Good news

Why China Built 162 Square Miles of Solar Panels on the World’s Highest Plateau

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/business/china-solar-tibetan-plateau.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

“stimulate something interesting for nature”

"All we can hope to do is stimulate something interesting for nature with the tools we have left to us, in the environment in which we now find ourselves."

https://fivebooks.com/best-books/wilding-isabella-tree/

Jane’s last message of hope

And who she'd put on Elon's 🚀

https://www.threads.com/@ginnanekaren/post/DPbBOARjy96?xmt=AQF07zP0Bi1aSOOQQiM0f8xGYJ0Wty731CZb-9R9nZO_iw&slof=1

Stupid

https://substack.com/@billmckibben/note/p-174385635?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

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

4.6 Billion Years On, the Sun Is Having a Moment

...there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth's power systems, in every sense of the word "power," offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you're interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don't come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways.

Bill McKibben

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/46-billion-years-on-the-sun-is-having-a-moment

The Techno-Futuristic Philosophy Behind Elon Musk’s Mania

"…The balance of evidence is such that it would appear unreasonable not to assign a substantial probability to the hypothesis that an existential disaster will do us in," Bostrom wrote, adding later in the paper, "With technology, we have some chance, although the greatest risks now turn out to be those generated by technology itself."

Whether or not Musk read the paper, he has echoed Bostrom and other proponents of longtermism, including the philosopher William MacAskill. MacAskill became something of a celebrity intellectual among technologists and financiers, to whom he preached an "earning-to-give" approach to philanthropy. Sam Bankman-Fried, the now disgraced crypto magnate, was one of his biggest acolytes. Musk touted MacAskill's 2022 book, "What We Owe the Future," saying on X — the social media network that he owns — that the explication of longtermist thinking is "a close match to my philosophy."

…

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/business/elon-musk-longtermism-effective-altruism-doge.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Mr. W, long misunderstood but useful at last

https://www.threads.com/@st.catharinesguy/post/DJ0JWRcs1Lk?xmt=AQF0g4sgL6LWgzCEJJohhXz2yWokwmlvvPqbdLTL8DwEuw

Go to Mars, Never Die and Other Big Tech Pipe Dreams

… One prominent paper concluded that $100 spent on A.I. safety saves one trillion future lives — making it "far more" valuable "than the near-future benefits" of distributing anti-malarial bed nets. "For a strong longtermist," Becker writes, "investing in a Silicon Valley A.I. safety company is a more worthwhile humanitarian endeavor than saving lives in the tropics." 

Tech billionaires' pet projects can sound deliriously futuristic, but lurking underneath them all is an obsession that is very old. It's the primal fear of death, encased in a shiny new rocket ship. Becker quotes other writers who have noticed how Silicon Valley, with its omnivorous appetite, has turned existential angst into yet another input. "Space has become the ultimate imperial ambition," the scholar Kate Crawford writes in "Atlas of A.I.," "symbolizing an escape from the limits of Earth, bodies and regulation." In "God, Human, Animal, Machine" (2021), Meghan O'Gieblyn describes how technology took over the domain of religion and philosophy: "All the eternal questions have become engineering problems."

The "ideology of technological salvation" that Becker identifies can therefore be understood, too, as a desperate attempt to deal with despair. Amid his sharp criticisms of the tech figures he writes about is a resolute call for compassion. He encourages us not to get hung up on galaxies far, far away but to pay more attention to our own fragile planet and the frail humans around us.

"We are here now, in a world filled with more than we could ever reasonably ask for," Becker writes. "We can take joy in that, and find satisfaction and meaning in making this world just a little bit better for everyone and everything on it, regardless of the ultimate fate of the cosmos."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/23/books/review/more-everything-forever-adam-becker.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

There’s No ‘Undo’ Button for Extinct Species

…Extinction is not a phenomenon of the mythic past. It's an active and ongoing crisis, one that's making our world less resilient and more impoverished. The potential victims, as the scientists at the International Union for Conservation of Nature noted, include many canids, the real-life extended family of dire wolves, now facing a raft of threats: "habitat loss and degradation, human-wildlife conflict, invasive species, disease and the overall disruption of natural processes." By providing the appearance of an escape clause, so-called de-extinction could undermine not just the few protections that endangered species have but also the idea that we need to make any changes at all...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/07/magazine/extinct-species-dire-wolf.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Sir David Attenborough Ocean film 'greatest message he's told'

"…the most important place on Earth is not on land, but at sea."

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn0wjxg0ex1o

Anguish at bay

It's full-on springtime now. My blackberries are sending out new canes, and the passion vines have broken ground. The nestlings in the bluebird box are old enough for their cries to be heard across the yard. The front-stoop skinks are awake, the first lightning bugs are blinking in the trees, and the first ruby-throated hummingbird has migrated safely back to Tennessee from his wintering grounds in South America. As they do every year, these signs of spring work to keep my anguish for the world at bay...

Margaret Renkl

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/05/opinion/spring-wildlife-safety.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

BBC Radio 4 - Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane, Episode 1: Anima

Hello — Is A River Alive? has been adapted as Radio 4's Book of the Week next week.
Five episodes, read by me — & we've folded in field recordings & some beautiful Max Richter music.
First episode, Anima, broadcasts tomorrow at 11.45am.
You can listen back here if you would like:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bsz8
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002bsz8