Tate Williams

On the brink of a big change, learning from the mesquite tree

Branches of the Honey Mesquite. Thomas Farley, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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This is going to be the last newsletter before a bit of a hiatus, don’t worry nothing is wrong but I do have news which is that I am moving to Tucson, Arizona. I know, big news. Tucson is a beautiful little desert community where I lived for about six years and where I’ve spent a lot of time here and there ever since, and it has always held a special place in my heart, wherever I’ve lived. Jamie and I have been kicking around the idea for a long time now and found a place we like and decided to go for it. So that is something I have been working at for a few weeks now, and will be working on for the next few weeks as we pack up our stuff, ship it across the country and then make our way there.

There are a handful of reasons for the move, including some family reasons, some Boston-related reasons, some Tucson-related reasons, but overall we are very excited about it. I guess in a climate and politics-related newsletter, such a relocation does raise a few questions as to how and why one moves to a hot desert climate as temperatures are rising and water becomes scarce, and also how and why one moves to a political battleground state in a time of, um, political battles. You can read some past thoughts on these topics here and here, but a lot of it has to do with the kind of place Tucson is. There’s this weird kind of resilience and camaraderie that you get among people who choose to live together in the desert, and also—in contrast to its much larger, more aggressively air-conditioned sister city Phoenix—a kind of loving co-existence with a hostile environment.

I will write more about this dynamic and also all the tensions and challenges that come with it in weeks to come, but for now I think I will offer a brief meditation on one of my favorite representatives of that harsh environment, which is the mesquite tree. Mesquite may lack the grandiosity of the saguaro or title of its cousin the palo verde, Arizona’s official tree. But more than maybe any of the many special flora of the Sonoran Desert, I’m really looking forward to spending more time among mesquite.

Part of the desert legume family, along with palo verde and ironwood, they can disappear into the background of a place like Tucson, the same way a poplar or maple might in New England, but they are anything but ordinary. One of my favorite things about them is that, although they make for great city trees, shading yards and lining streets and living through just about anything, they have this tendency to ooze a black-brown oily pitch, sometime when they are sick but usually after you trim them. It’s a defense mechanism that seals off the tree’s wound, sending a message to its human landscapers—you can put me here and admire me, appreciate my shade, but if you try to cut me back, I will bleed on your sidewalk and stain it the color of my bark. Mesquite has no respect for our concrete and asphalt. It has lived here far longer.

I learned about mesquite’s several exudates and their self-healing and even medicinal qualities from a book I read about the tree recently, Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair, by Gary Paul Nabhan, an Arizona ethnobiologist and nature writer. It is honestly a very strange book, full of groan-inducing (and weirdly sexual?) wordplay that I’m kind of surprised made it past an editor in the volume that it did. But it also was fascinating, and paints a picture of this gnarly emblem of desert living, one with many qualities that we can all aspire to as earthly residents, especially living through challenging times.

For one, as noted, it is an astoundingly resilient, fucker of a tree. Mesquite are practically unkillable. You can cut one down to nothing and it will grow back. They have incredible self-healing capacity, aided by the greasy sap they exude, but also a dense gum that forms and hardens into a crystalized resin over its wounds. These substances have been put to use for food and medicinal purposes over the years, as have mesquite pods, which can be ground into a sweet and cinnamon-tinged flour used in tamales and other recipes, or even mezquitatol, a mild beer once brewed by the O’odham.

Mesquite react and adapt to any number of harsh conditions. They allow longhorn beetles that chew their bark to reshape their architecture as is useful. In times of drought, they’ll allow their branches to be pruned back and regrow fewer replacements. When it’s wet, they sprout right back and grow taller than before.

Also aiding their survival is the fact that they are covered in three to four inch spikes. When they are young and vulnerable, the spikes are far denser, but the more established they are, they dial it back a bit. But don’t worry, if you cut a branch off, the spikes on the replacement branch will be denser than before, and three or four times longer. It is a tree that seeks revenge when wronged.

Storied community organizers in the desert landscape, they recruit others for protection. Mesquite and their older relative the acacia (devil’s claw or cat claw) are known to develop symbiotic relationships with species of twig ants, which fight off herbivores that threaten the host. Some ants will even trim the branches of nearby trees that might be horning in on their sunlight. One ecologist has observed that the trees can even “taste” the saliva of a threatening insect and emit a chemical that makes the friendly ants go berserk on the invader.

But they are more than tough. They are nurturers and architects of desert ecosystems. Mesquite and their relatives are “nurse plants,” allowing cactus, shrubs, and succulents to live in their shadows, protected from the intense sun and heat. More than that, they are keystone species that set into motion the growth of “resource islands” within the desert. Mesquite take root and interrupt the desert wind, allowing debris and nutrients to begin to gather at their base, which feeds the tree, but also allows other species to grow around it, and by extension invites pollinators, birds, herbivores, and up the food chain. The fungi and bacteria that serve and are served by host trees become rich underground. The resulting resource islands can have 10 times more nitrogen and other nutrients than the surrounding sand.

Eventually they may grow into mezquital or bosques, lush arboreal habitats dominated and sustained by mesquite. Mesquite-based ecosystems are some of the richest lands for native bees in the world. The Great Mesquite forest along the Santa Cruz River, which sadly no longer exists, was once so lush, home to some 85 kinds of birds, that the “avian densities, number of nests, and the size of trees inspired descriptors using magical or even spiritual terms.” (Roy Johnson and Ray Turner)

The way they create sanctuaries within harsh environments, Mesquite are masters of autopoiesis, the process by which a natural system reengineers its surroundings to create a network of parts needed to survive. Nubhan quotes scientists Fritjof Capra and Pier Luigi Luisi, who describe how a mesquite “brings forth a world.”

“That’s right: It brings forth a world, a microcosm [within] the desert that is in ways less desertlike.”

Part of the secret to its ability to pull this off comes from the fact that it establishes deep roots, settling in and drawing upon the ground where it stands, growing far more extensively than is visible to those of us above ground. One record-setting mesquite had roots estimated to reach down to a 200-foot depth, four times the height of the tallest known mesquite. Excavated trees are known to have four to five times more biomass below ground than above ground, one of the biggest such known ratios.

As I try to begin to stir the ground that has accumulated around me over the past 10-plus years, drawing up roots to find new ground to sink into, to offer shade to new allies, to hopefully add resources to a new island, and to jab predators with a thorn if necessary, I will think about what else I can learn from my friend the mesquite, appreciate its black pools left on the concrete, and hopefully eat a mesquite tamale or two.

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OK I gotta go pack so we are going to keep this one nice and tight for a change. I look forward to sending correspondence from a new home, and if we are IRL friends and this is the first you are hearing about this move, please don’t be mad I’m in a pre-move state of total disarray, it is nothing personal.

Tate

Plastic waste is inescapable, driven by industry, and inseparable from the climate crisis

The Trapper (1921), Rockwell Kent

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Today we are going to talk about something that is very close to my heart, which is plastic, and by that I mean it is literally close to my heart because the sweatshirt I am wearing is almost certainly loaded with synthetic polymer fibers.

The amount of plastic we use for just about everything is absurd and gross and in a vast number of cases, entirely unnecessary. A growing number of people are aware of this problem and no longer want this to be the case, and yet, plastic remains everywhere.

Our clothes are made out of it. My computer I’m working on is full of it. I have two pieces of plastic jammed into my ears most of my waking hours. The pillow I sleep on is made out of “hyperelastic polymer.” I have three or four little plastic toys on my desk that I turn to throughout the day to ease my anxiety, my little plastic therapists. And though I am deeply embarrassed to admit it, as I type I am drinking an iced coffee out of a single use plastic cup—a practice I had reduced to almost zero pre-pandemic, but one that I occasionally cave in to these days, its normalcy resurgent in the COVID era as we threw ourselves into the sterile, protective arms of disposable synthetic materials.

Which is to say, even for someone like myself who fucking hates plastic products with a burning passion, especially single-use consumer products, they are realistically inescapable. The sheer volume of plastic waste we’ve produced is an irreversible part of our reality at this point, and the path to at least curbing the problem is often misunderstood, suppressed or ignored, in large part because of the way that we have come to think of the plastic problem.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the narratives used over the years by both industry and environmental advocates, and how they’ve never successfully defined the environmental problem of plastic, at least in a way that would lead to a commensurate solution. Sometimes driven by sinister forces, but often not, the way that we often view plastic pollution is as a problem of consumer waste vs. convenience, and more recently, as a technical cleanup problem. It is, however, primarily an extraction and production problem, driven by industry, at the expense of communities at both the front end and the back end of its product’s lifecycle.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because another way we ought to think about plastic use is as another facet of climate change. The two feed into each other, the industrial systems that drive their production are entangled, and the root cause is the same—an untenable fossil-fuel based economy in which prosperity is reliant on ever-growing extraction and then emission of waste. This is a framing of the plastic problem that I don’t think is widespread exactly, but one that I have been hearing a lot more often lately, and that’s a step toward solutions that meet the scale and nature of the problem.

The stories of plastic waste

There are a bunch of ways we can think about plastic, philosophically, scientifically, culturally, it’s an entire field of scholarship. Like oil and gas, plastic tells the story of modernity. But today I’m mostly talking about how we describe it as an environmental problem, including through nonprofit and industry communications over the years.

One of the most notorious examples is the “crying Indian” ad. It was a 1971 PSA-style TV commercial that featured a Native American in stereotypical garb, canoeing down a river full of trash. “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country. And some people don’t,” a narrator says. At the end, a family throws a bag of garbage out a car window and the voiceover says “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

The commercial is offensive in like 1,000 different ways, but it has since been well-documented as total horseshit. For starters, we all know now that the actor playing the crying Indian was actually an Italian-American wearing makeup and a wig. But it was also produced by Keep America Beautiful, a front group for leading beverage and packaging corporations that actually opposed many environmental initiatives. It was a shrewd PR move that used the language of environmentalism to deflect blame from industry and place it on the shoulders of individuals. It also notably framed pollution as a problem of where we put stuff. It presents a pristine natural world and, separate from that, the world of humanity. The solution is for individuals to keep their garbage out of the pristine world, suggesting a boundary that rising sea levels and viruses remind us is imaginary.

Another step in the evolution of this messaging that was less nefarious, but carried similar implications, was the 1990s-era focus on lifestyle and consumption choices as the solution to environmental problems. On its face, it’s not a terrible impulse. Neither is not littering, for that matter, but both are incomplete. In this version, the framing shifts from where we put stuff, to how wasteful we are—the solution is a reduction of excessive consumption and buying of wasteful products.

This responsible consumption framing would ultimately be swallowed up by corporate greenwashing, and it fell out of fashion for a long time among environmentalists. When I was working in nonprofits, things like recycling, reusable containers, etc., were sort of dismissed as amateur hour, like it’s a cute thing to do, but we all know it doesn’t accomplish anything and policy and legal action is the only true environmentalism. Unfortunately, I think this resulted in a lot of environmentalists inadvertently turning their backs on the problem of waste. It’s still de rigueur in some circles to mock efforts to ban single-use plastic products, and the reusable tote itself has become a symbol of naïveté.

The latest incarnation of this story, and I think the one that we’re still mostly in right now, is that of plastic as an acute and isolated crisis. This is characterized by the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which environmental groups latched onto in the 2000s (it was huge when I was a fundraiser) as a new physical embodiment of environmental degradation—the new Cuyahoga River, but at a scale we never imagined. “There is an island made of trash that is the size of Texas” is a staggering, depressing statement that came to exemplify just how out of control pollution has become.

This was a more powerful and effective framing in a lot of ways, but it still understated the ubiquity of the plastic problem, and wasn’t linking it all that well with fossil fuels and climate change.

The Plastic Age

The defining characteristic of the plastic problem is its pervasiveness, and the narrative of the plastic gyres doesn’t quite get at it. Even the garbage patches themselves somehow undersell the problem they represent, as they aren’t really “islands of trash” but swirling, soupy nebula lacking well-defined borders, the tip of the plasticberg.

Like climate change, plastic is one of Timothy Morton’s “hyperobjects,” something that exists on a scale of time and space that humans can’t really get their heads around. One way to think about this is the suggestion from geologists that the “deep time record” is the most appropriate way to understand the scope of plastic pollution’s impact on the planet. Even if we never produced another piece of plastic ever again starting today, our plastic products are part of the fossil record, what you could call the Plastic Age. The ubiquity of plastic can be seen as a marker in the geological record as the beginning of the Anthropocene, the era of humanity’s dominance over Earth. The other likely indicator would be radioactive fallout from nuclear bombs. As one writer for Discover put it, “A million years from now, the 21st century will likely be remembered for plastic more than anything else.”

But we don’t need to look a million years into the future to see this legacy. Just open your mouth and inhale. Researchers tracing the way phosphorous nutrients travel around the globe discovered tiny plastic particles suspended in the air in every single sample taken from far-flung locations. Or look at baby poop. Another study found that based on body weight, levels of microplastics in baby poop were ten times higher than those found in adult poop. Disturbing, record levels of plastics have been found in fish taken from the Great Lakes. Plastic is in seawater and freshwater, so particles are making it into humans through our drinking water and up the food chain. We really don’t even know the extent of the potential health impacts, but it doesn’t seem great.

Its scope may be hard to grasp, but we’ve instinctively known for a very long time the world-altering impact of making everything we ever use out of a virtually indestructible material. The best depiction I’ve read of this ubiquity of harm is from way back in 1990, the novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, by Karen Tei Yamashita. It is an incredible book, considered to be in a genre defined by Jennifer Wenzel as “petro-magical-realism,” works of fiction that “imagine the transmutation of oil into spectacular life-changing wealth but also the ‘phantasmagoric ravagements’ of socio-ecological relations.”

In it, a mysterious, seemingly magical material emerges in a section of the Amazon rainforest, and it’s rapidly adopted as a miracle substance that impacts the full strata of society, ruining nearby Indigenous people’s lives, sparking a corporate boom town, even inspiring religious worship. The material is presented as offering utopian potential, with the ability to change everything, and for some it does indeed bring about great short-term luxury and prosperity.

As it turns out, it is actually just industrial waste, buried to such an extent that it has been pushed deep into the Earth, only to bubble up as a new substance in undeveloped parts of the globe. This ends predictably in disaster, but unfolds in bizarre, sad ways that all point to what one critic called at the time “metastasizing capitalism.” The material represents the kind of borderlessness and inescapability of extractive industry and its byproducts. Try to push it down and it emerges somewhere else, altering the lives of everyone it touches.

Turn off the tap

The other shortcoming of the acute and discrete crisis narrative is that its logical conclusion is a cleanup effort, a solution that is irresistible to those eager to believe that environmental degradation is a mere engineering problem to be fixed on the back end by human innovation. Not surprisingly, this approach has been championed by the tech industry, corporate philanthropy, and wealthy donors, who have sought out clever devices that can scoop up all that plastic and return the ocean to its pristine state.

The folly of this thinking is outlined in a depressing manner by Max Liboiron, an associate professor at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a leading scholar of plastic pollution, in an interview with Molly Taft at Gizmodo. You should definitely read that interview, but his overall point is that because of the sheer scale of the problem, “you cannot clean up the ocean in any way at a rate that is commensurate with the amount of plastic going into it.” He points out a big ocean cleanup effort underway that is seeking to remove 30 million pounds of trash, which it turns out, is a relatively minuscule amount.

“I can find you 30 million pounds, like, just outside of town with washed up fishing gear,” Liboiron says. “Yeah, I can get that in a hot minute. We’ve got some serious scale problems.”

He compares the problem to an overflowing bathtub, and instead of turning off the faucet, people keep trying to mop. “I’ve been saying turn off the tap the whole time. Turn off the tap, turn off the tap. That’s what we do. And we can name who is keeping the tap running. Coca-Cola. ExxonMobil. We have their phone numbers.”

You will not be surprised to know that those very corporations he mentions and more have not only resisted calls to turn off the tap, they’ve been, in large part manufacturing demand to open it up even more. Another must-read recent article on this topic ran in The Atlantic, by sociologist Rebecca Altman, whose father was a manufacturer of polystyrene in the 1960s. She chronicles how, since the invention of synthetic polymers, the industry has had to sell us on the necessity of the new material in its many forms.

The country was largely not buying it until World War II, during which military contracts drove mass production and later consumer products. In another parallel to fossil fuels, the cheapness of plastic products was created by government subsidies and economies of scale—which required more products to be made, a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that allowed plastic to eventually dominate the marketplace. Now, as Altman points out, even the most responsible consumer cannot escape it. “Society is awash in throwaway plastics not because of the logic of desire but because of the logic of history and of integrated industrial systems.”

And just as the crying Indian told us that pollution was our fault, industry has continued to push the narrative of consumers’ ability to recycle our way out of the problem, a practical impossibility. Some 40% of plastic goes toward short-term use products and 79% of all plastic that’s been generated to date has accumulated in landfills. Altman writes:

For decades, the industry has created the illusion that its problems are well under control, all while intensifying production and promotion. More plastics have been made over the past two decades than during the second half of the 20th century. Today, recycling is a flailing, failing system—and yet it is still touted as plastics’ panacea. No end-of-the-pipe fix can manage mass plastics’ volume, complex toxicity, or legacy of pollution, and the industry’s long-standing infractions against human health and rights.

Plastic is climate change

In plastics, we have a powerful product that in many ways ushered in modernity, but also supercharged colonialism and exploitation, and grew a powerful industry that would do anything to ensure its ever-expanding production and use. That probably sounds familiar because at the end of the day, the plastic problem is inseparable from climate change.

As Altman points out, these days the source material is pretty much the same—petroleum, or to be specific, natural gas liquids—of which the fracking boom has created a glut in the market that demands the creation of more petrochemical plants and plastic manufacturing (although the gas industry does everything it can to extend gas-powered electricity as long as possible). Needing new markets for plastic products, the oil and gas industry is lobbying to reverse Kenya’s limits on plastic use, and pushing the country to import more plastic garbage.

Meanwhile, plastic production itself is an emissions-intensive process, eating up an increasing share of the world’s carbon budget. And in both plastics and fossil fuels, the prerequisite step toward a solution is the same—turn off the tap. Geographer Dierdre McKay sums it up:

In a climate crisis, plastic waste doesn’t look like the world’s most pressing environmental problem. But considering plastic and climate as two separate issues is a mistake. Concern about plastic pollution isn’t distracting people from a more serious problem – plastic is the problem. If we see plastics as “solid climate change”, they become central to the climate crisis.

Real solutions

None of this sounds like very hopeful messaging, but as with climate change, until we recognize the nature of the problem, we’ll only keep seeking out the wrong solutions. It’s telling that just as industry leaders cling to the idea of ocean cleanup as a solution to plastic waste, so do they put all their chips on carbon dioxide removal as a climate solution. Mop, mop, mop, all day long.

I do think the narrative of the plastic problem is changing, as these articles and more point out. But it’s telling that when a friend recently asked me who he might donate to because he’s worried about plastic pollution, I had a hard time recommending a group that wasn’t focused mainly on cleanup, recycling, or industry innovation (plant-based plastic is a whole other mess).

One of the most prominent organizations working on waste reduction is the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which promotes something called the Circular Economy, the idea that we can make superior disposable products that can be reabsorbed into the ecosystem or turned into other products. Sounds good, but it also sounds an awful lot like, um, recycling, a strategy hasn’t really worked so far. A look at the organization’s enormous list of donors and partners inspires further pessimism:

Amazon, BASF, BIC, Bridgestone, Cargill, Coca Cola, Cisco, DuPont, Heineken, HP, Ikea, InBev, Keurig, LaCoste, Mars Inc., Microsoft, Pepsico, Philips, Primark, Ralph Lauren, Starbucks, Unilever, Veolia, Walmart, 3M, and the hits keep coming, basically every producer and distributor of single-use goods, plastic-lined clothing, and well, junk, that you could imagine is backing this work.

You might look at that and think, well that’s good news that they are open to solving this problem. But this is a bunch of people who are going to do everything in their power to continue mass producing and selling plastic products as long as they possibly can, because that’s what they exist to do. I’m not saying that everything this organization does is bad, or that reusing and recycling is bad, or even that making lifestyle changes is bad. These are all part of the solution. But none of it works unless we stop it at the source.

There must be more out there that I don’t know about, but Greenpeace is one group that has a waste reduction program focused on holding industry accountable. Other leaders are the organizers in environmental justice communities—like Sharon Lavigne and Rise St. James in Louisiana—who are working to block the construction of plastics and petrochemical plants.

It comes as no surprise that the people putting their bodies on the line are the people closest to the problem, as in the case with water protectors fighting oil pipelines, demanding that we keep it in the ground. The tap has been running in their neighborhoods for a long time now. They see who’s got their hand on it, and they’re done mopping up.

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Links

• A bunch of health risks to children increase as temperatures rise, including some that researchers don’t really understand.
• Sixty climate experts sign on to a letter calling for a ban on solar geoengineering, citing “unacceptable risk.”
• Just a stone’s throw from an ever-rising Boston Harbor, the city’s whitest and wealthiest residents can now enjoy iceless curling. That’s children of men shit.
• Centrists claim they don’t like student loan forgiveness because it will help well-off people, but they completely misunderstand how racist and regressive the entire student loan system is.
• The day before Holocaust Remembrance Day, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban the teaching of Maus, a Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel about the Holocaust. Cancel culture is out of control!
• “By decriminalizing personal-use drug possession, Oregon has become the first state to acknowledge that it is impossible to treat addiction as a disease and a crime simultaneously.”
• With no appropriate tools and neighbors rejecting low-income housing, mayors turn to police to manage homelessness. “You’re using the least equipped force in your community to respond to extremely complex health and social challenges that people experience.”
• Indigenous voters were decisive in Arizona Democrats’ wins, and they are livid at Kyrsten Sinema’s “betrayal.” She’s totally ignored Tribal advocates’ efforts to speak with her.
• Massachusetts cities and towns vulnerable to climate change are recognizing how fucked they are. “[We are] trying to figure out what to armor, and when to retreat and how to pay for this. We know it is only a matter of time.”
• This investigation into Joss Whedon’s history of bad behavior is a case study in toxic nerd masculinity. So many parallels to the Warren Ellis story and many others.
• Danny Trejo can’t live without his mustache wax, fuzzy dice, and Dodgers hat.
• Love this takedown of the Ross Geller/Ted Mosby character in TV comedy.
• Inshallah.

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Listening

Arooj Aftab, Lullaby

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Well another Saturday email because yesterday I had to go get a bunch of stuff in advance of this big snowstorm. Late last night it was looking kind of weak sauce and I was talking some shit about it, but it has turned out to be the real deal. But we have pancakes and plenty of coffee that I can make and drink out of a glass don’t worry. And today I have a wool sweater on. I don’t know about these sweatpants though, sigh.

Stay cozy fam

Tate

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men asks a timely question—how should we behave at the end of the world?

Theo’s morning routine, Children of Men, 2006

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Today is an exciting day because we are going to talk about Children of Men, one of my favorite movies of all time. I mentioned at the tail end of last week’s issue that I was thinking of rewatching it, and I did just that last and found it to be about as affecting as it was the first time I saw it and have been thinking about it all week. So we are going to revisit this 2006 dystopian masterpiece, with an eye toward its political and ideological subtext, and how it translates to a 2022 viewing.

I think if you haven’t seen it and it sounds like you might want to, maybe go watch it first, otherwise you can still read this but there will be spoilers. And if it’s been a while, maybe read this and then go rewatch it later I think you will get a lot out of it. OK buckle up here we go.

If there were no future

The first time I watched Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men was the year it came out or shortly thereafter, so around 2006, when I would have been calculator type type type 28. At the time I was running a canvass office in Portland, Oregon, probably working on some combination of LGBTQ+ rights, conservation and climate change, and this was deep into the post-9/11 Bush administration, so I wouldn’t call it a political awakening, exactly, but it definitely shook me up. I remember thinking about it for days after, watching it a second time before sealing up the little envelope and mailing it back lol, and even watching all of the surprisingly pedagogical DVD extras.

Probably because of its intensity, I don’t think I had watched it again since that first week I saw it, up until last Saturday’s rewatch. But I think about and talk about and reference the movie fairly often, because that’s the kind of movie it is. It gets under your skin.

Jamie and I each owned a copy of the DVD when we started dating and for years they sat side by side on a shelf in our various apartments which maybe says something about our marriage I don’t know what exactly. We often use the title as a kind of shorthand, exchanging a knowing “children of men” to describe a certain kind of unjust, chaotic, or dysfunctional situation, especially when juxtaposed with otherwise run-of-the-mill trappings of modern capitalist society. As Mark Fisher describes it, “internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist.”

One example that comes to mind was the time the Orange Line, one of the more decrepit subway lines in Boston, caught fire and filled a station with smoke, right in the heart of one of the country’s wealthiest cities, and passengers were kicking out windows of the train cars to escape. Children of men. (Now that I think about it, a lot of the examples I can think of are MBTA related.) It describes a certain kind of uncanny, despairing feeling that something is profoundly fucked up here and there is nothing we can do to fix it.

The movie is loosely based on the 1992 book by P.D. James, which lacks the film’s politics, but has the same central concept of a world in which humans stopped being able to reproduce, and no baby has been born in 18 years. The fallout is told through the experiences of a civil servant in London, Theo Faron, who is called upon by radical activists he associated with in his younger days to escort a young immigrant woman named Kee, who has inexplicably become pregnant, out of the country for her safety. P.D. James has said the book intended to answer the question, “If there were no future, how would we behave?”

This week I’ve been reading some retrospectives on the movie from recent years, which are loaded with terms like prescient, still resonant, more relevant than ever, etc. And after rewatching, I would agree, especially as climate change accelerates and many are asking themselves that very question posed by its premise.

I have also been wondering what exactly it is about the movie that makes it so affecting and, dare I say, radicalizing. What is that feeling it gives you and why? And why is it so persistently resonant? The answer, I think, is a combination of factors, including stylistic choices Cuarón made, a clear-eyed depiction of the systemic failures that underlie any number of real world global crises, and a very faint thread of hope that leads us to a redemptive conclusion.

Utterly realist

Children of Men‘s main contribution as a work of filmmaking is what one scholar described as its “utterly realist style,” and that plays a big part in its emotional impact. It’s shot like a documentary, with a handheld camera following our disheveled protagonist along his journey, starting with routinely pouring whiskey into his morning coffee on the streets of London, and ending with a barefoot scramble through a firefight in a refugee camp. It’s also filmed in a series of unpolished, seemingly unedited tracking shots, the longest lasting six-and-a-half minutes, during which drops of blood spatter the camera lens and remain there in the final cut. This approach means you are kind of stuck with Theo, experiencing whatever chaos just as he experiences it.

But not exactly, because we actually see a lot more than Theo usually does. Especially early in the film, he’s so jaded, moving through his life zombie-like, that we notice many details of his dystopia, including several acts of violence and cruelty in the background, even though he’s reached to the point where he mostly ignores them. (Much has been made of the imagery imitating classic works of art that also populate the screen, which adds a dreamlike layer over the realism. See this paper by Spanish literature professor Samuel Amago.)

The use of media as a storytelling device, too, is immersive, with almost all of the exposition taking place through video and audio news snippets or collages of newspaper clippings. This is how we learn that societies around the world have collapsed, that Britain has isolated itself from the outside world, and that the country is overrun with refugees, which citizens are to report for deportation. The use of media is especially potent considering the film came out five short years after 9/11, which most of us absorbed through a nonstop loop of media. Shaky cameras stumbling through a smoke-filled Manhattan were not too far behind us. So the way we experience the geopolitical violence in Children of Men is the same way many of us have experienced it in reality—through a 360-degree chorus of media.

The visual look of the film is also important. As Amago points out, Cuarón has notably said he wanted to make an “anti-Blade Runner,” and as his art department brought him concept sketches of futuristic cars and technology (it takes place 20 years in the future), he would reject them and instead point to actual imagery from Palestine, Iraq, Northern Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Balkans, Chernobyl.

The turmoil depicted in the film, then, is not speculative. It is real political violence of the time, and the only thing futuristic about it is the fact that it is no longer far away—it’s right here, in a city that will feel at least culturally familiar to much of his audience. Using the sensory language of the last time political violence breached viewers’ daily lives, Cuarón warns us that it will continue to happen in years to come.

Haunts the present moment

A cliche about good science fiction is that it is remarkably prescient. We marvel at the clarity with which its creators foresaw the future, as is the case today with Cuarón and Children of Men. A modern audience sees in the film a familiar world of environmental decline, despair over a hopeless future, low birth rates, cultural stagnation, growing xenophobia, authoritarianism, refugee crises. “Why Children of Men haunts the present moment,” says The New Statesman. From the BBC, “Why Children of Men has never been as shocking as it is now.” “How the sci-fi thriller foresaw a dark future,” one journalist wrote last year for NBC News:

The way “Children of Men” reflects reality has evolved and expanded every few years, shape-shifting to match the moment. But on each leg in its trip through the zeitgeist, it has mirrored the world with “brutal clarity,” said Mark Fergus, who co-wrote early drafts of the script with his creative partner Hawk Ostby.

Considering the fact that its meaning seems to morph to match the present moment, and that its entire central premise remains completely fantastical, why are we convinced that Children of Men is so spot-on?

All good science fiction brings with it shrewd insights, not about the future, but about the present. Authors simply dial things up a notch to create the effect of a caricature that feels more real than its actual subject. One way I have described this in the past, as in the case of eerie near-future depictions like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, is that they seem prescient because lots of the horrible things in the world during the time they were written never got any better. It’s easy to see the future when you recognize that things don’t change.

So the wisdom of Children of Men is the unspoken, but heavily telegraphed, leftist analysis of underlying geopolitical conditions that drive any particular moment’s crisis, so long as those conditions continue to exist. It’s said that Cuarón himself brought this analysis to the film, which was originally pitched as an adaptation of the book in the style of a “dystopian Casablanca.” Cuarón—fresh off of directing a Harry Potter movie, but not too long after his politically charged Y tu mamá también—took it in a new direction, drawing inspiration from 1966’s The Battle of Algiers, another revered and subversive film, about the Algerian Revolution.

If all sci-fi is reflecting the moment in which it’s made, there’s no question that Cuarón made the decisions he did in response to post-9/11 neoconservatism. In the five years prior, right-wing hawks dominated the Republican Party, which in turn dominated the U.S. and the Global North. Democrats were all but universally accepting of a massive expansion of the powers of the executive branch, resulting in endless, pointless foreign wars, the dissolution of previously cherished domestic civil rights, and the rise of extrajudicial police actions, including surveillance, torture, kidnapping, deportation, interminable imprisonment, all in the name of defeating some nameless, stateless foreign threat.

This critique is unmistakeable in Children of Men, with images from the War on Terror recreated in the background of the film’s action. The black bags over the heads of Abu Ghraib detainees become a recurring trope in the film. The opening voiceover describes a “Homeland Security Bill” and military occupation of mosques. Government PSAs remind citizens to report the presence of immigrants, reminiscent of the “see something, say something” propaganda that emerged in the 2000s.

Out the window left of Theo you can see a recreation of one of the most upsetting photos from Abu Ghraib.

—

Cuarón could not see the future. But he could clearly see the underlying conditions that were contributing to whatever crises the future might hold. In that sense, “the infertility thing” is just a placeholder, what Roger Ebert called at the time the film’s MacGuffin. It’s not the thrust of the problem this world is facing, it’s a symptom and an accelerant, or a concept climate change communicators will know well—a threat multiplier.

When talking with his old activist friend Jasper, played by Michael Caine, Theo reflects on continued efforts to cure the condition: “Even if they discovered the cure for infertility, it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. The world went to shit. You know what? It was too late before the infertility thing happened, for fuck’s sake.”

The walls don’t work

So what are these underlying conditions? They are fairly overt in the text, but even more so in the supporting documentary that Cuarón directed for the DVD release, The Possibility of Hope, which features Slavoj Žižek, Naomi Klein, Fabrizio Eva, Saskia Sassen, Tzvetan Todorov and others. The philosophers and historians drive home the film’s critique of global late capitalist society. All borders are removed for the flow of capital, so as to allow private industry’s expansion into new markets to consume new resources. For people, however, more borders go up and those borders become more militarized. The walls don’t work, of course, so the police and surveillance state expand. Extreme inequality and environmental degradation caused by runaway extraction make entire regions unstable or uninhabitable. That leads to mass migration, which leads to more cultures overlapping, hoarding and protection of resources, and growing fear of a foreign other.

Naomi Klein describes “global green zones,” areas in developing countries where private industry creates “safe” regions that offer the comforts of Northern wealth—generators, food, bottled water. Domestically, this looks like gated communities and luxury high-rises, often existing alongside abject poverty. In the film, we see this juxtaposition when Theo visits his cousin, a high-ranking government official, to finagle travel papers for Kee. He traverses street protests from the backseat of a Rolls Royce, looking out the window at parks where orchestras play and the wealthy parade around with pet zebras and camels, bizarre luxuries intended to fill the emptiness of their lives.

This raging backdrop of all-too-familiar dysfunction, albeit cranked up a few notches, invites us to project our own moments of acute crisis onto the film’s sci-fi conceit. COVID is a reasonable fit, as we sleepwalk through our pandemic-era lives with no clear end in sight. Characters refer to “the pest,” and we learn that Theo and his estranged wife Julian’s child died in a flu pandemic. Corporate ads for “Quietus,” an at-home suicide kit, run constantly in the background, the tagline “You Decide When” is a familiar neoliberal take on public health. The culling of the population rhymes with COVID-era tolerance for the death of the sick and old.

But more than anything, a modern viewing presents glaring parallels to the climate crisis. There’s a strong case to be made that the infertility in Children of Men can be read entirely as the ticking clock of climate catastrophe, a timer on humanity that is running out. Both are a symptom and an accelerant of geopolitical problems. Just as Theo points out that a scientific solution to infertility wouldn’t repair the state of the world, so do climate justice advocates warn that superficial tech fixes won’t repair the ravages of an extractive economy.

Both problems also yield the same all but certain outcome—a global refugee crisis. At its core, Children of Men is a story about a mass wave of refugees fleeing unstable regions, and the resulting cruelty toward people from outside a nation’s walls. It’s portrayed by cages of immigrants on the streets of London, an entire seaside retirement community converted into a massive detention site, and violent conflict. Such nationalism and isolationism could very well define the future climate crisis. The Washington Post recently described such a worst-case scenario:

Imagine in the coming years a global politics shaped by resurgent nationalism. Governments prioritize their own energy and food needs, invest more in national security than in global development, and undercut international efforts to curb the emissions of greenhouse gases. In this future, carbon emissions will roughly double by the end of the century, hastening along with them the drastic array of catastrophic environmental effects linked to global warming, from the melting of the Arctic to heat waves that make whole regions uninhabitable to an intensification of the extreme droughts, wildfires and floods that have already blighted parts of the world this summer. When some climate scientists speak casually, they categorize this imagined future as “Trump world.”

One of the big unanswered questions about climate change is how we will treat each other when things start to get really bad. Cuarón answers that question for us in Children of Men, and it is Trump World.

The possibility of hope

My biggest criticism of Children of Men is something that came up in a recent interview with author Sam J. Miller, and it’s a criticism of a lot of dystopian fiction. That is, reality doesn’t exist as utopia or dystopia, and we are always living in some combination of both. In Children of Men, there is an inescapable bleakness that, while effective in the telling of this story, seems unlikely even in the worst futures.

As Rebecca Solnit describes in A Paradise Built in Hell, disasters often yield some of the best of humanity. It also triggers the worst of us, often at the level of power-brokers and property holders, but on the ground, crisis often inspires joy, community, care, even fun. We see it in the aftermath of every catastrophe, in impromptu camps, kitchens, libraries, and parties where people demonstrate their love for each other.

We don’t see a ton of this in Children of Men. Among members of the uprising, we see mostly a grim version of solidarity. The depiction of this rebellion is, maybe not evil, but not great, although they do have a cool little farm set up, so I don’t know, maybe Theo just caught them on a bad day.

There are glimmers, however. Maternal figures like Miriam, the midwife who cares for Kee alongside Theo. Marichka, a diminutive fixer in the refugee camp who becomes an unlikely action hero. There is also the sweet and often funny relationship that develops between Theo and Kee, who is initially treated much like a piece of property, but becomes a fully developed character over the course of their friendship.

And of course, how can we forget Michael Caine’s Jasper, a highlight with his hippie hair and chunky cardigan, smoking weed and playing old records in his hidden away country home. Jasper’s not much of a hero, more of a Falstaff, and feels a little like a checked-out Boomer radical. But his humanity remains fully intact, right up until his sad end. He is notably an editorial cartoonist, whose humor undermines joyless authoritarianism. I coincidentally read an essay by David Graeber recently that contrasts the way manners are used to wall off hierarchies of wealth and power, while the practice of joking—in which equal relations playfight and talk openly about various bodily functions—signals a kind of permeability between the self and others. Jasper embodies this power as he asks gunmen to pull his finger, farting before they execute him.

And finally, we have Theo. Our white, male, middle-class bureaucrat, a cog in the machine who has given up on being an ethical human, until his redemption. You might see Theo as a white savior, but he doesn’t really save the day. He doesn’t lead oppressed masses to glory like Daenerys Targaryen. Instead, he does one good, ethical act—he helps Kee get to a boat. (The boat is owned by The Human Project, a not-so-subtle description of the thing Theo had once given up on, what Wendy Brown might call “the project of individual or collective mastery of existence.”) What starts off as a job to make a quick buck becomes a favor, and ends as a sacrifice, as he dies not even knowing if it was successful. But he did it. He helped.

It makes sense that Theo is our protagonist, in part because of Cuarón’s likely audience. Children of Men challenges a middle-class viewer to ask themselves the question posed by the book—If there were no future, how would you behave? Theo’s path tells us that, even if it’s true that there is little hope ahead for humanity, we find redemption by choosing to act not as a bureaucrat or a property owner, but as a human.

—

Podcast

I’ve been hearing some interviews lately with this activist and writer Daniel Sherrell, who recently published the book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World, and something he said on a recent New Yorker podcast really hit me and feels relevant to today’s issue so here it is:

When I imagine myself behind a veil of ignorance, not having been born yet, and somebody were to tell me you would be born in the year the first popular book on global warming would be released. You’ll see it. As you come of age, it’ll transition from a niche research topic to an ongoing global catastrophe. Obviously, I would’ve felt grief about that, and I do feel grief about that.

But also, if somebody had likewise told me that you’re going to spend the rest of your life coming together with people who share your values to try to create a polity and economy that actually treats everybody with dignity, I can’t think of a more meaningful way to spend a human life.

—

Listening

Children of Men also has a lot of great music in it and I love this Jarvis Cocker song called “Running the World” that is the second song as the credits roll.

—

OK that is today’s issue, thank you for reading, now and then it is nice to put an English degree to work because I paid for it.

I watched Children of Men and read some grown-up books, but I also did end up playing The Witcher on Switch for like 5 hours last weekend and also I watched three NBA games which is another fun new coping mechanism I have acquired ever since Jamie got me League Pass for Christmas. Suns are looking good I’m just going to put it out there.

Take care out there folks act like a human.

Tate

A bunch of things I loved in 2021

Kamisaka Sekka, from A World of Things. 1909-10.

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I’ve been working on some year-end retrospective things for work lately and maybe it’s just the contrast to how darkly dramatic 2020 and especially its conclusion were, but I’ve been having a hard time sort of taking stock of the past year. I guess I’m generally skeptical of annual narratives and the weird combo of nostalgia and blame we tend to heap onto them, and it’s also possible I’m just tired and ready to take a little time off and drink some hot wine while this one winds itself down. But it does feel distinctly more difficult to try to distill some sense of what it all meant in 2021.

I was talking to my friend Doug recently and we were discussing how when things go south on us in whatever way, one of the worst aspects and something that is perhaps underestimated in its toll is that life still just kind of plods along and you have to live with the results day to day and in that sense it is all kind of dumb and boring and exhausting on top of whatever more acute harms we have to endure. This year felt kind of like that, maybe more than others. A Slate critic, building on a New York Times column from April, described 2021 as “the Great Languishing.”

Things were surely better this year than in 2020 by some set of metrics, but then again, were they really? We’ve been slogging through this long tail of the pandemic, and although many of us are far safer than we were in 2020 thanks to the vaccines, more people in the US have died this year than last. With the rise of yet another variant and failure to vaccinate countries in the Global South, it’s beginning to feel like we’re stuck—stuck back where we started. Similarly, the drumbeat of climate disaster kept going all year, heat waves, flooding, fires. (If you haven’t, be sure to check out this New York Times feature “Postcards from a World on Fire.”) Authoritarianism marches ahead, which in the US looks like Republicans continuing to slowly disassemble democracy and human rights piece by piece, and Democrats continuing to disappoint on every front in response. So we say ah holy shit this is all pretty fucked up and then we have to go to work in the morning or make the grocery list or whatever.

I periodically think about this album from the early 00s by the Pernice Brothers called The World Won’t End, but it’s a real downer of a record lyrically so you get the sense that the title is meant as more of a complaint than a reassurance. The world won’t end.

On that note, I bring you the best of 2021!

It’s fine, I’m fine, everything’s fine. One posi thing is that I was actually looking at last year’s end of year post and I made a list of all the tools and rituals I wanted to bring with me from the first pandemic year into this one. And a lot of those things continue to serve me pretty well, including prioritizing reading, taking a minute to acknowledge when I’m having a hard time, talking to friends and family, not working on the weekends, and other stuff. And some new things too. Here are some of them.

—

Books I loved

• Year Book, by Seth Rogen
• KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money, by JMR Higgs
• My Heart is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones
• Last Days, by Brian Evenson
• Undoing the Demos, by Wendy Brown
• The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson
• The Dangers of Smoking in Bed, by Mariana Enriquez
• They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us, by Hanif Abdurraqib
• I Got a Monster, by Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg
• Under the Influence, by Robert H. Frank
• The Blade Between, by Sam J. Miller
• All We Can Save, ed. by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katherine K. Wilkinson
• No One Else is Talking About This, by Patricia Lockwood
• Dune, by Frank Herbert
• The Will to Change, by bell hooks
• The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, by Thomas Ligotti
• Intimations, by Zadie Smith

Comics I loved

• The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison (reread vols. 1 and 2)
• Uzumaki, by Junji Ito
• The Cursed Hermit, by Kris Bertin and Alexander Forbes
• Rohner, by Max Baitinger
• Flayed Corpse and Other Stories, by Josh Simmons and friends
• The Complete Dirty Plotte, by Julie Doucet
• Sound of Falling Snow, by Maggie Umber (reread)
• Mirror Mirror 3, by Haejin Park et al
• Loud!, by Maria Llovet
• The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist, by Adrian Tomine
• One More Year, by Simon Hanselmann
• Seeds and Stems, By Simon Hanselmann

Music I loved

• Low, Hey What
• Olivia Rodrigo, Sour
• Arooj Aftab, all, but especially Bird Under Water
• Taylor Swift, Red (Taylor’s version)
• La Femme, Paradigmes
• Kacey Musgraves, star-crossed
• Lucy Dacus, Home Video
• Tewksbury, Paths
• Indigo De Souza, Any Shape You Take
• Lido Pimienta, Miss Colombia
• Injury Reserve, By the Time I Get to Phoenix
• Slothrust, Parallel Timeline
• The Weather Station, Ignorance
• I DONT KONFORM, Sagebrush Rejects
• BADBADNOTGOOD, IV
• RADWIMPS, Your Name
• beebadoobee, Fake It Flowers
• Julien Baker, Little Oblivions
• Japanese Breakfast, Jubilee
• Noctule, Wretched Abyss
• Dry Cleaning, New Long Leg
• Waltzer, Time Traveler
• Viagra Boys, Welfare Jazz
• Kills Birds
• Drug Church, Cheer
• King Princess, all
• Suss, Night Suite, and more

Television I loved

• Avatar: The Last Airbender (yip yip)
• Broadchurch
• Brand New Cherry Flavor
• Counterpart
• Detroiters
• Emily in Paris
• Hacks
• I Think You Should Leave
• Lovecraft Country
• Loki
• Mrs. Fletcher
• Night Manager
• Wandavision
• Sex Education
• Succession
• Top of the Lake
• Insecure
• Y: The Last Man
• White Lotus

Movies I loved

• Another Round
• Atomic Blonde
• Booksmart
• Black Widow
• Holy Motors
• I’m Your Woman
• Empty Man
• Satan’s Slaves
• Nomadland
• Nobody
• Personal Shopper
• Kate
• Shiva Baby
• Night House
• Werewolves Within
• Your Name
• Weathering With You
• Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
• Rare Exports

Podcasts I loved

• Aack Cast by Jamie Loftus
• The Codcast
• The Ezra Klein Show
• Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy
• Heavy Leather Horror Show
• Longform
• The New Yorker Radio Hour
• Resistance
• Wireless Nights
• You’re Wrong About
• Floodlines
• The Slowdown

Newsletters I loved

• Anne Helen Peterson
• Tamiko Beyer’s Starlight and Strategy
• The Overhead Wire
• Flow State
• Heated
• Hot Take
• Adam Tooze
• Tressie McMillan Cottom
• Roxane Gay
• Welcome to Hell World

Articles I loved (maybe not loved but you know what I mean)

Hundreds of companies pledged to stop cutting down forests and did not succeed, nobody wants to live in a smart city, the youngest known chief in the history of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation is a climate champion, freeway expansions are still displacing people of color, Baby Tate, The Daily subjected millions of listeners to filthy lies from ExxonMobil, all COPs are bad, the seven day week is fake, more than half of police killings are mislabeled, kids will live through three times as many climate disasters as their grandparents, Republicans and industry are making it illegal for cities to pass laws that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the guitarist from Pearl Jam builds skateparks in Indian Country, Bill Gates uses his money to steer Africa toward GM seeds and industrial agriculture, young people think humanity is doomed, baby poop is full of microplastic, ghost forests on the East Coast, Jon Stewart can be such an asshole, David Sedaris can be such an asshole, Doreen St. Félix on Michael K. Williams, California’s carbon offset program is a mess, “I am worried, that’s an understatement — and I feel ill,” wells are drying up in California, the fossil fuel industry is destroying our future, climate scientists describe one awful future scenario as “Trump World,”  tequila gentrification, New Hampshire’s “Fyre Fest” of overnight camps, Oscar (Zeta) Acosta never got the credit Hunter Thompson owed him, an amazing season for the Phoenix Suns, devastating flooding in Germany and Belgium, drought is making Lake Mead unrecognizable, one billion marine creatures cooked to death in their shells, “It’s a wage shortage,” roving packs of marijuana smoking teens, a deadly “redneck Rave” in Kentucky, “I feel like I’m in Hell,” “superheated pavement,” a “cataclysmic day” for fossil fuel companies, “the pandemic is just the final straw,” Stephen Graham Jones’s open letter to conventions hosting Native writers, ANOHNI on NFTs: “I think it’s shit,” 30 Boston cops each made over $300,000 last year, fare-free buses in Boston, supergentrification, the “open concept bathroom,” what Hanif Abdurraqib can’t live without, Black cartographers have long practiced “counter-mapping,” draconian laws target fossil fuel protests, ecocide should be an international crime, the biggest protest movement in US history, the pandemic erased entire categories of friendship, and finally, kill the filibuster.

—

OK this is the last one for the year and will actually be the last one for a couple of weeks as I give myself some Fridays off during the holidays. I know this is always a hard time of year for a lot of us and honestly it is a hard time to be a human in general, so do whatever you have to do and get some rest and spend some time with loved ones, albeit with some added measures of caution. I’ll see you all on the flipside and we’ll do it again and there will be a lot of bad stuff but also there will be some good stuff and we will commiserate and celebrate together.

Jingle jangle

Tate

The third annual Crisis Palace feel good guide to year end giving

Wschód Księżyca (Moonrise), Stanisław Masłowski, 1884.

—

One of the things about living during the Biden administration is that the Republican Party’s horrors hit differently than they did under Trump, when they were mostly inescapable, because try as you might, you could not separate them from your day to day because that’s what autocrats do, they fill up the space of public life with themselves. Under Biden, there’s generally less perpetual dread, and some things you can point to as hopeful, so life kind of chugs along in some version of normalcy. But just under the surface the project of the GOP churns away, which is the restriction of democracy to enshrine permanent rule with a minority of voters, retraction of rights and freedoms for people they don’t deem worthy, and keeping power accumulated within rotten systems of patriarchy and white supremacy. And it just keeps going and going while Democrats hold two out of three branches of government and are like, you know what I think we can work with these guys to fill some potholes and then one day, whoopsies abortion is illegal.

It is really the kind of thing that makes you understand why people don’t vote, and even though I have never not voted, and I know from years of shitty experience that it is much, much better for the country to have Democrats in power than Republicans, let’s not forget how awful the Democratic Party and its leadership and many of its members are and how their centrism fails over and over again and our electoral system at its best routinely falls far well short of what you might call democracy.

All of which is to say it has been a frustrating week. But I also think that during times like these, when it becomes really clear the amount of regression that is happening, it is important to think about the ways we still can and should participate in democracy and otherwise support our communities, outside of the horror happening on the main stage.

An imperfect but important way that happens under our current system is through giving away money. I know it might feel like it’s unfair or kind of pointless to ask ordinary individuals to write these $100 checks or whatever to ameliorate our failing systems. But as I sometimes argue here, and have argued in the past as a fundraiser and as someone covering philanthropy, giving money is a form of power, which sounds bad but it can also be a form of power that ordinary people can harness.

It is also a practice that has existed in humanity in some form for time immemorial, and is a much broader and multifaceted activity than the modern, largely plutocratic incarnation that captures most of the discourse (think Bill Gates, the Rockefeller Foundation, donor advised funds). And what I mean specifically by that is, affluent people are given disproportionately high tax breaks for donations that often advance their own interests, and in the process siphon tens of billions from public coffers every year. But philanthropy as a part of being a person in society and a person participating in democracy has a much broader meaning than that, and a meaning that has been to an extent stolen away by what we might call big philanthropy.

In other words, small-p philanthropy is an imperfect tool within an imperfect system that allows us to do the work of changing the system. But it’s also, even in a good system, just a thing that people do to help other people, and can even be a useful feature of democracy.

Some of the best thinking about the political theory of philanthropy is coming out of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society. The co-director of the center Rob Reich (not the Clinton-era labor guy) wrote a great book on the topic Just Giving, and the center’s scholars also released a denser, more academic collection of essays a while back called Philanthropy in Democratic Societies, which explores similar themes. In Reich’s book, he points out that philanthropy may be a universal activity, and is shaped for better or worse by our norms and institutional arrangements. Our version of philanthropy may be corrupting and plutocratic, not because charity and giving inherently are that way, but because of the machine we filter it through.

Reich’s book and the authors in the collection of essays outline, not only the problems with philanthropy in society, but also the ways in which it might be beneficial and necessary. Some of the latter include:

1. Pluralism – This is especially important for ordinary individual donors, in that it is a check against government orthodoxies and market forces in the production of public goods. (Reich) A good example of this is actually funding for abortion care and rights in a country where, just for a totally extreme example, a bunch of grandpas in robes can impose theocracy by forcing pregnancies to be brought to term.
2. Discovery – This one is good for foundations, in that they can experiment with smaller-scale projects that test certain policies or practices, and if people like the outcomes, the state can adopt them. The reason this is good for philanthropic institutions is they can (in theory) exist outside of political cycles and act with long time horizons in mind. (Reich)
3. Reparative justice – Chiara Cordelli in Philanthropy in Democratic Societies writes that while living in non-ideal societies, “philanthropy should be understood foremost as a duty of reparative justice” in which the well-off must repair “harm to the worst-off, for which the former can be held liable.”
4. Damage limitation – She continues, “Spending time and money in political advocacy so as to support the provision of more and better services in five years’ time cannot compensate damages caused by cuts to these services here and now. Compensation must happen before more just institutions can be brought about.”

I have similarly argued that philanthropy should be seen as a way to redistribute power with justice as the goal, which means shifting wealth in ways that allow people harmed by a system to gain greater control over how that system might be changed for the better.

I should also note that Lucy Bernholz is another scholar at Stanford PACS who has a new book out called How We Give Now, which I am excited to read and will report back on it once I have. In it, she challenges us to expand the way we think about philanthropy, to include the many ways non-wealthy people use giving to “live our values and fully participate in society.” There are countless ways that we do this, and I attended a panel in which she made a really good point that for many communities, this definition of philanthropy happens, not as a kind of optional generosity, but almost a given in which support is exchanged from peer to peer as is necessary. (This gets to the idea of mutual aid, which I would argue is one of the many forms of philanthropy but that is another newsletter.)

So that is a little preamble to my annual year end giving guide. As always I’ll start with my three main principles of good individual giving: 1) lean toward local giving; 2) avoid big legacy NGOs, which usually have way too much money and sometimes but not always do more to protect the status quo than to change it; and 3) don’t worry about “getting scammed” or about ensuring “impact” because giving that is transactional and demands a quantifiable ROI is not really giving and also that is neoliberalism doing its work inside your brain.

There are a lot of repeat groups from past years because social change takes time and commitment you know, but some new ones too this year. I’m also going to break this up into different categories and branch out a bit from climate, starting with abortion care for obvious reasons, which is informed by ~my wife~ Jamie who works on reproductive rights and justice as her whole life’s work so she knows a couple things. Here are some ways you might decide to give this year:

1. Give to support the human right to a safe and easily accessible abortion.

National Network of Abortion Funds – First in this category is Jamie’s employer so I guess this is technically what we call in the biz “self-dealing” but NNAF is doing some of the best work nationally on this issue, supporting local needs through locally run funds that provide abortion care and also organizing to build power behind the right to abortion. You can give directly to network itself and PS they actually have really good merch too.

Give to a local abortion fund – Next, a preferred option under my first principle up there might be to give directly to a local abortion fund where you live or maybe in a place you are particularly concerned about of which there are many to choose from. NNAF can help you out on that front too, with this handy map and list that often includes direct links to donate.

Abortion Care Network – One more recommendation here is this network of independent clinics around the country, which is where most people get abortions (two out of three), but generally struggle to find funding. The network’s mission is to ensure access, provide exceptional care, and end harassment of people seeking care.

What about Planned Parenthood and ACLU you might be asking? Well, RE principle #2 up there, they are both very well funded already, and their work doesn’t necessarily support people who need abortion care directly or center the needs of those people, as they tend to work on a broader set of issues and policy goals (though their work still fills an important niche, particularly on the litigation front). And speaking personally here, I appreciate the way NNAF combines power-building led by people on the ground with the act of directly providing care, an approach that has a way of grounding their advocacy in the experiences of those in need.

2. Give to build a just multiracial democracy.

Working Families Party – WFP is a multiracial, working-class movement of individuals, unions, community-based organizations and movement groups. They sometimes but not always operate as an actual third party, and frequently will support candidates through Democratic primaries and up and down the ballot. A great group to donate to, and otherwise connect with through volunteering, organizing, online meetings and trainings, etc.

Movement for Black Lives – Most people probably know M4BL for its affiliation with the protest movement, but it is a staffed up organization running campaigns and organizing a coalition of groups who work toward justice and liberation across a whole set of issues including reparations, defunding police, economic justice, the right to protest, LGBTQ+ rights, disability rights, immigration, and climate change. They are an organizing powerhouse and unapologetic about their vision for the future.

Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA) – This one is Arizona-specific, but you know Arizona is a battleground, which is clear if you have been paying attention to the Senate even a little bit lately. LUCHA is awesome, formed in response to the bigoted immigration laws that came out of the state government over the years, but now organizes around all kinds of candidates and issues with a big focus on immigration but also economic justice including increased minimum wage and social service funding.

3. Give to build a grassroots climate justice movement.

Climate Justice Alliance – CJA is my sort of go-to group when it comes to following what is happening in the climate justice movement and keeping track of who the main players are. Similar to NNAF, I like the way they combine local needs and leadership with national organizing. They have an amazing steering committee and leadership and staff and are always just super on point and clear-eyed about what needs to be done and who should lead the way.

Give to a local climate justice group – A similar dynamic as NNAF, you might prefer to give directly to a group that is a member of CJA, and they make it very easy to do so. Some member groups I like and/or have backed in the past: ACE here in Boston, Green Roots also here, PUSH Buffalo, Cooperation Jackson, APEN in California, Gulf Coast Center for Law and Poverty, I could go on.

Power Shift Network – Power Shift is a youth-focused and youth-led organizing network that is horizontally structured, focused on climate and environmental justice through systemic change with an intersectional lens that takes into account issues such as poverty, democracy, health and racial justice.

4. Give to groups that act with the understanding that we are in a global emergency.

Climate Emergency Fund – This is one of my favorite groups to back right now, because they channel funds directly to activists working with dozens of groups to do things that a lot of donors and funders do not want to support, which is to say, raising complete hell about climate change. They back things like mass protests, hunger strikes, vandalization, disruptions of public spaces and roads, people gluing themselves to places like capitol steps or one of my personal favorites the big window outside the Today Show. (Holding media accountable is one focus area.)

Sunrise Movement – No surprise here I am a fan of this group. They’ve gone through some turmoil and are kind of in a spot where they are working to adapt to their incredible growth and grappling with some of their weaknesses (aka whiteness). But I still think they have the hot hand when it comes to US policy and organizing and can go toe to toe with powerful NGOs and special interests alike.

Extinction Rebellion – XR is a group that has similarly stumbled on issues of race in its early days, but from what I’ve read, it’s come a long way and expanded fast. I like them because for one they simply do not fuck around, and I also really like how they have a program that organizes writers and poets. They use a similar distributed model as Sunrise, all taking a page from Act Up’s work in the 80s.

Fridays for Future – This is the youth strike movement started by Greta Thunberg that has been particularly effective in Europe but operates globally. A similar distributed model that uses online organizing to mount disruptive actions in tons of locations, relentlessly.

5. Give to Indigenous-led groups working on climate change.

Indigenous Environmental Network – IEN and Oil Change International (another great group) recently put out a report that found Indigenous resistance to fossil fuel infrastructure has reduced emissions equivalent to at least a quarter of annual emissions in US and Canada. IEN has been supporting this work since 1990.

NDN Collective – NDN Collective gives out grants, fellowships, impact investing and lending in support of Native-led climate justice work. They got a big grant from Bezos, but they should get even more money because Nick Tilsen is a fucking badass.

Native Renewables – This group is awesome they fund off-grid solar grids to provide power to homes on the Navajo and Hopi reservations. The also do workforce training and education on installing solar power.

6. Give to other groups I don’t have a category for.

Corporate Accountability – This is a great organization that is unique for the way that it frames all of its work in opposition to corporate interests. Their climate program focuses on things like making the fossil fuel industry pay for decarbonization, kicking them out of climate negotiations, and calling out BS net zero pledges.

Solidarity Economy groups – Check out the New Economy Coalition to learn about and support organizations that advance alternatives to capitalism through cooperatives, community ownership and participatory democracy. In Boston we’ve got the Boston Impact Initiative and Boston Ujima Project.

Rewiring America – That’s right, I’m recommending a tech-focused organization founded by a couple of white dudes, buckle up. Saul Griffith is just a really cool, really smart guy who is has this single-minded vision and focus on electrifying everything through massive government mobilization, with social benefits top of mind. If you find yourself drawn to the tech and infrastructure challenges of climate change, this is the group to check out.

Food banks – Finally, COVID was a gigantic reminder that, as important as advocacy and organizing are, the project of social change can’t be separated from meeting the immediate needs of people who are being left behind by failing systems. Your neighborhood might have a mutual aid group or a community fridge that provides food to people in need, but every city has a local food bank.

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Links

• The Supreme Court, which has three members appointed by a president elected with a minority of the vote and who attempted to overthrow the US government, and one of whom is credibly accused of multiple accounts of sexual assault, looks ready to overturn Roe v. Wade.
• A long-term study found that having an abortion helped the people who had them in measurable ways and the vast majority did not regret the decision. (Which debunks a common lie about abortion but is also really not even necessary to know because abortion is a matter of bodily autonomy.)
• Voluntary corporate pledges don’t work part 1 million. Hundreds of companies pledged to stop cutting down forests. Ten years later, none were successful at eliminating deforestation from their supply chains and many didn’t even try!
• Companies building smart cities from scratch also doesn’t work nobody wants to live in them.
• Researchers chart the successes and struggles of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future.
• Environmental causes receive less than 2% of charitable giving, climate mitigation gets 0.4%, and environmental justice gets 0.5% of all environmental giving (about the same amount annually as The Nature Conservancy gets every week).
• Build Back Better would funnel billions to fossil fuel companies via tax credits.
• How environmental justice work takes a toll on people of color.
• Doreen St. Felix on Insecure.
• Baby Tate.

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Podcasts

I really loved the Aack Cast limited series that is all about the comic Cathy, and how all of the hacky jokes that it’s all about chocolate etc are largely unfair and sexist. Comedian and writer Jamie Loftus (who covered Mensa and Nabokov’s Lolita in previous podcasts) does an amazing job of criticizing the problems with Cathy while giving it credit that it often is not given, while exploring the generational divides in feminism the strip often portrays. She also draws lines from Cathy to modern, more diverse voices in autobio comics. Highly recommend!

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Watching

Counterpart. I’ve been getting more into spy fiction lately and this show is amazing, like Le Carre but with an amazing sci-fi twist. It got cancelled unfortunately but there are two seasons of 10 episodes and it is great. Also Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings was super fun.

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Hey I wanted to share some bad news which is that in the last newsletter I used that word populous instead of populace I am sorry and I’m still working through it emotionally but I think it will be OK.

One fun thing however is that last weekend we went to see Dinosaur Jr. and The Lemonheads it was a real Gen X party. An annoying part is that it was at the House of Blues which is this awful venue and sometimes they sell you these tickets where you can’t see anything which is unfortunately what happened in this case because these 8 foot tall dudes formed a wall between the balcony view and everyone else in the section. We did manage to steal one guy’s spot while he was in the bathroom and then took turns standing in it so in other words we forcibly liberated the House of Blues balcony section. Then later I took things a little far and got into an argument with a security guard it was like Crisis Palace IRL but we don’t need to get into the details. Bottom line, it was extremely loud and fun and we didn’t get COVID.

One nice thing you can always be sure about is that in Crisis Palace everyone gets a clear view and tall men have to stand in the back and there are no security guards, ever.

Tate

In Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos, neoliberalism brings the tyranny of the market and the death of the democratic project

Rex, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 1909

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Oh boy, another issue being written right as our Diarrhea Country kicks into full gear, in this case the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, which we honestly all knew was going to turn out this way, after all it is A-OK in many states to kill racial justice protestors with a car, so why not with an AR-15? In fact I fully expect Spotify to tee up a $100 million exclusive podcast contract with Rittenhouse and a Dancing with the Stars appearance is likely on the horizon. In other news it looks like Build Back Better just barely passed the House and now will go to the Senate which will further gut it and then back to the House and maybe back to the Senate and back to the House. Also the COP26 agreement was signed, including all the stupid watered down language I mentioned. That’s the news, now here’s the weather.

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Have you ever been in the shower or trying to fall asleep or something and thought to yourself, you know, it’s kind of weird that the single most important thing in the whole world is to be good at business, and if you aren’t, you don’t get a place to live or healthcare and a lot of the time you just die?

One way to describe this state of affairs is neoliberalism, a term I’ve had a hard time with in the past because it feels kind of overused to the point that it feels like it’s losing meaning. It always felt to me like people were using it to describe libertarianism, or capitalism, or the Democratic Party, or whatever thing they were mad about. There’s that funny scene in White Lotus, where two disaffected teens are idly complaining about Hillary Clinton, “She was a neolib and a neocon.”

Neoliberalism does have a specific meaning though—it’s a mode of reason that applies economic principles to all aspects of existence—but it’s kind of a slippery idea to get a hold of, I would say because it engulfs everything around us. In Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson describes this effect through a metaphor of the global market as a character:

“My body worked so well that eventually all things everywhere were swallowed and digested by me. I grew so large that I ate the world, and all the blood in the world is mine. What am I? You know, even though you are like everything else, and see me from the inside. I am the market.”

All the blood in the world is mine. You see me from the inside. That goes a long way toward explaining how, while everywhere all the time, neoliberalism becomes a kind of ambient noise that we only really notice every once in a while, in the shower or trying to fall asleep and thinking, why is the world like this?

After reading political theorist Wendy Brown’s 2017 book Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, I’ve come around to the term as a necessary way to name this problem. Brown not only gives a powerful explanation of what neoliberalism is and how it’s causing economic and political systems to fail, she also outlines the full extent of its harms—the reshaping of how we see ourselves as humans and how we interact with each other. Brown argues that it’s a world view that has seeped so deeply into the crevices of our minds and our culture that after just a few decades living under its reign, we have a hard time seeing any other possibilities outside of it.

Brown’s argument centers on how neoliberalism robs us of our lives as democratic actors working toward principles of common good. But I find one of the most disturbing aspects of her argument to be the way in which neoliberalism robs us of our imagination. It’s a form of giving up, spiritually and practically, on the project of working toward an ethical existence.

What exactly is neoliberalism?

Undoing the Demos is not a light read, and it builds on a lot of previous works of political philosophy, mostly by revising Michel Foucault’s assessment of the concept from his lectures in the late 1970s. But Brown updates and revises the definition based on how it has unfolded in the decades to follow, and her own added concerns of how deeply it threatens democracy.

I will skip over a lot of this, but basically if classical liberalism (as opposed to social liberalism as we typically use the term today) is characterized by democratic governance and free markets, Foucault describes neoliberalism as a “reprogramming” of liberalism that installs the market as the core principle of government and, eventually, all areas of life. Even in the eyes of Adam Smith, the market was seen as one tool for liberating the subject, but never the guiding principle it becomes in neoliberalism.

“Neoliberalism is not about the state leaving the economy alone. Rather, neoliberalism activates the state on behalf of the economy… to facilitate economic competition and growth and to economize the social, or, as Foucault puts it, to ‘regulate society by the market.'”

The concept emerged in postwar Germany and in the 1970s characterized the way the Global North began imposing markets on the Global South, absorbing and transforming nations for their cheap labor and resources. But the end result of neoliberalism is the complete dominance of homo oeconomicus, human as a market actor, who eventually becomes not just someone merely exchanging goods and services, but a unit of “human capital,” operating in the world as a company would.

Brown describes how this unfolds in our lives, where education is merely an investment in future earning potential, dating is an act of marketing oneself to a potential partner (now contracted out to tech companies), families are managed like firms, and our credit ratings determine the security and happiness we can achieve: “both persons and states are construed on the model of the contemporary firm, both persons and states are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value, and both persons and states do so through practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors.”

For both Foucault and Brown, neoliberalism is not merely one economic system, or even an array of systems and policies. “As a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct.”

That’s why it can’t be looked at as, say, a particular flaw in the US government, or the politics of the Reagan years. In fact, while Reagan and Thatcher are often associated with the rise of neoliberalism, its dominance comes with the Clinton years, when the political party nominally concerned with justice under the law solidified consensus that the market is synonymous with truth (as Thatcher liked to say, “there is no alternative”), and the role of the state and individual alike is to serve the market—but never interfere with it—because only therein lies prosperity.

In fact, one of Brown’s damning pieces of evidence of neoliberalism’s reign is a State of the Union address by President Obama following his reelection in 2012, in which it was widely believed that his progressive ideals had been reignited with his renewed political capital. But Brown points out that, one by one, every ideal he professes in the speech—from raising wages to ending domestic violence—is framed as a way to advance the competitiveness of America as an economic firm.

“A growing economy that creates good, middle-class jobs — that must be the North Star that guides our efforts” the president intoned. “Every day,” he added, “we must ask ourselves three questions as a nation…. How do we attract more jobs to our shores? How do we equip our people with the skills needed to do those jobs? And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?”

Attracting investors and developing an adequately remunerated skilled workforce—these are the goals of the world’s oldest democracy led by a justice-minded president in the twenty-first century.

This attitude is going strong today, as a vapid Democratic Party offers few values to speak of, because the values that undergird the party in theory—equality, a social safety net, regulation of industry—conflict with neoliberal reason. They are off the table. As a result, when pressed on what DNC leaders stand for, they can only meekly respond with “…jobs?” Even on climate change, an issue in which millions of lives and untold suffering hang in the balance, the Biden administration can only ever discuss the issue in the context of creating jobs and competing with China, our rival firm. Build those solar panels, get that paper.

What’s so bad about neoliberalism?

Maybe you are all about the rise and grind and wondering, well, what is so bad about all this? Well there are a bunch of concrete reasons the populous is turning against neoliberalism, although Brown sees these as tangential to the core problem.

Among the popular criticisms of neoliberalism is that it requires government to exist only to facilitate the free market, which means deregulation of industry and a shrinking welfare sate. With this comes gross inequality and suffering for people who are not winners in the market. Related to this is the coziness between corporations and government and the corruption that breeds (in fact, Brown points out that there is no such thing as corruption under neoliberalism, because private sector prosperity is inseparable from public interest). Then there is the crass commercialization of everything as a potential product, from education to organ transplants. And finally, neoliberalism deliciously ends in economic destabilization, as a financial sector that produces nothing but investment products becomes an engorged portion of the economy.

And yet. For Wendy Brown, the main reason neoliberalism is so bad for us is that it “is quietly undoing basic elements of democracy. These elements include vocabularies, principles of justice, political cultures, habits of citizenship, practices of rule, and above all, democratic imaginaries.”

She describes this as a battle between two versions of humanity: homo oeconomicus and homo politicus—the former an actor in an economic market, the latter an agent participating in self-governance. Under neoliberalism, homo oeconomicus eclipses homo politicus. “The vanquishing of homo politicus by contemporary neoliberal rationality, the insistence that there are only rational market actors in every sphere of human existence, is novel, indeed, revolutionary, in the history of the West.”

Brown describes this as a “turning inside out” of the social contract, in which we are each only responsible for ourselves, and there is no guarantee of security or even survival, unless it’s perceived as good for the firm’s competitiveness. “When there is only homo oeconomicus… the foundation vanishes for citizenship concerned with public things and the common good.”

Further, when competitiveness eclipses all other values, the pursuit of justice and equality inherently recedes. After all, while corporations frequently speak of “win-win scenarios,” the marketplace is defined by winners and losers, not equal treatment and protection.

Brown also presents the loss of homo politicus as a loss of freedom. This may sound contradictory considering a dominant idea of freedom is that of a free market—which in itself reflects what neoliberalism has done to our brains, fusing liberty with capitalism—but the idea here is that only through popular sovereignty do we achieve the freedom to decide our values and how we want to live, and without it we are living under the tyranny of the market.

“The neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom—free markets, free countries, free men—but tears up freedom’s grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike. States are subordinated to the market, govern for the market, and gain or lose legitimacy according to the market’s vicissitudes.”

There is one game to be played under neoliberalism, and we have no choice but to play it. As a result, all of the elements of a rich life that have been valued throughout history, learning for learning’s sake, working in community toward common good, creative expression, pondering our existence, are all replaced by the need to constantly increase our competitive advantage.

“Indeed, no capital, save a suicidal one, can freely choose its activities and life course or be indifferent to the innovations of its competitors or parameters of success in a world of scarcity and inequality.”

Expressions of neoliberalism

This is just a broad outline of the argument in Undoing the Demos, and the book puts forth several examples of how it plays out. There’s an analysis of how gender inequality is intensified, as the market actor is disproportionately seen as a male role, and the labor of caregiving ignored as the unpaid work of women.

“The persistent responsibility of women for provisioning care of every sort, in and out of the household, means that women both require the visible social infrastructure that neoliberalism aims to dismantle through privatization and are the invisible infrastructure sustaining a world of putatively self-investing human capitals.”

At the state level, governing is replaced with a version of corporate management that delegates responsibility to the individual, demands personal sacrifice from its employees, and brings industry to the table as “stakeholders” to decide the nation’s fate. Rote replication of corporate “best practices” replaces the democratic process.

In the courts, she discusses how Citizens United, which is primarily criticized for introducing a flood of money into elections, is actually more sinister than that—it degrades the participation in politics to the crude exchange of money for a service. In his majority opinion, Justice Kennedy legally entrenches not only corporations as people, but people as corporations, defining free expression as an economic marketplace instead of a precious equal right held by all.

Being an academic herself, higher education is of particular concern to Brown, who has watched state funding shrink, business schools and fundraising departments at her university swell, and liberal arts and humanities wither away as societal capital. The democratization of learning, while we have never delivered on its promise, was a radical act of equality, one that is unraveling as schooling is reduced to an investment in human capital (and in future donations from alumni).

Where do we go from here?

That point about education having always fallen short of its ideals is an important one for Brown. She makes clear toward the end of the book that democracy itself is not an end goal that always produces common good, quite the contrary. We don’t even agree on what proper democracy looks like.

She also notes that liberalism was failing homo politicus long before neoliberalism cemented its hold, and markets exploited and accumulated before neoliberalism. But liberal democracy at least offered the tools to create something that we could one day call true democracy, one that could potentially deliver justice. The economization of everything has taken those tools away, giving us only the ceaseless burden of competition in return.

This feels super relevant to our capacity to respond to climate change, especially if we seek to create a more just economy post-fossil fuels. As climate change finally becomes a top tier issue globally and nationally, we see it absorbed into neoliberalism, with corporations co-opting the idea of just transition as a “win-win” for economic growth, the rise of hollow net zero pledges and the primacy of private finance solutions. The only passable (maybe!) climate legislation is new tax incentives, and our primary global channel for collective decision-making has become little more than a way for world leaders to humbly ask industry lobbyists how states might best serve their firms during the crisis.

This is a depressing diagnosis, but one that names the disease in a way that is rarely so well articulated. In the conclusion, Brown points out that her goal was not to set out to find a cure for this problem, and she doesn’t offer much of one. But she does pose what such a cure might require of us, and it is no small task.

Merely passing policies to counter neoliberalism may not be enough. For example, you could restore regulations that market logic has rolled back, but that wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the dominance of market logic that governs our lives and institutions. City councils, schools, NGOs, community groups, these institutions that may “understand themselves as opposing neoliberal economic policies may nonetheless be organized by neoliberal rationality.”

The task left before us then is nothing short of creating a new order of dominant reasoning, and that often leads to despair and submission to this monster of our own creation. But we must cling to the idea that we can elevate ourselves beyond rote self-interest. “In letting markets decide our present and future, neoliberalism wholly abandons the project of individual or collective mastery of existence.”

Brown writes that reviving that project “is incalculably difficult, bears no immediate reward, and carries no guarantee of success.” Here, however, I think she is perhaps a bit too grim. We can find hope in her well-taken point that neoliberalism is not, in fact, all humanity has ever been. She only puts its reign at around 30 years. In other words, all the blood in the world belongs to the market, but that wasn’t always how it was! Neoliberalism’s installation was “novel and revolutionary,” remember, and we may already be seeing its cracks.

So the trick, as hokey as it sounds, is not giving up on the project, and I’d also add recognizing that, while the solution requires a change in the primary way we view the world, it’s not a pass/fail exam. I’m reminded of Cadwell Turnbull’s essay on the folly of seeking utopia as perfection:

“I’d argue that everyone would benefit if we defined utopia as a move toward justice and equity, and not just the state of perfection. But in America, especially in discussions about social justice, “just” and “perfect” are treated as synonymous objectives. And because perfect is never attainable, justice, too, becomes out of reach. … By failing to recognize the dystopia, and dismissing the possibility of a utopia, America has resigned itself to its current, dark narrative.”

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Links

• The Biden administration cast itself as a climate hero in Glasgow, then opened the largest oil and gas lease in U.S. history. Kate Aronoff explains how this is a perfect example of how climate treaties are failing in that they don’t STOP EXTRACTING AND BURNING FOSSIL FUELS.
• I love this profile of Dana Tizya-Tramm, the youngest known chief in the history of the Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation, which lies 80 miles north of the Arctic Circle. He has emerged as a climate champion, declaring a climate emergency and pioneering sovereign renewable energy for his nation.
• Boston’s broken zoning process rejected a popular development proposal in my neighborhood that would have offered 40% affordable units, specifically because by including those units it reduced the amount of parking.
• Urban freeways displaced Black and Latino homeowners and eradicated entire neighborhoods during the 1960s. We have since moved away from building such freeways, but we do keep expanding them and an LA Times investigation found this work is ~still~ displacing people of color.
• Miami issued a bold plan to slash carbon emissions, including an end to natural gas hookups in new buildings. Then the gas company emailed the city and said this will be “problematic for our industry” and the city reversed its decision.
• New York Times‘ The Daily draws millions of listeners, and it recently subjected all of them to filthy lies from ExxonMobil. Emily Atkin explains how the Times got played like fools.
• From Hot Take — Why all COPs are bad, and why being polite to fossil fuel companies and shitty politicians gets us nowhere.
• You might gather from right wing media that Joe Biden is singlehandedly making everything more expensive but inflation is actually happening worldwide mainly because the economy has recovered faster than expected post-COVID and also oil industry manipulation.
• Just a generation after the first Thanksgiving we idealize this time of year, New Englanders hunted and killed Native children for bounties offered by government decree. Dawn Neptune Adams, Maulian Dana and Adam Mazo suggest: “In this season, as families and friends gather to share gratitude, let us seek new opportunities to learn about our collective history, in all its complexity, and embrace a future built upon mutual understanding and respect for our neighbors.”
• Lots more people are identifying as Evangelical Christians but it turns out they don’t actually worship Jesus Christ they worship the Republican Party.
• I don’t know why David Sedaris has to be such an asshole.
• “Stomp, clap, hey” you know what I’m talking about is the music of gentrification, according to this theory I don’t entirely believe but like to entertain.
• The seven day week is fake af.

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Comics

I first read Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles in the early 2000s, maybe 2002, checked out from the Multnomah County Library, trade paperback by trade paperback and was obsessed with it. I’ve been rereading it and have spent the last month or so on volume 2. That’s a long time, but a comic unlike a novel can be judged by how slowly it makes you read instead of how fast it makes you read, and by that metric, The Invisibles has few peers. It is so dense and confusing and weird but also so fun that you really need to sit with every panel.

It was so edgy when it came out that I was a little worried about how it would hold up, and it does have a fair amount of language that would not be acceptable if it came out today, and it is deeply, profoundly 90s, but still feels surprisingly fresh and ahead of its time, bursting with anarchist politics, street magic, violent satire, anti-authoritarian rage, and gender and sexual rebellion. It remains provocative in the best way in that it expands and challenges your assumptions about the world and expands your empathy instead of stoking your worst impulses. I loved volume 2 and can’t wait to read the rest. I even ordered a little blank badge on the internet.

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Listening

Starting with Red I have been fully on board with Taylor Swift’s music, despite the occasional internal conflict over that fandom. I like the new stuff but Red is still my favorite, and she just put out a 30-TRACK rerelease as part of her legal reclaiming of her catalog. The new songs are good and the original songs are still great. Everyone is talking about All Too Well, but for my money, State of Grace is the real banger on this record.

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Phew, long one this week. Thanks for sticking with it. Let’s keep the ending short this week but have a wonderful Thanksgiving enjoy your time with family and loved ones, have a wonderful meal, and “let us seek new opportunities to learn about our collective history, in all its complexity, and embrace a future built upon mutual understanding and respect for our neighbors.”

Gobble gobble my bros.

Tate

It just keeps going and then after a while we die

The Volunteers, Käthe Kollwitz, 1922/1923

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Today we are going to do one of those issues where we get up to speed together on what is happening in big climate news, namely legislation in U.S. Congress and whatever in god’s name is happening in Glasgow right now. It’s entirely possible that you are already up to speed on this stuff or you understandably find it all pretty boring. But as is my way, I promise I will get in some good burns and witty banter and make it pretty straightforward so when all is said and done you can have at least a rough sense of what if anything you can be kind of happy about and what stuff you should be pissed about.

It will be link and quote heavy as a lot of these developments I am still getting my head around and as I type, it looks like COP26 is going into extra innings and there is still plenty of contentious debate left. It reminds me of this anecdote I saw on the internet where a baseball fan was watching a game with his significant other who was not a baseball fan, and there were no runs scored and it was getting late and she said, what happens if nobody scores? And he said, it just keeps going. And she was like that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. And that is kind of what climate negotiations are like except it just keeps going and then after a while we die.

Before getting into some of the details I will say that while I’m not one of those weirdos who watches diplomatic negotiations as though they were some kind of a sporting event, I am surrounded by quite a lot of chatter and news about COP26 and had some big picture reactions.

The main thing I noticed was that, while COP26 attracted more media attention than I can remember these things getting, the discussion around it was eerily disjointed. On any given day I would watch Twitter avatars of people in expensive suits talking about how exciting and important these talks are and after whatever news of the day would be like, “this is a really, really big deal!” And simultaneously I would see protestors and advocates more or less saying that this whole thing is a gigantic crock of bullshit. That we are basically watching elites shuffling around deck chairs, in denial about the extent to which the economy needs to be disrupted, unwilling to do anything that might disturb profits or economic growth, and generally tolerant of some level of consequences that will mostly harm countries and communities that did nothing to cause this problem.

You can probably guess where I fall on that divide, although to be honest I do think diplomacy is important and good things can come out of it. But I got the feeling that the stark difference in tone isn’t a result of ignorance or denial on the part of optimists, but a form of lockstep insistence on projecting to the world that thing are going great. It is as if a memo went around saying, celebrate, always celebrate. I noticed a similar tone amid some discussions of the infrastructure bill that passed (annoyingly called BIF, for bipartisan infrastructure framework), heralding it as a climate victory, when it is no such thing. Large, white-led NGOs and their staff were oddly gleeful in public statements and social media at both the bill’s passage and progress at COP.

I understand the desire to celebrate victories and to maintain optimism, and I guess if you’re in climate negotiations that’s kind of a necessary personality trait. But I also think there is a near enemy, which is insisting that things are going swell, which feels like an extension of climate discourse “rules” for decades—don’t scare people, don’t make people feel hopeless, don’t tell them the truth or they will simply shut down and disengage. As far as I can tell that wisdom was the result of like one study that some communications professor did in 1997 (fact check me if you want idc) and it has not worked out that great. I find a healthy dose of pessimism to be quite useful, especially when there is ample reason for it.

Aside from the optimism/pessimism divide, there are many other divides at COP26, which were on full display for the past two weeks. I’ve written a bunch about how as climate change worsens, we’re going to see a cleaving of society into people for whom things are bad but because they are rich they get by OK, and other people living in complete dystopia. And I feel like in these corporate friendly climate summits, that first camp really shows their asses, and the second camp gets increasingly enraged.

A Boston Globe correspondent summed this up nicely in a recent color piece from COP. “I can actually watch the people in power just sitting there having a nice day, having a cup of wine,” a German college student and COP protestor told her. “I’m furious, of course. It’s about our future.” And in another case, “This is now a global north greenwash festival,” Greta Thunberg said, as the crowd cheered and clapped, “a two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.”

Emily Atkin and others pointed out that climate-vulnerable nations and civil society groups are underrepresented, with the COP26 Coalition calling it the “most exclusionary COP ever.” Meanwhile, outside the event more than 100,000 protestors, largely youth, Indigenous and people from the Global South, engulfed the event, kept in check by hordes of police. More than 700 activists from civil society groups protested inside the conference on the last official day. Demonstrators attacked the glacial pace of the talks, the unwillingness of wealthy countries to pay climate reparations to countries that will soon be underwater as the cost of their indulgences, and the catering to industry that happens within the halls. Another Globe writer described a different scene inside the event:

“Inside the sprawling maze of the conference center, many countries created pavilions similar to commercial booths at conventions. One featured three mock polar bears wearing life vests, while another showed off hydrogen-powered cars. The Malaysians handed out doughy desserts, while Norway offered candy.”

Somini Sengupta of the Times noted the striking gender breakdown among negotiators and protestors—of 130 presidents and prime ministers gathering in Glasgow, she notes that fewer than 10 were women, and the average age was well over 60. “Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms in the coming decades are mostly old and male. Those who are angriest about the pace of climate action are mostly young and female.”

Nathan Thanki, a co-coordinator for the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, put it, “I thought I was coming to Glasgow, not Davos. #COP26 has been a corporate circus and you see the effect in the draft outcomes – references to ‘nature based solutions,’ private finance. Celebrities, US congresspeople and their entourages clog the halls. Bullshit clogs the text.”

The inside/outside divide is starker than ever, and it feels like those on the outside are no longer holding out much hope for the official process, if they ever did. That it has essentially become a trade show or PR event in which splashy promises betray the negotiating stances that wealthy negotiators take behind closed doors along with wholly insufficient progress on things they’ve already promised. There was some segment of activists who around 2015 took a tone of “COP sucks but we have to make it work” who are now more along the lines of simply “COP sucks.”

I’ll get into a few of the details that are making people so mad (or “excited to be be a part of such a historic event!!”) but that’s kind of the feeling I picked up over the last two weeks. The anger and frustration is palpable, weirdly offset by those celebrating victory.

What exactly is happening at COP26?

You guys maybe know all of this but just in case the “Conference of the Parties” is an annual event in which world leaders and their representatives gather to check in on progress on climate change and make various commitments, agreements, etc. And every five years (six because of COVID), they are supposed to gather and assess how countries are doing on their voluntary commitments under the 2015 Paris Agreement, ideally “ratcheting them up” to meet the challenge. If only doing that every five years sounds insufficient I would agree with you. And if you were wondering why they are just voluntary, it’s in large part because the U.S. Senate would never ever ratify a binding treaty.

Negotiations are still underway and going beyond today’s planned deadline, nations have failed to sufficiently ratchet up their commitments. There are various ways you can total this up, but the worst interpretation is that the commitments are on pace for 2.4 degrees of warming, which is catastrophe. There’s a middle estimate of 2.1 degrees, and an optimistic estimate of 1.8 degrees. To put a finer point on this, it’s not just the sum total. Although 22 countries improved their pledges, ZERO major economies are compatible with the Paris Agreement’s goal of 1.5 degrees. Some nations are on a trajectory closer to 4 degrees, which is hell planet territory.

But at least they are making progress, right? It’s not 3.7 degrees like it used to be. Well I guess, except for many countries are not on track to hit the insufficient commitments that they have agreed to. AND, a Washington Post investigation found that the data countries use to report their progress on emissions reductions is basically bullshit, with an enormous gap between what they say they are emitting and what they actually are. A lot of the discrepancy has to do with how much countries claim their land use, meaning trees, wetlands, etc, is offsetting carbon emissions, which you will not be surprised to hear is one of the most beloved climate solutions of corporations.

All of this is why critics are calling the negotiations “toddler steps” or saying that the COP26 is an outright failure. Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, told the Guardian: “We are concerned that some countries are trying to portray [Cop26] as if the 1.5C limit is nearly in the bag. But it’s not, it’s very far from it, and they are downplaying the need to get short-term targets for 2030 in line with 1.5C.”

Sticking points

As I mentioned, negotiations are going into overtime last I checked and there are some sticking points in negotiations that are illustrative of the middling progress and borderline comic resistance from wealthy nations and industry to yield any ground.

Right now it is basically looking like the negotiations will result in everybody having to increase their emissions reductions commitments next year, instead of waiting another five years. This is being portrayed by some as a victory, but honestly, let’s go home and try again next year doesn’t exactly instill confidence.

It’s possible we will still see some 11th hour triumph, but on the morning of the last day, advocates were very unhappy with late-night revisions that were made to the text of the agreement negotiators have been trying to hammer out, saying it was “watered down terribly overnight.” (Check out a pretty good breakdown here.) Again, some people are looking at it and saying wow real improvement, others are saying this is basically being written by industry lobbyists But it certainly doesn’t look good.

For the first time it would have added into the agreement that fossil fuel subsidies must be phased out. But the current language added a critical qualifier to call for the phase out of “inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.” Meaning efficient subsidies are totally rad and A-OK. For the record this is exactly the kind of self-contradictory language we see as corporations co-opt the idea of just transition.

Advocates see this as opening the door to continued payoffs to the oil and gas industry: “The next time someone says ‘fossil fuel subsidies’, remember they are talking about our so-called ‘leaders’ using working people’s taxes to invest in the deaths of children and the planet,” said South African human rights activist Kumi Naidoo.

Also changed: the “phaseout of coal” became “phaseout of unabated coal” and “renewables” was changed to “low-emissions energy systems” which is likely code for natural gas. None of this is surprising considering for years, several nations have fought to have the mere mention of fossil fuels off limits in treaty documents, which is wild, like negotiating over disarmament and not being willing to say the word “weapons.”

And, you will not be surprised to know that the fossil fuel industry itself is crawling all over COP26. One report found that the fossil fuel industry has more delegates than any nation at the summit—503 representatives. “This is larger than the combined total of delegates from Myanmar, Haiti, the Philippines, Mozambique, the Bahamas, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the regions and countries worst affected by climate change.”

Another point of contention is to what extent wealthy countries are going to pay for the damage their ever-fattening economies are causing. Rich countries are already not meeting their commitments in terms of climate funding—in 2009, they agreed to pool $100 billion by 2020 and so far they’ve commited more like $79 billion. “Everybody here is livid,” Saleemul Huq, a climate science and policy expert from Bangladesh told the LA Times. “They reneged on their promise. They failed to deliver it. And they seem not to care about it. And so why should we trust anything they say anymore?”

There has been heated debate over the scope of climate reparations (euphemized as “loss and damage”) that must be paid to countries that will suffer the worst consequences at the hands of wealthy carbon emitters. In the late hours of the conference, negotiators from the Global South are saying the US and EU’s refusal to give more money or agree to a loss and damage fund was a key sticking point.

Is everything so, so awful?

No, there are some bright spots that emerged from the negotiations! Here are some of them. Feel good for a minute:

• The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance was announced yesterday, a rare component in UN climate talks that acknowledges the need to phase out production of fossil fuels. It even has eight nations signed on (not the US obvy).
• Some philanthropies are advocating for a loss and damage fund, and committing $3 million to get it started.
• US and China made a surprise, last-minute agreement, albeit extremely vague, to work together to reduce emissions. They alone make up 40% of emissions.
• More than 100 countries agreed to end deforestation by 2030. The announcement was celebrated, although many pointed out that a similar 2014 pledge did just about nothing.
• More than 40 countries agreed to end coal mining. The U.S. did not sign the pledge lolz.
• More than 100 countries agreed to cut emissions of methane by 30% by 2030.
• More than 20 countries and a bunch of car makers agreed to phase out gas and diesel vehicles by 2040 or sooner. (Not the US, China or Germany who have been known to make some cars)

The US is still holding back progress

You might be seeing a pattern here which is like, something good happened but the US isn’t participating. Or all of these countries want to do this thing but the US won’t let them. That’s because the US continues to suck on climate change really really bad. Elizabeth Kolbert did a nice little rundown of America’s horrible track record in climate negotiations. The Guardian similarly points out that Biden is talking a big game but not delivering much at all, and the US is actively working against progress behind closed doors.

I mentioned earlier that there is this impulse to put a happy face on current federal legislation’s ability to reach our own climate commitment under the agreement, but all we’ve passed so far is old BIF, the infrastructure bill. That bill is not nothing, to be fair, and has a lot of good stuff in it like vehicle charging infrastructure, for example. But a lot of climate provisions were taken out of the bipartisan bill with the idea that the accompanying Build Back Better (BBB) plan would do the heavy lifting. Here check this out from Princeton’s Repeat project:

And where, to paraphrase Jack Nicholson as the Joker, is the Build Back Better plan? It is on the way, we are periodically assured. You might call it a commitment, a pledge even.

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Links

You have enough links from me today! I promise I’ll get back to the regular link routine there have been a bunch of good articles but I swear if I look at another article right now I’m going to lose it.

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Listening

I have been a pretty big Replacements fan for a long time and have been listening a bunch lately. I always loved this song Androgynous, but I will say when I listened to it when I young I heard it mostly as a love song. But if you listen to it today man it was maybe 30 years ahead of its time in challenging gender norms. Paul Westerberg wrote this in 1984! Great political music, it plants seeds, you know. It’s a beautiful song. Mirror image, see no damage / See no evil at all / Kewpie dolls and urine stalls / Will be laughed at / The way you’re laughed at now

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That is all for today I hope I helped you to get a grip on the past couple of weeks in climate news and did not make you so depressed. Here is a funny story to go out on. Sometimes I talk in my sleep and say funny things and last week Jamie said I rolled over onto my back and said

“Wow. Woooooow. Everything. Everything at once.”

So it seems like I basically achieved ego death in my sleep but sadly I do not remember it at all. Sounds like it was pretty cool though. I hope when you read this newsletter your reaction is similar. Talk to you next week and we will discuss everything. Everything at once. Wow.

Tate

Philanthropy’s refusal to fight the fossil fuel industry and the GOP is holding back progress on climate change

Adriaen van Utrecht, Still Life with Bouquet and Skull, c.1642

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Hello everyone today we have something special, you might call it a Crisis Palace classic in that it’s all about climate change funding. Specifically it is an opinion piece I wrote this week for the fine publication I work for Inside Philanthropy, where I am mostly doing editing work these days, but came out of retirement due to an energizing burst of frustration at the ongoing failure of mainstream funders and NGOs and also the extremely belated decisions of foundations to divest their endowments from the fossil fuel industry.

The following pulls together many aspects of mainstream funding for climate action that have bothered me over the years, a kind of look back at how we got to this point, which is not a great point. And for folks who don’t follow philanthropy that much and might be like, why are you so upset about these foundations, I’ll point out up front that funders have a lot of influence on which strategies are pursued in response to all sorts of societal problems. For example, the nonprofits that drafted the now-deceased CEPP provision in Build Back Better are groups well-funded by the biggest environmental foundations. And foundations have been closely tied to climate advocacy and climate diplomacy since at least the 1990s.

It’s tempting to look at this as some kind of conspiracy, but I would caution against that, as I don’t think it’s really like that they are not all powerful puppet masters. The main problem is these foundations often have the right goals, but are not equipped or prepared to challenge the systems underlying the problems they seek to solve.

If this sounds a little niche for you, I do think that this article provides a good general critique of the philanthropy and nonprofit world, and of the failure to pass effective climate policy and treaties over the years. We’re just not fighting the right fights. Here you go enjoy!

This post originally published on November 4, republished here courtesy of Inside Philanthropy.

Philanthropy’s Attempts to Remain Above the Fray Are Slowing Progress on Climate Change

In January 2014, a group of youth-led activists publicly turned to foundations and asked them to take a moral stance against the fossil fuel industry. 

Yes, there were good strategic and financial reasons for foundations to divest from oil, gas and coal companies. But the movement in large part presented it as a moral imperative. The activists were, in effect, saying to foundations: Tell us that you will turn your back on this industry that for decades has lied, lobbied and worse to continue burning carbon for profit, knowing full well that it would lead to catastrophe. Tell us that you will instead stand with us as we fight for our future.

And what did the philanthropic establishment do in response? Nothing. 

Sure, many smaller foundations made the pledge, and that roster would become formidable over the years. But the largest funders, several of which claimed the environment as a top priority, either declined or ignored the campaign. 

Ford, Hewlett, Gates, MacArthur, Moore, Rockefeller, Walton, Packard. None of them agreed to walk away from their fossil fuel investments, at least not publicly. 

Now, after seven years, two harrowing U.N. reports, and too many disasters to count, some of those funders are, at long last, publicly ditching fossil fuel investments. Good for them. But what, exactly, was accomplished by hemming and hawing for all those years, other than robbing movement leaders of momentum at such a critical moment? 

If you ask these foundations, many will say it was simply about maximizing investment returns, a dubious explanation. But after reporting on this topic for years, I’ve come to the conclusion that this was indeed mainly a moral decision, or rather, an unwillingness to make a moral decision. 

I bring this up not to wag my finger at divestment laggards (OK, maybe a little) but because this stonewalling of the divestment movement is a perfect example of philanthropy’s stubborn insistence on always remaining above the fray—seeking to solve social problems without engaging in the moral, ideological and political battles that shape those problems. It’s a stance that I would argue has held back progress in any number of left-leaning philanthropic causes, from democracy to abortion rights. 

We see it clearly in the climate fight, where necessary action is watered down, stalled, or just thrown onto the fire thanks to the outsized power of the GOP and the shameless actions of the fossil fuel industry. The still-uncertain fate of the Build Back Better plan’s ever-shrinking climate provisions is the latest example, but we’ve watched the same story unfold in past federal policy fights, pipeline battles, state energy policy, even global diplomacy. 

These failures can’t be laid at the feet of philanthropy alone, and they are often tempered by partial victories that funders helped make happen. But funders have tremendous influence over how these fights unfold, and until they name and confront the true opposition—in the case of climate, the fossil fuel industry and political opponents, primarily in the Republican Party—they’ll never be the allies that we need them to be. 

Unwillingness to confront the fossil fuel industry

Foundations that refuse to divest from the fossil fuel industry often say it’s motivated by simple math: Divesting will mean lower returns and less money to give as grants, grantmaking that they think will have a bigger impact. Large foundations, in particular, say their size makes it impossible to divest without losing money. 

It’s certainly true that foundations are terrified of losing money, and while that is a factor, I think it’s also a bit of a dodge. This is the conclusion I came to after reporting a series of articles on the debate in 2019. There’s a substantial body of evidence that divestment does not endanger returns, and impact investing experts I spoke with, even two years ago, said some form of “where there’s a will, there’s a way.” 

Really, these institutions just didn’t want to do it. The bundle of moral, ideological and strategic arguments for turning their backs on oil and gas investments could not compel them to break away from status quo financial practices. Another way I’ve come to think of this is that most philanthropic institutions are far more comfortable viewing themselves as rational economic actors than as moral actors. 

We can only peer so deeply into the hearts of foundation leaders, but there is evidence to back this theory up. In 2019, Stephen Heintz, president and CEO of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund and a hero in the divestment movement, told me that when he presented the idea to his board, he first made a moral case—that it’s essentially like a funder “trying to beat lung cancer on the one hand, and you’re still invested in tobacco stocks.” For RBF’s board, however, “the moral argument alone was not sufficient to carry the decision,” he said. Heintz won over his board only by adding in the financial argument, although now, the board and staff agree that divesting was “the most impactful and most important decision we made.” 

Also telling is that, as these larger foundations have come around to divestment, they’ve done so slowly, safely and quietly. The Rockefeller Foundation (RBF’s big brother) worked its way toward the decision for decades. “Divesting is the last resort,” Rockefeller’s CIO told IP when it made the announcement. “There’s different ways you can engage the companies on the issue.”

Bill Gates was so galled by the fact that activists wanted him to take a stand on divestment that when his foundation did pull its fossil fuel stocks, it did so out of the public eye, only revealing it in passing two years later. In other cases, it seemed foundations didn’t want to put their necks out until it was safe. Ford and MacArthur, for example, held off on announcing they were divesting until the process was almost complete, even though the Divest Invest pledge allows up to five years to sell existing stocks after signing on.

To both foundations’ credit, they did specify that the decision was explicitly about the foundation’s values, and it’s absolutely better that these large funders are coming around than not—and doing so publicly. But after seven years of pleas from divestment organizers (“we have basically been beating our heads against a wall,” one said), it can hardly be called a courageous move. 

This unwillingness to confront the fossil fuel industry is apparent, not only in philanthropy’s investments, but in its grantmaking. Climate philanthropy has helped support a rapidly growing market for clean energy. But expanding renewables isn’t the same thing as stopping the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and industry is sabotaging such efforts at every turn. U.S. oil and gas production has surged in recent years, and despite its bold climate goals, the Biden administration is now asking other oil-producing countries to pump even more. 

Meanwhile, one study found that between 2011 and 2015, only 12% of climate funding from leading foundations went to limiting fossil fuel development and production, and most of that was Bloomberg’s Beyond Coal campaign. Only 1.2% went toward opposition to natural gas fracking. A recent ClimateWorks report found that between 2015 and 2020, foundation giving to “challenge fossil fuels” was just 9% of total climate funding. Some of the most tangibly and symbolically impactful climate actions over the past decade—Indigenous communities resisting industry over new fossil fuel infrastructure—have received a relative pittance from institutional philanthropy. 

Even as funding grows, it appears few in philanthropy are willing to go toe to toe with the extractive industry that is pumping the atmosphere full of carbon in the first place. Why get their hands dirty?

A long history of non-confrontation

Several journalists and scholars have documented climate philanthropy’s aversion to confronting industry and engaging in politics, dating all the way back to a small band of funders’ early efforts. 

In his 2001 book “American Foundations: An Investigative History,” journalist Mark Dowie compares philanthropy to a “drag anchor,” a nautical device that steadies a ship but slows down progress. Dowie documents how early state-level work backed by the Energy Foundation was too cozy with utilities, eagerly obliging their needs at the expense of consumers and activist groups. 

He quotes economist Eugene Coyle: “The clean energy movement has been damaged by a top-down, anti-democratic, funder-led set of objectives developed by assessing what the enemy will accept, and then selling that accommodating framework.” 

Fast-forward to the next big boost in climate philanthropy in the late 2000s, the creation of pooled grantmaker ClimateWorks Foundation. The first iteration of ClimateWorks has been roundly criticized for its overly technocratic approach of providing elites with engineering and market-based solutions, including a cap-and-trade plan. While there were many factors at play, this era yielded one of the biggest failures in the environmental movement’s history—the collapse of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill. 

In “The Too Polite Revolution,” an autopsy of cap-and-trade’s failure commissioned by the Rockefeller Family Fund, the authors found that a small number of foundations and donors were financing the effort, which had the effect of narrowing its approach. The campaign strategy hinged on preemptive compromise with some of the biggest corporate polluters, with the understanding that this would inspire bipartisan support. Of course, it did not. Meanwhile, conservative donors were fueling the rise of the Tea Party, a deeply ideological movement that would make such a policy politically off-limits for Republican lawmakers. 

A similar dynamic has helped to shape climate diplomacy. In his 2016 book “The Price of Climate Action,” scholar Edouard Morena posits that, in climate negotiations, philanthropy and its grantees’ technocratic approach and unwillingness to engage in the politics of climate change contributed to the failure of the Copenhagen treaty in 2009 and weaknesses in the 2015 Paris negotiations. “In other words, it was about leveraging politics—right and left—for the purposes of a predetermined objective rather than engaging in politics—by overtly taking a position in the debate. Climate change was framed as an apolitical, solvable problem.”

While the Paris Agreement was ultimately ratified in 2015, philanthropy’s neutral, rational stance still had the effect of “homogenizing” the climate community in negotiation spaces, Morena writes. And either through lack of funding or more overt actions, foundations and their grantees edged out more ideological actors concerned about issues of equity and justice, or otherwise criticizing the agreement as too weak. 

Déjà vu all over again

A lot has changed since 2009, but once again, we are watching a disappointing attempt at sweeping federal climate policy paired with disappointing global negotiations. The Glasgow talks have yielded some new pacts and pledges, but the kind of dramatic pivot that would get nations on track with emissions reduction targets seems unlikely. And over the past month in Washington, we have watched expertly drafted, quite popular climate policy backed by well-funded NGOs shot down by the GOP and corporate interests. 

To be fair, we may end up seeing a big chunk of new federal spending on climate change, a proposed $555 billion, mostly in tax credits, which the Biden administration repeatedly points out would be historic. But historic compared to what, exactly? Considering that experts from across the ideological spectrum have called for more like $1 trillion every year for 10 years (4 to 5% of GDP) to decarbonize, this pales in comparison to what’s necessary. Not to mention, the bill, last time I checked, had stalled once again. 

It’s hard to say how much of the compromise-and-accommodate playbook is to blame this time around, but big foundations are heavily backing key NGOs involved. And while it did not name names, Sunrise Movement, a climate organization firmly rooted in both ideology and politics, expressed frustration with the lukewarm approach of its peers. “We’ve been pushing for the most ambitious version of transitioning the power sector,” Sunrise Movement Advocacy Director Lauren Maunus told The New Republic. “Other organizations have taken a ‘let’s see what we can pass by Manchin’ strategy, starting from the lowest common denominator.” That might as well be a direct quote from “The Too Polite Revolution.” 

The current dismal negotiation landscape proves the hard limits of the apolitical, non-ideological approach to climate change that many funders and the NGOs they favor have clung to for years. There is still not a single Republican willing to vote for the legislation, and Democrats’ razor-thin hold on power (for which we have broken democratic institutions to thank) means they’ve had to cram climate policy through a budgeting loophole to avoid the filibuster. Meanwhile, the most powerful person in the country, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia—who once literally shot a piece of climate legislation with a gun—clearly answers to the fossil fuel industry, whose lobbyists are engaged in a full-court press to gut any new climate policy. 

Philanthropy and NGOs did not create this awful scenario, but it is yet another wake-up call that all the brilliant policy fixes, all the attempts to appease corporations, all the appeals to common ground and sensible solutions are worthless in the face of the sheer obstructive power of the fossil fuel industry and political opposition, primarily in the Republican Party. Both must be confronted. 

Be on the movement’s side 

Here is where I make some concessions, as I am admittedly putting a lot at the feet of philanthropy. Foundations are not holding all the power here, not even close. There are many complex factors that got us to this point, including failures of the courts, Congressional Democrats, voters themselves. But as Morena and others have outlined, foundations have a way of demarcating the space within which advocates can operate. They help determine who is at the table and what moves are allowed, through funding and their public stance, or lack thereof. 

I should also note that climate change philanthropy has come a long way in recent years. When ClimateWorks was formed, there were only a handful of foundations working on climate. The number of backers and amount of support has significantly increased after stagnating for years. With that growth has come some diversification of strategy, and some large funders have wisely branched out. But funding remains highly lopsided toward particular approaches. 

Third, foundations do face legal limits on how political they can get—they can’t campaign or fund campaigns. But there is more latitude within the tax code than most foundations’ actions would suggest. There’s nothing stopping foundations from taking sharper ideological or moral stances, and there are plenty of ways for them to support advocacy work. Many donors are even throwing out their adherence to 501(c)(3) funding only, doing a hybrid of 501(c)(4) and political giving with the recognition that it’s the only way to get anything done. 

But you may be rightly asking, is that really what we want? A more political philanthropic sector? 

It’s a great paradox of philanthropy that even at its most effective, it’s deeply problematic. The idea of wealth flooding politics with cash is frightening. At the same time, that ship has already kind of sailed. And if problems of public good require engaging with politics, it seems like a bad idea for institutions devoted to the public good to just pretend that’s not the case.

That said, I always defer to the idea that the guiding force in such questions should be whether funders are giving up power or wielding it. And an apolitical stance is actually a form of wielding power—power in favor of incrementalism. Although people may be tired of hearing it by now, I’ll say it again. One solution is throwing unrestricted support behind groups close to the ground that are clear-eyed when it comes to the ideological and political nature of this problem. The kind of sustained support that allows them to do whatever it is they deem necessary—whether that’s legal and policy work, direct advocacy, campaigning for climate-friendly elected officials, handcuffing themselves to bulldozers, or occupying Senate offices. 

But also, and this is crucial to my point, foundations simply need to be on the movement’s side. Have their backs. Don’t undercut their work. And when they ask something of you, do it. Gestures matter. Words matter. Foundation leaders could learn something from Scottish climate activist Lauren MacDonald, who, on stage recently, told the CEO of Shell to his face, unflinchingly: “You should be absolutely ashamed of yourself.”

Instead, philanthropy is always that one friend or relative who doesn’t like to talk about politics. Who only speaks in hushed tones at the dinner table and always minces words, asking you to be careful not to spill on the couch or break the fine China. If there was ever a time to speak up and smash a few plates, it’s now.

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Watching

Rewatching Party Down after too long are we having fun yet.

Same.

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Reading

My Heart Is a Chainsaw, by Stephen Graham Jones. Always read SGJ.

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Ok folks there you have it, playing catchup today after attending my first concert in approximately 1 million years last night, New Jersey indie/punk icons Titus Andronicus playing their classic album The Monitor in its entirely at the Sinclair in Cambridge. Real live people playing music through amplifiers in the presence of myself and hundreds of other vaccinated and masked people and it was glorious. Here is one of the songs they played you can listen and it will be like we had a shared experience:

See you next week fam tramps like us baby we were born to die.

Tate