Newsletter

14: Say it out loud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But:

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

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

Reading

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

Here’s one relevant passage from the book: 

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

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

Links

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

Watching:

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

What I Wrote:

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

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

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

…

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

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

Read the full thing here.

Listening:

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

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

Tate

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

13: Really long spoons

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Things could go either way

Rainy Day, Boston, 1885, Frederick Childe Hassam

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

Music

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

Podcasts

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

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

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

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

Watching

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

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

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

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

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

Tate

12: Imaginable worlds

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

Bullitt Center Stair, Peter Alfred Hess

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tweet

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

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

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

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

And later: 

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

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

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

Related: Raze and rebuild 9/27/19

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

Listening

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

Reading

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

Links

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

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

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

This is you when you get this newsletter.

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

Tate

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

11: Haunted Palace

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[Wind howling]

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You get the idea.

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

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

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

We never stop.

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

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

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

…

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

From the New York Times: 

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

What I Wrote

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

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

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

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

Read all of the words here.

Watching

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

Hereditary *****

Lake Mungo ****

Revenge ****

Mandy ****

Ravenous (Les Affames) **** 

Happy Death Day ****

The Meg ****

The First Purge ***

Bird Box ***

Unfriended ***

Yellowbrickroad ***

mother! **

Downrange **

Ghost Stories **

Insidious The Last Key *

Killing Ground *

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

Waterloo Place, photograph by Leonard Misonne, 1899

Reading

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

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

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

Links

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

Listening

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

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

Tate

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

10: The right to exist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

Links

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

What I Wrote

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

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

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

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

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

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

Listening

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

Reading

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

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

Watching

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

I feel you Rahul.

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

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

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

Tate

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

9: A menacing act

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You turn the key, harm is being done.

Red Cavalry, Kazimir Malevich, 1932

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The mean streets of Roslindale.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

Listening

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

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

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

Watching

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

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

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

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

Tate

8: Washed away

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It was 3,000 people arguing with 2 million people

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

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

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

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

—

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

Links

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

Listening

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

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

Tate

7: Raze and rebuild

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

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

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

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

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

I abut this house. I am an abutter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading

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

Links

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

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

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

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

Tate

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6: Ring the bells

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

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

Podcasts

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

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

Watching

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

Listening

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

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

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

Tate

5: Loving the world to death

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I’ve developed an uneasy ambivalence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

Make it a Blockbuster night.

Links!

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

Listening

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

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

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

Tate