We’re fighting for policy changes that will make it possible for us to have better choices: utilities that offer us renewable options, electric trains that make short-haul flights obsolete, public transit. Exxon and its ilk have been fighting for decades to keep these choices out of our reach, and then claim that we are voting with our dollars every time we sit in traffic or heat our homes with fossil fuels supplied by a utility that has a monopoly. They can play gotcha as much as they want, but all it proves is how badly we need better options. And we are still going to fight like heck to make sure options are available to everyone.

And yet, for all that logic, I still find myself on edge. To be watched so much is a kind of never-ending nightmare. And sometimes it’s just infuriating. I skipped the funeral this summer of Patrick Sorrento, an important mentor to me at my college newspaper, because I didn’t want my minder to follow me and cause a distracting spectacle. When my daughter reports someone taking pictures of her at the airport, it drives me nuts. I have no idea if it’s actually this outfit; common decency would suggest otherwise, but that seems an increasingly rare commodity.

There’s plenty else that scares me this summer, of course: Every month we’re breaking temperature records, and Donald J. Trump has introduced a new snarl to our public life. Against these fears, the best one can hope for is a kind of resiliency. For a planet in desperate trouble, it’s good news that the price of a solar panel has plummeted. For our nation, there’s the hope that the social fabric — the Little Leagues and Methodist churches and Black Lives Matter assemblies and League of Women Voters and library guilds and N.A.A.C.P. chapters — remain just strong enough that we’ll escape the narcissistic nihilism of Mr. Trump.

As for me, there’s comfort in the knowledge that the climate movement doesn’t depend on me. For years now, I’ve been stepping back, mostly because I think the kind of movement we need is one that has thousands of leaders in thousands of places, connected like the solar panels on the roofs of an entire planet.

It’s stronger that way, because different voices bring different arguments to the fore. But another good reason for that distributed model, one that I’ve thought of often this summer, is that even a successful attack on one person does little damage to the whole movement, in the same way that you can smash the solar panels on my roof and not black out the Eastern Seaboard.

When that doesn’t cheer me up sufficiently, I fall back on my colleagues all over the world. A good thing about movements is that you really do have brothers and sisters, and they do have your back. The fossil-fuel industry may threaten us as a planet, as a nation, and as individuals, but when we rise up together we’ve got a fighting chance against the powers that be.

And perhaps that realization is just a little bit scary for them.