Daniel Sherrell is the author of Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, a memoir on the climate crisis framed as a letter to Sherrell's potential future child. He is a climate movement organizer and 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 State, legislation that the New York Times called “one of the world’s most ambitious climate plans.” He’s Campaign Director for the Climate Jobs National Resource Center, where he works with the American labor movement to tackle the climate crisis, reverse income inequality, and win millions of unionized clean energy jobs. The New Yorker and Publisher’s Weekly named Warmth one of the best books of 2021 and he’s a recipient of the Creative Force Foundation’s Award for “igniting positive social change through writing.”

DANIEL SHERRELL

It felt to me that if I wasn't able to figure out a way to orchestrate a genuine emotional encounter for myself with the enormity of this thing I was meant to be taking action on, then something in me was going to break, and I just wouldn't be able to keep doing the work. So, there was never a point where it's like, I'm going to write a book, but I did turn to the written word, almost little diary entries, to make psychological and spiritual sense of the crisis that I was dealing with in a thin way every day.

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To some extent, my generation has had to recreate it in their own image and figure out ourselves. Here's this massive problem with the climate movement. We came of age in the nineties, where any kind of mobilized left in this country was basically in the wilderness. It was the "end of history". There was nothing to do. We had solved it. Not to mention the fact that the AIDS crisis itself took out a lot of ACT UP leaders who might otherwise have been mentors...I was born in a moment where we sort of had to learn ourselves.

Photo by Giovana Schluter Nunes

This interview was conducted by Bruce Piasecki & Mia Funk. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Marley Hinschberger. Digital Media Coordinator was Sophie Garnier.