We Are the Weather

In 72 C.E., troops from the Roman Empire set out to kill every Jew in the Masada community. When it became clear that the Jews would lose, they died by mass suicide. In contrast, the Warsaw Ghetto Jews battled till the end. While there is evidence of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, there is no evidence that the Jews of the Masada community died by suicide. If they had, Foer wonders why. Why didn’t they pretend to convert? Why didn’t they just die fighting? Death by suicide is the worst kind of sin in the Jewish culture. Despite being a myth, the Masada suicide story lives on, Foer argues, because people need to believe in the myth, since it shows how a tiny community did what it had to in order to survive through time. Thus, Foer argues that the myth is perpetuated because it reminds Jews of a broader concept: refusing surrender.

Foer discusses the Svalbard Global Seed Bank in Norway. It is the largest collection of agricultural biodiversity in the world. Another bank called the Frozen Ark Project collects and stores DNA from endangered animals. These are both like modern versions of the Biblical story of Noah’s Ark—but Noah had a century to construct his ark, and we are running out of time. Foer says that globally, more people die by suicide than die in war, murder, and natural disasters combined. Since we are more likely to kill ourselves than others are to kill us, Foer says we should be more afraid of ourselves than anything or anybody else. Yet, even if he sounds hopeless, in the end, he argues that we can find hope in our hopelessness.

In this chapter, Foer invokes God and the stories of the Bible. He speaks about how Noah is described as a “man” of the Earth and points out the obvious irony that, in fact, most people associate Noah with the deluge and water. He also notes how hard it must have been for Noah to be ridiculed for a century while he and his sons toiled to obey God’s commands. He adds that the task must have gotten harder the further in time the building of the ark moved away from God’s order. Foer wonders if World War II had lasted 100 years, would people have continued to keep their lights off at night?

The chapter begins with Foer reporting on David Buckel, a civil rights attorney in Brooklyn. One day Buckel walked into Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and set himself on fire. He was protesting climate change apathy. A handwritten note identified him and explained his actions. In the one sentence note, Buckel says he set himself on fire as a “protest suicide” (195). Foer discusses this protest in the context of the Buddhist monks who set themselves on fire during the Vietnam War. Foer claims that Buckel weaponized an act of self-destruction in order “to burn into the public consciousness, to incite change” (202).

Stories from the New York Times and other publications are also cited for the philosophical clarity about climate change. Foer discusses an essay by Roy Scranton, known for his moving and painful journalism about climate change. The title of the essay gives away the premise of his story: “Raising my Child in a Doomed World” (196). Foer says that Scranton voices what he, Foer, feels as a parent. On the one hand there is joy, on the other is the guilt and despair that he’s left his children to die in a dying world.

One essay’s stance is that the only way to save the planet is to die, but Foer argues that people want to live. It isn’t the planet they want to save so much as life on the planet. Foer urges people to live ethically. According to the essay by Scranton, people aren’t free to do whatever they want. There are constraints, but people do have the freedom to make choices about how they want to live. There are many possible options, Scranton writes, one of which is to make choices about the environment. This, Foer says, means that we must cut ourselves off from things that harm the environment, like flying, having more than one child, eating meat, and driving. Foer is careful to remind readers that these are sacrifices, but compared to dying, they seem small.

Foer argues that we are killing ourselves because choosing death is easier than fighting for our lives. Right now, he says, we are threatened to extinction by mass suicide because we won’t change our ways. This chapter is a recitation of the many ways we will die and the few, vulnerable communities that might survive but will die later. If we don’t save ourselves, the Earth will be a dead rock, floating through the universe. And if there is life that manages to follow after we die, the people might have anthropology exhibits in museums with text explaining our civilization. Some of the descriptions of our extinct life might sound like the following: “They consumed food when not hungry, engaged in non-procreative sexual activity, and acquired superfluous possessions and knowledge” (211).

The chapter ends with a continuation of this list of traits humans had before they died. In the final sentence, the script that accompanies the display in the museum reads: “Every one of them began as a baby, and collectively they were—relative to the history of this planet—extraordinarily young” (212).

The final chapter is a letter Foer writes to his sons. He takes them through the history of his family, his grandparents’ survival of the Holocaust, and his grandmother’s death. In the letter, he discusses his grandfather’s death by suicide and the letters that went back and forth between his grandfather and grandmother.

He then discusses the moon landing. He tells his boys about a contingency plan Nixon wrote while Neil Armstrong was getting ready for the moon landing. It was titled, “In Event of Moon Disaster” (215). It was a letter written in case the astronauts died. The final sentence reads: “These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding” (215). Foer tells his boys that the speech that was never read increased Foer’s appreciation for what happened. What struck him, he tells his children, was how the speech was written for people of another time—people of the future. He wonders if there could be a similar letter regarding catastrophic climate change.

Foer then writes about an artist named Trevor Paglen who launched 100 photographs into space. The photos were curated, but, to Foer, it seemed like there wasn’t a message in most of them. One was a photo of Trotsky’s brain, another was a photo of dinosaur footsteps, and a third was a picture of the interior of a factory farm. Art curator João Ribas called it a “cosmic message in a bottle” (219). These pictures in space remind Foer of the thousands of papers of writings the Jews of Warsaw buried during the Holocaust and the letters he found in his grandfather’s drawers, all of these representing our desire for immortality.

Foer says he doesn’t believe in God or the prayer for the pilot flying the airplane, but when he flies and the plane is racing down the runway, he finds himself saying, repeatedly, “more life…more life…more life…” (221). It is a prayer of sorts, one that Foer says is the opposite of a suicide note. Foer recalls the first suicide note ever written, which he originally mentioned in the first page of the book, a book that presents countless arguments for and against deah by suicide. In the end, the soul tells the person to “cling to life” (224). Foer reminds his sons in his letter that one only writes a suicide note once, but a life note should be written all the time. He exhorts his sons, and his readers, to keep writing the life note, to fight for life—everyone must do this together.