Tate Williams

12: Imaginable worlds

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Prepare to jump not knowing if there is any place to land

Bullitt Center Stair, Peter Alfred Hess

This week I was talking to some people for an article about the Living Building Challenge, specifically a new building in Atlanta that is seeking to qualify under this super-rigorous sustainability standard. It’s kind of hard to sum up, but it’s a certification system that requires a building to be self-sufficient within the resources of its site. It has to give more than it takes.

So one big thing is that it has to generate more energy than it uses (buildings are responsible for 40% of GHG emissions in the US). All water must be collected, treated, and used on site, so rainwater is turned into drinking water; stormwater, grey water, and even air conditioning condensation are used for irrigation or worked back into the soil through landscaping. It has to use as much salvaged material as the waste its construction generates. One especially challenging requirement is a prohibited Red List of polluting or harmful materials that drastically restricts what can be used in construction.

The Bullitt Center in Seattle is a Living Building, a heavy timber structure, meaning it’s constructed from large wooden beams and columns. (C) Nic Lehoux for the Bullitt Center

Rather than just mandating best practices like better windows, toilets, etc. (although these are also important), Living Building certification is defined by a series of lofty end goals, even in categories like health, happiness, and equity. You can look at some of the existing Living Buildings here. 

The thing I like most about the program is the level of imagination it demands of participating builders. They’re often doing things that require policy change or have never been done before in their regions. The process asks them to really rethink how a building might be in right relationship with its surroundings and the people who use it. 

These buildings are often, but not always, pretty fancy projects that act as demonstrations or proofs of concept. There aren’t that many of them, although far more meet individual categories of certification. That said, I think this type of challenge to imagine something radically different from what exists now is critical in the context of climate change. That includes technology and the built environment, but also the political and economic systems that determine what gets built.

I was thinking about this idea and the building challenge while reading this week about the wildfires in California and a new report about rising sea levels in populated areas. Listen to this downer, for example:  

I think the perception is that we’re supposed to control them. But in a lot of cases we cannot,” said John Abatzoglou, an associate professor at the University of Idaho. “And that may allow us to think a little bit differently about how we live with fire. We call it wildfire for reason — it’s not domesticated fire.”

That is the truth but boy “think a little bit differently” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that statement. Whether we’re forced into it or by some heroic rising to the occasion, decarbonizing and adapting to climate impacts will require us to radically reimagine our relationship with our surroundings. 

Imagining a better reality is a frequent theme in the activist community or on the left, let’s say, who are often accused of being in denial of the current reality, as a result. Lack of imagination is often wielded as a badge of honor and sometimes as a cudgel by such critics.

Tweet

To believe we live in the best of all possible worlds. Such a brutal concept, the clinging to the way things are and what people currently have as the negation of anything better. 

Stay with me here I’m about to make a big jump which I guess is a thing we do at Crisis Palace. But I think we also need to extend this idea of imagining a better world well beyond just infrastructure and technology, and into our political and economic systems. Otherwise these amazing feats, these new ways of viewing our built environment, may never reach the kind of widespread and equitable distribution climate change demands. Here is another good dunk I liked by Jamelle Bouie

He continues, “‘free market capitalism is the best of all possible and imaginable worlds’ is just a staggeringly bleak thing to believe.” I feel like so much of our political debate is about the way we imagine what is possible. This is an idea that has always stuck with me since reading Angela Davis on prison abolition: 

The prison is one of the most important features of our image environment. This has caused us to take the existence of prisons for granted. The prison has become a key ingredient of our common sense. It is there, all around us. We do not question whether it should exist. It has become so much a part of our lives that it requires a great feat of the imagination to envision life beyond the prison.

And later: 

But it should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation.

It may feel like I’m drifting far in this train of thought that started with green building, to consider how it relates to institutions like incarceration. But as we are figuring out what our world looks like next, in the midst of climate crisis, I think the same sense of imagination needs to be applied to the things we build and to the systems that allow what gets built and for whom.

In both cases, we are talking about structures we create that shape how we want to live and how we want to treat each other and our surroundings, either set free or constrained by our imaginations. 

Related: Raze and rebuild 9/27/19

Swamp Thing, Alan Moore, 1987 (please do not put a hex on me for using this Alan Moore)

Listening

I went to see Sleater-Kinney this week and it was very good and fun. I was kind of down about Janet Weiss leaving and not that into the new record at first but I’ve been listening to it more and I’ve come to really love some of the songs on it including this one. I think it was actually one of the best songs of the show.

Reading

So I’m not reading this right now, but two weekends ago I got to see a live interview with Jaime Hernandez at the annual MICE Expo and it was a lot of fun so I was thinking I would recommend some of his work. Love and Rockets is maybe, I want to say, the best comics series ever? It’s also kind of hard to start since there is just so much of it, but I would recommend either volume of Locas, the collected Maggie and Hopey stories. These are hefty books, but you can probably check them out at your local library.

Links

  • Climate change threatens to “all but erase of the world’s great coastal cities.”
  • Learn to live with fire.
  • Rebecca Traister on powerful men casting themselves as victims. “…fury at any disruption to his presence or preferences in the world, or to a social order which would keep him at the top …”
  • A fun conversation between Billie Joe Armstrong and Billie Eilish, where they do not broach the controversial topic of how to spell Billie.
  • A photoset about the occupation of Alcatraz and modern Native American activism.
  • “Everybody has something to lose.” The Guardian’s environment editor with some words on writing about climate change:

Science remains paramount. Accuracy must always be the goal. But truth is more than datasets. It has to resonate on an emotional level. And it has to apply as much to the periphery as to the centre.

Bringing together the personal and the global is easier said than done, but that is the task ahead. In one way it has always been the job of journalists to make this connection. After all, that is what “media” means. But this work as a go-between feels particularly urgent now that our environment is breaking down and our politics is splintering into nationalist tribes. Addressing that is a responsibility.

This is you when you get this newsletter.

That’s this week’s Crisis Palace I hope you enjoyed it. Last night it was getting kind of late and Jamie told me that this little kid came to our door and said “Trick or treat. I’m so tired.” I really feel that kid. But keep knocking on those doors, because you never know when you might get a full size candy bar (not at our house though fyi).

Tate

PS: I would encourage you to recommend Crisis Palace to someone who might enjoy it or I don’t know maybe if you want to make somebody feel depressed that’s fine too.

11: Haunted Palace

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[Wind howling]

Katsukawa Shunsho 勝川 春章, “The actors Ichikawa Danjuro V as a skeleton, spirit of the renegade monk…” 1783

This is the last Crisis Palace before Halloween so it will be a very special frightening edition a holiday spooktacular you might say. If you are faint of heart consider yourself warned. 

—

In May of 1845, the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus set out for the Arctic on a mission to chart the last unknown section of the Northwest Passage. For centuries, European explorers had been trying to complete a route between the Atlantic and the Pacific by meandering through the treacherous waters north of Canada, and Sir Jon Franklin was going to be the guy to finish the job.

The expedition sailed into the Baffin Bay that July and was never heard from again. All 129 men aboard died presumably grisly deaths by disease or starvation or exposure, some resorting to cannibalism. It was the worst tragedy in the history of Arctic exploration. It was also a huge mystery, as the shipwrecks weren’t even found for another 170 years. 

Arctic and Antarctic expeditions have always been a little obsession of mine, so I was excited to find out that AMC’s The Terror would be a supernatural horror story imagining what could have happened to the Franklin Expedition. Based on the book by Dan Simmons, it’s also the only modern example I can think of depicting this era of exploration, much less with such painstaking detail. 

If this is your kind of aesthetic, you will probably enjoy The Terror.

The story is told over a single season and while not perfect, it is, as the kids say or maybe said like two years ago, extremely my shit. It goes to great lengths to recreate these Royal Navy missions from that time, and the costumes, sets, and CGI environments are incredible. While there are some unfortunate tropes that still make it in, the show also highlights the interactions the Netsilik Inuit had with these expeditions, something often left out of the story.

There are some fun splattery scenes, but I find the show actually works the least well when the supernatural element shows up (no spoilers), and is most effective in the depiction of the crew’s natural demise. Men with sunken eyes and bleeding scalps from scurvy but still wearing epaulets that kind of thing. It can be quite gross too, with archaic medical practices and little creepy moments like a spyglass sticking to an eyelid. It’s horror, not so much in the sense that it’s frightening, but that it is horrifying.

Some of the uplifting imagery you can expect from AMC’s The Terror.

People sometimes wonder why there’s not more art about climate change, but I find that a lot of fiction these days, while not about climate change, is about climate change. The Terror feels like one of those to me.

For one, it’s a story about colonialism, and even pollution (no spoilers). Thematically, it’s a story of arrogance in the face of the environment, hurtling people to an inevitable demise. And how each person responds to that fate, be it denial, depression, violence, or kindness. All villainy here derives from hubris, and all virtue from humility.  

There’s also this sense of slow-moving catastrophe. One of the most effective touches kicks in after the ships become trapped in the ice pack, a deadly fate that not only carries a ship wherever the ice decides to drift, but can also crush a ship’s hull. Throughout much of the show, we hear this steady, dull creaking and groaning of the ice pressing against the hull, a reminder of what horror is to come. 

You get the idea.

There’s a chapter in Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction where she explores what set modern humans apart from our prehistoric relatives like Neanderthals. Evolutionary geneticist Svante Pääbo brings up one distinction which is that we just can’t sit goddamn still.

Kolbert calls it our “Faustian restlessness.” See, unlike neanderthals, it’s only modern humans who started to migrate by venturing out onto open water with no sight of land. 

“How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island? I mean, it’s ridiculous,” Pääbo says. “And why do you do that? Is it for the glory? For immortality? For curiosity? And now we go to Mars. We never stop.”

We never stop.

He hypothesizes that there could be some “madness gene,” an evolutionary quirk that makes humans compulsively explore, and has ultimately led us to alter the ecosystem of the whole planet. 

And yet, Kolbert also explores in that chapter another thing that sets humans apart—our skill at reading social cues, which gives us the unique survival advantage of “collective problem-solving.”

The Terror made me think of that part of the book, these human tendencies and the tension between them, particularly in the context of climate change—of conquering versus collaborating. You might describe it the way Eric Holthaus did in the last newsletter—the divide between colonialism and “relearning our interdependence.” 

…

One final side note, there’s currently an Arctic expedition underway on a vessel called the Polarstern that, like the Erebus and the Terror were, is one of the most technologically advanced ships of its time. This ship will also get itself stuck in the Arctic ice pack, but this time deliberately, drifting along with it as a way for a team of climate scientists to better understand how warming is affecting the region. So you know, better motivations, and I’m sure they will be just fine. Still.

From the New York Times: 

Mr. Lauber said the sound of the ice pressing against the hull — a scraping noise that can reverberate throughout the ship — could bother some less-experienced members of the expedition. But they should be confident that the Polarstern will stand up to the conditions, he said.

What I Wrote

Continuing with the community foundation climate change series I’ve been working on, I really liked this one, about the work of Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico. Here you can just read some of it for free no charge:  

During the month following hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, the Puerto Rico Community Foundation was responding to between 10 and 15 walk-ins every day—individuals and nonprofits acting as de facto first responders to their communities. Their requests included basic short-term recovery needs such as equipment for cleanup, food, water purifiers and gas-powered generators. 

Before long, just as the storms would change the lives of everyone in Puerto Rico, the foundation began to evolve. The team at FCPR (Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico) soon began learning more about energy and water systems, and began funding sustainable, community-controlled infrastructure projects. […]

Made possible in part by a surge of philanthropic support for the U.S. territory after the 2017 storms, the foundation has become a champion for equitable rebuilding and making infrastructure on the island more resilient. That includes helping to establish solar communities with their own renewable energy microgrids, adding solar infrastructure to dozens of health clinics, and improving aqueducts to provide clean water to individual communities. 

Read all of the words here.

Watching

Every October I watch almost only scary movies, have done so for many years. When I was a kid, I could never watch them. I got way too scared what a baby. Then I hit a point in adulthood when I sort of reconciled with horror. Now I just love them. So here are all the scaries I watched this year, ranked in descending order and with star ratings. (I have another week left so will probably fit in 3 or 4 more but I want you guys to have this as a resource if you want to watch some just before Halloween like a normal person).

Hereditary *****

Lake Mungo ****

Revenge ****

Mandy ****

Ravenous (Les Affames) **** 

Happy Death Day ****

The Meg ****

The First Purge ***

Bird Box ***

Unfriended ***

Yellowbrickroad ***

mother! **

Downrange **

Ghost Stories **

Insidious The Last Key *

Killing Ground *

I’m going to say the big dark horse this year was The Meg. People really slept on The Meg that was a good ass movie. Please do not unsubscribe because I like The Meg thank you.

Waterloo Place, photograph by Leonard Misonne, 1899

Reading

Last week we talked about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and this week I’m going to spotlight a modern Shirley Jackson disciple Paul Tremblay. I’m reading his latest book, a collection of short stories called Growing Things. 

In horror fiction, there’s always a balance between the known and unknown, the explicit and the ambiguous. I find whether you like or don’t like a work of scary fiction depends on if it hits the right point for you personally. I find Tremblay’s stories to be just right, and they all have a nice sense of humanity at the core of them too. They will still mess you up though.

Growing Things would be a good place to start if you want to read some of Paul’s stuff, but you also can’t go wrong with A Head Full of Ghosts, his best novel. Ah jesus that book yikes.

Links

  • The big climate news this week was the start of a historic trial alleging ExxonMobil misled investors about the risks of climate change. The company knew since the 1970s, with remarkable accuracy, the consequences of its business model, and after that became clear, embarked on a misinformation campaign that still hobbles climate action. 
  • Dal, shrimp chips, poke bars. The regional variations of Costcos are a nice reminder that culture grows in any container. 
  • The utopian town design that makes Renaissance Fairs such a groovy experience.
  • A new study found that just 12% of Americans, who fly more than six round trips a year, are responsible for 2/3 of our aviation emissions.
  • Road fatalities are soaring for people who are not inside cars. 
  • Dogs and other animals have rich emotional lives—imaginations, memories, preferences, and love, an ecologist says. 
  • 18 voices on how masculinity is changing. Plus, how about we encourage men to apologize more instead of telling women to apologize less. 

Listening

Here’s a playlist with a bunch of spooky songs. Enjoy responsibly:

OK that’s what I got for you this week I hope you all have a great Halloween if you celebrate the holiday. Remember it is totally fine to be afraid sometimes. I for one still avoid being in a dark room that has a mirror in it because of that Bloody Mary story. Jamie borat voice my wife can never watch The Shining again. My dog is afraid of flies. So we all have our things the important part is to be in touch with your fear it is just another part of you.

Tate

P.S. Did you know you can reply to this email? It’s true and I will read it. So I don’t know maybe you have an opinion about those movies or about Arctic explorers you want to share feel free.

10: The right to exist

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Take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working

The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, 16 October 1834, JM William Turner, 1835

There’s a fissure in the climate community around the extent to which racial and economic justice issues should be a driving force behind climate solutions.

I’ve written about this divide often, because for many years mainstream climate philanthropy and nonprofits have been heavily technocratic, focused mostly on top-down engineering and policy fixes. Meanwhile, there’s a growing climate justice movement that frames climate change as interconnected with social issues like racial and economic inequality, housing, and health care.

I’ve been wanting to write something about an argument I hear a lot in opposition to the climate justice framing, often from very smart, well-intentioned people. I got into a similar debate on a panel discussion earlier this year, and more recently over email with another writer who I have a ton of respect for. 

But I’ll tee up this tweet from a person I do not know to sort of sum this argument up:

I don’t think this guy is a bad dude, but he beats this drum a lot, and it is a drum that I suspect resonates with a lot of people even though I find it to be a very, very bad drum. 

To start off, there’s a pretty straightforward just transition argument that climate action is not necessarily the best mechanism for furthering justice. There is abundant evidence that low-income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately from environmental and climate impacts, despite contributing less to the problem. If we don’t actively counter that fact, we could transition to a new energy economy and still end up with deep, perhaps even worse inequality, and that can’t happen.  

But you still get people who agree with this basic concept and will say something like the above: Well, climate action is inherently an act of justice, because it stops vulnerable people from suffering. Put another way, we can’t get bogged down in issues of fairness when pursuing climate action because climate change creates such severe injustice that curbing it must be prioritized above all else. 

What that argument gets seriously wrong, however, is that it casts people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts merely as passive victims of the problem. In other words, climate change is what happens to poor unfortunate people, and climate solutions are things we do for them and sometimes to them. 

Even people arguing in favor of climate justice often fixate on outcomes in this way, that we have to be altruistic and consider people in need, etc. 

I find climate justice as a solution to be a far more powerful argument—that we can’t get to the level of political power and sweeping change necessary without the most impacted communities playing a central and leading role. This is basically an organizing argument—that among other things, you need a powerful, engaged activist base and historically that’s the people who are feeling the pain of a problem right now. 

In that sense, it’s not about “attaching” justice or fairness issues to climate action. Bold climate action requires engagement with justice and fairness issues. It’s about mobilizing human beings around the ways they are currently experiencing the problem.

“That’s frankly where our strongest base of support is,” Roger Kim, head of the Climate and Clean Energy Equity Fund and former head of Asian Pacific Environmental Network, once told me, referring to impacted communities. “And we haven’t invested enough in that pillar of support and power, to be more active and in a leadership role in tackling this issue.”

Kim’s fund is supporting multiracial organizing in places like New Mexico oil and gas country, where indigenous communities, labor groups, and traditional (cough, white) environmental groups are aligning around energy policy and chalking up wins.

Again, there are lots of other arguments for centering justice in climate action, such as the importance of drawing upon communities’ unique knowledge to shape appropriate solutions. But communities being unfairly impacted the most by climate change are not a burden for problem-solvers to bear. They’re leaders that the world can’t solve this problem without. 

I want to close this little section with part of an essay I’ve been thinking a lot about, by Eric Holthaus, one of my favorite writers on climate right now: 

This is what the climate emergency looks like, not stories of solar tech and world leaders signing a lukewarm, lowest-common-denominator agreement – and definitely not a simple statement of long-established physical science.

It is the minute-by-minute revolutions that are happening in nearly every home and neighbourhood around the world where people are simply claiming the right to exist. It is not just the contemporary image of a family standing amid their island ruins; the climate emergency looks also like the 500-year history of colonialism in the Americas. This has been happening for a long time, because climate change is a crisis of our relationship with one another and with nature.

…

We need to know, viscerally, that we can no longer abandon our neighbours in their time of greatest need. We need to relearn our interdependence. There is the alternative. The way to write this story that doesn’t end in apocalypse.

Links

  • Free the buses! Give every bus in the country its own lane.
  • Phineas Baxandall who I used to work with wrote this excellent report on gas taxes. Raising MA’s gas tax would hit low income households the hardest, making the state’s tax even more regressive than it already is. A hike could be paired with other tax credits to make it progressive.
  • Everyone is so polarized because we all live in these internet media bubbles that only reaffirm our beliefs, is a thing people always say that is not actually true. (Maybe we just disagree!)
  • A great profile of Elizabeth Warren in her formative years as a kickass young law professor in Houston.
  • Ohio was going to wrongly purge 40,000 people from its voting rolls (in a strong D county) but voting rights advocates stopped it including this guy who spends his Saturdays scanning voter data for abuses.
  • Cuffing season is upon us.

What I Wrote

I mentioned a few weeks back I’ve been talking to people at community foundations about their climate change work including in Hawaii, and that article ran this week. Here is the introduction: 

In the spring of 2018, Hawaii experienced two major natural disasters. Kauai was hit with 50 inches of rain in 24 hours, creating historic flooding and landslides that washed away homes and cars, and blocked a main highway. Weeks later, on the big island, a months-long volcanic eruption began that would destroy some 700 homes. 

In both cases, the Hawaii Community Foundation responded by setting up relief funds within days of the events. While the immediate aid was greatly needed by the impacted communities, the events also got the staff thinking more about what the future might hold. 

“We also recognized that we could be more proactive in thinking about that work, recognizing that climate change is probably going to bring us more flooding, hurricanes that are stronger,” says Amy Luersen, the foundation’s vice president of community collaboration.

The foundation went on to create permanent funds for each of the four main counties, available for a combination of resilience projects, and when necessary, disaster aid…

Read it here: In Hawaii, Where Climate Change is a Fact of Life, a Community Foundation Gets Proactive

Listening

I guess there’s a whole thing of hip hop songs about Spongebob which I appreciate. You will like this one:

Reading

I just finished Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle. I had read Hill House a few years back and The Lottery in school but never this one and I was saving it for October. It’s told from the perspective of this amazing character, a teenager named Merricat whose family has been ostracized from their town. Here’s a fun little passage:

I wish you were all dead, I thought, and longed to say it out loud. Constance said, “Never let them see that you care,” and “If you pay any attention they’ll only get worse,” and probably it was true, but I wished they were dead. I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain and dying. I would then help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true. “It’s wrong to hate them,” Constance said, “it only weakens you,” but I hated them anyway, and wondered why it had been worth while creating them in the first place.

Watching

Phew let’s lighten things up. There are a lot of reasons Americans love the Great British Baking Show, as I do. There’s the calming pastoral landscapes, the thrill of hearing people say words a little differently, the way the bakers are all so nice to each other. But I think there is an under-appreciated element, which is that you are watching a bunch of ordinary people cope with intense anxieties and feelings of inadequacy very openly and in real time, in a safe and reassuring environment. So much crying for a show about baking but in a good way.

I feel you Rahul.

You know I hesitate to share this next part for reasons that will become clear, but I am always trying to look out for you guys and I feel like I gained some important wisdom from a recent unpleasant experience. 

If you have any little bottles in your home that are about the same size and shape as a bottle of eyedrops, but they are not actually eyedrops, go ahead and stop what you’re doing, get up, and throw those little fuckers right in the trash just to be safe. I don’t really feel like elaborating on what I did to myself this week but let’s just say the consequences well they were not good. Don’t worry I am fine now. 

So my next piece of advice is, if you are going about your day and find yourself in reasonably good health with all of your different parts working, take a moment to appreciate that feeling of all the things working. Because you never know where some unexpected danger will come from and make something suddenly not work. Sometimes the danger even comes from your own stupid hand, harming your own precious eye. 

Tate

PS: New subscribers, did you know that you can read past issues online? There are 11 now, and they are all up on Substack. Thank you for all the great feedback on the newsletter and remember if you like it, please share or forward to someone who might also enjoy it so I can expose others to my propaganda. 

9: A menacing act

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You turn the key, harm is being done.

Red Cavalry, Kazimir Malevich, 1932

Earlier this year, two miles west of my house, a woman named Marilyn Wentworth was crossing the street to get a coffee at her favorite shop, a little family-owned place I go to all the time. As she used the crosswalk to navigate the four lanes of traffic that rip through the neighborhood’s business district, a car struck and killed her. Her husband of 42 years reported seeing her body “fly in the air.” 

That’s a particularly dangerous stretch of road, even for Boston, and the city is now pursuing a plan that would remove one car lane and add protected bike lanes. The Wentworth family and many others are advocating for it. But as you can imagine, there’s a lot of resistance. At a recent public meeting on the plan, one city council candidate charged the mic and said, “This is not a good idea.” 

That there’s any resistance at all is a testament to the dedication with which someone will defend their right to strap themselves into a two-ton cocoon of plastic and steel to get anywhere they want to go, as fast as they want to go, with as few impediments as possible.

That tragedy, others like it, having to drive around metro Boston, and the purchase of a new bike have all contributed to my own increasingly severe reassessment of the act of driving.

Growing up in the West, driving unambiguously meant freedom. Going 55 mph on sprawling suburban roads just to get a pizza or whatever. Vast stretches of open highway ultimately leading to the Pacific Ocean. Careening through the Mid-Atlantic to see fireflies for the first time. Criss-crossing the country in my 20s as many ways as I could, over and over.

These days, I’m more likely to think of driving as a menacing, harmful act, something I want to avoid as much as humanly possible. If you’re like whoa whoa pal sounds like you’re saying people who drive are bad people, keep in mind that I do drive a car. Jamie (Borat voice my wife) and I are fortunate enough to not have to drive very much where we live, but we still make a few car trips most weeks, plus occasional weekend trips out of the city. 

But when I get behind the wheel, I know that I’m a much worse person than I am when I’m not driving. I’m angry. I’m impatient. I’m unforgiving toward those around me. In no other setting do I think or say worse things about other humans except possibly on twitter. Statistics tell me I’m more likely to die from a road injury than any cause other than disease, and it’s the only activity I do where there’s at least an outlying chance that I will kill someone. (Of course, there would probably be no punishment, as killing a pedestrian while driving has been described as “the perfect crime.”)

The mean streets of Roslindale.

If you’re thinking, boy sounds like you need to become a safer driver, the numbers betray the case for individual blame. Pedestrian deaths in the United States are at a 30-year high (6,227 in 2018). A Guardian article this week on the topic explored why that number has been climbing, and the reasons are complex. But experts have no shortage of explanations for why roads are so much more dangerous here than in any other wealthy country—we drive more, we drive farther across urban sprawl, we drive faster and faster, though we know speed increases likelihood of death. More Americans than ever drive SUVs and trucks, which are between two and three times more likely to kill the people they hit. Experts largely doubt that automation technology in cars will solve this problem. In short, cars rule our roads.

There does seem to be a growing intolerance of this fact of American life. Recently, Allison Arieff, a writer on design and cities, wrote a column for the New York Times in which she made the case that “Cars are Death Machines,” recounting several personal stories of death and injury by car from among the hundreds she collected on Twitter.

We all have these stories. You do. I certainly do, though I feel like I can’t do my own justice in newsletter form. Despite our losses and pain, we allow cars to remain dominant.

We usually talk about emissions and climate change as separate issues from car safety, but I don’t really see them as all that different. In both cases, it’s a matter of personal freedom and convenience, disproportionately distributed, at the cost of collective health and safety. Transportation is now the largest source of American greenhouse gas emissions. A recent report showed that for all its progress California is not on track to hit its own emissions reduction goals, in large part because of its passenger vehicles. Traffic deaths and climate change are both consequences of a particular way we choose to live. One way or another, you turn the key, harm is being done.

I imagine we’ll always have cars, and yes, more electric vehicles if powered by renewables will reduce emissions. And again, I’m not trying to castigate anyone who drives a car, we’re all doing the best we can out here my dudes. But the strides we need to make on fossil fuel use and our deadly roads both point to the reality that we’ve just got to stop driving so much. And stop designing the world around us to cater overwhelmingly to cars. 

That’s an entirely possible future. Prior to the 1970s, the Netherlands was far more car friendly and dangerous, but public outcry forced the pedestrian and cyclist paradise into reality. Even here in the States, in the 1950s and 1960s, we once had a mass movement of mothers demanding safer streets, blocking car traffic with baby carriages in radical demonstrations. And in the Boston neighborhood where Marilyn Wentworth was killed, residents formed a new group to advocate for pedestrian rights. There’s one in my neighborhood too.

And in the meantime, I’m going to keep driving as little as I can. And when I do drive, I will drive very, very slowly. Sorry and you’re welcome. 

Links

  • The next Standing Rock is everywhere.
  • David Roberts predictably did a much better job writing about the Climate Emergency Fund than that Times article I was mad about last week. I will still respectfully note that I wrote about the fund three months ago ahem.
  • Unfortunate trends, and the most detailed map of auto emissions in America.
  • Salt water is creeping toward inland trees, creating dead, bleached, and blackened “ghost forests.”
  • The Klamath River now has the rights of a person under tribal law.
  • “For the first time on record, the 400 wealthiest Americans last year paid a lower total tax rate than any other income group.”
  • Argentine feminists are reclaiming the tango to make it less patriarchal.
  • The rare Fiona Apple interview is always a real gem. She’s also working on a new album, AND Pitchfork named Idler Wheel… the #5 album of the 2010s. It’s all coming up Fiona.

Listening

Since it’s Fiona’s world I thought I would keep it going and highlight a song of hers that I’ve been listening to lately. This is actually both a cover and a collaboration between King Princess and Fiona Apple, recording the final song on 1999’s When the Pawn. It is a good song and a good version.

Here’s a fun thing, after When the Pawn came out, Fiona Apple toured behind it in 2000 and then after an onstage breakdown took a five-year hiatus from performing and had this whole fiasco with her record label trying to stop Extraordinary Machine from coming out.

Well, when that album was finally released, she played her very first show in five years at the Roseland Theater in Portland, Oregon in 2005, and you know what, I was there. She put on a beautiful show and crowd was so warm and encouraging so that’s a nice memory. Fiona forever.

Watching

During October I watch scary movies pretty much exclusively and I always find it interesting how sometimes bad scary movies are the scariest and good scary movies aren’t really that scary. Goes to show you never really know what you’re going to be afraid of. It’s a real treat when a movie is both good and scary and so far this year, Lake Mungo scores high.

We are having what they call a mast year for acorns in New England which is a totally natural part of the boom and bust cycle of oak tree fruit, no climate change to see here move along. But it means there are acorns everywhere, lining the sidewalks, squirrels chucking them down on your head or the roof of your car like you’re some kind of Mister Magoo.

My sister just came to visit from Arizona and we saw some acorns and she said oh acorns my students love the ones I brought back last year we still have them. She works with tiny kids and for tiny kids in the desert, an acorn must be some kind of fairy tale object like a spindle or magic beans. Then later on I walked on a patch of like a hundred acorns and lost my balance for a second like a cartoon burglar walking on marbles.

So the lesson here is, if you see just a few acorns, pick one up and give it to a tiny child because they will be super into it. If you see many acorns in one place, be careful because you could fall and break your ass.

Tate

8: Washed away

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It was 3,000 people arguing with 2 million people

Entrance to a crypt, 40 feet underwater in the Swift River Valley. Photo by Ed Klekowski.

This week I’m going to reach way back into the archives to share an article I wrote about the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir in central Massachusetts. A huge engineering feat—and a surprisingly common tactic as the nation migrated to cities—four entire towns were evacuated and wiped off the map to flood the valley that became a reservoir serving Greater Boston. 

I thought of it because one of the people I interviewed for it reached out recently about another history project he’s working on, and it reminded me that this was one of my favorite stories I ever reported.

The story of the Quabbin and reservoirs like it are also relevant to climate change. For one, it underscores how precious water supply is. There’s also the brutal social consequences of top-down engineering solutions. I also find it to be a reminder of just how much the world can change, and how during our current societal shift, we can appreciate what our ancestors were able to accomplish, but strive to do better. Anyway, here you go hope you like it.

—

A lightly edited excerpt from Washed Away, originally published in The Magazine. Read the full story here. 

If you look at a map of Massachusetts, you can’t miss the Quabbin Reservoir. It’s made up of two long, narrow gashes separated by a peninsula, the centerpiece of a park in the middle of a protected watershed measuring about 81,000 acres. The 140 million gallons of water it supplies daily requires minor treatment and no filtration, because the watershed scrubs it crystal clear. Its aqueduct delivers water to 51 communities, 40 percent of the state’s population.

As far back as 1895, planners saw a unique opportunity in the Swift River Valley; they suspected that with some geographic jujitsu, they could use the natural landscape and gravity to trap and deliver more than enough water for the rapidly growing metropolitan area to the east.

Between 1870 and 1920, Boston’s population nearly tripled, according to census figures. At the turn of the century, the city bought some time with another huge and traumatic project, building the nearby Wachusett Reservoir, at the time the largest drinking water reservoir in the world. But it wasn’t enough.

Aside from growth, there was also a serious public health problem to solve, says Marcis Kempe, who held senior positions in Boston’s water system for 36 years before retiring to run the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum. He describes individual communities drinking from a hodgepodge of unhealthy water systems, some taking crudely filtered water from the Charles River and other sources heavily polluted by industry or sewage.

Around the time the Wachusett Reservoir was built, the Massachusetts Board of Health led a survey of long-term potential solutions and came back with a recommendation — the Swift River Valley farther west was surging with clean rivers and streams, and the geography was such that they could dam two gaps at the bottom of the valley to create an enormous reservoir. It was perfect.

But thousands of people lived in the Swift River Valley, with settlements that went back generations. One town had incorporated in 1754. Of course, these colonists displaced the Nipmuck tribe that was there long before, but that’s a different, longer, and far worse story.

Rumors started circulating among residents as early as the turn of the century that their towns were targeted, and there was resistance. But the deck was heavily stacked against them. Public meetings were held in Boston, too far for most to travel. The towns didn’t have anywhere near the money, political power, or organization to mount any viable defense.

As former resident Warren Doubleday says in Thomas Conuel’s Quabbin: The Accidental Wilderness, “It was three-thousand people arguing with 2 million people. We didn’t stand much of a chance.”

This was a time when the country forced massive flows of water to bend to its will: the Hoover Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Hetch Hetchy in California, and hundreds of others. In fact, while Quabbin is a poignant example, displacing towns or clusters of housing for water projects was a common practice. The Scituate Reservoir in Rhode Island flooded five small villages. Then there were Elbowoods, North Dakota; Olive, Neversink, and several other towns in New York; Hailstone, Utah; and Falcon, Texas, as late as the 1950s. All flooded.

In 1926 and 1927, two acts were passed by the Massachusetts legislature that set in motion the creation of the Quabbin. What happened next took more than a decade. Aside from the elaborate construction of the two dams, the tunnel to connect the Quabbin to the Wachusett Reservoir, which feeds Greater Boston, is a 24.6-mile underground aqueduct with a maximum depth of 650 feet, still among the longest in the world. Twenty-six men died during the construction of the reservoir, half while building the tunnel.

Much of that work erased the four towns, plus sections of other towns and smaller villages. In all, 2,500 people would need to be relocated and the towns disincorporated. And to ensure a clean reservoir, they couldn’t just be flooded. All trees and vegetation below the waterline were cleared. Many houses were relocated whole and can be spotted throughout the region, but most were torn down and either sold for wood or burned.

Don McMillan, a resident of nearby Hardwick, was quoted in Michael Tougias’s Quabbin: A History and Explorer’s Guide: “We would sit on the porch of our house, and the western sky was aglow at night from the flames of the burning brush in the valley. It was eerie.”

More than 7,600 graves and headstones from the valley’s 34 cemeteries were moved, many bodies disintegrated except for skulls and larger bones. Most were moved in wood boxes by hearse to Quabbin Park Cemetery, in Ware, where they remain.

Houses and land were purchased cheap by the state under eminent domain. Most families, many of them already struggling at the height of the Depression, fled to nearby towns to start a new living.

Local historian J.R. Greene details the final days of the towns in the valley. At Greenwich’s last town meeting in March 1938, reporters set up a photo op in which selectmen held a pencil eraser over the town on a globe, but at least one was disgusted by the display.

Greene describes April 27, 1938, when the town of Enfield held a Farewell Ball at the town hall. An estimated 1,000 people crammed into the event, and 2,000 more gathered on the outside. At midnight, the band played Auld Lang Syne, and a hush fell over the crowd, followed by “muffled sounds of sobbing,” according to one reporter.

That September, the slow-motion destruction was punctuated by a hurricane, the most powerful in the region’s recent history. Sally Norcross remembers being the last family left in Dana, watching the storm from their house while her older brothers hoped the church steeple would fall down so they could take it as a souvenir. When the hurricane passed, her father and brothers had to carve their way through the fallen trees to make their way out of town.

Less than a year later, flooding began. It took seven years for the reservoir to fill.

…

Read more about the flooding of the Swift River Valley, including what its former residents are up to now, in the full article here. 

Autumn Mood, Ladislav Mednyánszky, 1890 via Slovak National Gallery.

Links

If you want to see a few tweets in a row, a thread if you will, about a New York Times article that I thought was stupid, you can right here:

Listening

This week’s music recommendation comes from my dad, who in a very fatherly move, said I should be watching the new Ken Burns documentary on country music. I have not watched the documentary but have been enjoying its formidable soundtrack. I particularly like the second disc a period of country music I enjoy that is roughly the 1950s, Hank Williams kind of stuff. Here is a song from it:

Boy lot of stuff going on in the news today right? Well there is one thing I hope you remember amidst all the chaos. Get a flu shot. It takes like two seconds and is free in a lot of places. Drink plenty of water. Remember that you are a strong person.

Tate

7: Raze and rebuild

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Wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side

Neighbors, by Christopher Frost, in Forest Hills Cemetery where I walk my dogs sometimes.

“Political awareness without activism means looking at the devastation, your face turned toward the center of things. Activism itself can generate hope because it already constitutes an alternative and turns away from the corruption at center to face the wild possibilities and the heroes at the edges or at your side.” – Rebecca Solnit

Where I live in Roslindale, a diverse and still somewhat accessible neighborhood toward the southern end of Boston proper, there’s a 130-year-old house a couple doors down with a really nice big tree out front. We got a note in the mail that the owner intends to raze and rebuild the house, not a huge deal in the grand scheme, as the entire city of Boston feels more or less like one giant raze and rebuild project these days. But for the years we’ve lived here, we’ve watched as the owner let this house sit in various states of disrepair and inattention. Now the longtime tenants are being kicked out for a swift 100% displacement. The owner Jerry, who bought the house in 1990 for $161,000, will cash in on Boston’s surreal housing market, turning the property into three units that will probably sell for half a million each. This is a very common occurrence around here.

Last week I went to a meeting in a community center basement to hear about the project. There were a couple dozen people there and as always some had serious qualms about zoning variances, landscaping, quality of siding. A handful of us kept trying to steer the conversation toward affordability, but the perfectly nice people from the city reminded us that unless a building is 10 units or more, they can’t require affordable units, our hands are simply tied you understand. Just for fun, I asked Jerry if he would voluntarily consider making one of the three units affordable and he politely said no, I’m afraid that is not a thing that will be happening. 

I abut this house. I am an abutter.

A few blocks away from that house, there is a city-owned parking lot just outside of the neighborhood’s business district. Boston has this program that is trying to add housing stock to existing public properties (libraries, firehouses, etc.), and given this sizable lot, it seemed like a good opportunity to retain the public parking while building affordable housing maybe on top of it, for example. 

So this week, I went to another meeting in the same community center basement about this project, and there were many, many more people in attendance. You might not be surprised to find out that lots of them were very angry! A lot of people talk about how the internet is ruining public discourse, but those people should attend more community meetings because they are kind of like live-action Twitter, lots of yelling and heckling. For most of the people opposed, the concern was parking and that losing any of those parking spots would kill the local businesses. The rough concept had no net loss of parking, so seems like maybe also some people just really didn’t want new affordable housing being built. There were, however, quite a few other people who were in favor, freaked out about the affordable housing crisis in the city, and even some who brought up climate change. 

There was a lot of big national news about climate change this week—the summit in New York, ongoing protests, a grim oceans report—but I wanted to talk about these meetings because they have been on my mind and also they are one way the climate crisis, and climate justice specifically, unfolds in very local form. Housing and land use are multifaceted issues, but they are inextricably linked to both carbon emissions and climate impacts. Cities are going to continue changing dramatically, both as a result of mitigation and adaptation and sometimes chunks being swallowed up by the ocean unfortunately.  

As more extreme changes are required, communities will have to make serious decisions about what we want our neighborhoods to look like. The range of people being asked to sacrifice, being pushed aside, or being forced to relocate will grow, but always starts with lower-income families and communities of color. Housing discussions are often grouped into either NIMBYism or YIMBYism, two not particularly helpful terms describing either knee-jerk opposition or support for any new building. In reality, these decisions are complicated and emotional, and don’t fall along easy divides. There are good reasons to support new developments and good reasons to be skeptical that they will deliver what they promise. The challenge at hand is to deliberately build, rebuild, and rehab in ways that are low-carbon, equitable, and allow communities to thrive.

Lately I’ve been interested in the work of community nonprofits like PUSH Buffalo in New York, which is developing green affordable housing, local renewable energy projects, and offering green jobs training, all while lobbying at the state level for better housing and climate policy. It’s the kind of thing that presents a vision for future neighborhoods, while trickling up to bigger national change.

I would very much like to finish here by saying when you get together with your neighbors to discuss these issues, it is very refreshing compared to bitter national debates. But honestly, it is also kind of a pain in the ass. Still, there is common ground to be found, battles to be won, and bonds to be forged right in our backyards. And at least there you get to see people you know and wave, oh hi how have you been, and every now and then great things emerge. Not sure they will emerge on that parking lot though, we’ll see. People seem pretty attached to it.

Reading

I read this book a few years back, but it’s so good and very relevant to this topic so I’m going to recommend the Pulitzer-winning Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City by Matthew Desmond. It’s basically a sprawling work of journalism, a masterpiece of nonfiction storytelling and observation, but Desmond is a sociologist who spent years living alongside the families he profiles. The rigor is unbelievable and it’s both heart-wrenching and inspiring as it closes with policy solutions to the problems he documents. 

Links

  • Every system made of water on the planet will be thrown into turmoil, to varying degree, depending on how much we can reduce carbon pollution in the next few decades.
  • Scooters, e-scooters, bikes, ebikes are great. But I hate electric scooter startups for a bunch of reasons. Two new reasons—most of the time they don’t replace car trips and there are hidden emissions in the business model.
  • The revival of 90s fashion is forcing Aya Cash to confront her angsty, self-loathing 90s youth.
  • Arizona faces deep cuts to its use of Colorado River water, with farmers losing access in the next few years on an accelerated timeline due to climate change and overuse. At the same time, the Ak-Chin and Gila River tribes are becoming agricultural leaders.
  • Those freaky robot dogs are hitting the streets. They will always make me think of this horrifying Black Mirror episode, and maybe for good reason seeing as how their maker is funded by military contracts.
  • “How dare you. You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words.”

Kickflip Batman courtesy of Watertown-based artist Jesse Lonergan. This is my favorite drawing I saw this week, but all of Jesse’s work is fantastic.

Watching

We just finished the third season of The Good Place as the fourth and final season approaches. Ted Danson is a national treasure and D’Arcy Carden 100% deserves an Emmy. It also makes zero sense for this weird show about moral philosophy to be a primetime network sitcom. My dear friends/family Josh and Theresa told me about a meme where everyone is some combination of two humans from the Good Place. I am clearly Chidi and Eleanor because I can’t make a decision and I am an Arizona trash bag. For example, I strongly identify with heaven smelling like a waterpark to Eleanor.

Listening

This song was in a show I was watching and now I love this French-Congolese rapper Youssoupha even though I have no idea what he is saying.

I mentioned now and then good things emerge from local politics, and sure enough, we had a preliminary city council election this week that was cause for celebration. We’re heading toward what could be one of the city’s most diverse and progressive city councils. I did a little volunteering for a candidate in our district, Ricardo Arroyo, who ran on a platform of equity (including affordable housing). He is a very inspiring and good dude, and ended up winning the most votes, heading to the general election in November.

Sometimes politics feels enormous like this giant monster, maybe a UN summit or an actual monster facing impeachment charges. But it’s important to remember that politics is also really small, sitting on a folding chair in a community center basement. So small you can wave hello to it or even wrap your arms around it if you are on good terms.

Tate

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6: Ring the bells

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I want you to panic and act as if the house was on fire

The Climate Strike in Boston today. It was a sweaty scene.

Pretty much as long as climate change has been in the realm of public dialogue, there’s been this oddly accepted wisdom that there are certain ways you should and should not talk about the issue. It basically boils down to don’t raise your voice, don’t be alarmist, don’t be a pessimist. Otherwise your message would be too depressing, too disturbing, and leave people without the necessary hope for constructive action. 

Even worse, some warned, is politicizing climate change. The worst thing you could do was present it as a problem of people and power, intertwined with other issues that might come across as divisive like poverty, inequality, health care, or taxes. In fact, better to not even call it climate change. People respond much better in polling to ideas like energy independence or efficiency so maybe we can just sort of trick people into supporting climate action by way of euphemism. 

Some of this wisdom came from well-intentioned academics and pollsters, doing their best to divine the tea leaves of why people were simply not engaging on the issue despite its growing urgency. But much of this fear of alarming or upsetting people comes from an intense aversion toward disruption as a path to change. There’s a certain theory of political change that the right way (or third way, if you will) is to find an appealing path most people in power will agree on. This was in part the theory that brought about Waxman-Markey in 2009, which did not go that great because people didn’t really give a shit about it. 

Another theory is that periods of sweeping, rapid change are steeped in unrest. At first, most people react really badly to it. It makes us uncomfortable and can feel like everyone hates each other kind of like right now. But it also can jolt our norms and pull the culture into completely different realms of what’s possible. “There’s nothing new under the sun,” Octavia Butler said. “But there are new suns.”  

I have to wonder what people who have called for optimistic, measured responses to climate change think when they see a global event like today’s climate strike. Do they see millions of people in the streets across 150 countries and think, boy that’s really going to rub people the wrong way? Do they see signs made by 16-year-olds that read “This is a fucking crisis” and “I want to die of old age” and “Earth is in a state of emergency” and think about how poorly such messaging does in polling?  

Because when I see that kind of thing up close—like the thousands of mostly young people who marched on the State House in Boston today—I think, Jesus we’ve been doing it totally wrong this whole time. And finally, gloriously, we are talking about climate change from the heart. 

Another thing that was really striking about the climate strike (sorry I’m tired and don’t have that many words) is just how different it was compared to the countless marches and rallies I’ve been to over the years. Sometimes when you go to a thing, especially an environment thing, there’s this kind of gut response I get like oh it’s a bunch of these mf’ers again. This thing was very different. The activists have a different arsenal of funny songs and chants and dances. The mayor got one minute to speak and an 18 year old kid got like 15. Packs of actual children were running around unattended, like some kind of reverse Children of the Corn. There may have been the suburban white anarchist dudes there somewhere, but there were also hoodie-wearing black and brown teens pounding on drums spray painted with Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise logos. There were plenty of old people there like me but we all kind of had this look of like, holy shit, on our faces, at least I did. In other words, it felt weird and new in the best way.

One of my favorite little moments was this one older lady I was walking near toward the end and when people would chant like Fuck Charlie Baker or whatever, she would be like “no, no, no” scolding them. And one time some kids chanted something bad about cops and she said, hey those are people’s fathers and brothers and sisters. And this one teen said, “Yeah and they alllll suck.” Which I thought was pretty funny. Not the most strategic messaging I guess, and the teens were overall very chill, but the take home message being—that lady can no longer tell these young people the right thing to say. It’s not her show anymore. 

Not anyone’s show really, and by that I mean not the environmental movement or liberals or the Sierra Club or very rational and concerned white people or communications professors or any particular interest group. Nobody gets to warn everyone to keep it down, don’t be alarmist, don’t upset people, and even if we did it wouldn’t work. We’ve lost control in the best way. That’s what change feels like. 

Links

  • Relevant to the day, American teens are frightened by climate change and 1 in 4 are turning that fear into action.
  • A “full-blown crisis,” there are 29% fewer birds in the US and Canada than there were in 1970.
  • In news about the color black, this chicken is entirely black its feathers, bones, organs, everything. Also, researchers made the “blackest black” even blacker than vantablack. It absorbs at least 99.995 percent of incoming light.
  • “Making our first album with Ric Ocasek remains the most transformative and magical experience I’ve been lucky enough to have.” (h/t Swedlund)
  • If you have been confused about what is going on with Jeremy Renner, Anne Helen Petersen is here to explain.
  • An ode to Speckle.

Podcasts

That bird study is pretty brutal, and it made me think of this New Yorker Radio Hour episode with Elizabeth Kolbert, in which they were talking about a new report on biodiversity loss. She says:

The general trend line of biodiversity loss, it’s all just playing out according to plan, unfortunately. And it’s true that global GDP is larger than ever, and at the same time, species loss and the destruction of the natural environment, the natural world, is also greater than ever, and those two things are very intimately linked, and if you only pay attention to the GDP part you might say oh everything’s fine. But I think the point this report is really trying to make is that those lines are going to cross. People are still dependent on the natural world…these are biological and geochemical systems that we’re still dependent on for better or worse, and we are mucking with them in the most profound ways.

Watching

Years ago I saw a commercial for the American version of a miniseries called “The Slap,” and I thought to myself, my god that looks like the stupidest show ever made I will not watch it. If you google the slap one of the results is “Is The Slap a real TV show?” But I kept hearing good things about the original Australian version, which aired back in 2011. I’m halfway through and it is quite powerful and suspenseful in its own weird middle-class, middle-age way. I’m reading A Visit from the Goon Squad at the same time, also from 2011, and they are kind of thematically similar. Flawed people circling each other and the random interactions that shape all of their lives. Anyway, it’s a real adult drama and I guess now and then it’s nice to watch a show that is not about teenage witches or homicidal robots or my other bullshit. 

Listening

I first came across A Tribe Called Red because they were referenced in Tommy Orange’s amazing novel There There. Here is a song of theirs, sorry if you don’t like electronic music go listen to some James Taylor grandpa.

That’s all for this round, sorry this one may be a little rough around the edges I wanted to crank something out about the strike. So if it turns out I am wrong about all of this I do not want to hear about it thank you.

Remember a lot of people work hard to make these actions possible so kick a little money their way why don’t you. And remember it is OK to panic a little.

Tate

5: Loving the world to death

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I’ve developed an uneasy ambivalence

H. Widayat, Ikan Laut Dalam [Deep sea fish], 1987. via Rabih Alameddine

Between Epstein and the Sackler family, there’s probably more scrutiny being placed on philanthropy and the donor class now than in decades—the sector’s flown under the radar for way too long. Along with the indispensable work of investigative journalists hunting down abuses and dirty money, I also think it’s important to grapple with questions of what philanthropy is, why we subsidize it, and if there is a form of it that serves society better than the problematic version we have now.

Although I wrote it before the Epstein story blew wide open, I had a pretty lengthy essay run at the end of last week in which I broached some of those big picture questions head on in a way I hadn’t really done before. I like how it turned out and it’s also one of the best-received things I’ve written on the subject. So this week, I’m posting a chunk of that essay—the introduction and then the very ending. But you know if you want to read all the words in the middle, you can do so here.

Generosity and Impact Aren’t Enough. Let’s Judge Philanthropy on How Well it Shifts Power

I’ve developed an uneasy ambivalence toward philanthropy over the years I’ve been writing about it. It stems from a kind of inner conflict over the fact that nearly every case of philanthropic impact, even impact I may celebrate or encourage, is also a case of concentrated wealth exerting its power. 

I get the feeling many people who cover or work in the sector have a similar sort of queasiness. Following the death of his hometown benefactor Gerry Lenfest, philanthropy scholar Benjamin Soskis wrote about his own conflicted feelings, describing the American attitude toward philanthropy as a “tincture of gratitude and apprehension.” Or as David Callahan writes of covering the sector in The Givers, “I’ve come to feel whiplashed between hope and fear.” Others prominent critics like Anand Giridharadas are less ambivalent, and as the New Gilded Age grinds on, there’s been a warranted backlash against wealthy donors. 

And yet, these pools of wealth remain, as do the many, varied foundations and donors trying to put them to public good. In spite of our reservations, philanthropy large and small fuels civil society, our cultural institutions, and often social change, as it has in some form throughout history. 

This presents a dilemma, for me, at least. How can we appreciate and encourage “good philanthropy,” while simultaneously sounding the alarm about the dangers of concentrated wealth and its influence? Are those two sentiments in conflict, and do they have to be?  

To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know. I do know that the dangers are very real, as real as our weakened public sector and tax base. And some days, I think we’d be better off scrapping the entire charitable tax deduction, or at least vastly changing it. But after much writing and reading on the subject, I’ve come to think that part of this conflict, and a possible way to reconcile it, lies in how we judge what makes good philanthropy. 

Namely, we often gauge the success of philanthropists by some combination of generosity and impact (by impact, I mean achieving intended, measurable outcomes). I increasingly think we ought to, if not completely replace those yardsticks, supplement them by considering as a measure of true philanthropy a funder’s success at shifting power out of its own hands and into others. This could involve funding program areas that challenge plutocracy, putting into place more diverse and participatory governing structures or simple grantmaking practices that yield power and control to recipients instead of funders. 

…

I’m not so naive that I think those in the sector might read this and throw out their playbooks. And I know there’s a large contingent in philanthropy that believes wealth does, in fact, entitle them to more power. This is also admittedly far from a fully baked solution. It’s not too difficult to imagine a scenario in which someone is generous, impactful, and shifts power, but the outcome is still quite bad. 

But it’s a framing that I think has merit, and feels more like what philanthropy ought to be than it often is. Maybe looking to a kind of generosity of power instead of money can bring some moral and practical clarity to using existing pools of wealth to make the world a better, more just place.

Read the whole thing here. OK now back to the rest of the newsletter.

Make it a Blockbuster night.

Links!

  • “I will reckon with a gathering sense that regular travelers like me are loving the world to death. And that perhaps this love might be better expressed by letting it be.”
  • As wealthy residents flee vulnerable coastal real estate, low-income communities on higher ground are sent packing. Also, Flagstaff, Arizona has seen an influx of people fleeing Phoenix.
  • There was a bigot parade in Boston and when the DA Rachael Rollins dropped charges against counter-protestors, a judge refused. It was a clear overreach and an attack on Rollins, who ran on prosecuting fewer minor crimes.
  • The time Roxane Gay ate an edible, tied herself to her bed with a sheet, and called 911 to tell them she was dying.
  • A bar near me that first opened in 1882 is closing down because the neighborhood has become too expensive. The liquor license was sold for $455,000 for a “megarestaurant” that will open up in the Seaport. Cool city!
  • A piece of cocktail party wisdom about free will has been debunked but don’t get all excited that doesn’t mean you have free will.
  • Blockbuster Video was one of my first jobs in high school, and I can confirm, it was not that great. I did, however, love that job as I got to rent movies for free. One time I spilled a giant soda on a credit card machine and my boss was pretty cool about it.

Listening

Tacocat is one of my favorite bands and they are currently on tour in Europe which you can follow along on Instagram if you want. Here is my favorite song on their latest record.

Jamie and I went on a little vacation to the Hudson Valley where we saw all kinds of farm animals, went on a nice hike, and ate a lot of very good food. It’s a beautiful place. It is also like a lot of aging East Coast vacation destinations where there are these random pockets of ruin. We drove by a huge old resort that looked like it had been abandoned forever but turned out it closed just under a year ago. It was built in the 1950s, and “once was one of the grand Borscht belt resorts of the Catskills.” It has seen tough times since then, including a tragic drowning, and just 11 months out of business it looked like the earth was already trying to take it back.

That Roxane Gay story reminds me of the last time I ate an edible and two hours later was frozen on the couch asking Jamie to touch my foot so I could be certain I still had a body. Readers, I’m here to tell you that you too still have a body. If you aren’t sure, ask someone dear to you to touch your foot, and if you’re alone maybe tie yourself to your bed and hold on tight.

Tate

4: The longest siege

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You can’t hide as much on an island.

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Vignette Study of a Ship in a Storm via Rabih Alameddine

From Sunday all the way into Tuesday, Hurricane Dorian pummeled the Bahamas, leaving behind mass destruction and flooding and a death toll of at least 23. Two entire neighborhoods home to many Haitian immigrants were pretty much leveled. One meteorologist wrote for the Washington Post:

“Grand Bahama Island may have just endured the longest siege of violent, destructive weather ever observed.”

Hurricanes don’t generate their own forward momentum, rather they float along at the desire of global wind currents. Dorian is part of trend known as “stalling,” where instead of plowing through communities, a hurricane moves in and then just sort of sits there for a long stretch of time, dumping water and tearing apart everything it can with winds in this case up to 185 mph. Dorian moved slower than a person walks and at times didn’t move at all, leisurely hammering Grand Bahama Island for over 40 hours. Imagine being in a hurricane for 40 hours.

As you probably guessed, there is a compelling case that stalling is connected to climate change—models show global winds generally slowing down, in part because the Arctic is warming rapidly and there’s less temperature contrast to stir them up. We also know that warmer waters are creating stronger hurricanes, rising sea levels are creating bigger storm surges, and more moisture in the air is producing more rain during these storms. There was a lot of lame storm coverage that didn’t mention these facts, and lamer coverage that merely quoted Democrats pointing them out. But there was also a ton of good analysis pieces, including this one from Michael Mann and Andrew Dessler.

Sort of coincidentally this week I have been talking to people at community foundations in places like Puerto Rico and Hawaii about their climate work. I keep asking them some version of the question, do you get any pushback from people in the community who don’t want to act on or even acknowledge climate change? One person in Hawaii I spoke with today sort of politely laughed and said:

You know, you can’t hide as much on an island. If things happen, they happen pretty quickly and it’s pretty obvious. So I think people are very aware, and in our lifetimes we have seen drastic changes. … It’s just obvious to everyone, so it’s really not an issue here. You can talk about it openly and actually if you don’t mention it, someone’s probably gonna call you on it.

Speaking of Long Sieges

Meanwhile on the mainland, CNN punished us for demanding more climate coverage by making us watch presidential candidates talk about it for 7 hours straight until we got sick and swore we would never ask about climate change again.

The result was riveting television for those of us who watched the entire thing—just kidding I did not watch any of it! I had things to do and didn’t want to sit around and watch CNN for 7 hours I don’t know what to tell you guys. I opted to wait until morning for the clips and recaps, like this one and this one and this one. I also checked in on Twitter where I learned that apparently Joe Biden’s eye filled up with blood.

Joking aside I am actually really glad that the town hall happened and it should be considered a major victory for activist groups like Sunrise who have been campaigning for months for a climate debate (the reason it had to be town hall style and for so long is that the DNC unforgivably rejected a true debate). The town hall was also a victory for Jay Inslee rip and Warren is even absorbing some of his climate plan. So even if it was pretty inaccessible, the town hall sends a signal and hopefully marks a step toward us being better at talking seriously about this stuff in the public sphere. And there was a lot of substantive discussion, including several questions from the audience holding the candidates accountable for their policies and campaigns. Some clear differences are emerging on nuclear, natural gas, and carbon taxes. And some dumb CNN stuff like Wolf Blitzer asking if he has to drive an electric car like come on Wolf.

CNN, which most days is like a Labrador trying to explain the state of the world, deserves some credit for doing it. Hopefully we will continue to see more coverage, outside the context of Democratic politics, woven into more daily news stories, and connecting the issue to people and their lives. If you want to see a non-7-hour summary of the candidates’ climate plans, this one isn’t bad.

“The Daemon Lover” by Maggie Umber in Now 5

More Links

  • A Globe writer outlines the living hell that is finding an apartment in Boston.
  • Massachusetts’ equity goals for its legal weed industry are going pretty much horribly. “Our ancestors, as black and brown people, would laugh at the fact that we put trust and faith in the government to want to help us.”
  • Around 30% to 40% of the U.S. food supply goes uneaten, but 1 in 8 Americans is food insecure, and food waste contributes 8% of global warming emissions.
  • A new sort of anti-prison opened up in Oakland, a center to focus on restorative justice and combat mass incarceration. “Too often, when people think of the term ‘public safety,’ they’re thinking of punishment and prisons. We felt a need for something equally tangible, equally visible, in concrete, brick, and mortar form.”

What I Wrote

A post I wrote called Epstein, Science, and the Power of Saying No to Money ran this week, building on a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about here lately. It points out that scientists often think they are immune from matters of politics and power (and often they are just complete bastards). But accepting money holds meaning and consequences, and it’s how the scientific enterprise connects with society.

In the aftermath of toxic donor scandals, some beneficiaries are responding by giving back or donating the money, a respectable move. An even better one would be declining it in the first place. After all, philanthropy is an exercise of power, and one way that our institutions, thinkers, artists and, indeed, all of us can use our own power is via the underrated act of saying “no.”

Podcasts

I’m listening to an Ezra Klein Show with British writer Joe Higgs, who writes about chaos magic and Alan Moore and Timothy Leary kind of stuff. He wrote a book about this electronic music duo that took a million pounds to an island and just lit it on fire. He’s also talking about how because Gen Z is always networked via smartphone they are less fixated on individuality, more empathic, and more anxious, which is why when they watch The Breakfast Club they hate Judd Nelson and love Anthony Michael Hall and also they do things like fight climate change and gun violence.

Music

I guess I’m a little late in promoting this band, since Wikipedia tells me they broke up approximately one month ago. But Philadelphia’s own, or I guess formerly own, Cayetana still has two excellent studio releases you can enjoy and that I highly recommend. I kind of hate to link to a cover because they have so many great songs of their own, including this one, but I do love their version of Age of Consent. 

This issue comes to you from my bedroom, where I am hiding with our two tiny dogs because a perfectly nice man is repairing our kitchen ceiling and otherwise the dogs will bark at him and possibly bite him. Even from in here, the oldest dog who only has one eye is still barking at him. Despite these challenging constraints, Crisis Palace carries on. Sorry this one was a little dark.

Though it may be annoying, be like my one-eyed dog this week. Keep barking if you think something is wrong, and then later on you can take a very long nap.

Tate

3: In every dream home a heartache

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Come to my house and call me a bedbug to my face

Mascuppic Lake in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts, home to many dark family stories but also a good place to haul some ass on a jetski.

I kind of didn’t want to talk about David Koch because there’s something about it that makes me imagine some Portlandia sketch where there’s a community meeting about a dog park or something and a person in a fleece hat keeps bringing up the Koch brothers. Which is to say there is a certain type of liberal who is obsessed with the Koch brothers and tries hangs all of the country’s problems on them. 

That said, we can certainly hang a bunch of the country’s problems on them! And so, with his recent death at 79, let’s take a minute to acknowledge David Koch’s truly horrible legacy. 

One reason I wanted to talk about the Kochs is that I just finished an article that has not been published yet, but it’s about the folly of celebrating philanthropy based on generosity or effectiveness, neither of which makes it an inherent good. Here is a preview: 

Generosity is often framed in terms of voluntary redistribution, but we’ve seen how giving is not particularly effective at breaking up large fortunes. Some of the world’s most generous donors, Bloomberg, Gates, Buffett, and others, have watched their personal fortunes balloon since committing to give away that very money. Wealth once accumulated develops a gravitational pull that leaves generosity far too weak a tool when it comes to untangling inequality. 

It feels relevant in the context of David Koch, because there’s a narrative out there that with his passing we shouldn’t be attacking him, due to his generosity toward things like art museums and cancer research. MIT, in particular, whitewashed his legacy, a posthumous thank you for the alum’s donations over the years. That kind of sanitization is a dangerous way to respond to any powerful person’s death. 

Setting aside the fact that I struggle to call anyone who dies with $50 billion in his pockets particularly generous, philanthropy doesn’t absolve how their money was made, or what other damage was wrought in their lifetime.

In David Koch’s case, he and his brother used their money to advance their staunch libertarian beliefs, which also conveniently protected their enormous personal wealth. The Kochs used their giving extremely effectively in this regard, turning away from the fringe Libertarian Party in the 1980s and realizing they could elevate their extreme ideas in the mainstream (they were well to the right of Reagan) by building a massive network of donors to bankroll lobbying, think tanks, local advocacy, and dark money political donations.  

Some of the Kochs’ greatest hits include funding to slash the social safety net and health care access, weaken unions, scuttle gun laws, and undo campaign finance rules. But I’d say their worst offenses involve their denial of climate change and gutting of environmental regulations. As Jane Mayer and Christopher Leonard have reported, the Kochs were some of the country’s worst polluters through their chemical and fossil fuel businesses, and much of their opposition to regulation directly protected their own profits. Fearing a costly crackdown on the fossil fuel industry, they spent decades opposing any regulation of greenhouse gases and any moderate Republican who was open to it, while sowing doubt about the scientific consensus on climate change. They helped to create a Republican orthodoxy that still blocks federal policy today. David Koch is gone, but we will all be suffering the consequences of his efforts for many years to come. 

One more quick David Koch is horrible story, but with this one has a happy ending. A cool trick they picked up in the 2010s was to swoop into communities considering public transit investments—things like tunnels, new bus routes, light rail expansions, real scary stuff—and pump money into the opposition, tanking once-popular proposals on the basis that taxes and public transit are attacks on liberty. 

But (as we saw with you know who’s takeover of the party) there are limits to the Kochs’ influence. Their most recent transit battle was in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona (OK I’m actually from Mesa). On Tuesday, a Koch-funded effort to ban any new light rail or streetcar construction in the city lost in a landslide. Good job Phoenix. The Koch legacy casts a long and ugly shadow, but it is not all powerful.

Links

  • London will begin piping heat from the subway into homes and businesses to conserve energy. Another “wasted heat” project diverts it from a sugar factory into a greenhouse that grows weed.  
  • “Call me a bedbug to my face.”
  • The Southwest got a lot of snow, but the Colorado River and the people who depend on it are still in trouble. “You can put an ice cube — even an excellent ice cube — in a cup of hot coffee, but eventually it’s going to disappear.”
  • Due to a scheduling oddity, Fenway charged just $5 for what turned out to be a single 12-minute inning. It was a fun/sad window into how accessible Fenway must have been at some point, and certainly no longer is. 
  • Facial recognition tools are “dangerous when they fail and harmful when they work.” Calling for a moratorium (actually how about we just make it illegal).
  • There are, it turns out, laws when you are drinking Claws. My favorite flavor is black cherry. 
  • Surprising nobody, there are laws when drinking nutcracker, and New York cops are blitzing vendors of the summer drink popular in Black communities.
  • And for the summer public drinking trifecta, there’s a war on partying gentrifiers on Southie Beach. “On the weekend, they stand there with their drinks and their phones and their glasses and they just pee.”  

More Bacchus by Eddie Campbell. This is how you feel when you get this newsletter.

Watching

The second season of Mindhunter (or, The Murder Boys, as I call it) is just as gripping as the first. It occurred to me that the FBI agents behind the Behavioral Science Unit have been portrayed so often in fiction that they are basically folklore at this point, like Batman or Sherlock Holmes. This is a Roxy Music song used in the first episode’s cold open, but in the show it cuts off right before one of the best payoffs in rock history so you can listen to it here at around 3:00 and do like stupid fake guitar motions or whatever you feel like.

I also watched Us which was scary as shit and also really funny and the artistic use of I Got 5 On It and N.W.A. will go down in film history if there is any good in this world.

Reading

In the middle of The Power, by Naomi Alderman and it is great so far. I’ll probably write more about it later but it imagines a world in which all young women develop an electricity-based power that can basically fuck up anyone who messes with them. It’s a real page-turner but also a cutting look at the mechanics of all forms of power. 

I read some stuff about how using Google navigation is making us all stupid and I cannot afford to get stupider I’m not trying to go to Jupiter over here. So I started driving in Boston without Google and it is a real adventure. It wasn’t pretty but I made it home from Brookline today. So if I’m late for something, cut me some slack at least I will be smart when I get there.

I hope all of your navigations on the road and in life are successful.

Tate