Why did you buy this cartoon? What called out to you about it?

I still have the cartoon that I tore out of the magazine in November of 2012. It's a little yellow and threadbare. My wife doesn't usually read the whole magazine, but sometimes there's a cartoon I want her to see, and I cut it out just to show her. I usually throw them away after showing them to her. This one I never did.

I didn't buy the original of the cartoon for a year and a half after that. Perhaps it didn't occur to me that it was possible to do that. I recall searching The New Yorker Condé Nast website and discovering that you can buy originals. They told me the price and I thought, "Well, okay, I'll do that."

This was well before the cartoon went viral on social media, as far as I'm aware. I had a sense that it either was, or would be before long, an important cartoon. It really sums up—in one simple picture and caption—both the problem of climate change and the cause of the problem. Namely, our refusal to adjust our system to deal with the fact that fossil fuels are causing terrible and largely irreversible damage.

At the time, I was spending a lot of my time thinking about, and working on, climate change. That's why this cartoon spoke to me. I was a volunteer with the Sierra Club, working to stop the building of a huge coal plant in Virginia. I had also recently enrolled in a program at Johns Hopkins to get a master of science degree in energy policy and climate.

When the original cartoon arrived in the mail, there was a note from the cartoonist, Tom Toro, thanking me for supporting him and saying: "If you'd like to get in touch, I can tell you more about how this cartoon came to be." That was the beginning of an email correspondence with Tom that is ongoing. I’ve exchanged a dozen or so emails with Tom in the 11 years since I bought the cartoon. He tells the story of how he submitted it to the magazine and was surprised when they came back and said they wanted to publish it right away, which doesn't usually happen.

I put the framed original cartoon on my wall and admired it there for almost 11 years. Then I heard about it going viral. People like Greta Thunberg and Leonardo DiCaprio were using it on Twitter and Facebook. A few years ago, Toro wrote to me and said: "It's kind of gone viral again, I guess. I think Bernie Sanders has used it a number of times."

The cartoon was taking on a life of its own. I remember thinking: "Well, I kind of knew this was going to be an important cartoon and it's starting to be recognized." I had had it all these years, and it gave me great satisfaction, but I thought it'd be good to find a museum somewhere where it could be seen by other people. 

I've been reading about the Climate Museum and the exhibitions you've had over the last several years. I also saw articles about your work in The New York Times. When you announced that you secured a permanent home, that made me sit up and take notice.

New York City, being a large city with lots of visitors, seemed like a great place for the cartoon. I got in touch with the Museum to see if by any chance you would like to have it. I was really happy when I heard that you would be thrilled to receive it.