Godzilla on the Phone

Whalesong, climate action, and the case for phonebanking.

I hate when strangers call me and try to talk to me about my extended car warranty or a fake problem with my tax return or anything at all, really. I’ve probably won a million dollars and don’t know it. I’ve definitely hung up on my health insurance company more than once. One time when I was living in California, a man called to pitch me a vacation to Daytona Beach. I was feeling bored that day, and I had been watching a lot of James Veitch doing Scamalot, so I humored him. He could talk, and boy, did he want to. I put the phone down and cleaned the kitchen sink, and then picked it back up and said “uh-huh.” I watered the plants. And then I went outside to where my housemate David was napping in a chaise lounge and asked how good of a Godzilla impression he could do. He told me he could do a pretty good one, and so I said to the man on the phone, “I’m sorry to interrupt, but do you hear that?”

The man said, “What?”

“It’s—” Cue David, playing the best Godzilla I’ve ever heard. Which is easy, because back then I’d never seen Godzilla, and I still haven’t.

“It’s—” I started to make noises, too. Mangled choking sounds, godawful sounds.

“SAVE YOURSELF! SAVE YOURSELF!” I yelled. And I hung up.

The only point I’m making is how much I hate strangers calling me. Which is why you might be surprised to learn that I have become one of them.

Annoyingly, phonebanks appear to be one of the most effective tools we have for encouraging voters to turn out for the 2024 U.S. election — what could be the most consequential election of my lifetime. There are many to choose from, but I went with the Environmental Voter Project. Over 8 million environmentalists did not vote in the 2020 presidential election and over 13 million skipped the 2022 midterms. EVP is a nonpartisan nonprofit focused on changing that.

The other night, I joined my first phonebank. I felt a little guilty doing it, knowing there might be someone out there who hates getting calls from strangers as much as I do. But on the other hand, if there’s someone else out there who’s just a little too overwhelmed with life (because who isn’t?) to make a voting plan, someone who needs a little nudge, a little love, someone from Pennsylvania or North Carolina, well then.

In an hour and a half, I talked to one nice person on the phone who said he was going to vote. I talked to a lot of people who said I had the wrong number. I left four voicemails. I got hung up on a lot. I felt a little bit like I was doing something. I felt a lot a bit like I was doing absolutely nothing. Wrong numbers are great! The kind and patient person running the chat said. They tell us where to stop focusing our efforts. The experience was uncomfortable. Unglamorous. Not in my wheelhouse, not even a little.

But the thing that made it worth it, the thing that still makes me cry when I think about it, were the people in the Zoom room who didn’t think to turn off their video cameras. Grumpy and tired at the end of a long day, I watched them with my own screen black. All those earnest faces. All those raised eyebrows, those soft lines. The way their heads tilted when they heard someone’s voice on the other end. Their trembling chins, their craned necks. All those people on a Wednesday night just trying to make a difference. Asking, Will you be there, too?

I thought of birds, singing at dawn. I thought of whales, the time I dipped my head beneath the Pacific and heard a humpback groaning and wavering and soaring, clear and bone-deep. I thought of the ways things get communicated across the landscapes that divide us.

Since I started writing for the Appalachian Mountain Club this September, it’s become abundantly clear to me how much each of us is needed. I was already interested in conservation and climate change, already telling stories about sustainability, and inclusivity in the outdoors, and the intersection of people’s passions with this moment in the earth’s history. Heck, I teach a class about connecting people heart-first to climate action through creative writing. I’m actually writing this to you from a treehouse classroom in midcoast Maine, surrounded by my students, who are also tap-tapping away on their computers in search of the right words.

But there was so much I didn’t know. There’s so much I still don’t know. The difference is that now it’s literally my job—not just to know, but to translate these things into something that can be felt. Did you know about 30x30, the 2021 goal established by the United States and world leaders to protect at least 30% of lands and waters by the year 2030? How about the WWF Living Planet report that found wildlife populations have declined by 73% since 1970? I’m still catching up. I’m late to the party. Or maybe I’d arrived to the party, but I was stuck in the foyer where it was cold and the music was kind of bad. I’m here to tell you that the real party is in the kitchen, and it’s hot and joyful, and there’s plenty of room. It’s ok if you’re late as long as you’re here.

Speaking of joy, I’ve been reading Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s book (& Substack) What if We Get It Right, in which she asks my new favorite question: What if we act as if we love the future? If you feel stuck or unsure of where to put your feet in all this, I recommend checking out her climate venn diagram:

• What brings you joy?

• What are you good at?

• What needs doing?

Join me. In voting climate up and down the ballot. In calling. (I’ll be there tonight, and likely Sunday too, but if that doesn’t work for you, here are more.) In donating. In believing a better world is possible. In loving this fucking earth through small and meaningful action. In hoping. And I mean hope in the way Rebecca Solnit means it:

Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the Earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... ​To hope is to give yourself to the future—­ and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.