Three of us launched the Daily Dose a couple of months ago out of Vijaya’s living room. We made it a nine-month commitment, through the vital 2020 election. As we were planning and even as we began, we had no idea that we’d be sheltering in place during a global pandemic in a matter of weeks, and for an uncertain but not brief duration. We launched the Daily Dose to put more voices, and more diverse voices, more frequently, into the flow of networked, world-wide conversation about a different urgent global crisis facing us: the climate emergency.

Some very interesting work has been put forth during this time about the links between climate and coronavirus, and about the important lessons we might learn from the one about the other. The Prime Minister of New Zealand released (but did not write) a powerful poem to this effect by Nadine Anne Hura, even as our own “leader” was suggesting disinfectant as a virus cure.

What I want to talk about today, though, is the Dailiness of the Daily Dose. From the three of us at the core of its launch, three more joined, and now we are up to seven members of a lose collective with a lot of independence whose shared goals are to post something every single weekday and to end climate catastrophe. It turns out the first goal has more to offer the second than simply propaganda.

Writing weekly or biweekly about climate, researching topics, looking at the week’s climate news, funneling the climate through the lens of whatever else is happening and visa versa, seeking solutions, and editing and promoting each other’s essays has—speaking for myself—thrust me into a constant and vital education about a topic I’d shied away from looking at too closely. The Daily Dose insists on a perspective of hope and action. We believe we have an obligation to act as if we—those battling for climate awareness and action—can change the world, like the many other small minorities who’ve enacted and impacted the major world-political shifts.

Helming a public-facing conversation forces us to keep coming up with ideas, to keep taking the action of writing, posting and sharing, to keep our eyes on the world in the same way we know we should never turn our backs on the ocean when we are standing in the powerful surge of waves. This is the right attitude toward climate catastrophe in this moment.

Writing on deadline also reminds us of what we can do when our backs are up against a wall, when the ticking of the alarm clock is growing louder, when the clarity of what must be accomplished and by when is inescapable. Writing on deadline is the only way, really, to produce something that can be declared done. Because the alternative to writing on deadline is writing until a piece is finished. I call it “writing to perfection,” and of course there is no such thing. “A piece of work is never finished, merely abandoned,” it is said (and variously attributed to da Vinci, E.M. Foster, Paul Valery). But the art and essays we live by, the ones that inspire and sustain us, have been abandoned not to the proverbial drawer but to the world at large. “Here it is,” we say, “the best we could do in the time allotted and under the circumstances.”

“Public, not perfect,” Daily Dose member Angie says. But the secret is that if a public viewing is at the other side of that deadline, we rise up and do better than we would have done if we were aiming for perfection, a goal impossible to reach. Alive to the eyes on the other side of the screen, on the other side of the deadline, we write in conversation, we reach for something more than we already contain. “I know you have nothing, “ Antonio Porchia said. “That is why I ask you for everything. That way, you will have everything.” “Sé que tienes nada. Por ello te pido todo. Para que tengas todo.”

We are up against a global deadline with the climate emergency. Coronovirus has taught us many things, including breaking through a hard glass ceiling of what seemed possible to change in the terms of global capitalism to preserve human life. We’ll need that news to take the kind of urgent action we’ve forced ourselves to by waiting so long. But deadlines are good for human beings. We get creative, we connect, we focus. We do our best work when we have no other choice.