Putt Putting Along

Putt Putting Along

The election is behind us, although what we do now will impact the next one. I’m gripped by the growing concern that the climate breakdown is not being understood by most of us at the level of threat that it is quickly coming. For those who may have at least tried playing the game of golf, it’s like finally getting your ball to the green, but then trying to guess both how hard to stroke the ball as well as guess which way, if any, the ball will break to find the hole. Even the best golfers in the world get this wrong … a lot!!

My concerns are accelerating for we in the ‘developed’ world are neither not responding anywhere near quickly enough to stave off a climate nightmare in the decades ahead, nor that we have little to no conception of the gross injustice we own for this global predicament. We like to think that if we all just put solar on our roofs and purchase the electric car, we’ve done our part and the world will go on as before. Just fine tune the existing system and all will right itself.

I don’t believe it.

But then how should I live what life I have left? Having reached my current age, according to the latest data, I might expect another 11-12 years, a bit longer than the expected life of my current pacemaker. But who truly knows which way the ball will break 😊. The problem for me is aligning those serious concerns listed above, with what should I and what can I do in the remaining time I may have to make a positive difference. Sit back and watch football, basketball, sitcoms, and block it all away, as if I am exempt from addressing the global injustice others must live with? Keep doing what I’ve been doing – a little of this and little of that and hope that things get better? Or something more thoughtfully connected with the concerns themselves?

And what, given my limited talents and energy, could I possibly do that would be most useful? I’m thinking out loud here as I type these thoughts. Not sure where this thought experiment is going or where it will end. But the pulse of it has been steadily increasing. I admit to a deep urge to understand the complexities and interactions of the human natural world interface. I suspect it was my studying geography that introduced me to various interactions between the physical/natural world and the human one. I used to think of those two as separate distinct worlds as our culture taught most of us, but now I clearly recognize that they are one intertwined system. Subconsciously it explains why I tend to read works that dance between them from a variety of fields --  from philosophy, economics, sociology, political science, environmental science, etc.

As I sit here thinking about this on November 27, 2022, here’s what I believe is both before us and what maybe I should do with the remainder of my time on planet Earth. I should review these thoughts in a year and see if any of it still rings true and did I follow my own sage advice, or should I redirect my attention and energies elsewhere.

Climate change and ecological destabilization are accelerating more quickly than most reporting portrays. Primary evidence for me is that even the quadrennial IPCC Assessment Reports, which because they are ‘consensus’ reports, they are more conservative than either the more scary or hopeful models they study. Even these more conservative summaries have continued to show increasing alarm with each ‘new report. In short, they continually soften the possible threat. Thus, the timetable for the arrival of very serious trouble is shortening. And yet while some progress on some fronts is being made, the current trajectory is too close to the disastrous ‘business as usual’ approach, in large part because we think we can grow our way out of it. That is the basis of our economic system’s gospel. That is, as long as we grow our economy as measured by GDP, we can innovate away from the abyss. Just produce more efficient technologies and grow renewable energy and we’ll be fine. There is little talk of doing with less.

Economist Kate Raworth, building on the work of the late Herman Daly and others, has helped us see that the economy needs to balance ecological boundaries of the planet with the social boundaries of human well-being. Currently we have overstepped both of those boundaries with the result of shrinking of both ecological and social health. More of the same foretells disasters unlike we have yet seen. This is magnified in regions of the world that are both less able to adapt and are less responsible for this unravelling. Therein lies a focus of how I think we need to direct our solutions. It can’t simply be focused on one narrow solution – e.g. carbon sequestration or income equality. There must be an intentional blend, akin to that in the Sustainable Development Goals, agreed to in principle by all member nations of the United Nations in 2015.

Anthropologist Jason Hickel in his recent very insightful book – Less is More, gives a clear-eyed look at our predicament, how we got here, how we should steer our way forward. To me, his work reawakened our (developed world) responsibility for creating most of the havoc the world is experiencing and therefore our overdue responsibility to assist our developing nation neighbors in mitigating and adapting to it. That means we have to consume much less so they can consume a little more. Technology alone will not get us there, for there are unavoidable limits as Hickel clearly points out.

My inclination is to look at the possibilities at two levels. One is how can I reduce my own consumption while supporting others who need more. And a second is, how do I affect how we change the ‘business as usual’ systems that are driving the dangerous and senseless growth. If I look at my nearly lifelong battle against war, what have I possibly learned that can be directed towards these challenges? First, is the realization that systems don’t change without feedback and that two, system change requires persistence – ask the women suffragists, civil rights and labor activists. We shouldn’t expect quick victories with our proposals for change. That reality is in deep tension with the accelerating threats. As Jackson Brown sang years ago, “There Are Lives in the Balance”.

And who can knowingly predict what series of future events might just trigger the possibility that could shift our ‘business as usual’ into more sustainable directions. Keeping ideas and possibilities alive is essential work. As economist Milton Friedman noted, “Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

 

How I came to be someone enchanted with ideas of possibilities I haven’t a clue. But it feels like it is firmly part of my DNA at this point. Some utopian/hopeful gene was nourished somewhere along the way by others I have been exposed to. I think maybe I’m a late bloomer. I remember a decade ago when the editorial team I was part of for an encyclopedia of sustainability were discussing the possible entries we needed to cover in it. Among other topics, I pushed for addressing “power”. Like energy, power flows everywhere in our world. But unless we happen on it during some course of study, we spend little time trying to understand it.

You might think, given my concerns with climate change, that I’m referring here to the narrow thread of power we associate with energy. But I’m at least as interested in power in the broader social sense. It is essential, in my mind, that we learn the distinction of “power over” vs. “power with”. This is true from the interpersonal level to the larger social, political, and economic levels. I have little faith that our future can escape disaster if we don’t learn this soon. Just a week ago the world met in Egypt to find and build global responses to climate change. We saw the developing nations calling out the empty pledges of the developed nations from the last meeting. We have exercised power over them in many ways since colonial times.

In fact I would argue that our culture is steeped in the “power over” mantra. You see it in the thrill of competition in full bloom with today’s World Cup. Or when I asked a friend if they were rooting for the University of Michigan against Ohio State in American football this weekend, even though they were not affiliated with either team. They so despised their arch rival they wanted them to lose more than anything. While the competitive force is most visible in athletic endeavors, it is widely subsumed in our economy, our politics, even our schooling.

It operates in our foreign relations, in patriarchy, in authoritarianism, and in seemingly every area of life. As our learned naturalists have been telling us, nature is not simply a competitive, dog-eat-dog system. There is a symbiosis and cooperation woven throughout it. It is the glue that makes it possible for life to exist and flourish. We are not simply competitive creatures and sooner we learn this and challenge the dominant worldview that says otherwise, the better the future for our children and theirs.

Therein lies some slivers of hope from the COP 27 meetings just completed. There was some measure of cooperation established, although hardly enough in the agreements signed. So, too with the UN Sustainable Development Goals agreed to by all 193 members of the UN in 2015. As noted climate policy expert Michael Klare notes in a piece yesterday, there are hints that China and the U.S. could work together on addressing and leading climate change policies and actions. We should do all in our power to urge our government to seize this opportunity to seed a future built on cooperation. Not a time to sit on the couch.

 “Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

 

Hope, Lies and Making Change

I was up early as usual yesterday morning to sneak in a little quiet reading time before heading off to set up for our local monthly recycling drive we've been operating for 28 years. It was chilly (14 degrees) and dark when I loaded up our 1999 Ford Ranger, 4-cylinder truck with our material before swinging by the elementary school to load some of their recycled paper, tin and plastic to our drive site. 



This monthly adventure allows me to catch the national NPR show, On the Media, which is unfortunately the only time I ever hear it. Bob Garfield and Brooke Gladstone have been doing this always thoughtful and reflective show for many years.


Since the truck was not yet warmed up I had the heater fan off, which made listening to it easier. Before I got to the school they aired a segment that inspired this blog post. Bob Garfield was demonstrably depressed by the state of our politics and the press and he was trying to cope with it. Wherein a colleague referred him to a book by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark. [Those of you who may been occasional readers of this blog will note that name, and even that book, from which I have added one of my favorite quote, which I'll add at the end. Here's another blog post that excerpts a quote from a 2013 essay or this one from a post-2016 election essay.]



But Garfield went further than just trying to summarize the book. The colleague suggested he contact Solnit to see what she had to say and therein lies the reason for this blog. I have never heard Rebecca Solnit. I knew that she was one of my favorite writers - penetrating, lyrical, powerful and unafraid to stare into dark corners of our world. But Solnit is not simply a writer. She is also an activist and it is from that personal engagement that the fire and power of her writing emerges. I was somewhat anxious that she would not be as powerful a speaker, especially in an interview environment. Some people we know write beautifully, but speaking live on the spur of the moment doesn't allow for the editing that good writing does.

Not to worry, despite a very different voice than I expected, the exchange with Garfield, by both of them was uplifting in ways I cannot give adequate words to. The 11-minute audio track from the show is a necessary vaccination for all progressives as we enter the dark times. Please take the time to listen to this segment. I also suggest those of you who have access to On the Media through your local NPR station, add it to your regular diet of listening.

Below is a quote I have used in many talks and in many things I have written. If by the time you get this far in the blog you have not listened to the interview with Garfield, perhaps reading this tiny excerpt from the same book that inspired Bob Garfield to call her for an interview, this might nudge you to do so. I believe you will be glad you did.

     Causes and effects assume history marches forward, but history is not an army.         It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away a stone, an                 earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes one person inspires a                 movement, or her words do decades later; sometimes a few passionate people             change the world; sometimes they start a movement and millions do; sometimes         those millions are stirred by the same outrage or the same ideal and change                 comes upon us like a change of weather. All of these transformations have in               common is that they begin in the imagination, in hope. To hope is to gamble. It’s         to bet on the future, on your desires, on the possibility that an open heart and               uncertainty is better than gloom and safety. To hope is dangerous, and yet it is             the opposite of fear, for to live is to risk.

I say all this to you because hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. I say this because hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope. At the beginning of his massive 1930s treatise on hope, the German philosopher Ernst Bloch wrote, “The work of this emotion requires people who throw themselves actively into what is becoming, to which they themselves belong.” To hope is to give yourself to the future, and that commitment to the future makes the present inhabitable. 

             -Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark,

If you need an extra boost here's a link to Stand Up (and Be Strong) by Keb Mo 

On Lost Causes, Climate Change, and Possibilities

To be honest, I really like Naomi Klein’s work – her crisp analysis of complex issues and her manner of conveying those insights.

I’ve read “Shock Doctrine” and other shorter pieces and saw her give an astonishing lecture a few years back based on only a few notes that wove a complex set of issues into a coherent whole.

 That being said I was not sure I was up for reading her 500pp+ new book “This Changes Everything”.

 

I assumed I knew everything she was going to say. But I had put a notify request on the title at the library when it was ordered, so when it came in a couple weeks back I thought I should at least give it a short whirl. I’m on page 370 of 466 pages of prose followed by 60 pages of notes. It’s been a good read. And while I know most of what she has laid out here, there are both new nuggets and a distinctive whole to her well written analysis that I’ve have enjoyed and been inspired by. In short – I highly recommend the read….

Today I read another fervent piece on climate change by another favorite author of mine, Rebecca Solnit. "Let's leave behind the age of fossil fuel. Welcome to Year One of the climate revolution" was published this past week with yet a bit different twist.

Like Klein she is a keen analyst of the human condition, and arguably a more  prolific writer on our condition. Her insights are fresh, as you'll see.  I won’t summarize this, as it is short enough to read as printed in The Guardian

Then this evening I read this very interesting piece by the international relations scholar, Richard Falk, entitled “ On Lost Causes and the Future of Palestine”. 

 
While unlike the other two pieces it doesn’t deal with climate change. His jumping off point is a reflection on the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said’s concept of “Lost Causes”. This is what links so closely with the pieces by Klein and Solnit.  Read separately, they will have some impact on the reader. Read together, they may transform us. And that's the possibility worth sharing….

Climate, Prosperity, Economic Growth, and Governance

     "It must always be remembered that the greatest barrier to humanity rising to meet the climate crisis is not that its too late or that we don't know what to do. There is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. And yet the reason so many of us are greeting this threat with grim resignation is that our political class appears wholly incapable of seizing those tools  and implementing those plans> And it's not just the people we vote into office and then complain about  - it's us. For most of us living in post-industrial societies, when we see the crackling black and white footage of general strikes in the 1930s, victory gardens in the 40s, and Freedom Rides in the 60s, we simply cannot imagine being part of any mobilization of that depth and scale. That kind of thing was fine form them, but surely not us - with our eyes glued to our smartphones, our attention spans scattered by click bait, our loyalties split by the burdens of debt and the insecurities of contract work. Where would we organize? Who would we trust enough to lead us? Who, moreover, is "we"?

     In other words, we are products of our age and of a dominant ideological project - one that has too often taught us to see ourselves as little more than singular gratification - seeking units to maximize our narrow advantage. This project has also led our governments to stand by helplessly for more than two decades as the climate crisis morphed from a "grandchildren" problem to a banging-down-the-door problem." Naomi Klein, in The Nation, October 6, 2014

British economist, Tim Jackson writes in last week's Guardian about the conflict between economic growth and climate change. In The Dilemma of Growth: Prosperity vs. Economic Expansion, Jackson asks:


"Rethinking prosperity is a vital task because our prevailing vision of the good life – and the economics intended to deliver it – have both come badly unstuck. Financial markets are unstable; inequality is rising; and despite the 500,000 or so people who took to the streets before Tuesday’s UN Climate Summit in New York, tackling climate change still faces a “frustrating lack of progress”. If this were not enough, the proposition that more is always better has signally failed to deliver, particularly in the affluent west. But questioning these values is deemed to be the act of lunatics, idealists and revolutionaries."

Add me to that list.

But wait, there are signs of hope. From author Terry Tempest Williams blogging at the NYC Climate March, just a week ago -
    
     "They just kept coming in waves, in torrents, a river of people convening on the streets of New York City in the march for climate justice. They just kept coming, hundreds of thousands of individuals, indigenous, black, white, brown, yellow, and red, a rainbow of colors winding through the canyons of Manhattan.
     This movement of climate justice is no longer segregated, is no longer privileged, is no longer young or old, or the radical fringe moving toward the center. Instead, this movement resides in the core of a collective concern: Earth has a fever. There is no Planet B. What we witnessed on Sunday, September 21, was 400,000 individuals standing in the center of this crisis with love."

Maybe, there is just enough hope, that readers will throw off the shackles of hopelessness and take up the hard and long work of redirecting our future.

An election is only five weeks away. It's not too late or too early to work for a candidate or proposal in your community that can point us in a new direction. Not sure who? LOOK HERE

 

Now, not tomorrow.