The Case for Longtermism--What We Owe the Future

… there is remarkable overlap between the best ways we can promote the common good for people living right now and for our posterity.

Every year millions of people, disproportionately in poor countries, die prematurely because fossil fuel burning pollutes the air with particulates that cause lung cancer, heart disease and respiratory infections. Moving off carbon is a win-win for both the near and the long term. The same holds for preventing pandemics, controlling artificial intelligence and decreasing the risk of nuclear war.

The idea that we could affect the long-term future, and that there could be so much at stake, might just seem too wild to be true. This is how things initially seemed to me. But I think this wildness comes not from the moral premises that underlie longtermism but from the fact that we live at such an unusual time.

Our era is undergoing an unprecedented amount of change. Currently, the world economy doubles in size about every 19 years. But before the Industrial Revolution, it took hundreds of years for the world economy to double; and for hundreds of thousands of years before that, growth rates were close to zero. What's more, the current rate of growth cannot continue forever; within just 10,000 years, there would be a trillion civilizations' worth of economic output for every reachable atom.

All this indicates that we are living through a unique and precarious chapter in humanity's story. Out of the hundreds of thousands of years in humanity's past — and the potentially billions of years in its future — we find ourselves living now, at a time of extraordinary change.

A time marked by thousands of nuclear warheads standing ready to fire. A time when we are rapidly burning fossil fuels, producing pollution that might last hundreds of thousands of years. A time when we can see catastrophes on the horizon — from engineered viruses to A.I.-enabled totalitarianism — and can act to prevent them.

To be alive at such a time is both an exceptional opportunity and a profound responsibility: We can be pivotal in steering the future onto a better trajectory. There's no better time for a movement to stand up, not just for our generation or even our children's generation, but for all the generations yet to come.

William MacAskill is a professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of the forthcoming book "What We Owe the Future," from which this essay has been adapted. nyt

==

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism
William MacAskill’s movement set out to help the global poor. Now his followers fret about runaway A.I. Have they seen our threats clearly, or lost their way?

“The world’s long-run fate depends in part on the choices we make in our lifetimes,” the philosopher William MacAskill writes... 

The philosopher William MacAskill credits his personal transfiguration to an undergraduate seminar at Cambridge. Before this shift, MacAskill liked to drink too many pints of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life-affirming flush; he was the saxophonist in a campus funk band that played the May Balls, and was known as a hopeless romantic. But at eighteen, when he was first exposed to “Famine, Affluence, and Morality,” a 1972 essay by the radical utilitarian Peter Singer, MacAskill felt a slight click as he was shunted onto a track of rigorous and uncompromising moralism. Singer, prompted by widespread and eradicable hunger in what’s now Bangladesh, proposed a simple thought experiment: if you stroll by a child drowning in a shallow pond, presumably you don’t worry too much about soiling your clothes before you wade in to help; given the irrelevance of the child’s location—in an actual pond nearby or in a metaphorical pond six thousand miles away—devoting resources to superfluous goods is tantamount to allowing a child to drown for the sake of a dry cleaner’s bill. For about four decades, Singer’s essay was assigned predominantly as a philosophical exercise: his moral theory was so onerous that it had to rest on a shaky foundation, and bright students were instructed to identify the flaws that might absolve us of its demands. MacAskill, however, could find nothing wrong with it.

By the time MacAskill was a graduate student in philosophy, at Oxford, Singer’s insight had become the organizing principle of his life. When he met friends at the pub, he ordered only a glass of water, which he then refilled with a can of two-per-cent lager he’d bought on the corner; for dinner, he ate bread he’d baked at home. The balance of his earnings was reserved for others. He tried not to be too showy or evangelical, but neither was he diffident about his rationale. It was a period in his life both darkly lonesome and ethically ablaze. As he put it to me recently, “I was very annoying.” (continues)
New Yorker

Some past texts

 2020:

• Environmental Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Robin Attfield; 

• Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben; 

• On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal by Naomi Klein; 

• The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go from Here by Hope Jahren

2018:

1. Love Earth Now: The Power of Doing One Thing Every Day, by Cheryl Leutjen-"what you can do right now that will mean more to the world than all that power and influence can buy"

2. No Is Not Enough: Resisting Drumpf's Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need, by Naomi Klein-"Drumpf's reckless agenda—including a corporate coup in government, aggressive scapegoating and warmongering, and sweeping aside climate science to set off a fossil fuel frenzy—will generate waves of disasters and shocks to the economy, national security, and the environment... Our historical moment demands a credible and inspiring “yes,” that sets a bold course for winning the fair and caring world we want and need.

3. Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistanceby Bill McKibben-“Is it a surprise that the debut novel from one of our best-known environmental activists focuses on grassroots resistance?"... "may well be the lost sequel to Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang..."

4. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction by Erle Ellis-"Humanity's impact on the planet has been profound. From fire, intensive hunting, and agriculture, it has accelerated into rapid climate change, widespread pollution, mass extinctions...The Anthropocene has emerged as a powerful new narrative of the relationship between humans and nature."

 

Also recommended:

Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime by Bruno Latour

 

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the

 

Anthropocene by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

 

The Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

 

The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert

 

After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene by Jed Purdy

The Overstory by Richard Powers

Ecotopia by Ernest Callenbach

*Flight Behavior by Barbara Kingsolver

*Anchor Point by Alice Robinson

*We Are Unprepared by Meg Little Reilly

*Polar City Red by Jim Laughter

*Please Don't Paint Our Planet Pink by G.Kleiner and L.Thompson

*see The Best Cli-Fi Books by Dan Bloom

Maddaddam trilogy by Margaret Atwood

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Clade by James Bradley

Gold Fame Citrus by Claire Vaye Watkins

Severance by Ling Ma

Odds Against Tomorrow by Nathaniel Rich

The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh

Pacific Edge by Kim Stanley Robinson

Staying with the Trouble by Donna J. Haraway

 

Required texts 2016 (fyi):

1. Ecotopia - 40th Anniversary Epistle Edition(Callenbach)

2. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate(Klein)

3. Atmosphere of Hope: Searching for Solutions to the Climate Crisis (Flannery)

Living Through India’s Next-Level Heat Wave

…This March was the hottest on record in India. The same was true for April. On the afternoon of April 26th, Bhalswa caught fire. Dark, toxic fumes spewed into the air, and people living nearby struggled to breathe. By the time firefighters arrived, flames had engulfed much of the landfill. In the past, similar fires had been extinguished within hours or days, but Bhalswa burned for weeks. "The weather poses a big challenge for us," Atul Garg, the chief of the Delhi Fire Service, said, nine days after the fire began. "Firefighters find it difficult to wear masks and protective gear because of the heat." A nearby school, blanketed by hazardous smoke, was forced to close. In the end, it took two weeks to extinguish the blaze. The charred bodies of cows and dogs were found in the debris...

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/01/living-through-indias-next-level-heat-wave

Passing the torch

 Returning to MTSU, Fall 2022- 

Environmental Ethics 

PHIL 3340

If you're concerned for the health and future of "the only home we've ever known," consider registering for PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics - TTh 2:20, JUB 202. The theme this semester: passing the torch to a new generation of environmental citizens.

We’ll read and discuss, among others…

Wendell Berry. Perhaps most known for his 1977 bestselling book, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, the writer and farmer has served as a moral beacon to Americans for half a century, warning of the dangers of consumerism, industrial agriculture, and the dissolution of rural communities. Now, as we face the greatest environmental crisis in history and grapple with deep polarization, his impassioned arguments on subjects ranging from industrial farming to technology have taken on a new urgency... Michael Pollan, “Wendell Berry is still ahead of us”

Paul Hawken. In Regeneration Paul Hawken has flipped the narrative, bringing people back into the conversation by demonstrating that addressing current human needs rather than future threats is the only path to solving the climate crisis… Regeneration contains an extraordinary array of initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as marine protected areas, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, regenerative agriculture, forest farms, and the #1 solution for the world: electrifying everything.

Bill McKibben. Author/activist, cofounder of 350.org. The Climate Crisis: Annals of a Warming Planet. “Bill McKibben is such a heroic and consequential leader in the fight for the climate on behalf of all humankind, it's easy to lose sight of his humanity. As usual, this book is a thoughtful critique of wrong turns America has taken, but this time refreshingly and revealingly intertwined with his personal story. As a fellow former suburban boy who has also tried hard to figure out ‘what the hell happened,’ The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon was like listening to a wise old pal preach.” —Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire and Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America

Kim Stanley Robinson. Told entirely through fictional eye-witness accounts, The Ministry For The Future is the story of how climate change will affect us all over the decades to come. Its setting is not a desolate, post-apocalyptic world, but a future that is almost upon us - and in which we might just overcome the extraordinary challenges we face.

The Sunrise Movement. The Sunrise Movement is a youth movement to stop climate change and create millions of good jobs in the process. We’re building an army of young people to make climate change an urgent priority across America, end the corrupting influence of fossil fuel executives on our politics, and elect leaders who stand up for the health and wellbeing of all people.

More info at http://envirojpo.blogspot.com/, or email phil.oliver@mtsu.edu.

Is Climate Change a Prisoner's Dilemma or a Stag Hunt?

"...in the tragedy of the commons, exploitation of a resource inevitably makes the resource scarcer. In this case, the resource is not land or coal, but the sum of the ecosystem itself, which degrades in time as it is exploited and polluted. The payoff of exploitation diminishes to zero and protection becomes increasingly attractive. So eventually there will be a point—near environmental collapse—where every actor will get it together and actually protect the environment. In game theory, this scenario where coordination is clearly dominant over defection is called a "stag hunt." Only, in this absurd scenario, that point would come fairly close to when the environment was already gone…" --Atlantic

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/04/climate-change-game-theory-models/624253/?utm_source=email&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share

How Much Should I Spend to Keep My Elderly Dog Alive?

We don't always think rationally about our pets in relation to our humanity.

…The quality of the life of a dog or a cat is a matter of the quality of its moment-to-moment experiences. They have no projects to complete; their lives have no narrative arc that matters to them. They do not fear death in the way we do: As far as we can tell, they do not have the concept of death. That's why the sorts of reasons a person might have for going on even after existence has become a source of pain don't apply to them…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/magazine/pets-euthanasia-ethics.html?referringSource=articleShare

"The solution is to offer a vision of a better future"

How to Talk About 'Extreme Weather' With Your Angry Uncle
What if everybody else is just as terrified to discuss climate change as I am?

NASHVILLE — Articles on how to talk about the warming planet with climate skeptics always thrust me into a state of mild anxiety. I live in Tennessee, where the governor professes not to understand what's causing the country's extreme weather. Right-wing pundits on the airwaves and right-wing trolls on social media dominate what passes here for public discourse on climate. Republicans funded by obscene oil profits keep doing the industry's bidding.

In this context, it's easy to assume that climate skeptics are everywhere. Even in the country as a whole, only 1 percent of voters identified climate change as the most important issue we face.

Though I write often about the environment, and specifically about climate change, I almost never discuss the subject with across-the-aisle friends and family. Just thinking about it makes my heart speed up... Margaret Renkl

Look up

	CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 ⁦‪@CBSSunday‬⁩ The effects of climate change are being felt more quickly than we thought possible, but the Academy Award-winning director says there are actions we can take now to deal with this existential threat cbsn.ws/3OEePEY pic.twitter.com/XQbgRZpdcp   7/24/22, 9:04 AM

Is a rational American response to climate change still possible?

Climate Change Is Not Negotiable

President Biden's best course is to take the same regulatory path Barack Obama was forced to follow.

The American West has gone bone dry, the Great Salt Lake is vanishing and water levels in Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two great life-giving reservoirs on the Colorado River basin, are declining with alarming speed. Wildfires are incinerating crops in France, Spain, Portugal and Italy, while parts of Britain suffocated last week in temperatures exceeding 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yet the news from Washington was all about the ability of a single United States senator, Joe Manchin, to destroy the centerpiece of President Biden's plans to confront these very problems... nyt

Keeping it light

A clip from Don’t Look Up, and then a real TV interview that just happened pic.twitter.com/CokQ5eb3sO

— Ben Phillips (@benphillips76) July 20, 2022

This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession With Growth Must End

"It's a false assumption," argues Herman Daly, "to say that growth is increasing the standard of living in the present world."

I get a lot of criticism in the sense of "I don't like that; that's unrealistic." I don't get criticism in the more rational sense of "Your presuppositions are wrong" or "The logic which you reason from is wrong."

Growth is the be-all and end-all of mainstream economic and political thinking. Without a continually rising G.D.P., we're told, we risk social instability, declining standards of living and pretty much any hope of progress. But what about the counterintuitive possibility that our current pursuit of growth, rabid as it is and causing such great ecological harm, might be incurring more costs than gains? That possibility — that prioritizing growth is ultimately a losing game — is one that the lauded economist Herman Daly has been exploring for more than 50 years. In so doing, he has developed arguments in favor of a steady-state economy, one that forgoes the insatiable and environmentally destructive hunger for growth, recognizes the physical limitations of our planet and instead seeks a sustainable economic and ecological equilibrium. "Growth is an idol of our present system," says Daly, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, a former senior economist for the World Bank and, along with the likes of Greta Thunberg and Edward Snowden, a recipient of the prestigious Right Livelihood Award (often called the "alternative Nobel"). "Every politician is in favor of growth," Daly, who is 84, continues, "and no one speaks against growth or in favor of steady state or leveling off. But I think it's an elementary question to ask: Does growth ever become uneconomic?" (continues)

The time traveler

 

Trees

Can Planting a Trillion New Trees Save the World?

To fight climate change, companies and nonprofits have been promoting worldwide planting campaigns. Getting to a trillion is easier said than done.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/13/magazine/planting-trees-climate-change.html?referringSource=articleShare

Ezra Klein podcast: KSR

...Kim Stanley Robinson is one of our great living science fiction writers. And one thing that makes him great book after book is the way geology is a character and a context in his work, whether that is the terrain of Mars, the coastal structure of New York, or the glittering mountains of California. And Robinson’s attention to land in his fiction turns out to be rooted in his attention to land in his life.

He has this new book, an unusual foray into nonfiction for him, which is about his lifelong relationship — and I mean that in the more human sense of the term — with the Sierra Nevadas. And it’s right there in the title, “The High Sierra, a Love Story.” This is his love story, but it’s also a lot more than that. It’s an exploration of what he calls psychogeology, the way the places were in shape the ways we think. And this conversation, too, is an exercise in psychogeology, in his, in mine, maybe, when you listen to it, we’re going to see some of yours. And hopefully, through here, one day, all of ours. What would a politics that was more attentive to the place we lived in, the place we get to experience, look and feel like? (continues)

LISTEN

The Supreme Court’s E.P.A. Decision Is More Gloom Than Doom

The most profound effect of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency may ultimately be cultural.

...This is all terrible. But it isn't much changed by West Virginia v. E.P.A. either. U.S. emissions are not likely to rise. The powers the judgment restricts were never actually exercised under the Clean Power Plan. The Affordable Clean Energy Rule, devised by former President Donald Drumpf as a fossil-fuel-friendly alternative to the C.P.P., is not in effect either. And American emissions have fallen faster without a cap-and-trade program and without the C.P.P. than advocates of either suggested was possible under those programs.

That's not to say that where things stood yesterday is an encouraging place to be, or that the decision is meaningless. It could well prove a significant setback in the years ahead, though presumably only under a more aggressive or more empowered Democratic administration than this one.

For the time being, it probably changes more about the way we might imagine possible climate futures than anything about the one we are actually building today through inaction. But when it's all hands on deck, you don't want one hand tied behind your back. Which is why, for those keeping a close eye on the ever shortening timelines for action, today probably feels considerably more restrictive still — a handcuffing. nyt

The Supreme Court Tries to Overrule the Climate

Wall Street may be the only other actor large enough to actually shift the momentum of our climate system. The pressure on banks, asset managers, and insurance companies will increase precisely because the Court has wrenched shut this other spigot. Convincing banks to stop funding Big Oil is probably not the most efficient way to tackle the climate crisis, but, in a country where democratic political options are effectively closed off, it may be the only path left. 

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-supreme-court-tries-to-overrule-the-climate?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Beware the Luxury Beach Resort — The Atlantic

…The people who might most benefit from this book (The Last Resort)—those who have bought into the myth of paradise with an ocean view, deleterious impact be damned, and have the means to regularly experience a version of it—don't want their illusions destroyed. If they were to receive The Last Resort as, say, a (passive-aggressive) birthday gift, they might well immediately fling it into the giveaway bin.

I don't say this to condemn those who hesitate to listen to the climate Cassandras among us, or who at any rate fail to act on warnings to desist from this or that treasured activity. I also choose to ignore many inconvenient truths, and the sacrifices that they should inspire but that would dampen my own pleasure in living: Forswearing fancy beach resorts just happens to be no skin off my sun-blistered back. If I can't help feeling that Stodola tries to have it both ways, which I read as a kind of hypocrisy, the reason I find it hard to swallow is that I so often do the same.

Or, rather, we all share in the hypocrisy, save for those few Earth angels who live off the grid and use no plastics. If we all paid attention to what is happening to the planet in the Anthropocene, we'd be running around with our heads on fire. Instead, we churn on in our lives, ordering stuff for next-day delivery when we could shop locally, driving to the grocery store only half a mile away instead of biking, and flipping the radio dial when another instance of extreme weather strikes, because we just can't bear what another fire or hurricane portends. All the while, we're nagged by conscience, which slowly drags our spirits down. Perhaps we need a nice beach vacation to recover! And so we go on, with our tidal cycles of unbearable guilt and panicked complicity, in and out, just like the ocean, where we sit and watch the sunset in our near-nakedness, drinking mai tais, in order to forget all the ways we are failing the Earth, in our vicious circularity, in our infinite regress.

---

This article appears in the July/August 2022 print edition with the headline "Beach Bummer." 

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/07/last-resort-beach-vacation-environmental-impact/638448/

Recovering America’s Wildlife Act (RAWA)

"It would be wonderful if Americans came to understand that other creatures have inherent worth, independent of their usefulness to us. That plants and animals are worth preserving for no reason but their own right to live among us unmolested... https://t.co/b1ElUtk7DA

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 20, 2022

Burning 🔥 fast

	CBS Sunday Morning 🌞 ⁦‪@CBSSunday‬⁩ When we burn fossil fuels to power our homes and cars, we're burning the remains of ancient life – plants and animals that were transformed over millions of years into coal or oil. And we are using up that resource at a rapid rate cbsn.ws/3OrcIEI pic.twitter.com/JMv1DtUP9r   6/19/22, 9:16 AM

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Bhutan, “the world’s greenest nation”

"The most exceptional thing about Bhutan is the land itself. A majority of Bhutan’s citizens still live off the land, practicing subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. The country’s tropical lowlands, pine forests, and alpine heights are bastions of biodiversity, populated by creatures found in few other places on the planet: the clouded leopard, the one-horned rhinoceros, the red panda, the sloth bear, the serow, and Bhutan’s national animal, a stocky ungulate called the takin, which looks a bit like a goat that’s been doing a lot of barbell work at the gym. The preservation of these ecosystems is a top priority in Bhutan, which has been called “the world’s greenest nation.” Almost all of Bhutan’s electricity comes from hydropower. Bhutan’s constitution mandates that 60 percent of its land remain under forest cover; currently, forests cover nearly three-quarters of the country’s approximately fifteen thousand square miles. All those trees have helped to make Bhutan a carbon sink: it absorbs three times as much CO2 as it emits, and is one of only two carbon-negative nations. (The other is Suriname.) An additional 4.4 million tons of annual CO2 emissions are offset by hydroelectricity exports, mostly to India, and Bhutan projects that the figure will rise to more than 22 million tons by the year 2025. The government has set ambitious goals for further progress. By 2030, Bhutan intends to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions and produce zero waste. By 2035, 100 percent of Bhutan’s agriculture will be organic. All of this has earned Bhutan a reputation as an earthly paradise, the last unsullied place. (The New York Times has called Bhutan “the real Shangri-La.”) Bhutanese officials dismiss this notion—yet they trade on it. Once, Bhutan admitted only twenty-five hundred tourists each year; today the number has swollen to one hundred thousand, with luxury resorts springing up in remote regions to lure eco-tourists. Bhutan’s official tourist slogan makes a bald appeal to the Eat, Pray, Love crowd: “Happiness is a place.” The realities of Bhutan are, of course, more complicated. On the streets of Thimphu, there are drug rehabilitation clinics and pizza joints, and when children get out of school, they discard their ghos and kiras for hoodies and skinny jeans. In 2020, the Bhutanese parliament passed a bill that decriminalized homosexuality, but gay, lesbian, and transgender Bhutanese are still stigmatized and subject to widespread prejudice. Gender equality is a work in progress. Few of the country’s elected officials are women. A 2017 study found that more than 40 percent of Bhutanese women surveyed had experienced physical or sexual partner violence and never told anyone or reported the incident. Gross National Happiness itself is entangled with troubling history. According to the official narrative promoted by the government, GNH has been national policy since the 1970s. But the scholar Lauchlan T. Munro has argued that GNH is an “invented tradition” that originated with a quip by the fourth king in a 1980 New York Times interview, and was only elevated to the status of “organizing ideology of the Bhutanese state” years later. This change, Munro says, was part of a “skillful and hard-nosed” response by the Royal Government of Bhutan (RGOB) to a series of domestic and geopolitical crises in the 1980s and early ’90s. During that period, a wave of Buddhist nationalism arose in Bhutan in reaction to the country’s rapid modernization and opening to the outside world. In an effort to appease traditionalists, and to address the social fracturing brought on by Bhutanese youth’s embrace of Western values and popular culture, the government began pushing a slew of new laws and reforms under the rubric “One Nation, One People.” These included the institution of a national dress and behavior code based on Bhutanese and Buddhist norms. At the same time, the RGOB enacted draconian measures against the population it refers to as Lhotshampa (“people from the south”), a mostly Hindu, Nepali-speaking minority in southern Bhutan. The government banned the use of Nepali in schools, forced the Lhotshampa to wear traditional Buddhist Bhutanese clothing, and conducted a census that was designed, critics assert, to delegitimize a population that had lived in Bhutan for centuries, designating thousands of Nepali Bhutanese as “migrant laborers” and illegal immigrants. According to one human rights report, “thousands of Nepali-Bhutanese were arrested, killed, tortured and given life sentences” during this period. In 1990–91, Bhutan’s army expelled an estimated one hundred thousand Nepali-speaking citizens, forcing them into refugee camps in eastern Nepal. Human Rights Watch has deemed these expulsions “ethnic cleansing”; Bhutan has been called the “world’s biggest creator of refugees by per capita.” It was in the aftermath of these events that Bhutan began touting Gross National Happiness as its official doctrine, promoting “the image of a small, landlocked, plucky country” following an “alternative path to development based on happiness, not material consumption.” It’s clear that Bhutan’s commitment to sustainable development is profound and unique; it’s clear that the antimaterialist ideals of GNH are deeply held by many in Bhutan. But it is also true that GNH has functioned as propaganda, giving a gauzy New Age spin to a policy of ethno-religious nationalism. In Bhutan as elsewhere, happiness is a goal, an ideal. A place? Perhaps not."

Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle" by Jody Rosen: https://a.co/gmfRWNI

Kill (at least some of) your lawn

Yes, You Can Do Better Than the Great American Lawn

"If you could even transition 10 percent of your lawn to something else, and water the rest less — that's a fantastic start"…

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/15/realestate/yes-you-can-do-better-than-the-great-american-lawn.html?referringSource=articleShare

"We have to reframe the story of climate change"

Geraldine Brooks Had an Unpleasant Surprise When She Taught at Harvard
"Half my students had never read a Shakespeare play," says the historical novelist, whose latest book is "Horse." "That set my hair on fire."

...Which subjects do you wish more authors would write about?
We have to reframe the story of climate change so that it is not only about renunciation and loss, but also about possibility and joy. A wild lawn full of bees and wildflowers is more beautiful and less work than a dull expanse of toxic ChemLawn; a sunlight-powered electric car happens to be a more sporty drive than a gas vehicle, and a pre-owned treasure discovered while socializing with neighbors at the local Dumptique brings more satisfaction than a plastic tchotchke one-clicked on the internet. It's not about giving things up but finding better ways.
...
Do you prefer books that reach you emotionally, or intellectually?
How can you feel without thinking? In what world, or species, would those two qualities be separable?
...
If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

"The End of Nature," by Bill McKibben, with the publication date of 1989 picked out in highlighter. It might remind him we've faffed about on this crisis for more than three decades so it's time to stomp on Joe Manchin and get a climate package passed... nyt

Spring Awakening

@MichaelSimsBook, my favorite Tennessee-born former bookselling colleague-turned-author... https://t.co/LOQ36xZonW

— Phil Oliver (@OSOPHER) June 10, 2022

By Michael Sims
June 10, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

The ocean was not the native habitat of Rachel Carson. She was born amid the tumbled hills near Pittsburgh, in Springdale, one of many western Pennsylvania hamlets that took root by a river and experienced a fleeting industrial heyday. Soon after I moved to this region I visited her birthplace on a pilgrimage of sorts, one I recently undertook again. Carson helped shape my worldview and values. An expert on the sea, through her vision of the operatic grandeur of evolution she gave context to my landlubber rambles. Childless herself, she helped frame my notions about parenting.

The Rachel Carson Homestead is a modest two-story house that I initially drove by without noticing, amid ordinary homes since built upon property once owned by her family. From her plank-floored room on the second floor, young Rachel could not see the Allegheny River sparkling at the bottom of the hill, but she could see smoke perpetually hanging over the town between its two large power plants. She could smell the glue factory. Born here on May 27, 1907, she attributed both her ambition to write and her love of nature to her mother and the tainted beauty of these riverside hills.

In 1925, when Carson ventured 14 miles to attend Pennsylvania College for Women in Pittsburgh, she wore homemade dresses that could not have been less Roaring Twenties. Now called Chatham University, Carson’s alma mater celebrates her as the inspiration for its Falk School of Sustainability and Environment and has even named its cougar mascot “Carson.” She started out as an English major, only to switch to biology after taking science classes with Mary Scott Skinker, who would become Carson’s mentor. “Biology” means the study of life: a large enough category to unite Carson’s intellectual and creative ambitions. “I have always wanted to write, but I know I don’t have much imagination,” she remarked to a friend. “Biology has given me something to write about.”

(continues)

Raising children in the Anthropocene

	Long Now Foundation ⁦‪@longnow‬⁩ Long Now Speakers Kim Stanley Robinson and Cory ⁦‪@doctorow‬⁩ discuss raising children in the face of a climate emergency. fatherly.com/entertainment/…   6/7/22, 4:27 PM

World Oceans Day

	IPCC ⁦‪@IPCC_CH‬⁩ Today is #WorldOceansDay! The ocean & cryosphere regulate the climate & weather, provide food & water, support economies, trade & transportation, shape cultures & influence our well-being. Find out how #Climatechange affects the ocean & cryosphere ➡️ bit.ly/IPSROCC pic.twitter.com/XE7RyR0Stu   6/8/22, 7:46 AM

Walking with Thoreau & Muir

These Authors Follow in the Footsteps of Earlier Travelers, Literally

Recent travel books show an interest not just in distant places, but in distant times.

In SIX WALKS: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau (Tin House, 279 pp., $22.95), the author Ben Shattuck retraces selected journeys Thoreau made across Cape Cod and New England. Since Thoreau is so well known for the small cabin he built alongside Walden Pond, one might imagine he preferred to view nature from inside a cozy shelter. But those more deeply familiar with his work know Thoreau was an avid and tireless walker, one who was not right in health or spirit if he did not spend at least four hours a day, and often more, "sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields."

Shattuck, moved by the thoughtful, even at times ecstatic, observations in Thoreau's journals and essays, was motivated to follow his footsteps by the despair of a crushing breakup. His walks on Cape Cod, across Massachusetts and in Maine are written as meditations, not as guides, establishing from Page 1 that what sent him outside was the pain of loss.

Along the way, Shattuck finds endless points of identification with Thoreau, as when, camped on Wachusett Mountain, Shattuck wonders of the author-poet: "Was he doing the same thing I was doing? Walking to husk the dead skin of grief?" He finds parallels in their dreams, in their view of the stars, in their friendships and even in connections as odd as drug use and alien visitations. In one of the book's finer moments, the identification is so complete that, sitting inside Walden Pond's replica cabin, a bearded and sullen Shattuck is mistaken for a Thoreau re-enactor.

In the second half of these six walks, the author has recovered from his heartbreak and, perhaps inevitably, the work reflects this loss of urgency. Yet Shattuck shrewdly navigates the shift, turning his attention to the usefulness of sorrow, how underappreciated our painful moments are when we are in them. "Grief and joy are in the same life," Shattuck writes, "but it's only in the forest where you notice the shafts of sunlight spilling through." In writing of his walks, the author hits a few helpful notes of atonement, acknowledging Thoreau's racism toward Native Americans and his own privilege. (Wandering through private yards and sleeping on a Cape Cod beach, he recognizes, are less risky for him because he is a white man.) He also addresses larger sorrows of our time, including the impact of climate change on the beaches he walks. Mainly, though, Shattuck seeks to comfort himself, and his book is thus comforting. Grief in various permutations has become a near-constant companion to thinking people in our time, and so it seems we all could use a good, long walk right about now, something to restore our spiritual balance. And who better to guide us than Thoreau, whose writing, like his walking, is tireless, the antithesis of a teenager Shattuck hears shrieking on the side of a mountain that she is "Not. Having. Fun." And there's the point. It's not that life is without its agonies. It's the sweetness in the sorrow that is captured in this writing, along with the natural world's endless invitation to solace.

Not all journeys in somebody else's footsteps prove especially comforting. In A ROAD RUNNING SOUTHWARD: Following John Muir's Journey Through an Endangered Land (Island Press, 245 pp., $28), the Georgia journalist Dan Chapman retraces the ecologist John Muir's thousand-mile walk through the Reconstruction-era South, and what he finds there today is alarming.

In 1867, Muir, "father" of the national park system, conscience of the environmental movement and co-founder of the Sierra Club, traveled by foot from Louisville, Ky., to Florida, crossing one of the most biodiverse regions in the world and, at that time, a land of unspoiled beauty. The only threats Muir observed on his walk came from bandits, as life in the land of the defeated Confederacy was often quite desperate.

It is Chapman's mission not only to stand in Muir's shoes to see what he saw, but to view Muir's world through a 21st-century lens and consider "the future of an ever-sprawling, drought-challenged, climate-hammered South." It is difficult to look at.

Chapman took to Muir's trail in 2018, during one of the warmest Octobers on record for Georgia's coastal plain; the overwhelming state of the environment as he saw it was either threatened or already irredeemably harmed. Mass extinctions, disappearing farmland, polluted rivers, coal ash, wildfires, the desecration of old-growth forests and nature generally knocked out of balance are what the writer chronicles everywhere he turns his gaze. Even the national parks Muir inspired are now under pressure; the Smoky Mountains are being "loved to death." Scotland born and Wisconsin bred, Muir eventually called California's Yosemite Valley his home, but it was a moment of revelation as a young man on his thousand-mile walk, while camping in Bonaventure Cemetery near Savannah, Ga., that may have caused him to dedicate his life to nature. There, as Chapman puts it, Muir intuited that "nature would ultimately get crushed by man if not preserved." Chapman launches his exploration in that same cemetery, where, like Muir, he spends the night beneath the stars. (One of the curious revelations of these books as a whole is the apparent frequency with which men sleep outside without permission.) "It's getting late and I'm getting tired," Chapman writes as he settles down to sleep that first night, offering a metaphor as much as a statement of mood. Humans have done grievous harm to the earth in the past 150 years; it is exhausting at times to look at what we've done, and yet we're running out of time to reverse course and spare the world far more dire consequences. nyt