Nov 10 quiz

"Welcome distraction?" Not distracting enough. Embrace decay.

1. What were the profoundest implications of Ecotopia's 20-hour work week?

2. How did Ecotopia respond to mass unemployment?

3. Ecotopians do not feel separate from what?

4. Economic arguments against clear-cutting are an Ecotopian rationale for attitudes that can almost be called what?

5. An ideal population for an urban constellation in Ecotopia was felt to be what?

6. Ecotopian couples are generally monogamous, except when?

7. Americans and their technology are blamed by Ecotopians for what tragic and irreversible process?

8. The war games are an adaptation of what hypotheses to "real life"?

9. How are children's lives different in Ecotopia?

10. Why is the bicycle beautiful, according to "doctor Jake"?

DQ

• Would you prefer a shorter work week? If so, on what grounds? (Economic? Philosophical? Spiritual?)
• What Works Progress Administration-style projects would you support?
• Do Americans have a healthy or unhealthy relationship to their technology?
• Were the Druids onto something?
• What's the ideal size for urban living? Where are the most livable places in America?
• Is there anything inherently preferable about monogamy, from an ecological perspective?
• Does our way of relating to the rest of nature make us repressed or inexpressive?
• How are we encouraged to discharge our aggressions in a socially acceptable manner? (Or are we?) Is violent contact sports healthy, either for the participants or spectators? Is there something emasculating about our way of life?
• Should there be gender distinctions in how we express our competitiveness?
• What kind of life do we owe our children? (See below*)

The view from Lake Wobegon-

So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out, and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting “Lock her up” — we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted “Stronger Together.” It just doesn’t chant.

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that’s their problem now. They wanted only to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple of six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay — by “us,” I mean librarians, children’s authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, bird-watchers, people who make their own pasta, opera-goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.

Alas for the Drumpf voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones, and they will not like what happens next... -Garrison Keillor, continues

==

Prospects for the Environment, and Environmentalism, Under President Drumpf
By ANDREW C. REVKIN NOVEMBER 9, 2016

President Donald J. Drumpf..

Get used to the sound of that, my environment-oriented friends.

Is this end times for environmental progress or, more specifically, climate progress?

No.

The bad news about climate change is, in a way, the good news:

The main forces determining emission levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will be just as much out of President Drumpf’s hands as they were out of President Obama’s. The decline in the United States has mainly been due to market forces shifting electricity generation from coal to abundant and cheaper natural gas, along with environmental regulations built around the traditional basket of pollutants that even conservatives agreed were worth restricting. (Efficiency and gas-mileage standards and other factors have helped, too, of course.)

At the same time, the unrelenting rise in greenhouse-gas emissions in developing countries is propelled by an unbending reality identified way back in 2005 by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, when he said, “The blunt truth about the politics of climate change is that no country will want to sacrifice its economy in order to meet this challenge.”

At the same time, as well, other fundamental forces will continue to drive polluted China and smog-choked India to move away from unfettered coal combustion as a path to progress. An expanding middle class is already demanding cleaner air and sustainable transportation choices — just as similar forces enabled pollution cleanups in the United States in the last century.

That’s why the Paris Agreement on climate change will continue to register progress on emissions and investments in clean energy or climate resilience, but only within the limits of what nations already consider achievable (as others will be explaining in detail because the first post-Paris round of negotiations is under way right now in Marrakech).

Long ago, Jesse Ausubel, a veteran Rockefeller University analyst of global resource and environmental trends, asserted that, “in general, politicians are pulling on disconnected levers” at the intersection of energy and environmental policy.

As I wrote in 2014, that doesn’t mean environmental agendas by politicians are useless, and environmentalism remains vital as a result. But what approach is most workable, particularly under a Drumpf administration with Congress in Republican control?

It it end times for 20th-century-style us-them environmentalism?

That’s up to the movement.

One response to a Drumpf presidency will be to double down with more pipeline blockades and other efforts to “keep it [carbon] in the ground.”

I’m not saying there’s no utility there. As I wrote on Monday, the Dakota Access Pipeline actions have brought much-needed attention to some longstanding grievances of Native Americans, including the diversion of environmental risks from the neighborhoods of more empowered constituencies onto Sioux lands and waterways. And revealing, and pressing, the banksfinancing the pipeline project is great.

But timing matters. Thinking ahead, for example, to the next congressional race, in 2018, I’d recommend avoiding the tactics used by those who tried to make the Standing Rock action as much about climate and carbon as Native American justice. With that in mind, I think it’s worth including a section I cut from my Monday post — a section I held off running at the time following Mark Twain’s dictum about the value of “unsent letters.”

The section dealt with Bill McKibben’s message in an Op-Ed article in The Times explaining “Why Dakota is the New Keystone.” I felt it was a mistake for McKibben (an old friend from decades spent in parallel, but divergent, tracks on climate change) and others to make this a green litmus test for Hillary Clinton:

In the final hours of an incredibly consequential presidential race in which every vote — centrist or liberal — will play an important role, I was discouraged to see him use this moment to criticize Hillary Clinton’s campaign for “ugly silence” in not jumping to the ramparts on this.
Is there any logic to this at the end of an extraordinarily divisive campaign in which polls are tightening? Let me know if you see it.

Late last week, the pressure from the left did elicit a response from the Clinton campaign, which was predictably, and woefully, parsed, as Evelyn Nievesdescribes in The Nation today.

It’s a pattern that extends back to the erosion of treaty rights starting in the 1860s through court fights following U.S. Army Corps of Engineers damming projects along the Missouri River, according to Peter Capossela, an attorney specializing in federal Indian law who has represented the Standing Rock tribe in the past.

Is forcing that statement a victory?

Should this have been made an Election Day issue?

I guess we’ll find out.

We just found out.

Of course Clinton’s defeat was a devastating political death of a thousand cuts — many self inflicted, others not. But this strategy of the green left was surely in the mix because it negated real concerns of working people facing economic uncertainty.

Obama recognized the importance of taking such concerns into account in hist great “South By South Lawn” climate conversation with the scientist Katharine Hayhoe and the actor and activist Leonardo DiCaprio:

I think it is important for those of us who care deeply about this — and Katharine is a wonderful example of the right way to do it — to not be dismissive of people’s concerns when it comes to what will this mean for me and my family. Right?

So if you’re a working-class family, and dad has to drive 50 miles to get to his job, and he can’t afford to buy a Tesla or a Prius, and the most important thing to him economically to make sure he can pay the bills at the end of the month is the price of gas, and when gas prices are low that means an extra 100 bucks in his pocket, or 200 bucks in his pocket, and that may make the difference about whether or not he can buy enough food for his kids — if you just start lecturing him about climate change and what’s going to happen to the planet 50 years from now, it’s just not going to register. [Watch the video here.]

So what do environment-minded citizens, including journalists, do next?

There’s plenty to do, much of which is continuing lines of effort that are already under way — as with communities and organizations and media identifying a host of problems, from Volkswagen’s cheating to continuing leakage of methane from “super-emitter” sources in our oil and gas infrastructure.

I’ll be trying to do what I’ve done for a very long time — hold people in power accountable for actions or inactions that can result in harm or betterment. There are green glimmers amid the most polarizing sound bites of the Drumpf campaign. One came in his responses to the questions posed by the Science Debate organization:

“Perhaps we should be focused on developing energy sources and power production that alleviates the need for dependence on fossil fuels.”

That’s a statement I plan to hold him accountable on. I wrote on it in my piece on Drumpf’s choice to run the transition at the Environmental Protection Agency — Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Last night, I sent Ebell a note asking for his new contact information. I’ll be getting in touch as soon as he’s up and running.

Here’s another answer Drumpf’s team provided to the Science Debate folks:

[T]he federal government should encourage innovation in the areas of space exploration and investment in research and development across the broad landscape of academia. Though there are increasing demands to curtail spending and to balance the federal budget, we must make the commitment to invest in science, engineering, healthcare and other areas that will make the lives of Americans better, safer and more prosperous.

I’ll be keeping track on that front, as well, given the critical role invigorated basic research will have in accelerating a transition from the fuels of convenience to clean-energy choices that can work not only here, but everywhere.

Postscripts | First, keep in mind that I’ve restricted my comments here to environmental policies. I’m as troubled as anyone elseseeking a welcoming, equitable, informed and enterprising America in what Drumpf’s rhetoric has fueled and could do going forward if not modulated.

Gary W. Yohe, an economist at Wesleyan long focused on energy and climate, noted another important factor that will limit Drumpf’s options and offer environmentalists a powerful prod:

It should be noted that carbon emissions were identified as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act (that was passed by Congress under the Nixon Administration and amended under Clinton). This finding was confirmed by the Supreme Court. All three branches of the federal government therefore agree that the Administration, through the E.P.A. must, by law, do as much as it can to reduce emissions to reduce damages and minimize human health risks. This is what the Obama Administration has been doing. Were the Drumpf Administration to ignore this legal imperative, it would be sued by the E.D.F., the Nature Conservancy, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and/or…. for being derelict in meeting their statutory obligations.

Read Brad Plumer’s analysis at Vox for some more on both the concern side and the hope side — ignoring the awful headline, which doesn’t reflect what he wrote. (this was the hopeful tweet):

That said, the climate fight is *not* yet lost altogether. There are reasons for hope, too. http://www.vox.com/2016/11/9/13571318/donald-trump-disaster-climate …

There’s no way around it: Donald Trump is going to be a disaster for the planet

The world was making fragile progress on global warming. Trump wants to blow it all up.vox.com

Also read Jonathan Chait of New York University in New York Magazine:

We should meet this disaster with resolve, not despair.http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/11/forget-canada-stay-and-fight-for-american-democracy.html …

Tom Yulsman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, journalism program, posted this:

Dear President Elect Trump: Climate change is no hoaxhttp://bit.ly/2eLXkET Raining near North Pole> @yulsman
==
An Anthropocene Journey. If you need a diversion as the extraordinary election aftermath plays out in the United States, here’s one option.

Below you can read excerpts from a magazine essay I was asked to write reflecting on my “anthropocene” journey — the decades I’ve spent examining what’s now called humanity’s great acceleration, the explosive growth in our numbers, resource appetites and environmental footprint since around 1950.

I wrote the piece for the inaugural issue of, yes, Anthropocene Magazine — the new incarnation of Conservation Magazine, published for 15 years by the University of Washington and now reimagined with help from the MacArthur Foundation, Wilburforce Foundation and Future Earth, an international sustainability science consortium. Here’s a video in which I and other contributors and partners explain the magazine’s focal point. I put it this way:

“What an amazing juncture to be alive. Humanity was a dribble for most of its existence, and then there’s been zoom, and within the lives of almost everyone who’s alive right now something different is coming.”

In the essay, I explore the host of meanings and debates that have emerged around the word, saying, “After 16 years of percolation and debate, anthropocene has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time—duration and scope still unknown.”

What has your Anthropocene journey been like, and where is it going? Read on for mine, and weigh in. For a soundtrack while you read, I recommend “Anthrocene,” the new song by the Australian musician Nick Cave (and bandmate Warren Ellis), using a spelling I proposed way back in 1992.

Here are some excerpts and a link to the full piece... (Revkin continues)==
An American Tragedy. The election of Donald Drumpf to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Drumpf’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

There are, inevitably, miseries to come: an increasingly reactionary Supreme Court; an emboldened right-wing Congress; a President whose disdain for women and minorities, civil liberties and scientific fact, to say nothing of simple decency, has been repeatedly demonstrated. Drumpf is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader who will not only set markets tumbling but will strike fear into the hearts of the vulnerable, the weak, and, above all, the many varieties of Other whom he has so deeply insulted. The African-American Other. The Hispanic Other. The female Other. The Jewish and Muslim Other. The most hopeful way to look at this grievous event—and it’s a stretch—is that this election and the years to follow will be a test of the strength, or the fragility, of American institutions. It will be a test of our seriousness and resolve.

Early on Election Day, the polls held out cause for concern, but they provided sufficiently promising news for Democrats in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and even Florida that there was every reason to think about celebrating the fulfillment of Seneca Falls, the election of the first woman to the White House. Potential victories in states like Georgia disappeared, little more than a week ago, with the F.B.I. director’s heedless and damaging letter to Congress about reopening his investigation and the reappearance of damaging buzzwords like “e-mails,” “Anthony Weiner,” and “fifteen-year-old girl.” But the odds were still with Hillary Clinton.

All along, Drumpf seemed like a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right. That he has prevailed, that he has won this election, is a crushing blow to the spirit; it is an event that will likely cast the country into a period of economic, political, and social uncertainty that we cannot yet imagine. That the electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Drumpf’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness, his disdain for democratic norms, is a fact that will lead, inevitably, to all manner of national decline and suffering.

In the coming days, commentators will attempt to normalize this event. They will try to soothe their readers and viewers with thoughts about the “innate wisdom” and “essential decency” of the American people. They will downplay the virulence of the nationalism displayed, the cruel decision to elevate a man who rides in a gold-plated airliner but who has staked his claim with the populist rhetoric of blood and soil. George Orwell, the most fearless of commentators, was right to point out that public opinion is no more innately wise than humans are innately kind. People can behave foolishly, recklessly, self-destructively in the aggregate just as they can individually. Sometimes all they require is a leader of cunning, a demagogue who reads the waves of resentment and rides them to a popular victory. “The point is that the relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion,” Orwell wrote in his essay “Freedom of the Park.” “The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

Drumpf ran his campaign sensing the feeling of dispossession and anxiety among millions of voters—white voters, in the main. And many of those voters—not all, but many—followed Drumpf because they saw that this slick performer, once a relative cipher when it came to politics, a marginal self-promoting buffoon in the jokescape of eighties and nineties New York, was more than willing to assume their resentments, their fury, their sense of a new world that conspired against their interests. That he was a billionaire of low repute did not dissuade them any more than pro-Brexit voters in Britain were dissuaded by the cynicism of Boris Johnson and so many others. The Democratic electorate might have taken comfort in the fact that the nation had recovered substantially, if unevenly, from the Great Recession in many ways—unemployment is down to 4.9 per cent—but it led them, it led us, to grossly underestimate reality. The Democratic electorate also believed that, with the election of an African-American President and the rise of marriage equality and other such markers, the culture wars were coming to a close. Drumpf began his campaign declaring Mexican immigrants to be “rapists”; he closed it with an anti-Semitic ad evoking “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”; his own behavior made a mockery of the dignity of women and women’s bodies. And, when criticized for any of it, he batted it all away as “political correctness.” Surely such a cruel and retrograde figure could succeed among some voters, but how could he win? Surely, Breitbart News, a site of vile conspiracies, could not become for millions a source of news and mainstream opinion. And yet Drumpf, who may have set out on his campaign merely as a branding exercise, sooner or later recognized that he could embody and manipulate these dark forces. The fact that “traditional” Republicans, from George H. W. Bush to Mitt Romney, announced their distaste for Drumpf only seemed to deepen his emotional support.

The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Drumpf by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Drumpf and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Drumpf was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

Hillary Clinton was a flawed candidate but a resilient, intelligent, and competent leader, who never overcame her image among millions of voters as untrustworthy and entitled. Some of this was the result of her ingrown instinct for suspicion, developed over the years after one bogus “scandal” after another. And yet, somehow, no matter how long and committed her earnest public service, she was less trusted than Drumpf, a flim-flam man who cheated his customers, investors, and contractors; a hollow man whose countless statements and behavior reflect a human being of dismal qualities—greedy, mendacious, and bigoted. His level of egotism is rarely exhibited outside of a clinical environment.

For eight years, the country has lived with Barack Obama as its President. Too often, we tried to diminish the racism and resentment that bubbled under the cyber-surface. But the information loop had been shattered. On Facebook, articles in the traditional, fact-based press look the same as articles from the conspiratorial alt-right media. Spokesmen for the unspeakable now have access to huge audiences. This was the cauldron, with so much misogynistic language, that helped to demean and destroy Clinton. The alt-right press was the purveyor of constant lies, propaganda, and conspiracy theories that Drumpf used as the oxygen of his campaign. Steve Bannon, a pivotal figure at Breitbart, was his propagandist and campaign manager.

It is all a dismal picture. Late last night, as the results were coming in from the last states, a friend called me full of sadness, full of anxiety about conflict, about war. Why not leave the country? But despair is no answer. To combat authoritarianism, to call out lies, to struggle honorably and fiercely in the name of American ideals—that is what is left to do. That is all there is to do.

-David Remnick, New Yorker
==
Trump's 1st Term ...On the morning of January 20, 2017, the President-elect is to visit Barack Obama at the White House for coffee, before they share a limousine—Obama seated on the right, his successor on the left—for the ride to the Capitol, where the Inauguration will take place, on the west front terrace, at noon.

Donald Drumpf will be five months short of seventy-one. If he wins the election, he will be America’s oldest first-term President, seven months older than Ronald Reagan was at his swearing-in. Reagan used humor to deflect attention from his age—in 1984, he promised not to “exploit, for political purposes, my opponent’s youth and inexperience.” Drumpf favors a different strategy: for months, his advisers promoted a theory that his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, who is sixty-eight, has a secret brain illness and is unable to climb stairs or sit upright without help, and, in speeches, Drumpf asked whether she had the “mental and physical stamina” for the Presidency.

The full spectacle of Drumpf’s campaign—the compulsive feuds and slurs, the detachment from established facts—has demanded so much attention that it is easy to overlook a process with more enduring consequences: his bureaucratic march toward actually assuming power. On August 1st, members of his transition team moved into 1717 Pennsylvania Avenue, a thirteen-story office building a block from the White House. The team is led by Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, and includes several of his political confidants, such as his former law partner William Palatucci. As of August, under a new federal program designed to accelerate Presidential transitions, Drumpf’s staff was eligible to apply for security clearances, so that they could receive classified briefings immediately after Election Day. They began the process of selecting Cabinet officials, charting policy moves, and meeting with current White House officials to plan the handover of the Departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and other agencies.

Drumpf aides are organizing what one Republican close to the campaign calls the First Day Project. “Drumpf spends several hours signing papers—and erases the Obama Presidency,” he said. Stephen Moore, an official campaign adviser who is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, explained, “We want to identify maybe twenty-five executive orders that Drumpf could sign literally the first day in office.” The idea is inspired by Reagan’s first week in the White House, in which he took steps to deregulate energy prices, as he had promised during his campaign. Drumpf’s transition team is identifying executive orders issued by Obama, which can be undone. “That’s a problem I don’t think the left really understood about executive orders,” Moore said. “If you govern by executive orders, then the next President can come in and overturn them.”

That is partly exaggeration; rescinding an order that is beyond the “rulemaking” stage can take a year or more. But signing executive orders starts the process, and Drumpf’s advisers are weighing several options for the First Day Project: He can renounce the Paris Agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions, much as George W. Bush, in 2002, “unsigned” American support for the International Criminal Court. He can re-start exploration of the Keystone pipeline, suspend the Syrian refugee program, and direct the Commerce Department to bring trade cases against China. Or, to loosen restrictions on gun purchases, he can relax background checks...

-Evan Osnos

==

* Talking to Kids About Drumpf. Someone asked me this morning to say something about talking to kids in this time of crisis. Indeed, Van Jones, speaking last night on CNN, as our own Brexitish disaster was unfolding, spoke passionately about the perils of this Wednesday morning’s breakfast: What do you say to kids when a man whom they have been (rightly) brought up to regard as a monstrous figure is suddenly the figure,the President we have? I have been unstinting in my own view of the perils of Trumpism, and will remain so. But I also believe that the comings and goings of politics and political actions in our lives must not be allowed to dominate our daily existence—and that if we struggle to emphasize to our children the necessities of community, ongoing life, daily pleasures, and shared enterprises, although we may not defeat the ogres of history, we can hope to remain who we are in their face.

I went for a long walk late last night with my seventeen-year-old daughter, and noted that she felt better when she turned back, inevitably, to her cell phone and its firecracker explosions of distraught emotion from her circle. Connection, even connection in pain and dismay, is the one balm for trauma of any kind. Kids need to be reminded that those connections remain benign, no matter how frightening the images on the screen (or the panic in their parents’ eyes) may be. We owe it to them not to react hyper-emotionally, even while we make an effort not to under-react intellectually—to pretend that this is just another election. Many of us learned the painful lesson of 9/11, that panic is friend only to our fears.

We teach our children history, and the history that many of them have learned in the past decade or so, at American schools and colleges, is, perhaps, unrealistic in remaining unduly progressive in tone. They learn about the brave path of the slaves’ fight for freedom, about the rise of feminism, and with these lessons they learn to be rigorously skeptical of the patriarchy—without necessarily seeing that the patriarchy survives, enraged. The strangest element of this sad time is surely that our departing President, a model of eloquence and reason, is leaving office with a successful record and a high approval rating. How Drumpf’s strange rise and Obama’s high rating can have coincided in the same moment will remain one of the permanent conundrums of our history.

The lesson of history—one of them, anyway—is that there is no one-way arrow in it, that tragedy lurks around every corner, that the iceberg is there even as the mighty Titanic sails out, unsinkable. Having a tragic view of life is compatible with having a positive view of our worldly duties. This is a big and abstract thought to share with children, of course, and perhaps, like so many like it, it is teachable only as a pained—at this moment, acutely pained—daily practice.

-Adam Gopnik