The second annual Crisis Palace feel good guide to year end giving
Tiger in the Snow, Katsushika Hokusai
This week I have been thinking a lot about philanthropy because as the year winds to a close we are doing some 2021 planning for Inside Philanthropy, the site where I am currently an editor. I’ve been writing for the outlet for several years now in different capacities, which is probably how many of you ended up at this newsletter. Climate change philanthropy was a bigger focus when this started out, since I would usually write about stories I was reporting and writing.
It’s still part of the newsletter for sure, but I have noticed this year that I’ve been kind of drifting more toward social movements and different theories of change related to climate and intersecting issues. Part of that is a function of writing fewer articles about philanthropy myself, and part of it is just evolving interests.
I do think of it all as being on the same sort of continuum, which is roughly about the things we are building and rebuilding during an era of crisis. That includes the different forms of power being channeled into creating that change, one of which is funding. I feel like for a lot of people, philanthropy is kind of a puzzling topic, they might think of this group of rich free market technocrats. And that is certainly part of it, but it’s also a really varied sector, and one that demands attention for a handful of reasons that I’ve been mulling over going into the new year:
Important work contributing to the public good needs funding and it often doesn’t get it from public sources (reproductive rights, health, and justice are key examples). Some of this is a failure of government, but some of it is just a huge range of needs. I first came to this topic as a fundraiser, and there’s an important, basic service of explaining who is funding what and how to pay for different work.
Donors and foundations are movable. Philanthropies represent pools of money and power that, in my experience, do respond to criticism, advice, and cultural shifts. Sometimes.
Philanthropy is not a monolith, but it does have pervasive structural problems. Just like business and government, it’s a sector containing multitudes. But it skews heavily in favor of the wealthy, a form of institutionalized plutocracy, under current rules, at least. There’s a need for sector-wide criticism.
Actors within philanthropy need to be held accountable. This is sort of changing as more journalists take note, but most of the media out there covering the sector is funded by, you guessed it, philanthropy! (IP is independent and subscriber-funded.)
I will say it is a challenging topic to write about. It’s an important, under-scrutinized area with potential to serve a unique function in society, but it’s also this product of concentrated wealth and an immoral economic system, which it often reinforces. (You can read my best attempt at a grand unifying theory of this problem here).
I didn’t mean this to be a plug for my day job, but I’m thinking through these issues this week and how to balance them in our coverage, and by extension how they fit into my own writing, so there’s a few thoughts.
This is also a big time of year, within a very big year, for I guess lowercase philanthropy, the basic act of giving money to something you care about. Aside from a way to meet immediate needs, I also see giving money to things as a direct way to bridge individual and collective action—one of the biggest challenges in climate action.
I recently came across an article that Mary Annaïse Heglar wrote for Wired back in April, titled “We Can’t Tackle Climate Change Without You,” in which she sums the impossible task of answering, “But what can I do?”
They know it’s about more than recycling, “buying green,” and turning the lights off when they leave the room. They’ve gotten the memo that we need structural change in addition to individual change. They’ve processed past the shock. They’re ready to get to work. Why, they demand to know, can’t I give a simple answer to such a simple question?
Her simplest answer (but read the whole thing) is “Do what you’re good at. And do your best.” That’s because everyone has some part to play, and what you do has to be sustainable and appropriate to your life and work.
I totally agree with that sentiment, but one thing she notes that I would emphasize is that a big part of what each individual can do is joining in with what other people are doing. Or getting other people to join in with what you’re doing.
A huge change we are undergoing as we transition from whatever we were before to what we’re going to be next—as a result of the pandemic, climate change, mass extinction, the failures of capitalism—is the understanding that the individual is the collective. One step toward advancing that change is to find your people. And one step toward that is finding a group that aligns with your values and giving them money or time if you have it, even a small amount.
So with that long prelude here are some of my recommendations this year for donating, based on our own household’s activity and other groups I’ve come across that I think are great. A lot of overlap with last year, but some are new.
Also I know a lot of people are giving to their local food pantries and service providers, which 100% need more donations and volunteers, but you don’t need me to tell you that, go forth.
My usual broad advice is:
Avoid the Big Greens: I don’t think your average person concerned about climate change should be giving their $100 or whatever to EDF or The Nature Conservancy. They really don’t need your money and individual engagement also means less for their model.
Don’t Worry About Getting Scammed: This is a predominant narrative in media coverage of donating money, and I just can’t stand it. Don’t stress about stuff like “overhead.” Don’t make recipients perform for you. When you give money, you accept risk and put faith in others, so trust that they know how to best use resources.
Give Locally: Individual giving is best 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.
OK now here is a list of groups:
Climate Justice Alliance: This network of organizations is awesome, working to make the green new deal more equitable, among many other things. You can donate directly to the network, or look at its list of members and find one near you. I’m a longtime supporter of ACE here in Boston, but GreenRoots is also great.
Indigenous Environmental Network: This network was in the spotlight around Standing Rock, but has been around for over 30 years now. They are a powerful voice within that same EJ coalition, fighting for just transition, opposing oil infrastructure, training organizers and more.
Native Renewables: I’ve been interested in local and decentralized clean energy projects that don’t rely on the utility grid or sell energy back to the grid, and this is a Native-led project that is really cool, setting up thousands of homes on the Navajo and Hopi reservations with PV solar.
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.
I wanted to add a few non-explicitly climate focused groups this year, because it is getting harder to draw a line between organizations working in the climate arena from other justice groups working in health, labor, racial justice, housing, and more, all building power for structural change.
Movement for Black Lives and the Working Families Party: These are the main groups I volunteered with during the election and their joint project with a handful of other groups, The Frontline, is doing super impressive work in movement building right now, electoral and otherwise.
LUCHA: An Arizona group I also connected with during the election. They came about in response to the “show me your papers” law in Arizona and continue to organize around multiple issues and elections.
Support political candidates who prioritize climate action.
Oppose political candidates who obstruct or ignore climate action.
Links
“Among frequent viewers of Fox News, not even 1 in 5 say they accept that Biden won the presidential election, about which there is no legitimate question.”
The richest 1% of the global population (earning more than $109,000 a year) account for more than double the emissions of the poorest 50%, and the world’s wealthy will need to reduce their carbon footprints by a factor of 30 to get the world on track.
This isn’t Zeynep Tufekci’s first coup attempt. “The U.S. president is trying to steal the election, and, crucially, his party either tacitly approves or is pretending not to see it.”
New York’s public libraries used to all have apartments in them for caretakers. There are still 13 left.
Epidemiologists are devastated. “I’ve realized that when we need to rise up as a country, we have truly no moral capacity to do it. It makes you ask why the hell we even bother.”
When all those spies and diplomats got sick in Havana, it was probably because they were being blasted with microwaves.
Last weekend I watched David Byrne’s American Utopia, because I listen to this funny Talking Heads podcast (that used to be an REM podcast that used to be a U2 podcast and for about five minutes was a Red Hot Chili Peppers podcast until the hosts realized mid-episode that neither of them really liked the Red Hot Chili Peppers that much) and they devoted an episode to this movie version of Byrne’s Broadway show.
I loved this movie so much, and whatever I say to describe it won’t quite capture it but it’s this live performance of Talking Heads and David Byrne songs, with the entire band remotely wired and fully choreographed throughout. There’s also this storytelling component about human connection, and Spike Lee directs the movie version and adds this whole other dimension.
I’m not even a huge Talking Heads fan and from what I’ve heard Byrne has always been kind of a jerk and you may also have some problems with Talking Heads’ whole white nerds do afrobeat thing. But in his old age, Byrne has clearly been trying to make good, and it really shines through in this show. In that sense, on top of being just a joyous viewing experience, it also feels redemptive.
Watching
Look I know that was technically already a watching entry but I have another one so sue me. I have been watching a lot of animation lately and tearing through Aggretsuko, about a Sanrio (Hello Kitty) character, a red panda who works in a boring office job in Tokyo and she is very sweet but then occasionally expresses her internal rage by singing death metal karaoke. Here is a fun article about it from back when it first came out.
Comics
I’m back into Usagi Yojimbo, inspired by watching The Mandalorian. Reading Book 4 now, which randomly has a foreword by Jodorowsky. I just love Stan Sakai check out these anthropomorphic cat ninjas.
Listening
I don’t really like Christmas sorry to all you Christmasheads out there, and I especially do not like Christmas music, outside of the actual day of the holiday. But one of my favorite bands Calexico put out a holiday album called Seasonal Shift and I love it. This has become kind of a feel good newsletter issue and this is definitely a feel good album. There’s even a song that is somewhat about climate change: Wondering what I’ve been holding onto that’s been causing the ice to give way… Here’s one of the more holiday-ish songs:
OK there you go, some donation recommendations for the end of the year. If there are others I should know about, let me know! Did I mention paying for climate journalism? Do that too. Now get out that debit card or just let your browser auto populate your card number which is probably super irresponsible but I do it all the fucking time sometimes at like 2 a.m.
And you know what, these groups align with my own values and goals for this world, and because you read this newsletter, you maybe agree to some extent.
But if you want to get involved in climate action from a different perspective—whether that’s your religious faith, your love of hunting, fishing, or other outdoor activities, bird watching, enthusiasm for science and technology, finance and investment, pretty much whatever—there are people out there to connect with. I will help you find them. Email me. Find your people. Like the bee girl in the Blind Melon video.
The Pond at Benten Shrine in Shiba, Hasui Kawase, 1929
I am wiped out at the end of a long week, but one of the things I’ve been focusing on that I thought I could talk about here today was this panel that I moderated yesterday for the UNFCCC secretariat, which is the administrative body that oversees climate treaties. This year they are hosting a bunch of virtual Climate Dialogues, which are just wrapping up today, and I was invited to moderate one about climate philanthropy and green recovery. You can see the full list of dialogues here and some have links to recordings if you’re interested.
In COVID times, moderating a panel means putting on the top half of a suit, moving my desk into the living room to get away from the dogs, and running a video conference call that is being watched live by many people. So kind of a strange experience, but all in all I think it went OK.
The event is perhaps a bit dry for casual viewing, but you can watch a recording of the whole thing posted on YouTube if you would like to a) hear some very smart panelists talk about climate change philanthropy and green recovery from COVID-19, b) see how I’m getting better but still not great at cutting my own hair, or c) hear me say “um” 1 million times.
I find hosting these events, as opposed to being a panelist, to be a little tricky because you have to balance your own opinions and interests with what the hosts and participants and audience will be most interested in, and also try to give all of the panelists enough time to get their perspectives in. But aside from the fact that Bloomberg got some extra attention at the beginning because he’s a big donor to the UNFCC I was pretty much able to control the flow of the event, which friends and loved ones will attest is something I am a big fan of.
Doing these panels can also be rewarding in that you get to talk to people you might not otherwise, and I thought all of the panelists yesterday were great, even folks from foundations I don’t always see eye to eye with. You can also get some ideas in front of a particular audience, in this case a lot of government and nonprofit people. So for this panel, I wanted to try to spotlight climate justice in the discussion, and to bring up some criticisms of philanthropy that might not otherwise make it into the conversation.
I put my opening comments below, but if you do want to watch I recommend you skip right past the very beginning where I screwed up and we all sat awkwardly in silence for a minute, and check out these highlights:
Private foundations and donors have always played a role in funding work on climate mitigation and resilience. But right now, we’re seeing a couple of converging forces that present the sector with the potential to have a much larger impact.
For one, we’re seeing more foundations and wealthy donors embrace climate change as one of their major priorities. Since the 1990s, a core group of foundations have been very engaged in topics like climate policy, climate diplomacy, and expanding renewables. But the issue has drawn a pretty small percentage of overall philanthropic giving in the past.
That’s been changing in the past five years or so. So around 2015, climate funding hovered at less than 2% of philanthropic dollars, but in the past five years, foundation support has doubled to $1.6 billion in grantmaking in 2019. When you include individual donors, that number is somewhere between $5 billion and $9 billion annually.
That number is sure to rise, as many new funders are coming to the table. The Open Society Foundations recently launched its first official climate change program. Emerging donors like Jeff Bezos are committing billions in new funding to the issue, which has drawn both excitement and also quite a bit of skepticism. In addition, philanthropy is becoming a larger force in countries like China and India.
The second big factor at play is COVID-19, which has shaken the philanthropic sector along with the rest of the world. While the pandemic has to some extent drawn attention away from the climate crisis, it’s also fueled the demand to transition to a more equitable and sustainable world, as trillions of dollars from multiple sectors are headed toward future recovery efforts.
Climate advocates are calling for a “green recovery” that would unlock funding for things like solar power, wind power, energy efficiency, community resilience, and multimodal transportation in cities. At least one major private funder, the Rockefeller Foundation has made green recovery one of its top priorities going forward, committing $1 billion over the next three years to the cause.
So there’s some sense of hope that with a green recovery, transformative change could be possible in coming years, and philanthropy can offer significant resources toward that effort.
As we consider the future of climate change philanthropy, I think it’s important to keep in mind the sector’s potential pitfalls as well as its potential benefits. For one, it must be noted that along with rising economic inequality, we’re seeing more intense concerns over the influence of private wealth on society. Common critiques of philanthropy include a lack of accountability, a tendency toward incrementalism and market-based solutions, and a tendency to exert control over agendas and strategies.
That being said, the sector has several strengths: including the power to convene diverse parties, the freedom to operate independently of political pressures, and the potential to support a wide range of approaches and ideas.
All of this raises some important questions for our conversation today, and next our panelists will introduce themselves and share a little about their work.
We’re getting back into therapy-via-scented-candle season, so I will recommend this cute couple’s business based in Bisbee, Arizona, which we first came across while we were in Bisbee, but continue to order from periodically. It’s called Bisbee Soap and Sundryand I’ve mentioned them briefly before. Their top offering is creosote-scented products, which are incredible, but really it’s all great, I have a bunch of their candles and soaps.
Reading
I recently set aside the nihilism and scifi epics to read a couple climate books that have been on my list. One that I mentioned previously is The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.
Figueres is the former executive secretary of the UNFCCC (her father is José Figueres Ferrer, the three-time president of Costa Rica known for, among other things, abolishing the country’s army), and she had this kind of famous moment where she took over after the failed Copenhagen treaty, and admitted to the press that she didn’t think a global climate agreement would be possible, “not in my lifetime.” But then she was instrumental in salvaging climate negotiations and shepherding the 2015 agreement. Rivett-Carnac was Figueres’ senior advisor at the UNFCCC and lived as a Buddhist monk for two years, which actually comes through in the book.
I have to admit that I didn’t have super high expectations, because like a lot of people I have conflicting opinions about the Paris Agreement and UN climate negotiations overall, and thought it might be overly sunny about both. While it is optimistic as an overall theme, the book surprised me for being as radical as it is. There are a lot of strong anti-growth/GDP, anti-consumption, and anti-colonialist messages in this book, as well as a call for mass civil disobedience. It does stop short of fully attacking capitalism as an economic model, which I guess is not super surprising.
The best part is definitely the first half of the book, which is probably one of the most concise and clear summaries I’ve read of the climate crisis and what needs to happen to avoid its most catastrophic consequences. It feels very real and concrete, and doesn’t pull any punches. There’s also quite a bit of philosophy and just raw emotion in there, which I find it interesting how books on climate change are becoming less about the science and trying to convince people of the concept, and more on how we are supposed to live with our shifting relationship with the world.
For people who are super savvy on climate, or for those looking for a more explicitly lefty perspective, this book might not quite satisfy. But I’m always looking for that one climate book that most people could pick up and find to be clear, compelling and useful, and this may be the closest thing to it that I’ve read yet. Recommend!
Watching
Oh boy. So many things. Watching so many things. I will highlight two, which includes that I finished my Sopranos rewatch over Thanksgiving weekend. I know everyone has been really eager to know how I would rank the seasons upon rewatch, so the definitive order from best to worst is: 2, 1, 6, 5, 4, 3.
The other thing is that we are finally watching The Mandalorian, which I really am enjoying. I didn’t quite realize it until a couple episodes in but it is basically Lone Wolf and Cub and Sam Peckinpah movies in space, and the Mandalorian is a ronin. But you know we’re all just here for the baby.
Listening
Well I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving, the savoriest, and the second-most problematic of all US holidays, but one that I think can still be a nice shared experience and a moment for reflection and learning.
One extremely 2020 moment in our household is that Jamie (I never do borat voice anymore, sad) and I decided to watch that new Taylor Swift movie about folklore during our Thanksgiving dinner. We have a complicated relationship with Taylor Swift, because don’t we all, but do like a lot of her music including folklore, and that movie is extremely emotional. During this one song, we both started to spontaneously cry and then started laughing because we were both crying because of this Taylor Swift movie, but really because of the sort of culmination of all this, and then crying some more.
All of which is to say that it has been a tough year.
So the last will be first, and the first will be last
Frans Snyders Still Life with Grapes and Game, c. 1630
Today I want to talk about the Bible, and I imagine some of you will be like, ah finally I love the Bible and some of you might be like ah I don’t know about this. Either way, I hope you will enjoy it. I’m not particularly religious unless you count the teachings of Avatar the Last Airbender, but I do keep thinking about this one Bible story, which is a real banger, that a friend brought to my attention during the debate earlier this week about student loan debt.
If you missed it, there’s a chance that a Biden administration will enact some form of loan forgiveness in response to the growing student debt crisis, and as a form of economic relief. There have been many bad takes in response, like the usual kind of silliness that young people could easily pay back their loans if they were more responsible with their money, which ignores skyrocketing tuition costs and essentially flat wages. But another response that is particularly bleak is that loan forgiveness would inspire widespread anger and resentment among those who already paid off their student loans. “Gonna be bad,” one columnist shittily concluded.
Just for the record, I finished paying off around $20,000 in debt just a few years ago (a pittance compared today’s higher ed costs) after about 20 years of monthly payments, missed payments, late payments, deferments, forebearances, tanked credit ratings, etc. And I can say, as someone with no small reservoir of anger and resentment, that it would never even occur to me to be angry and resentful that other people might be spared an awful financial burden, just because it’s one that I had to bear. I would like to think that’s the case for most people, but as Roxane Gay wrote about the issue today in the New York Times:
A great many Americans are only concerned with fairness when they think someone else might get something they won’t get. And they are seething with resentment as they imagine a country in which we help one another. It’s appalling, that this is where we are … that this is who we are.
The debate got me thinking about what the particular mindset is that would generate such seething, and how it feels similar to a form of anxiety over who deserves what and who stands to lose what they’re entitled to that feels very deeply woven into the climate crisis.
I tweeted something along these lines, and my friend Erin who is a teacher and extremely smart replied, “It’s also an exact allegory of Matthew 20:1-16.” So I looked it up and here it is you can go read the whole passage, which is also called the “Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard.”
But in a nutshell, Jesus says, imagine the kingdom of heaven as a landowner hiring people to work his in vineyard, and I’m very sorry it’s a he, that is just how land ownership was back in Jesus days. He hires some people first thing in the morning, and then some more people later in the afternoon, and promises to pay them each what is right. At the end of the day, everyone gets exactly one denarius, which is an old Roman coin equal to a day’s wage, regardless of how many hours they worked.
The people who started in the morning say, hey we are clearly getting shafted here, because we’ve been here all day, why don’t we get more denariuses or I think maybe denarii. And the landowner says take your money and GTFO please. Like I said, everyone gets a denarius.
“Or are you envious because I am generous?” he says, and then closes with the beautiful line: “So the last will be first, and the first will be last.”
This is kind of a weird parable, and people have different takes on it some say it’s about not being rude to religious converts. On one level it is a pretty straightforward story about how God’s grace is extended to everyone, no caveats or qualifiers. But you can also read it as a story about what equality actually looks like.
As one religious scholar put it, “So excessive is God’s propensity to give and care, it violates our instincts about fairness. Such justice looks rash.” Or as my friend Erin said about the parable, “It’s essentially, ‘to the privileged, equality looks like oppression’ in scripture form,” which is perfect.
So like I said, I’ve been thinking about the story, and it reminds me of Elizabeth Anderson’s writing about equality. (See last year’s pre-Thanksgiving issue for more on this.) She challenges the common formulation of “luck equality,” which takes pity on people who have experienced bad luck, and tries to compensate them, but only to the extent that they truly deserve. Instead, Anderson posits, everyone is entitled to a certain base level of shared dignity and well-being, merely because we are all human. Everyone gets a denarius.
You could say, well, that’s just Jesus for you he’s always off doing stuff like that, that is no way to run a vineyard. But as I understand it, the idea is that we all have that propensity for Jesus-level care within us. Or another way to put it, we all have the capacity to not give in to our least Jesus-like tendencies, aka wanting others to suffer just because we have suffered. Even further, we have a potential nature within us that takes joy in seeing others rise, and recognizes our mutual benefit when they do.
—
When I was initially considering how the student loan controversy and this parable relates to climate change, I was thinking about the tensions between wealthy and poor countries about who should bear the greatest responsibility for the transition from fossil fuels.
Wealthy nations like the United States have been burning carbon at industrial levels for decades longer than other nations, and therefore bear the overwhelming responsibility for climate change. On the other hand, less wealthy countries bear less responsibility based on past emissions, but often experience the worst impacts. Many of those countries are now rapidly increasing their emissions as they seek to improve their quality of life, so there’s been a rift over who should be held most responsible for global emissions reductions.
I get some serious morning vineyard worker vibes from wealthy nations in this scenario—resentment and unwillingness to sacrifice their own prosperity so that developing countries can seek the same quality of life. Of course, the allegory doesn’t map quite right, because in this case it would be like the workers who were hired in the morning spent the whole day lighting the vineyard on fire as they worked. But you follow me, the vibes are the same.
This week I also happened to be reading The Future We Choose, by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, which addresses this problem in one section. It adds another dimension, though, which is that the debate over who deserves what exists within a zero-sum model of the world’s resources, which was perhaps always false, but is now obsolete as we have to abandon our primary source of energy.
A fair outcome is not viable as long as we pursue it from a mindset of scarcity and competition. The state of the planet no longer allows for this mindset because we have reached existential scarcity: limits to the survival of many of the ecosystems that sustain us and that help to maintain safe greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere. If the Amazon is destroyed, carbon emissions will rise so high that the entire planet, not only Brazil, will suffer the consequences.
The authors argue that the previous, extractive paradigm was to compete over resources because we perceived them to be scarce. Now that they truly are scarce (because we have a firm limit on the carbon we can burn), if we continue to compete for what’s left, the planet will degrade such that everyone’s prosperity will collapse. On the other hand, if we can flip the script to generosity and collaboration, they argue, we can reach a state of abundance that benefits everyone.
This section, and the book overall, raises some challenging questions for me about how accountability coexists with cooperation. But the thing that is most appealing to me about their argument is that it starts from a status quo of self-interest, and instead of just making a plea for empathy with the poor, goes a step further to mutual benefit. This is not unlike the racial justice concept of collective liberation, in which I acknowledge that my interests are fused with yours. If you have a free college education, I’m not just happy for you, I also benefit.
If we fight over who gets a denarius, eventually all the denariuses go away and nobody gets any. If we say, Jesus style, everyone gets a denarius, the vineyard thrives as do we all.✓
Links
“Could it have been done without a tribal vote? No.”
For $25,000, you can publish a full page of climate denial in the Washington Post.
“The truth is not some compromise halfway between the truth and the lie … And the ethical is not halfway between white supremacists and human rights activists.”
One of the few good “understanding the Trump voter” articles. It basically boils down to protecting self-interest in a non-functioning democracy.
“The idea that the disagreement itself is an attack on free speech is a weapon used by the privileged” Emily VanDerWerff on the fallout from The Letter.
“Restaurants were by far the riskiest places, about four times riskier than gyms and coffee shops, followed by hotels.”
Our political crisis stems from a flawed system in which Republicans can win power while losing votes. They never have to appeal to the left or the center, leading to asymmetrical polarization.
A guy who was running a $35 million Ponzi scheme tried to run from the FBI by riding his submersible scooter into Shasta Lake, fully clothed.
Listening
25th December, Everything But The Girl
Watching
Great British Baking Show, season 10. One of the bakers really struggles with anxiety and everyone is so open about it and supportive of him it makes me want to cry.
He just could not get the beignets right.
That is all for this week friends, hope that gives you something to think about over the holiday RE: vineyards and denariuses and climate change. I won’t be sending a newsletter out next week but I will see you on the flipside. I hope everyone has a safe and healthy holiday and honestly just stay home it’s really not worth it. We will be having a two-person Thanksgiving this year with some video calls and I think it will be just fine.
If you are having a hard time, just imagine you and I and everyone else subscribed to this newsletter are having one big virtual Thanksgiving together and you can argue with my stupid opinions I don’t mind and we can all eat whatever we want and it will be super easy to sneak out to smoke weed and it will be the best Thanksgiving ever.
Don’t miscast the role of activists as a source of power to influence elections instead of in the pursuit of ideals
Traité de fauconnerie /.Leiden et Düsseldorf :Chez Arnz & Comp.,1844-1853
Talk began almost immediately after election night about the fate of the Democratic Party and to what extent it was a success or a failure, and who is to blame for the failure parts. As pretty much always happens, anything that goes not as well as expected (based on broken ass polling btw) gets blamed on the thing the blamer doesn’t like which is often progressives. The funniest version of this was when people like Andrew Sullivan were saying things like, the American people have rejected “wokeness,” as though his own loathing of they pronouns was a big motivating factor among the 2020 electorate.
But the complaints also extended into more material arguments, that ideas like defunding the police, Medicare for all, Black Lives Matter, opposition to fracking, and the Green New Deal were self-defeating forces for Democrats. Honestly, I don’t take a lot of these individual complaints that seriously, because conservative Democrats who make them are not actually concerned that they are strategic missteps; they just don’t like them as concepts and really don’t like that many of them have a lot of support. So it’s just not that surprising that people who oppose progressive policies would blame them for their political woes. I also don’t lose a lot of sleep over stances like defund the police being used in law-and-order GOP attack ads, because those ads are stoking white fear rather than differences over policy. When racist campaign strategies use activist messaging against Democrats, I don’t really see that as a problem for activists or Democrats.
But I do get the inner-conflict in recognizing the need for Democrats to win elections, and knowing that a good chunk of the electorate disagrees with the ideals that I would like Democrats to stand for. Take, for example, the tightrope that candidates like Mark Kelly have to walk in a freshly painted light blue state like Arizona. So I find it both understandable and troubling when people who I think really do share most of my political goals lament activists’ dedication to their ideals. This is usually expressed in terms like “litmus test” or “ideological purity,” another common one you hear is “circular firing squad.” The argument in all cases being, by clinging to certain principles, activists are stopping progress from being achieved.
This idea of ideological purity, that someone would accept and celebrate nothing but one outcome, can be a maddening one. But it’s a sentiment that I think is vastly overblown in terms of how pervasive and how powerful it is. It’s kind of like the “cancel culture” argument applied to elections, as though cranky ass leftists on Twitter somehow hold mystical power over the direction of the Democratic Party.✓
There’s another fundamental misunderstanding happening, though, when people make this argument even in good faith, which comes down to what roles different actors play within the push for social change. Specifically, it miscasts the role of activists merely as a source of power to influence the outcome of elections, instead of a force of power in the pursuit of certain ideals, in which elections are one important pathway. It’s the incorrect assumption that, even though activists’ goals may align with a political party’s during elections, that the two forces share the same interests, which often they do not.
I saw this in a tweet by a climate writer who I actually really like who, concerned about losing the Senate in Georgia along with hopes of climate legislation, expressed frustration over criticisms of Jon Ossoff, who opposes the Green New Deal and most of the progressive agenda. I don’t really want to put this writer on blast because it’s just a dumb old tweet so I will just viciously subtweet him here in my newsletter, but the argument was basically that the reason Democrats lose is because far-left activists push radical policies that successfully move the conversation forward, but then candidates can’t embrace those policies given the electorate they face, and activists turn those policies into litmus tests for support. Another version of this in the climate community that I’ve seen a bunch lately is, don’t turn on Dem politicians because they are opposed to fracking which fyi is the extraction and burning of fossil fuels which needs to end so we don’t die. A lot of people are out there talking about fracking like it’s Lil’ Sebastian or something.
Again, I get the impulse behind these concerns. Nobody wants to lose the Senate. But it is not progressive activists’ or climate activists’ job, nor is it their goal, to get Democrats into office. The expectation is that activists should enliven sections of the party’s base, and then when they are no longer useful in appealing to some imaginary median voter, be quiet and go away until they are once again needed. Regarding the backlash against “defund the police,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pointed out, “The idea that politicians can control activist messaging doesn’t make sense. They don’t work for us.”
Organizers behind the Green New Deal are a good example of this. Through a combination of protests and uncompromising messaging about climate urgency, groups that rallied around the Green New Deal totally altered the discourse around climate change policy. Many Dem candidates incorporated elements of the Green New Deal into their campaign platforms if not adopting it in everything but name. But many of them distanced themselves from the Green New Deal itself, fearing it would alienate some voters. Biden was one of them, but Sunrise worked its ass off to get him elected anyway. Does that mean that Sunrise should stop using the Green New Deal as its standard for climate policy? Absolutely not, because their job is pulling society toward that goal—not getting Joe Biden into office. As organizers with the Working Families Party and M4BL have been putting it, the Biden administration is doorway, not a destination.
That example also points to another misunderstanding, the idea that when activists are committed to certain radical ideals, they somehow betray the chances of Democratic candidates to win. In reality, it is often progressives, who may disagree with much of any given Democratic candidate’s platform, who work tirelessly to get them into office, as seen in the enormous multiracial GOTV push in key states this year. I’m sure there are some people out there who didn’t vote because Biden wasn’t far enough to the left. But in my experience, while people were wringing their hands about litmus tests and ideological purity, the activist left was working overtime to get Biden into office, knowing the enormous implications of the election, even though Biden himself may throw much of their agenda under the bus.
In other words, don’t underestimate activists’ ability to be unwavering in their ideals, while still living with the complexity of the political world. This is a combination of ideas that I seem to keep coming back to in terms of what I believe my job is, both as an activist and a journalist or writer—maintaining clarity of purpose and principle alongside comfort with complexity and uncertainty.
One final point here is that, when people talk about these activist slogans that they deem counterproductive, they often talk about them as though they are these arbitrary lines drawn in the sand. In reality, these are driven by pain experienced in communities. The Green New Deal (which by the way is itself flawed), isn’t defined by what’s politically popular; it’s defined by what’s actually necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change. Communities organically embraced the concept of defunding the police, not because it polled well, but because police keep killing and incarcerating Black people and no reform efforts will make it stop. People support Medicare for all because of their basic moral belief that everyone should have access to healthcare, and knowing or being among the millions who do not. More than slogans, they are needs.
On that note, I will close with part of this article Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor published recently that is very worth a read, and she gets into a lot of the weaknesses within the Democratic Party and the battle for what it stands for that I didn’t have time to get into.
The need in this country dwarfs the best of what Biden has put on the table for changing our current condition. But the demonstrations of the summer, the ongoing campaigns for mutual aid, and the growing movement against evictions are demonstrable proof that power is not only generated in mainstream politics but can be garnered through collective organizing and acts of solidarity. They also foretell a future in which the country does not return to a long-forgotten normal but is animated by protests, strikes, occupations, and the ongoing struggle for food, medicine, care, housing, justice, and democracy.
Sunrise Movement and Justice Democrats put together a wish list for Biden’s cabinet, which proposes a new Office of Climate Mobilization and Rep. Deb Haaland, a Pueblo of Laguna member, as secretary of Interior.
Trump’s most profound legacy may be the irreversible damage his administration did to the climate in just four years.
Tucson, AZ, where my heart resides no matter where I live, had its hottest and driest summer on record. The city has committed to becoming a global leader in climate justice.
Loren Connors, Airs. Here’s a nice track from it but you gotta listen to the whole thing because it is very soothing. Also check out Blues: The ‘Dark Paintings’ of Mark Rothko but it’s maybe a little less accessible than Airs.
Reading
I decided to pick up some lighthearted reading to get through the election anxiety.
Comics
I’ve mentioned this anthology series before, but if you have an interest in indie comics and especially if you don’t have a great comic store in your area, there is just no better way to spend 13 bucks than on an issue of the NOW Comics Anthology. Put out periodically by Fantagraphics, it always features a who’s who of exciting cartoonists, well-established and newcomers. Here’s one of its best covers, a recent stunner by Al Columbia:
Well the past couple of weeks have been something. If you are like me, between the virus and the election, you have been living in an endless cycle of dread and acclimation, punctuated by fleeting moments of hope.
Saturday and Sunday, for example, there was this wonderful feeling of relief because there is now a point on the horizon where this evil motherfucker perhaps won’t loom over all of us, all the time. I heard so many people saying on Saturday night they slept for like 10, 12 hours. I collapsed into an hourlong nap after the election was called Saturday afternoon. Some of that relief is still there, but the fact that one party is still not recognizing the clear outcome of an American election is fairly terrifying, if predictable RE: see chart above.
Lot of thoughts kicking around I kind of feel like this one wasn’t that fully baked but that’s newsletter life. Muddling through these days, by way of a cocktail of Avatar the Last Airbender, Stardew Valley, and books about nihilism. And poetry. Everyone seemed to like the poem last week I was very happy to hear it.
Whatever your Stardew Valley is, maybe it’s skincare routines or old episodes of Bones, don’t feel bad about it and hang in there. We are gonna get through this winter I promise you.
Well it has been quite an exhausting week or month or insert period of time here. It is looking increasingly certain that Joe Biden will be the next president and 45 is on his way, in as slow and undignified manner as he can muster, to the shit bucket of history. Not going to lie, there may be some amount of champagne on the horizon, but if you are like me, the thoughts and emotions you are working through right now are…complex.
I decided that instead of the usual email this week, I would share some words that have provided me some strength and comfort over the past few days, in hopes that they will do the same for you. I first heard the poem You Are Who I Love, by Aracelis Girmay, on The Slowdown on the morning of election day and have kind of carried it around in my head like a lifejacket since.
For me, it serves as a reminder that no matter what happens at any given point in history, we are all part of a struggle that is much larger than any one of us or any particular moment. As enormous as the stakes of this election are, it is just one step in a long, unceasing push for a just world, and in that fight, none of us will never be alone.
Aracelis was generous enough to give her enthusiastic permission to republish this beautiful poem for you all. You can buy collections of her work here, here, and here.
You Are Who I Love
Aracelis Girmay
You, selling roses out of a silver grocery cart
You, in the park, feeding the pigeons You cheering for the bees
You with cats in your voice in the morning, feeding cats
You protecting the river You are who I love delivering babies, nursing the sick
You with henna on your feet and a gold star in your nose
You taking your medicine, reading the magazines
You looking into the faces of young people as they pass, smiling and saying, Alright! which, they know it, means I see you, Family. I love you. Keep on.
You dancing in the kitchen, on the sidewalk, in the subway waiting for the train because Stevie Wonder, Héctor Lavoe, La Lupe
You stirring the pot of beans, you, washing your father’s feet
You are who I love, you reciting Darwish, then June
Feeding your heart, teaching your parents how to do The Dougie, counting to 10, reading your patients’ charts
You are who I love, changing policies, standing in line for water, stocking the food pantries, making a meal
You are who I love, writing letters, calling the senators, you who, with the seconds of your body (with your time here), arrive on buses, on trains, in cars, by foot to stand in the January streets against the cool and brutal offices, saying: YOUR CRUELTY DOES NOT SPEAK FOR ME
You are who I love, you struggling to see
You struggling to love or find a question
You better than me, you kinder and so blistering with anger, you are who I love, standing in the wind, salvaging the umbrellas, graduating from school, wearing holes in your shoes
You are who I love weeping or touching the faces of the weeping
You, Violeta Parra, grateful for the alphabet, for sound, singing toward us in the dream
You carrying your brother home You noticing the butterflies
Sharing your water, sharing your potatoes and greens
You who did and did not survive You who cleaned the kitchens You who built the railroad tracks and roads You who replanted the trees, listening to the work of squirrels and birds, you are who I love You whose blood was taken, whose hands and lives were taken, with or without your saying Yes, I mean to give. You are who I love.
You who the borders crossed You whose fires You decent with rage, so in love with the earth You writing poems alongside children
You cactus, water, sparrow, crow You, my elder You are who I love, summoning the courage, making the cobbler,
getting the blood drawn, sharing the difficult news, you always planting the marigolds, learning to walk wherever you are, learning to read wherever you are, you baking the bread, you come to me in dreams, you kissing the faces of your dead wherever you are, speaking to your children in your mother’s languages, tootsing the birds
You are who I love, behind the library desk, leaving who might kill you, crying with the love songs, polishing your shoes, lighting the candles, getting through the first day despite the whisperers sniping fail fail fail
You are who I love, you who beat and did not beat the odds, you who knows that any good thing you have is the result of someone else’s sacrifice, work, you who fights for reparations
You are who I love, you who stands at the courthouse with the sign that reads NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE
You are who I love, singing Leonard Cohen to the snow, you with glitter on your face, wearing a kilt and violet lipstick
You are who I love, sighing in your sleep
You, playing drums in the procession, you feeding the chickens and humming as you hem the skirt, you sharpening the pencil, you writing the poem about the loneliness of the astronaut
You wanting to listen, you trying to be so still
You are who I love, mothering the dogs, standing with horses
You in brightness and in darkness, throwing your head back as you laugh, kissing your hand
You carrying the berbere from the mill, and the jug of oil pressed from the olives of the trees you belong to
You studying stars, you are who I love braiding your child’s hair
You are who I love, crossing the desert and trying to cross the desert
You are who I love, working the shifts to buy books, rice, tomatoes,
bathing your children as you listen to the lecture, heating the kitchen with the oven, up early, up late
You are who I love, learning English, learning Spanish, drawing flowers on your hand with a ballpoint pen, taking the bus home
You are who I love, speaking plainly about your pain, sucking your teeth at the airport terminal television every time the politicians say something that offends your sense of decency, of thought, which is often
You are who I love, throwing your hands up in agony or disbelief, shaking your head, arguing back, out loud or inside of yourself, holding close your incredulity which, yes, too, I love I love
your working heart, how each of its gestures, tiny or big, stand beside my own agony, building a forest there
How “Fuck you” becomes a love song
You are who I love, carrying the signs, packing the lunches, with the rain on your face
You at the edges and shores, in the rooms of quiet, in the rooms of shouting, in the airport terminal, at the bus depot saying “No!” and each of us looking out from the gorgeous unlikelihood of our lives at all, finding ourselves here, witnesses to each other’s tenderness, which, this moment, is fury, is rage, which, this moment, is another way of saying: You are who I love You are who I love You and you and you are who
Listening
Nothing but respect for my president.
OK that’s all for this week. The next couple of days I will be thinking a lot about all the different people who made what is happening now possible, and how we can honor each other and stand shoulder to shoulder to make much, much more possible: Latinx and Native voters and organizers in Arizona, Black voters and organizers in Detroit and Atlanta and Philadelphia, Stacey Abrams and the New Georgia Project and Georgia Stand-Up, young climate activists at Sunrise and beyond who talked to millions of voters, The Frontline, United We Dream, Movement for Black Lives, Working Families Party, LUCHA, people in the streets demanding that we count every vote, everyone who texted, called, voted, donated, volunteered at polls, and on and on and on.
I will see you all next week and we will do it again.
Mitch goes for a swim, from The Beach House (2019).
Welcome to the second annual Haunted Palace, the spooktacular Halloween edition of this newsletter, which should give you a good scare. You can read last year’s edition here. Also, there will be spoilers for the movie The Beach House ahead.
Jeffrey A. Brown’s 2019 indie horror movie The Beach House has probably become best known for a rather gross scene involving improvised foot surgery, but one of its most unsettling moments happens before things get quite so bad for its characters. Kindly baby boomer Mitch, played by Jake Weber with a perfect mix of forced optimism and anxiety, is sitting on the beach with our younger protagonist Emily, and begins to lose his grip on things. He and his wife Jane, who is terminally ill, wanted to have one last visit to their favorite vacation spot, but at this point in the movie it’s becoming clear that something is very wrong with the water and the air surrounding them, making the people sharing the titular beach house increasingly sick and disoriented.
After some sad reflection, Mitch gets up, says “Fine fine, everything is fine. I think I’ll go for a swim,” walks into the beautiful blue ocean, swims out until he is just a tiny black dot (see above), and then he disappears and never comes back.
This is just one of the fun ways in which the four main characters, pointedly divided by a generation, come to terms with the realization that their peaceful vacation environment—starting with the food, then the water, and finally the air—has turned on them. The culprit, it’s revealed somewhat ambiguously toward the end of the film, is some creepy glowing microbes released from the bottom of the ocean as a result of its warming, infecting animal life and causing things like really gross bathroom problems, decaying skin, and sort of turning into a zombie.
You’re going to want to run that through a Brita.
I found The Beach House to be one of the more effective examples of eco-horror in recent history, mainly because the microbes are used not so much as a literal environmental impact to be afraid of when you turn on the tap. Rather, they are a device to conjure the combination of ambient dread and occasional violence experienced while living on a planet that is becoming more and more hostile to us. This weird sensation of our shifting relationship with the planet—being in awe of it, feeling like we have done something really bad to it, and finally, recognizing that we are just a speck of dust in its long history. And the question the movie poses over and over is, once you’ve taken all that in, how scared should you be?
That makes it sound like this big pretentious movie, but it actually takes place on a very small, personal stage, and with almost zero literal discussion of climate change or even environmental degradation. That actually makes it far more successful as an eco-horror film than (IMO) failures like Barry Levinson’s too-on-the-nose The Bay (2012) or Darren Aronofsky’s heavy-handed allegory mother! (2017). It’s also beautifully, anxiously shot, making peaceful coastal settings weirdly menacing (it’s shot on precariously water-locked Cape Cod).
Swimming into the void
One eye-rolly thing is that the story involves white, middle-class people coping with environmental health threats like toxic air and water that, on some level, poor and marginalized communities have been actually living with since the dawn of industry. But I think that’s actually key to the story, which is that these four people, one young couple and another on the far side of middle age, have largely viewed their environment as a source of comfort or play, and it’s now attacking them for the first time. A little before he takes his long walk off a short beach, Mitch realizes that the vacation town is eerily vacant (it is because everyone is dead).
“It was always so beautiful here, but this time, I don’t know, something is off. The thing we liked about coming here was that it was so comfortable. The same weather, the same rooms, the same furniture. They were frozen in time.”
Things certainly are off, but before things get killer-oyster, skin-falling-off bad, the generational differences are hashed out in a weed-and-wine-infused dinner party. Our hero Emily’s spoiled on and off boyfriend Randall, who I imagine having spent a lot of time harassing people on red rose Twitter, wants to retreat from society; he’s dropped out of college and wants Emily to come live in his parents’ vacation home with him indefinitely. “What’s the point of an education? Just to get a job? There has to be something else. What’s underneath all of this. Marriage, kids, taxes, bills, watching television, bills, sports on Sunday.”
He calls Emily’s grad school aspirations “bullshit,” but they are anything but to her. She studies organic chemistry, focusing on origins of life, giving her a kind of warm stoicism about our place in geological history, as she describes a universe mostly hostile to life as we know it. “Life is so fragile. We’re the right combination of elements, the temperature, the right distance from the sun.… One thing slightly off and we would be nothing. Dust or gas or something. I’m in awe of it.”
For the older couple Mitch and Jane, there’s a kind of willful, but not entirely unsympathetic disconnect with reality. They just want things to be the way they were before, and the fact that they are changing is terrifying to them, exacerbated by the fact that Jane is sick and dying. “You kids today, how you see the world. It’s so different. All the information out there. It’s scary,” Mitch says to Emily. “I think that’s why I put my head down and focus on our baseball team.”
“Don’t be scared,” she says. “The doors that could be opened because of that information, it should make life more beautiful.”
We’re made to feel that her optimism and openness to whatever the future holds is admirable, but the story’s end leaves us a darker message.
—
An underlying theme in The Beach House is that there’s a narrow set of planetary circumstances that make it possible for human life to thrive, and those circumstances are not guaranteed. This is also a core message behind David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, which I happened to be reading when I watched this movie. I have no idea if Jeffrey Brown was influenced by this book, but they both speak to a certain flavor of climate dread.
The book is based on Wallace-Wells’ feature by the same name, which made a huge impact in climate communications for being one of the first popular articles that unflinchingly spelled out the worst case scenarios of climate change. I didn’t love everything about it (until the afterword, he keeps more of a writerly distance from assigning blame and heroism than I prefer), but it’s a beautifully written, affecting book.
Deliberately alarmist, I think it got kind of miscast as a science book that’s predicting the future, when really it’s more of a philosophical thought experiment, teasing out the extremes to reframe the way we think about climate change. He pushes the boundaries of our expectations to kind of knock loose the mental and emotional block many people have constructed around the issue.
One such extreme that already feels closer than when the book published is the loss of some base level of comfort and dependability in our environment. As Wallace-Wells writes:
Governor Jerry Brown first described the state of things in the midst of the state’s wildfire disaster: “a new normal.” The truth is actually much scarier. That is, the end of normal; never normal again. We have already exited the state of environmental conditions that allowed the human animal to evolve in the first place, in an unsure and unplanned bet on just what that animal can endure. The climate system that raised us, and raised everything we now know as human culture and civilization, is now, like a parent, dead.
In one of my favorite climate books, by Elizabeth Kolbert, she makes a similar observation, that if you go back far enough into the climate record, humans weren’t able to develop into what we think of as civilization until all of our ingenuity and unique talents were finally paired with an amenable climate, which emerged about 10,000 years ago. In planetary time, that’s a blip.
Another form of climate terror, illustrated in The Beach House’s barrage of threats coming from air, land, and sea, is the idea that since industrialization, but especially in the past 30 years, humanity’s carbon emissions have been equipping the planet with an arsenal to attack us with. Wallace-Wells again:
However sanguine you might be about the proposition that we have already ravaged the natural world, which we surely have, it is another thing entirely to consider the possibility that we have only provoked it, engineering first in ignorance and then in denial a climate system that will now go to war with us for many centuries, perhaps until it destroys us. That is what Wally Broecker, the avuncular oceanographer, meant when he called the planet an “angry beast.” You could also go with “war machine.” Each day we arm it more.
The world is not just changing irrevocably, it is actually turning against us. And the absolute worst-case scenario at the end of one long and dark potential timeline is what he calls “zero earth,” or “the livable planet darkening as it approaches a human dusk.”
To be clear, Wallace-Wells doesn’t expect this outcome to occur, and is more optimistic than you might expect. But the fact that “we have brought that nightmare eventuality into play at all is perhaps the overwhelming cultural and historical fact of the modern era.”
I actually kept thinking while reading this book that it is a fitting companion to Eugene Thacker’s Horror of Philosophy trilogy, starting with In the Dust of This Planet (Wallace-Wells even seems to slyly reference the book at one point). Maybe his most famous concept is his formulation of three worlds. The world-for-us describes the world as we experience it and are a part of it, the thing we walk around in all day tra la la off to the store to get some food. The world-in-itself is the world that doesn’t really give a shit about us, “which often ‘bites back,’ resists, or ignores our attempts to mold it into the world-for-us.” That is the one that is dealing us these blows, setting loose deadly microbes to ruin our vacations.
Finally, there is the world-without-us, the world that exists outside of human experience. For Thacker, this world is always there just beyond our comprehension, and the terror of its inaccessibility is a big part of his writing. But it also describes the world in which humans are one day extinct. Climate change is forcing us to bump up against the idea of a world-without-us.
Part of the difficulty in relating to a planetary problem like climate change is that it smooshes together all of these worlds in stressful ways. The world we try to shape to our will, the world that bites back at us, and the world in which are not even a thing. We are heroes, villains, and a speck of dust, all at once.
—
What do we do with this knowledge? How do we walk around and live as ordinary people who gotta figure out what to have for dinner? The Uninhabitable Earth explores this to an extent, discussing what shape ethics and politics might take in the future, and how we will make sense of this growing societal dread. He talks about the emergence of “climate nihilism,” and writes, not very fondly, of the Paul Kingsnorths who argue for submission and retreat. These are the petulant Randalls of the world, who want to give up and live in a vacation home, or the exasperated Mitches, starting a slow, mindless swim into oblivion.
I think this section of The Uninhabitable Earth is the least successful, but probably because it asks the hardest questions. You can feel the author’s inner-conflict, just as it’s probably apparent that I don’t have much of a clear outlook here myself. I honestly really like the way Thacker’s nihilism decenters and humbles humanity. The acceptance of it is calming. But I find the self-congratulatory withdrawal of writers like Jonathan Franzen to be revolting. (Mary Annaïse Heglar calls them “the sadbois.”) I guess I’m trying to sort out the path from dread, to acceptance, to resolve.
At the end of The Beach House, Emily’s efforts to escape the infection ultimately fail, leaving us with an outcome as ambiguous as our own. The implication is that this is an extinction event, although with a hint that life is merely being transformed into something new. In the final scene we see her lying on the beach, eyes milky white, repeating to herself what she said to Mitch as he looked to the future in fear. “Don’t be scared, don’t be scared, don’t be scared, don’t be scared,” and then a wave crashes over her, leaving nothing behind.
I’ve mentioned before that every October I watch nothing but scary movies. I watched more than usual this month, a pretty incredible 26 and counting, as a result of far more time spent trapped in the house than in typical years. Horror movies are weird because sometimes the best ones aren’t scary and the worst ones are scary and sometimes you like them even if they aren’t that good or that scary. The majority of the movies I watched this month were so-so, as it goes, but some good ones, including:
Blood Quantum (thanks Theresa)
Host (not The Host, which is also very good)
What Keeps You Alive
Night of the Demons
The Ritual
Phase IV
Scare Me
Ready or Not
Black Water
Relic
Well, I have to say, this is certainly the scariest Halloween I can recall. Downright terrifying. No links this week just because. Voting, calling, texting, worrying, worrying.
Marc Maron said in an email last week, “We are actually scared for our lives in so many ways. So if you are experiencing fatigue, increased heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, trembling, weakness, trouble concentrating, trouble sleeping, gastrointestinal issues, panic, dizziness, aches and pains, grinding of your jaw, headaches, loss of appetite, increase of appetite and/or muscle tension it might just be an unconscious response to life and what is happening in the world right now.”
I know this sentiment has been expressed a lot lately, but I like how Marc listed off the actual symptoms I found that helpful.
I obviously have no idea what’s going to happen next week and it may be a different world of sorts when I send the next newsletter. But you know what, after Tuesday, you will be here and I will be here, and this will be our home and we will be surrounded by people we love and who love us back, no matter what. Don’t be scared.
Climate action, we were told, would be distant, gradual, and painless
Butterflies and moths,.London & Edinburgh,T.C. & E.C. Jack[1910].
I was going to write about something else today but I was reading about the debate last night and there was some climate talk that actually seemed interesting and relevant to big climate questions. Especially as I’m reading The Uninhabitable Earth (which I will write more about at some point) it had me thinking about the way even advocates have been perhaps misguidedly talking about climate change for many years, and even though things are shifting, the mainstream discourse is still pretty far behind, despite it finally becoming an upper-tier issue. So this is going to be a classic, CP season 1 style, from the hip climate screed let’s go!
First, for those who didn’t watch the debate—which includes me because I decided years ago that I would no longer engage with politics as a sporting event—there were, I believe 12 minutes of discussion on climate change. A lot of it was Trump relying on, really his only communications strategy, which is known as “flooding the zone with shit,” so some talk about wind fumes and tiny windows, etc. This led to honestly a pretty solid brag in which he told Biden “I know more about wind than you do.” There was also talk of environmental justice which is amazing, good for the host, and then some debate about the oil industry.
The big headline was that Biden said he wants the country to “transition away from the oil industry” including putting an end to fossil fuel subsidies. These are both things Biden is solidly on the record as supporting, and honestly, non-controversial at this point. But it’s being treated as revelation, or a gaffe, or a downright scandal by the right, who are like oh my god he admit it. Part of this is just Republican climate denial, because ceasing to use oil as fuel would sound preposterous if you are trying to live in a self-fabricated reality where climate change is not happening.
But the fact that this is even viewed as remotely controversial in a discussion about climate change makes me think that climate communicators and advocates have failed to convey both the urgency of the problem and the need to actually end the fossil fuel industry.
That climate came up at all, and has been coming up more on the national stage, is somewhat encouraging. Trump actually tried to get climate removed from last night’s debate agenda and failed, likely knowing it’s become a losing issue. Such shifts, along with improving public opinion numbers, represent a huge victory for the climate movement, albeit in tandem with the failure of having it take this long, surely fed by intensifying disasters. It’s a signal nonetheless that denial and evasion as an opposition strategy is losing its effectiveness. Republicans can’t really get away with saying oh this isn’t real—now they have to say, well maybe it is real, and sure we’ll plant some trees, build some new technology, but we’re not going to actually stop burning fossil fuels come on now.
But the exchange also made it clear that even people who are solidly pro-climate action like Joe Biden, the majority of Democrats, and even climate advocates, are still struggling with how to talk about a problem whose solution requires a rapid dismantling and rebuilding of the entire global economy. Now that the center stage debate over is this real or is this fake is seemingly on its way out (a strategy that, by the way, likely delayed action to the point that what we do now is far too late), the new debate is turning into, how fast must we act and how much are we willing to disrupt the status quo.
This came up in the Democratic primary, when candidates largely agreed on long-term goals, but only Jay Inslee seemed to convey what that would require politically in the short-term. As David Roberts wrote way, way back then:
Democrats have never really grappled with the details of aggressive short-term climate policy. And because the unbroken wall of Republican opposition makes substantial federal climate policy impossible anyway and perpetually holds the debate to the remedial “is it real” level, Democrats never really get called on it.
When pushed even a tiny bit on this front last night, Biden crumbled immediately, backpedaling to say oh I only meant federal subsidies are going away, and “we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.” But anyone who is serious about stopping catastrophic climate change cannot credibly, simultaneously say that we are going to keep burning fossil fuels for a long time.
Some of what is going on here is obviously political posturing for key states that currently do a lot of fossil fuel extraction. But I feel like it also speaks to climate scientists’ and the climate movement’s failure to emphasize the urgency and enormity of the problem, and the over-reliance on rosy narratives about renewable market share.
For so long, the conventional wisdom was to pull your punches and give optimistic narratives, in large part because in the early days especially, the challenge was getting people to not immediately tune the issue out. I remember an early climate change campaign I worked on in maybe 2006 was for a renewable portfolio standard in Oregon, and the literature we’d hand out featured a rainbow kite blowing in the wind on the beach. For years after that, messaging was all about green jobs and high speed rail being cool, and a lot of it still is. At the same time, plans and commitments to climate action seemed to be eternally looking several decades out. Climate action, we were told, would be distant, gradual, and painless.
This is a big problem with "climate pledges," even those from governments and corporations. Check this out: I, Tate Williams, pledge to end climate change by 2040. Talk to you in 20 years goodbye!
It’s hard to deny, even if it made sense at the time, that this framing has not served us well. A major shift in that narrative came when the IPCC released its bombshell 2018 report that, in fact, action needs to be rapid, drastic, and start immediately. The world needs to get to net zero emissions by 2050 and cut annual emissions in half in just 12 years (now just 10 years). Even if you are banking on a very large amount of carbon removal (a topic for another day), that feat demands breakneck phasing out of fossil fuel use. And we are doing a pretty lousy job so far. If nations hit all of their existing pledges and commitments, we are still likely headed toward unprecedented human suffering at nearly 3 degrees of warming—and very few countries are on track for even that.
Another problem is that market environmentalism has fixated on increasing market share and lowering the costs of renewables like wind and solar, with far less attention paid to actually stopping the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The expansion of renewables is truly one of the bright spots in climate action. But counterintuitively, more wind turbines and solar panels don’t necessarily mean lower emissions. As David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth:
Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it.
To be fair, in recent years, there has been an encouraging rise of “leave it in the ground” messaging and supply side activism in the climate movement, which hopefully will continue to gain momentum. But oil production grinds on. The United States has become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and a report from Oil Change International found that between 2018 and 2050, the United States is set to unleash the world’s largest burst of CO2 emissions as a result of new oil and gas development. California, a leader in renewable energy policy, nonetheless ranks fourth in the nation for crude oil production. Meanwhile, as Wallace-Wells writes, “a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies.”
All of this is to say that, even among elected officials and candidates who believe in climate change and the need for action, very few are bringing the real talk about the level of change and disruption to our current economy and our lives that this problem requires. Namely, that an entire industry has to die. And we have to kill it. Not just any industry, but one that in large part has powered centuries of comfort and prosperity in the Global North.
That doesn’t mean we should be cheerily marching into a horror show of economic hemorrhage. This is where the importance of a just transition comes in, and plans like the Green New Deal’s emphasis on job creation, economic justice, and building a new economy. Making the transition will be very, very hard in the short term, but it can also be a portal to a more just and sane society. And besides, it’s our only option. Perhaps the most important factor that politicians rarely talk about is that inaction has a price tag that is many times higher than action. Joe Biden says his climate plan will cost $2 trillion over four years. That may sound like a lot, but remember that the US so far has spent $6 trillion on its coronavirus response. One report estimated global damages incurred if we hit 3.7 degrees of global warming at $551 trillion.
So the narrative shift needed is not that the change ahead is going to be fucking horrible so buckle up. It’s that we are about to enter, regardless of which path we take, a totally different world than the one we are in now. We can’t keep this world, so to keep talking about it as a baseline we need to protect is out of step with reality. It’s gone already. The debate last night was an illustration of how far along each political party—and to some extent mainstream America—is in understanding that reality. And how much work the movement has ahead of us in getting people there.
Links
Thousands of children were separated from their families by the Trump administration, and the parents of 545 of those children still can’t be found. Some were babies when they were separated, meaning they have not been with their parents for most of their lives.
“Our social, environmental and economic systems seem to have entered a liminal space between the old world but not quite fully formed in the new. Far from bouncing back to ‘normal,’ they may be on the precipice of something new and strange.”
There’s some crazy shit going down in Boston Schools including that the Boston School Committee Chairperson had to resign after mocking ethnic names in a public Zoom meeting.
MA State Police basically never fires any of its troopers, even if they drunkenly lead local cops on a car chase and have to be tackled and handcuffed, among other indiscretions.
Remember all those trees that were going to be removed in one of Boston’s mostly Black neighborhoods? Well the city is backing down!
Here’s a great interview with Jay Rosen on why the media fails at covering Trump over and over and why fact checking and standing up to him still works in his favor.
At first I saw this and was like seriously, I do not care at all if these actual adults can’t go to Disneyland, but you know what, after reading this I get it because we all have our stupid bullshit.
If this week you were like wtf is Quibi, here you go this explains why it failed including because it was stupid.
Listening
Here this song will help you.
This one is probably a little rough and maybe too many swears because my dudes I am tired. Vote yet? We got ours in last week Jamie dropped them off in the box at City Hall. I’ve been phonebanking with LUCHA and Seed the Vote, and text banking with The Frontline. Both are very easy to do from the comfort of your living room if you are looking to do some volunteering with grassroots groups building power before and after the election. There is also a big day of action in the works on October 27 check it out.
I know the calls and flyers and texts and emails are maybe getting annoying. They may feel intrusive or repetitive. Democracy is honestly pretty annoying but it is not nearly as annoying as not democracy. As a wise sage recently said, it’s a team sport. So whenever you are thinking ah jesus another call, just try to think of it as your periodic reminder that you are a part of something beautiful and bigger than yourself. And if you get an election text from me you can tell me to fuck off if it makes you feel better I won’t mind.
A conversation with Tamiko Beyer. ‘Poetry is this moment where you can actually start to shift reality through language.’
From Birds of America (1827) by John James Audubon (1785 – 1851 ).
Tamiko Beyer is a poet, writer, activist, and communications strategist. Her 2013 poetry collection We Come Elemental is a beautiful meditation on humanity’s relationship with our environment, and boundaries between the self and our surroundings that are not as sharp as we may think. The recipient of several awards, fellowships, and residencies for her creative writing, Tamiko was also deputy communications director for Corporate Accountability for years, before moving to a part-time role to devote more time to her writing.
In April, Tamiko will publish a new collection, Last Days, from Alice James Books. Ai-jen Poo, executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance says of Last Days, “To those who have been in the fight a long time, who are tired, who want to rest, and who want to win, these are vital, nourishing, life-giving words.”
As she began to prepare for the book’s release, Tamiko says she was getting increasingly uneasy about taking part in the usual sales-focused dog and pony show that is the author book tour. She and her partner Patti Lynn, who is executive director of Corporate Accountability, hatched a plan to instead raise money to buy hundreds of copies of the book from her publisher and, along with copies of poet Gabrielle Civil’s forthcoming chapbook, give them away to organizers and activists. The campaign will happen in conjunction with a series of events she’s currently planning with peers from the arts and social justice work.
I’m also proud to call Tamiko a friend, so I was excited to get on the phone recently to talk about her unusual, anti-capitalist book launch, the relationship between art and social change, and whether poetry can change the world. It was a great conversation I think you will enjoy it.
You know, we’ve obviously talked many times, and I’ve read your poetry, but we’ve never really talked very much about your poetry, so I’m excited to learn more about your work. But first, what has your life has been like lately? What’s giving you comfort or joy? And how are you coping?
Being outside has really been a huge source of comfort and inspiration. I live very close to the Neponset River, so I try to go out for a walk almost every day. When the pandemic first started, people talked about paying attention to nature and the changes, so I feel like it’s kind of a cliche, but it’s really true. Since March I’ve been so much more aware of the whole cycle now from spring through autumn. Developing that kind of relationship with my very immediate surroundings has been really beautiful. So that’s been a huge thing.
At the beginning of the pandemic, I did a lot of mutual aid stuff and making food for people. And that felt like, okay, I’m doing something, you know. And then it got to be a little too much and not sustainable. So I’ve scaled back on that. But I feel more connected to my community. Dorchester Community Care was the mutual aid network that came up out of that, and it’s run by people at the Asian American Resource Workshop and the Dorchester Not for Sale folks. So now I’m kind of hooked into that and also hooked into the BIJAN network.
I also started an anti-racism accountability group through RadComms, a network of radical communicators, which was started after the 2016 election by Shanelle Matthews, who’s involved in the Movement for Black Lives. Some of the people in the network are organizing others in the network to be in these accountability circles. That’s just starting, but I’m excited about it.
So that has been, not necessarily a source of comfort, but I derive meaning from doing that kind of work. And then I have my projects that I am focused on, which also, I feel like I get a lot of fulfillment and meaning from.
I thought we might talk about some sort of big picture stuff, like how you think of your poetry in the context of your activism. I know only a little bit about this history of poetry and social change, but I was reading about how during the Iranian Revolution, there were these nightly poetry readings that were very sharply political and the Shah eventually shut them down. I wonder if you see yourself as part of this tradition of using poetry for social change?
Yeah, I definitely do. That’s interesting. I didn’t know about the Iranian poetry readings, but I can see that happening. I feel like in so many histories of oppressive governments, poetry has often been used as subversion and to communicate things that are dangerous to communicate in prose. I’m thinking about how there’s this organization called Kundiman, which is for Asian American readers and writers, but it’s based on this Filipino word that means love poem. And during the colonial occupation of the Philippines, they would write love poems, but everybody would know that the lover was the country under occupation, rather than a person. And I think about that a lot.
And just here in the US, there’s just been such a long tradition of, especially poets of color, using poetry or writing poetry as resistance. I think about simply writing as a person of color, and there’s a lot of things I could say about that, but in terms of your question, yeah, it’s definitely how I came into poetry. Some of my earliest influences were Adrienne Rich and Audre Lord and Joy Harjo, and then this Japanese American poet Mitsuye Yamada, who was imprisoned during World War Two, and she published a whole book of poems that she wrote there and afterwards. And so that’s really how I came to understand myself as a poet, as writing in this tradition.
I suspect for a lot of people, they might feel like that tradition isn’t very prominent in the United States, maybe they are not exposed to poetry very often. I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about how it does exist here, and any other examples of poets who have had a big impact on American culture or American social movements.
I’m thinking about American social movements, and in the 1960s in the Civil Rights Movement, there were many Black poets. When you were asking me the question, the person who came to mind immediately is Nikki Giovanni.
But I guess I’m kind of grappling with two different things. I think poetry has been marginalized in American culture for a long time. I think within the poetry world there has been a tendency towards being insular. And there’s this whole messed up system where really the only way you can make a living as a poet is if you’re in academia, and that comes with a whole set of things. So I think there’s been this trend of poetry being not relevant. But I actually think of that as mostly white poetry. [Laughs] I think in many communities of color, poetry has always been an important thing.
Language shapes so much of our reality, and usually, we don’t have much of a say in how that happens. But poetry is this moment where you can actually start to shift reality, just through the materiality of the language.
So I think about Saul Williams, who was like the first person who made slam poetry famous. That oral storytelling and using language, speaking language out loud to community. It’s like the cyphers, you know, the hip hop tradition. So that’s in the Black community. And then I think Asian American poetry was very marginalized for a long time, but now there’s this kind of Renaissance, actually a Renaissance of many poets of color.
I think that it just hasn’t been mainstream. It hasn’t been like part of the academy or the literary world. And all of the poets who win prizes and all that, it has always been a struggle for poets of color to be recognized and valued. But I think that’s really changing. There are signs of that changing now.
This is kind of a weird comparison, but I think a lot about the tradition of science fiction and fantasy, and how in the past people always thought it was this thing for white teenage boys, but at the same time, there were all these women and people of color who were writing this extremely subversive science fiction, that even right now is becoming very popular, you know? It seems a little bit similar.
Yeah, for sure. And now there’s speculative poetry, so the worlds are coming together.
And then the other thing that I was thinking about is that people do turn to poetry in specific moments. Like when somebody gets married, or when there’s a funeral, or at protests. I do think there are moments when people want to mark the occasion, that often they go to poetry, or they look for poems. And so, there’s obviously the famous poets and poems that people go to, but I think that community poets have also played an important role in those moments, even if they’re not published poets, like the cousin who writes a poem for their uncle’s funeral or something. I do think that tradition also exists in American culture.
Right, that’s true. In the past 5-10 years or so it’s been a much bigger part of my reading, but for a long time I was admittedly kind of scared of poetry, probably due to a lot of the dynamics that you described earlier. But the way I sort of think about it is that, even if mainstream America may not read a lot of poetry, it has a big impact when we do read it, if that makes sense. Especially when poetry breaks through, I’m thinking of like Citizen by Claudia Rankine, it’s a big deal for the culture.
Yeah, totally. I think that’s exactly right.
I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what poetry can do that maybe other forms of art, or a news article, or a book can’t do. What’s the power in it that maybe other mediums don’t have?
So I think that one of the things that I’ve thought a lot about with poetry is how you use language differently than you do in almost any other form of communication. And you make the language work really hard, or strangely. You know, a poem works based on associations and surprise, and I think that those are the two things that often make a very successful poem, is when images or associations are evoked from the language that you wouldn’t necessarily have made, just because of the tightness of the language or the juxtaposition of ideas or images.
I don’t think that poetry can change the world. But I do think that it can play a role in it by forcing people to pay attention.
And so I think that poetry requires a different relationship to language, and forces the reader or the listener to have a different relationship with language. And then I think about how language shapes so much of our reality, and how, usually, we don’t have much of a say in how that happens. But poetry is this moment where you can actually start to shift reality, just through the materiality of the language, if that makes sense.
You know, I don’t think that poetry can change the world. But I do think that it can play a role in it by forcing people to pay attention, forcing the poet and then also their readers or listeners to pay attention to how the world is being created around us through language, and imagining different ways of being through the playing with language.
I’m reading Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings right now. It’s really good. And she’s a poet, but this is a book of essays on race, and specifically her perspective as an Asian American person in the US. And there’s a whole chapter called “Bad English.” And she talks about how she subverts English as a form of both resistance and survival, growing up as a first generation Korean American whose parents were basically looked down upon because they couldn’t speak English well. So I think that is one of the things that poetry does that I don’t think any other form really does.
Yeah, you know, the connections thing really resonates with me, because I was listening to someone talking recently about this idea of deep reading [Narrator voice: It was Ezra Klein], where you kind of go into this almost trance-like state and start making vivid connections to things in your life and other things you’re reading. It takes time to get there with prose, but it strikes me that with poetry, that’s almost inherently a part of the way that you read it.
Right. Yeah, I mean, I think about how when poetry is taught in school, that’s not really how it’s taught. In school, you have to, like, figure out what it means and decode what the poet is trying to say. But I really think a more useful way to teach poetry is to teach people that they have to just change the way they’re used to reading. And you’re not reading for meaning or content, necessarily, but you’re reading to dive into the language, and then meaning and associations will emerge, you know?
Yeah, I was an English major, and they taught poetry in the same way that they taught literary analysis of a novel. You are sort of taught that the goal when you’re sitting down to read a poem is to solve a puzzle. So if you read a poem, and you’re like, I don’t understand this, then you feel like, oh, I’m a bad reader of poetry, and you put it down and move on.
Right. And it’s not that interesting, you know, I mean, maybe to some people it’s interesting, but it’s far more interesting to be like, what does this poem have to tell me about my life in this moment right now? Or the context I’m living in right now, even if it was written 100 years ago? I think that’s been a real disservice to poetry in US education.
Yeah, totally. I really like what you were saying about how language can shape the world without our knowing or without our permission. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about that idea?
Well, I was thinking about all of the received language that we have, in terms of thinking about how to decolonize myself and how to write in an anti-racist way. Like, I’m always coming across phrases and ideas that I’m like, where does that come from and then looking it up and being like oh that’s not that great. You know, like, the rule of thumb. And so I think all of the ways that capitalism and patriarchy and white supremacy have shaped our language as a way of shaping our world.
Writers and artists and poets are helping to imagine what things could look like outside of the ways that things are now. And I do think that that is a pivotal role for all artists. I kind of feel like if you’re making art, and you’re not doing that, like, what are you doing?
So there’s that. And then I also think about how in English, the noun and the verb are the central component of how to craft the sentence. And in Japanese, often the noun or the personal pronoun is missing. You hardly ever say me or I in Japanese. It’s implied. And so I think about that, too, the very structure of how in English, the individual is always first and foremost. And in Japanese culture, it’s not. That’s also, I think, one of the ways that language shapes how we see the world.
Sometimes I think I became a poet because I was bilingual as a kid. I mean, obviously, there are plenty of poets who weren’t. But I do think the experience of understanding that there’s not one fixed way to say something or to understand something through language was central to my development as a human being.
I noticed that you have a Favianna Rodriguez quote in the materials from your book launch. And it made me think of this concept that she wrote about once where activists sometimes think of art as a tool to inspire action. But it can also operate more in the idea space, the formative part as opposed to the execution part. And I wonder if you think of your poems as trying to get somebody to act? Or to what extent are you trying to inform ideas about the world? Or both?
Well, I guess I would say that I don’t think about what I want the poem to do. When I sit down to write a poem, I don’t think, I want this poem to move people to do X. I write poetry as a way of helping myself understand the world and my place in it and the future that I want. And then obviously, when I go back and revise and work on it, I do hope that it moves people in these more big picture ways that we’ve been talking about, rather than, like, hoping my poem will move somebody to sign a petition. Although, you know, that would be great if that happened!
But when I think about my poetry as a whole, and when I think about what I’ve done with my poems, especially recently, it is really kind of speculative. It is more in the realm of imagining the future that we want, imagining that kinds of relationships between people and the earth and plants and creatures that is actually the kind of world that I would like to live in or I would like people in the future to live in. And being part of that movement that I think is really blossoming right now, of writers and artists and poets helping to imagine what things could look like outside of the ways that things are now. And I do think that that is a pivotal role for all artists. I kind of feel like if you’re making art, and you’re not doing that, like, what are you doing? In this moment, you know? [Laughs] That’s my opinion.
I recently read We Come Elemental, and I really loved it. And it made me think a lot about how we’re very closely connected to the rest of the earth, but that it is also so much more than us. Remembering what we’re a part of something is one of the things I really took away from it. You have this great phrase, “It’s easy to forget that we live on an island…” which I think applies to so many things. And I don’t really have a question with that.
But, um, I guess I wonder how much do you feel like you organize your poetry around certain themes. Are there concepts that you tend to come back to?
Yeah. I mean, when I wrote We Come Elemental, I kept being drawn to write about water over and over and over again. And I couldn’t even really say why, but I was thinking about the ocean and bodies of water as a way that this earth kind of demonstrates what it means to live on it. The constant motion and constant change and depth and all of the mysteries within it. And how humans need it, living creatures need it to survive. So I feel like there are all these lessons in water that I just kept getting drawn back into. And then, I learned about the Great Pacific Gyre while I was writing it, and was just horrified and had to figure out—like I was saying, it’s really about me figuring out how to deal with the world around me as it is sometimes.
What does it mean not to necessarily claim queerness as natural but to claim nature as queer?
And then also, using the plural pronoun, which I do a lot in We Come Elemental—and also in this latest book—was like, what does it mean to be a we? Who is we? What does it mean to be part of a we? There was a lot that I was kind of thinking through in terms of being part of a collective, or being part of humanity, that I’m still really interested in and working through. Lately, I’ve been thinking about the responsibility of claiming the voice of a collective, and how I can do it more responsibly. And what does that look like given that I actually am only one person, and I have a singular perspective?
Yeah that definitely comes through. Another concept I kept thinking about when I was reading is this idea of permeability, or a fuzziness between what we think of as inside of us and outside of us.
Well, I think that idea of permeability—and in this book, “the slip of boundaries” is a line in one of the poems—is something that I’m really interested in. I think it’s kind of a resistance to capitalism and individualism. The idea that the individual is self-contained, and the most primary unit of importance, and I just don’t think that. How to embody that through poetry is something that I come back to often.
I feel like a lot of times when people write about nature, it can be kind of corny, like nature is on a pedestal that they want admire. And I always think of Neil Young’s environmentalist songs, which, I love Neil Young, and I don’t know if you’ve heard them, but they are just so corny. But your approach is the total opposite of that. And I wonder what your secret is to writing about nature in a way that isn’t goofy or like, oh, gee whiz, you know?
It’s a good question. Nobody’s asked me about that, exactly. But when you first started asking me the question, I was thinking about how, in the early 2000s, I wrote this Manifesto, queer::eco::poetics, thinking about how queerness has been seen as unnatural, right? And what does it mean not to necessarily claim queerness as natural but to claim nature as queer? What does it mean to be fully queer and know that I am part of nature, and so then that means that I think nature isn’t this like beautiful, warm, fuzzy, idealistic thing. It’s messy and weird and dangerous, and you know, bizarre at points [laughs]—and also beautiful and magnificent and glorious. And I think that’s always how I’ve approached writing about nature, from that interest in the queerness of nature, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Like, it has all of the complexities of us, and we have all the complexities of it, because we’re the same thing.
Exactly. Right.
OK let’s talk about the new book! Can you tell me about the writing of this book? Over what period of time are the poems from this new collection covering?
Yeah, a long period of time. So there’s actually a poem in there from the early 2000s, but most of the poems are written between 2011 and now. I wrote a few after my manuscript had been accepted, but most of them were written over a seven, eight year period. And they were the exactly the years that I worked at Corporate Accountability full time. That’s kind of why it took so long to write another book, because I was working 45 hours a week, right. And that’s partly why I decided to leave. I was like, I have all of these poems that I’ve written over these years. For me, writing is easy. Generating words and images is an easy part of writing poems, but what is a lot harder has been looking at these really messy, raggedy drafts and figuring out what to do with them.
Well, you mentioned that with We Come Elemental, you kept coming back to the idea of water and I wonder if in the new book if there are any themes that you picked up on or if there’s anything that people can expect to read about in this collection.
There’s a lot about climate change. And the last quarter of the book is imagining a future many centuries from now, where people fly, people and birds have somehow merged together. And they’re these bird creatures. [Laughs] Yeah, so there’s that. And then the title is from a sequence of poems that kind of imagines this ragtag group of revolutionaries who are bringing down the corporate empire. So there’s a lot of prose poetry throughout, but that sequence is mostly prose with poems from the ancestors woven in.
Wow, is that speculative aspect pretty different than anything you’ve written in the past?
Yeah, I feel like this manuscript is pretty different. It’s also less experimental than We Come Elemental. It’s less difficult. And I did that on purpose. Because I am interested in playing with language and pushing language and seeing where language can go, and We Come Elemental kind of went down that path. That book’s earlier draft was my thesis for my MFA, and I feel like that kind of environment encouraged that kind of writing. As I was working at Corporate Accountability, and just being more out in the world, I felt like, I want anybody to be able to pick up this book and not feel like it’s not speaking to them, you know, not feel like it’s alienating them. It might not be their favorite book, but at least they’ll have some sense of it. And I feel like sometimes with We Come Elemental, I’m like, I don’t know if I want to send you my book, because I don’t know if you’ll like it. [Laughs] I don’t know if you’ll feel welcomed by it.
So I do feel like with the poems that I was writing during this period, I was purposely being a little less about pushing language. I mean, there’s still plenty of experimental poems in there. But there are large sections where I was more interested in telling a story in a more accessible way. So that is the speculative part.
You mentioned this new book is maybe more inviting for different audiences. I wonder who you want to read this book? And that may not be like a demographic or something. But what would a person be looking for that they might find in Last Days?
Yeah, I realized as I was finishing it up, it was 2017, 2018, I wanted this book to speak to and to inspire, and to bring solace to activists and organizers. I feel like that is who I’m hoping this book will resonate with. I mean, I hope it resonates with lots of different people. But I am really interested in all of the ways that the arts and organizing can be more integrated than they are now.
And so yeah, I don’t know that this book will move anybody to action, but I’m hoping that it will be a source of joy for the people who are doing really hard work on the ground right now, in this really difficult time. And then I hope it speaks to other people who also want a different kind of world than the one we have right now, they might not have found themselves in the world of organizing and activism, but think about these issues and think about the world as it is and the world as they want it to be. And that this might resonate with those people too.
Tell me about the book launch plan and how you got to the idea and what you’re hoping will come out of it?
So I guess some context is that like, with poets, especially, but I think maybe a lot of authors now, when we have a book come out, you have to do a lot of legwork. The press doesn’t do a lot in terms of setting up events, although it depends on the publisher. So after it was accepted in 2019, I was facing a publication date in 2021. So I had a lot a lot of lead time, but it was mostly making me anxious to think about how am I going to get this book out into the world?
I don’t know that this book will move anybody to action, but I’m hoping that it will be a source of joy for the people who are doing really hard work on the ground right now, in this really difficult time.
It was through conversations with Patti, and just thinking about, what would be the ideal vision of how I get this book into the world? And all the work that I’m going to do to do it? Is it just to like, set up some readings in bookstores, where there’s a handful of people and I sell 20 books? Or is it something else? And through those conversations, I clearly identified that the people I want to get this book into the hands of are organizers and activists. And it was just so helpful to talk with Patti who, you know, obviously has 20 years of organizing, and she was like, why don’t we just figure out a way to actually send hundreds of organizers this book? And I was like, okay, how do we do that?
We came up with a plan that we’re still developing, but I’m trying to raise about $15,000 to buy between 250 and 500 copies of my book from the press. And then, there’s another poet, Gabrielle Civil, who has a chapbook coming out around the same time. She’s a Black poet who’s also a performance artist, and just really brilliant and amazing. And so we’re also going to buy her book, her chapbook, and then figure out a way to send the book to people who want it who are doing organizing and activism. And then we’ll also do some events and that sort of thing, too. But that was really the kind of breakthrough that we had. So that’s what I’m working on right now.
That’s such the opposite of what you might think of a book promotion tour being.
Right, that’s why I feel like it was such a paradigm shift of like, I don’t want to be out there selling myself and selling my book. Like, I totally get that that’s how it works in this moment. But what if it didn’t have to work like that? You know, what if I ask people to chip in to this project? And then I could just buy the book and send it to people who want it? Why not make something like that work? And that just seems so much more fun and interesting to me than like, figuring out how to sell my book.
Well, it’s interesting, it’s similar to what you’ve done with your newsletter, where you donate all the subscription fees. Maybe you can talk a little bit more about how you manage this struggle between creating a product to sell versus creating something you can share with people?
I guess first I have to say that I’m really lucky and privileged that I have a steady gig with Corporate Accountability, and in a partnership with Patti, where we’re not struggling to pay the bills. And so obviously, if I didn’t have that, I think I would be in a very different position. And I think that’s just important to note.
But given that, it’s not like we have a very lavish lifestyle or anything, like I have always lived pretty simply and I just don’t buy a lot of stuff. So, since I don’t need more money than what I already have, I’m interested in how to live within capitalism and recognizing money as the way that people that make things are valued, that people show their appreciation for something. That’s just the way it is in this moment. And I’m interested in shifting that, but also, if that’s the way that it’s happening, how can I work within that system to actually create change?
So with the newsletter, I’ve been really interested in this idea of subscriptions, and what that means. What does that mean for the people subscribing? I subscribe to Ann Friedman’s newsletter, and I always feel so good doing it, you know? Because she’s just so brilliant and if I can help support her, then that’s great. So given that Substack has this whole system, what would that be like to offer people the opportunity to support it if they really like it, but I don’t need the money. So that’s where the idea of just donating it all came from, but then, not having the different tiers of getting something special if you pay.
That’s my favorite part. That you can subscribe, but it’s just the same thing. It really subverts what Substack wants people to do with premium content, which is kind of a gross idea.
I’m pretty sure if they ever figure out what, I mean my list is so small, and the people who subscribe is just like a handful. But I think if they actually caught on to what I was doing, they’d probably kick me off. [Laughs]
Well that is so cool and I’m excited to see how the book launch unfolds. Tamiko, I know I took a lot of your time, thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.
Me too. Yeah. Thank you for all your great questions. I really enjoyed this conversation.
Okay talk to you soon.
Call It
by Tamiko Beyer
We steer the car straight. Behind the day, stars shine steady
as lighthouse signals: stay away, stay way, stay away. Weather refuses linear
progression—icecaps drifting from out of the blue to where the hell.
The hurricane’s eye was a slow-mo turn and now the sun’s a bright
squint. The rich nestle in their linens. The rest of us scratch out syllabic
posts, our rheumy screens laden with desire. Maybe we’re the aliens.
Invasive species burning up bones of our interplanetary ancestors.
What lousy shipwrecked guests. And now, is a graceful exit even possible?
An easy slip off the highway before the pileup, another grisly crash?
The car stalls. We look under the hood, read the oil stains.
They say: not for long, humans. Not long for this breakneck break speed world.
Originally published in The Common
Links
Phoenix has experienced the most days over 100 degrees in a single year (half of them). Also it never dropped below 90 degrees for a record 28-night stretch during the summer.
Bezos has not only given jack shit after his huge climate philanthropy pledge, he is also bankrolling Republican senators who are blocking climate action.
Despite the eviction moratorium and rental assistance, thousands of people in Massachusetts can’t pay rent and are staring down thousands of dollars in debt.
Breweries’ patio lifeline is running out as winter nears.
“For Native Americans, the restoration of buffalo is as much about healing people and reviving our culture as it is about healing the land.”
The plastics industry is a big fan of new federal marine plastics legislation. Because it doesn’t make them do shit.
“When you say that you are urgently looking for climate solutions, yet continue to build a world economy based on extraction and pollution, we know you are lying because we are the closest to the land, and the first to hear her cries.”
Listening
This is a long one so I’ll keep the landing nice and tight. But I did want to say that last night I asked Jamie how much money it would take for her to eat a can of our cat’s prescription cat food. The answer: there is no amount of money. For me, the answer is $50,000.
Then I thought about it and how in 20 years I might regret saying that, because I may be willing to pay to eat a can of cat food if things have gone full Cormac McCarthy. Then Jamie told me I should not say things like that because I am supposed to be the optimistic one. So this week reader, I am wishing you a future in which nobody has to eat cat food, unless it is for a large hypothetical sum of money. And also we can all fly.
Those at the top will follow, because the world has changed around them
Autumn, Helmer Osslund, 1907
Well, we seem to really be in the shit now folks, hold on tight. We did a lot of election talk last week and there is some a little further down there don’t worry, but I have been told that it is important for our mental health to think about best-case scenarios in addition to worst case scenarios. So in that spirit, I thought we might gaze longingly toward a future world in which the United States could enact meaningful climate legislation. I am definitely not making any kind of optimistic prediction here about the state of the federal government, but I have been thinking about how at some point down the line, hopefully before everything is literally on fire, all of this bottom-up movement building I am always going on about needs to make the jump to some kind of giant, top-down federal legislation. And I’m honestly not sure what that looks like, or how movement demands don’t get discarded in the process.
I have written a lot about this tension between bottom-up and top-down strategy in the course of covering climate philanthropy, in particular, because one conclusion I have drawn over the years is that the past failure of foundations, and the large NGOs they favor, to successfully pass climate policy on a national scale can be largely attributed to their attempts to sidestep grassroots support and leadership from the communities impacted the most. You can read more at those links, but the basic case is that, by keeping the issue of climate change firmly in the realm of the top-down and technocratic—meaning policy, legal, STEM, and industry elites—they have not been able to ground the issue in people’s lives, and therefore, have never built the kind of broad, cross-demographic political power needed to yield durable results. (As opposed to executive actions that can be reversed every other presidency.)
That approach ignores a moral argument for environmental justice, that the needs of low-income and communities of color disproportionately harmed by climate change must be prioritized, and that those closest to the problem should be driving the solutions. But also, with an issue that demands profound transformation, starting at the top just doesn’t work—only a huge social movement has the firepower to create that kind of sweeping change at the speed necessary, and environmental justice communities are a core source of knowledge and power in such a movement.
Sometimes people hear this theory of change and they are like fuck yeah, and other times, they are like, yeah that’s a good point but this is also way too big of a problem for the grassroots. Climate solutions require huge national policy and the president and congress and industry leaders and diplomats, etc. The latter has been sort of the default response from climate philanthropy, although that is changing to some extent. But it’s also what a lot of people, even just friends of mine will say when we talk about it, because I am clearly a super fun and upbeat friend to talk to. And they are somewhat correct. Climate change is a massive, systemic problem that can’t be solved without, at least, federal policy. So it can understandably sound kind of naive to make the hard sell for grassroots climate action, like it is just way too small or slow (although lots of evidence on social movements argues otherwise).
But a bottom-up strategy describes a direction, not a location. It doesn’t exist strictly in communities, rather, it builds up to different levels—enacting local solutions that contribute to reducing emissions, getting large numbers of people engaged and bought into climate solutions in ways that impact their own lives, so you have a strong base of power. And then linking up local efforts to build toward large-scale systems change. One analog is the same-sex marriage fight. While some will argue against the prioritization of that particular goal, it was a highly effective campaign that won hearts and minds locally, enacted state policy, and then, eventually, the national law of the land had no choice but to follow, because the world had changed around it.
Crossing that bridge to national climate policy is difficult and complicated, and it’s hard to say what it looks like in execution. The Green New Deal is an attempt at it, building support for broadly shared intentions and then working toward specifics. But even that is a delicate balance, with environmental justice groups and networks holdingback their full support, objecting to some of its main principles like allowing net zero emissions.
There is another really important way in which the bottom up and the top down strategies need to be bridged, and one that I’ve heard come up lately as people are guardedly and in hushed tones talking about the possibility of a U.S. federal government that is once again open to climate action. And that is, how you would implement big federal climate legislation once it’s passed.
Political Scientist Leah Stokes recently published a book called Shortcircuiting Policy: Interest Groups and the Battle Over Clean Energy and Climate Policy in the American States, in which she argues that the failure of climate policy at the state level can be explained by powerful special interests that have managed to overshadow public will (she is a strong proponent of organizing to overcome this influence). Stokes also explores a problem she calls the “fog of enactment,” which describes “the gap between actors’ expectations and the policy’s actual outcome.” Sometimes that is because elected officials don’t fully understand the policy, which is informed by interest groups, but also, a lot of meddling can happen after legislation passes when most people aren’t paying attention. Either because of sneaky gaps worked into the bill, or ambiguities that allow great latitude after its passage, the impacts are often less than expected.
Implementation is also an important window in which stated intentions to meet the demands of the grassroots and the needs of impacted communities can fail to land. This is why, as exciting as ambitious climate plans like the Green New Deal and even Biden’s climate platform may be, serious concerns remain over what will make it from paper to reality, including whether much-touted environmental justice principles survive.
Just as people on the ground need to inform policy before it’s drafted, they should also be guiding its implementation, says Roger Kim, executive director of the Climate + Clean Energy Equity Fund. Earlier this week, I was catching up with Roger, who runs a pooled climate fund that supports multiracial, multi-issue coalitions that are organizing around climate action in some key states. He brought up the issue of implementation, noting that, even if a big federal spending package were to pass, it would likely be carried out through the states, as in the case of 2009’s stimulus bill. That’s likely where the rubber meets the road in terms of whether environmental justice principles and local needs are actually served, he says. When negotiations get tough, the priorities of people of color and low-income communities are the first things to go.
Right now, all of this is totally hypothetical, but Roger and the Equity Fund’s grantees are thinking a lot about what that implementation process might look like. One model for forming that kind of bridge between grassroots and top-down action could be exactly the kind of coalitions they are funding—representing environmental, but also labor, faith, seniors, Indigenous, racial and immigrant justice groups, and more—steering federal policy implementation, if they can build up enough power.
Of course, that also raises the specter of state elections, and how state governments can either undermine or support progress at the federal level. Which is to say that, even in our best case scenario of federal climate policy, there are so many other, smaller best and worst cases that will determine what happens next. That could be seen as reason to lose hope, or it could be a reminder to never invest too much into any race happening on the big stage. Connect with enough people on the ground, win hearts and minds, build power, and those at the top will follow, because the world has changed around them.
Dune content. Update: still reading Dune.
Links
The editors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote a devastating, non-partisan case for voting out the Trump administration, pointing to lives lost as a result of its failure, “at least in the tens of thousands.” “When it comes to the response to the largest public health crisis of our time, our current political leaders have demonstrated that they are dangerously incompetent. We should not abet them and enable the deaths of thousands more Americans by allowing them to keep their jobs.”
The wealth of the world’s 2,189 billionaires grew to $10.2 trillion during the pandemic, a record high. The super-rich now hold the greatest concentration of wealth since the first Gilded Age at the turn of the 20th century.
Facebook tied hundreds of fake accounts spreading disinformation about the election to conservative group Turning Point USA. But they only banned the marketing agency the group hired.
And yet, the disinformation campaign that successfully tarnished voting by mail was led by Republican leaders and mostly amplified by mainstream news outlets—not social media or bots.
Spooky season is upon us again, and my horror movie track record this month so far is about 50/50, hits and misses. I recently enjoyed these two back to back: The Ritual (Netflix) and Scare Me (Shudder). Scare Me is half comedy and Aya Cash is so funny in it. The Ritual is yet another death cult movie that does not reflect well on the people of Sweden.
If you are going on vacation to Sweden any time soon make sure you do some very careful location research.
And that’s what I got for you today. How we doing, bad? Yeah. I always try to tell a funny story in this closing section, but I just asked Jamie if anything funny happened this week and she said, “Absolutely nothing. Except maybe when you asked me what if we started calling toilet paper T-Pain.” So there you go.
I did want to follow up on all of those election recommendations in last week’s issue and say what we actually decided to do. So in the general election, so far our household which is me and Jamie and three small animals who contribute nothing has donated to Biden, Mark Kelly’s Senate campaign in Arizona, M4BL’s election fund, a GOTV coalition in Arizona called miAZ, and Mijente. Will probably give one or two more, maybe just reupping some of these when things get gnarly. I’m going to phone/text bank a few hours on Saturdays. Still not sure yet on election day.
I was also thinking that was kind of a lot of stuff to throw out there last week, and how not everyone has the stomach for calling up strangers or signing up for online trainings or watching polling stations or what have you and who can blame you. So I also wanted to offer this sincere sentiment as we head into the next few challenging weeks: Just do whatever you can do and take care of yourself.
If you vote, talk to friends and family, and kick in even a small amount to a candidate or group you like, that is really, really good. Go for walks and look at ordinary things with a sense of awe. Envision the worst case, but also the best case scenario. Yip yip.
We knew it was going to be like this, but that doesn’t mean we are short on surprises
A history of the birds of Europe :.London :Published by the Author,1871-1881..
I don’t know what to say about Donald Trump having COVID, and there are not enough cliches in the world to describe the sensation of this ongoing descent into political chaos that seems to have really picked up speed in the past oh 7-10 days and is not getting any calmer in the approaching months. We kind of knew it was going to be like this I guess, but that doesn’t mean we are short on surprises.
That aside, you know I don’t like to get political here crying laughing emoji, but I did want to send out an election issue CP at some point, and the fact that we are almost exactly a month out, and that earlier this week there were some real dark “what the fuck should we be doing right now” conversations in this household make the timing feel right today. This one will be heavy on links, because I strive to be of use to you.
But first, let’s see where do we stand right now. Election experts are concerned that this one could actually break America, with the incumbent taking concrete steps toward rejecting its outcome on the basis of illegitimacy. Republicans are about to further minority rule by hypocritically filling a Supreme Court seat during an election. Voting rights are under attack by that same party, millions of people have been protesting regularly since 2017, prompting violent police crackdowns and state laws making protest illegal. No justice for Breonna Taylor. I did not watch the debate, but I gather it was not awesome, although to be clear, there is nothing Trump showed us that he hasn’t shown us many times before, which has only built up his power and popularity in the party. And now, after downplaying and mocking and lying and putting us all at risk over and over and over again during this awful pandemic that has killed 2 million people and 200,000 Americans which is like 66 nine elevens, he has the disease himself, with somewhere between an 8% and 18% chance of dying from it.
And there’s an election in 32 days. So yeah, if you are like me and pretty much everyone I talk to lately, you are freaking out a little. I will take a quick minute here to note that this issue will really only be of use to readers who want to remove Trump from office and/or live in a democracy. It is possible you do not share this sentiment, and while I love all my readers, sorry we can’t really agree to disagree on this one. There are many valid and understandable differences of political opinion to be had, but this election honestly isn’t really about those differences. This election is about a cruel bigot, an assault on democratic practices, and a waning number of years to avoid irreversible climate catastrophe—non-negotiables around the old palace. I know it is very hard to vote against one’s own usual political alignment, but I really, really hope people take this reality into their hearts in coming weeks.
OK now that we got that out of the way, it can be difficult to know how to get involved even in a “normal” election year, because even for people who are engaged in some kind of activism or local politics, a presidential election is kind of its own thing. We donated in the primary and will give to the Biden campaign, but now that it’s rapidly approaching I find myself wanting to do more, and hopefully with broader impacts too. So over the week I have been doing some reading and I asked a few smarty pants friends who work in organizing and/or elections what they are doing, worrying about, recommending. (Thank you to Jen Kim, a tireless campaigner and organizer; radical activist and donor Farhad Ebrahimi; and Molly Danahy, ass-kicking attorney with the Campaign Legal Center.) And now I got a list of things you and I both can support and/or volunteer on.
This one is pretty straightforward but needs to be said. The outcomes of a Biden victory move us closer to, not further from, the country I want to live in, so that is the campaign I am throwing my weight behind. Just sticking to climate for now, Biden believes in and accepts the seriousness of climate change and his climate plan is actually pretty strong, having consulted with progressive candidates’ teams after the primary. As the New Yorker editors point out, Biden may lack progressive bona fides, but he brings a certain emotional honesty, empathy, and perhaps most importantly, he is engaged and movable on the issues I care about.
Multiracial organizing efforts
A presidential campaign can only go into so many communities, and maybe they fixate on swing voters gazing plaintively out a diner window in small town Ohio. In addition, they work wholly in service of one end (an important end!) rather than sustaining long-term power. Both things are necessary.
The Frontline & Election Defenders
The Frontline and Election Defenders are 501c3 and 501c4 efforts resulting from a collaboration between the Movement for Black Lives’ Electoral Justice Project and the Working Families Party. The two initiatives are enlisting and training volunteers for a combination of tactics to get out the vote and ensure that polling locations are safe, reliable, and accessible. That includes being a poll worker, protesting, doing voter turnout, providing people with accurate information, and preventing voter suppression. The idea is to engage as many of the 25 million+ people who have taken to the streets this year in electoral politics.
This one comes from Farhad, so I will let him say why:
My own personal assessment is that this is one of the smartest and most strategic efforts that we’ve seen to electorialize social movement energy in quite some time. The question is not how we get the folks who’ve been taking the streets to volunteer for the Biden campaign, but rather how we can support them to show up powerfully and charismatically in an electoral context in a truly movement-oriented way.
Movement for Black Lives
In addition to launching The Frontline initiative, M4BL’s Electoral Justice Voter Fund “marshals a cross-issue, transnational Black electoral-justice movement by building a network of local organizers and partners. We define electoral justice as encompassing accountability, interventions, dismantling, and building anew.” The fund supports voter participation and pays Electoral Justice Fellows generous stipends to lead civic engagement work.
Organizing in Arizona’s Latinx communities
This category I arrived at because I have a particular stake and interest in Arizona politics. I grew up in the state and consider it my home in many ways and I have watched it become simultaneously more retrograde—draconian immigration policy written by a white nationalist from Kansas, the rise of Joe Arpaio on the national stage—but also more dynamic and progressive.
Arizona is also an important bellweather in US politics, with complex demographics and values that are ever-shifting. In the last election, moderate Democrat Kyrsten Sinema won Jeff Flake’s Senate seat, in large part due to a huge Latino organizing effort and turnout. This year there’s another Senate seat in play, and if the state turns against Trump, it would send a powerful signal.
Aside from GOTV and swinging the outcome of the election, there is a lot of important work to be done to protect the franchise and defend against threats to a just 2020 election.
This is an amazing grassroots organization working to end the disenfranchisement of formerly convicted people. In 2018, Florida voters overwhelmingly passed Amendment 4, restoring voting rights to people with felony convictions. FRRC led the campaign, and now runs a fund that helps returning citizens pay off outstanding fines and fees so they can complete their sentences and regain their voting rights.
Similar to FRRC, Restore Your Vote works to help people with felony convictions nationwide learn how to restore their right to vote. CLC is running several other voting rights programs and you can donate to them here.
This initiative is recruiting and training poll workers, of which there is a shortage due to the coronavirus pandemic. That link takes you right to a form where you can sign up to volunteer wherever.
A national election protection coalition that provides a wide range of information and assistance to voters at all stages of the voting process. They need lawyer and non-lawyer volunteers, and you can also donate at the link.
A voting rights organization working in Indian Country, Four Directions protects Native American voting rights in court, but also runs GOTV operations and voter registration drives.
So there you go. I wish I could say I have things remotely figured out or that I think everything will work out. But we start somewhere and do what we can. I will give to maybe three groups in the next few days and volunteer with one or two in coming weeks. But there are many organizations and many ways to get involved, and I always recommend people follow their hearts to some extent and always start locally if there are opportunities where you live. Yip yip.
Watching
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Links
“Trump’s mishandling of the coronavirus defines his presidency. He downplayed the severity of the disease, misled the country repeatedly about it, tried to pin the blame on local governments, did not ‘take responsibility at all’ for the anemic American response, held massive rallies against scientific advice, hammered on states to reopen before it was safe, rejected easy safety measures, and undermined trust in our public-health institutions. Trump was never going to protect the country from the virus. But ultimately he could not even protect himself.”
We are not collectively mourning COVID-19 victims, because that would require a reckoning.
A fringe Facebook group called the “Patriot movement”—teeming with racism, homophobia, and crackpot theories, certain that we are being taken over by Muslims, and “obsessed with pedophilia”—has become a force in Arizona politics.
The language used in media coverage makes cyclists seem like a more of a road hazard than they are and shifts blame away from drivers.
A massive “climate park” in Copenhagen can capture more than 6 billion gallons of rainfall when the sewer system is being overwhelmed.
Salt Bae, who is famous for the way he put salt on something, opened a restaurant in Boston but it was shut down on its opening weekend for repeatedly violating COVID-19 rules.
Listening
I will be honest I’m a little fried today because I had to do some consulting work this week that involved rewriting a lenghty climate change-related thingy that I had originally written in March 2019 so you know, some things have changed that needed to be reflected. There are two things that were striking during this process. First, there was a ton of basic information about climate change, the science of it, even the intersectional nature of the problem, that I found could be cut way back because it felt kind of no duh at this point. So that’s a good thing, as it feels like people get it way more than they used to, albeit for sad reasons like experiencing its impacts.
But the other thing was that there was a certain tone of dogged optimism in the original draft that I had to largely strip away, because it just didn’t feel credible anymore, like an attitude from a different era. “Avoiding catastrophe” became more like “caring for each other in the face of adversity” that kind of thing. I had a difficult moment while taking a pause in writing to let it sink in just how much darker our day to day lives and our outlook for the future have become, in the span of only 18 months.
People adapt so well, which is an incredible strength, but we can also lose sight of what is happening to and around us. The harm that is being done that becomes just the state of things. We don’t need to think about it constantly, but maybe keep it within arm’s reach so it can be of use, when it’s time to go vote or take to the streets or knock on our neighbors’ doors.
Tate
PS I wanted to give a big thanks Britta Shoot for the very kind shoutout on Twitter the other day and for sharing the newsletter with friends! You too can share Crisis Palace!
