A path forward

"If I have a literary reputation, it's for a kind of dark realism. When I was still in my way—20s back in the 1980s—I published what is sometimes called the first book on the climate crisis. It bore the cheerful title The End of Nature; in the decades since, with 20 books and countless essays and articles published, I have chronicled those early warnings as they came true. This moment would seem to be—indeed it is—the summation and the vindication of all that angst.

And yet, right now, really for the first time, I can see a path forward. A path lit by the sun. And it's a path not just out of the climate crisis—it's a path that opens into a very new world. As I type, I've got this book's titular song, George Harrison's gentle and optimistic anthem, pouring through the headphones, blotting out the sound of the rain on the roof. I think that even as we teeter on the brink of renewed fascism, we're also potentially on the edge of one of those rare and enormous transformations in human history—something akin to the moment a few hundred years ago when we learned to burn coal and gas and oil, triggering the Industrial Revolution and hence modernity. But now, quite suddenly, we're learning not to burn those fossil fuels, and to rely instead on the large ball of flaming gas that hangs 93 million miles distant in the sky. We're on the verge of realizing that the sun, which already provides us light and warmth and photosynthesis, is also willing to provide us the power we need to run our lives. We are on the verge of turning to the heavens for energy instead of to hell."

— Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization by Bill McKibben

Here Comes the Sun Day

…Solar power is longer the "Whole Foods of energy — nice but pricey," Mr. McKibben said. Instead, it's become the "Costco of power — cheap, available in bulk, and on the shelf ready to go," he said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/20/climate/solar-power-sun-day.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Saving the world

"There are a lot of hydrocarbons in the world and, though not everybody agrees with me, I think there will always be a lot simply because we will stop using them for environmental reasons long before it runs out."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/jonathon-porritt-on-saving-the-world/

An impoverished variety of experience

I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down

… It is tempting to say that Helene provided us an unplanned hiatus from the "flood of information" that addles the contemporary mind, the torrents of data and noise that overtake the trickles and rivulets of our senses. But this is backward. The problem with our direct sensory experience of the world is that it contains too muchinformation: too much data, too many interpretations, too much meaning. The philosopher Eugene Gendlin once described it as a "myriad richness" that presents us with far more "than our conceptual structures can encompass" — "we feel more than we can think," he wrote, "and we live more than we can feel." It is experience that is the flood, the borderless amnion we have always lived within and cannot escape.

What is degrading about the blitz of digital information into the mind is not its abundance but its meagerness. Its bland volumes insist that mere information can sum to the richness of experience: that words, pictures and videos can fully capture what it is like to endure a hurricane; that our activity on social media is equivalent to the essential human behaviors it simulates; that you can truly know the world through the curated and recycled observations, ideas and messages of other people. Interacting with a network is a variety of experience, of course. But it is one that is impoverished by abstraction, remoteness and endless mediation. On the internet, we even tacitly recognize the pettiness and insufficiency of these virtual sensations: Those most sickened by them are advised to "touch grass." Don't look, but touch. There are mysteries and meanings that live in our contact with the world, and with one another, that do not survive in the traffic of a network.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/magazine/hurricane-disaster-information-media-blackout.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

What’s up

Slavery in the name of progress | A Wake-Up Call by Martin Scorsese

…the dangerous paradox at the heart of modern civilization: what we call "progress" might actually be leading us toward collapse.
Based on Ronald Wright's concept of the "progress trap," this documentary journeys through history, economics, biology, and politics to reveal how technological advancement, debt, overconsumption, and ecological destruction are threatening the future of humanity.

Ronald Wright's bestseller A Short History of Progress inspired this cinematic requiem to progress-as-usual…

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qqiG7tYxD1Q&si=bDQXnnWUU4VoJIAX

Here Comes the Sun: A Last Chance for the Climate and a Fresh Chance for Civilization, by Bill McKibben

Coming Aug 19-

https://a.co/d/ihegwje