Extreme Heat Is Here to Stay. Why Are We Not More Afraid?

In “The Heat Will Kill You First,” Jeff Goodell documents the lethal effects of rising temperatures and argues that we need to take hot weather a lot more seriously.

...As this terrifying book makes exceptionally clear, thinking we can just crank up the A.C. is a dangerous way to live. Goodell, who has written about climate change for more than a decade, is currently based in Texas, where “every heat wave is a nail-biter” — including, coincidentally, the one that is happening right now. In addition to the viciousness of the climate-control cycle — we cool ourselves on a warming planet by making the planet warmer — powering all those air-conditioners is like playing chicken with the electrical grid: “If power goes out for long on a hot day, businesses shut down, schools close and people die.”

Goodell’s stripped-down style suits his subject. This is a propulsive book, one to be raced through; the planet is burning, and we are running out of time. Death is a common refrain, and it doesn’t apply only to humans. “When it gets too hot, things die,” an agricultural ecologist tells Goodell. Or, as Goodell writes of creatures that adapt by moving to cooler places: “If they can’t find refuge, they die.” A hotter world puts the most vulnerable at risk — the old, the sick, the poor...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/29/books/review/the-heat-will-kill-you-first-jeff-goodell.html?smid=em-share

Digging up bones

My Last Shopping List for Him

"…When we bury our loved ones in Greece, tradition requires that we exhume the bones after three years for lack of space; it's rare to get a two- or three-year extension…"

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/style/modern-love-greece-loss-last-shopping-list.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
My Last Shopping List for Him

Natural (compost) burial looks better all the time…

Henry on hubris

"Anthropocene, a popular twenty-first-century term, refers to the period in which human beings began to shape the world in fundamental ways through technology; machines, culture, and nature could no longer be disaggregated in the Anthropocene. Thoreau could never endorse Etzler’s deeply hubristic plan for the future. At best, Etzler’s promise for the machine age was a mirage. But even if such techno-social arrangements were realizable, according to Thoreau, a question would remain: Would they be, when fully and properly accounted, better or worse for us?"

Henry at Work: Thoreau on Making a Living" by John Kaag, Jonathan van Belle: https://a.co/iCoxnDL

Recent, Rapid Ocean Warming Ahead of El Niño Alarms Scientists - BBC News

"The average surface temperature of the world's seas has increased by around 0.9C compared to preindustrial levels, with 0.6C coming in the last 40 years alone.

This is less than increases in air temperatures over the land - which have risen by more than 1.5C since preindustrial times. This is because much more energy is needed to heat water than land, and because oceans absorb heat far below their surface.

Even this seemingly small average increase has significant real-world consequences.

• Loss of species: more frequent and intense marine heatwaves lead to mass mortality of sea life. This is particularly damaging for coral reefs.
• More extreme weather: increased heat in the upper ocean surface means hurricanes and cyclones can pick up more energy. This means they become more intense and longer-lasting.
• Sea-level rise: warmer waters take up more space - known as thermal expansion - and can greatly accelerate the melting of glaciers from Greenland and Antarctica that flow into the oceans. This raises global sea levels, increasing risks of coastal flooding.
• Less ability to absorb CO2: the oceans currently take up about a quarter of greenhouse gas emissions. Warmer waters have less ability to absorb CO2. If the oceans take up less CO2 in future, more would accumulate in the atmosphere - further warming the air and oceans."

Full article here:  https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65339934 

Our Most Important Environmentalists Are 4 Years Old

They can teach children how important it is for everyone to help.

...Maybe it seems a little excessive for someone to bring home an armload of environmental books meant for her neighbors’ children to read, but to me it felt like an exercise in hope.

As I read those books, it dawned on me that picture-book authors and illustrators are laying the groundwork for a better climate future by tapping into children’s inborn compassion, curiosity and sense of justice. These books explain how important it is for everyone to help, kids included, and they give the adults no place to hide. If a child can care so much, shouldn’t we care, too?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/19/opinion/books-children-climate-change.html?smid=em-share

Carl Sagan, 1990, on being "prudent"

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Carl Sagan (@carlsagandotcom)

In Defense of Humanity

We need a cultural and philosophical movement to meet the rise of artificial superintelligence.

...As a small child in Concord, Massachusetts, I could see Emerson's home from my bedroom window. Recently, I went back for a visit. Emerson's house has always captured my imagination. He lived there for 47 years until his death, in 1882. Today, it is maintained by his descendants and a small staff dedicated to his legacy. The house is some 200 years old, and shows its age in creaks and stains. But it also possesses a quality that is extraordinarily rare for a structure of such historic importance: 141 years after his death, Emerson's house still feels like his. His books are on the shelves. One of his hats hangs on a hook by the door. The original William Morris wallpaper is bright green in the carriage entryway. A rendering of Francesco Salviati's The Three Fates, holding the thread of destiny, stands watch over the mantel in his study. This is the room in which Emerson wrote Nature. The table where he sat to write it is still there, next to the fireplace.

Standing in Emerson's study, I thought about how no technology is as good as going to the place, whatever the destination. No book, no photograph, no television broadcast, no tweet, no meme, no augmented reality, no hologram, no AI-generated blueprint or fever dream can replace what we as humans experience. This is why you make the trip, you cross the ocean, you watch the sunset, you hear the crickets, you notice the phase of the moon. It is why you touch the arm of the person beside you as you laugh. And it is why you stand in awe at the Jardin des Plantes, floored by the universe as it reveals its hidden code to you. Adrienne LaFrance, Atlantic

Is It Wrong to Bring a Child Into Our Warming World?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on personal responsibility and climate change.

...my fiancé and I, who are both Generation Z, care deeply about the planet and painfully watch as scientists predict that the earth will reach 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the 2030s. Is it selfish to have children knowing full well that they will have to deal with a lower quality of life thanks to the climate crisis and its many cascading effects, like increased natural disasters, food shortages, greater societal inequity and unrest?

We realize that a child’s very existence adds to our carbon footprint, but as parents we would do our best to foster an environmentally friendly household and try to teach our children how to navigate life sustainably. My fiancé says that because we are privileged as two working engineers in the United States, we can provide enough financial support to keep our children from feeling the brunt of the damage from climate change. Is it OK to use this privilege? — April

From the Ethicist:

Here are two questions that we often ask about an action. First, what difference would it make? Second, what would happen if everyone did it? Both raise important considerations, but they can point in opposite directions. The first question asks us to assess the specific consequences of an act. The second question asks us (as Kant would say) to “universalize the maxim” — to determine whether the rule guiding your action is one that everyone should follow. (I won’t get into the philosophers’ debates about how these maxims are to be specified.) Suppose someone pockets a ChapStick from Walgreens and asks: What difference does it make? One answer is that if everyone were to shoplift at their pleasure, the retail system would break down.

There’s no such clash in answering those questions when it comes to your having at least one child. The marginal effect of adding a few humans to a planet of about eight billion people is negligible. (A recent paper, by a group of environmental and economic researchers, projects that by the end of the century, the world population could be smaller than it is today — though that’s just one model.) And if everybody stopped having babies, the effect would be not to help humanity but to end it.

I’m not one of those people who will encourage you to imagine you’ll give birth to a child who devises a solution to the climate crisis. (What are the odds?) Still, it’s realistic to think that children who are raised with a sense of responsibility could — in personal and collective ways — be part of the solution, ensuring human survival on a livable planet by promoting adaptation, resilience and mitigation.

Probably the key question to ask is whether you can give your offspring a good prospect of a decent life. The climate crisis figures here not because your children will contribute to it but because they may suffer from it. It sounds as if you’ve already made the judgment that your kids would be all right, supplied with the necessary resources. That is, as you recognize, a privilege in our world. But the right response is not to reduce the number of children who have that privilege but to work — together — toward a situation in which every other child on the planet does, too.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/02/magazine/children-climate-change.html?smid=em-share

Heat Wave and Blackout Would Send Half of Phoenix to E.R., Study Says

New research warns that nearly 800,000 residents would need emergency medical care for heat stroke and other illnesses in an extended power failure. Other cities are also at risk.

If a multiday blackout in Phoenix coincided with a heat wave, nearly half the population would require emergency department care for heat stroke or other heat-related illnesses, a new study suggests.

While Phoenix was the most extreme example, the study warned that other cities are also at risk. Since 2015, the number of major blackouts nationwide has more than doubled. At the same time, climate change is helping make heat waves worse and increasing instances of extreme weather around the world.

The study, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, suggests that the risk to cities would be compounded if a hurricane, cyberattack or wind storm were to knock out power during a heat wave and deprive thousands of air-conditioning.

This summer, two-thirds of North America, including the Southwest, could experience shortfalls in the electrical grid, particularly during periods of extreme heat when demand for air-conditioning spikes, straining resources, according to an analysis released this month. Phoenix's mayor, Kate Gallego, has urged the federal government to add extreme heat to the list of disasters like floods and hurricanes that could prompt a federal disaster declaration... nyt

E.P.A. Announces Crackdown on Toxic Coal Ash From Landfills

"The Biden administration is moving to close a loophole that had exempted hundreds of inactive coal ash landfills from rules designed to prevent heavy metals like mercury and arsenic from seeping into groundwater, the Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday.

Coal ash, a byproduct from burning coal in power plants, contains lead, lithium and mercury. Those metals can pollute waterways and drinking water supplies and have been linked to health effects, including cancer, birth defects and developmental delays in children. They are also toxic to fish.

The proposed regulation, part of a settlement between the E.P.A. and environmental groups, would require those responsible for the coal ash to monitor groundwater supplies and clean up any contamination from the landfills.

Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, said the rule would help to protect low-income communities of color, where the overwhelming number of old landfills are located."

(Full article link - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/17/climate/epa-coal-ash-landfills.html?auth=forgot-password&referring_pv_id=maAztSud9J138ausgVBrq3Pc )

How to Quit Cars

"… Progressive urban planners genuinely believed, in a period of panic about the death of cities, that their renewal depended on up-to-date infrastructure. The sensibilities that, in the nineteen-seventies, tore down beautiful old Shibe Park, in North Philadelphia, and moved the Phillies to the soulless Veterans Stadium considered the move an obvious improvement. That the electric trolleys being abandoned in Philadelphia were greener and more efficient was not an insight available to that time. We need not find cloaked and sinister reasons for our ancestors' bad decisions, when ignorance and shortsightedness—the kind we, too, suffer from, invisible to us—will do just fine..."

—Adam Gopnik

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/05/22/carmageddon-daniel-knowles-book-review-paved-paradise-henry-grabar

Effervescent moments

Meliorists believe there are ripe moments in time when our efforts become transformative. Conclusions are not foregone. Outcomes are not preset. Odell, Klein, and Solnit are meliorists.

"In the conclusion of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, Naomi Klein writes honestly about her own fear regarding the future and motions toward kairos as it relates to action. She recognizes "upwellings" and "effervescent moment[ s]" in which "societies become consumed with the demand for transformational change." These moments often come as a surprise, even to longtime organizers—the surprise that "we are so much more than we have been told we are—that we long for more and in that longing have more company than we ever imagined." She adds that "no one knows when the next such effervescent moment will open."

I reread these words in 2020, in the weeks following George Floyd's murder, which were full of such upwellings. For me, this time was an unforgettable illustration of the relationship among kairos, action, and surprise. Time took on new topographies, and the author Herman Gray contrasted "the slow time of COVID and the hot time of the streets." In a July 2021 podcast, Birdsong suggested that the pandemic had invited some amount of culture shift simply by exposing how connected people were to those they'd never thought about, like farmworkers and nurses. It changed how the world and the people in it looked, and it was in this opening that Floyd's death and the uprisings occurred. She suggested that here, in this specific moment, "there was a greater sense of connection… from people who hadn't previously felt any connection to black people being murdered." It was a reminder of what Rebecca Solnit repeats several times in A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster: "Beliefs matter."

In the midst of calls to "get back to normal," this book was written in kairos for kairos—for a vanishing window in which the time is ripe. In any moment, we can choose whom and what we perceive as existing in time, just as we can choose to believe that time is the site of unpredictability and potential rather than inevitability and helplessness. In that sense, changing how we think about time is more than a means for confronting personal despair in a catastrophic meantime. It can also be a call to action in a world whose current state can't be taken for granted any more than its actors can remain unnamed, exploited, or abandoned. I believe that a real meditation on the nature of time, unbound from its everyday capitalist incarnation, shows that neither our lives nor the life of the planet is a foregone conclusion. In that sense, the idea that we could "save" time—by recovering its fundamentally irreducible and inventive nature—could also mean that time saves us."

— Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock by Jenny Odell
https://a.co/bdz1gFN

Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Climate Optimism: Celebrating Systemic Change Around the World https://a.co/d/jiwwNNU

A Guide on Climate Optimism and Environmental Sustainability

Zahra Biabani, a climate activist focused on hope and action, wrote this book to help readers learn why we need to and how we can  stay optimistic in the face of the climate crisis. People are doing good things for our planet all over the world…. it's time we highlight it!

Change the way you think about the future. The fate of humanity can be daunting, but we don't need to live in that space. First, we need to change our attitude in order to implement nature based solutions that help mitigate climate change. Good news: there are numerous encouraging environmental trends that will change the way you think about how we can protect the planet.

Get to know Zahra Biabani, a climate activist, influencer, CEO, and writer. Zahra's content focuses on climate hope, optimism, humor, and doing good things. After unexpectedly establishing a career as an online sustainability educator and influencer her junior year at Vanderbilt University, Zahra decided to jump head first into the waters of entrepreneurship and authorship. Climate Optimism is her way to spread hope in the world.

Inside, you'll find:

• A comprehensive review of the most promising  climate solutions
• Practical advice to change the way you think and feel about climate change
• Two years worth of good news from the "Weekly Earth Wins" series
• Interviews with activists in the Global South working on projects that further environmental sustainability

If you're looking for a sustainable living book or books for activists centered on environmentalism like A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety, The Intersectional Environmentalist, or Sustainable Badass, you'll love Climate Optimism. amazon

"Yellowbird Artscape"

Environmental philosopher David Wood's "retreat from civilization" in Woodbury TN, as he described it to me at the party last evening after Carol Gould's Lyceum lecture.

Peter Singer: The Simplest Way to Change the Planet’s Fate

MELBOURNE, Australia — The year of the first Earth Day, 1970, was the year I stopped eating meat. I didn't do it to save the Earth, but because I realized that there is no ethical justification for treating animals like machines for converting feed into meat, milk and eggs. It is wrong to ignore or discount the interests of sentient beings because they are not members of our species.

In the United States and beyond, giant agribusiness corporations continue raising animals in ways that disregard their welfare, never allowing pigs or chickens to walk outside, crowding hens who lay eggs into cages that prevent them from stretching their wings and breeding chickens to grow so fast that their immature leg bones struggle to bear their weight.

Boycotting this monstrous abuse of billions of animals each year is a powerful reason for not eating meat, but the outsize contribution of meat and dairy products to climate change is for me now an equally urgent part of shifting to a plant-based diet. But we need not be hard-line about avoiding all animal products. If everyone chose plant-based foods for just half their meals, we would have fewer animals suffering, and a tremendously better shot at avoiding the most dire consequences of climate change.

Meat and dairy production are major sources of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculates that releasing into the atmosphere a ton of methane will, over a century, raise the temperature of our planet by 28 times as much as releasing a ton of carbon dioxide. That would be bad enough, but the impact is even more lopsided in the shorter term: Because methane breaks down much more rapidly than carbon dioxide, over 20 years, that ton will warm the planet as much as 84 tons of carbon dioxide...

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/22/opinion/earth-day-climate-change-meat-vegan.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Guest%20Essays

Why it's Not Too Late for Climate - and What to Do

Andy Revkin podcast:
Sustain What? is a series of conversations, seeking solutions where complexity and consequence collide on the sustainability frontier. This program contains audio highlights from hundreds of video webcasts hosted by Andy Revkin, founder of the Columbia Climate School's Initiative for Communication and Sustainability. Dale Willman is the associate director of the initiative. Revkin and Willman believe sustainability has no meaning on its own. The first step toward success is to ask: Sustain what? How? And for whom?

Gardening

"The gardener digs in another time, without past or future, beginning or end… Here is the Amen beyond the prayer."

Visionary artists and writers on the creative and spiritual rewards of gardening: https://mailchi.mp/themarginalian/gardening-200

https://indieweb.social/@mariapopova/110189190892770917

Berry Center newsletter

Spring '23  

 Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet

Story by Jeremiah Budin • Yesterday 7:00 AM

Scientists discover hyper-intelligent, fast-growing mushroom that could have a major impact on our planet (msn.com)

In the hunt for compelling alternatives to plastic, researchers in Finland may have just found a winner — and it’s already growing all over the sides of trees.

The substance in question is a type of mushroom known as Fomes fomentarius. It grows on the rotting bark of trees and has historically been used mainly as a fire starter, lending it the nickname “tinder fungus.” (It has also been called “hoof fungus” because its shape resembles a hoof.)

However, a research team at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland thinks that it could be much more than that. 

“F. fomentarius fruiting bodies are ingeniously lightweight biological designs, simple in composition but efficient in performance,” the team’s study, published recently in Science Advances, said. “Growing the material using simple ingredients is an alternative solution to overcome the cost, time, mass production, and sustainability of how we make and consume materials in the future.”

In short, instead of mass-producing plastic at an enormous cost to our planet, in the future, we could simply grow a mushroom with similar structural integrity to plastic at scale.

 

The experience of poetic attention

The Art of Noticing – and Appreciating – Our Dizzying World

The poet Jane Hirshfield invites us to embrace the habits of a poetic mind — and observe the beauty that unfolds.

"Poetry is the attempt to understand fully what is real, what is present, what is imaginable, what is feelable, and how can I loosen the grip of what I already know to find some new, changed relationship," the poet Jane Hirshfield tells me. Through poetry, she says, "I know something new and I have been changed."

Hirshfield is the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and two illuminating essay collections about what poetry does to us and in the world: "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry" and "Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World." Her book "Ledger" is one I gift to people most often. Hirshfield's true talent as a poet is her singular ability to imbue the ordinary, the invisible, the forgotten with a sense of majesty and wonder. Her work is littered with lines that force you to stop, to slow down, to notice what you might have missed or overlooked.

[You can listen to this episode of "The Ezra Klein Show" on Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.]