Holly Jean Buck and Daniel Immerwahr discuss community fetishism and thinking small against the shifting backdrop of US climate politics.

Few systems are as vast as climate change. Weather systems don’t, as a rule, respect national boundaries or borders, but attempts to address the crisis on a global scale are stymied by individual national and commercial interests. At the grassroots level, discussions about how to confront an increasingly erratic climate are frequently co-opted by corporate interests, steering the conversation toward individual actions and “easy” solutions – such as offering airline passengers the option to pay extra for carbon-offset credits. Daniel Immerwahr and Holly Jean Buck explore how we can navigate these challenges and avoid the pitfalls of overly simplistic, community-focused approaches to slowing climate change and ameliorating its impact.

Daniel Immerwahr is a scholar of US and global history. He teaches at Northwestern University and is a contributing writer at the New Yorker. Holly Jean Buck researches and teaches in the faculty of environment and sustainability at the University of Buffalo.

Daniel Immerwahr I hear constant chatter about community from philanthropists, NGOs and activists. Do you?

Holly Jean Buck A focus on community is everywhere, but striking from different angles. One way is how students I work with in environmental studies think of community as the go-to response for every ecological crisis – a solution to every problem. The other dimension is my work in building large energy projects, where there’s this demand for community engagement and involvement. I became sensitised to it because most of my work for the past 10 or 15 years has been in public engagement, which isn’t spoken about in the same way. Is community displacing our idea of the public? I went to a meeting at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative in the Bay Area, a gorgeous building in Redwood City, and on the sidewalk leading up to it they have inscribed all these sayings about community – community is family, etcetera. I thought, you know, these are the people who’ve essentially derived their wealth from breaking down the idea of community. I was just looking at a report from the Surgeon General on our epidemic of loneliness and isolation. It’s a good report, full of all these indicators of how we’re not spending time with each other and spending more time on platforms. A sense of community is linked to positive health indicators – individual health, social cohesion, quality of life.

According to a 2023 report by the former US Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, “Loneliness is like hunger, a signal we’re lacking something for survival”, and “a dark thread” that runs through many social ills. The antidote to this social crisis, according to the report, which has garnered a lot of attention, is greater human connection.

DI Often you hear activists saying that we need action to be centred in communities and not in large institutions, because when the scale is reduced to face-to-face interaction, we have more autonomy and power and a feeling of inclusion. Does that make sense to you or are you suspicious?

HJB I am suspicious of it, but it also makes sense. It needs to be placed in the context of other scales of action. We also have to separate the discourse or the ideology from what is actually happening on the ground, which may be a different thing altogether.

DI It seems like some of the pleas that we hear from the left – for worker control, Indigenous agency over land rights  – can be expressed as a form of community empowerment in a way that seems potentially helpful.

According to the United Nations, around 20% of the world‘s surface is made up of Indigenous or community lands, containing 80% of the world‘s remaining biodiversity. In many countries, collective rights of Indigenous people is not recognised or de facto denied.

HJB Maybe, but I think the community discourse ends up flattening a lot of those dimensions. As soon as we’re talking about community, are we spending time talking about unions? 

DI I agree that the people who spend a lot of time talking about community are less inclined to talk about unions, and that both of those can be construed as ways of empowering local and grassroots engagement, but they seem to point in slightly different directions – or maybe dramatically different directions. So let’s get into that. What work that the community is doing symbolically differentiates it from other grassroots visions?

HJB It’s a way of NGOs having power and control, sometimes at the expense of public, democratic, elected bodies. I’ll talk about it in the domain I know best, which is large energy projects and, to some extent, strategies for managing climate change on the municipal level. It’s clear how we got to this point where we’re looking to NGOs to determine things. In many states, we don’t trust the state government, like in Texas or Louisiana where the state has done a bad job protecting communities from the adverse effects of industrial development. Putting power and control in the hands of community groups is a way of addressing the fact that those governments aren’t, essentially, doing their jobs. The other aspect is that because of globalisation, we can’t just necessarily tax or regulate the developer of, say, a hydrogen project. As we don’t have a mechanism for extracting benefits that way, people look to something like a community-benefit agreement, where a developer signs a contract with a community group. But it’s not an elected community group, it’s self-nominated. So now you have these organisations in the middle of what should be public decision-making.

Union drives, such as the well-publicised struggles of Starbucks Workers United, face new challenges under the Trump administration. The failure by Democrats in December 2024 to extend the term of the then-chairperson of the National Labor Relations Board, Lauren McFerran, will likely result in a Republican majority on the Board, which enforces law related to collective bargaining and unfair labour practices.

DI We don’t trust the states, we don’t trust the corporations, so there has to be some kind of entity to represent collective interests, and the idea that that would be the local community sounds great to everyone’s ears. But who is the arbiter for the local community? Who decides what the grassroots has to say? What have you seen in these instances?

HJB Not to cop out, but I’ll give a scientist’s answer, which is – I think we need more research on this before I can make a strong empirical claim. We’re just not even asking those questions in a challenging way. There are probably cases where it’s worked out fine, and probably cases where those individuals or groups didn’t represent community needs all that well. It’s an open question, and a critical one. You’ve written an amazing book [Thinking Small] that understands this impulse towards community as a big thread in at least American communitarian thought throughout the 20th century, and you have a lot of examples of how that’s worked out around the world. Do you see this tendency in connection with that or is there something new and different about this 2020s wave?

DI There are some new inflections – the extensive involvement of women has been important in the 21st century in a way it wasn’t in the 20th century. There have been new tactical elements like microfinance. But no, it is amazing how consistently community gets coughed up as the answer when you’ve run out of answers. You see why it works: it’s not statist, it’s not libertarian, it’s somewhere in between. Everyone has some kind of romantic fantasy of village life where everything works. Part of the fantasy is that all social conflicts can be resolved at a local level – we may be ideologically opposed, but we go to church together, and our kids go to school together. Perhaps instead of fantasy, it’s a hope that we can overcome all the divisive aspects of our society, and find a way of responding to social problems that don’t require you to actually take sides in a conflict. It’s like, “OK, if everyone just hangs out and goes bowling together, then it could all be fine.” I’m very glad that we have community ties that knit us together, so that when we have issues that come from different positions we can understand each other. But I feel as a major political project, it’s fairly quietist. You often see activists say things like, “We want land reform, we want to take on this corporation”, and people respond by saying, “Let’s have more town meetings.” So, like you, I feel there is a tension between political resolutions of problems and a kind of sociological chilling out, which seems to be what is often asked by community leaders. I think you and I both have in mind another weird feature of community-based action, which is the scalar feature you’ve already referred to, the tension between community stuff and global problems.

In his 2000 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam surveyed the collapse of civic engagement across all aspects of American society at the time, fuelled by an atmosphere of distrust in institutions. The book has become a frequent reference in articles and books accounting for the repeated successes of President Trump’s populist politics.

HJB The fact is that energy transition is not addressable on a local level, but look at some of the ways we’re training young people to think about climate change. I was at a meeting in Louisiana, a big meeting of about 100 young scholars who had been charged with working on a “resilient Gulf of Mexico”. We did an exercise where everybody put up their solutions and visions for the future Gulf on Post-it notes across the wall of this hotel ballroom, and all of the solutions were for things like community gardens. Nobody was talking about what you practically do with, say, a fertiliser plant, of which there are many in the region. These bigger industrial transformations are important.

DI We’re used to a democratic deficit in one direction. It used to be the case that the only people who could vote in the United States were propertied white men, and that resulted in clear problems in terms of who was in the conversation. One of the enticing things about community solutions is that they vigorously attempt to involve poor people – but even when they succeed, there’s a democratic deficit in the other direction, because if you have a deliberative group that does not include the corporation, all that can happen is community gardens. There can be no dealing with the fertiliser plant because that becomes exogenous to the entire operation.

Around 60% of the ammonia production in the US is concentrated in the Gulf of Mexico. Anthropogenic nitrogen inputs from the Mississippi-Atchafalaya River Basin have caused substantial environmental challenges in the northern Gulf of Mexico, such as coastal eutrophication, harmful algal blooms, and seasonal hypoxia.

HJB What used to link these structures was the idea of a political party, which is basically vacant from American life.

DI It seems like if you want to have a theory of community, you also need to have a theory of what it might scale up into and what it might be connected to. So there might be a lot of grassroots activism, and then there’s a party, and that funnels up to an agency with global consequence. The fetishisation of community is so extreme that it becomes hard to see any of those links to larger power positions, and I worry that this creates something that’s convenient for corporations: a lot of local action that can’t possibly accomplish anything.

HJB Or is even co-opted, as you talk about in some of the examples in your book.

Daniel Immerwahr’s book, Thinking Small: The United States and the Lure of Community Development (2015), is a reminder that “the intimate scale can be just as oppressive as the large scale.” The book details how in the immediate post-war period, the US and other Western powers fostered the idea of small-scale community development in developing countries as a way of avoiding top-down structural reform. However, he argues, the outcome of this approach was merely to reinforce historic inequalities and hierarchies as rich landowners co-opted funds and opportunites to manipulate poor and neglected populations.

DI Do you feel like any of this has changed in the age of Trump? A lot of that Chan Zuckerberg-style “we can all do this together” energy feels kind of pre-2016 to me. Has our reflexive attachment to community changed?

HJB Maybe it is somehow Obama-era. But there’s a way Trump promotes it, because to some people what his election signalled is that the public is dangerous, and even maybe deranged, because they voted for him. If you can’t trust the electorate, it turns people back towards this idea of community action as the way of dealing with things.

DI I was interested in how many people after 2016 concluded that we needed to do a better job of reaching out interpersonally. That’s not a crazy reaction – it’s quite admirable. I have also been surprised after this election at how many people have reacted by retreating into the little things we can control, because larger politics feels impossible. Rather than asking how we can create large-scale institutions, parties that work, the plan is to just hang out until maybe something better happens. Do you feel that there’s a fear of large-scale institutions on the left?

Following 2016, and in particular in the run-up to the 2020 election, liberal figures like Pete Buttegieg and Ian Bremmer exhorted voters to reach out to Trump voters. The idea of this affective depolarisation took on an aesthetic level in features such as the Guardian’s “Dining Across the Divide”. It’s worth noting that the guest on a 2016 New York Times podcast entitled “Understanding the Trump Voter” was now-Vice President J.D. Vance.

HJB Definitely. In your book, you discuss that movement away from modernism and bureaucracy and quantification, with community as the antidote. You write:

There was, especially in the middle of the twentieth century, a structural momentum favoring industrialization, bureaucratization, standardization, commodification, secularization, urbanization, mechanization, specialization, and quantification – the related processes that we collectively call ‘modernization.’ On the whole, people moved toward cities rather than away from them, organized their lives around industry rather than around agriculture, and witnessed the growth rather than the diminution of state power. Those trends were more the result of economic and social forces than they were of conscious policy choices. Yet their effect was to make it look like the modernizers were winning the argument and the communitarians were losing it. It was a tug-of-war on a steep slope: the victors may not have been stronger, they may have just been the ones who had the good fortune to be pulling downhill.

DI The right is much more comfortable operating on multiple scales. I think that is a major effect of the Trump movement – it’s not communitarian or democratic in the sense of a large movement, but it funnels up into a project.

HJB Project 2025.

Project 2025 is a political initiative published by the Heritage Foundation in 2023, in anticipation of a second Trump presidency. The project envisions sweeping changes to the federal government and its agencies, including the abolition of the Department of Education. It advocates mass deportation of illegal immigrants, undermining environmental regulation, rejecting abortion and contraception as health care, removing DEI programmes, and proposes to ban pornography. Several contributors to Project 2025 have joined Trump’s incoming cabinet.

DI Exactly. That sort of populism focuses on a single, charismatic person, and I feel like that’s something that the left is very nervous about. When you think about actually addressing climate change, which always seems so overwhelming, what kinds of things do you think would be most helpful? What are the areas that you wish there were more political energies around?

HJB I fundamentally think we’re going to need voters to vote for things that are tough. If I was a philanthropist, I would be investing a lot more in understanding what might work for those voters and how to communicate the challenges, and not just communicate in a one-way direction, but understanding people’s priorities and then developing policy based on what you’re hearing. This is going to be a long process.

DI Can you talk about the tensions between some of these large-scale energy transition-related projects we’re going to have to do, and the local stakeholders, landowners and voters who would have to come on board in order to make it work?

HJB The main frame for climate policy has been net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by mid-century, and we had all these countries sign up to that informed by global scale analysis and global modelling. Very few people in the US know that the US had a net-zero-by-2050 goal, so there’s a massive disconnect. Not only do they largely not know what that means, they don’t know about the different actions in every sector that would involve remaking transport and industry and agriculture, and so on. There’s a huge disconnect between what we’ve been doing in national-level policy, which is informed by that global modelling and that analysis, and what people are thinking about or aware of.

DI I could see two reads on that. One is that the United States as a country has set itself on a course to get to net zero, whether it’ll make it or not, and it just forgot to send a memo around. Two is that all these agreements are basically bullshit, and the fact that nobody within the country is fully aware that we made the agreement or what would be required to enact it is a measure of how paper-thin these agreements are. Which of these do you lean towards?

HJB I lean more towards the first one, just because I know so many people who have committed their lives to working on this, but somehow their theory of change didn’t involve the electorate knowing about it. It’s like they thought there would be some sort of workaround where you didn’t have to actually deal with Trump voters or people in rural places, because the theory is that if you just make clean energy cheap enough, then the market will take care of it.

DI Do you see that as at all plausible?

HJB No. It’s a necessary precondition, but on its own, it’s not going to do it.

On Wednesday January 8, less than two weeks before President Trump’s second inauguration, the six largest banks in the US – JP Morgan, Citigroup, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs – quit the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which commits its members to aligning their lending and investments with the net-zero target. President Biden had recommited the US to net zero in 2021. One of President Trump’s first executive orders, signed on his inauguration day, took the country back out of the Paris Agreement once again.

DI Something I’ve felt enormously frustrated by is that we’ve had politicians who seem to take climate change seriously, at least rhetorically, but I can’t think of a major politician who has said to voters that things might look different for them.

HJB Carter did, but it didn’t work out for him.

DI That’s right, there was that incredible moment when a run on oil was producing some shortages, and Carter’s view was: turn down your thermostats, wear a goddamn sweater and we’ll get through. Then when it came to Reagan, he said in a speech something like, they tell you that you have to learn to live within limits but I don’t believe that. I’m running for president, let’s take all those solar panels off the White House and crank the thermostats back up. I can’t think of a moment in US political history since then when the idea that people would have to adjust their lifestyles in any way has been reintroduced.

HJB People took that lesson to heart, that it’s politically impossible to say that, but I don’t know. We just did a survey, and more people thought that net-zero policies would limit their freedom than give them economic opportunities. There may be some truth to that, but we haven’t actually explored the economic opportunity space.

One of the late Jimmy Carter’s most famous political interventions came in response to the 1979 oil crisis. Addressing the nation he called the crisis “the moral equivalent of war”, and, to encourage energy conservation, turned down the heat in the White House and wore a cardigan. He also installed solar water-heating panels on the White House.

DI That seems to be such a weird way to pose the question, because getting to net zero is going to suck. You apply the brakes so that the car doesn’t hit the wall. To say that it will be more beneficial to make an energy transition misses the main benefit of the energy transition, which is having a habitable planet. The fact that we have to propose it to people as if there’s an upshot for you that is unrelated to the main thing we’re trying to do seems kind of delusional.

HJB I do think we should talk more about how people’s communities will concretely benefit.

DI Are people in the United States amenable to doing the kinds of things required for an energy transition?

HJB Some things would get us about halfway there, and other things will be a lot harder.

DI Where do you think people are most flexible?

HJB We should start with industrial decarbonisation, but in smart ways that don’t impact the prices of things too dramatically. The less visible is probably a good starting point at this point in time. The power sector is very doable. What’s harder is meat consumption; I don’t see that being easily addressable.

DI That was one of the things that the Republicans jumped on with just talk of a Green New Deal: “Are you telling us to eat less meat? Let’s torch the planet!”

A 2019 report projected that the global plant-based meat market, then valued at $17.1 billion, would grow to $54.8 billion by 2035. The projection has been shown to be optimistic, and revised figures estimate that it will reach only $36.37 billion by 2034. As scientific advances have been made in meat substitutes that look like the “real thing”, there has been right-wing backlash. There is a significant overlap between men’s rights activists and carnivorous diets: Jordan Peterson, for example, survives on an all-beef diet.

HJB I would stay away from those sorts of things as near-term actions and focus on the power sector and industry.

DI What you’re saying is we should do everything top-down that can be done that will not impact the daily lives of most people, in the hope that they don’t notice that anything has happened.

HJB I know I just critiqued this, but I also think that there are things – like building decarbonisation – that have benefits for people. You install a heat pump, you install a cooling system, you have better air quality. You can package all these things together.

DI When you look at the players currently involved – NGOs, governments of individual US states, the federal government, international bodies – is there any group that seems to be the most effective?

HJB One good thing about the Inflation Reduction Act is that it set up a way of funding local governments. That’s the way to do it. It’s not just giving money to NGOs to work in local places; it’s building out that capacity at the county level and at the municipal level. People who are working in state or local government are the ones who are going to be either applying for federal funding or dispersing it to others, alongside regional organisations, councils of governments, and some NGO workers. It’s not only the public sector, but those people who understand how these regional and local scales interact are just so important for climate action and energy transition, and we need a way to see them and talk about them – and put money into their work.

President Biden’s landmark Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) directed billions of dollars into renewable energy initiatives across America, of which 85% are estimated to have gone to projects in Republican-led districts, particularly in states historically reliant on coal. It is likely that the bipartisan nature of this Act will help protect its provisions under the incoming Trump presidency.

DI How pessimistic are you?

HJB Right now I’m in the middle. I don’t think we’re in the worst-case situation. Even with Trump’s election, there’s still a lot of momentum in renewables. However, I’m not optimistic either. We’re still looking at 2.7, 3 degrees of warming, and it’s not clear that our systems are resilient enough for that. Where are you at?

DI I’m horribly pessimistic. So, this is a sunburst of optimism. .

Holly Jean Buck‘s After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration (2019) blends essay with microfictions to argue that geoengineering is a vital tool to address the harsh reality of the climate crisis – and that meeting targets requires the removal of carbon from the atmosphere as well as limiting its production. For Buck, climate engineering is not simply a “technology”, but “a variety of practices that include people in various relationships with nature and each other.”