Alex Steffen was one of my go-tos for a long time before I left Twitter! As more environmental thinkers I used to admire have gone off the “let everything collapse” deep end (which I get but they seem to have no compassion for human suffering), Steffen remains thoughtful on that front. Community resilience FTW. One of the big things, of course being affordability, which I think needs state-level solutions in some places mainly because many conservative legislatures keep strangling local fixes.
That human suffering part is so difficult. On the one hand, I don't think capitalism has any answers to any of these problems but it will fight like hell to pretend it does, and that will increase human suffering, especially for the people already suffering, who have never known anything BUT suffering. Meanwhile, I see what happened in Colorado recently, or has happened in California, and my heart breaks for those people. It does! But I couldn't read more than a third of that Weil piece on California because my rage was starting to ruin my day before the sun has risen ... and maybe has. Because the reek of so much white privilege just oozes from it. I think of the thousands and thousands of Indians murdered – entire tribes eliminated, FOREVER – to make that state a white person's paradise. I think of the ongoing brutal treatment of migrant workers who make possible the economy for all those white people. And now we're supposed to care because it's privileged, ivy league-educated white people who are suffering? NOW it's a crisis? I really, really struggle to find the depths I need to dig to for the existential compassion for them. I understand the "let everything collapse" deep end so well at times like this because so many people are already suffering and will continue to suffer, and I'm like, "Fuck it." It's easy to be a "thinker" when the entire world has been built to support your entitlement to do that thinking on a porch on a perfect little cabin in the mountains, built entirely on the backs and blood of people you don't really even see. I'm nauseous with my own rage. I guess this is what it means to be "triggered", eh? Fuck.
I hear you and echo Antonia below: it's so striking, how much all of this agony over collapse, and inconvenience, and fear of the outside world, and precarity....it only comes to the fore when white bourgeois people cannot escape it. It's worth remembering that every damn time any white person talks about it, and I was remiss in not noting it. Like you, I often feel inclined to say well fuck it, NOW we're going to try to save California paradise for the privileged? And then I slingshot to the transapocalyptic reality: if we *don't* try to do this, it's still all going to go to shit, and the suffering will still be so unequally distributed. So how do we really reckon, REALLY reckon, like actual reparations reckon with that past and move forward to create less suffering? That I don't know.
I'm all for saving California and everywhere else so long as we are saving it for everyone equally. I am all the fucking way in for that. But it involves a redistribution of wealth that just doesn't get talked about. The article about the Portland restaurant seems like a kind of model. "Look, front-of-house people, we are going to do this thing. You're still going to get a fair wage. But some of what you were exclusively getting is now going to be shared with the back-of-house people too, if only because you wouldn't be GETTING yours without being buttressed by what they are doing." I know that's an oversimplification ... or is it? It's all so frustrating. I feel like I am going to hurl today.
You know how deeply I agree with you 💗 Like, every interview I’ve heard with Stan Rushworth over the last couple years someone asks him about what kind of thoughts he has for people living in “these times” and his answer is always the same: he was born during World War II, which was brutal, and served in Vietnam, also horrible, and beyond that his people and all people indigenous to these lands suffered something like 98% population loss after white invasion from genocide and introduced disease.
At every point that our many crises get worse, I feel like what white people should be doing is pausing to understand that none of this is new; it’s only happening to certain groups of people for the first time and our surprise and sorrow is indicative of our previous insulation from it all.
(By human suffering I’m thinking more like the entirety of Bangledesh for example. And also the non-human life and world. Like wolves. Which just. I’m so wordless right now. I couldn’t read the California piece either.)
Thank you for this - this is what got me to finally subscribe! Bookmarking links for later, but wanted to add before I dash that I recently re-ran across this gem from 40 + years ago from futurist/evolutionary economist Hazel Henderson when she was asked to consider the future:
"1980s - 2030 and beyond:
Tendencies counter to the previously described evolutionary path for the human species [she’d predicted that from 1985-1990 humans would find more reverence for nature and “a humbler view of our maternal selves”] will continue to strive to retain their dominance. Even though the competitive, patriarchal, nation-state system with all its institutional forms of hierarchy, dominance/submission, and “machismo” technologies and its aggression-based values can no longer be maintained, leaders will continue to try and shore up these social systems. As those leaders try to maintain control, they will continually propose dangerous policies of confrontation and violence, risking nuclear proliferation and war, rather than admitting that the value systems by which they rose to power were viable only in the expansionary phase of human evolution, but cannot be perpetuated as boundary conditions are reached in a finite planetary ecosystem. In a new phase of global human interdependence, only a switch from competitive to cooperative value systems can assure the continuation of human development and avoid extinction."
I love this level of systems thinking - and so much of it points back to co-ops, mutual aid, and other non-capitalist forms of organization and governance. Those are clearly the new answers we need, but it's very, very hard to go from thinking and writing about it to making it happen. We're trying here in St. Louis, and I feel like we have so much going for us - funding, visionary leaders, a large, amazing network of folks - but it's still a struggle. I love learning about places like Kachka, but I still feel like we're trying to invent an electric car in a workshop lit by candles.
"Trying to invent an electric car in a workshop lit by candles" WHEW, I FEEL THAT. This is part of why I think getting rid of the filibuster feels so important — if we can't free up the system to movement, we're only going to move incrementally (or in very small pockets).
I agree completely...but I also want to be part of one of the very small pockets. Maybe they also have value in helping to "free up the system to movement" from the bottom up? Maybe we don't have to invent a car all at once all by ourselves...maybe we can start by inventing a new way to talk to our neighbors. Just feeling the need to inject some hope after my downer of a post up there.
Wow—this was a wonderful piece! Reading about policy shift here for me is like when you learn a new word and then start noticing it everywhere.
For example, I am so frustrated when people on the Right say that we don’t need to fund childcare or provide family leave because women should just stay home with their kids. But nearly all US families require two incomes to stay afloat these days. The Right is misapplying the booming economy of the 1950s to our financially stressed times.
A similar issue arises in elder care. In the past, it was extremely rare for people to live into their 80s, and families were larger, so women almost never faced the most grueling parts of elder care—caring for parents with dementia for many years—all on their own. (My mom, for example, took on most of the work for caring for both her parents and her father-in-law for years.) Right now, support for women engaged in elder care is nonexistent, as though we had very few elders to care for and plenty of family to help out.
Even in education we see it. Why do we have such long summer breaks (when parents scramble for childcare and kids lose a portion of the previous year’s educational gains) when very few of us are needed for the harvest? Why does our math curriculum push all kids toward calculus, when only a minuscule percentage of them will ever use it, and when statistics and financial literacy would be so much more useful? Why do high schools start early, depriving teens of badly-needed sleep, and elementary schools start late, forcing working parents to scramble for childcare?
Thank you for giving me a framework and effective way of thinking about so many problems in our country.
Thank you for this post! It was was an exhilarating read for a Sunday morning! And, I think it will help with my still-ongoing goal setting for 2022. I often find myself thinking about a 2018 post on the Granola Shotgun blog that coined the kind of rugged resilience I would like work toward: the mangiapocalypse, or a way of preparing for various kinds of environmental disasters and economic precarity in a way that is focused on shared abundance, strong social networks, and cooperative effort. No longer accessible on the main blog, but archived here: https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/the-mangiapocalypse/
To adapt to an increasingly "uncivilized" new normal so that We The People (not the rich, fuck them forever) will survive ... will require a lot of middle class global Northerners to walk away from concepts that have been inculcated in them since childhood.
Anyone remember Smokey the Bear? Hmmm. Forest fires can be good, actually, and I'm really glad you brought up fire.
The book linked below covers anthropogenic fire and the deleterious influence of early and mid 20th century "scientific" concepts of fire management. It was written about 30 years ago but much still holds true. Humans, fire, and natural landscapes did quite well together for centuries, and then came the modernizers.
The US has backed off on some of the more harmful fire management ideas that were instituted beginning in the Progressive era (early 20th century). But if you remember Smokey the Bear, you got a dose of the "fire is just about always bad actually" medicine.
Unfortunately, I now get to leave having done the morning labor, I get to do the afternoon labor, but I will come back and run off at the mouth in response.
elm
so never fear, or scream in annoyance, whichever option works for you
p.s. if i can edit my comments now, does this mean that such advanced 21st technology such as <strike> and <bold> and <emphasis> could be here Real Soon Now?? perhaps the substack gods will come bearing gifts soon! it could happen!
Alex Steffen was one of my go-tos for a long time before I left Twitter! As more environmental thinkers I used to admire have gone off the “let everything collapse” deep end (which I get but they seem to have no compassion for human suffering), Steffen remains thoughtful on that front. Community resilience FTW. One of the big things, of course being affordability, which I think needs state-level solutions in some places mainly because many conservative legislatures keep strangling local fixes.
Car-centrism is such a big part of all this …
That human suffering part is so difficult. On the one hand, I don't think capitalism has any answers to any of these problems but it will fight like hell to pretend it does, and that will increase human suffering, especially for the people already suffering, who have never known anything BUT suffering. Meanwhile, I see what happened in Colorado recently, or has happened in California, and my heart breaks for those people. It does! But I couldn't read more than a third of that Weil piece on California because my rage was starting to ruin my day before the sun has risen ... and maybe has. Because the reek of so much white privilege just oozes from it. I think of the thousands and thousands of Indians murdered – entire tribes eliminated, FOREVER – to make that state a white person's paradise. I think of the ongoing brutal treatment of migrant workers who make possible the economy for all those white people. And now we're supposed to care because it's privileged, ivy league-educated white people who are suffering? NOW it's a crisis? I really, really struggle to find the depths I need to dig to for the existential compassion for them. I understand the "let everything collapse" deep end so well at times like this because so many people are already suffering and will continue to suffer, and I'm like, "Fuck it." It's easy to be a "thinker" when the entire world has been built to support your entitlement to do that thinking on a porch on a perfect little cabin in the mountains, built entirely on the backs and blood of people you don't really even see. I'm nauseous with my own rage. I guess this is what it means to be "triggered", eh? Fuck.
I hear you and echo Antonia below: it's so striking, how much all of this agony over collapse, and inconvenience, and fear of the outside world, and precarity....it only comes to the fore when white bourgeois people cannot escape it. It's worth remembering that every damn time any white person talks about it, and I was remiss in not noting it. Like you, I often feel inclined to say well fuck it, NOW we're going to try to save California paradise for the privileged? And then I slingshot to the transapocalyptic reality: if we *don't* try to do this, it's still all going to go to shit, and the suffering will still be so unequally distributed. So how do we really reckon, REALLY reckon, like actual reparations reckon with that past and move forward to create less suffering? That I don't know.
I'm all for saving California and everywhere else so long as we are saving it for everyone equally. I am all the fucking way in for that. But it involves a redistribution of wealth that just doesn't get talked about. The article about the Portland restaurant seems like a kind of model. "Look, front-of-house people, we are going to do this thing. You're still going to get a fair wage. But some of what you were exclusively getting is now going to be shared with the back-of-house people too, if only because you wouldn't be GETTING yours without being buttressed by what they are doing." I know that's an oversimplification ... or is it? It's all so frustrating. I feel like I am going to hurl today.
You know how deeply I agree with you 💗 Like, every interview I’ve heard with Stan Rushworth over the last couple years someone asks him about what kind of thoughts he has for people living in “these times” and his answer is always the same: he was born during World War II, which was brutal, and served in Vietnam, also horrible, and beyond that his people and all people indigenous to these lands suffered something like 98% population loss after white invasion from genocide and introduced disease.
At every point that our many crises get worse, I feel like what white people should be doing is pausing to understand that none of this is new; it’s only happening to certain groups of people for the first time and our surprise and sorrow is indicative of our previous insulation from it all.
I know you do. I'm just finding it difficult to be compassionate and hating myself for it, heh.
I think even the best of people find it difficult on a daily basis. And goodness knows I’m not one of those. But I know the depth of your care 💗
(By human suffering I’m thinking more like the entirety of Bangledesh for example. And also the non-human life and world. Like wolves. Which just. I’m so wordless right now. I couldn’t read the California piece either.)
Thank you for this - this is what got me to finally subscribe! Bookmarking links for later, but wanted to add before I dash that I recently re-ran across this gem from 40 + years ago from futurist/evolutionary economist Hazel Henderson when she was asked to consider the future:
"1980s - 2030 and beyond:
Tendencies counter to the previously described evolutionary path for the human species [she’d predicted that from 1985-1990 humans would find more reverence for nature and “a humbler view of our maternal selves”] will continue to strive to retain their dominance. Even though the competitive, patriarchal, nation-state system with all its institutional forms of hierarchy, dominance/submission, and “machismo” technologies and its aggression-based values can no longer be maintained, leaders will continue to try and shore up these social systems. As those leaders try to maintain control, they will continually propose dangerous policies of confrontation and violence, risking nuclear proliferation and war, rather than admitting that the value systems by which they rose to power were viable only in the expansionary phase of human evolution, but cannot be perpetuated as boundary conditions are reached in a finite planetary ecosystem. In a new phase of global human interdependence, only a switch from competitive to cooperative value systems can assure the continuation of human development and avoid extinction."
She's in her late 80s and still at it.
Wow!
I love this level of systems thinking - and so much of it points back to co-ops, mutual aid, and other non-capitalist forms of organization and governance. Those are clearly the new answers we need, but it's very, very hard to go from thinking and writing about it to making it happen. We're trying here in St. Louis, and I feel like we have so much going for us - funding, visionary leaders, a large, amazing network of folks - but it's still a struggle. I love learning about places like Kachka, but I still feel like we're trying to invent an electric car in a workshop lit by candles.
"Trying to invent an electric car in a workshop lit by candles" WHEW, I FEEL THAT. This is part of why I think getting rid of the filibuster feels so important — if we can't free up the system to movement, we're only going to move incrementally (or in very small pockets).
I agree completely...but I also want to be part of one of the very small pockets. Maybe they also have value in helping to "free up the system to movement" from the bottom up? Maybe we don't have to invent a car all at once all by ourselves...maybe we can start by inventing a new way to talk to our neighbors. Just feeling the need to inject some hope after my downer of a post up there.
Not too far from STL... would love to more more about what's happening there!
Wow—this was a wonderful piece! Reading about policy shift here for me is like when you learn a new word and then start noticing it everywhere.
For example, I am so frustrated when people on the Right say that we don’t need to fund childcare or provide family leave because women should just stay home with their kids. But nearly all US families require two incomes to stay afloat these days. The Right is misapplying the booming economy of the 1950s to our financially stressed times.
A similar issue arises in elder care. In the past, it was extremely rare for people to live into their 80s, and families were larger, so women almost never faced the most grueling parts of elder care—caring for parents with dementia for many years—all on their own. (My mom, for example, took on most of the work for caring for both her parents and her father-in-law for years.) Right now, support for women engaged in elder care is nonexistent, as though we had very few elders to care for and plenty of family to help out.
Even in education we see it. Why do we have such long summer breaks (when parents scramble for childcare and kids lose a portion of the previous year’s educational gains) when very few of us are needed for the harvest? Why does our math curriculum push all kids toward calculus, when only a minuscule percentage of them will ever use it, and when statistics and financial literacy would be so much more useful? Why do high schools start early, depriving teens of badly-needed sleep, and elementary schools start late, forcing working parents to scramble for childcare?
Thank you for giving me a framework and effective way of thinking about so many problems in our country.
Thank you for this post! It was was an exhilarating read for a Sunday morning! And, I think it will help with my still-ongoing goal setting for 2022. I often find myself thinking about a 2018 post on the Granola Shotgun blog that coined the kind of rugged resilience I would like work toward: the mangiapocalypse, or a way of preparing for various kinds of environmental disasters and economic precarity in a way that is focused on shared abundance, strong social networks, and cooperative effort. No longer accessible on the main blog, but archived here: https://granolashotgun.wordpress.com/2018/05/08/the-mangiapocalypse/
To adapt to an increasingly "uncivilized" new normal so that We The People (not the rich, fuck them forever) will survive ... will require a lot of middle class global Northerners to walk away from concepts that have been inculcated in them since childhood.
Anyone remember Smokey the Bear? Hmmm. Forest fires can be good, actually, and I'm really glad you brought up fire.
The book linked below covers anthropogenic fire and the deleterious influence of early and mid 20th century "scientific" concepts of fire management. It was written about 30 years ago but much still holds true. Humans, fire, and natural landscapes did quite well together for centuries, and then came the modernizers.
The US has backed off on some of the more harmful fire management ideas that were instituted beginning in the Progressive era (early 20th century). But if you remember Smokey the Bear, you got a dose of the "fire is just about always bad actually" medicine.
https://www.scribd.com/book/272882651/World-Fire-The-Culture-of-Fire-on-Earth
AHEM: Good fucking piece! 💯‼
Unfortunately, I now get to leave having done the morning labor, I get to do the afternoon labor, but I will come back and run off at the mouth in response.
elm
so never fear, or scream in annoyance, whichever option works for you
p.s. if i can edit my comments now, does this mean that such advanced 21st technology such as <strike> and <bold> and <emphasis> could be here Real Soon Now?? perhaps the substack gods will come bearing gifts soon! it could happen!