlining a future where posing that question is a requirement. “Sower” isn’t just about a time and a fire and a place; it’s about people deciding what kind of apocalypse they are going to have, and then deciding how to live in its aftermath.

I used the quote as a repeated riff in a talk I gave a few weeks ago in Las Cruces about how people have to engage in the small-d democratic work to decide, together, what we want our communities to look like as we adapt to climate change. I meant to just use the quote once, but the scrap of paper on which I’d written it poked up above the rest of my notes, and I kept returning to it, a preacher’s call.

We’ve long ago moved past the option of not having to adapt to climate change, of not facing a village, town, city, farm, or river that has less water than we would prefer. It’s on us now to make good choices, or less bad choices, and doing that requires finding ways to come together in community to wrestle our way through the competing and conflicting values.

This is hard.

This is at the heart of water management even without climate change, and we can do it well or poorly, in ways that respect shared values or trample them. The book Bob Berrens and I are writing (have written? book time is weird) about Albuquerque’ relationship with the Rio Grande is really an attempt to untangle the history of precisely this, a century of messy community conversations about how we want our river and our community to look, to interact with one another. Before we had to wrestle with apocalypse we had to wrestle with what kind of community we wanted to have. The results were messy, but in the process we built the sort of institutional framework we must now call on to help us with the next step.

By “institutional framework” I am not talking about government agencies, or not only talking about government agencies. I’m talking about a way of being in the world.

I’ve had reason of late to return to some intellectual roots, John Dewey’s 1927 The Public and Its Problems. I read Dewey as a youngster, assimilated the basic pragmatist framework, and charged out in the world to use it. Philosophy! Now I’m back 45 years later to reflect on how that went.

Dewey’s 1927 book lays out an argument that I find appealing in this fraught moment: that what we mean by “democracy” is not a structure of government, with voting and stuff, but rather a way of being in community:

Associated or joint activity is a condition of the creation of a community. But association itself is physical and organic, while communal life is moral, that is emotionally, intellectually, consciously sustained.

A decade later, in a talk entitled “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” Dewey said this:

[T]o get rid of the habit of thinking of democracy as something institutional and external and to acquire the habit of treating it as a way of personal life is to realize that democracy is a moral ideal.

This seems like pretty weighty stuff when I just want better regulations around domestic groundwater wells, or the simplification of the regulatory hurdles faced by water agencies that want to do aquifer storage and recovery, or a way to meet our Rio Grande Compact obligations to those folks down in Las Cruces I was talking to last month. But Dewey’s point is that we can’t just hand off the governing thing to a handful of elected officials in Santa Fe or Washington, D.C., and expect them to manage the apocalypse for us.

It’s on us to engage in the big, messy conversations about what we want that apocalypse to look like.

Going back to look at Abdurraqib’s essay as I put together a talk for this week’s Land and Water Summit in Albuquerque, I realized that the version I’d been using for my glossy pull quote elides something really important.

I’m the optimist, right! It’s why y’all bought that book (and thanks for reading!). I love the Land and Water Summit crowd, people with the sort of care for engagement with their community in search of a better future, the kind of action Dewey was talking about.

But here’s the full quote, with emphasis added:

Like Butler’s characters, we get to determine what kind of apocalypse we’d like to have, and you can’t drag everyone to a better place. Not everyone can get there.