Ground Up

+College students: register here for the next "Ground Up" advocacy bootcamp on how to make your campus more sustainable...

Bill McKibben https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/for-reality?utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

We can still get out of the climate Hellocene and into the clear

"...After we reduce demand and greenhouse gas pollution through personal changes, governments and policy-makers will need to eliminate the remaining emissions from whatever polluting industries are left, in part by pricing carbon pollution. Here, new technologies rather than individual behaviour play the key role.

I've met inspiring people all over the world: CEOs using clean energy to make the world's first green steel near the Arctic circle, a medusa-scientist-CEO magically turning carbon dioxide pollution into stone, leaders transforming how we travel and eat. I met people restoring landscapes – saving forests – Amazon to Arctic, people turning ravaged peatlands back into resilient systems that one interviewee called 'fierce, stout, and excited to be alive'.

A regulatory mandate, prices on carbon dioxide and methane pollution, or both, will be required to meet the climate challenge. When the polluter pays nothing, climate solutions will always be more expensive than free.

Finally, because we delayed climate action so long, we'll need to hack the atmosphere, to remove or destroy greenhouse gases already in our air. I used to think that such talk distracted us from the real job of cutting emissions. It does, but the inaction of the 2010s convinced me that to maintain a safe and liveable climate, we need to develop technologies to remove carbon dioxide, methane and other gases directly from the air using everything from microbes and trees to factory arrays. And we'll need to do it at industrial scales, running the coal industry in reverse. I wish that weren't the cases – hacking the atmosphere is risky and expensive.

By doing all of these things – reducing personal consumption and emissions, systematically cleaning up energy-intensive industries such as steel, cement and aluminium production, and removing greenhouse gases from the air – we could restore the atmosphere in a lifetime.

The Endangered Species Act doesn't stop at saving plants and animals. It mandates their recovery

One super-potent gas, methane, could be brought down to acceptable levels in less time than that. Methane is cleansed from the air naturally only a decade or so after its release. Because of this shorter lifetime, if we could eliminate all methane emissions from human activities, including agriculture, waste and fossil fuels – a big if – methane's concentration would return to preindustrial levels within only a decade or two. That's what I mean by 'restoring the atmosphere'. Restoring methane to preindustrial levels would save 0.5°C of warming and could happen in our lifetimes.

Restoring the atmosphere will save lives. Particulate pollution from coal and cars kills more than 100,000 Americans a year. One in five of all deaths globally is caused by burning fossil fuels – 10 million senseless deaths a year – when cleaner, safer fuels are already available.

By analogy, the Endangered Species Act of 1973 doesn't stop at saving plants and animals from extinction. It mandates their recovery. When we see grey whales breaching on their way to Alaska each spring, grizzly bears ambling across a Yellowstone meadow, bald eagles and peregrine falcons soaring on updrafts, we celebrate life and a planet restored. Our goal for the atmosphere should be the same.

At the end of our last day together, Fleischmann and I finally spy the Mamirauá research station – a two-storey houseboat roped to riverside trees. We spot a sloth, too, and drift in to track its progress. It isn't high in the cathedral forest, it's swimming – head up like a lifeguard – using the stroke you might expect of a sloth – a crawl. With caimans in sight, we're pulling for the sloth as it takes forever to reach river's edge – parroting the slow pace of climate action – and finally ascends the flooded várzea forest.

Fleischmann and I exhale when the sloth is safe, push up the channel, and rope our boat to the floating research station at river's edge. Climbing to the second-storey balcony, I peer into the forest canopy for the final time this trip. I celebrate the army of people rising to solve the climate crisis and, eventually, to see the atmosphere restored. I've dedicated the past decade of my career to this quixotic idea, and I share it in hope."

https://aeon.co/essays/we-can-still-get-out-of-the-climate-hellocene-and-into-the-clear?utm_source=Aeon Newsletter

Olivia Coalmine

https://www.threads.net/@nicky.crooks/post/DE2UZdEiMHh?xmt=AQGzf1ouCpEXncVSwg2Zj3RxfBfSHgLY-55Ctirjs_KRSA

It's the birthday of Aldo Leopold

(not to mention, William James, and my wife)…

It's the birthday of Aldo Leopold, born Rand Aldo Leopold in Burlington, Iowa (1887), the author of the conservation movement's cornerstone text, A Sand County Almanac (1949). As very small boy, he was drawn to the outdoors, and when he heard that Yale was going to begin one of the first forestry graduate programs, he set his mind to attend it. He went on to become one of the nation's first professional foresters.
He defied convention in his work. Assigned to hunt livestock predators in a New Mexico national forest, Leopold began to feel that these bears, wolves, and mountain lions shouldn't necessarily be sacrificed for the sake of local ranchers, and he made the point that removing them had a broader impact on the entire ecosystem. His philosophy ultimately came to argue that humans ought not dominate the land; he popularized the term "wilderness" to mean not grounds for outdoor activity but nature in its own, untended state.
After 15 years in the southwest — during which time he developed the first management plan for the Grand Canyon, wrote the Forest Service's first game and fish handbook, and succeeded in designating the nation's first wilderness area — Leopold started and chaired Wisconsin's graduate program on game management. In 1935, Leopold formed The Wilderness Society with other conservationists.
He bought a worn out farm for $8 an acre near the Wisconsin River, barren and nearly treeless from years of overuse and degradation, in an area known as the "sand counties." With his wife and children, he set about tending a garden, splitting firewood, and eventually planting more than 40,000 pine trees. The farm came to stand as a living example of Leopold's life work and ethic, that peaceful coexistence with nature could be possible, and that the same tools used to destroy land could help to restore it.
Leopold began to document his family's work and set some of his ideas about conservation down in essays that were published in 1948, one week before he died of a heart attack while battling a grass fire. The Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There continues to be one of the world's best-selling natural history books.

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-saturday-026?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The World Is Falling Apart. Should I Scrap My Plans to Have Kids?

A hundred years ago, you would have been bringing a child into a country where perhaps a majority of people lived around or below the poverty line, where, as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1926, "we continually have mobs fighting and doing unutterable things because at bottom, men are afraid of being unable to earn a respectable living," where stepping on a tack could prove fatal, where environmental regulation as we understand it hardly existed, where segregation was widely entrenched and reproductive rights were scarcely to be found. In the meantime, Stalin was consolidating his power in the U.S.S.R., Mussolini was eliminating forces of opposition in Italy and Hitler was rebuilding the Nazi Party in Germany. Still, people had kids, and so here you are, able to look back in horror at the way things used to be...

The Ethicist

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/20/magazine/family-planning-uncertain-times-ethics.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Jimmy Carter, Green-Energy Visionary

...Carter was correct. Had we embarked on an enormous project of solar research then and there, we could have cut the costs of renewable energy far faster than we did. There was no single technological breakthrough that finally lowered the cost of solar power below that of fossil fuel in the past decade, just a long series of iterative improvements that could have come much faster had we worked with the vigor of, say, the Manhattan Project. Instead, Reagan immediately cut the budget for solar research by eighty-five per cent and did away with the tax credit for solar panels, decimating the infant industry. His national-security adviser, Richard Allen, told Reagan about a book denigrating solar energy, whose author had claimed that it was "little more than a continuation of the political wars of a decade ago by other means. . . . Where salvation was once to be gotten from the Revolution, now it will come from everyone's best friend, that great and simplistic cure of all energy ills, the sun." The culture war against clean energy had begun...

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/jimmy-carter-green-energy-visionary

This New Year, Resolve to Green Up Your News Feed

During this year's global election supercycle, as it was called, national elections were held in a record number of countries, accounting for roughly half the world's population. This scenario made the prospects for a climate turnaround, or at least the beginnings of one, seem especially promising. The human race is growing increasingly concerned about climate change, and 2024 was a global opportunity to elect leaders who were serious about addressing the greatest threat we face as a species.

That's not how it worked out.

"It's quite clear that in most advanced economies the big loser of the elections has been climate," Catherine Fieschi, an expert in European politics, told The Guardian last month.

This bitter pill was made more galling by the degree to which environmental issues generally — not just climate but also pollution, deforestation, biodiversity loss, etc. — hardly registered in the run-up to our own elections. And yet when the environment was actually on the ballot in the form of initiatives that fostered conservation or climate resilience, it did very well...

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/opinion/climate-change-news-coverage-2025.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare