A Caring Counterforce

I wake up to a light snowfall, a garden flecked with white, and a swirl of memories of winter. I moved to Amsterdam in the mid 90s, and my first winters here were all about skates: the canals froze over early and I watched the city transform in a thousand ways. People took their lunch breaks on the ice, where pop-up shops dotted the canals with pea soup, oliebollen, and hot chocolate on offer. Chairs were brought out for little kids to skate behind, like training wheels on a bike. And neophytes like me were warned in the early phase of the freeze not to skate under the bridges, where the ice could be thin.

But in 1997 it didn’t stay thin long. A steady freeze meant a national tradition, perhaps more anticipated than Sinterklaas or Queen’s Day, would once again bring a tide of skaters to the ice, from peak athletes who trained for this all year, to wobbly kids and their parents just wanting to be able to say they were a part of it: the Elfstedentocht, or Eleven Cities Race. For some, it was a competition that could elevate you to mega-star celebrity status among the Dutchies, joining a century-old parade of elite and fabled winners who would never have to pay for drinks again. For others, it was a leisure tour, a great day out, a celebration of a national heritage, a dance on steel blades with ancestors in the frozen flow of history.

And history may be what it has become. 1997 was the last year the race was run. We all know why.

A few weeks back, my friend Douwe van Der Werf (“The old man of the seaport”) gathered a pretty extraordinary collection of people to think about how we can move “Beyond Tragedy.” The tragedy was undefined. The room was an eclectic mix of activists, artists, spiritualists, relationship coaches, indigenous nomads, musicians, and people living on the fringe of mainstream norms. The overlap in our Venn diagrams? I’d say it was people who have a lover’s quarrel with the world. A combination of anger, grief, and disbelief mixed with creativity and some kind of day-to-day courage. A frustrated sense that humanity is capable of so much better.

But one participant had a simpler take: we were people who care. And what made us fringe was the fact that caring, in today’s world, is being demonized.

Photo by Lisa Rose

What has this got to do with the thickness of ice in a lowlands country?

It’s about grief. A wonderful woman recently reminded me that grief, unresolved and unembraced, is the place grievances spring from. As a community, none of us have resolved the grief of how climate change has already erased whole chapters of our collective past. Whole ecosystems, whole islands, entire cultures, entire species, and entire traditions. None of us have resolved our grief for the failures of human goodness that we witness every day. Our politics are still reeling from a pandemic that shocked far more than a supply chain, but exposed just how frail, exploitative and insane our global economic system is. We move daily through an increasingly desperate sense of decline, lessened resources, constrained abundance. We acknowledge that endless growth is no way to measure progress in a world of limited resources, but our institutions seem incapable of thinking in any other way. Billionaires squabble over the taxes on their enormous slices of pie while convincing working people who can no longer afford homes that immigrants are out to steal their crumbs. Despots and criminals don’t just seize the reigns of power, they’re willingly handed them in exchange for attractive promises they can never keep. We can’t fully resolve our grief for these things because we’re still in profound denial of a simple fact. The world as we once knew it isn’t dying, it’s already dead.

The question we wrestled with was this: Where in this miasma of despair are the stories that can help us out of it? Because while anger may be the next step after denial, it isn’t enough. Constructive anger is an alchemical concoction that requires a catalyst of hope.

But as I looked around that room, I saw abundant evidence of hope. Not optimism, the belief that everything will work out no matter what, but hope: “Optimism with its sleeves rolled up.” Here were people who were gathered for no other reason than they cared. Nobody was being paid for their time, nobody was paying to be there. Everyone in that room believed a better world was possible, and was eager to put their shoulder to any wheel that might move it toward realisation. Everyone had brought a gift, whether it was food, a poem, a story, a carved owl talking stick, a lithograph of a raven.

We were a counterforce. A glimmer of a profoundly different future for the world. A resistance, a response, a point of light in the darkness. And, as my artist friend Iris Maertens puts it in pictures:

So I being 2025 with a resolution to support the counterforce. To put action to a thought that Italo Calvino so beautifully crafted in his Invisible Cities:

“There are two ways to escape suffering… the first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Among the ideas in that room that needs to endure and be given space was a young filmmaker’s graduation film, a “climate fiction” about a mother who realizes that her son doesn’t remember snow. Just as my own sons have no memory of an Elfstedentocht, just as an entire generation of Dutchies are growing up without the historical traditions of ice. Here’s Eva’s summary of her project:

In a climate-changed Brussels, where Christmas has become a summer affair, a grieving mother’s attempt to revive snowy memories for her son forces her to face the intertwined loss of her husband and the disappearance of winter.

Why is it so hard to tell a climate story? Perhaps it’s because the stakes are so monumental, and the answers are not black-and-white. My approach avoids the binary of utopias and dystopias in a future setting, instead seeking the spectrum in between, where invention and reflection are most needed. Drawing on influences like Lucrecia Martel’s focus on the present moment and Yorgos Lanthimos’s use of absurdity, the film blends naturalistic aesthetics with humor and melancholy. It portrays a mother and son navigating personal grief and the quiet, pervasive grief of a changing climate.

This film also reflects my excitement about the growing movement of filmmakers tackling the climate storytelling challenge. Like others in this space, I’m eager to push beyond surface-level narratives, experimenting with structure, relationships, and future-proof values. It’s a story of hope—not complacent hope, but active hope that questions how we live, adapt, and connect in an altered world.

You can help make this film a part of the counterforce at the gofundme link here. If there are other projects that you believe fit Calvino’s description, pop them in the comments. Support them. Give them space. Make them endure.