In our first episode in our new series on the climate crisis, I talk to Dan Sherrell about his book, Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World.

Dan is a climate organizer – he has led successful campaigns to phase out coal-fired power plants, divest millions of dollars from the fossil fuel industry, and pass a Green New Deal bill for New York, and he’s currently Campaign Director at the Climate Jobs National Resource Center in Washington D.C.

He wrote Warmth during a break in his career, thanks to a Fullbright scholarship and artist-in-residence grants.

In Warmth, Dan attempts to come to terms with the emotional fallout of growing up in the age of climate change. The book is written as a letter to an imagined future child and is a kind of thought exercise about what it means for his generation (he was born in 1990) to invest in the future.

Dan and I discuss what is at stake in reckoning with how it feels to live in an age when our world is at peril. We also talk about what we need to do. Most immediately, Dan tells me, we have to do our part to encourage Congress to pass the Build-Back-Better bill with meaningful climate legislation, a process that has been imperiled by the effort of Senator Joe Manchin to torpedo that section of the bill. He recommends working with the Sunrise movement.