Tate Williams

22: That void ahead

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How should you feel about the future?

Bangkok, present day

In the last newsletter of 2019 I started to talk about the dizzying scale of climate change and the algorithms that scatter the information we exchange and how they’ve broken the way we experience time. A good corollary to that is the fact that the way we experience the future also seems to be broken. 

What better person to ease us into this topic than William Gibson, one of my favorite writers since I was a teen reading Burning Chrome and listening to Nine Inch Nails. I went to see him, William Gibson that is, in Cambridge this week as I always try to do when he has a new book out. He was recounting how he was just about finished with a semi-contemporary novel as the 2016 election happened. He found himself plunged into professional crisis as he realized his entire manuscript suddenly existed in an irrelevant reality, a timeline that had basically hit a dead end and collapsed. 

While Gibson is cast as a futurist, he cycles between writing in a slightly off-kilter present, the near future, and the distant future, and insists that in all cases he’s using these timelines merely as tools for understanding the present moment. So Neuromancer was less about cyberspace and more about corporate globalization in the 80s. Post-election, he found the timeline he had been using was broken. Suddenly, his new book was irrelevant, because as he put it, the post-2016 world had become “so stupid he often thought he must be dreaming.” And every week it seemed to get stupider than the week before. How does a science fiction author write something that can keep up with a world in such turmoil?

He did find a clever solution after much agonizing, and spoke recently with New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg about the implications of that creative dilemma, which she calls a “darkness where the future used to be.” Gibson’s books have always been fairly dark, but he used to consider himself an optimist, stating in one essay about the never-arriving apocalypse, that history never stops happening. “Since the end of the Cold War, I’ve prided myself on being the guy who says, eh, don’t worry, it’s not going to happen tomorrow,” he told Goldberg. “And now I’ve lost that.”

Increasingly, it feels like we don’t know how to envision what’s to come. Gibson recalls how in the 20th century, we constantly referenced the 21st century with a kind of glee, and that doesn’t happen anymore. “We don’t seem to have, culturally, a sense of futurism that way anymore. It sort of evaporated.”

In my own mind, I do find I have a hard time picturing beyond 30 years or so. The possibilities of where the world could be at that point seem so radically divergent depending on what happens in the next 10 years that it’s just kind of a cloud. But I have to admit I would generally not describe that cloud as a happy place.

David Wallace-Wells once wrote, about the difficult decision to have children:

Take any chunk of nine months over the last decade and the picture of climate change is sure to have darkened in that time. Take any chunk of nine months in the future and the same is likely to be true. Extend the chunk of time to the length of a childhood, or a full life, and that picture of climate suffering gets dramatically worse.

The optimism or pessimism with which we view the future has been a source of great debate in climate communications. For many years, based on I don’t know some communications professor’s article, people got it in their heads that we like optimism more than pessimism so you have to shroud the warning of climate change in hope. As a result, we’ve been sugar-coating it for years. Wallace-Wells’ Uninhabitable Earth article and then book were a quite effective effort to counter that. 

I tend to be of the opinion that the relentless attempts at positive messaging were indeed a disservice. But there is something to be said for needing to imagine a better future. I just listened to an Ezra Klein interview (I know I’m always talking about that podcast) with Saul Griffith in which he talks about how decarbonization is hard, but it’s totally possible and we’ve done big things like it before but nobody ever talks about it that way. And it can actually make our lives better. What I like about Griffith is that he’s also very realistic about the difficulty, that it will take huge government mobilization, not just market forces, and we have a limited window to do so before certain irreversible tipping points.

One main objection to the case for optimism is that it’s often focused solely on technology. As Michelle Goldberg points out in her column, people are not only no longer optimistic about technology the way we once were, it’s actually become a source of horror. We keep seeing how tech seems to make things better at first, then ruins everything. So any credible envisioning of a better future has got to include new realities of social and economic structures, along with physical infrastructure. (See more on this here: Imaginable Worlds, and Eric Holthaus recently wrote a great example of it here.)

There are authors out there trying to fill in the black void ahead.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife is a book that I found flawed, but I do sometimes recommend because it has this vivid vision of an apocalyptic Phoenix (where I grew up) and some gut-wrenching worst-case scenarios of how we’ll treat each other during climate crisis. But one of the issues I have with it is that I find it leans a little too heavily on the everyday misery of his characters.  

By contrast, in his novel Blackfish City, Sam J. Miller is a master of depicting a violent dystopia that is nevertheless a really cool place to live sometimes, where people are often just kind of doing their thing and eating really good noodles. One of my favorite little moments happens randomly at the end of a very serious conversation:

“Thanks, Grandfather. Oh, look!”

Two sea lions barked and bumped chests. Both men laughed.

Octavia Butler’s excellent Earthseed books are on trend these days, because they are cathartically bleak stories of a near future in ways that seem extremely plausible or even accurate to the present day US. They are very, very dark. But Butler’s books do have touching relationships and communities, and her Earthseed philosophy poses a way to live in peace with chaos and trauma. The series was supposed to end with the characters starting new communities on other planets, but Butler struggled with the final book and didn’t finish before she passed away in 2006. 

In Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad, climate change unfolds quietly in the background of her interconnected characters’ lives over the decades. She almost offhandedly describes the sea wall barricading off part of Manhattan, water shortages and altered seasons, and solar panels that collect energy from the moon at night, all while characters live out the drama of their lives. 

I’m still ambivalent about how optimistic or pessimistic we ought to try to be about our future. The answer is probably neither and both, as Cheryl Strayed says, that “two things can be true at once.” This is well put by Mary Annaïse Heglar in her essay, “Home is Always Worth It,” in which she criticizes both “doomer dudes” and those demanding a hopeful tone.

We don’t have to be pollyannish, or fatalistic. We can just be human. We can be messy, imperfect, contradictory, broken. We can recognize that “hopelessness” does not mean “helplessness.”

…

We don’t know how this movie is going to end, because we’re in the writers room right now. We’re making the decisions right now. Walking out is not an option. We don’t get to give up.

That’s all of our jobs now, activists, writers, people making decisions at their kitchen tables—to fill in that void ahead. We have to imagine what kind of world we want to build, even while it’s on fire. It won’t be ever-warring doom or a utopia of innovation, but it has to be something.

Links:

  • We all know plastic waste is very bad, but petrochemical plants generate enormous GHG emissions. “Plastic is fossil fuel in another form.”
  • Baby boomers are basically living in a form of socialism, but remain deeply opposed to others experiencing it. Meanwhile, the path to adulthood looks bleak for young people.
  • Market Street in SF is car free. “Today represents the way the world is finally changing how it thinks about the role of transportation in cities.”
  • Jon Stewart’s 2010 rally was a low point of denial about common ground with an unhinged right.
  • The Guardian will no longer accept fossil fuel advertising. (Meanwhile, the Post and NY Times are producing ads for oil companies.)
  • If, like me, you do not get the whole Andrew Yang thing, this article does a very good job of explaining it.
  • If, like me, you do not get the whole Tyler the Creator thing, this article does a very good job of explaining it (although you probably still will not like him).
  • Judges keep trying to block DA Rachael Rollins’ agenda. Still, Rollins wiped out a larceny conviction of an immigrant who was facing deportation because of it. “Justice won today.”

Understanding Fossil Fuel Divestment

You can still access a two-part series I wrote about fossil fuel divestment, answering why major foundations are still invested in oil and gas, and why divestment is such a critical issue.

Major Climate Funders Are Still Invested in Fossil Fuels. Why is That?

Ellen Dorsey of Wallace Global says, “There is a whole thing around how entrenched modern portfolio theory is, and how the investment professionals have a vested interest in retaining control. So they’re going to fight. They become part of the opposition to it.”

As Top Foundations Resist Divesting from Fossil Fuels, What Might Change Their Minds?

“It is unconscionable and immoral to support the industry that is burning down the planet,” says Clara Vondrich, director of Divest Invest. “So, yes, it is a litmus test for real climate commitment, particularly given that there’s a false choice between returns and divestment.”

Reading

I’ve been wanting to read this one for a long time I’m currently in the middle of Erica Chenoweth’s Why Civil Resistance Works, a highly influential book for climate activists like Sunrise Movement and Extinction Rebellion, but also animal rights activists groups like Direct Action Everywhere. It’s the result of a study that looked at resistance campaigns from 1900 and 2006 and found that nonviolent campaigns were nearly twice as likely as violent campaigns to be successful.

“Moreover, we find that the transitions that occur in the wake of successful nonviolent resistance movements create much more durable and internally peaceful democracies than transitions provoked by violent insurgencies.”

Watching

Sex Education is a little on the crude side, but more than anything, it’s a show with an enormous heart. I think part of the charm is that it takes place floating free from location and time, in an imaginary rural England / American high school fantasy land where teens play Harry Nilsson at their parties and have deep conversations about body image and consent. Sort of like Spider-Verse did for superheroes, Sex Education attempts to heal the troubled past of the teen comedy genre and it is also very funny.

Buying

I have a real bag addiction I just love things that carry things and I have way too many backpacks, etc. It’s almost certainly rooted in some deep control issues, but anyhoo we don’t have to go down that road. The best bag I own right now is the Lo & Sons Hanover Deluxe 2. It sounds fancy, but it is a unisex, plain matte black backpack, holds its shape, has a removable internal organizer in case you want to use it just for clothes, and the right number of little pockets.

Best of all, and this just never happens—it has zero branding. You will not find a company name or logo anywhere on the bag. not even on the zipper pulls. It is an artifact from a William Gibson novel, come to life. This is it.

That’s what I got this week. I’m starting up an obnoxious new hobby which is a thing I do sometimes. Once I told my friend Swedlund that I needed a hobby and he said you have like five hobbies what are you talking about. So this one is pickling things which I swear is not some kid of apocalyptic survival project. I just like pickled vegetables but I like them only in a really specific way so I’m going to try to make them. I have all these packages showing up, kitchen scales and digital thermometers like I’m Walter White or something and the other day Jamie texted me you got your pickle packages and I responded with this which she thought was pretty funny.

Image result for dill with it gif

I’ll let you know how the pickles go maybe I’ll do a competition where the winner gets a jar of pickles because I have a feeling I’m going to have way too many pickles before long. So stay tuned if for no other reason than the chance to win some pickles. Stop saying pickles.

Tate

21: Memory keepers

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The history is gruesome, but delivered so delicately, and feels like receiving a gift

Naga, the seven-headed snake protector of Buddha, being carried around by like a million dudes. Angkor Wat.

So I recently got back from this trip to Cambodia and Laos, and briefly Bangkok, and it was an amazing trip but it’s the kind of thing that’s difficult to put into words. On one hand it’s this relatively frivolous thing, basically some Americans’ two-week vacation and there’s nothing worse than people going on about the precious wisdom gleaned from their time abroad. But travel is also profound in this really personal way that’s hard to even fully wrap your own head around. It kind of scrambles your brain.

And then on another level it’s just a bunch of random stuff that happened and now it’s over. It was riding rickety old bikes across an island of ginger and banana crops, drinking Negronis on a rooftop bar watching the sun set over Phnom Penh, riding in various boats down the Mekong, sleeping through a high fever waiting for 1500mg of antibiotics to do their job, sitting on the couch laughing and catching up with dear friends, eating noodles, swimming in infinity pools, wandering through night markets. 

But I did want to bring something from the trip back to the old Crisis Palace, some souvenirs and a slide show, and in thinking about what to say I keep coming back to these two squishy themes of perspective and memory. 

Lot of good sunsets. This one’s in Luang Prabang, Laos

Most of the work I do and things I think and write about tend to revolve pretty tightly around the United States and that makes some sense because this is my home after all and you can only really engage with so much it’s a big world. But spending time in a place so far outside of your usual realm, especially one like the US, you’re constantly having to face both how insignificant your one little country is in the grand scheme of things, but also how significant that one little country can be. The challenges facing other regions are so much different and bigger in their own way than the ones the United States faces, but also the way the United States deals with its problems can either create or alleviate profound problems far beyond its own borders.

I was talking to my therapist about this and he compared the US to a small spoiled child in a large family that nevertheless has the power to make everyone else miserable. And, of course, we frequently, directly harm other countries, something you are constantly reminded of in various historical plaques around the world.

This rat named Bibititi and others like it can detect land mines and other explosives. The US dropped at least 26 million explosive sub-munitions on Cambodia during the Vietnam War.

Cambodia is like a lot of countries in the Global South and developing parts of Asia, in that it’s experiencing a lot of unequal economic growth, and with it growth in emissions, but still lacks sufficient investment to mitigate or adapt to climate change. It’s also dealing with a corrupt, albeit currently stable, government and threats to its economic sovereignty from outside superpowers. Meanwhile, whether it’s worsening drought, flooding, storms, or punishing heat, its people are suffering the consequences of the high standards of living that wealthier countries have been enjoying for many decades. 

So it’s humbling to ride through swarms of diesel burning tuk tuks and scooters sometimes carrying families of four across town, or the endless chorus of construction in an urban center surrounded by rice farms, and then think about say public transit policy in Boston. It’s also infuriating and depressing to think about how much power and wealth we have in the States and think of what we could accomplish with it and what we actually accomplish with it. These aren’t super novel ideas or anything but seeing them up close for a couple of weeks is something, and it made me want to do a better job of understanding how issues I care about manifest in other parts of the world.

This one is Bangkok.

During the trip I was talking with a friend about climate change as is my bullshit and he was expressing pessimism that humanity will respond in some kind of noble or just way, you know judging by the scoreboard. But he is also fairly optimistic that we’ll make it through to the other side, because that’s just what people do. He was clear, however, that this is not a desirable outcome he is comforted by, that it basically means an “abandonment of any sense of ethics.” 

That reminded me of this book by Annalee Newitz called Scatter, Adapt, and Remember, about how humanity has a good shot at avoiding extinction because we can do those three things in the title. But I couldn’t remember the third thing which is funny because it is literally to remember. And the remember part is probably the most important one. The scattering and adapting seems like something we are good at but the remember part, that is the tricky one. 

One very important thing we did while in Phnom Penh was visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, which at one point was a school but was used as an interrogation and detention center during the Khmer Rouge regime. When Pol Pot’s forces seized control in 1975, the goal was to turn Cambodia into a classless, socialist agrarian society. That goal provided justification for dehumanizing and ultimately eliminating anyone with ties, perceived or real, to the preceding society. This is exemplified by the fact that when they took control of Phnom Penh, the Khmer Rouge declared it “Year Zero.” They were erasing the past. You could be executed for speaking a different language, even wearing glasses. The resulting genocide killed at least 1.7 million people, around a quarter of the population at the time, in just a few years.

The Tuol Sleng museum is incredibly well done. Walking the grounds, you get the feeling you are witnessing some of the worst cruelty humanity is capable of, but also that you are part of something sacred in the remembering of what happened here. Only 12 people survived the Tuol Sleng prison, and two of them still spend their days at the museum sharing their stories. The history is gruesome and painful to hear, but is delivered so delicately, and feels like receiving a gift. Visitors are asked to become “memory keepers” and “messengers of peace” upon leaving the site. 

Photos of prisoners at the Khmer Rouge S-21 interrogation and detention center

I’ve mentioned before how Kate Marvel describes her biggest fear about climate change, that it’s not any geological outcomes, but “what it will make us do to each other.” Whether democracy can survive climate change, whether rapid change and scarcity of resources will only amplify our cruelty. There’s pushback coming from some climate circles that we should cool the talk about extinction and emergency, that humanity will survive. But what a low bar. Fear of extinction is about more than just loss of our species. It’s about loss of entire ways of life, entire cultures, the loss of our humanity in the name of mere survival.

In facing any big global crisis, not just climate change, I think my friend and Newitz are probably right that humanity will survive. We will certainly scatter and adapt. But I think whether we come out better on the other side requires that we stay rooted in our past and all we are capable of, good and bad, and always remember.

Links

This is you when you get this newsletter.

Listening

Please enjoy this little firecracker from LA quartet Kills Birds, led with fury by Bosnian-Canadian filmmaker Nina Ljeti.

Reading

I have a lot of books to catch up on here but one I finished before leaving that I wanted to be sure to highlight is Shapes of Native Nonfiction, edited by Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton. I’m biased because Theresa is a very good friend and by law my family member but I would highly recommend it even if that were not the case. It’s an amazing collection of essays, and puts a unique focus on creative use of form and how it carries each author’s message. It’s a page-turner too, with an engaging mix of subject matter and plenty of humor.

Our hosts in Phnom Penh have two very smart and funny children and the first day we were there we had some time to kill with the kids. One thing I always try to teach young children whenever I have access to them is this funny little scatological rhyme and when I told the boy Simon I was going to teach him something illicit he got super serious and got a pen and paper so he could record it properly. Here it is.

And with that my job is done.

Tate

20: Shifting underneath us

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To strip something of its power or rights, or to rid yourself of something that you no longer want

Angkor Wat at sunrise photo credit: ME

That’s a picture of Angkor Wat this massive complex of Hindu temples in Cambodia, a truly breathtaking place where people from all over the world gather to strike their best poses kissing or arms up in the air and sometimes to get into arguments about who is blocking whose view. It’s one of many places I was lucky enough to see over the past couple of weeks on vacation in Southeast Asia. I also just got back home so am coming off of like 30 some hours of air travel and brutal jetlag so I barely know what day it is or what my name is right now and I am very cold. Which means this is going to be a quick issue light on the accoutrements.

But I did want to send something out because earlier this week, part two of an in-depth series of articles I wrote about the fossil fuel divestment movement published. The first installment was more about understanding the logistics and financial pros/cons of ditching fossil fuel stocks. This one is more about the strategic, philosophical, and moral debate so be sure to check it out I like how it turned out. Here are a couple chunks of it:

Wallace Global Fund started its journey toward divesting from fossil fuels as far back as 2009, but along with trying to change its own investment practices, Executive Director Ellen Dorsey became interested in divestment as an organizing strategy.

Starting in 2010, Wallace Global began making grants to explore a fossil fuel divestment campaign, and later convened a group of campus-based activists to discuss the topic, which had been bubbling up at Swarthmore and other colleges around that time.

This was unfolding in the shadow of a failed federal cap-and-trade bill in 2009, and amid a reckoning with the fact that meaningful climate action would require a broad-based, powerful grassroots movement. Campus campaigners were ready to try something new (and old), lifting a page from the divestment campaign against South African apartheid in the 1980s.

The fossil fuel divestment campaign caught fire with support from Bill McKibben and 350.org, rapidly growing to more than $12 trillion in funds committed today, across more than 1,100 institutions. For proponents of divestment, that growth and successful campaigns like the Sunrise Movement that have since sprung out of divestment, are solid proof of its power as a movement-building strategy and more.

It also makes it all the more frustrating that leading foundations explicitly concerned with climate change have not joined in by committing to divest their own endowments more than five years since an initial push focusing on the philanthropic sector.

“There’s a lot of talk about philanthropy being responsive, but I believe if there’s a movement, a true global social movement that’s making a demand of investors, philanthropy should heed those demands,” Dorsey says. “Divestment really created the first grassroots climate movement, and to not be responsive to the demands of that movement is just incomprehensible to me.”

…

I will say that in the course of reporting on divestment, I have certainly gained a better understanding of why foundations have said no. As Heintz puts it, “It’s complicated, right? It’s complicated technically, it’s complicated from the point of view of governance, and it is hard work overcoming deeply embedded conventional wisdom.”

But it also seems as though the barriers foundations cite to divestment are often overstated or overestimated as a result of advisors and leaders not wanting to change their ways or yield control. Meanwhile, they are perhaps underestimating some powerful financial, strategic and moral reasons to divest, some of which are only becoming more urgent.

As Dorsey puts it, foundations need to declare a climate emergency. If they did, they’d reconsider many aspects of their business-as-usual conduct, including substantially increasing their rate of grantmaking and capping the growth of their endowments.

“We would use every tool in our toolbox, including our investments,” she says. “And we would divest from fossil fuels immediately, and invest in climate solutions. To do anything less puts us on the wrong side of history.”

That’s one important aspect of this debate that is maybe the most compelling to me—divestment from fossil fuels points in the direction the world is heading.

You can read the whole thing outside the subscription paywall for a limited time here at Inside Philanthropy: As Top Foundations Resist Divesting from Fossil Fuels, What Might Change Their Minds?

And you can read the first installment here: Major Climate Funders Are Still Invested in Fossil Fuels. Why is That?

And this is a thread in response to the article, from one of the key foundations I spoke with:

And with that, I will wrap things up and go doze on the couch with Jamie and the dogs. I missed you all. Thanks for keeping an eye on the Palace, watering the plants, etc. I’ll talk to you soon.

Tate

19: Bright light

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A bunch of things I loved in 2019

Millions of Stars in Omega Centauri: Fred Lehman (South Florida Dark Sky Observers)

This is the time of year when we are all getting a little list fatigued or at least I am. This year, with the end of the decade in particular, I find myself unmoved by gauzy or melodramatic retrospectives because it feels like in the 2010s we slipped from the gears of how we typically experience the passage of time. Or maybe that things have gone so haywire that it feels a little silly to look back and think gee whiz another decade in the history books what a ride this human experience is! I know people have always felt this way to some extent but I don’t know I’ve been on the planet for four decades now and never felt quite this way. I liked this one essay about how time is broken that validated this sensation:

The 2000s were a bad decade, full of terrorism, financial ruin, and war. The 2010s were different, somehow more disorienting, full of molten anxiety, racism, and moral horror shows. Maybe this is a reason for the disorientation: Life had run on a certain rhythm of time and logic, and then at a hundred different entry points, that rhythm and that logic shifted a little, sped up, slowed down, or disappeared, until you could barely remember what time it was.

If climate anxiety went somewhat mainstream this year, that has a similarly time-warping effect, in that we normally gauge time on human scales and pretend geological scales don’t exist because they are so much bigger than us so as to be imperceptible. But engaging with climate change plunges the personal passage of time into the planetary passage of time, which can be a disorienting and not super fun experience.

It’s what Eugene Thacker describes in his Horror of Philosophy books as the conflict in our awareness of the world-for-us, the world-in-itself, and the world-without-us.

Indeed, the core problematic in the climate change discourse is the extent to which human beings are at issue at all. On the one hand we as human beings are the problem; on the other hand at the planetary level of the Earth’s deep time, nothing could be more insignificant than the human.

Meanwhile, “the world-without-us lies somewhere in between, in a nebulous zone that is at once impersonal and horrific.”

So you know rough stuff out there. But I’m getting off on one of my things and this special end of year issue was going to be all recommendations. Because I do love the year end list as a way to see what moved other people and find out about things I may have missed. But because of our shared list fatigue let’s keep things real loose here and it’s not even going to be things released this year, just things that I loved during 2019 that I think you might love too. (And if you are still looking to make a year end donation, here are my recommendations because I know you are probably not hearing from very many people about making year end donations right now.)

Climate Voices I Loved

Books I Loved

  • Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino
  • Private Government, by Elizabeth Anderson
  • We Have Always Lived in the Castle, by Shirley Jackson
  • A Visit From the Goon Squad, by Jennifer Egan – This was a great book about the passage of time AND it’s a low-key climate change book.
  • There There, by Tommy Orange
  • Just Giving, by Rob Reich – If you’re going to read one book about philanthropy and its problematic role in democracy, make it this one.
  • Friday Black, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
  • The Power, by Naomi Alderman

Comics I Loved

  • Usagi Yojimbo, by Stan Sakai – I read the first couple of volumes as part of a dive into B/W 80s indie comics.
  • Bacchus, by Eddie Campbell – the whole run, part of the same dive
  • Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore – Read some of this when I was younger but I’ve been going through the whole run this year was volume 5.
  • Pretty Deadly, by Kelly Sue DeConnick, Emma Rios
  • Good-bye, by Yoshihiro Tatsumi
  • Maids, by Katie Skelly
  • Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Robert Hack

Music I Loved

  • Makaya McCraven, Universal Beings
  • Palehound, Black Friday
  • Thom Yorke, Anima
  • Solange, When I Get Home
  • billy woods, Kenny Segal, Hiding Places
  • Big Thief, U.F.O.F. and Two Hands
  • Mount Eerie, Lost Wisdom
  • Tinariwen, Elwan
  • Tacocat, This Mess is a Place
  • The National, I Am Easy to Find
  • Svalbard, It’s Hard to Have Hope
  • Skeletonwitch, Devouring Radiant Light

Also enjoy this retro banger by DJ Shadow and De La Soul:

Television I Loved

  • Watchmen 
  • Barry
  • The Good Place
  • Fleabag
  • The Terror (ssn 1) – I wrote about this one here.
  • I Think You Should Leave – I watched this sketch comedy show twice it made me laugh so much.
  • Killing Eve
  • Mindhunter (The Murder Boys)
  • Pen15

Podcasts I Loved

  • Mothers of Invention
  • Ezra Klein Show
  • Climate One
  • Longform Podcast
  • Call Your Girlfriend
  • Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy

Articles I Loved

The liberals who hate the left, the awful guys who worship logic, Boston’s traffic crisis, Democrats won’t challenge the almighty car, climate change is about how we treat each other, give every bus in the country its own dedicated lane, a feminist version of the tango, we’re violating the rights of our descendants, the end of climate change requires the end of capitalism, Joe Rogan’s moronic free thinking, the wealthy who contribute nothing and take everything, the feminist history of the newsletter (and its commodification), cars are killing more pedestrians, the history of anti-car protest, the sob story of racist comedians, “they stand there with their drinks and their phones and their glasses and they just pee,” Black Americans have fought to make America a true democracy (the entire 1619 project), the New York Times doesn’t have the tools to make sense of the world, how YouTube radicalized Brazil, it was never about busing, the Green New Deal has already won, Negroni Season (this article is 10 years old but I just read the classic Awl series this year), the World’s Most Annoying Man, men have no friends, Michelle Wu, Boston’s next mayor, Democratic centrism is a lost cause, Jay Inslee was the only candidate serious about short-term climate action.

Other Things I Loved

And those are some things from 2019.

I hope you all had or still are having a nice holiday. In our household we at least nominally celebrate Christmas although that basically means eating cheese, drinking hot wine, and watching Gremlins.

Bright light bright light!

And the day after we’ll go see a Star Wars movie if there is one which there was this year. It wasn’t a very good movie but I also thoroughly enjoyed it, something Disney/Marvel/StarWars has pretty much cornered the market on at this point. The series became weirdly obsessed with genealogy, but it also has some touching messages about friendship and looking out for each other. Jamie pointed out this nice moment when Poe becomes a general but then he tells Finn, his non-canonical life partner, “I can’t do this alone I need you in command with me” and how that is very anti-toxic masculinity and also a reminder that nobody can save the galaxy alone.

So next year as we take on seemingly insurmountable challenges, we can all take a lesson from Poe and Rey and Finn and BB8 and Babu Frik, and that new little robot, and Chewbacca, and Adam Driver, and those people on the horses, and the lady with the shiny helmet and that other lady with the shiny helmet, and Rose Tico who JJ Abrams basically cut from the series which is messed up, and Baby Yoda and the tiny orange lady, and the two unnamed women who kiss, and the Porgs, and Princess Leia and Laura Dern and I think Charlie from Lost, and C3PO and R2D2. We may not know what we’re doing out here, but we have each other.

Tate

PS. This is the last Crisis Palace for a few weeks while I’m on vacation don’t be sad I’ll be back before you know it.

18: Stranded assets

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The moral argument alone was not sufficient to carry the decision

Winter, Zebegeny, Amrita Sher-Gil, 1939

I’ve been working on this lengthy article for the past few months off and on and pretty intensely during the past month and it is finally published, partially at least. It got so long that we decided to split it up into a series of two articles and the first installment is out now. It’s about the fossil fuel divestment movement, and specifically why foundations that are substantially funding climate action are still invested in the oil and gas industry, even as so many other institutional investors are walking away. That, it turns out, is a very good question!

All in all, I think it’s the biggest reported work I’ve written, both in terms of length and amount of reporting. I talked with maybe a dozen people, most multiple times each, read probably as many reports and research articles on the topic, and wrote I think five drafts (my editor is very patient, for which I am grateful). I will talk a little about why it was such a slog but here is a piece of it:

Major Climate Funders Are Still Invested in Fossil Fuels. Why Is That?

When the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a family foundation derived from one of history’s biggest oil fortunes, announced it would ditch its fossil fuel investments, it became a beacon for the growing divestment movement—a symbol of the way the economy is shifting. As dramatic as the decision was, it took a lot of time and convincing to get there.

“The case I first went in with was essentially saying, it’s morally contradictory to be a leader in philanthropic efforts to combat climate change and to be continuing to invest in the fossil fuels that are causing it,” foundation President and CEO Stephen Heintz says. “The simple analogy is, you’re making grants to beat lung cancer on the one hand, and you’re still invested in tobacco stocks.”

Heintz says while that was compelling to the foundation’s board, “the moral argument alone was not sufficient to carry the decision.” It wasn’t until a grantee of RBF’s, Carbon Tracker, made a financial case—the “stranded assets” argument that the vast majority of known fossil fuel reserves cannot be burned—that they reached a consensus to walk away from the industry. Five years later, Heintz says the board and staff agree that in all of their work on climate change, which first started in the 1990s, “this was the most impactful and most important decision we made.”

In those five years, the larger divestment movement has also ballooned across universities, faith-based institutions, governments, and more—now totaling $12 trillion in committed assets. And yet, while nearly 200 foundations worldwide have committed to divest, many thousands have not, and the largest American foundations with explicit missions to combat climate change have opted not to divest. In fact, divestment leaders say that since the push to get foundations to divest began around five years ago, they’ve backed away from philanthropies and focused on other, more promising targets such as insurance companies and pension funds.

“Look, we’ve done a lot of work targeting some of the most iconic foundations, and we have basically been beating our heads against a wall,” says Clara Vondrich, director of Divest Invest.

Which raises the question—why are so many foundations, including prominent leaders in climate and energy issues, so unwilling to publicly walk away from the fossil fuel industry?

To answer that question and gain a better understanding of this charged and complex issue, I spoke at length with foundation leaders, impact investment experts and activists. Ultimately, I’ve found that whether foundations divest boils down to legitimate challenges they face, but is largely about the level to which they are willing to break away from a certain entrenched status quo—and one that is built on increasingly shaky ground. On the flip side, leadership must be sufficiently moved by a bundle of strategic and moral arguments for divestment, such that breaking from that status quo is deemed worthwhile.

Throw all these factors into a boardroom, and what comes out is a divestment announcement. Or, as is more often the case, not.

Read the whole thing here it should be paywall-free for a little while and the second installment which is more about the political and moral importance should be out after the holidays.

Divestment is something that I have had a pretty solid opinion on for some time, since I first covered the Harvard divest campaign back when I wrote for this scrappy Boston indie media outlet that god I just loved writing for but paid very little (it has since morphed into the current iteration of Dig Boston). I’ve been wanting to write something about divestment and foundations because they have been laggards in the movement and it just made no sense to me, so I talked to a few people and wrote up a draft but I just felt like I didn’t fully understand the issue and couldn’t make a very confident assessment of it. So I put the draft on a shelf and did a ton more reporting. The challenging thing about it is that I had to learn a bunch about institutional investing, which I knew almost nothing about, and it’s also a very heated debate so it was hard to get people to talk on record. Oh I am also a slow writer.

Not surprisingly, given my own outlook on the crimes of the fossil fuel industry and my assessment of philanthropy (that it has an important purpose but usually just props up existing power structures), my mind has not changed. But I do understand the holdouts and the complexities of the issue far better than I did before. I hope that as a result people who read both installments can see not only where I’m coming from, but also the underlying values and conflicts and systemic problems that are at the root of the disagreement.

Anyway happy it’s done I think it turned out OK. When you work a long time on something like this it is always kind of sad because it’s like well there it is some bits and bytes that people may or may not look at and if they read both articles they will be done in like a half hour and then they will read approx 100 other articles about baby yoda that day boo hoo my life is so hard.

Links

  • The Senate has become increasingly skewed toward the interests of the GOP and white Americans and there is really no clear way to change it love too do democracy.
  • The Mormon Church has been hoarding its charitable donations to the tune of $100 billion, a whistleblower says, to be used in the event of the second coming of Christ so that is going to buy the new Jesus a lot of nice sandals.
  • Remember that cave in Indonesia where people were drawing the turkey hands 40,000 years ago? Well now archaeologists have found drawings of mythical human-animal hybrids in the same spot, which they think is the earliest imaginative art. Honestly I don’t think they are very good but you have to start somewhere.
  • I like this meditation on how to emotionally surrender to a long, cold, dark winter by Jason Kottke.
  • Another good article on the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz this one has some amazing old photos.
  • I am obsessed with little subcultures including the one around Sonic the Hedgehog so I enjoyed this review of a live performance of music from the Sonic video games, even though it is white on black text so enjoy your temporary blindness!

Listening

I guess Tinariwen this group of musicians from northern Mali have been around for a long time but they are new to me. I cannot get over the way the guitar sounds in this song and all of their songs for that matter. Enjoy this video of them shredding in the middle of the Sahara desert.

Watching

I finished the final season of Silicon Valley which made me happy and then sad, sort of like Jared when he met his biological parents. I think Jared is my favorite character but Richard’s attorney is underrated.

I also watched the finale of Watchmen which if you haven’t you gotta it is a real masterpiece. This is a great interview with Emily Nussbaum and Damon Lindelof in which he talks about how part of his goal was to make amends for the many failings of Lost.

There you go shorter one this week. I feel like I had a lot more to tell you but you know it’s that time of year a lot going on. I think I have one more newsletter in me in the 2010s and then I will be on winter hiatus while I’m out of the country getting into misadventures and looking at various temples etc.

Whatever you celebrate I hope you have a really nice one and spend time with loved ones if you enjoy their company and if you don’t enjoy their company maybe just spend a tiny bit of time with them and then go see Star Wars and find out whose has a secret grandpa or whatever or maybe take drugs and go see Cats I heard one of the cat people spins around so fast he explodes into dust. Which is to say, Happy Holidays from Crisis Palace.

Tate

PS. The only present I want from you this year is for you to smash that little heart button right there and then in the spirit of the season share Crisis Palace with someone who might like it.

17: A huge metal door

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An interview on what in the hell happened at COP25

Tiger in a Tropical Storm, Henri Rousseau, 1891

So last week I was talking about how climate change is this collective problem with collective solutions and how we have to make personal changes while also pushing for systemic changes. But there are a lot of other ways to look at this problem, and one important one is how climate change is an act of violence—human-caused suffering perpetuated disproportionately against the people who have done the least to deserve it.

I was thinking about this reality a lot this week, including while listening to an interview with marine biologist Dr. Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, who described breaking down into tears while reading a recent UN report on climate change and oceans.

When we think about who has caused climate change, it is corporate greed and government malfeasance, and the creation of this insane fossil fuel based economy, when we have other options. This is a knowing decision. We’re getting screwed and the people who are getting screwed the worst are the ones that emitted the least carbon… It’s just totally unfair and it’s just so cruel.

And at the same time, when we think about Hurricane Dorian hitting the Bahamas and decimating that island and then a boat of a few dozen people trying to come to the US to find a safe place to live and we turn them away. Those are the things that I think about when I read the science. Because it’s not just numbers, it’s whether people live or die.

And we turn them away is the real gut punch there. Like when Kate Marvel says, “the scariest thing about climate change is what it will make us do to each other.”

Then there was the news from COP25, in which members of civil society, many indigenous and people from the Global South, were literally shoved outside of the negotiation space after a nonviolent action. Hundreds of representatives, called observers, had their access to negotiations temporarily revoked. This chilling image of the giant industrial door and a row of stoic men in suits barring reentry felt like some kind of harbinger.

Turns out I knew some people who were at this disturbing scene, staff from the nonprofit Corporate Accountability, who stood with protestors outside in solidarity. So I got on the phone with Sriram Madhusoodanan, deputy campaigns director, in Madrid to talk about what’s happening there. Disclosure here, my wife (Borat voice) Jamie worked for Corporate Accountability for a long time so I’ve known Sriram and many of his colleagues for years. I really appreciate him taking the time out of his very busy schedule to talk to me for my dumb newsletter where I make Borat jokes and talk about dogshit and comic books and also climate change.

Before I get to the interview, a little about COP25. The negotiations that happened over the past two weeks were focused on the rulebook for implementing the Paris Agreement, the voluntary framework nations agreed to as a means of reducing global emissions. In case you wondered how that implementation is going, it’s not great! And as I write this it sounds like negotiations are stalling, and the US (in the process of withdrawing but still hanging around to screw it up) and other richer countries are being blamed.

Sriram explained some of the points of contention, which also reflect the demands of climate protestors:

  • Disagreement over “loss and damage,” which is how poorer countries are compensated for harm caused by climate change (see above). The US, the largest historical emitter of GHGs, has been trying to escape its liability because we are garbage.
  • Article 6, on the creation of international carbon markets, where countries can buy and sell emissions reduction credits to meet their climate goals. Many, including NGOs like Corporate Accountability, oppose such schemes on the basis that there’s tons of fraud, it’s questionable whether they reduce overall emissions, they create bad incentives, and threaten indigenous peoples.
  • And, of course, progress is moving way, way too slow.

One other note—corporations are all over these negotiations, and Greenpeace’s Jennifer Morgan told Vox that polluters have been shaping the agenda. “This COP [meeting] is particularly disturbing because I see more and more the emphasis or the influence of the fossil fuel companies here than should be the case,” she said.

Now here’s my chat with Sriram Madhusoodanan (edited for length and clarity).

Maybe you can start off and just tell me what happened in the lead up to the activists being kicked out? There was an action, right?

Yeah, so there was a nonviolent action that activists were organizing outside one of the plenary halls on Wednesday, which was right before the UN secretary general was scheduled to speak. People came together to demand the kind of progress that’s being called for out in the streets, versus the really slow pace of progress and lack of ambition that we’re seeing in these halls. And the fact that often it feels like these governments aren’t really listening to nor being really held accountable to people.

A number of people led predominantly by indigenous folks, women, non-binary folks, folks from the Global South, activists, occupied the space and unfurled a banner calling for rich countries to step up and pay up, acknowledging the fact that it’s the US, European Union, and other historical polluters that have been blocking key elements of these negotiations, especially climate finance and loss and damage.

As soon as they did that, they were met by a pretty strong response and aggressive reaction from the UN security forces, that ultimately led to much of the coverage that you saw. Activists were bullied, pushed, kicked out of the space of the plenary and pushed out into the cold.

In addition to that, there was this really kind of, I don’t know, it was a remarkable moment and maybe tells us more about how these conferences have been going than anything else, where the door was being brought down with the activists outside and an entire line of security guards basically blocking them from reentering.

Yeah. You know, and that image was so powerful. So were you in that group of people then, you and Corporate Accountability were involved in that group of people who did the protest?

Yeah, a few of us were involved and were outside, really in partnership and solidarity with many of our allies from the Global South and indigenous people and youth who had decided, you know, enough is enough. We’ve seen this UNFCCC be around for 25 years, and because of governments who’ve been actively blocking progress in these talks, really failed to achieve the kinds of impact that it needs to.

“Why is the UN seeing us as the threat here? When the real threat to people and the planet is the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters that are still walking these halls.”

And I think it’s also important to note that while activists were censored, were kicked out, and had a very aggressive response from security, fossil fuel corporations and other big polluters are essentially having a red carpet rolled out for them with sponsorships and with their trade associations walking the halls and influencing the talks. While activists fight to even have a small amount of space to bring forward their concerns from the frontlines of the climate crisis, and in some cases are even censored or extremely limited in how they can voice these concerns to the governments that are there negotiating a treaty or rules implementing one that are going to affect them and their lives every day.

Maybe you could tell me what it was like? What was the response of the activists? What were your feelings at the time?

Immediately, activists started chanting “shame on you, shame on you.” I think it was striking that that was the response that the UN decided to take. I think it’s unprecedented in the 25 years that it has moved 320 people out and de-badged them for the day for taking an action like this.

I think it also speaks to a deeper sensitivity that we have to raise, which is why is the UNFCCC so afraid of hearing these direct stories from activists and civil society on the frontlines of this crisis. When, if anyone looks around, they will tell you and certainly millions of people on the streets are saying that what this process has thus far delivered is far short of the ambition that’s necessary. And you know, I would also argue that’s not by mistake. You’ve got very powerful interests in countries that are blocking progress every step of the way, still to this day as negotiations are wrapping up.

Right.

Can I answer that another way too? I mean, I think it was also one of bewilderment too because you know, many activists were there, many of them with their belongings or their coats and things like that still inside. And you know, just thinking wait, why is the UN, why are they seeing us as the threat here, when the real threat to people and the planet is the fossil fuel industry and other big polluters that are still walking these halls.

And then, you say de-badge. Can you describe to me what that means exactly?

Yeah. So the UNFCCC works off of a process of observer accreditation. So you know, one needs to be an accredited observer in order to basically have a badge to attend the talks. And then the UNFCCC has a number of guidelines through which they will be able to say, well, if you’re in violation of these, that then means that we have the power or authority to take your badge away.

I will say that the general experience from civil society is that these rules are applied rather arbitrarily. So over the course of the past COP, you know, there’ve been instances where a newsletter from the Climate Action Network called Eco, which has been a staple of many of these talks and is a joint effort of civil society around the world, was not allowed to be distributed first inside the COP on the claim that it was “a paperless COP,” even though there was lots of paper that was being handed out by businesses and trade associations. And then second, Spanish police stopped them from handing it out outside. So, you know, this is how the UNFCCC often has been using these guidelines, to actually silence expression and concerns from civil society.

So have the protestors been allowed back into the negotiations?

As of Thursday all of the protesters, except for three, were allowed back into the premises. And it seems like these remaining three won’t be allowed back in for the duration of the COP.

Who are those three? Why are they not being let back in?

Good question. You’d have to ask the UNFCCC. At least two of them were folks who were actively organizing and leading the chants and organizing people during the action. And one of them was holding a banner.

Have there been protests like that previously?

There’s absolutely been protests. In fact, in Warsaw, as one example, there was a massive walkout from civil society, not in small part protesting the fact that the COP president was speaking at a trade association summit of the World Coal Association that was happening simultaneously and next door to COP19 in Warsaw.

“You know, you walk through these halls and you just wonder, are the people here seeing the same things that we’re seeing out in the streets and in the real world?”

I think that what was unique about this one is perhaps the political moment we’re in right now. I mean we’re looking back at what’s been a lost decade of climate action. Since 2009, there’s been really little to no meaningful progress on the key indicators that we need to address and the root causes, which is reducing fossil fuel emissions. So I think that there’s a rightful frustration and there’s an anger.

Would you say that these negotiations are worse or more frustrating perhaps than previous negotiations? Or do you think it’s more that people are just sort of fed up with more of the same?

They’re more frustrating because of—how do I say this? You know, you walk through these halls and you just wonder, are the people here seeing the same things that we’re seeing out in the streets and in the real world, because it does feel like the pace of progress is so slow and so glacial and it is not meeting the ambition of what people are demanding.

I think in this COP we saw a number of young people who had been part of the Fridays for Future movement, many of whom, this was their first COP. And rightfully so, they came out of it frustrated at the pace of progress, but also livid at, at least this was my perception of it, livid at the amount of presence of the fossil fuel industry and other corporations inside the space. It’s kind of what you get when you have a climate conference that is bankrolled by Spain’s largest polluter, like Endesa.

I think a lot of people have a kind of ambivalence about the Paris Agreement. Maybe they are hopeful for it, but disappointed by it. What do you think activists and maybe yourself personally are feeling about the fate of the Paris Agreement at this point?

Yeah. You know, and let’s be clear, the Paris Agreement was certainly not perfect to begin with and fell far short on a number of key elements. But in this moment it is really the global mechanism that we have to address the climate crisis in a way that could deliver on climate justice demands, particularly for those in the Global South that are being most impacted by the climate crisis right now.

Again, none of these things are in and of themselves good or bad, but it does come down to the governments in the room and how they choose to move forward. And time and time again, even to this day, we see the United States actually lighting the house on fire on its way out the door. And we see other countries that try and position themselves as climate champions, the EU prime among them, but also Australia and Canada, really enabling or even cowering behind the US every step of the way.

So, I think that the Paris Agreement itself, whether or not it succeeds very much depends on what governments in the room continue to do. Under Trump, you could say, yes the US is always going to be obstructionist and has been for a very long time, but the EU, Australia, and Canada can choose to stop enabling them.

“Time and time again, we see the United States lighting the house on fire on its way out the door.”

And developing countries can also choose to unite behind real solutions and ensure that those are being advanced rather than the kind of distractions that we’re seeing here. And we actually see that when these countries from the Global South present a united front—and truly they do represent the vast majority of the world and certainly the largest section of people impacted right now by climate change—they are unstoppable.

Well that covers everything I wanted to ask you. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.

Yeah, definitely. And hopefully I’ll see you sometime in Boston.

Yeah, for sure. I guess is there anything you’d want to add before I let you go?

Yeah, you know, I think just one of the things, to step back a moment, for big picture stuff. I think big polluters are effectively planning to torch the planet and they’ve infiltrated talks like the UNFCCC to advance exactly this agenda. It’s fundamentally to protect their profits and continue business as usual. And we see plans of theirs, including expanded use of fossil fuels, that would lock us into soaring emissions.

So what, as a global community, we were saying inside those talks and what millions of people out in the streets are demanding outside and will continue to demand, is that we need to kick these polluters out. We need to make them pay and we need to advance real solutions to address the climate crisis.

Links

  • Gov. Charlie Baker is often praised for his business-like approach to the T, cracking the whip and getting its budget under control. As it turns out, cutting spending and accelerating projects has compromised its safety.
  • Chili’s Menu, by Cormac McCarthy
  • I wrote previously about the city’s initiative to add housing to public facilities, that includes adding apartments to four library branches.
  • When liberal writers hate the left.
  • How Taylor Lorenz uses the internet, including TikTok: “What you do is essentially sit and watch an endless stream of entertaining videos until you get tired.” That is accurate.
  • More cities are kicking out cars (and they feel fine).
  • Public utilities, including Arizona’s largest APS, donated millions in charitable giving (on top of political spending) to gain political influence.
  • If you buy this bar in Ingomar, Montana you will also become the town’s 14th resident.

Podcasts

I’ve only listened to the introductory episode, but I’m very excited about Hot Take, a new podcast from Amy Westervelt and Mary Annaïse Heglar about “Media criticism—but intersectional, constructive, and climate” which is extremely Crisis Palace.

I also listened to an older episode of the podcast No Place Like Home, another great climate podcast (I should do a climate podcast issue) with Heglar. She talks about what the climate movement could learn from the civil rights movement, and how emerging activism is much more urgent and intersectional, and shakes off the sterility and isolation of traditional (cough white) environmentalism. I like her ideas on how we need to do a better root cause analysis of climate change, and her method of “asking why five times” which after just a couple of whys climate leads you to slavery and then colonialism.

Spend Money

Trying out this new section lmk. We had an early gift exchange with Jamie’s family over the weekend and got a lot of very thoughtful gifts, you know the kind that really make you feel seen. But I think my favorite is this Octavia Butler shirt—designed by Nick James, sold by Philadelphia Printworks—from my brother in law and sister in law (what a gross term that is).

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”

The company supports “local and national organizations doing work in the areas of food security, police brutality, immigrant rights, tlgbq+ rights, mass incarceration, and more.” So go spend some money there they have lots of awesome designs.

Watching

I was super into Orphan Black for a while there, and then the third season got a little messy but now I have picked it back up and just finished season 4. It’s definitely one of the best sci-fi shows in recent memory, and a different kind of sci-fi than you usually see on TV for sure. It’s also just super weird and bounces all over genre and a huge ensemble of supporting characters a little like Sense8 did at its best. But, if for no other reason to watch, Tatiana Maslany is staggeringly good playing like 10 different characters. I often find myself forgetting it’s her doing some of them.

Reader, this is how I feel about you when I skip a week of this newsletter.

Who knew a show I have never watched and its characters I do not understand would become such an important part of how I communicate on a daily basis.

Jamie sent me the above meme and it has a personal resonance because one time we were at this craft brewery (shocker) and there was a birthday party with some young people of a certain aesthetic let’s just say and the birthday boy arrived and addressed the crowd and from a distance I imagined him saying “My bros. I want you to know that you truly are my bros.”

And you know what. YOU are truly my bros and I mean that in a colloquially gender neutral way. I will always be there for your Sunday afternoon birthday party at a craft brewery, virtually speaking, of course.

Tate

PS. This was a longer one but I’m glad you stuck around. And always feel free to let me know if you liked this feature or that feature if you’d want to see more of something etc bro.

16: Fear of flygskam

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A different sort of guide to end of year giving

Dante running from the three beasts, William Blake, 1824-27

So we have an international trip coming up fast which is going to vastly expand the household’s carbon footprint and I’m doing that thing right now where I tug on my collar and wipe my forehead out of guilt like ayiyi. There’s been a lot of debate lately about whether it’s OK to fly if you’re concerned about climate change, some people call it “flight shaming,” in Swedish it is flygskam, although shame is really an awful framing for that discussion if you ask me.

It highlights a major barrier that I imagine prevents people from engaging with climate change and probably part of why it was ignored for oh one million years. It can feel like a binary moral decision, either you are one of those climate change people and you only get around by sailboat, or you are just like welp that sucks good luck kids. When in reality there is a huge middle ground that we’re all floundering our way through. It sort of reminds me of this episode of The Good Place where *light spoilers* they discover that nobody is getting into heaven anymore because the unintended consequences of everything we do are so awful, the world has become so complex and interconnected that there’s really no good way to live.

Which means we all kind of have to walk around like these guilty moral philosophers, asking ourselves what am I OK with exactly? How much hypocrisy (especially those of us living in the Global North) will I be tolerating today? Should I just keep doing my usual thing or buy an electric car or purchase carbon offsets or go live in a cabin or block a highway or maybe go blow up an oil pipeline? Or, for a real life example from today aka right this very second, I skipped a big climate action and that sucks but you know I had shit to do including writing an article about climate change soooo.

We are constantly faced with this anxiety-inducing question of how to live a moral life during a climate crisis. I guess the good news is, none of us are alone in figuring this out and there isn’t really one answer. We’re all figuring out new ways to live, new ways to interact with each other, new structures to build.

Another common binary that makes this even more difficult is the argument between the need for systemic change versus individual actions. On this one, I do tend to lean toward the Robin Williams in Good Will Hunting camp.

Which is to say, there are exploitative systems, and profit-seeking corporations, and entire political parties to be honest, powerful people that have actively and aggressively fought to perpetuate the crisis that we are in. And that is not your fault Will Hunting. But I also think people take this logic too far sometimes, and use it to sort of absolve themselves of any duty to act on what is a collective problem with collective solutions. We seriously do all have to change our lives, but that change is not going to be perfect, and it’s literally impossible to do without systems change too.

So all of this is a roundabout way of saying that in an effort to offset the carbon bomb of this upcoming flight to Southeast Asia I am thinking about organizations fighting on the systemic side of things that I should donate some money to. And I figured, you know what, maybe you guys want to do something similar for your holiday travel, or you want to make a donation as a gift to someone, or whatever I don’t know your finances.

Oh, and I also saw a Vox guide to climate giving and it was from the standpoint of effective altruism, a philosophy I mostly disagree with and thought hey I could do that but from my own standpoint on giving which focuses on shifting power, supporting new leaders, backing local action and movement-building. So here is my very fast and furious guide to climate giving aka climate giving tokyo drift because I got kind of a late start this week.

Avoid the Big Greens: I don’t think your average person concerned about climate change should be giving their $100 or whatever to NRDC or EDF or The Nature Conservancy. These groups have generally speaking been disproportionately funded by philanthropic giants and wrapped up in corporate partnerships for years now, over-emphasizing market-based and incremental solutions as a result, and most of them have terrible diversity records. They have a certain role to play (legal strategies in particular), but their approach is overrepresented in the movement. If you insist, I’d say Sierra Club or Greenpeace have strengths, or a good alternative national group is 350.org.

Don’t Worry About Overhead: Overhead means things like human beings, computers, benefits, decent health insurance, organizational stability, competitive hiring, chairs. Don’t make the recipients of your generosity bow before you for scraps. When you give you accept risk and put faith in others so trust their leadership and that they know how to best use resources. Also don’t get caught up in an “impact per dollar” rabbit hole or something like that because that’s not really how this works.

Give Locally: I tend to think that individual giving is best not when it punts your social concerns out of sight and out of mind, but when you form a connection with the work being done. That’s one reason giving locally is important, but also bottom up solutions tend to be more durable and equitable than top-down solutions. Giving locally may feel small, but local change builds up to something profound it’s a fractal thing. Keep in mind you may not have a Local Climate Change Group, exactly, but you probably have a local environmental justice group or transit or green space or housing advocate whose work has implications on your community’s carbon emissions.

Now here is a list of groups that I like:

Climate Justice Alliance: This network of organizations is amazing and is working to make the green new deal more equitable, among other things. The best part about it is that you can look at its list of members and find one near you! So in Boston we’ve got ACE and GreenRoots, and back in my place of origin, Arizona has the Black Mesa Water Coalition.

Climate Emergency Fund: Want to raise some hell? This is a pretty cool project that I covered a while back and has gotten some mainstream attention lately. They make small grants for activists demanding urgent action.

Extinction Rebellion: Want to block some highways? XR also follows a nonviolent resistance theory of change which you may know from such hits as Indian independence and the civil rights movement.

Sunrise Movement: These kids helped put the Green New Deal on the map and have rapidly become power players in climate policy, mass protests, political engagement.

Corporate Accountability: I’m biased because Jamie worked here for years and we have a lot of friends there, but they have a badass climate campaign that includes getting industry out of climate negotiations and making polluters pay for solutions.

Indigenous Environmental Network: These folks had a big presence at Standing Rock and continue to be a national force.

Movement Training Organizations: Indigenous Peoples Power Project (IP3), The Ruckus Society, Movement Generation all participate in training the next generation of activists which is hugely important to building power.

And here are some more no shade I’m just running out of time!

Peoples Climate Movement

Native Renewables

Idle No More

NDN Collective

Oh, and one more, support a political candidate who has made climate change a priority in their campaign. Because if you are supporting or not opposing national leaders who are blocking climate progress, I am sorry Will but this time it actually is your fault peace and love.

Podcasts

Kate Marvel is an amazing climate communicator even though she is by trade a scientist who works in climate modeling. She has a nice lengthy conversation with Ezra Klein in which he poses that very problem of what is the nature of climate change and how are we supposed to live with it. No easy answers here but they talk about some difficult ideas like whether democracy is up to this task, how radically we all should be responding, how bad things could get, etc.

It’s not necessarily a question of what we feel as individual people, it’s a question of a system that we as individuals are participating in. … How does one live in a world which is polluted with a bad thing that you are participating in whether you like it or not and it is almost impossible to cut yourself off from it? … It’s ways to think about systems, ways to understand the false dichotomy of individual choice versus social change.

Part of a series Ezra Klein is doing on climate welcome to the party pal.

Links

  • How climate change will impact real estate and insurance markets is terrifying. In California, the state took the unusual step of banning the cancellation of insurance policies in wildfire-prone areas.
  • Bad news of the week is that CO2 emissions hit an all time high so that is not the right direction if you’re keeping track. Natural gas, everyone’s favorite climate-change-causing climate solution, was the biggest driver of emissions. “Natural gas may produce fewer carbon emissions than coal, but that just means you cook the planet a bit more slowly.”
  • Last issue, I linked to a great column on the occupation of Alcatraz, written by activist, journalist, policy maker etc., Julian Brave NoiseCat. Now here’s an also great profile of NoiseCat, written by Eric Holthaus, a name friends of the Palace will also recognize. If you missed the Alcatraz link, it here.
  • There’s a car-free neighborhood planned for my former home of Tempe, Arizona of all places. An underreported feature is that it will include more greenery and twice the shade of a typical neighborhood to make walking manageable in soaring temps. Sounds like a veritable palace amid crisis.
  • Taylor Lorenz recently started writing for the NYT and she is cranking out these amazing articles about the surreal world of young people on the internet. This latest one is about a 15 year old who was making $10K a month with a meme factory.
  • I never really considered that it’s abnormal to grow up eating pizza at a place where live organ music is being played, but I guess it is. The longtime organist at my hometown’s Organ Stop Pizza passed away RIP.
  • With episode 6, HBO’s Watchmen made it much clearer what it’s up to and it is really something. If you’re not afraid of spoilers, read Jamelle Bouie on the game changer.
  • I meant to post it earlier and sorry if I actually did already, but this op-ed is one of the best critiques of philanthropy I’ve read in mainstream news media. “With a few notable exceptions, philanthropy is the white woman grabbing her purse when a black man enters the elevator.”

Listening

Universal Beings by jazz drummer Makaya McCraven, this is the whole album which is one amazing collection of live performances spliced together into one set but you can skip around and sample different parts enjoy.

Another music thing is that I went to my second Phish concert of the year which is pretty weird considering I do not like the band Phish. But my good friend Pat likes them and so I went to a couple of shows with him for fun. Both have had moments where I was like shoot me in the face but also other moments I very much enjoyed. You gotta keep trying new things you know. So anyways I’m going to start following them on tour next year see you all in the parking lot my dudes.

Don’t be afraid out there. Don’t be ashamed. We’re all stuck in this together, just like at a Phish concert.

Tate

15: Shared fates

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It must have been Thanksgiving

Sanjay P. K., Cave painting at Petta-kere, South Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Above is a photo of some of the oldest cave art ever found, maybe over 40,000 years old, from an island in Indonesia. When some research about it was published in 2014, I posted it on social media and my funny friend Evin commented something along the lines of “It must have been Thanksgiving.” Which always makes me laugh when I think about it so it seemed appropriate to share that little joke as T-Give approaches.

Last week I mentioned a book I’m reading by Elizabeth Anderson, a philosopher who writes about politics and ethics and I just saw that she won a MacArthur fellowship this year too. I’m still reading that book, called Private Government, but I also recently finished a paper of hers from 1999 called “What is the Point of Equality?” that I thought was so good. It’s a pretty savage essay at times, thrashing some competing ideas and I love a good philosophy burn. But it has this powerful idea at its core called democratic equality—equality as interdependence and shared respect, and certain basic conditions of living we should all have access to, for the simple reason that we are all people and should stand as equals, no matter what.

Her basic argument is that there is this flawed understanding of the point of equality that says it should be a process of compensating those who have experienced bad luck, with resources from those who have an excess of luck (called luck egalitarianism). The aim of that approach is to help out those who are worse off only so long as it’s not their fault and then leave the rest to sort itself out in the market based on the choices people make.

There are a lot of problems with this idea, Anderson says, including that it’s focused entirely on distribution of goods instead of the social conditions that lead to equality, and that its corrections are based on a combination of pity and envy and paternalism. Like, oh I feel so bad for this person, it’s not their fault their life sucks let’s give them some money, but only as much as they deserve and so they won’t envy how great things have worked out for me. The result is a combo of free markets and conditional social insurance.

I will let Anderson lay it down:

[T]he hybrid of capitalism and socialism envisioned by luck egalitarians reflects the mean-spirited, contemptuous, parochial vision of a society that represents human diversity hierarchically, moralistically contrasting the responsible and irresponsible, the innately superior and the innately inferior, the independent and the dependent. It offers no aid to those it labels irresponsible, and humiliating aid to those it labels innately inferior. It gives us the cramped vision of the Poor Laws, where unfortunates breathe words of supplication and submit to the humiliating moral judgments of the state.

Ooh that part gives me chills. Rather than trying to correct some cosmic bad fortune, Anderson focuses on fighting the social norms and hierarchies that keep certain people from the conditions that allow them to function as equals with dignity. One more A-bomb (Anderson-bomb):

Egalitarian political movements oppose such hierarchies. They assert the equal moral worth of persons. This assertion does not mean that all have equal virtue or talent. Negatively, the claim repudiates distinctions of moral worth based on birth or social identity—on family membership, inherited social status, race, ethnicity, gender, or genes. There are no natural slaves, plebeians, or aristocrats. Positively, the claim asserts that all competent adults are equally moral agents: everyone equally has the power to develop and exercise moral responsibility, to cooperate with others according to principles of justice, to shape and fulfill a conception of their good.

I know the fact that all people are equal can seem like pretty basic stuff, but the uncompromising way Anderson puts it, it’s striking how far our own democracy is from that ideal.

I think the idea that everyone has universal, equal worth is one we don’t live with in our heads enough, and that goes for people across the political spectrum (but let’s be honest more on one side sorry!). I suspect lots of people, honestly myself included at times, live with these subconscious calculations of that person is above me, or I’m above that person—even people working in fields of social justice or charity. This gets back to that past newsletter about how climate justice isn’t about helping out people in unfortunate situations, rather, it’s about standing shoulder to shoulder with people to make the world better.

Anderson’s argument is not saying that everyone has equal capacities or talents, or is entitled to equal goods. But that all people are entitled to certain goods and conditions, no matter what, no judgment or strings attached, for their entire lives. And we receive that base level because at the end of the day, society and all the goods we produce are a result of our interdependence—everyone has a mutually beneficial role.

That sense of interdependence could be a north star as we both curb and suffer the impacts of climate change. As climate refugees flee their homes, and we retreat from entire geographies, our fates will be tied together. I like how starting from a point that emphasizes our universal, equal worth and our shared claim to conditions of living can cast a certain light on the problem and the solutions we come up with.

You can read the full paper here, it’s worth it and answers a lot of the what about this what about that stuff some of you jerks might be thinking peace and love peace and love.

Links

Speaking of our shared fates, the Boston Globe did this really good series on traffic in the city. I still have to read the last installment but the take home: Boston’s roads can not hold the number of cars trying to use them—300,000 more than there were five years ago! Some of the hits include the governor totally abdicating the state’s role in reducing traffic with tools like congestion pricing. Also, the city’s largest employers offering financial incentives for their employees to drive to work. My favorite part was when the reporter told the mayor about the employer subsidies and he had never heard of them! Which I guess says a lot about who’s running the city these days. I wish it covered more on land use but I did appreciate the recurring mention of BRT and dedicated bus lanes which is a thing I have done some work on. Here’s the whole series: Seeing Red.

  • There was actually a lot of great reporting that came out this week on transportation, including this Boston Magazine feature on how to save Boston transportation. And this Times article on how different cities are trying to redefine their relationship with cars.
  • Venice is suffering the worst flooding since 1872.
  • I highly recommend The Strategist’s “What I Can’t Live Without” series, especially the ones by David and Amy Sedaris. This latest one by National Book Foundation Executive Director Lisa Lucas is good too, in which she drops that she once worked at a comic book store and has an Adrian Tomine print on her wall.
  • “As our people, and all people, face crises — catastrophic climate change, mounting inequality, creeping hate — maybe audacious and enduring Indigenous ideas like the Alcatraz occupation are exactly what we need.”
  • This report on the health threats climate change poses to children is heartbreaking. They have faster heart and breathing rates and are outside more playing and being little kids, which makes them more vulnerable to pollution and extreme heat.
  • Jia Tolentino on a band I love Big Thief.

Watching

I’m still kind of like, what exactly are you up to, HBO Watchmen show, but regardless it is totally bizarre and captivating television I can’t pull myself away from it. Especially Jeremy Irons as an elderly and slightly batty Ozymandias.

You know, say what you will about technology pulling us farther apart from each other, but I always feel a sense of connection with my mother and two sisters knowing we are all watching HBO GO with the same password.

Listening

I’m a big fan of Phil Elverum, including Microphones but mostly the Mount Eerie stuff starting around Wind’s Poem. He’s very prolific though, and I had overlooked an early one Lost Wisdom, a record that just got a sequel. I’ve been listening a lot to the first one including this amazing song that borrows the chorus from another amazing song by Bjork. Listen to it and cry if you feel like it.

Reading

Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios’ Pretty Deadly is this weird western/anime/fantasy/horror that is honestly kind of demanding of the reader but in a good way and it is also totally gorgeous.

By the way I add links to Amazon here so you can find this stuff but I get no affiliate money and you should actually buy them at your local shops and not Amazon but you guys are adults you can figure this out.

And now I want to talk about dog shit for a second. Our two dogs are really old and one of them has to go to the bathroom several times a day it is the worst so we were using so many dog poop bags and it was getting very wasteful. We have been trying to work out a better system to contain the waste and I came up with a sealable galvanized metal bucket to keep in the backyard along with a little extendable scooper and rake.

Jamie is out of town so I was boasting about my new system over text and she was sarcastically like oh wow I can’t wait to try it and I realized that I was in fact expressing pride about a shit bucket. But you know what, we all have to celebrate the small victories wherever we can, and sometimes that’s a solid bucket to take care of the shit.

I’m proud of your small victories too, readers. Keep it in the bucket.

Tate

14: Say it out loud

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It’s the men that serve both god and devil that you have to fear

Detail of an illustration from a prose adaptation of Pèlerinage de la vie humaine by Guillaume de Deguileville, late fifteenth or early sixteenth century. Via Rabih Alameddine.

There is a lot of debate in journalism right now about the extent to which a writer or news outlet should strive for balance or impartiality, and how far journalists often go to conceal their perspectives even at the expense of saying what they know to be the truth.

I think a lot about this thing I once heard Jason Isbell say about being a country music singer who doesn’t try to conceal his own political beliefs, in his music or otherwise: 

What your politics are is a subjective term. If you’re in prison, and you’re trying to get out, the rights of inmates are not your politics. That’s your breakfast and your lunch and your dinner, and the time in between. 

Very often the term politics is used to make beliefs more manageable and even more compatible in a lot of ways. It’s hard to say, “You believe the wrong thing sir, what’s in your heart is wrong. You have a bad heart.” But it’s real easy to say, “I disagree with your politics,” and very often when somebody says the latter, they mean the former, they’re just not brave enough to say it out loud.

In many corners of mainstream journalism, and certainly when I was starting out in college and daily papers, the conventional wisdom has been that you have to bring a certain balance to everything you cover and leave your opinions at the door. So for example a lot of journalists don’t participate in any public political action (or get suspended if they do) and some don’t even vote, in pursuit of neutrality. This is what media scholar Jay Rosen refers to as “view from nowhere journalism,” where the person presenting the news adopts a posture of “viewlessness,” positioning themselves as the sage center between two polarized views. This is the kind of thing that drives a lot of people bonkers, myself included, like when newspapers fail to label racist ideas as racist, or give equal weight to two sides of an argument when one side is clearly nonsense.

It also denies the reality that we’re all out here just sizing up what’s in front of us and making a personal assessment as best we can with what we have. In fact, going out of the way to hide a point of view often yields a more imbalanced, intentionally skewed presentation of the facts, as in the case of elevating an incorrect or fringe opinion alongside an accurate or widely accepted one.

From Dias de Consuelo #1, 2015, by Dave Ortega

This model of journalism has been busting at the seams in the past oh I don’t know trump or so years, as presenting balance in this political moment necessarily means amplifying objectively foul and dangerous views. Or maybe calling out the really bad stuff, but then saying things like, well you know the other side is also very bad in their own email server-related ways, etc.

But its failures are perhaps most apparent in climate change coverage where, because those on the political left are largely concerned about the issue, and those on the right largely deny or say they deny its existence, both sides for years were presented with equal weight, despite one being demonstrably incorrect. Coverage has definitely improved in this regard since the early days of climate reporting, but outlets still have a reluctance, for example, to proactively state when impacts on our lives like extreme weather are connected to climate change out of fear of appearing biased. 

I do not think it will come as a big surprise due to my constantly sharing them to hear that I haven’t subscribed to the idea of concealing my opinions in writing for quite some time. I guess that’s in part because for years I worked in progressive nonprofits so you know that ship has kind of sailed. These days I try my best for what Rosen calls “here’s where I’m coming from” journalism, where you stick to the facts and strive to be fair, but still acknowledge that you have a certain point of view.

That’s not as easy as it sounds though, and there’s always a danger that in owning your opinion, you can lean too heavily toward a sense of conviction, allowing it to undermine your interrogation or the discovery of things you hadn’t considered. This danger of course extends well beyond just journalism, in the way we all engage with complex problems like you guessed it climate change.

We all bring our ideologies to the table. And while some things should not be equivocated or compromised, a sense of certainty can also be folly. In the news, we see this mistake in headlines that declare, “Sorry, [this thing] won’t solve climate change” as if any one thing ever will. Don’t click on articles like that.

My own ideology, for example, tends to favor the importance of climate justice, movement building, grassroots action, and public sector solutions, and some aspects of that I consider non-negotiable. But I’m also aware that my perspective doesn’t represent the entirety of the problem or its solutions. Climate change and similar complex global problems and their solutions are rife with blind spots and contradictions.

So how do we deal with this conflict between holding to our convictions and acknowledging complexity and unknowns? Increasingly, the voices out there that I admire are dealing with this tension, not by clinging to the false balance of always presenting both sides, but by acknowledging both their own perspectives and their uncertainties—maybe a more honest kind of balance.

I just started reading a book by Elizabeth Anderson called Private Government and I like the way she begins to frame her argument with an analysis of what exactly an ideology is for: 

An ideology is an abstract model that people use to represent and cope with the social world. Ideologies simplify the world, disregarding many of its features. An ideology is good if it helps us navigate it successfully … Ideologies also help us orient our current evaluations of the world, highlighting what we think is already good or bad in it. Finally, they are vehicles for our hopes and dreams.

But:

…our cognitive limitations give rise to the danger that our models of the world may be ideological in the pejorative sense of this term. This occurs when our ideologies mask problematic features of our world, or cast those features in a misleadingly positive light, or lack the normative concepts needed to identify what is problematic about them, or misrepresent the space of possibilities so as to obscure better options, the means to realizing them, or their merits.

It’s not always easy to walk this line. But I think if you go into each endeavor with a decent starting inventory of what’s in your heart, what you know and you don’t know, I think you can make your assessment of the way forward with good faith and humility. And then just try to be brave enough to say it out loud.

Reading

A lot of this line of thinking was prompted by an excellent book that I just finished, Trick Mirror, by Jia Tolentino. The New Yorker writer and former Jezebel editor sets up the collection as a series of essays, each one taking on one difficult question that she struggles with. She makes a point of the fact that she does not come to very satisfying conclusions, and that she tries to never write with a sense of certainty because that usually doesn’t ends well. Her sense of humor and intellectual precision make the book a joy to read, and the first essay is maybe the best thing I’ve ever read about the internet. 

Here’s one relevant passage from the book: 

I wish I had known…that the story didn’t need to be clean, and it didn’t need to be satisfying; that, in fact, it would never be clean or satisfying, and once I realized that, I would be able to see what was true.

You can listen to a lot of great interviews with Tolentino about her book and her comfort with uncertainty, including a nice short one with David Remnick, and a longer one on Longform that is more media-focused but basically a masterclass in writing for this moment in history. 

Links

  • Construction materials are a much bigger emissions problem than we thought, in some cases making up more of a building’s overall carbon footprint than its operations.
  • In the Marshall Islands, there’s a huge concrete dome that holds 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools worth of nuclear waste, a result of 67 nuclear bombs the US detonated. Sea level rise now threatens the waste dump.
  • Boston’s lower-income and majority non-white neighborhoods are evicting “many orders of magnitude” more people than other neighborhoods, 1 in 10 units in Roxbury.
  • Cities with protected bike lanes are safer for everyone on the road, with 44% fewer deaths than the average city. Painted bike lanes have zero benefit. Shared painted lanes are worse than nothing.
  • A popular used bookstore on Newbury Street shut down in 2003. The owner recently reopened it inside of the barn next to his house in New Hampshire. Update: the barn in New Hampshire just become the hottest new Boston suburb studios are going for $3000 and there is a new craft brewery opening up in the spring.

Watching:

Schitt’s Creek has a very good ensemble cast but come on we are all here for Catherine O’Hara. I have watched her character’s drunken performance of a fruit wine commercial approx 100 times.

What I Wrote:

This week the article on that building I wrote about in this issue of the newsletter published. Here is a little piece of it in case you missed that issue or you just want to read something that has been properly edited for once:

You could view this single building as something of a boutique project fueled by a rare level of philanthropic backing.

But in addition to carving out pathways for advanced green building practices, there’s a kind of value in philanthropy supporting something that requires a lot of imagination, something that is more transformative in nature than the vast majority of builders would do of their own volition—it can then inspire others to take something away from it.

…

“Our goal was not for everyone to come to the building and say, ‘I have to go build a Living Building.’ We would love for that to happen, for sure. But we think that our goal was more for everyone who comes to this building to be inspired to do something on their next building,” Creech says.

“There are literally hundreds of ideas that are on display in this building.”

Read the full thing here.

Listening:

This band Svalbard (which wikipedia informs me is a Norwegian archipelago although this band is from England) is sort of metal sort of hardcore but even if that’s not your thing give it a shot you guys I think you will enjoy it. Serena Cherry writes lyrics, plays guitar, sings, and does the band’s artwork and I love how some of their song titles are just a thing they don’t like, sometimes followed by question marks or question marks and exclamation points as if to say “what about this thing come on are you kidding me.” Their latest album title, It’s Hard to Have Hope is very on brand for Crisis Palace. The drums on this song oohwee.

OK that wraps up this issue of Crisis Palace. Even though I’m now in my 40s and I don’t go to very many hardcore shows I really feel that bouncy kid’s vibe. He’s like you know I’m having fun and everything but I’m also starting to get worried about when the band I came to see is going to start because three more are supposed to play and it’s already 11 and I have to get up early. But you know what? He still made it out to the show and that is worth something. Keep bouncing everyone. Never. Stop. Bouncing.

Tate

P.S. I started to number these as you may have noticed how do we feel about it yeah or nah? Either way, hit that heart button below and to the left and then tell all your friends. Peace and love peace and love.

13: Really long spoons

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Things could go either way

Rainy Day, Boston, 1885, Frederick Childe Hassam

In 2017, a three-year campaign by housing justice advocates to curb Boston’s eviction crisis culminated with a tenant rights bill called the Jim Brooks Act being quietly shuffled into a corner of the legislature to die. It had been whittled down to two basic protections—informing tenants of their rights and tracking the number of evictions, but ultimately that proved too much for real estate lobby. 

Advocates were both “defiant and despondent” in the aftermath, left with a sense that there was little hope for progress when it came to slowing mass displacement in the city. Even though it did pass City Council and ultimately died in state legislature (it needed to pass both because of some Massachusetts law it’s like dungeons and dragons here), I remember sitting in one contentious council hearing and watching my district’s councilor Tim McCarthy contributing nothing and ultimately voting against the act, and thinking, man this mfer has to go. 

So I was excited when a 32-year-old public defender named Ricardo Arroyo, from a well-known family in Boston progressive politics, announced he was going to challenge McCarthy in the next election. I think the incumbent saw the writing on the wall because he dropped out, sparking a crowded race this year that ultimately came down to Arroyo and one of McCarthy’s staffers, who basically ran on the status quo.

From the time Arroyo threw his hat into the ring, I would run into him around town and chat and he was so nice and you could just tell he had that fire for the job. He came out with a strong platform around justice in housing, the environment, education, and more, and before long he was the front-runner. Lo and behold, after many doors knocked and conversations had, Arroyo won the election by a healthy margin on Tuesday night. 

It was a big night for the Boston City Council overall, as for the first time in history, both women and people of color will hold the majority of seats next year, with candidates running on progressive platforms not unlike Arroyo’s. It’s a dramatic shift for a city that has been dominated by white men who haven’t represented the makeup of the city in a long time, and have fallen behind the politics of its residents and even the mayor in many cases. Winning candidates told the Bay State Banner that they’re predicting the new council will take up issues like rent control, housing affordability, transit equity, zoning reform, things that could never get traction in past councils. All of this change swept in on a wave of increased activism in the city during recent years.

But this isn’t a newsletter about Boston politics, exactly, so my point in talking about the election is this—you just never know how things are going to go. 

It can be so easy to become depressed or hopeless about whatever issue it is you’re working on or following in the news. This week, for example, the federal government served official notice of intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement. A report on the agreement also came out the following day, finding that three-quarters of countries in the agreement are falling far short of their commitments. That piece of diplomacy, on which so much of people’s hopes around climate action hung, is feeling increasingly like a failure. 

But these things happening in local politics all over the country and even in the national climate debate are a reminder that change can accelerate at speeds you would never have imagined and far larger opportunities can open up than previous failures would have suggested. Historian John D’Emilio describes progress as moving in ebbs and flows, alternating cycles of “creeping and leaping.” It feels like we’re in a leaping period right now.  

And who knows tomorrow something totally messed will happen these things are chaotic and non-linear after all. But I think back to just two years ago, and how hopeless it felt after the Jim Brooks Act failed, and then fast-forward to Tuesday, how it felt like an entirely new landscape. Watching an exciting political newcomer take the stage (amazingly, to Jay Rock’s WIN) to make Boston history, in front of a crowd as diverse and full of hope as the city is right now.

“Think about the folks who are going to have voices now,” Arroyo said on election night. “Think about the issues that are going to be lifted up. It’s honestly more than I can even take in right now, it’s something that gives me so much pride to be part of.”

Links

  • This climate justice plan in Providence is really impressive, as is the process behind it. One key ingredient? No traditional environmental groups involved.
  • The Tsilhqot’in First Nation just opened British Columbia’s largest solar farm. Entirely indigenous owned and operated, it will generate $175,000 in annual revenue and can power 135 homes.
  • Democrats are getting serious about climate change but are basically ignoring policies that would reduce driving which makes getting serious about climate change kind of impossible.
  • Witch houses of the Hudson Valley. People keep finding symbols and artifacts like dismembered dolls, children’s shoes, and bottles of human hair concealed in old houses, thought to be a form of spell casting to keep evil out. (read everything by Geoff Manaugh)

Music

Here’s a song I like by Paul Chambers, in which he is playing an upright bass with a bow.

Podcasts

I love the band The National, though I’m very cognizant of the fact that their middle-class, middle-aged depression rock is maybe a little too on brand for me. I’m catching up on a podcast from earlier this year called Coffee & Flowers in which they dissect the band’s music song by song including interviews with the band and I’m obsessed with their unpacking of Boxer one of my favorites of all time.

(Here’s a fun fact, there’s a similar podcast about Tori Amos that Jamie (Borat my wife) listens to and she has been a guest on that podcast multiple times and I even got to be a guest once so we are basically famous.)

Anyway in one of the episodes about The National, singer Matt Berninger refers to this old parable that I had never heard of before about long spoons. It basically goes like this, God shows a person heaven and hell, and in hell, people are sitting at a table around a pot of stew but they can’t eat the stew because they only have these really long spoons that make it impossible to feed themselves. They are like, ah this sucks so bad I wish I could eat that stew. Heaven is exactly the same scenario, only the people have figured out how to use the really long spoons to feed each other so everyone’s really happy. I thought a funny end to that story would be that person telling god that he doesn’t really like stew.

But anyway, that parable struck me as a very Crisis Palace kind of parable, in the sense that, you know these things could really go either way.

Watching

I’ve been watching Portlandia lately, a season from 2016, which I find soothing. All the shots of Portland remind me of when I used to live there, and watching something that is just a few years old is fun like a kind of micro-nostalgia. Although there is one episode that, I’m not even joking a tiny bit, is about Louis CK and a vaping store, so some things don’t hold up so well.

There’s this one character named Doug who I like to think of as the worst possible version of myself.

The other day I was at a coffee shop and this guy next to me said, do you want to hear a poem. What do you even say to a question like that but he said, no I’m actually a poet and I wrote this poem can I read it to you. So I said yes and he did and then we started talking about writing etc and turns out he didn’t become a poet until he was 43 years old.

Before that he ran a company that made steel and iron fixtures in buildings. I figured that must have been gratifying in its own way. He said no he hated it, but admitted that writing can be very difficult too. “Some days it’s shit and some days it’s genius and some days it’s maybe good enough to entertain a stranger in a coffee shop” and then he left.

Thank you for being my stranger in a coffee shop today, reader, and remember it’s not too late for you to start writing poetry if you want to.

Tate