Eric Drooker’s “The Impossible Dream”

Last week, world leaders gathered in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, the latest in a long line of summits aimed at finding a solution to the climate crisis. Some gains were made, at least on paper: a number of countries signed on to pledges that would halt deforestation by 2030 and cut emissions of methane. And yet, as Elizabeth Kolbert writes in her Comment in the November 15th issue of the magazine: “The sad fact is that, when it comes to climate change, there’s no making up for lost time. Every month that carbon emissions remain at current levels—they’re running at about forty billion tons a year—adds to the eventual misery. Had the U.S. started to lead by example three decades ago, the situation today would be very different. It’s still not too late to try—indeed, it’s imperative to try—but, to quote Boris Johnson, ‘humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change.’ ” This prevailing mood, of justified gloom and necessary optimism, inspired the artist Eric Drooker’s latest cover, which features an appearance from that enduring dreamer of impossible dreams, Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Have you experienced any effects of the climate crisis firsthand in California, where you live?

In these last few years, we’ve had massive wildfires up and down the West Coast. Summer and fall are now “fire season.” There are entire weeks when I have to keep all the windows shut because of the toxic smoke. I have a carton of N95 masks handy to protect my lungs.

Cervantes’s novel, which you have referenced in this week’s cover, was published in the early seventeenth century. What are the windmills that a modern-day knight-errant would want to take on?

If Don Quixote found himself in the twenty-first century, he’d immediately embark on a mad, chivalrous crusade to save his planet from the Hydra-headed corporate colossus of capitalism.

Your work, which includes an illustrated edition of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” often draws inspiration from literature. What are you reading these days?

I just finished Neal Cassady’s long-lost letter to Jack Kerouac, “The Joan Anderson Letter: The Holy Grail of the Beat Generation.” I’ve also been devouring graphic novels by the dozens, including Glenn Head’s harrowing memoir “Chartwell Manor,” Ben Katchor’s “The Dairy Restaurant,” Eleanor Davis’s “The Hard Tomorrow,” and Adrian Tomine’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist.”

For more coverage of the U.N. summit, read:

Bill McKibben on Biden’s presence, and Joe Manchin’s shadow, at the summit:

Joe Biden, who had promised to come to the Glasgow climate summit with “bells on,” appeared to snooze for a moment as he sat listening to speeches at Monday’s session. It was a highly relatable interlude. An inescapable feeling of fatigue has settled in around the summit—barring some useful surprise, much of the air seems to have been sucked from this conclave before it began, not least because of the ongoing antics of Democratic Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, whose influence was easy to feel even a (rising) ocean away.

Sam Knight on Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s fickle climate leadership:

Opening the Glasgow talks, Johnson did a bit about James Bond and a ticking time bomb. He is, more than anything, a facile student in a perpetual essay crisis: staying up late, scribbling unwieldy, fancy-sounding analogies to get through another assignment. Something something Sophocles. It’s mostly wordplay and bullshit.

For more covers about the climate crisis, see below: