The desert in the summer is above all an environment of extremes

Thistle cholla cactus at Saguaro National Park. Photo by me.

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Spending time in Arizona during the summer is a good reminder that weather can kill you.

Jamie and I recently returned from a two-week stay in Phoenix and Tucson, a long-overdue trip to visit family and good friends that would normally happen in cooler seasons, but because we hadn’t been back since 2019 we made sure to schedule a trip during the window of light COVID danger, which unfortunately basically closed while we were there.

We managed to avoid COVID during our travels, but we did get an ever-so-gentle reminder that the desert is always willing and eager to swallow you up if you offer it an invitation. While in Tucson we made a visit to Saguaro National Park, a forest of century old cactuses just east of Tucson that has a bunch of scenic picnic areas and trails of varying lengths. On the way there, we were caught in a downpour, one of many the area had been experiencing this monsoon season, and it cooled the desert all the way down to the 80s and offered some precious lingering cloud cover.

We ate sandwiches at a trailhead and took in desert views that were greener than I have ever seen them, from a distance more the shade of a golf course or prairie grass than the usual shrubby dirt floor. Twice we saw raptors perched on towering saguaros, probably hoping to pick off a rabbit or a ground squirrel enjoying the morning rain. Every lizard was out.

You normally avoid a desert hike midday in the summer, but it was so cool we figured we could do a couple of miles pretty easily. We had probably a liter and a half of water, not a ton but not bad, and hats, sunscreen etc. The first three-quarters or so very peaceful, cool, beautiful. But about the time we thought we should be closing the loop and getting back to the car, we hit a marker that said we were still a mile away. As it turned out, some hasty map reading meant the chain of trails we picked was more like three and a half miles total. Not only that but the sun had burned right through the morning storm and it was hot once again. And our water was about gone.

To be clear, we were entirely safe. Mostly. The park is never too far from a road and we had cell phone service the whole time. So worst-case scenario we were at risk of humiliation, two hikers, one born and raised in Arizona having to be carted off of a remedial trail by park rangers, like the East Coast tourists and transplants I grew up talking shit about.

So we were safe, but still. Even though I have been on summer hikes several miles longer as a kid, you never forget that creeping feeling of sharp teeth nearby. That you might be in trouble, not now, but maybe soonish, a mix of paranoia and regret at any carelessness, made worse when you’re generally an anxious person. Also made worse when you know better than to be out in the desert in the summer without an overabundance of water—you never bring just enough—and you don’t start a hike in the middle of the day either. I also know that shit can so sideways extremely quickly, even just a stone’s throw from civilization. Just a week earlier, a young woman visiting Phoenix from Massachusetts died on an city hike I’ve done a hundred times, collapsed right next to a home off the mountain trail (that story is very sad and kind of suspect, also a cautionary tale about trusting a cop, it turned out).

When you know you’re starting to push it heat-wise, you get that awful feeling of your body working hard to stay cool, heart pounding, soaked in sweat, your cheeks bright red as your blood vessels open up to release heat at the skin. All signs that the body’s cooling system is doing its job, but also early signs of potential heat exhaustion and eventually heat stroke. But we kept trudging through this sandy wash that was completely dry already of course, me asking Jamie if she was OK every 30 seconds (she was totally fine). Checking the GPS nervously, 0.8 miles from the car. 0.5 miles from the car…

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The desert in the summer is above all an environment of extremes, and those extremes are getting more extreme as a result of climate change. So last summer was the hottest ever recorded in Phoenix, and the region broke many heat records in 2020, including the most days in a year with high temperatures at or above 100 degrees, 145 days.

This August while we were there was markedly cooler than 2020—I think the hottest it got during our visit was 111, usually more like 100, which is manageable when the air is dry—but as we are increasingly learning, climate change is far weirder than just a linear increase in average temperatures. So 2021 has been unusually wet for the region, but not just wet, experiencing deluges that have been overwhelming roads, washes, backyards. The kind of rain that does provide temporary relief during drought, but not the kind of relief you necessarily want, or that you can rely on to quench the region’s thirst.

That kind of precipitation is also dangerous. This year’s monsoon has brought charcoal grey walls of cloud veined with crackling lightning, dust storms, flash flooding, even rare tornado warnings. The day we arrived in Phoenix, search parties found the body of a 16-year-old girl who died in Northern Arizona, swept away by floodwaters. A 4-year-old girl and a 13-year-old boy also died in flash floods just in the same week or so.

So it’s the extremes, but also the extreme swings that are really frightening.

Underscoring those extremes, the International Panel on Climate Change released its latest big report while we were in Arizona. It’s another bleak assessment based on an analysis of 14,000 studies, full of similar warnings we’ve become accustomed to hearing, but this round there’s more precision, more certainty, and even more “holy shit this is really really bad” than the last major assessment in 2014, which was more of a red alert than any previous communications from the IPCC.

Among the take-home points include that even if we take urgent, radical action, the world has already warmed about 1.1 degrees since the 19th century, and the carbon emissions we have already released will keep warming the globe for at least another 30 years. So the drought, heat waves, extreme precipitation, storms, and flooding we are experiencing more regularly will keep getting worse, no matter what, until at least around mid-century. Some impacts like global sea level rise will continue for thousands of years. Just sit with that for a minute, that the pollution we have created since industrialization (and in large part even since the 1990s) is such that it’s causing global shifts that will continue for millennia.

The assessment also outlines changes to expect broken down by region, which in North America we know will include rising sea levels in most places, more severe tropical storms and cyclones, more deadly wildfires, more drought, and more extreme precipitation and flooding.

I had the surreal experience of reading the report (or at least the summary of the report) while flying on the plane back to Boston from Arizona, which spewed out into the surrounding skies a large portion of my own annual carbon emissions. The round trip generated about 521 kg of carbon dioxide. That is more CO2 than the average person in 41 other countries will generate in an entire year. A routine trip for me, but also an experience of gross privilege considering only 11% of people worldwide fly in a typical year. I don’t think it’s useful to blame individuals for their actions as the cause of climate change—save your blame for the fossil fuel industry and the GOP—but flying is a difficult reminder that whether I like it or not I am a participant in an economic system and a way of life that are cooking us alive.

Being in an enormous city in the middle of the desert in the summer is another one of those reminders. Not that I think that humans shouldn’t be able to live in the desert. I actually love being there, particularly Southern Arizona and Tucson, I happen to love a great many of the people who live there, people who have caring hearts and want to protect the desert and make the state and its cities better, saner places. There is a lot of important work being done by elected leaders, planners, activists, researchers, and just ordinary people in the Southwest to figure out how communities there can reduce emissions, save water, and otherwise co-exist with the ecosystem as the planet warms.

But it is a tall order. The City of Phoenix—which is actually only a third or so of the metropolitan area that is made up mostly of endless sprawling suburbs—is working to become carbon neutral by 2050. Collective city level reductions in the United States are, in fact, having a small but meaningful impact on national carbon emissions. But for some perspective, Phoenix reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 0.5% between 2012 and 2018, and over the same time period, the city’s population grew by 12%.

Shuttling around the Valley in our rental Mazda down 12-lane freeways and also just normal-ass city roads where people drive 70mph, you can see that growth everywhere. New subdivisions always going up, or more often, out, further and further into former farm and desert land, anchored by parking lots the size of neighborhoods that offer cavernous restaurants air-conditioned to a chilly 40 degrees cooler than the outside air. There are many fighters and pockets of progress in the Valley, but broadly it remains a city that is aggressive in its commitment to eternal growth and water and energy use mostly in the name of comfort and freedom from restraint.

Again, this isn’t to shame all the people who live in places like Phoenix, see above. But it’s these extremes in consumption juxtaposed with extremes in the surroundings that are so jarring. Like flipping channels between HGTV and Mad Max: Fury Road.

Talking to friends and family who live there, who have lived there for their entire lives and are fully aware of and concerned about climate change, there is this shared sense even in idle conversation that things are changing. That there are going to be more problems. Whether that’s flooding, drought, or just shittier summers year after year. Conversations regularly drift back to things people are seeing that they never saw before. How it was never like this, how we all know something is wrong.

During our trip, Arizonans were anticipating the first federal declaration of water shortage on the Colorado River, which triggers 20% reductions in Arizona’s water supply from the river. The shortage was officially announced on Monday. While this first round of cuts will affect mostly farmers, more are likely on the way and will impact more of the millions of people who rely on the river for at least a portion of their water supply.

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Spoiler, we did make it back to the car just fine, crawled into the trusty Mazda and pumped the AC. Made light and looked at the map to figure out where that extra mile and half came from, ah shit there it is. Picked a few cactus spines out of the soles of our shoes and talked about all the wildlife we saw. Waited for our skin to fade closer to its normal pale Bostonian shade before heading to the visitors center to refill our bottles and drink ice cold water courtesy of the Department of the Interior.

Just off the trailhead where we parked the car, there’s a place called Signal Hill, a little mound made of rock that rises about 50 feet above the desert floor. It’s got beautiful views, but is famous for ancient petroglyphs carved into the rocks at the top, made by the Hohokam, who lived in the region between 200 and 1450 CE. It’s drawings of animals mostly, a lot of spirals, and the mind kind of malfunctions when you look at them all just sitting there in the open, made by other people hundreds of years ago, just a half hour drive from a modern city.

There’s a sign on the trail pointing out that people have lived in the Tucson Basin for more than 10,000 years, with a very long historical timeline that only at the very end marks the era of colonialism that would kill, forcibly remove, and assimilate civilizations that have thrived there for centuries, clearing the way for resource extraction. Ruled by the Spanish starting in 1692, then Mexican control in the mid-19th century, and finally, at the very tippy tip of the timeline, America takes over starting in 1853. A blink of an eye, really.

Taking that kind of broad perspective sometimes helps when things feel like they are going off the rails, historically speaking. You can see the big picture and things seem maybe not so bad. Then again, another of the IPCC’s findings is that levels of CO2 in the atmosphere are higher today than at any time in the past 2 million years. The planet is warmer than it has been in the past 125,000 years. It is hard to wrap our heads around these kinds of numbers, the damage on a geological scale that this relatively newborn incarnation of humanity is causing.

If deep history can have any comforting effect, maybe it comes from the idea that this country—a culture that is not fully, but in very large part responsible for this profound impact—is a relative blip in human history. That this period of conquest and extraction, stripping, drilling, and burning that got us here is not everything we have been.

The IPCC report, while grim, still points out pathways that are open to avert the worst-case scenario, better and safer trails. Who reigns can and does change and so do ways of life, meaning maybe we can become something better and humbler in the face of this desert and its sharp teeth. And if not, maybe the civilizations who replace us will be better, or at least better suited to what is coming next.

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Links

• July 2021 was the hottest month ever recorded.
• Workers die from heat exposure every year, but there is no OSHA standard to safeguard them, despite efforts to establish rules since the 1970s. Some companies have had multiple workers die from heat, with negligible consequence.
• Wells are drying up in California, and it’s happening in more parts of the state than during the last drought.
• Let’s say it without flinching: The fossil fuel industry is destroying our future.
• Toyota used to be a leader in reducing car emissions, but now it is actively fighting electrification and pushing large trucks and SUVs for a higher profit margin.
• Climate scientists refer casually to one future scenario as “Trump World,” in which nationalist governments protect their own needs instead of contributing to emissions reductions. Emissions double and temperatures rise by 3.6 degrees.
• The stated goal of the Afghanistan war was to remove the Taliban from power. Now after 20 years of U.S. occupation the Taliban is in power again but it has an $83 billion army that the U.S. built and trained.
• In this sad tale of woe from a landlord upset about the eviction moratorium, he says that he is losing a whole 15% in profit so he has stopped making any improvements to his properties but also he is very rich and doesn’t actually need the income and it has not impacted him at all.
• The Rock, Kendall Jenner, Michael Jordan and many more celebrities have their own tequila brands. “Personally I find it very sad when thousands of years of history are reduced to a marketing campaign from a very famous individual.”
• “I Think You Should Leave” quotes are a love language. After the club go to Truffoni’s for sloppy steaks. They’d say no sloppy steaks but they can’t stop you from ordering a steak and a glass of water.

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Listening

You do see a lot of weird things in Phoenix like there’s an ad for a personal injury lawyer who rips the sleeves off of his suit to show that he’s no ordinary lawyer. And we were driving one time in some traffic and on a farm on the side of the road there was this big water tank and the brand had a logo of gun crosshairs on it just for no reason and the car in front of us had vanity plates that said BRBI GRL or something like that and Gasoline Dreams by Outkast came on from Stankonia which is an album I used to listen to a lot in the early 2000s when I lived in AZ and it felt like a very appropriate soundtrack to that particular traffic jam.

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Watching

Speaking of colonialism, maybe everyone has seen The White Lotus by now but it is such a savage critique of wealth and shitty white people and patriarchy but also tourism and philanthropy and nonprofits and journalism and probably a lot of other things and it pulls zero punches. There are also some critiques of the show that are important to engage with and Mike White engages with them pretty openly and thoughtfully in this interview, which I also recommend.

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OK that is the thing this week. I know I was gone a week longer than I said I was going to be, but we had to go get the dogs from the grandparents last Friday and also I was fuckin tired as hell so it just wasn’t going to happen.

I also want to say that I know this vacation recap sounds like I just worried about climate change and got really hot the whole time but you get it that is just the Crisis Palace way.

In addition to all of that, I had a wonderful time seeing my mom and dad and stepmom and my sister Amanda for the first time in over two years I couldn’t believe I was there with them talking and hugging and sometimes arguing in person. We ate very good food, sat on my mom’s couch watching movies with her little chihuahuas, watched the family of doves that live on her back patio, got a mani/pedi, went to a minor league soccer game, stared in amazement at Arizona skies, sat on a back patio with lifelong friends watching a summer downpour, visited some breweries and a winery, bought a few new Western shirts at Saba’s, stayed up late talking with Swedlund in our made-for-Instagram Airbnb, and so on. Restorative and long overdue.

But now I am back and I am also very happy to see you all again. You can now expect a return to the weekly bloviation and crankification from me you are welcome goodbye.

Tate

A list of 15 things you can do about climate change, ranging from easy to illegal

Dodo in a Landscape with Animals, c. 1629, Roelant Savery

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In last issue’s link extravaganza, one of the more popular articles was a post by Emily Atkin, from her awesome climate newsletter Heated, titled, “What can I do?” Anything. I totally get why that grabbed a lot of interest and it made me think that there must be an enormous hunger right now for clear actions people can take in a moment when we are all feeling increasingly helpless in the face of cascading climate impacts. I imagine more people are starting to come around to the severity and urgency of the problem, others have maybe always been concerned but are feeling more compelled to act, and still others have been doing a lot already, but are feeling like there has got to be more.

Emily Atkin’s post is really good and I definitely recommend reading it if you haven’t, but it also got me thinking maybe there is something similar I could offer, as someone who thinks about this topic all the time and who has written about and worked in the climate movement to some extent for like 15 years.

But there is just no linear path to finding your way into this party, and all paths are valid and necessary. I also don’t have any claim to the right answers here because after all, the shit that I and others have been doing for all these years clearly hasn’t been working all that great! ~laughing and crying emoji~ This is also an enormously complex problem that is always changing, and the right policy goal or organizing strategy 15 years ago is very likely the wrong one now. Which is to say that I am constantly trying to figure out what tf I should be doing at any given time myself. So I thought this could be a good exercise for me as much as you to kind of map out the items on the menu.

And I guess before I get started in earnest, there is something else I wanted to say on this topic and that is, please don’t give up on us. By us I mean like, all of us. You don’t have to be optimistic, I know things look pretty bad, but climate despair and withdrawal is really spiking out there in time with this drumbeat of terrible news. I especially feel like a lot of people who are really engaging with the issue for the first time have skipped directly from denial to, welp this is out of my hands, I hope that government/industry/whoever can get their shit together and figure it out. Some of this is a legitimate and understandable emotional response that needs to be felt and worked through. But it’s also often a position of luxury, held by a lot of contrarian white guys (takes one to know one) who feel like they suddenly need to have a tough, terse cocktail party line on climate change that usually sounds like “it’s really a technology problem,” or “time to get serious about nuclear” both of which are just not useful.

The reality is that virtually every aspect of the economy and our infrastructure and many aspects of our daily lives are going to change, either voluntarily or by force of nature, and the sooner more of the good changes happen, the less suffering and death humanity will experience along a sliding scale of potential, and the better our odds of preventing the very worst of it. Nothing you do alone can stop climate change, but everything all of us do is like a vote for a future, which given voter turnout is maybe not a great analogy to be using. Even if you’ve done absolutely nothing at all to date, honestly, who fucking cares you don’t have to do hail marys on the rosary or whatever. It’s the perfect time to start. Welcome. You made it. It’s good.

Here is my list of actions that individuals can do to fight climate change, roughly ranked from easiest to most difficult, which I would emphasize is not the same as ranking by importance or priority. And also to be perfectly clear, I absolutely do not do all of these things myself, not even close. I am right here with you figuring this out.

1. Talk about climate change

This is one that I think might seem like the dumbest, but I actually think is low key maybe the most important. The reason is that there is strong evidence that our individual decision-making is much more a product of social phenomena than we would often like to admit, contributing to what Robert H. Frank calls behavioral contagion. As Favianna Rodriguez says, culture moves faster than policy, often a precursor to rapid systemic changes. She’s referring to culture in terms of art and other forms of narrative, but the same can be said about our day-to-day interactions and social connections.

Think about it – how often do you have a random conversation with someone about climate change? Probably not that often, even though it is the biggest problem we all face. We have to normalize talking about it. Recommend an article, ask people what they think, acknowledge your own anxiety.

2. Keep learning about climate change

It can feel like a constant challenge to stay on top of the issue, even as someone who does it as part of his job. Fortunately, there is more user friendly information out there than ever before, in any form you could ever want. So many great nonfiction books (a plug for All We Can Save). And increasingly a lot of fiction on the topic (I’m currently enjoying Ministry for the Future). Lots of great newsletters! Another thing I would recommend is podcasts if that’s your thing. I actually think this might be the best way to learn about climate change, and there are tons of them maybe I’ll do a list at some point let me know if that would be useful.

3. Get to know your neighbors

In areas of New York like Red Hook that were hit hard by Superstorm Sandy, the residents who had the strongest social connections and networks fared better in reacting, responding and recovering from the storm. Research on the deadly Chicago heat wave of 1995 found that among demographically similar areas, those with thriving community organizations and civic engagement had drastically reduced mortality rates. We learn this lesson over and over again. When we find ourselves at greater risk of disruption and disaster, it’s our social networks that save us.

4. Make strategic changes to your lifestyle

This one may be a little controversial, because it is currently fashionable among climate activists to say that the need for individual action is a lie, which is an important correction after years of awful neoliberal messaging that said all we needed to do was change our lightbulbs and shame on us for leaving the lights on. When in fact, we need to dismantle the most powerful industry in the world, rebuild our entire energy infrastructure, and pass public policy that will impact everyone in the world.

So all that is true, but I think there’s been an overcorrection and that message has turned into, “because systems need to change, there’s no point in individuals making changes” and people disengage. You see this all the time in memes that are like oh look at these fires good thing you aren’t using straws you stupid idiot. But there’s no reason individual and systemic change should be at odds, and separating the two overlooks the fact that individual change contributes to systems change.

For one, this is another matter of behavioral contagion, where signaling genuine concern and action can spark others to do the same, and that translates to not just changing lightbulbs or putting up solar panels, but going to demonstrations, voting, etc. All of this builds personal connections to climate change, and shifts cultural norms in ways that set the table for more radical change. I also tend to think of this as a form of prefigurative politics, in which we live the values we want to see reflected in the world as a virtue in itself.

Another techier argument for this one comes from Saul Griffith, who encourages us to focus on individual action in terms of transforming our own personal infrastructure, meaning pivotal decisions we make around things like cars, utilities, housing. There are certain lifestyle changes that actually do have long-lasting effects because they alter the way we will live for years to come.

5. Vote for and otherwise support elected officials taking climate change seriously. Do not vote for candidates who aren’t. Like fucking ever I’m serious.

This is the only one where I get real judgey so skip it if you want. The counterpoint to the individual lifestyle change point is that the really big climate change solutions ultimately have to come from government. Community action has to build to large scale policy. Governments are not only needed to take the right actions, but the wrong governments will also actively block action from happening.

Voting for elected officials who are unsupportive of action on climate change is frankly the single worst thing you can do as an individual when it comes to climate change. And to be honest that means Republicans I am sorry but it’s true. You don’t have to like Democrats I don’t even like most Democrats but you just can’t vote for Republicans if you care about climate change. This one goes far beyond big elections on the national stage though—city councils, state legislatures, vote, canvass, donate, phone bank, yard sign, whatever is your thing you like to do.

6. Tell your elected officials you care about climate change

You got someone in office now remind them via email, twitter, phone call, office hours that climate change is one of the most important issues for you. I can do a lot better on this I find myself reaching out to my electeds mainly in like crisis moments or when big votes come up but I’ve rarely just written to say hey this is the most important thing I need from you.

7. Donate to organizing, advocacy and direct action groups

A classic. Even small donations add up and fuel the most powerful organizations pooling collective power. I prefer automatic monthly donations so I don’t have to keep track of what I’m giving to and currently donate to Sunrise, Climate Justice Alliance, and ACE (a Boston climate justice group). Others I periodically give to include Native Renewables, Green Roots (another local group), Indigenous Environmental Network. But honestly, there are so many you can support, particularly if you have an interest like outdoorsy stuff, birds, hunting/fishing, even skiing, you can find groups that work on climate these days. I’ve done a couple annual giving guides if you’re looking for ideas.

8. Move your investments away from the fossil fuels

This one helps reinforce the stigma around the fossil fuel industry and actually does build up to financial consequences. The flip side of divestment is that you can also invest in high-performing funds that support renewables and other climate friendly enterprises. This is another one I need to do I have a humble IRA that I created in a panic a while back when I had a huge tax bill and I am long overdue in moving it to an ESG fund.

9. Participate in climate change marches and mass demonstrations

One of my faves! For some people this is a no go because of various anxiety issues or some people feel understandably unsafe if there’s a risk of interaction with police or sometimes counterprotestors. But mass demonstrations are overwhelmingly safe, reaffirming, and yes, impactful. Protests signal latent political power to decision-makers, contribute to cultural change, and form bonds and commitments that reverberate well beyond any one event. All you gotta do is show up!

10. Start a climate change discussion group

This is like “talk about climate change” but the advanced version. It has the same effects, but also creates those important social bonds, and helps deal with the emotional trauma of climate change. It’s another one I’ve never done but have considered doing. One easy way to do it would be a climate change book club. The All We Can Save project has a feature called Circles, created by Dr. Katharine Wilkinson, which is a kind of template for a climate change support and discussion group structured around the book. Sounds amazing.

11. Take up a climate friendly hobby

Urban farming, climate victory gardens, building green infrastructure in empty lots, water conservation projects, planting trees, starting a blog or newsletter. I guess I have this thing but I would love to find the right get your hands dirty climate hobby.

12. Volunteer with organizing, advocacy, and direct action groups

One great thing about giving to a local organization is that it opens to door to participating directly in their work. That could involve outreach or lobbying efforts or rallies, but if you have a skill or interest, there are grassroots organizations that could use your help, whether that’s communications, design, legal expertise, helping with events, stapling shit, whatever. If you’re not sure where to start, groups like Sunrise and 350.org and XR have active chapters in many cities, or check out any of CJA’s local member groups.

13. Organize where you have influence

OK now things are starting to get a little more complicated, but consider that whatever stuff you do, like your work, your hobbies, your kids’ schools, etc, chances are there are things you could do to organize other people toward some climate action that is bigger than just you. That could include inviting an expert to come and give a talk or setting up a panel for a work or some other event. Maybe you get your office or local school district to install solar panels, or reduce your company’s corporate flights. Or get whatever community organization you might be involved with to sign on or partner on something with another group that works on climate. Hold a fundraiser. Everyone has some people who will listen to them so get those people to do stuff and they they will get their people to do stuff. This is another one that I feel like I do a little but I could do a lot more if I got creative.

14. Intentionally get arrested in a direct action

OK shit is starting to get real now. Groups like Sunrise and Extinction Rebellion have used sit-ins and blocking of roads resulting in arrest to great effect, forcing profound shifts in climate discourse as a result. And you may be familiar with civil resistance’s other greatest hits like the Civil Rights Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, the Iranian revolution, and so on. This is another one that is not on the table for everyone (I’ve never been arrested myself), particularly for people of color who face far greater risk at the hands of police. But aside from fiery young activists, people with some level of privilege or perceived societal status, like seniors or those involved in faith organizations, often turn to this strategy. The groups mentioned above hold regular trainings and direct actions, and the Ruckus Society is another organization that specializes in teaching nonviolent resistance.

15. Use your body to block the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure

This is kind of an offshoot of the last one, but the impressive feat of dramatically lowering the cost of renewables has not actually reduced carbon emissions because we just keep drilling for and burning fossil fuels. The supply, not just the demand for fossil fuels, has to be stopped. Indigenous activists and otheres who are leading efforts to block fossil fuel infrastructure are climate heroes, and it often works. It has very real personal consequences, but is one of the most profound things someone can do to fight climate change.

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So there is my list, work in progress, one that will definitely be ever expanding. Not all of them will be right for you, not all of them are right for me. Maybe think of it more like a menu than a checklist but the waiter is coming so come on try to decide soon.

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Links

• “The extremes that would have been newsworthy a couple of years ago aren’t, because they pale in comparison to the astonishing rises a few weeks ago.”
• Hundreds of active wildfires led British Columbia to declare a state of emergency.
• “The idea that you could possibly die from weather is completely alien. … There’s not even a realization that adaptation is something we have to do right now. We have to save peoples lives.”
• A summer camp in New Hampshire, the “Fyre Fest” of overnight camps had to shut down early because it was such a disaster. One kid punched a counselor.
• The compromise infrastructure bill that scrapped all meaningful climate provisions is being blocked by Republicans because bipartisanship is merely a fairy tale to comfort small children.
• Speaking of bipartisanship, Kyrsten Sinema’s devotion to the filibuster has made her very unpopular among Arizona voters.
• A great interview with Favianna Rodriguez on the power of culture in the climate crisis.
• Cape Cod is having an off the charts summer tourism season and it’s caused a huge surge in COVID cases.
• There’s been a startling rise in “unruly” passengers on US airlines, a result of drinking and drug use and mental illness, but also 3/4 of the cases are related to people refusing to wear masks.
• Meanwhile, customers at overworked and understaffed restaurants are treating the staff like shit.
• Oscar (Zeta) Acosta never got the credit or the compensation he was due for his role in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
• A look back at an amazing season for the Phoenix Suns.

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Listening

I Don’t Want to Die, by Waltzer

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Watching

I’ve been watching The Deuce which is really good, but I would like to highlight this amazing 2016 anime I watched over the weekend called Your Name, directed by Makoto Shinkai. It is one of the most beautiful animated movies I’ve ever seen, and it’s very emotional and sweet and funny too. Loved it, want to watch it again.

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Well I am about to head to Arizona to visit family and friends for the first time in over two years and looks like I timed it perfectly just as the delta variant is poppin off. I think it will be fine I will be careful you please be careful too but man I find it really hard to know what we should be doing right now other than getting vaccinated obviously jfc people.

But that also means that the newsletter will be taking a little summer vacation for the next two weeks but don’t worry I will be back before you know it. I will miss you all, individually. Take care of yourselves please water the plants in the palace while I am gone I will bring you all souvenirs back from Arizona how about a paperweight with a scorpion inside or a tequila candy with a worm in it OK you got it.

Tate

PS I know a lot of readers have been at this thing a lot longer than I have – what is on your list of climate actions that you take and other people can take? What are you planning to add?

Enjoy this extensive list of articles that are mostly pretty depressing to be honest

Anton Zwengauer, Landscape with Deer at Sunset, 1847

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Hey everyone this has been a packed week and I have no good words left so we’re doing a links only roundup issue today. My email plugin’s server was busted yesterday too so it is both a day late and a dollar short but that’s how you know this is a true DIY operation this thing is stapled together I hope that is part of the charm. Have some of these other people’s words instead of my words and I will talk to you next week peace and love.

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Links

• Devastating flooding in Germany in Belgium. More than 120 dead, 1300 missing, washed out roads and bridges, collapsed homes. Horrible images. “With climate change we do expect all hydro-meteorological extremes to become more extreme. What we have seen in Germany is broadly consistent with this trend.”
• Harvard has still not divested its $42 billion endowment from fossil fuels.
• Companies are resuming donations to Republicans after stopping them in response to the deadly attack on the Capitol.
• Tech workers said they were all leaving the Bay Area but now it looks like they are all moving back.
• Pandemic is ancient history and landlords want their money now. Also rent prices are soaring. Maybe we can all move to Worcester.
• A University of Arizona study found that millions of aging Americans won’t be able to sell their homes as a nest egg, because younger people won’t want them or won’t be able to afford them.
• The Brazilian Amazon used to a be a carbon sink, sucking up massive amounts of CO2 in its dense greenery but a new study found that it has flipped to a net source of carbon emissions because of fires.
• The European Union proposed an effective ban on gas and diesel burning cars by 2035.
• Drought is making Lake Mead unrecognizable. “I could have sworn I was here just six weeks ago catching smallmouth and bigmouth bass. Now it looks like a lawn.”
• “Vegas has done great things such as ripping out the grass, but we’ve lost 20% of the flow of the Colorado River since 2000 and another 10% loss by 2050 is completely possible. I worry it could be even more than that, and that should frighten everyone.”
• Nature editorial: Cities must do a better job of mitigating urban heat, including requiring the construction industry to incorporate heat reducing measures into their building projects.
• Researchers made a fabric that can cool the wearer down by 5 degrees C. Unfortunately it is a “snug fitting vest” so that doesn’t sound that nice to be honest.
• This tool at the NYT allows you to see how much hotter your hometown is than when you were born. For me, Mesa, Arizona used to have 155 days above 90. Now it’s 172 and heading toward 200.
• One my less popular opinions is that most documentaries are fake and unethical. Adding to my case is the fact that this Anthony Bourdain documentary used AI to recreate his voice saying certain lines the director wanted in the film which is disgusting.
• In a true victory for freedom of expression, teachers in Arizona can lose their teaching certifications if they talk about racism in class. Read about more totalitarian nightmares created by CRT panic laws here.
• A study of 175 American cities found that in 97% of them, communities of color were hotter than predominantly white neighborhoods.
• Cool interview with Boston illustrator Raul the Third who is killing it I have one of his prints on my office wall.
• What can you do about climate change? Anything.

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Comics

Way back in an earlier issue I featured work by a Boston-based cartoonist Dave Ortega, who has been creating a meticulous family memoir comic about the life of his grandmother, set against the backdrop of the Mexican Revolution. Now Radiator Comics is running a Kickstarter to publish the collected edition of Días de Consuelo, which you are going to love. I backed and you should too! See more detail at the link.

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Listening

Rhymes like Dimes. Doom forever RIP.

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That’s it for me today I hope you are all spending time with your people and having some fun this summer all things considered. Speaking of Links I’m thinking about storming Hyrule Castle this weekend I’ve been stalling because I haven’t been ready to say goodbye to Breath of the Wild but I know that I have a job to do. Also Suns on Saturday game 5 fingers crossed it’s getting tense!

Tate

‘You could be in trouble if you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time’

The Birds of California, 1923.

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For 22 years or so I lived in Arizona, where the summers sear into you the childhood memories of chlorine-stained hair, blistered skin, scorched feet, drinking out of neighbors’ hoses to fight off dehydration. It’s hotter there now on average, but when I was a kid we did break a record at 121 degrees in Phoenix and I remember I went for a bike ride that day because I was a dumb kid and I guess I wanted to see what it was like. You never really get used to living in that kind of heat and it always sucks in different ways, but it also becomes just part of life. 

When I first moved away I went to Portland, Oregon, not because I wanted to get out of the heat, but not not because I wanted to get out of the heat. The irony is not lost on me that the first place I escaped to ended up being ground zero for one of the worst and most eye-opening climate change-fueled heatwaves on record. That was a good reminder that when it comes to extreme weather, it’s the deviation that kills you. People can live in all kinds of fucked up places if we’re ready for it, but the one-teens when you’ve barely even felt 100 is a special kind of hell. It’s the change more than the climate.  

I kept moving after Portland and have now made a home in five cities. If my count is right that has included 15 different apartments and houses as an adult. I currently have family in five different states and friends in many more not to brag but I have friends. All of which is to say, even though I’ve been in Boston for some time now, I’ve lived a kind of rootless adulthood, largely at ease with packing up and going to new places. 

Even so, as I spend more and more time thinking about climate change, one of the things that I worry about the most, at least as it relates to my own personal experience, is where I should be living as things continue to get worse. It’s been bothering me for years, this feeling like if I make the wrong move or don’t make the right move I’ll get stuck somewhere I shouldn’t be. I’ve been thinking about this maybe a little more urgently ever since we got the news that the owner of the house where we rent an apartment is about to sell it. (#16 here I come!)

I don’t think I’m alone in this anxiety, and I feel like the pull between staying in a place and leaving a place is a deeply human one. The modern version of humanity was built around agriculture, a practice that requires a commitment to a place in order to gain a return on investment for the time you spent there. At the same time, few things define being a person than our sheer inability to sit fucking still. I’ve written before about a favorite passage from Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction, where she describes our “Faustian restlessness.” 

I also think that when we are experiencing trauma, chaos, or uncertainty, that inner conflict strains us more than usual, like a macro version of fight or flight. When things get tough, something screams at us, should I dig in or should I take off? Marc Maron once said you can’t always run away from your problems, but sometimes you can. 

We saw this during COVID, when tons of people made cross-country moves at the most difficult time imaginable for a variety of reasons, but also, really, because they just had to get the fuck out of Dodge. I wonder how much of that will continue after the hellish June we had, flooding on the East Coast and in the Midwest, and the epic season of drought and wildfire it seems like we’re headed toward in the West. I wonder how many people, if not being forced to move, are just feeling like maybe it’s time to skip town. 

Control 

At the core of this urge I suspect is a way to feel a sense of control in times when we’re losing it. I think that was part of it during the pandemic. It led us to find something to grab on to and hold tight, whether that was where we were or where we went. 

During COVID and climate change alike, that sense of control is largely an illusion, of course. On some level, the decision of whether we should be going somewhere else is an arbitrary one, because in one way or another, we are all going to lose our home. Not necessarily the loss of literal brick-and-mortar or the loss of a hometown, but we are all losing the world we were born into, and with it the things that we associate with home, things that give us a sense of comfort and normalcy. The change of seasons we grew up with, the birds we used to see, the places we used to go swimming, the lobster in a vacation town. Even the sky will take on different colors than it used to, whether from wildfire smoke or sulfates we spray into the air.

Wallace-Wells writes about how what we’re entering is worse than a new normal, it’s “the end of normal; never normal again.” I often think of this part in the cli-fi novel The Wind-Up Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi, which is set in Thailand and describes spirits getting stuck in place because there is nowhere better for them to reincarnate: 

“Mediums all speak of how crazy with frustration the Phii are, how they cannot reincarnate and thus linger, like a great mass of people at Hualamphong Station hoping for a train down to the beaches. All of them waiting for a reincarnation that they cannot have because none of them deserve the suffering of this particular world.”

For climate refugees, the choice of where to go will not exist, because it will be made for them, with climate impacts making homes literally uninhabitable and economic insecurity forcing them to go wherever they can. There is a refrain among people working in climate change that there is no escape from it, that all of our lives will be disrupted so it’s in all of our interests to take action. That is absolutely true, and the failure to effectively communicate that early on was one of our worst missteps, as people in wealthy regions long assumed they would be insulated from harm. But we also know that, even if it will harm us all, it won’t harm all of us equally.

For example, even in places that are making a planned retreat, and even when that planned retreat is funded through buyouts, lower-income people experience worse levels of disruption. A recent study of flood relocation in Houston found that non-white and lower-income residents were more likely to be displaced, and they ended up moving three times farther from home on average, removing them from their social bonds and networks of support. “Neighborly bonds built over time can help with daily needs such as errands and child care; they can also help with community resilience when residents have to prepare for and rebound from the next disaster.”

What we’re likely going to end up with is a cleaving into two classes of mobility—those who can decide where they want to be (whether that’s staying or moving) and those are forced into the decision. 

Staying 

All of that is why, even as a person who has spent his adult life leaving places and going to other places, there’s something about the idea of an elective relocation in retreat from climate change that makes me feel queasy.  

I think like a lot of people with some amount of privilege, there is this kind of tug in the back of my head that says, just get away, run. Sell all your stuff and go as far north as you possibly can, find a little piece of land on high ground and clutch onto it like a lifeboat for as long as possible. It’s an occasional impulse that I feel ashamed of, the same way I feel ashamed of the white liberal urge to leave the country when it lurches in disturbing political directions. 

There’s something so childish about it, an abandonment, but also an impractical one. I once told my therapist that I occasionally get depressed and fantasize about running away to a cabin somewhere and just chopping wood or whatever. He said, do you honestly believe that if you did that, you would be happy. That you would be proud and satisfied with your decision? Of course, the answer is no. Even if you could, by some miracle, find a place to live that is safe from climate impacts, you’re still a part of what is happening. 

So over the past few years, I’ve come to this conclusion that the right strategy in terms of location and relocation during climate change is not trying to live in a place with the fewest climate consequences, but trying to find and/or build a community that has the capability to take what is going to hit it, and care for its people as it’s happening. I think of it as a form of staying and fighting, although for people like me that could very well mean moving somewhere different, just not doing so in retreat. It’s not really about moving or not moving. It’s about finding and devoting yourself to a place and people that you claim as your home. 

I know this might sound real hippie dippy doo, but one thing about climate change, whether in mitigation or adaptation, is that it kills by degrees. I did not mean that as a pun or a double meaning or whatever, but everything we do, every step we take to stop burning carbon and to make our communities more able to take the impacts of burning too much carbon, can reduce suffering. 

We’re seeing versions of this kind of social resilience I’m talking about in island nations, where after multiple hurricanes, people build networks of mutual aid through text or phone trees that allow people to help each other after storms before official services can respond.

When it comes to city heat, we are learning a lot more about how much it can vary. Vivek Shandas, a climate researcher at Portland State University who studies these variations, found that during the recent heatwave, the temperatures he recorded on the exteriors of buildings varied by up to 40 degrees. The heat island effect in cities is an oversimplification, he says, because some places within cities are 15 or 20 degrees cooler than others. Some of the factors that make the difference are within our control.

In areas of extreme flooding, green infrastructure, which refers to different forms of permeable landscapes, can cool temperatures in the summer and provide places for surges of stormwater to go instead of overwhelming streets and sewer systems. As landscape architecture professor Mary Pat McGuire writes about green infrastructure: 

By thinking interdependently with water, climate-adaptive rainwater design employs broad knowledge of regional ecology, soils, the seasons, and the land itself as a natural-systems infrastructure that centers community and ecological health.

Different than large-scale gray infrastructure—which is often planned top-down by wastewater authorities—communities are directly involved in determining where green infrastructure should be designed and implemented based on local needs and cultural preferences.

That extends to all kinds of local solutions, like renewable mini-grids, tree canopies, aggressive water conservation in deserts. There is actually quite a lot that’s in our power when it comes to livability during extremes. But it requires changing the way we live with and think about our surroundings. 

The huge problem looming over all of this is that none of these solutions is enough to “solve” climate change, of course, and without massive changes to our systems, we’ll cross certain thresholds that will make large sections of the globe practically impossible to live in. And some places are further along that path than others. That’s the part that’s so terrifying, and the part that always makes me reconsider my peace and love theory. At some point, you can adapt, you can build social bonds, but then a place can just literally run out of water. It can fall into the ocean. It can burn to the ground. 

So I don’t know. There’s no easy answers here fam. But it feels right to me that chasing a safe place is the wrong move, and a better one, a safer one even, is to find the people and places that are yours and fighting for them, and fighting against the forces that would one day make them uninhabitable. It won’t guarantee that we’ll stay out of harm’s way, but nothing will, and it might be a saner way to find control in a future where we are increasingly losing it.

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Links

• New York was hit with severe, dangerous flash flooding. “You could be in trouble if you get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
• That heatwave was “virtually impossible” without climate change.
• That was the hottest June on record in North America, the second-hottest in Europe, and fourth-hottest globally (after 2016, 2019 and 2020).
• Suburban living generates the worst carbon emissions, urban the least, rural in the middle.
• Firefighters have a bad feeling about this year.
• A marine biologist estimates one billion animals marine creatures cooked to death in their shells off the coast of Vancouver during the heat wave.
• A court upheld the first ban on natural gas hookups in new buildings. Utilities likely bankrolled the suit against the ban. Love that bridge fuel!
• There’s no labor shortage. “It’s a wage shortage.” Restaurant workers speak out.
• A vacant dirt lot in Brooklyn is now a thriving aquaponics farm (farming without soil).

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I don’t want to put the person who tweeted this on blast but this kind of shit is the most deranged climate change hero worship and it would probably make Greta Thunberg herself super mad. That is Captain Planet. What you are describing is literally Captain Planet and the Planeteers please grow up. #NoHero

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Listening

The eternal construction in the neighborhood has put Constructive Summer by The Hold Steady in my head for some time now.

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Speaking of Arizona, the last time the Phoenix Suns were in the NBA Finals was in 1993 and I was 15 years old and I wore this Suns hat that was like cream colored with the 90s logo and a purple suede bill and I bet I could get a lot of money for that if I could find it now. Which is to say that even though I haven’t been a big NBA fan in a while, I am very much enjoying watching the Suns in the Finals and between you and me I think they are going to win. I love Chris Paul and Devin Booker and Deandre Ayton and I know Phoenix has some problems but it has the Suns so please support them for me if nothing else. I ordered a new hat it should get here soon.

Tate

Because what’s a superhero story without a sequel

Tiger in a Tropical Storm, Henri Rousseau, 1891

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A few weeks ago I talked about the perils of America’s fixation with fictional and real-life superheroes, this class of people who stand above the rest, acting with impunity and admiration and almost always in the defense of the status quo.

The title of that issue was No Hero, which was a reference to a dark indie comic of the same name by Warren Ellis and Juan Jose Ryp, about a group of radical superheroes called The Levellers, who formed in Haight Ashbury in 1966 and gained their powers by taking drugs. Their first act in the comic, which was published in 2008, is to stomp a bunch of San Francisco police who are attacking a kid because he stole a can of paint. Of course, as you might imagine, The Levellers eventually go horribly wrong, morphing into a kind of deformed world police force themselves, called The Front Line, and misery and chaos ensues.

I was going to write about Warren Ellis in that earlier issue so that’s why I named it No Hero, but I didn’t have enough time and also writing about the sexual misconduct scandal of a British comic book writer seemed a little far afield. I kept the title because it sounded good. But you know what, I’m going to go ahead and write about it now, because it is timely again and it is my newsletter and because Ellis’s fall and the recent faint pulse of his redemption has been informing a lot of my thinking lately about our relationship with heroes, and how we can hold them and ourselves accountable when they inevitably let us down.

So bear with me and even if you have no interest in comics, I’m sure you can just mentally swap in the name of someone you admired who did something terrible and you’ve had a hard time coming to terms with it. You know you have one in mind. And as always it will become relevant to bigger stuff so sit tight.

A good chunk of Ellis’s work is cut from similar cloth as No Hero, and he’s maybe best known for a series called The Authority, in which a group of superheroes get fed up with the state of the world and decide to turn against the corporate and political powers that be (the opposite of the kind of tool-of-the-state superhero story Ted Chiang was lamenting). But I first began to really love Ellis’s work when, as a college journalist in the 90s, I read Transmetropolitan, a book about a gonzo reporter in a dystopian future America who takes down crooked presidents, his only weapons a newspaper column and a bowel disruptor gun that well you can probably figure out what it does. It’s a deranged, technicolor, ultimately deeply moral story and ever since I found it, I’ve read just about everything Ellis has done and loved most of it.

Every now and then you find a writer who for whatever reason their perspective just clicks with you. For me, a lot of that is his sense of humor and staggering talent for gathering up and sharing cool ideas. But like a lot of my favorite genre fiction writers, much of his work is ultimately about power. What it takes to acquire it and what it takes to tear it down.

The other thing to know about Warren Ellis is that over the years, he developed a somewhat ironic, but also kind of not at all ironic, cult-like internet following, especially in the Wild West days of early 2000s web. He was always starting new email newsletters, message boards, webcomics, blogs, websites, and every time he did, a thriving online colony of creative counterculture types would follow in swarms.

I never got very deep into the forums, just an occasional lurker, but I did always subscribe to his newsletters and for years his weekly email was the one I always looked forward to the most. Because of this, his fans really feel like they know him personally, and to some extent they do. His work and his persona fused together over the years, and often his weekly online bulletins were as rewarding as whatever he was publishing at the time.

With all of this, Ellis accumulated a certain amount of power himself, at least in certain circles. And it was generally perceived that he used it for good. He developed a reputation for helping out young artists and writers, particularly women coming up in a male-dominated art form. A good number of today’s leaders in the field got there in part because of Warren’s help, including Kelly Sue DeConnick, who became a prominent figure in mainstream comics and championed feminist storylines within a genre steeped in toxic masculinity—she created the basis for the MCU version of Captain Marvel. (DeConnick met her now husband, another esteemed comics writer Matt Fraction, in a Warren Ellis online forum.)

Ellis also became known as an online figure who never suffered fools. He never minced words, and his online communities had strict rules that booted anyone displaying misogyny, harassment, or other bad behavior. There are stories of men being sexist or abusive and Warren would more or less publicly thrash them and ban them for life.

But, and you probably saw this coming, it turned out there was a very dark side to all of this that people were aware or unaware of to varying degrees. About a year ago, a flood of accounts of sexual misconduct by Ellis emerged, eventually documented on a website called So Many of Us. It came out that Ellis had been cultivating sexual relationships online with fans and proteges, as many as 20 at a time for a while, grooming young women in very similar ways in each case, and eventually ghosting them when it suited him. It’s similar to the kind of abuse of power we’ve now seen from so many men in creative fields, using their position in the industry to manipulate people who admired and trusted them. It sent a shockwave through the comics community, prompting long overdue conversations about toxic environments and gatekeeping.

I first heard about this when I got an email from Ellis, but this one at a weird time, a random weekday afternoon. And it was nothing like his other emails. I would be surprised if it was written by him, as it was a stilted, tone deaf, lawyer-up-style non-apology. One last betrayal in the form of a bunch of bullshit, the one thing you thought Warren Ellis would never subject you to. It’s hard to describe just how upsetting and infuriating it was, and I hesitate to try, knowing that what I had to contend with was one-one-millionth of what the dozens of women and non-binary people he mistreated had to go through. And yet here I am, a dude on the very distant outskirts of the shockwave of hurt this guy created. I spent that Saturday reading through many of the testimonials, of which there are now 37 online (over 60 signatories overall), feeling an unshakeable queasiness at the similarities across their stories.

It was like finding out someone I knew and trusted, like a admired relative or teacher, was in fact not a person but an alligator or a rhinoceros. An entirely different kind of creature than what you thought. But he isn’t that of course. He’s just a person, an insecure man in a position of power. Not a hero and certainly not a superhero. Another reminder that, even in groups on the margins, even in circles of people railing against power in their own way, there will always be men who do awful things.

And that leaves us with the terrible question. What do we do with these people, not always (JK Rowling) but let’s face it almost always men, who we once looked up to but have let us down? It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about in the year since, but I guess, really, since November 2016. It’s the question underlying my earlier email, and its conclusion that we should challenge the way we valorize our billionaires, our politicians, the people we too often expect will show us the way or save us from ourselves. We might also apply that same precautionary principle to our sense of fandom or intellectual admiration.

Sometimes the answer is easy just goodbye move on. But sometimes it’s not so easy. The discourse would have us believe that there are only two ways to handle the problem. The first is the much-feared, mostly mythological cancellation—the removal of the person and their work from the public sphere. The second is giving the proverbial pass, under the banner of “separating the art from the artist.” The idea that well, nobody is perfect, we can’t demand moral purity from creative people, therefore we should just tolerate the pain they’ve caused others as the price of a good movie or book or whatever. Most of us, I suspect, end up stuck somewhere in between.

In 2017, Amanda Hess wrote one of the best essays I’ve read on this topic, titled, “How the Myth of the Artistic Genius Excuses the Abuse of Women.” “Can we now do away with the idea of ‘separating the art from the artist’?” she asks, arguing that it’s the very elevation of these men as something special, this creative class separate from the rest of us, that allows them to harm other people (often destroying other people’s equally valid art) and then insulates them from consequences. She challenges the taboo commonly enforced by male critics that says we must never consider an artist’s work in the context of their lives and misdeeds. More often than not, however, the deeds of the artist live and breathe in their work and cannot in good faith be ignored. She writes:

It seems uncontroversial that offenders who remain in positions of power ought to be unseated to prevent further abuses. As for the art, we can begin to consider how the work is made in our assessment of it. This conversation is often framed, unhelpfully, as an either-or: Whose work do we support, and whose do we discard forever? …

Drawing connections between art and abuse can actually help us see the works more clearly, to understand them in all of their complexity, and to connect them to our real lives and experiences — even if those experiences are negative. … If a piece of art is truly spoiled by an understanding of the conditions under which it is made, then perhaps the artist was not quite as exceptional as we had thought.

I would add that it also seems uncontroversial to stop giving our money to offenders, but I think Hess’s suggestion that we intentionally conflate the art with the artist is a useful one, as a means of removing them from their pedestal. Sometimes, as Hess suggests, this will reveal the emptiness of the art (Ryan Adams comes to mind). Other times it might change the way we interact with certain art or ideas. But, critically, this does not mean absolving people of what they’ve done. We hold people accountable, feel the anger and betrayal, and then we sit with it. With all of it.

There’s another important benefit to this approach, which is, if we allow ourselves to look head on at the entire picture, instead of closing one eye or turning away when we don’t like what we see, we leave a door open for repair—and maybe even forgiveness.

When the people who publicized their accounts of Ellis’s abuses came forward, one thing they made clear is that this wasn’t meant as a campaign to take him down. Instead, they invited him to take part in a process of “openness, accountability, and growth, extending an offer of working with Ellis on some form of transformative justice.”

At the time, he ignored the invitation and basically dodged any responsibility. But recently, upon some unexpected news that he would be returning to comics, the backlash started up again, almost as intense. And so, I got another email, the first one in a year. And this one was a little better. Longer, sounded more like him. And it started by saying he’s been silent for too long and he has accepted the invitation to be part of a mediated dialogue. People will say that he only did it when he basically had no other options, that he was forced, and it certainly looks that way. But I don’t know that I really care either way. Ellis has got a long way to go before many people, myself included, will be ready to forgive him, but maybe it’s a start.

For a long time, I’ve had a kind of “special bookshelf” that holds like a half dozen of the books that I go back to over and over again. Some of Ellis’s books were on that shelf, but last year I took them down. I didn’t throw all my Warren Ellis books in the trash, but I did put them on a regular old shelf with all the rest of my books. That special shelf was starting to feel too much like a pedestal, and it’s one I’m not sure I want to have anymore.

I like to think that we’re going through a period of accelerated change and heightened accountability, whether that’s related to police brutality, sexual abuse, structural racism, misogyny, abuse of each other, abuse of the land, abuse of entire cultures. Some of that greater accountability is a result of hard fought progress, changing the norms of what we are willing to tolerate. Some of it because we’ve simply reached a point where people who have spent generations taking and taking now have a bill to pay in money or blood, through flood or fire.

With that change will come this recurring question of who caused harm, who must be held accountable, and how much we can forgive. Sometimes the subject will be a clear villain. But other times it will be people once held in high esteem or people we maybe even thought of as heroes. I think we’re capable of a lot of forgiveness, but that’s not possible without a truthful accounting of what damage has been done, and the only way to get a proper look is by bringing them down from that special shelf, down here with the rest of us.

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Links

• The West is bracing for “a heat wave for the ages that could absolutely destroy all-time records from Washington to California as well as parts of Canada.”
• Much of the Southwest is in a “megadrought” which is the “driest 20 year period since the last megadrought in the late 1500s, and the second-driest since the 800s.”
• Heat islands in Boston are cooking lower-income neighborhoods, sometimes as a result of poorly planned city projects. The difference in temperature can be as much as 10 degrees.
• I like how the pandemic caused this spiritual awakening in which people realize they don’t want to waste their lives in horrible jobs and the discourse is basically “this could be bad for inflation how can we get people to go back to their horrible jobs.”
• People are wilding out on South Boston’s beaches, including roving packs of marijuana smoking teens and people ordering alcohol delivery directly to the beach.
• We all know the hysteria about critical race theory is not really about critical race theory.
• There was a “Redneck Rave” in Kentucky that ended with 30 criminal charges, someone’s throat being cut, and another person getting impaled on a log.

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Watching

I know I am the last person to watch Succession, but I always thought it was going to be this intense drama like Mad Men or something but making all these super rich people looking cool and smart. But it is actually like Veep for super rich people. Or like a British satire of corporate America. It is so funny and everyone is stupid and awful just like real life.

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Listening

New Slothrust song this might be a Crisis Palace record I think this is the third song featured by this band.

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I endorse

Razorcake. My friend Theresa introduced me to Razorcake, which is a Los Angeles-based zine dedicated to “DIY punk, independent culture, and amplifying unheard voices” and it is great. A lot of fun band interviews but interviews with all kinds of people like this month’s cover feature is a founding member of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles for example. They are running a subscription drive for just a few more days so go subscribe 10 issues for $17 or you can even just donate go do it you love independent media you are obsessed with it.

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Well this weekend I am getting a haircut and going to a Red Sox game so that will be a real big thing. And today I went to a coffee shop to do some work, another first. My longtime barista said welcome back oh by the way here’s the wifi password it’s not the same, and I said oh Joe, none of us are the same anymore are we, and we had a good laugh and then I sat down and wrote this for a few hours.

Jacoby is doing OK ups and downs but we are having to get increasingly creative to get him to take his pills because he keeps catching on and spitting them out. Jamie is like the Anthony Bourdain of getting dogs to take pills the other day she coated it in coconut oil and put it inside a piece of brie with sprinkles of venison on top. Michelin starred dog pills.

I like to think that this newsletter is much like a dog pill wrapped in brie and coconut oil, sprinkled with venison, irresistible to you but it also serves an important purpose. Please don’t spit it out it took a long time to prepare.

Tate

What gets built has little to do with the interests of the community and everything to do with what builds more wealth

Illustrations of the nests and eggs of birds of Ohio. v.1. 1886

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The sun is shining, the masks are off, and the sounds of gentrification are ringing in the air.

In any given direction from where I am sitting in my frankly uncomfortably humid apartment office in one of Boston’s outlying neighborhoods I can hear nail guns, power drills, table saws, all grinding away during every waking hour. The hot smell of overpriced lumber is strong, and the streets are lined with blue toilet boxes and dumpsters overflowing with the guts of century-old homes.

People are done with the pandemic and we are in the short window of prime outdoor labor weather and the housing market is reaching peaks that rival the 2000s bubble, so it seems as though every other address in the city is being redeveloped, every triple-decker remodeled, every eyesore being razed and rebuilt.

The housing market is scorching nationwide, although it is particularly out of control in Boston. In April, the median price of a single-family home in the city hit $765,000, and the price of a condo hit $622,000. Remember that one neighborhood close to me where there was the condo with an “open concept” bathroom? Well in that neighborhood right now there is burned out husk of house that’s on the market for half a million dollars. Even in nearby Providence, which has long been one of those mid-sized towns that can provide an escape for East Coasters fed up with the worsening exclusivity of our larger cities, prices are rising and supply is tighter than ever.

Way back in one of the early issues, I wrote about a house a couple of doors down in our half-fancy/half-not-fancy neighborhood that was scheduled for demolition. For years this was a rental property home to lower income tenants and owned by a slumlord who lives out in the suburbs and generally left it in disrepair. Apparently, Jerry, his name is Jerry, maybe got tired of dealing with tenants and saw what they call in real estate “an opportunity” so he decided to tear it down, rebuild, and sell.

I got a note in the mail a couple years back about it because we live nearby and were invited to some meetings to discuss the project, during which there was a lot of talk about mostly code variances and also a group of neighbors who were very worried about a big tree on the property far more than they were worried about people who lived there. “We’re all here about the tree” one of them said, the fuck we are some of us said back, because a handful of housing justice gadflies like myself (at what age do you go from activist to gadfly?) attended to yell at the city about displacement and lack of affordable housing.

In Boston, new projects only need to include a percentage of affordable housing if they have 10 or more units, the kind of project that’s impossible in many neighborhoods. The affordable housing is also not even that affordable, and the developer’s requirement can even be punted out of the neighborhood to be built offsite in some unsightly part of town. Those are some of the many factors that are contributing to the city’s problem—that even as Boston scrambles to create more stock and meet housing demand, people are constantly getting kicked out and priced out and the new units that go in are totally inaccessible to most Bostonians.

Anyway, that project near us of which there are many just like it got put on hold because there was a pandemic you may be aware, but it’s back on now, 100% displacement, torn down in a day or two, currently a construction site and soon the units will sell for god knows how much.

There used to be a house here.

Housing is an important issue for a lot of reasons, obviously, including that it determines everyone’s wellbeing and dignity and quality of life, but also because what we build where determines our energy use, with buildings accounting for some 40% of energy consumption and also dictating how we travel. It’s also a very frustrating issue for many reasons. For one, there are some very clear (clear to me!) policy solutions that seem to never be able to pass due to deeply rooted power structures. That is why, for example, some 75% of land in major cities in the United States is zoned for single-family housing, a form of exclusionary zoning that effectively bans poor people and people of color from living in most neighborhoods, while institutionalizing sprawl and excessive energy consumption.

Housing is also frustrating because decisions are often oversimplified into some very unhelpful binaries that rarely represent the reality on the ground. The big divide is YIMBY vs NIMBY, people who either shout “yes!” or “no!” to the prospect of things being done in their proverbial backyards. A NIMBY, as it goes is a rich, often liberal homeowner who doesn’t want to see new housing built because they want to protect their neighborhood. A YIMBY is usually a very nicely dressed professional who says all development is good due to their shrewd understanding of markets, this is a simple supply and demand problem you see. And these are the two sides.

You know I hate to do a both sides, but honestly, this is a both sides kind of thing, because sometimes the right answer is NIMBY and others times it’s YIMBY. And sometimes YIMBYs and/or NIMBYs are part of the problem.

For example, as someone who sometimes goes to community meetings to yell at the city about new condos, you might gather that I am a NIMBY. But I am totally not! I love new housing. I basically wish every structure in the city had new housing units built on top of it. I come from a family of builders as does ~*my wife*~ and I even wanted to be an architect for much of my young adulthood until I realized it was way too hard which in retrospect was probably a bad career decision. So, pro-building over here.

In fact, as I was getting riled up about Jerry’s raze and rebuild job, I was also getting all red ass about people in the neighborhood who were opposing a new mixed-income housing project just down the street. The city wanted to develop a piece of public property into affordable housing, and townies and business owners came out in full force to stop the plan. We went to this packed information session in a beer hall in which the city tried to clear up misconceptions and defuse the anger over the project and there were people literally just screaming at these poor city planners, about how people were going to get murdered and people in the new apartments would spy on us through their windows and all of the thriving businesses in the square would actually just close and be boarded up and then things would start catching on fire. And they did it they killed the project!

And now it is happening once again, just down the road in Jamaica Plain, one neighborhood over you know where the open air toilet condo is. There is a stretch of road that’s been under heavy development, with market rate condos shooting up alongside either end of the street in recent years. But a low income housing development was slated to go in, and a neighboring property owner decided to SUE to stop it from happening because he says it will hurt his business. The business, in case you were wondering is a beer garden. (In fact the same craft brewery from the beer garden where we attended that city information session. You know the kind of place, where you drink beer on an old barrel as a table and young dudes in tight clothing get drunk and talk about soccer while their toddlers run around and bug perfectly nice couples just trying to get a buzz on.)

So at the time, it was just the landlord suing (his name is no joke Montgomery Gold), and the brewery owner tried to stay out of it. But he made some guarded comment that made it clear he was definitely against the housing project. And now there is another affordable housing project in the works, this time for very low income seniors for Christ’s sake, and the landlord is suing once again, and this time so is the brewery owner!

As you can imagine, they are getting a lot of backlash, but there are also a ton of people in local facebook groups etc, as always, doing endless mental gymnastics to find reasons to oppose affordable housing. While there is indeed a lot of complexity in housing, honestly sometimes people just don’t like the idea of poor people moving in. In any case where a developer is trying to build a project that serves lower and middle income people, there are always concerns about variances, concerns about parking, concerns about traffic, concerns about building height, concerns about the color of the building, concerns about the type of siding that will be used, concerns about landscaping, concerns about disruption to business, concerns about safety, concerns about privacy, concerns about “who this will bring to the neighborhood.” The objections are numerous and the accommodations are never enough. It is always the wrong project in the wrong place at the wrong time. They never oppose affordable housing, they just oppose THIS affordable housing project.

So I guess my point is, there are good reasons to fight for new development and there are good reasons to fight against new development. Sometimes a project is a great idea and sometimes it’s shit, and the decision about whether it gets built or not always seems to have nothing to do with the best interests of the community and everything to do with what will build more wealth, with the final call always made amidst and in spite of a cacophony of neighbors screaming at each other from folding chairs in the basement of some community center.

So not only do we have a frustrating problem of special interests preventing good policy that would make things on balance better for everyone, we also have a problem in which we seem to have no good way for communities to effectively make planning decisions. On the latter point, I truly do not know what the solution is. Often my go-to answer to these kinds of decision-making problems is more participation, more democracy. But to be honest, deliberative processes on housing and land use are often total disasters and end up either derailing good projects for bad reasons, or creating an irrelevant side show.

In some parts of the country, the housing problem has become so bad that they’ve resorted to just railroading local opposition. For example, in Santa Rosa, when the combination of wildfires and the pandemic brought the area’s homelessness problem to new levels of severity, elected officials charged ahead with a plan to build a tent city to house 140 people at a local community center. During a public meeting, hundreds of residents screamed at politicians for hours, trying to stop to the plan.

But they did it anyway, as outlined in a recent article in Next City. “Go ahead and vote me out,” one city councilor said. “You want to shout at me and get angry? Go ahead.” And once it was built, people in the community actually ended up embracing the project, dropping off donations and spending more time at the center. As a county supervisor put it, they just had to take the risk. “We can’t just keep saying no. That’s been the failed housing policy of the last 30 to 40 years. Everybody wants a solution, but they don’t want to see that solution in their neighborhoods.”

While not a housing policy exactly, in my neighborhood there was a nightmarish traffic problem in a major two-lane thoroughfare, so the city wanted to take out a lane of parking and make it a bus priority lane. Had they gone through the usual series of meetings, people would have lost their minds. People love parking so, so much. But the city just did it. First, with a bunch of cones to try it out and then eventually with paint. And when people complained, the city would point out that traffic is now moving way faster and a large percentage of the people parking in those spots it turned out were commuters coming in from outside the neighborhood.

On one hand, I love these sorts of guerrilla projects that either involve taking political risks or making temporary improvements that can prove themselves before they become permanent. There’s a good case to be made for giving local leaders some latitude to make these moves.

But I don’t know, it also feels like that’s not really it either, you know? Like there has to be a way for communities to chart these paths, and we can do better than leaving it entirely up to representatives or municipal staff, who often defer to developers anyway. Part of me has to believe that the problem isn’t the participation itself, but how the participation is done, and whose voices are being heard when these projects come up. Because let’s be honest, most of the time what we’re seeing here is not just neighbors screaming at neighbors; it’s privileged neighbors screaming at other privileged neighbors, over the best way to protect their own chunk of wealth, which is not really much of a community meeting.

It’s something we need to get better at, because these changes end up affecting us all; even gentrifiers are getting gentrified these days. I should know—a few days ago, our landlord came knocking on our door saying he’d like to come by in a few days and take some photos of the house. A new opportunity has come his way, it seems. If he can get the right price point that is.

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Reading

Related, Sam J. Miller, who wrote a fantastic climate sci fi book Blackfish City, recently came out with an excellent new book, The Blade Between, which he calls a “gentrification horror novel.” I love Miller’s books because while there are clear protagonists, for the most part there are no clear good guys and bad guys. Along with being a fiction writer, Miller spent much of his career as a community organizer working on housing, and while that gives his writing a clear sense of justice and empathy, it also gives it a clear sense of complexity. As he writes in Blackfish City, “Every city is a war. A thousand fights being fought between a hundred groups.”

That message lives on in The Blade Between, which is about a young artist returning to his fast-gentrifying hometown of Hudson, New York, and the turmoil that follows, made worse by the ghosts of slaughtered whales and other angry spirits. The book is about the internal conflict we all feel about the places we are from. “It’s OK to love something that you hate, just like it’s OK to hate something that you love,” one character concludes.

But it’s also about the way these places are changing, often becoming unrecognizable and at the great cost of people who live in them. The people of Hudson are all shattered at varying levels, often as a result of an economy that has left them behind or chewed them up, and the resulting addiction, eviction, fire. But the book is also not unsympathetic toward gentrifiers themselves, recognizing the guilt, pain, and frustration in not wanting to be complicit in what is happening in our cities. It direct its anger mostly at the cycles and systems that need to be torn down and rebuilt.

As Miller writes about his book, in a recent essay for Tor.com:

“…my prime directive was crafting an ending that raised up the possibility of a third path forward being forged, through dialogue and hard work on both sides. In the modern-day housing market, there are no ghosts. No monsters. Only people. And if we want the future to look less like the horror story of hate and violence that is our history, we all have to make peace with trauma, and our role in it, and the privilege and pain we possess in relationship to it. And our power to create change.”

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I don’t know about you guys, but lately I have been feeling like all of the debate and discussion and progress and polling that we’ve all been watching in a bunch of different areas since January might be totally meaningless in the end because there’s a machine working nonstop in the background to dismantle democracy and our next federal government will basically be interminable Trumpism elected against the wishes of a large majority of the country. And now some movie and music picks.

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Listening

A while back I shared a song from Soft Sounds From Another Planet, but just today there is a brand new album from Japanese Breakfast so here is a single from it that I have been listening to.

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Watching

Still watching movies only, including currently slogging through The Master which I’m considering bailing on because it’s very boring but let me know if I should stick with it. One good movie I watched recently was Train to Busan which is a zombie movie that is very intense and emotional, in part just imagining what it must be like having intercity high speed rail.

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A fast one this week, old school CP, fast and furious which is another movie I just watched, Tokyo Drift, to be exact. Do not worry about our house, we will be fine either way. It is just a wild time right now in these leafy streets, you know what I’m saying?

In other news, our old little dog Jacoby, you know the one who was having trouble sleeping, it turns out the poor little guy does have dementia, doggy dementia they call it. Apparently in old age, dogs sometimes get confused as to what time it is and they have a hard time following a normal schedule. So we’re trying all kinds of medication to help him sleep and let him relax in his golden years.

I hope you readers are able to relax too, whether you are in your golden years or not. And I hope you can get there without eating half a gabapentin and half a trazodone squished into a piece of hot dog every night. But even if you do, that’s cool with me I support it.

Tate

Tearing down the idols that stand in our way

Sutton Hoo ship-burial helmet, c. 600-650 C.E., The British Museum

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“I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. …

But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo.“

This is a quote from science fiction author Ted Chiang, from a recent interview with Ezra Klein that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (yes Ezra Klein my favorite podcast that I never stop talking about). My childhood comic book brain initially started flipping through mental long boxes and thinking, well actually that’s not the case there are a lot of superhero stories where they go against the status quo, sometimes the state or big corporations, but you know what, I am not trying to get into the business of defending superhero comics in this newsletter. Some of them I like, most I don’t, and as with any self-respecting fan of comics, I’m usually either conflicted or annoyed by the genre and its dominance in popular media.

And in broad strokes, Chiang is right about superheroes. While they often begin as underdogs, the core of most superheroism is some form of genetic or otherwise inherent exceptionalism (the super part) and a reliance on that exceptionalism for the good of the masses (the hero part). And while the best ones are usually subversive storylines that chip away at that concept, the general theme of your typical superhero story is fighting crime, eliminating an aberration, protecting the norm. When you consider the fact that four of the highest grossing films of all time have the word “Avengers” in the title, you have to wonder why that kind of story clearly appeals to us so, so much.

Fanboys often point to the universality of these themes, making the college freshmany observation about the “hero’s journey,” which has been frequently dismissed as an overgeneralization of the world’s folklore. There’s also something distinctly American about the superhero fantasy. The idea of exceptionalism is so ingrained in our own national identity that it’s an astoundingly non-controversial political opinion that America is, in fact, just plain better than the other nations in the world.

You can see our obsession with superhero stories in lots of areas of American life if you think about it, but Ted Chiang’s observation also made me think wow, this sounds a lot like he’s talking about billionaire philanthropists (also some of our superheroes are literally billionaire philanthropists). In my very first newsletter ever I pointed out that Americans actually did not always love the idea of wealthy philanthropists, at least not as an institution, but we are coming out of a long modern period in which wealthy donors were largely considered an almost purely benevolent force in society. Ahem.

We are now, perhaps, emerging from that period, and when historians look back on when it became official, they may point to the fall of Bill Gates, which now seems to be underway. For the record and to say I told you so I have never been a big fan of Bill Gates. I don’t even really like writing about him to be honest but here we are again. Not that I had some inside information that he is a total creep, which, to a degree we will no doubt discover soon enough, he appears to be. But mainly because the very existence of Gates as mega-philanthropist and the foundation he built with his now estranged wife Melinda French Gates (see above, to the right of Bono) struck me and many other longtime haters as a problem in and of itself. Gates represents so many of the aspects of big philanthropy that many are no longer willing to tolerate.

For one, the main justification for philanthropy within democracy is heterodoxy in how we deliver public goods. But when private wealth and philanthropy can grow to the size of something like the Gates Foundation, it accumulates the power and monolithic prescriptiveness of the state (or at least our worst characterizations of the state) but without any of the democratic guardrails. Even beyond the power carried out by their actual funding of this or that, they gain a special kind of authority on any number of matters and are looked to to solve any number of societal problems guided by their own particular worldview. This class of people who stand above everyone else.

As an extension of that, big philanthropy is frequently guilty of prescribing solutions that either reinforce or at least do not threaten the status quo. So aside from the wrongness of a private citizen with the authority of a Bill Gates, I usually find myself disliking the solutions he puts forward themselves, because they tend to favor the hierarchies that gave him power in the first place. That includes pushing innovation and global markets to make agriculture more resilient through monocropping, school reform funding focused on uniform standards and assessment, and his unshakeable faith that new technology is the only way we can mitigate and adapt to climate change.

While there’s been a lot of criticism of Bill Gates over the years, like many philanthropists, he still somehow retained this glow of overall goodness in popular culture. Even if you disagreed with some of the things he said or approaches he took, you couldn’t deny all the good he’s done for the world. Whenever Gates fired off some random comment on something he has zero expertise in, you could always count on a wave of fawning media. We saw this most recently with his book and press tour about climate change, which was generally treated as the latest assessment from one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic.

I guess there’s a chance Gates emerges from the current scandal intact, but the general consensus is that the aura of goodwill is already gone. One of his fiercest and earliest critics, Linsey McGoey, says it’s long overdue, not because she celebrates the Gateses’ falling out, but because of the freedom from superheroics that it grants us.

“The best thing to come out of a sad event like this divorce is recognition that today’s global problems are ours to tackle, we the people — interdependent, global members of the public — through solidarity and shared science. We can’t relinquish this task to unaccountable philanthropists. The age of deference to them is over, and it’s about time.”

Climate change is the biggest of those global problems that is ours to tackle, not to be left in the hands of ordained saviors, but the desire to leave it there is strong. In the 2020 Democratic primary, we had perhaps three climate superheroes to contend with, all of them white men, two of them billionaires. We love the idea of the “good billionaire” like that guy from Contact, who descends from the skies to use his powers for good, be it Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg, or Elon Musk delivering us electric cars but just in case plotting an escape plan to Mars. In my second ever newsletter I argued that, even if they use their riches in the best most effective way possible, we will always lose something important when billionaires are our climate heroes, in that they take the problem and the solution out of the hands of us lowly mortals.

It’s not just wealthy mega-donors, though. When the climate movement began to grow exponentially, including record-breaking demonstrations around the world in 2019, there was an inescapable narrative that this was the work of a single young Swedish girl. How remarkable that one teenager could set in motion such an uprising, people would say, the youth shall save us thank god for the youth. We should know better because Greta Thunberg herself constantly tells us that she and her generation are not here to save anything. She, like the millions of other climate activists, is just a person who wants to have a future.

We often elevate our elected officials to superhero status in this way too, with one hateful piece of shit in particular being the most obvious example that comes to mind. But so often in politics, or I guess to be more precise, in the popular portrayal of politics, the elected leader taking office is often seen as the endgame, you know, when we finally get the infinity gauntlet back and then spoiler Iron Man dies. Not only that, but voters and activists’ allegiances to these leaders are expected to be unwavering and absolute. Once you pick the person, that’s your person, and if you turn on them or doubt them or criticize, it’s seen as a failure or a comeuppance. Ahaha the left is eating itself you see look at these stark divisions that have been revealed a rift you might even say.

We saw this recently here in Massachusetts after tons of young organizers went to bat for Ed Markey in 2020, as the reliable progressive and climate champion faced a primary threat, weirdly from the center. Known as the Markeyverse, they are believed to have played a large role in his reelection, which sent a wave of fear throughout the state’s Democratic establishment. When Markey’s stance on Israel and Palestine let these generally leftist supporters down, they went after him for it.

Pundits and political operatives took delight in this, characterizing it as a lesson for these naive young people about politics. But you know what? Fuckin good for them. Really, we could all learn something from the Markeyverse, and the ease with which they fought their own hero. Because at the end of the day, they were never in it for Ed Markey. Their devotion didn’t lie with his name, or his face, or his hair or his cheugy sneaker fashion. It was with their own ideals and their own political goals.

This is why I make it a rule to never stan a politician. Not because they are inherently bad or unscrupulous people, but because they exist to serve, to act as a stand in for the people who put them there. They are a conduit for power and change, not the change itself. A coalition of Latinx and Native organizers were instrumental in putting Kyrsten Sinema in office, because she offered a better path to change than the Republican alternative. And now that she is failing to deliver, the coalition that put her there will remove her. Or if she starts to come through, maybe keep her there.

One of the core principles of Sunrise Movement‘s electoral work goes: No permanent friends. No permanent enemies. That sounds kind of foreboding, but I’ve always found it to be admirably zen-like. “Our only permanent allegiance is to protecting our communities, our shared home, and our future.” You might add to it, no permanent heroes. Which is not to say there are no people we admire or turn to for help or even model ourselves after. It’s not to say we can’t enjoy the next Spider-man movie. But we might challenge our devotion to the idea of superheroism, which can rob us of our own power and prevent us from tearing down the idols that are standing in our way.

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Links

• “People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone. There really won’t be very much that we can do about it.”
• “America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end… However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.”
• Eversource, the utility company that was caught waging a campaign against electrification and in defense of natural gas was now caught distributing pro-natural gas propaganda in Massachusetts classrooms. These fuckin guys.
• A “cataclysmic day” for fossil fuel companies.
• Gizmodo has had some pretty good climate headlines lately: Shareholders Tell Exxon to Eat Shit
• It’s taken so long to extend the Green Line to low income neighborhoods, that when it’s finally done, low income people will have been mostly forced out of those neighborhoods.
• “People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”
• In 2020 as millions of low wage workers lost their jobs, median CEO pay at New England’s largest companies soared 21.4%, to $14.5 million. GE’s CEO Larry Culp brought home $73 million. The national ratio of compensation between CEOs and their workers was 21-to-1 in 1965; by 2019, the ratio was 320 to 1.
• Arizona’s attorney general is bringing eco-fascism to mainstream US politics. “It is shocking to see what was in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto described in more legalistic language in this suit by the Arizona attorney general.”

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Watching

Film festival continues. Fans of crime fiction will thoroughly enjoy I’m Your Woman, which is a pitch perfect 1970s neo-neo-noir thriller, but told from the perspective of characters who might have otherwise been supporting characters.

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Listening

Goat Girl, A-Men

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Welp in other news looks like we are about to run fresh out of democracy and UFOs are fully real. On a more personal note, it is a motherfucker of an allergy season out there. One of our aged little dogs Jacoby has also taken to waking up at 3 in the morning and wanting to just hang out and have fun with us for a couple of hours. Jamie thinks it was the full moon but I think he has dementia. Either way it has been a tough week sleepwise so I’m going to play some Zelda and call it a day.

I hope you all have a nice holiday weekend take some Claritin and watch out for UFOs.

Tate

Changing societal norms leading to policy change, which leads to even faster-changing societal norms

Portrait of an Extraordinary Musical Dog, Philip Reinagle, 1805

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Every now and then I’ll read something in a book or an article in which the author at least seems to come to a conclusion about the power of social movements independently from the field of movement building. With an entirely different field as a starting point, they’ll work their way through a body of research, and the conclusion that spits out is: social movements create transformative change. The latest example of this was Robert H. Frank’s book Under the Influence: Putting Peer Pressure to Work, in which he reaches this conclusion by way of his nearly 50-year career as an economist, specifically his pioneering work in behavioral economics.

Frank’s motivation for writing his latest book came largely from his concerns about climate change, and he’s supportive of the Green New Deal, but his entire framing of the problem is one of economic incentives, tax policy, and reaching a better understanding of why we make the decisions we do.

At the core of the book’s thesis is the idea that, contrary to most economic theory, our decisions are often less a matter of individual self-interest and are far more influenced by our social circumstances than we realize. And if we were to govern based on this understanding, we could unlock cascading beneficial behaviors, and end senselessly harmful behaviors that put human civilization at risk. While there is one part of the book’s argument that I tend to disagree with, Frank makes a compelling case for the power of social forces to create sweeping change, with either profound negative or positive consequences.

Competing Freedoms

A lot of his underlying arguments about why this is the case can be read as a matter of challenging the gospel of competition and individual choice in economics. He dispels misconceptions about the father of his field of study, who is often used to justify free markets above all else: “Adam Smith…is often cited in defense of the claim that competitive markets produce the greatest good for the greatest number. But that was never Smith’s position. His signature insight was that the pursuit of narrow self-interest often leads to socially beneficial outcomes, but not always.”

In fact, he points out, unencumbered markets often create horrible outcomes for the group, outcomes that each individual would actually never have wanted. Some metaphors he uses include a crowded theater in which everyone stands up to see better, so then nobody can see. Or a business district in which everyone wants to make a bigger sign advertising their stores, so you end up with a cacophony of signage useless to everyone. I first wrote about his ideas in Crisis Palace #48, one of the more popular issues you guys liked it:

Sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. They liked smoking, after all, and it was a cool thing to do. But a small minority did quit as a result, and that sparked “behavioral contagion,” which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the US. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed first. Smoking is now anything but cool and when people who are definitely not me sneak a drag they do it in shame and isolation.

In Under the Influence, he expands on the smoking metaphor, pointing out that, while the danger of second-hand smoke was used to convince politicians and voters concerned about personal freedom to support laws restricting the act (smoking wasn’t just a personal matter, you see, it was actually hurting other people), it was actually kind of a uh smoke screen. It’s true that smoking does hurt other people, but the second hand smoke threat is tiny compared to social impacts of smoking. In part because of the famous Framingham study I pointed out in the earlier issue, we know that if you smoke, other people you know will too, and other people they know will too, and many will get sick and die from it. That’s the real reason for regulating smoking, and if we accept the importance of social circumstance in our decision-making, we can come up with more powerful and responsible policy solutions.

The way Frank contends with personal liberty is one of the book’s strengths. For someone who is arguably making the case for the nanny state, he genuinely cares about personal freedom and needs, but shrewdly points out that in our relentless protection of individual choice and disregard for social forces, we frequently create a world in which all of our hands end up being tied, forced by competitive markets to make decisions we would not actually want for ourselves and that don’t serve anyone particularly well (more on this in CP #77).

When legitimate aspirations are in conflict, people’s freedom to do as they please will be limited no matter which way we turn. … Clearer thinking about behavioral contagion requires careful analysis of the trade-offs between competing types of freedom, which in turn requires difficult conversations about free will and other thorny philosophical issues.

The vast majority of smokers, he points out, now wish they had never started smoking and now they can’t stop because they are addicted. Is that freedom? Even if we don’t pass laws outright banning such activities, we can at least acknowledge the profound social harm in allowing it without restraint, and pass policies that give all of us something of an edge when it comes to making beneficial decisions.

The Arms Race

Another big strength in Under the Influence is the way it frames emergent social phenomena as a concrete force we must understand and direct. Despite the book’s subtitle, the term “peer pressure” strikes me as insufficient in describing it, calling to mind schoolyard bullies. In fact, one argument against regulating for behavioral contagion is that it’s the job of parents, not the state, to teach their children to resist peer pressure. Similarly, social forces are also often dismissed as a form of vanity or superficiality, “keeping up with the Joneses.”

Neither is a fair description of what is happening here because 1) social pressure is not always a bad thing that kids or adults should resist (consider antivaxxers), 2) the poor decisions we make as a result of social forces are often completely rational and made because of very real consequences and incentives that are often out of our control. Our decisions are highly dependent on our frames of reference—what we can see around us and what our peers are doing—and that’s not necessarily a personal failing or misjudgment.

One powerful section of the book is when he describes how negative behavioral contagion creates harmful cascades, even though the decisions that lead to it are not necessarily frivolous or misguided.

For example, look at the growing size of Americans’ homes over the years—the median new house built in the United States grew from 1500 square feet in 1973 to more than 2500 square feet today, and fewer occupants means we now have twice the living space. You might argue, oh families just want to impress other people with their fancy McMansions, and there is definitely a level of selfishness that guides antisocial behaviors. But real estate values also dictate the quality of schools, meaning parents frequently buy houses they don’t need in neighborhoods they can barely afford as a rational decision to give their kids a better education. This leads to bidding wars, anxious comparisons to other neighborhoods, and ballooning housing costs that make everyone collectively less happy, as research has found after a certain point, bigger houses stop making people happier.

Another example is car sizes. The sport utility vehicle was virtually non-existent before 1966. In 1975, it accounted for just 2% of total vehicle sales. In the 90s, that all changed. By 2014, SUVs had become the highest-selling passenger vehicle category in the United States, vehicles whose nominal purpose is almost never used by consumers, whose size and design make roads less safe, and that spew greenhouse gases at higher rates, putting human civilization at risk. (Frank doesn’t make this point, but there’s a perception of personal safety in larger vehicles that is self-defeating when all vehicles become larger.) There is basically no explanation under traditional economics as to why SUVs are so widespread, other than the very fact that more people started to have SUVs. There was a spark of popularity, and behavioral contagion took care of the rest, Frank argues.

He describes these buying habits and more as the equivalent of a military arms race, in which the expansion of individual countries’ weapons stockpiles do not make anyone safer or more secure, quite the contrary. The decisions are made to improve each actor’s relative positioning, but looking at the overall picture, all parties are worse off.

This leads to enormous cascades of overconsumption, overuse of resources, wasteful spending on things that make life worse instead of things that would make it measurably better, such as improved infrastructure, education, healthcare, etc. Rising economic inequality only makes this dynamic worse, as the highest end of excess tends to pull everyone else’s frame of reference up toward increasingly unrealistic and wasteful levels of spending.

The Spark

Of course, the opposite can be true too. Frank’s big positive example of behavioral contagion is the simple fact that when one house gets solar panels, neighbors are far more statistically likely to do so, as are their neighbors, and so on and so on. That applies to all kinds of climate friendly decisions. But he is not advocating for individual lifestyle changes as the answer to climate change. Rather, the cascade he describes is a loop of changing societal norms, leading to policy change, which ideally leads to even faster-changing societal norms, accelerating at a pace that we initially never would have thought possible.

In fact, Frank is advocating heavily for one policy in particular—so-called Pigouvian taxes. These are taxes on activities that have negative externalities on society, like a gas tax, which then would reinvest funds in Green New Deal style infrastructure and technology. This would disincentivize bad behavior and allow new technology to catch fire in ways that would rapidly spread. Such taxes would need to be coupled with subsidies for lower and middle income people so as to not be regressive. For example, Massachusetts did just that last time we raised our gas tax which was way back when grunge was the most popular style of music. It makes it kind of a roundabout version of a wealth tax, but one that also influences behavior.

This is kind of where I start to lose enthusiasm for Frank’s argument, although this is really his big finale. Not that I’m against carbon taxes, which can be progressive as he describes, but I have a hard time buying how passing such a tax is the spark that sets off a cascade of behavioral contagion, turning the tide on climate change. New taxes are unpopular, after all, because people with money hate giving up their money and people without money know that they usually end up getting screwed over by tax policy.

Frank’s solution for getting past that distaste is that we must get better at explaining the idea of behavioral contagion, using strategic forms of persuasion. Specifically, he argues, we must convince the public, especially the wealthy, that paying Pigouvian taxes won’t actually have a noticeable negative impact on their lives, because their purchasing power relative to others would remain the same.

As an example, Frank points to the slow-then-fast acceptance of same-sex marriage as one of the big case studies of positive behavioral contagion, but he points to rational, repeated arguments in favor as one of the main reasons that the cascade began.

This strikes me as at best an incomplete understanding and exposes what Frank-as-economist is really missing in his analysis—power. Cascades of transformative change are prevented, not just because people don’t understand the issue properly. Rather, it’s powerful interests intentionally wielding their power to prevent the cascade from getting started. Overcoming that power takes more than just a good persuasive argument, although that’s part of it. It also takes emotion, disruption, leadership, commitment, relationship-building. It takes organizing.

This brings to mind that recent climate paper calling for “catalytic cooperation,” and the parallel research that found what is preventing climate action is not so much a collective action problem where nobody wants to act first. It’s more attributable to a range of domestic power struggles that need to be won on the ground.

That’s how I think the contagion starts, and that leads to policy that feeds back into it. That policy could very well be a Pigouvian tax that Frank suggests. But it could be any number of other policies as well, because by then the explosion has already started and possibilities are expanding. What if it was a completely different economic system! It’s almost like the carbon tax he envisions is simultaneously thinking too big and too small.

That said, I quite like Frank’s description of what it looks like after the catalyst has been set off. How social forces can create both profound harm and good, and how policy can leverage those forces for rapid change. I think he’s just missing a piece—the thing that sets off the spark, which I would say is building local power to win individual battles. Add that spark to the fire of behavioral contagion, and that’s a formidable theory of change.

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Links

• “You see all of the kids around me, they’re just kids,” the girl said, pointing to a group of younger children. “Why would you just send a missile to them?”
• “Just because Bill Gates puts on a pastel sweater and says he’s donating money to good causes doesn’t mean that he’s actually helping the world.”
• The fact that Massachusetts’ army of progressive teens (aka “the Markeyverse”) made the New York Times is amazing. This article does have some problems though, including only quoting white kids and not pointing out that Dana Depelteau is a complete fucking clown.
• Working long hours is killing hundreds of thousands of people a year by increasing risk of stroke and heart disease. I used to work at a nonprofit that worshipped long hours (which was and to some extent is still the norm in the sector) and I feel so guilty and ashamed of it.
• John Kerry’s statement that 50% of emission cuts will come from new technology is a form of climate delay that is similarly harmful but more insidious than climate denial.
• Sea level rise as a result of climate change added $8 billion in damage during Hurricane Sandy.
• Arizona’s Corporation Commission nearly passed a 100% carbon-free electricity plan but then a Republican commissioner sabotaged it by changing mandates to goals at the last minute. This was incorrectly blamed on partisan divides, when really it was just the GOP fucking it up.
• Tucson’s ambitious goal to plant 1 million trees.
• The Hoover Dam was once proof that humanity could bend nature to its will through engineering. Now it’s proof that we can’t.
• Climate change has redefined what we call “normal” weather. These sliding graphics of heat and precipitation over the century are brutal.
• Stephen Graham Jones pens an open letter to conventions hosting Native writers. “Do they get cold sandwiches from that vendor in the hall like everybody else, or do they bring a beaded parfleche of pemmican in with them…”
• ANOHNI on NFTs: “I think it’s shit. They won’t stop until they have sucked the life and value out of every remaining shred of organic life and every last gasp of analog craft or thought and crammed it into Elon Musk and Grimes’ patented space dildo, headed for Mars to reauthor the future of sentience in their own psychotic and ethically bankrupt likeness.”

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Watching

Still on the personal film festival and there have been some good ones lately including Spring Breakers, Howl’s Moving Castle, and a rewatch of Spirited Away. But one I want to highlight is this super weird French movie from 2012 called Holy Motors. It’s very hard to describe, but the director Leos Carax who is kind of a Jodorowsky sort of figure says, “It’s trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day” so there you go. The whole thing is totally unique very worth watching if you can track it down, but one of the best parts is this musical intermission:

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Listening

Let’s keep it weird and French with this psych pop band called La Femme that I have always enjoyed especially 2013’s Psycho Tropical Berlin, kind of retro bachelor pad music with an edge. But their new release Paradigmes is truly bonkers, with songs in Spanish but French accents, English with French accents, banjos, horns, like 10 different vocalists, all over the map. I love this song that is randomly about Colorado.

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I endorse

Seltzer. I’ve been joking around a lot lately about cheugy, a kind of new word that means basic or vanilla or coming to a trend late or sticking with a trend too long. I obviously have a fair amount of cheug in my life, but I was contemplating cheuginess the other day as I do, and how it’s often synonymous with objects of comfort. Comfort being, by definition, not new or cutting edge, but something that has had its edge fully worn soft, and we keep coming back to it for solace. In the winter, my comfort cheug of choice is scented candles. In the summer, it’s seltzer. Can after can. Especially cheugy is Polar’s “mythical” flavors like Unicorn Kisses and Mermaid Songs, which taste like weird blends of movie theater candy and fruit. Cheugometer malfunction cannot process too cheugy explodes.

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Well, whoomp there it is, as the Tag Team used to say. That’s what I got today. This one was honestly kind of boring but you got a good picture of a dog playing the piano. I missed you all last week, but I did get the second vaccine dose and then had a very nice birthday celebration at Castle Island, which in true New England fashion, is of course not an island. It was a beautiful day and everyone was in a good mood, we saw some friends get together and even hug each other. Some masshole family camped out too close to us and went on and on about how they chaahge too much faah pickles but you know what. We didn’t even care.

I hope this newsletter is like your version of Castle Island and even though there is some boring tax policy junk on the island this week, it is still a sanctuary of joy and clarity, even if it is not really an island.

Tate