Archive

Sending signals

😍A quick note before this 'episode' of my sporadic newsletter: I just want to say thank you for following along and reading these notes I have sent out intermittently for a couple years. This will be the last one sent via this particular site. Though I really like

The future lie

One of the things that I hope the Democrats do as they focus their messaging for the presidential race is see the true gold mine of nonsense revealed by the 2021 comments Republican vice-presidential candidate JD Vance made- & has been defending- about the Democrats being run by "childless

Wider circles

Something I appreciated last month that wasn't climate change-related but I think relates to the larger question of human attention (which climate change is a part of) was how focused so many people in the United States were on the path of the total solar eclipse on April

A possible future

Sometimes I feel like part of the challenge with looking at climate change is that so much energy is inevitably placed on the near-term future- the climate models and projected effects this century. I think some of that is just human nature given our life spans, & also on how

If Only Earth was a Product

One thing that has fascinated me as generative AI became a constant theme in the news this year is how rarely anyone questions the underlying assumption that this makes sense (or is somehow inevitable) as a focus for huge resources of money & computing power. These interactive AI tools that

Something different...

I've been remembering what drew me to poetry years ago: it's the way a poem is looking to create its own structure and meaning in the space it takes up. Even when the world around it can seem like it is losing its structure & coherence-

That blindfolded, wooden dummy feeling

When events in the news are particularly dire (as they have been lately), I sometimes do the escapist mental act of flashing forward into the future thirty years or fifty years or even a hundred. That last one is certainly beyond the scope of my time on earth, but regardless,

Thirsty for Intelligence

The New York Times ran a thorough (and thoroughly scary) investigative piece at the end of August that looked at multiple ways the U.S. has been depleting its groundwater resources, treating aquifers as if they are infinite sources of water instead of limited ones. Climate change is mentioned as

Off the map

It's been awhile since I wrote one of these little pieces. I felt less able to focus on the larger questions & topics related to climate change when a lot of my attention was going toward the details of relocating back to the mid-Atlantic region from New England.

The multiple narratives

There is a commercial advertising Israel on tv that I saw multiple times when I visited my mom recently: it features a hip-looking young couple checking out the beaches and the nightlife and oh, look over there: it's 3 old guys representing the big 3 monotheistic religions, peacefully

Can humans do this better?

A friend sent me an article that has stuck in my head amidst all the other articles I've read lately: this piece about a two-person start-up that is selling 'cooling credits' to the public to pay for their company to use weather balloons to release sulfur

Imagining the virtual outdoors

I was thinking about how this kind of 'weather lockdown' may become more common with increasing climate instability. ..

Could it be?

Why are we- residents of the world who like to breathe clean air- still in a defensive position in regards to these companies who are cousins to the big fossil fuel giants that lied for years about climate change?

That regular habit...

I've never been a smoker but I remember, years ago, hearing of quitting cigarettes as a popular 'new year, new you' kind of focus for making a change. That was in the old world of my childhood where climate change wasn't a thing, but

The Missing Story

To me this timeline captures something essential: how for hundreds of millions of years, change has happened here, usually quite slowly, at a pace no human could perceive if we somehow took a time machine back and tried to live through it.

End-of-year attention

A documentary like "Chasing Coral" is a reminder that it isn't just human lives that I should feel obligated to, so I re-watched it from the beginning.

Billions & billions spent where?

Meanwhile, the costs for climate action- from prevention and mitigation to transformation of systems and recovery from damages- just rise and rise.

Unlocking messaging that works

If the Democrats could frame climate change as an issue where those who are weak on action to address it are 'taking away freedom', I think they would be taking a stronger stand...