Please join me for a stroll about the grounds
From The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison. Also the header image from Crisis Palace #1.
Welp it has been just over a year since I started this newsletter that is nominally about climate change, but also about social movements, activism, philanthropy, and generally what it is like to be alive right now. As I write this, California is battling simultaneous catastrophes in the form of wildfires, record heat, blackouts, and a pandemic. I am worrying and sending love to my family members living in that part of the country during yet another frightening moment. So still no shortage of crisis, I guess.
What else. A historic uprising for racial justice. A climate movement that is more powerful than ever and resetting the national agenda. Changes rumbling in my parochial city. And I’ve gotten to know a lot more of the people on my block on a first name basis. It has been a year.
I’m going to keep this thing going, maybe try some different lengths (they seem to be growing), probably more interviews in the next year. But it feels like a good time to look back on some highlights from the past 46 issues for a minute. To get a sense of the project so far—scanning past issues, it seems I’ve called at least a few people pieces of shit, and you know what, I stand by it. Also newer readers can maybe check out some earlier stuff, and this could be a good one to share if you are so inclined.
I hope you will enjoy this stroll down memory lane and reminisce with me about all we’ve been through together. Or you can skip ahead to the links and stuff at the end.✓
From The right to exist:
You still get people who agree with this basic concept of climate justice but will say something like: Well, climate action is inherently an act of justice, because it stops vulnerable people from suffering. Put another way, we can’t get bogged down in issues of fairness when pursuing climate action because climate change creates such severe injustice that curbing it must be prioritized above all else.
What that argument gets seriously wrong, however, is that it casts people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts merely as passive victims of the problem. In other words, climate change is what happens to poor unfortunate people, and climate solutions are things we do for them and sometimes to them.
Even people arguing in favor of climate justice often fixate on outcomes in this way, that we have to be altruistic and consider people in need, etc.
I find climate justice as a solution to be a far more powerful argument—that we can’t get to the level of political power and sweeping change necessary without the most impacted communities playing a central and leading role. This is basically an organizing argument—that among other things, you need a powerful, engaged activist base and historically that’s the people who are feeling the pain of a problem right now.
In that sense, it’s not about “attaching” justice or fairness issues to climate action. Bold climate action requires engagement with justice and fairness issues. It’s about mobilizing human beings around the ways they are currently experiencing the problem.
From A menacing act:
Earlier this year, two miles west of my house, a woman named Marilyn Wentworth was crossing the street to get a coffee at her favorite shop, a little family-owned place I go to all the time. As she used the crosswalk to navigate the four lanes of traffic that rip through the neighborhood’s business district, a car struck and killed her. Her husband of 42 years reported seeing her body “fly in the air.”
That’s a particularly dangerous stretch of road, even for Boston, and the city is now pursuing a plan that would remove one car lane and add protected bike lanes. The Wentworth family and many others are advocating for it. But as you can imagine, there’s a lot of resistance. At a recent public meeting on the plan, one city council candidate charged the mic and said, “This is not a good idea.”
That there’s any resistance at all is a testament to the dedication with which someone will defend their right to strap themselves into a two-ton cocoon of plastic and steel to get anywhere they want to go, as fast as they want to go, with as few impediments as possible.
(update: all the city did was put up a couple of new signs)
From Weaknesses and Vulnerabilities (April 10):
As the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear, Shamar Bibbins, a senior program officer at climate funder the Kresge Foundation, was on a call with a public health nonprofit they fund in California, going over the kinds of questions that everyone working on climate change is having to face, like whether climate action should be taking a back seat to the immediate health threat.
The grantee made it clear that these are not issues that can be separated and dealt with in isolation. Remember, they told Bibbins, “Wildfire season is just around the corner.”
The thought of wildfire smoke coupled with a deadly respiratory illness is especially chilling, but feel free to swap it out with run-of-the-mill industrial pollution, any extreme weather event, flooding, or an urban heat wave to visualize how climate change is not some pet issue to be put back on the shelf, but a problem that compounds all other problems, and will hammer the same systems being tested by the virus.
“We like to say that climate change is a threat multiplier, that it affects everything. Climate change is a public health issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a poverty issue, it’s a social justice issue,” Bibbins said. “As this pandemic just keeps unfolding, we’re seeing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our systems.”
In other words, things are breaking too easily, and in all the most predictable ways.
(update: still breaking)
From Drag anchor:
I see a lot of people, very serious climate people, rush to Bloomberg’s defense because of his philanthropic record. But his philanthropy shows us a lot about how Bloomberg wields power, which is that he uses all the channels available to him to try to fix the world in the ways that he sees best. So I see Bloomberg’s presidential campaign as another example of this hijack and redirect approach, attempting to fix a Democratic Party that is veering beyond his preferred solution set.
You might think well what’s the big deal he did help shut down those coal plants, after all. But hey maybe there was a way to transition away from coal without the US becoming the world’s largest producer of oil and gas in the process. And you know what, maybe he could beat Trump, but given what we know about his record, in service of what values, exactly? At the expense of whose suffering? And maybe the most important question, why is this the guy who gets to set these terms? And the answer is that he has $62 billion.
(update: everyone yelled at him and he dropped out)
From In every dream home a heartache:
One more quick David Koch is horrible story, but with this one has a happy ending. A cool trick they picked up in the 2010s was to swoop into communities considering public transit investments—things like tunnels, new bus routes, light rail expansions, real scary stuff—and pump money into the opposition, tanking once-popular proposals on the basis that taxes and public transit are attacks on liberty.
But (as we saw with you know who’s takeover of the party) there are limits to the Kochs’ influence. Their most recent transit battle was in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona (OK I’m actually from Mesa). On Tuesday, a Koch-funded effort to ban any new light rail or streetcar construction in the city lost in a landslide. Good job Phoenix. The Koch legacy casts a long and ugly shadow, but it is not all powerful.
From Ring the bells:
There may have been the suburban white anarchist dudes at the Climate Strike, but there were also hoodie-wearing black and brown teens pounding on drums spray painted with Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise logos. There were plenty of old people there like me but we all kind of had this look of like, holy shit, on our faces, at least I did. In other words, it felt weird and new in the best way.
One of my favorite little moments was this one older lady I was walking near toward the end and when people would chant like Fuck Charlie Baker or whatever, she would be like “no, no, no” scolding them. And one time some kids chanted something bad about cops and she said, hey those are people’s fathers and brothers and sisters. And this one teen said, “Yeah and they alllll suck.” Which I thought was pretty funny. Not the most strategic messaging I guess, and the teens were overall very chill, but the take home message being—that lady can no longer tell these young people the right thing to say. It’s not her show anymore.
(update: the youth-led movement basically set the presidential frontrunner’s climate agenda)
From Raze and rebuild:
Where I live in Roslindale, a diverse and still somewhat accessible neighborhood toward the southern end of Boston proper, there’s a 130-year-old house a couple doors down with a really nice big tree out front. We got a note in the mail that the owner intends to raze and rebuild the house, not a huge deal in the grand scheme, as the entire city of Boston feels more or less like one giant raze and rebuild project these days. But for the years we’ve lived here, we’ve watched as the owner let this house sit in various states of disrepair and inattention. Now the longtime tenants are being kicked out for a swift 100% displacement. The owner Jerry, who bought the house in 1990 for $161,000, will cash in on Boston’s surreal housing market, turning the property into three units that will probably sell for half a million each. This is a very common occurrence around here.
Last week I went to a meeting in a community center basement to hear about the project. There were a couple dozen people there and as always some had serious qualms about zoning variances, landscaping, quality of siding. A handful of us kept trying to steer the conversation toward affordability, but the perfectly nice people from the city reminded us that unless a building is 10 units or more, they can’t require affordable units, our hands are simply tied you understand. Just for fun, I asked Jerry if he would voluntarily consider making one of the three units affordable and he politely said no, I’m afraid that is not a thing that will be happening.
(no progress, house sitting vacant and overrun with weeds thanks Jerry)
From Imaginable worlds:
It may feel like I’m drifting far in this train of thought that started with green building, to consider how it relates to institutions like incarceration. But as we are figuring out what our world looks like next, in the midst of climate crisis, I think the same sense of imagination needs to be applied to the things we build and to the systems that allow what gets built and for whom.
In both cases, we are talking about structures we create that shape how we want to live and how we want to treat each other and our surroundings, either set free or constrained by our imaginations.
From Say it out loud:
These days I try my best for what Jay Rosen calls “here’s where I’m coming from” journalism, where you stick to the facts and strive to be fair, but still acknowledge that you have a certain point of view.
We all bring our own ideologies to the table. And while some things should not be equivocated or compromised, a sense of certainty can also be folly. Climate change and similar complex global problems and their solutions are rife with blind spots and contradictions.
So how do we deal with this conflict between holding to our convictions and acknowledging complexity and unknowns? Increasingly, the voices out there that I admire are dealing with this tension, not by clinging to the false balance of always presenting both sides, but by acknowledging both their own perspectives and their uncertainties—maybe a more honest kind of balance.
(update: still trying my best)
From A huge metal door:
Sriram Madhusoodanan, Corporate Accountability: “You know, you walk through these halls [of COP25] and you just wonder, are the people here seeing the same things that we’re seeing out in the streets and in the real world, because it does feel like the pace of progress is so slow and so glacial and it is not meeting the ambition of what people are demanding.”
From Bright light:
If climate anxiety went somewhat mainstream this year, that has a similarly time-warping effect, in that we normally gauge time on human scales and pretend geological scales don’t exist because they are so much bigger than us so as to be imperceptible. But engaging with climate change plunges the personal passage of time into the planetary passage of time, which can be a disorienting and not super fun experience.
From First line of protection:
Coronavirus and climate change are similar in that everything seems fine until it’s clearly not fine anymore but by that time it’s mostly too late because what really mattered was all the stuff we should have been doing when everything seemed fine but we didn’t.
So in both cases, when you take precautions in advance you might feel silly and some people might even make fun of you, but then later if you didn’t act in advance, you will feel like you really screwed up like James Franco in that movie where he squished his arm in the rock and was like ah shit I can’t believe I left that bottle of gatorade in the truck now I have to drink my pee.
From Things that seemed so inevitable:
This is a terrifying feeling, but it is also revealing of what exactly it is we are all doing here. What we’ve been valuing all this time and what we subject ourselves to, often needlessly, in service of a system that is, at least for now, loaded with holes. As Anne Applebaum puts it, “Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.”
For one, they unveil with stark clarity the worst humans among us, that some portion of the people who are always holding back our quality of life, our collective liberation, our basic survival, are quite simply, forgive me, just pieces of shit.
From Anticipatory grief:
It feels crass to talk about having a hard time as a white, middle-class man who could have it way worse, and who benefits from the systems that are making it so much harder on other people. But I know that in my own activism and writing about social justice, I feel a tendency to want to be this stoic, stiff-upper-lipped ally, when what’s really needed is full engagement, intellectual and emotional. In mainstream climate change discourse, in particular, the dominance of white male voices, often scientists trying to stick to their data, has cultivated a sterile, emotionless tone that many feel has held back the cause.
From Smaller, slower:
So there’s one crowd that says climate change is just another thing we have to figure out and it will be hard but we’ll innovate our way out of it and continue our general upward trajectory of better technology and economic growth. Another crowd says, actually, climate change is indicative of a sick relationship we have with the planet and its resources—overconsumption, consolidation of wealth, corporate globalization, industrial agriculture, loss of biodiversity.
If you’ve read any of my other emails or just the way I wrote that last sentence, you will rightly suspect that I lean toward the latter story, but like all of these stark divides on climate, I think there’s some truth in both. The idea that we should somehow dial back technology and standard of living and return to some kind of agrarian society seems both impossible and undesirable (Bill McKibben is a climate hero, but he lives in rural Vermont and that says a lot if you know anything about rural Vermont, and I once heard him say in an interview that in some ways maybe life wasn’t so bad in the Middle Ages it’s like come on Bill McKibben).
But coronavirus—and the urbanization, deforestation, and trade of wildlife that spark pandemics like it—casts a firm vote for the idea that our relationship with our surroundings is broken.
(update: still broken)
From Shouting from the rooftops:
The Iranian Revolution itself was overwhelmingly nonviolent in its tactics and involved pretty much every segment of society, succeeding in toppling a repressive monarchy where previous violent uprisings had failed. Participants included student activists, workers, professionals, merchants, academics, you name it. There were mass protests in the streets, but there were also nightly poetry readings.
In contrast, there was an armed guerrilla movement happening at the same time, but the authors point out that it was unable to to gain significant participation. In part because it was violent, but also because of its rigid Marxist litmus test that the coalition-based movement did not have.
One of the most interesting things about this diversity of participation is that, while you might expect that kind of big tent approach would lead to compromise or capitulation, in some ways it did the opposite. Toward the end of the revolution, the Shah offered steps toward liberal reform that opposition would have jumped at in earlier days. But by that time, there was only one acceptable outcome—regime change. In other words, when people show up, you don’t have to compromise.
From A fear of what comes next:
The abolitionist goal is creating something different, with the understanding that violent paramilitary forces with racist DNA and no accountability, responding to a city’s every social problem, will never be an acceptable situation. We need something new, so we take funding away from one thing, and give it to other things that do a better job of solving the problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain.
From Stars seemed aligned:
Arroyo pointed out that cop overtime budget alone, even with the Mayor’s proposed cut, would still be 165% bigger than the community center budget, over 1,000% bigger than the budget to aid seniors, 9,400% bigger than the budget for people with disabilities, 15,000% bigger than the fair housing and equity budget. Hell, the police overtime budget is half the size of the city’s entire public works budget.
Have I made it clear via my aggressive use of command-i that we are still just talking about overtime pay? Where does this $60 million in annual overtime go, you might ask? Well, sometimes it goes to fraud. To the fraud line item. Shockingly large chunks of it go to individual police. In 2016, a 34-year-old cop was the highest paid person at the City of Boston, taking home more than $400,000. Last year, the second-highest-paid city employee was this piece of shit, who has been the subject of 20 internal investigations, six that are currently pending.
“Does this budget reflect my love for my communities? Does it go far enough in providing a much needed hand up to those who are most devastated by this pandemic and centuries of systemic racism?” Arroyo posed to the council. “Is this operations budget just? Is it equitable? The answer for me is no, and so is my vote.”
From The letter:
Imagine if you will, a group of highly paid newspaper columnists and tenured professors sounding the alarm that “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” all during a period of surging, historic political engagement. That speaks volumes about what this cohort thinks it means to protect public discourse.
This hysteria over imagined mobs of intolerant leftists is a response to the same underlying shift that has people wringing their hands over statues and storefronts during outcries for social justice. It’s the same underlying conditions that cause a couple in khakis to point their guns at peaceful demonstrators marching past their mansion.
People lacking voice, safety, high paying jobs, health care, and housing are rising up and demanding better. And a subset of people who have those things and more are freaking. The fuck. Out.
From Inalienable:
Cadwell Turnbull:
“We don’t really have a good word for a just and equitable society. The way that I usually hear the conversation around utopia, and it kind of bugs me, is we use utopia as a stand in, both for our ideas of what a perfect society might look like, and what a just and equitable society might look like. And the conflation means that you can use the perfect society definition to gaslight the justice and equity one.
You can say, ‘perfection is impossible’ to a question about housing, about education. It’s a way that we normalize the present and we pretend like the things that are happening—the injustices that we see in our current world—aren’t the result of choices we’re actually making.
Someone will say, we should make our society work for everyone, and someone else will say, what you’re describing is utopia and utopia is impossible. This is good enough. We should improve upon this thing. When, in reality, this thing is really bad. And we should question the whole assumption of this thing.”
✓
Links
- The DNC stripped from its policy platform language calling on an end to fossil fuel tax breaks and subsidies, and climate activists are extremely pissed. Nancy Pelosi also endorsed Joe Kennedy what a stupid ass party.
- The Globe has been running attack after attack on the Mass Bail Fund, but a criminal justice professor points out that the fund is on the right side of justice, as its actions reduce trauma and statistically reduce future violent acts.
- America has fled its cities before, and it has never gone well.
- Climate progress is being wiped out by surging methane. The latest rollback means oil and gas companies are no longer required to detect and repair leaks.
- Death Valley hit 130 degrees, which could be the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. “It’s like stepping into a convection oven.”
- In Bend, Oregon, the last surviving Blockbuster listed itself on Airbnb, inviting three small groups to each spend one night in the store next month. They set up a couch and a TV and VCR.
- “Pull down your mask, liberate your consciousness: It’s time to meet Facts Man.”
- People who lived on submarines and at the South Pole offer advice for surviving winter during a pandemic. “For a while my biggest problem was eating constantly.”
Listening
I’ve always loved this song and listened to the album on vacation and it got me wanting to read Wuthering Heights but I’m afraid I wouldn’t like it as much as the song. This video is amazing.
Reading
The Case of the Missing Men, Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes
I missed you all while we were on semi-vacation the past couple weeks. Jamie and I went out to stay at a cabin in Western Massachusetts for a while where we cooked on a grill every night, made fires in a firepit, and most nights got to look up at a sky full of stars, all of which was very nice. Eating various local cheeses, pointing out the window at rolling hills and 300 year old farmhouses.
Being in the country during a pandemic was still a little weird though, in some ways more apocalyptic than in the city. Always driving for miles to three locations before finding one that is open, social media updates and “Welcome!” signs betrayed by dark interiors and empty shelves. Some spooky moments including in a Starbucks in Chicopee.
I would still recommend it if you can safely pull it off, if only for a few days to break things up. We’re thinking of lining up another little jaunt for the fall. Before what is sure to be a long and dark winter sets in.
Tate
PS. What do you want to read in Crisis Palace next year? Favorite sections? Topics? Least favorite? Too long? Too short? Reply and let me know I would sincerely love to hear from you.