Hyper-individualism, the FAA, and the blame game

"…Trump's impulse to blame other people for the [DC air collision tragedy even before anything was known about its causes reflects his rejection of the concept of the American government in favor of the idea that the world is simply a collection of individuals. Since the early twentieth century, the U.S. government has performed an extensive and remarkably successful role in public safety. But Trump talks about the U.S. government—what he calls the "Deep State"—as if it is the enemy and must be destroyed, while elevating those operating outside of it as society's true leaders.

This rejection of the U.S. government began as soon as he took office as he purged officials and civil servants with the accusation that they had been poisoned by "Marxism," or diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives.

Transportation safety officials were among those purged, and the loss of the person at the head of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) during former president Joe Biden's term, Mike Whitaker, after he clashed with Elon Musk captures Trump's antigovernment worldview. After Whitaker called for Musk's SpaceX company to be fined $633,009 over safety and environmental violations, Musk endorsed an employee's complaint that Whitaker required SpaceX "to consult on minor paperwork updates relating to previously approved non-safety issues that have already been determined to have zero environmental impact." Musk wrote: "He needs to resign."

Musk appears to believe that humans must colonize Mars in order to become a multiplanetary species as insurance against the end of life on Earth. As Jeffrey Kluger reported for Time magazine today, Musk has complained that the FAA's environmental and safety requirements were "unreasonable and exasperating" and that they "undercut American industry's ability to innovate." Musk publicly complained: "The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!"

Whitaker resigned the day Trump took office. That same day, the administration froze the hiring of all federal employees, including air traffic controllers, although the U.S. Department of Transportation warned in June 2023 that 77% of air traffic control facilities critical to daily operations of the airline industry were short staffed. The next day, January 21, Trump fired Transportation Security Administration (TSA) chief David Pekoske, and administration officials removed all the members of the Aviation Security Advisory Committee, which Congress created after the 1988 PanAm 103 bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland. The Trump administration vacated the positions with an eye to "eliminating the misuse of resources."

Other vacant positions at the FAA, according to CNN's Alexandra Skores, are "the deputy administrator, an associate administrator of airports, an associate administrator for security and hazardous materials safety, chief counsel, assistant administrator of communications, assistant administrator of government and industry affairs, and assistant administrator for policy, international affairs, and environment."

…

HCR 

https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/january-30-2025?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

Stoic ecology

One of the crucial Stoic concepts is that of oikeiôsis, which is often translated as "familiarization with" or "appropriation of" other people's concerns as if they were our own.

The root term is oikos, meaning "house, dwelling place, habitation," from which we get the modern words "ecology" (the study of the environment, that is, our house at large) and "economics" (initially, household management).

https://substack.com/@thephilosophygarden/note/c-89854349?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The Coyote Hiding in the Produce Aisle

…Most of all we need to rethink our own relationship to the natural world. Learning to coexist peacefully — as individuals, families, neighborhoods and communities — isn't easy in the human realm, but it's almost effortless where wildlife is concerned. It's just a matter of remembering that this is their world, too. It costs us almost nothing to move over a little and make room. After all, they were here first.

—Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/27/opinion/chicago-coyote-aldi-wildlife-humans.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

The ‘Braiding Sweetgrass’ Author Wants Us to Give Thanks Every Day

…The novelist Richard Powers said "Braiding Sweetgrass" moved him — he had to pull over when he was listening to the audiobook in his car because he was crying so hard. The book profoundly shaped his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Overstory," which centers on the lives of trees.

"So much of 'The Overstory' is imbued with Robin's vision of the agency of plants, seeing them as complex creatures that have a kind of intelligence," Powers said.

As her profile and influence have grown, Kimmerer has helped turn a lonely pursuit into a growing field of study and research.

Kimmerer now gives 80 to 100 talks a year, addressing universities, environmental groups, and state and federal conservation agencies. She founded the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry. Universities around the country have created programs and centers dedicated to traditional ecological knowledge. Some Indigenous leaders credit her with paving the way for more Indigenous people to pursue careers in science and ecology...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/books/braiding-sweetgrass-serviceberry-robin-wall-kimmerer.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Phil.Oliver@mtsu.edu

👣Solvitur ambulando

💭Sapere aude

 U.S. News

Solar farms are booming in the US and putting thousands of hungry sheep to work

0 seconds of 1 minute, 25 secondsVolume 90%

 

By  NADIA LATHAN

Updated January 19, 2025

BUCKHOLTS, Texas (AP) — On rural Texas farmland, beneath hundreds of rows of solar panels, a troop of stocky sheep rummage through pasture, casually bumping into one another as they remain committed to a single task: chewing grass.

The booming solar industry has found an unlikely mascot in sheep as large-scale solar farms crop up across the U.S. and in the plain fields of Texas. In Milam County, outside Austin, SB Energy operates the fifth-largest solar project in the country, capable of generating 900 megawatts of power across 4,000 acres (1,618 hectares).

How do they manage all that grass? With the help of about 3,000 sheep, which are better suited than lawnmowers to fit between small crevices and chew away rain or shine.

The proliferation of sheep on solar farms is part of a broader trend — solar grazing — that has exploded alongside the solar industry.

Continues at: https://apnews.com/article/sheep-solar-texas-climate-333e72167bcf24047257e1be352ce1a9

On a Cold, Dark Inauguration Day, a Message From the Birds

"…Birds don't exist to serve as symbols, and yet they can't help but mean something to the symbol-making species watching them through a window or a storm door. On this Inauguration Day that brings no hope for help from elected officials to address climate change or to protect vulnerable species, including our own, the living world is showing us what to do: In the dark days already gathering, we will need to do our best to look out for one another and for the creatures we love."

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/opinion/winter-birds-cooperation-survival.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

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