Questions SEP 24

GT 3.8--3.14 (thru Winter...). WW 189-225 (thru History After Progress). McK thru Aldo Leopold...

Presentation: Christina Guest

Good News: keyshop says I now have access to the building after 4:30 pm. So, we can look forward to going out again...when it's not too hot or too loud.

GT

1. Greta says 3 billion people in the world use less energy annually than a standard American what? How does that make you feel? 154
2. What should we be celebrating? And what have we been told to celebrate? 155-6 
3. What's Greta's definition of hope? 157
4. 
   

WW

1. Coming soon... please post your discussion questions

McK

1.  ...

==

Hidden Brain podcast-

Fighting despair. Every morning, you wake up and face the world. What does it look like to you? Do you see a paradise of endless opportunities, where people are friendly and helpful? Or a world filled with injustice, where people cannot be trusted? In the final installment of this year's You 2.0 series, we talk with psychologist Jamil Zaki about how we become disillusioned and distrustful of the world, and how to balance realism with hope.

==

The Big Big Big Big Big Picture

A big new study zeroes in on our dilemma

"...these temperatures are much higher than anything humans have experienced, and they guarantee a world with radically different regimes of drought and deluge, radically different ocean levels and fire seasons. They imply a world fundamentally strange to us, with entirely different seasons and moods—and if that doesn’t challenge bare survival, it certainly challenges the survival of our civilizations. Unlike all the species that came before us, we have built a physical shell for that civilization, a geography of cities and ports and farms that we can’t easily move as the temperature rises. And of course the poorest people, who have done the least to cause the trouble, will suffer out of all proportion as that shift starts to happen.

But that’s not the really scary part. The really scary part is how fast it’s moving.

In fact, nowhere in that long record have the scientists been able to find a time when it’s warming as fast as it is right now. “We’re changing Earth’s temperature at a rate that exceeds anything we know about,” Tierney said.

Much much much faster than, say, during the worst extinction event we know about, at the end of the Permian about 250 million years ago, when the endless eruption of the so-called Siberian traps drove the temperature 10 Celsius higher and killed off 95 percent of the species on the planet. But that catastrophe took fifty thousand years—our three degree Celsius increase—driven by the collective volcano of our powerplants, factories, furnaces and Fords—will be measured in decades.

Our only hope of avoiding utter ruin—our only hope that our western world, in the blink of an eye, won’t produce catastrophe on this geologic scale—is to turn off those volcanoes immediately. And that, of course, requires replacing coal and gas and oil with something else. The only something else on offer right now, scalable in the few years we still have to work with, is the rays of the sun, and the wind that sun produces, and the batteries that can store its power for use at night.

Another new analysis this week, this one from the energy thinktank Ember, shows that 2024 is seeing another year of surging solar installations—when the year ends there will be 30% more solar power on this planet than when it began. Numbers like that, if we can keep that acceleration going for a few more years, give us a fighting chance.

That’s what all those seminars and cocktail parties and protests in New York over the next week will ultimately be about—the desperate attempt to keep this rift in our geological history from getting any bigger than it must. As this new study once more makes clear, raising the temperature is by far the biggest thing humans have ever done; our effort to limit that rise must be just as large.

We need to stand in awe for a moment before the scope of earth’s long history. And then we need to get the hell to work." Bill McKibben

Al Gore’s source

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

 

It's the birthday of the writer Upton Sinclair (books by this author), born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1878. When he was 15 years old, he started supporting himself by writing dime novels, and he wrote pulp fiction to get himself through school. He went to Columbia University and wrote one novelette a week the whole time. 

He got an assignment from a socialist weekly to investigate working conditions in the meatpacking industry. Horrified by what he saw in Chicago, he wrote The Jungle (1906). It kept getting rejected so he finally published it at his own expense. It was his sixth novel and his first successful one — a huge success. After The Jungle was published, President Roosevelt received a hundred letters a day demanding reforms in the industry. Upton Sinclair said, "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

He used the proceeds from the novel to open a socialist colony in New Jersey. But when it burned down in a fire, he was poor again. He went on to write almost 100 books.

He said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-september-23a?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Other life, other environments

"In all likelihood, in the next 25 years, we'll find evidence of life on another planet," Dave Eggers writes.

"And yet this is not front-page news."

https://www.threads.net/@postopinions/post/DAG7_QQxDUK/?xmt=AQGzJg5GyVB2loR5_0MoXwOLn0CzB-1UZ0xKYCLAXFpolg

freedom

Bicycles and public transport delivering the freedom that car ads promise!

https://www.threads.net/@defilmendefietser/post/DAIg798o2WJ/?xmt=AQGzG_w2_kQk2uPUKsW861JAesZDPYw7OCw52ZpDFXmc9Q

Prehistoric Earth Was Very Hot. That Offers Clues About Future Earth.

…With all the carbon dioxide that humans are now pumping into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, the new findings suggest that temperatures could rise more than expected over the coming millenniums, said the study's lead author, Emily J. Judd, a climate research analyst at the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research in New Zealand.

"We're not saying it's going to heat up immediately," Dr. Judd said. But "in the long term, the planet will likely get warmer than we previously thought."

In the meantime, she said, humans are adding carbon dioxide to the skies so quickly, nearly 40 billion tons per year, that it will have much more catastrophic effects than the gradual, geologic shifts of Earth's past.

"When carbon dioxide and temperatures change rapidly, that's when everything on the planet just can't keep pace," Dr. Judd said. "The environment is changing at a rate that's too fast for organisms to keep up with. And that's when we experience mass extinctions."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/19/climate/prehistoric-earth-temperatures.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&ngrp=mnp&pvid=E60D8429-61FF-4A30-A682-9DFCF86D86C7

Questions SEP 19

GT 3.1--3.7 (thru Food & Nutrition). WW 157-188 (thru Crisis Capitalism). McK thru Donald Culross Peattie. Midterm report presentations begin... 

GT

1. Greta says the climate crisis is symptomatic of what larger crisis? 132
2. What did the WHO director say is our rationale for creating conditions that threaten epidemic, mass migration,  and climate stress? 133
3. What are some actions that both contribute towards the UN's sustainability goals and improve health? 135
4.  How many more heat-related deaths are projected by the end of the century, if emissions persist and no adaptation occurs? 137
5. What's the lethal "wet bulb" temperature? 138
6. Meeting the Paris Agreement emissions targets in the next half century would have what result? 142
7. Where might climate change spread malaria and dengue? 145
8. What common practice is an unfortunate illustration of "survival of the fittest" in action? 147
9. What is the field of planetary health teaching us? 149
10. What animal populations have been especially decimated since 1970? 150
11. Please post your discussion questions in the comments space below.

WW

1. Why does W-W think there's so much fictional apocalypse in pop culture? What may such stories become, as climate change expands? 157-160
2. Why doesn't Amitav Ghosh think we'll probably never have a "great climate novel"? 160-1 What's the best cli-fi you've read? (For me it's Overstory and Bewilderment by Richard Powers, and I'm looking forward to Playground... and Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry for the Future.)
3. Who are the "stakeholders" in the status quo of industrial capitalism, and what complicates the impulse to villainize the oil companies? 163
4. Where is climate denial not a problem? 164
5. What's misleading about climate "parables" involving polar bears and coral reefs? What "pathetic fallacy" do they encourage? How have plastic and bees exemplified "red herring" parables? 165-7
6. Why have floods elsewhere in the world "hardly made a mark" in the U.S. and Europe?  168
7. What new message have climate scientists only recently been comfortable with, as they've overcome their "reticence"?  173
8. Which of the cognitive biases named on 174-5 do you consider most responsible for our collective failure to address climate change? 
9. What's the Frankenstein problem? 177
10. What does Naomi Klein mean by "the shock doctrine"? 179
11. What is Kids vs. Climate? 184
12. What are the two proposed "negative emissions" methods, and what is their unfortunate present status? 186-7

McK

1. What was Benton MacKaye's vision for the AT? 209
2.  A cosmopolitan city, said MacKaye, is not what? 214-5
3. In whose memory is the national wildlife refuge on Sanibel Island named? 224
4. What future did archy predict for Earth? 238

Pence (& his hero Buchanan)

 If you missed it (& didn't want to)...

Mike Pence & James Buchanan

 

The former vice-president did his Constitutional duty on Jan.6, 2021. That makes him a dutiful public servant, not--surely--a "hero"... unless it's become heroic not to participate in anti-democratic insurrection.

He regards James Buchanan as a hero. One of our past campus speakers viewed the namesake of our top Honors Scholarship very differently:

==

Democracy in chains

Hobbes and Machiavelli were not friends of democracy.

Neither was the MTSU alum who is celebrated on our campus with a commemorative plaque, a reading room in the library, and an honors fellowship in his name: James M. Buchanan.

His story, and the threat to American democracy it represents, is dramatically told in Nancy MacLean's Democracy in Chains, the kindle version of which is currently on sale for $1.99. Everyone connected with MTSU needs to know the story, and the origins of the Political Economy Research Institute on our campus.

 

"James M. Buchanan, economist and author, received the 1986 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Grandson of a former governor, he attended Middle Tennessee State Teachers College, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Chicago. Buchanan's emphasis on applying market principles to political choice led to the founding of the subdiscipline of Public Choice, recognized throughout the world. Since 1983, Buchanan has been associated with George Mason University." Marker

bust

Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean

Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.

In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.

Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.

Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.

• “To Buchanan, what others described as taxation to advance social justice or the common good was nothing more than a modern version of mob attempts to take by force what the takers had no moral right to: the fruits of another person’s efforts. In his mind, to protect wealth was to protect the individual against a form of legally sanctioned gangsterism.”
• “[James M. Buchanan] directed hostility toward college students, public employees, recipients of any kind of government assistance, and liberal intellectuals. His intellectual lineage went back to such bitter establishment opponents of Populism as the social Darwinists Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. The battle between "the oppressed and their oppressors," as one People's Party publication had termed it in 1892, was redefined in his milieu: "the working masses who produce" became businessmen, and "the favored parasites who prey and fatten on the toil of others" became those who gained anything from government without paying proportional income taxes. "The mighty struggle" became one to hamstring the people who refused to stop making claims on government.”
• “The same cannot be said of James Buchanan. His impact is still being felt today. For it was Buchanan who guided Pinochet’s team [in Chile] in how to arrange things so that even when the country finally returned to representative institutions, its capitalist class would be all but permanently entrenched in power.”
• “Buchanan carried the anti-organized-labor message into his classes, teaching his students that the Wagner Act had licensed “union monopolies” that distorted the wage structure. He used an example involving the state’s labor market, blaming the United Mine Workers of America for the rising unemployment of coal valleys.”
• “Buchanan took pride in what he called his academic entrepreneurship. Contributions from corporations such as General Electric and several oil companies and right-wing individuals flowed in, as anti–New Deal foundations provided funds to lure promising graduate students. Before long, the cofounders of the center were able to seize an opportunity to prove their enterprise’s value to the Byrd Organization on the issue that mattered most to its stalwarts in these years: the future of the public schools.”
• “Democracy,” the towering African American historian John Hope Franklin observed in the midst of World War II, “is essentially an act of faith.” When that faith is willfully exterminated, we should not be surprised that we reap the whirlwind. The public choice way of thinking, one sage critic warned at the time James Buchanan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, is not simply “descriptively inaccurate”—indeed, “a terrible caricature” of how the political process works.”
• “But take a longer view—follow the story forward to the second decade of the twenty-first century—and a different picture emerges, one that is both a testament to Buchanan’s intellectual powers and, at the same time, the utterly chilling story of the ideological origins of the single most powerful and least understood threat to democracy today: the attempt by the billionaire-backed radical right to undo democratic governance. For what becomes clear as the story moves forward decade by decade is that a quest that began as a quiet attempt to prevent the state of Virginia from having to meet national democratic standards of fair treatment and equal protection under the law would, some sixty years later, become the veritable opposite of itself: a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and the national levels, back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of midcentury Virginia, minus the segregation.”
• “Privately, Gordon Tullock and Jim Buchanan discussed the social control function of denying a liberal arts education to young people from lower-income families who had not saved to pay for it. “We may be producing a positively dangerous class situation,” Tullock said, by educating so many working-class youth who would probably not make it into management but might make trouble, having had their sights raised.” ― Nancy MacLean, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America

Lyceum next Friday (27th)

 The Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies is hosting its first Applied Philosophy Lyceum of the academic year on Friday, September 27, 2024, at 5:00 PM in COE 164.

 

 

DR. MARIANA ALESSANDRI

Associate Professor, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley

 

“THE UPSIDE OF ANXIETY: Kierkegaard on feeling better about feeling bad”

 

Is anxiety best described as a lack of faith, an error in reasoning, or a brain disease/chemical imbalance? Do any of our contemporary definitions or descriptions of anxiety help us feel better about it? In 1844, the “congenitally anxious” philosopher Søren Kierkegaard posited that the more anxious a civilization is, the more profound the culture. Can Kierkegaard’s defense of anxiety help us, in 2024, to feel better about feeling bad?

 

Join Dr. Mariana Alessandri, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, and author of Night Vision: Seeing Ourselves Through Dark Moods, as she talks about the mental illness that 1 in 3 college students suffers from.

 

 

* This event is free and open to the public. A reception will follow the discussion.

Slow down

Grant Petersen believes that the bike industry's focus on racing—along with "competition and a pervasive addiction to technology"—has had a poisonous influence on cycling culture. The bike designer has risen to popularity by urging people to go slow.

https://www.threads.net/@newyorkermag/post/DACa1cSSUG5/?xmt=AQGzD2TQO30zlvaoI6sVxPgDzz5hWduOEWIoPYRt4i_73w

Scientists become source of hope and information on TikTok, Instagram

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-09-12/climate-scientists-tiktok-instagram

The Ocean Cleanup is a non-profit organization that's working to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP) and other ocean plastic pollution. Their strategy is to use a combination of technologies to intercept plastic in rivers and clean up what's already in the ocean. 

Here are some details about their work: 

Cleanup system
The Ocean Cleanup's system uses two vessels that cruise side by side, dragging a U-shaped barrier through the ocean. The barrier directs plastic into a net at the center of the system, which is then pulled into a bag and emptied onto the ship's deck. 

Sorting and recycling
The crew on board sorts the plastic into different categories, such as fishing nets and solid plastics. The plastic is then recycled or pelletized for use in new products. 

Goal
The Ocean Cleanup's goal is to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040. They also want to stop new plastic from entering the ocean by tackling 1,000 rivers worldwide. 

Cost
The Ocean Cleanup estimates that it could cost $4–7.5 billion to clean up the GPGP. 

Donations
You can donate to the Ocean Cleanup by bank transfer or check. US donors can also donate to American Friends of The Ocean Cleanup, a 501(c)(3) foundation that supports the same mission. 

In recent news:  Cleanup Group Says It's on Track to Eliminate the Great Pacific Garbage Patch by 2034

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/cleanup-group-says-its-on-track-to-eliminate-the-great-pacific-garbage-patch/ar-AA1qBTGi

Arbor therapy

A study in Kentucky has connected new tree plantings with health data from nearby residents — a first in urban forestry that researchers call "trees as medicine."

https://www.threads.net/@citylab/post/DABR4rLOk67/?xmt=AQGzs5Voj-RF1PfvPHde1mi2ixrbiQH8ttkdqHA-Ow8UeQ

Bike station

In the Netherlands, you don't arrive by bike at the train station. Instead, you arrive by train at the bike station!

🚆 50% of train travellers arrive by bike.
🚲 33.000 bike parking spots around Utrecht CS.
💰 30 million Euro investment.

(video by @defilmendefietser)

https://www.threads.net/@fietsprofessor/post/C__JlWdNJf_/?xmt=AQGzCa1EhHNofQKWGb94tLVbenb6q_VOHNu9bsu2VqvEuA

Midterm report presentations

If your name is not here and you don't have a preference (or if your preferences were already taken), I'll assign your report topic & date by Monday the 16th.

Everyone will do a midterm report presentation (and later a final report presentation.)

We'll do one or two report presentations per class (each followed by discussion). Tell us something about your topic that we won't have read in our assigned texts, and prompt us with a discussion question or two. Indicate your topic and date preference (and a 2d choice, just in case) in the comments space below beginning Sep 10. (If you don't indicate a preference, I'll assign a date and topic.) 

Your topic should relate to something in the day's assigned texts. Check the syllabus (below*) and coordinate with classmates to avoid redundancy.

First come, first served.

If you're presenting on a nice Fall day, consider taking us outside. Try not to rely on powerpoint (etc.)  technology (but if you do, post a link to the presentation on our site in advance.)

SEP 

19 - Eli Miller

24 - Christina Guest

26 - Alex Wiseman; Gray Fogo (or Oct 3)

OCT

1 - Chelsie Gordon, Aidan Haines

3 - Audrey Lewis

8 - Jonathan Keith, Eli Kersey

10 - Exam 1

17 - Katherine Welch; Nathan Ruppel

22 - Gary Wedgewood

24 - Martin Stricklin

29 - Molly Carico

==

*

SEP

19 GT 3.1--3.7 (thru Food & Nutrition). WW 157-188 (thru Crisis Capitalism). McK thru Donald Culross Peattie. Midterm report presentations begin.

24 GT 3.8--3.14 (thru Winter...). WW 189-225 (thru History After Progress). McK thru Aldo Leopold.

26 PH -33 Foreword... Oceans. GT 3.15--3.20 (thru True Cost...). WW 226-265. McK thru E.B. White.


OCT
1 PH -61 Forests. GT 4.1--4.5 (thru Persistence of Fossil Fuels). McK thru Rachel Carson. Midterm report Presentations continue.

3 PH -93 Wilding. GT 4.6--4.9 (thru Drawdown Technologies). McK thru Lynn White Jr. 

8 PH -115 Land. GT 4.10--4.14 (thru Mapping Emissions). McK thru Garrett Hardin. 

10 Exam 1.

15 PH -147 People. GT 4.15--4.17 (thru Future Electric). McK thru Joseph Lelyveld. 

17 PH -169 The City. GT 4.18--4.22 (thru Myth of Recycling). McK thru Wendell Berry. 

22 PH -191 Food. GT 4.23--4.27 (thru Perception Gap). McK thru Amory Lovins.

24 PH -213 Energy. GT 5.1--5.5 (thru Changing Diets).GT 5.6--5.9 (thru Practical Utopias). McK thru Wes Jackson.

29 PH -255 Industry, Action + Connection, Afterword. GT 5.10--5.14 (thru Lessons from the Pandemic). McK thru William Cronon. Midterm report presentations conclude.

Silent Solar; Not so silent Vance

Good news, under the radar

Not perhaps a week for good news—not with Donald Trump trying to initiate a pogrom in Ohio (and the Secret Service protecting him from a crazy rightwinger). Not with insane floods across central Europe where the blue Danube is now a raging brown monster, or in the Lake Chad region where hundreds are dead.

But there's something else going on behind the scenes—silently. And it's happening in places where people need it most. 

Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they're now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly... 

Bill McKibben 

==

This is more about the media/political environment: 

Propaganda Literacy

Even as Ohio’s Republican Governor Mike DeWine has defended the vast majority of the state’s Haitian population, while recognizing serious issues related to the surge of newcomers, Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, has double downed on his calls to “fellow patriots” to “keep the cat memes flowing” - stoking sufficient fear and hatred in pursuit of the White House that bomb threats continue and racist Proud Boys have reportedly showed up in Springfield. And Haitian residents are living in fear.

With all of this in mind, I thought it worth highlighting a Sustain What conversation I had in December 2020, as then-President Trump pushed his “stop the steal” election lies and laid the foundation for the January 6 insurrection. My guest was University of Rhode Island communications professor Renee Hobbs, who teaches propaganda literacy, is the author of a fantastic guide book, Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education in a Digital Age, and has built a priceless suite of online learning tools to explore and share. Here’s a book excerpt!

...

Andy Revkin

 Climate change is one reason for hotter oceans. But there are others

September 16, 20243:00 AM ET  www.npr.org

By Emily Kwong, Rebecca Hersher, Rachel Carlson, Rebecca Ramirez

Hurricane season is heating up: Hurricane Francine hit Louisiana last week and dumped rain across the South. There's lots of other stormy activity in the Atlantic right now — and forecasters are expecting more in the next few weeks. One big factor is the warm water in the Atlantic and Caribbean, where these storms form. Abnormally warm water is bad news on a few fronts. It can help storms like Francine get really powerful, in addition to causing problems for fish and other marine species.  This is an issue in our oceans across the globe. Average global ocean temperatures have been in record-breaking territory for most of the last year and a half. Climate change is the main culprit, but in their quest to pin down the source for our hot oceans, scientists are investigating other suspects, including volcanoes and the sun.

 

Questions SEP 17

GT 2.20--2.24 (thru What Happens...). WW 126-154 (thru Systems). McK thru Henry Beston... 

GT

1. Why are insects important? 110  Do you find them "fascinating and beautiful"?
2. What's happened with pesticides since Silent Spring was published? 111  Are you a user?
3. In Paul Ehrlich's analogy, we're close to what?  What can be done about that?
4. Why is phenology ("the study of the timing of biological events in the life cycles of plants and animals, and how these events are influenced by the seasons and climate") important? 113  Any comment on George Santayana's seasonal philosophy?)
5. What uncharted territory are we fast heading into? 115
6. What do we need to do to avoid a "positive" tipping point (which would be a negative development) in the global carbon cycle? 117
7. What is permafrost and what have we only recently learned about it? 118
8. There's no doubt that what methane event is underway? How can that be mitigated? 121
9. If we're lucky, sea-level rise will be what?  124  Should we feel lucky?
10. Climate change is a what? 125  Whether it bends towards climate justice is up to who?

WW

1. Before fossil fuels, nobody what? 126  Coincidence? Or a plausible causal connection?
2. How do worse-case scenarios compare to the Great Depression, in terms of GDP? 128, 135   Is it prudent to plan for the worst, when making economic and public policy?
3. What is the cost of trans-Atlantic flight, measured in Arctic ice? 131  Will you think about that before booking your next trip to Europe?
4. What U.S. city presently enjoys optimal annual average temperature for economic productivity? 132  Does this correlate with other lifestyle features there you find either desirable or not?
5. Why is the U.S. more vulnerable to climate impacts than any country but India? 133  What will it take to get more Americans to appreciate and act on this?
6. Why is a 3% greater likelihood of conflict due to climate change not trivial?  Warming of 4 degrees might have how many more wars? 136-7  Would that be trivial?
7. Why can't we see the threat of escalating war very clearly? 140  Was Senator Harris right to ask the CIA director-nominee whether his climate denial would influence his national security policies (as she details in The Truths We Hold)?  
8. How does Guatemala illustrate how climate impacts can cascade into violence? 
9. According to U.N. estimates, there may be how many climate migrants by 2050? 146
10. What did Sheila Heti say about child-bearing? 149  Do you agree with the spirit of DW-W's comments on that?

McK

1. What do you think of the latest McKibben substack column about the sudden rise of solar sustainability  (below)?
2. What prevailing attitude towards nature did Gifford Pinchot exemplify? 172  [No surprise, considering his employer in NC.] Is it still the prevailing attitude? Do you share it? 
3. What "stupidly false adjective" did he indict? 174 
4. For what did he say we must make ourselves responsible? 179-80
5. With what did William Hornaday see nothing wrong? 181
6. What did Dreiser say is not up for discussion? 190 Was he wrong? Should it be?
7. What did Gene Stratton-Porter say about the country's resources? 192
8. Please post your discussion questions in the comments space below

And remember,

I encourage you to read this MTSU student's Environmental blog...

 Kathryn Modine is a MALA (Master of Liberal Arts) student working on her capstone project, a new environmental blog called Interconnected Planet. I encourage you to read and possibly comment on her first and subsequent posts. When you comment on her blog please share that comment with us here too, and give yourself a base on our scorecard when you do.

Richard Powers on What We Do to the Earth and What It Does to Us

I'm eagerly anticipating Playground… and the e-book is currently on sale, just $9.66. Maybe we should add it to our reading list. I'll definitely be adding it to mine.

Asked if we should we be feeling awe, delight, or terror about the environment, AI, etc., Powers smartly says:

"Do I have to choose one of them? I mean, all of them. Don't you feel all of them?

It's been said that this book will do for the ocean what The Overstory did for trees...

"… Since the nineteen-eighties, Powers has built a reputation as a novelist of unusual intellectual curiosity and range—as interested in probing the frontiers of technological innovation as in expanding the possibilities of fiction. He's written prize-winning, best-selling novels about computing, virtual reality, neuroscience, and nonhuman forms of consciousness, often focussing on the process of discovery and invention. But it was his twelfth novel, "The Overstory," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2019 and sold more than two million copies, that turned him into an unlikely sensation. The book is a five-hundred-page multigenerational epic that follows nine characters whose only overlap is some form of relationship to trees—a chestnut tree that symbolizes a family's resilience, a banyan that saves a parachuting pilot from danger, a California redwood that a band of activists risk their lives protecting. (Passages of the novel are even narrated from the perspective of a tree—an attempt, as Powers put it, to shake us out of our "human exceptionalism.") "The Overstory" is about the damage that humans do to the natural world, but it is also about the natural world's innate resilience to the worst we can inflict. To many readers, Powers became "the tree guy."

Powers lives in eastern Tennessee, in a small town very close to one of the main gateways to Great Smoky Mountains National Park, which he visits multiple times a week. He walks the trails as though he's checking in on old friends, remarking on flowers that are "brand new," pointing to barren-looking patches that will be "all bloomed out" within a couple of weeks. Judging by how frequently he hosts friends or journalists in the Smokies, he seems to relish being "the tree guy." As we hiked, he would occasionally pluck a leaf off a tree and encourage me to chew it, or point to a plant and tell me to take a whiff. He joked about "doing the 'Smells of the Smokies' tour."

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/09/16/richard-powers-profile