Tom Toro’s favorite Tom Toro cartoons about climate change » Yale Climate Connections

Tom Toro, who’s been cartooning his way through existential dread at Yale Climate Connections since 2019, has a new cartoon collection out today. It’s called “And to think we started as a book club,” and you can get it from your favorite bookstore.

Sara Peach: What was your motivation to start (and continue) creating cartoons about climate change?

Tom Toro: I’ve always been an environmentalist at heart. As a kid, I’d go to Earth Day cleanup activities around the Bay Area with my family, and I’d spend summers on my grandparents’ farm in Ohio. Nature spoke to me. Sometimes in profound ways, like the afternoon in fifth grade when I came home from school and had a sudden panic attack because I realized that I couldn’t make a snack for myself without creating garbage. But sometimes in silly ways, like the long conversations I’d have with my cat in a made-up language. I guess it’s this mixture of crisis and comedy, both stemming from my lifelong connection to the natural world, that made creating cartoons about climate change a perfect fit. 

Peach: What are your favorite two or three cartoons that you’ve contributed to Yale Climate Connections over the years? 

Toro: You’re asking me to pick favorites among my babies! But OK, fine, I’ll play along if I must.

I love this one because the double entendre neatly aligns the activists’ tireless commitment with their policy goals. Clever wordplay is catnip to me. Also, it’s an optimistic cartoon about climate change, which is something of a rarity in the genre:

The next cartoon I’d pick (again: under duress!) is one about a person checking into a hotel, but standing next to them is a huge, hulking monster. I find this cartoon extremely identifiable, to a painful degree. Maybe it’s because I’m about to launch my book tour that will involve jetting around the country far more than I normally do – or maybe it’s because all of my family members live in different states and I need to jump on a plane whenever I visit them. Burning jet fuel to see blood relatives is a sure sign that our society is structured incorrectly.

Last but not least, there’s a cartoon very close to my heart. I think this cartoon is a poignant reminder that the devastation we’ve been fearing for so long is now here. Temperatures are increasing, sea levels are rising, extreme weather events are everywhere. The future our children inherit is going to be unstable and dangerous. That’s inescapable. But at the same time, it’s clarifying. With the effects of climate change right on our doorstep, our duty to mitigate the damage, and to reverse course – for our children’s sake, if not our own – is more obvious than ever. 

Peach: You’ve brought your cartooning skills to the climate movement to great effect. What would you say to people who want to do something about climate change but feel like they don’t have the “right” skills to contribute?

Toro: The impact my work has had is almost entirely accidental. I didn’t plan for my cartoons to go viral. I couldn’t have foreseen that someday they’d be shared by Greta Thunberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bernie Sanders – and even laid on the grave of Karl Marx.

But long before that, I was struggling for years to break into The New Yorker, and there was never any guarantee that they’d eventually accept my cartoons. I could have easily quit in frustration, as I was tempted to do many times along the way, and then we wouldn’t be having this conversation.

What I’m trying to say is: Don’t focus on impact. It’s out of your control. Instead, put your energy toward intent. The meaning that you invest in what you’re doing is what will pull you forward and guide you through the difficult periods. Your intention – to communicate, to help, to heal, to bring joy – that’s what really matters, regardless of how skillfully it’s done. Stay involved with good intentions, and just let the ripples spread from there; let the repercussions take care of themselves. You never know what impact you might have.