How to Poison an Ocean

…This past November, the U.S. Department of the Interior released plans to lease up to 1.27 billion acres of public waters for new offshore-drilling efforts. (Such plans don’t automatically translate into new rigs; leases had been available for years, including under the Biden Administration, but regulatory costs and low oil prices had limited their appeal.) The Center for Biological Diversity soon warned that, if the Trump Administration carried out its plans, it could cause more than four thousand oil spills—not including large-scale disasters like Deepwater Horizon. “These catastrophic incidents will become more likely as the Trump administration rolls back offshore drilling safety rules,” the Center said on January 6th. The Trump Administration went on to rescind key regulations from the National Environmental Policy Act, and to exempt drilling projects in the Gulf from Endangered Species Act requirements…

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/how-to-poison-an-ocean

Marsh & Merwin

George Perkins Marsh delivered an address before the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Vermont, on this date in 1847. Marsh had worn many hats over his lifetime: lawyer, journalist, sheep farmer, mill owner, linguistics scholar, and diplomat. He contributed to the design of the Washington Monument and co-founded the Smithsonian Institution. But it was in his role as United States senator that he addressed the Agricultural Society. He was the first person to publicly raise the issue of manmade climate change, and his speech helped spark the conservation movement.

In his speech, Marsh said: “Man cannot at his pleasure command the rain and the sunshine, the wind and frost and snow, yet it is certain that climate itself has in many instances been gradually changed and ameliorated or deteriorated by human action. The draining of swamps and the clearing of forests perceptibly effect the evaporation from the earth […] The same causes modify the electrical condition of the atmosphere and the power of the surface to reflect, absorb and radiate the rays of the sun, and consequently influence the distribution of light and heat, and the force and direction of the winds. Within narrow limits too, domestic fires and artificial structures create and diffuse increased warmth, to an extent that may effect vegetation.” He was talking about concepts familiar to us now as the urban heat island effect and the greenhouse effect.

As a result of his speech, Marsh went on to publish a book titled Man and Nature: or, Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action (1864). “[M]an is everywhere a disturbing agent,” Marsh wrote. “Wherever he plants his foot, the harmonies of nature are turned to discords. The proportions and accommodations which insured the stability of existing arrangements are overthrown. Indigenous vegetable and animal species are extirpated, and supplanted by others of foreign origin, spontaneous production is forbidden or restricted, and the face of the earth is either laid bare or covered with a new and reluctant growth of vegetable forms, and with alien tribes of animal life.”

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Today is the birthday of American poet, translator, and environmental activist W.S. Merwin (1927), born William Stanley Merwin in New York City. His father, a Presbyterian minister, moved the family from Union City, New Jersey, to Scranton, Pennsylvania, when Merwin was a small boy. It was in Scranton that Merwin first began to feel a deep kinship with nature. He liked to talk to the trees in his backyard, spinning stories and practicing the hymns he was writing for his father’s church. One day, two men came and began cutting limbs from the trees in the backyard. Merwin lost his temper and began hitting the men with his fists. They left, and Merwin’s father, impressed with his son’s vigor, did not punish him. Trees, and the natural world, would later influence much of his poetry. In the poem “Place,” he writes, “On the last day of the world/ I would want to plant a tree.”

In 1948, after graduating from Princeton University, Merwin began a period of travel and study in Europe that lasted several years. In Portugal, he found himself tutoring the children of the Portuguese royal family for $40 a month and room and board. On weekends, he traveled to Spain on milk trains, hoping to meet his idol, the poet and translator Robert Graves, which he did. Graves befriended him and when his own children’s tutor failed to show up, he hired Merwin, who spent the next year in Majorca. In London, he befriended poet T.S. Eliot, who was homesick for America and used to give Merwin French cigarettes during their visits. Merwin also became friends with poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in London. Merwin was translating Pablo Neruda’s poems for a BBC program, and Plath used some of this work as a springboard for the poems that would become the collection Ariel (1965), published two years after her suicide.

His first collection of poetry, A Mask for Janus, won the 1952 Yale Younger Prize, judged by W.H. Auden, who became a good friend. They had a falling out in 1971, when Merwin refused the Pulitzer Prize for his collection The Carrier of Ladders. The Vietnam War was still raging, and Merwin — who had long been an anti-war activist — wrote a short, public letter to the Pulitzer committee, in which he thanked them for the award, but declined the prize money, writing, “After years of the news from Southeast Asia, and the commentary from Washington, I am too conscious of being an American to accept public congratulation with good grace, or to welcome it except as an occasion for expressing openly a shame which many Americans feel, day after day, helplessly and in silence.” He directed that the prize money be equally split between a painter who’d been blinded by the police during a civil protest, and the Draft Resistance. Auden was incensed. He wrote his own public letter to Merwin, accusing him of a “publicity-stunt” and calling the action “ill-judged.”

Merwin moved to Hawaii and set about restoring a former pineapple plantation on Maui to its original rainforest state, a painstaking and yearslong process. The relationship between his writing and ecology is constantly expanding. He said: “We try to save what is passing, if only by describing it, telling it, knowing all the time that we can’t do any of these things. The urge to tell it, and the knowledge of the impossibility. Isn’t that one reason we write?”

Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize (2009) for his collection The Shadow of Sirius (2008). His most recent book is The Moon Before Morning (2014). On writing, Merwin insists on regular practice. He said: “I’ve found that the best thing for me is to insist that some part of the day — and for me, it’s the morning until about two in the afternoon — be dedicated to writing. I go into my room and shut the door, and that’s that. You have to make exceptions, of course, but you just stick to it, and then it becomes a habit, and I think it’s a valuable one. If you’re waiting for lightning to strike a stump, you’re going to sit there for the rest of your life.”

And he said: “I think there’s a kind of desperate hope built into poetry now that one really wants, hopelessly, to save the world. One is trying to say everything that can be said for the things that one loves while there’s still time.”

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-wednesday-september-30-2026/

“End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World”

 

In a new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” the influential leftist thinkers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that a powerful coalition of religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalists and tech oligarchs (Elon Musk chief among them) is actively — and successfully — hastening the destruction of the world as we know it. Why? Because they believe that they’re primed to thrive on the other side of catastrophe, everyone else be damned. This is a sobering, scary vision of contemporary political battles. But as the still hopeful Klein and Taylor explain, they wrote their book because they believe the conclusion is far from foregone. 

Naomi Klein is the author of the best sellers “The Shock Doctrine” and “Doppelganger,” and Astra Taylor is an author and documentarian, as well as a founder of the Debt Collective, a debtors’ union. 

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/12/ma...

Naomi Klein and Bill McKibben connect the dots

What connects Elon Musk, the floods in Nepal, and an AI data center in Memphis? My friend, @Bill McKibben, who has helped me see patterns for a long time, threads it all together. Prepare yourself. See our full conversation with @Ayana Elizabeth Johnson about climate vs fascism here: https://naomiklein.substack.com/p/climate-vs-fascism-with-bill-mckibben https://substack.com/@naomiklein/note/c-328203420?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Planet’s heating up, but so are renewables

“… And so—first bottom line from these five years—we can and must say that that global warming is proceeding even faster than feared, having accelerated across this period and moved to a level where it is causing daily disruption across the planet. This is the most basic news that the world needs to know, the most important thing happening on our earth. The degree to which we are now dancing along the precipice can’t be overstated—here, for instance, is Adam McKay’s perfectly fair account of just how close to civilizational bankruptcy we’ve come, driven by the lie that “global warming is real but not urgent… Keep doing what you’re doing.” But the rise in temperature is not the only thing happening on earth. In the years I’ve been writing The Crucial Years I also published two books, and the most recent—Here Comes the Sun, out in paperback next week—was very much the result of this newsletter. It allowed me to see, a little earlier than most, that we’d quite suddenly hit the steep part of the S curve for renewable energy, and that solar, wind, and batteries had almost magically transformed themselves from “alternative energy” into the obvious way forward. That very much continues. Indeed, last week we passed—almost unremarked—a serious milestone in human affairs...” Bill McKibben https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/take-five-268?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Elon’s Academy

We’d better imagine something completely different, and fast. “The scenario that follows,” cartoonish though it is, “is built entirely on Musk’s own statements.” More than “perplexing”… “Imagine a day in 2035. …students port their Neuralinks into Grokipedia modules on history. They learn that the term “slave” originally referred to white people and the British Empire was important mostly for ending African slavery. Terms like “racism” and “sexism” never appear as they have been proven to correlate directly with the “woke mind virus”—considered eradicated since 2032. The great error of history in the dark years of the early twenty-first century was that “weak makes right.” This was part of what is described as the “vampire cult” of education now mercifully superseded. The powerful, she learns, should never apologize. Even great civilizations, though, do not last forever. She absorbs the surprising fact that all empires have fallen for the same reason: low birth rates. Fewer people mean not only less labor power—no longer relevant due to the replacement of almost all workers by humanoid robots—but, more importantly, less human intelligence. As she has been taught many times, intelligence is the “the primary evolutionary vector for humans.” On guard against further decline, her science class teaches her about the latest developments in selective human breeding for higher intelligence, including “iterated embryo selection” which allows for choosing specific genetic alleles and cross-fertilizing them without implanting them in a womb, as well as the now-standard “spell-checking” of genetic code to remove all mutations. Learning about this technology is framed as a patriotic duty to ensure strong offspring and reduce future burdens on the privatized health system. It is incumbent on smart women like her to produce at least 2.1 children. She is reminded again of the self-evident truth that there are only two genders and of the evils of past decades, when people changed their genders in what is now recognized as “child mutilation and sterilization.” Such actions are now punishable by imprisonment. More important of course is the pursuit of digital superintelligence. Advances have already made possible the creation of a fleet of humanoid robots ten times the human population on earth. They are a constant presence on streets and in homes. The school itself is maintained and guarded by them. They also lead the gym class, which doubles as border defense education with drills and carbon-fiber weapons. On the way home, the air is hazy with vapor and filled with a low-level hum from the cooling towers of the Neural Districts—massive data center complexes ringing the city. A Tesla sign on a fence reads “Data is Sovereignty.” Asking her parents why the trees are dead and the streambeds dry, they respond “critical infrastructure.” At home, the lights are dim because “nonessential use” is rationed to supply the data centers at peak hours. She talks to her parents about Mars. Starship is now launching twenty times a day and the rockets have become fully reusable, but the launch window only comes every two years. Promotional videos and gleeful simulations populated by animated companion AIs circulate constantly on X. One more push, one more sacrifice, they all sing, and humanity will ascend.” — Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed by Quinn Slobodian, Ben Tarnoff https://a.co/0i68r6H4

Damages

…smoke drifts across borders when there’s a big fire, but carbon dioxide constantly drifts across every border every day. And if you could see carbon dioxide, and watch its flow over time, the biggest single cloud has emanated from the United States. China may catch us someday but we’re the ones who have produced the current mess. 

I’m sitting listening to David Wallace-Wells lecture this morning at the Chautauqua Institution, and he reminds us that the carbon humans have produced “weighs more than everything we have ever built on the surface of this planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life on the planet. It weighs more than the total mass of life and buildings combined.”

So—if there are “damages” to be paid, who should pay them? Canada, whose forests are burning? Or America, who set those forests on fire. 

This is not an academic question. Lots of players are trying to extract damages from the fossil fuel companies…

Bill McKibben

https://open.substack.com/pub/billmckibben/p/smoke-gets-in-yourhole-where-your?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

“Climate fiction” search results on audible

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