Pat Robertson is dead, and Rebecca Watson has made an excellent video about him. I knew he was a monster, but I had no idea just how monstrous. She also makes the very good point that there is no justice but what we make for ourselves, and we should do a better job of making it. Watch the video, or check out the transcript on Skepchick.
There’s a concept in urban design, called the “15 minute city”, that has been gaining a lot of traction in some circles. The basic idea is that everything a person needs in their day to day life ought to be within 15 minutes’ walk from their home. That means jobs, groceries, doctors, and so on. This tends to come with limitations on car use within those cities. One proposal I’ve heard is that people can drive around cities on ring roads all they want, but if they drive across the city more than a set number of times, they have to pay a fine. People on the right, of course, have folded this into their all-encompassing theory of how everything is a conspiracy, but that’s not actually the point of this post. The point of this post is that the 15 minute city concept, while a fantastic idea, may be too little, too late.
I’ve got a few points that I make repeatedly, and in different ways. We need to do more than we’re doing. We need to move food production indoors. We need to bring plants into our cities more. We need to end profit-driven overproduction. We need to start building enclosed cities.
It’s that last one I want to talk about today, in light of the Nova Scotia wildfires, and the dangerous and dramatic air pollution they have caused in the United States. To begin with, I don’t mean building a glass bubble over our cities. To me, that seems like a terrible idea, and utterly impractical. No, what I want has more to do with tunnels and building layout. When I moved from the US to Glasgow in 2019, I had to fly into Germany, drive to the Netherlands, and take a ferry out of Rotterdam to get to Great Britain. Because of the rules around traveling with pets, we had to spend a couple nights in Frankfurt, so that we could go to a German vet to vet our pets. The Airbnb we stayed at was a family’s extra bedroom, and what caught my attention was the fact that their grocery store was literally in the same building as their apartment. When Tegan and I needed to get supplies for our drive to the coast, all we had to do was go downstairs. Add in a connected subway system, or even enclosed walkways between buildings (underground or otherwise), and suddenly people might not need to go outside for days or weeks at a time.
In my youth, the very concept would have horrified me. In many ways, it still does. While I’m nowhere close to being the outdoorsman I once was, I value time outside, and I value being able to see wildlife. The idea of deliberately designing a world in which people never need to go outside is disturbing. What’s far more disturbing is the fact that this is the direction in which we must start moving, if we want to survive.
Normally, when I talk about this kind of urban redesign (folks in the country will need other solutions, and we absolutely need to invest resources in helping them), the danger in question is heat. The rise in global temperature has, predictably, led to a rise in lethal wet-bulb conditions. Basically what that means is that the combination of heat and humidity mean humans can no longer cool themselves by sweating. It just doesn’t work. That means that pretty much anyone can develop lethal heat stroke pretty quickly. I like Wikipedia’s breakdown of this:
The wet-bulb temperature (WBT) is the temperature read by a thermometer covered in water-soaked (water at ambient temperature) cloth (a wet-bulb thermometer) over which air is passed.[1] At 100% relative humidity, the wet-bulb temperature is equal to the air temperature (dry-bulb temperature); at lower humidity the wet-bulb temperature is lower than dry-bulb temperature because of evaporative cooling.
The wet-bulb temperature is defined as the temperature of a parcel of air cooled to saturation (100% relative humidity) by the evaporation of water into it, with the latent heat supplied by the parcel.[2] A wet-bulb thermometer indicates a temperature close to the true (thermodynamic) wet-bulb temperature. The wet-bulb temperature is the lowest temperature that can be reached under current ambient conditions by the evaporation of water only.
Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F).[3]
This isn’t a matter of sucking it up and living with the heat. It’s a matter of humans being physically incapable of living with the heat. All humans. If it’s just moving between nearby air-conditioned buildings, most people would be fine, but I’m not so sure about they very young, the very old, and folks who’re sick or have disabilities. This is also very much tied to the manufactured crisis of homelessness. Being unhoused is already incredibly dangerous, and while there has been a decline in lethally cold conditions (faster than the rise in warm ones), the overall rate of warming is on the rise, and it’s a lot easier for someone without shelter to stay warm on a cold night than to cool down on a hot day.
The heat and humidity are not, however, the only things that we need to consider.
As most of you are no doubt aware, Nova Scotia is burning, and a huge area to the south of those fires is being smothered by the smoke, with New York City getting the most attention:
The image shows an NYT headline reading: “Swaths of North America Are Shrouded Under Unhealthy Air”, with an image below it captioned, “View of Manhattan, via EarthCam”. The image below is a compilation of four photographs of the Manhattan skyline. The first, at 10:02am shows the city pretty clearly, with a bit of haze in the air. At 11:56am, the whole scene has a dingy yellow tint, and details like tower reflections in the water are no longer visible. At 12:53pm, the dingy yellow has taken over, and Manhattan is little more than a silhouette of its skyline. At 1:53pm, the silhouette is still there, bit the air is now a deep, orange color.
People are being urged to stay indoors as much as possible, and to wear masks to help filter out the smoke. I remember when COVID hit, Rebecca Watson mentioned that she already had masks, because California has been getting this same treatment over the last decade. Now I’m wondering how many people in NYC were prepared for this crisis because they’re still masking for COVID. Make no mistake: people are being sickened and killed by this.
But this goes further than just a couple reasons why people might need to remain indoors. Heat and air pollution are not separate, as the former often makes the latter far worse. If it weren’t for the smoke, New York would be having a pretty normal time of it, with a today’s high being 72°F/22°C, but what if this was happening at the same time as a heat wave?
High heat and air pollution are each problematic for human health, particularly for vulnerable populations such as older adults. But what happens when they hit at the same time?
We examined over 1.5 million deaths from 2014 to 2020 registered in California – a state prone to summer heat waves and air pollution from wildfires – to find out.
Deaths spike when both risks are high
The number of deaths rose both on hot days and on days with high levels of fine particulate air pollution, known as PM2.5. But on days when an area was hit with a double whammy of both high heat and high air pollution, the effects were much higher than for each condition alone.
The risk of death on those extra-hot and polluted days was about three times greater than the effect of either high heat or high air pollution alone.
The more extreme the temperatures and pollution, the higher the risk. During the top 10% of hottest and most polluted days, the risk of death increased by 4% compared to days without extremes. During the top 1%, it increased by 21%; and among older adults over age 75, the risk of death increased by more than a third on those days.
[…]
There are several ways the combined exposure to extreme heat and particulate air pollution can harm human health.
Oxidative stress is the most common biological pathway linked with particulate air pollution and heat exposure. Oxidative stress is an imbalance between production of highly reactive molecules known as reactive oxygen species, or ROS, and the body’s ability to remove them. It’s been linked with lung diseases, among other illnesses.
Antioxidants help clean up these molecules, but particulate air pollution and heat disrupt this balance through excessive metabolic ROS production and lowered antioxidant activity.
Our research also showed that the effects of particulate air pollution and heat extremes were larger when high nighttime temperature and pollution occurred together. High nighttime temperatures can interfere with normal sleep and potentially contribute to chronic health conditions such as heart disease and obesity, and disrupt how the body regulates temperature.
Older adults may be more susceptible to effects of extreme heat and air pollution exposure, in part because this stress comes on top of age-related chronic health conditions like heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes or chronic lung disease. Impaired body temperature regulation in response to heat can also occur with aging. And older adults may be less mobile and therefore less able to get to cooling centers or to medical care and be less able to afford air conditioning.
We have reached a point, with the warming of this planet, where survival will increasingly depend on things like air conditioning and air filtration. Both of these things cost energy, and if we are using fossil fuels to generate that energy, then we will be making the problem worse, simply by trying to survive it.
This is why it was so important that we transition away from fossil fuels before it got to this point – not just because it might have helped us avoid a great deal of needless death and suffering, but also because we’ve always known that rising temperatures would mean rising energy demand from things like air conditioning. What’s more, our current grid can’t handle the power demands of a heat wave, resulting in power failures that place many more people at risk.
We’re at this point thanks to decades of procrastination by our so-called leaders, and they seem committed to continuing that procrastination until they die, while working to ensure they’re replaced by people who’re likely to continue that pattern. Without drastic action, and a real change in direction, it will keep getting worse, and there is no limit to how much worse it can get. Because there is no limit to the greed and callousness of the rich, we need the power of an organized working class to have any shot at building a better world. That will come through community organizing, and workplace organizing. Neither are easy, but until we have the ability to bring the system to a halt, those who’re enjoying the ride will keep on going forward, driving us straight to hell.
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The world is too complex to have its problems solved by the removal of one particular line of thinking. That said, I’d love to see the end of this notion that movements for change have to be “civil”. There is nothing civil about the way our system works today, it’s just that people who are well served by that system get to pretend otherwise, because the cops aren’t busting down their doors, and attacking their families. We don’t have a civil society, we have a society that constantly, desperately works to avoid looking at the chaos, violence, and incivility that keep things the way they are. For those who want a better world, civility is only of use when it’s the best tactic to further our goals. It has no inherent value, in the face of hatred, climate change, and the blood-soaked machine of capitalism.
My folks are in town for a week – the first time I’ve seen them since I left the US in 2019! We’re doing a variety of things while they’re here, but today we went to Bull Island. It’s basically a sandbar that was created when Dublin put up a seawall to help keep river silt out of the harbour. It has become a pleasant dune habitat, with some decidedly marshy bits.
For those who can’t see, the image shows tousled grass in greens and browns, with a watery patch that reflects the gray sky in the middle. There are a few shrubs, maybe a couple meters tall, in the upper third of the picture, to the left. In the background you can see smoke stacks in the harbour, and a few small mountains in the distance.
There were a number of birds there, but I only got one halfway-decent picture of a hooded crow that was watching our progress.
The picture’s focus leaves it feeling a bit impressionistic, but it shows a crow with a dark gray breast, neck, and head, and black on its face and throat. Its head is turned to the side to get a good look at us. Despite the poor picture quality (sorry!), the bird stands out well from the green background.
Along the way, we noticed a hole in a dune. It looked like a burrow for something, but though we had guesses, we weren’t sure what it was. A little further on, we found this hole.
In the middle of the picture, you can see one rabbit foot, fur and all, with a bare leg bone still attached. Next to it is the rabbit’s spine and pelvis, both notable, because like the leg and foot, they are not attached to any rabbit. In the background, the ominous opening of a predator’s lair!
I respectfully stepped around the little boneyard, and got a closer shot of the burrow entrance. There wasn’t any notable smell, which was surprising. The two most likely culprits would be foxes or badgers, both of which tend to stink up their homes a bit. After further inspection, we found other burrows in the same great big grassy mound, which sounds more like a badger, but Wikipedia doesn’t think there are any living on the island. Further study needed? Edit: Upon further research, it seems foxes will actually live in groups of three or four adults, and they do leave prey carcasses around their homes. I guess it was just wishful thinking. Foxes are neat and all, but all I need to do to see one is go for a walk after dark around where I live. Badgers, not so much.
The burrow is sandy, which makes sense on an island made of sand. It seems clear that its structural integrity depends on the roots of the grass growing on top of the hillock. You can see grass, and some yellow flowers in the foreground, as well as one pink and white flower near the bottom left corner.
We attempted to take a picture to show the scale of the hillock, but because Tegan was standing on the trail, which ran right next to it, it came out looking like she was sitting in the grass, taking a picture of my father and I just standing around.
You can’t tell, but this picture was taken from a trail at the base of the hillock we suspected of being a badger set. The camera is around 1.6 meters off the ground, with the hillock being about the same height from the trail. You can see me standing, facing to the right, and my father, further back, facing to the left. Dad’s standing a bit higher up, looking down at one of the set’s entrances. We’re both wearing broadbrim leather hats (good for keeping sun off faces), and also I’m wearing a dark blue shirt, a multi-coloured vest, sunglasses, and a black backpack. Dad’s wearing a jacket and a blue and white shirt.
If you want me to be able to take better-quality pictures, or feel I should be less worried about my finances, consider giving me money at patreon.com/oceanoxia
This video does what it says on the box. Casual Geographic is here it entertain and inform, and in my opinion, he succeeds at both.
Tomorrow is a day of action for those working to stop Cop City, in Atlanta, Georgia.
For any who need to catch-up, “Cop City” is a police training facility that the city government of Atlanta wants to build. The planned location is currently forested, but it used to be a prison plantation, and a dumping ground. The facility will include firing ranges, explosives training, a helicopter landing pad, and a mock city, all for cops to train in urban warfare and suppressing political demonstrations. The local community does not want this. Part of it is because they use the forest as a park, part is the importance of opposing deforestation, and part of it is not wanting a massive police training facility in their community. Even leaving aside the problems that police cause wherever they go, who wants the soundtrack of their home life to be gunfire and explosions?
Most of the city opposes this, as has been demonstrated every time there’s an opportunity for public comment. It seems like there will be an attempt to have city employees show up to speak in favor of the facility tomorrow, which seems fitting, since the only people who want this thing seem to be the mayors office, the cops, and the corporations helping to fund this. On that note – the supposed cost of this facility was originally slated at $90 million, with $30 million coming from Atlanta taxpayers, and $60 million from an assortment of corporations. It has now come out that the city will have to pay more than double what was originally announced, at $67 million, and I think it would be foolish to assume that that cost won’t keep rising. I guarantee there are better uses for that money.
But wait! It gets worse!
In addition to murdering a forest protector, the cops have arrested dozens of other activists on trumped up domestic terrorism charges. In response, the movement arranged a bail fund, so that people wouldn’t just be locked up prior to their trial. This is an entirely legal thing to do, despite the fact that cops and other conservatives don’t seem to like it. Apparently, however, the cops don’t care about whether it’s legal. They don’t like it when people stand up to them, and they want to keep the activists locked up, so they arrested the people organizing the bail fund, on charges of money laundering and charity fraud:
Under the direction of the Republican state attorney general, Christopher Carr, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department carried out the arrests of Marlon Scott Kautz, Savannah Patterson, and Adele Maclean of the Atlanta Solidarity Fund (ASF).
The group offers financial support to people who have been arrested for protesting, including the dozens of people who have been detained for resisting the development of the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, also known by critics as Cop City—a $90 million police training facility that would take up 85 acres of publicly-owned forest.
The three board members were charged with money laundering and charity fraud, leading state Rep. Saira Draper (D-90) to question the state’s use of SWAT teams and helicopters to conduct the raid in a residential neighborhood.
“Peaceful protest is as American as apple pie,” said Draper. “Using heavy handed tactics to suppress peaceful protest is shameful.”
Writer and historian William Horne denounced the arrests as “the behavior of a fascist police state.”
Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, told The Intercept on Wednesday that the ASF is “the first bail fund to be attacked in this way.” The funds have been used for at least a century to pool together communities’ financial resources to help bail people, including civil rights protesters, out of jail.
“There is absolutely not a scintilla of fact or evidence that anything illegal has ever transpired with regard to Atlanta fundraising for bail support,” Regan said.
She added in a press statement that “bailing out protestors who exercise their constitutionally protected rights is simply not a crime.”
“In fact, it is a historically grounded tradition in the very same social and political movements that the city of Atlanta prides itself on,” she said. “Someone had to bail out civil rights activists in the 60’s—I think we can all agree that community support isn’t a crime.”
And yet, I can almost guarantee that the cops who decided to do this will not face any serious repercussions. Police abuse of power is one of the biggest reasons people oppose Cop City, and look how they respond. In 2020, when there were protests against police brutality, the cops amped up the brutality, even shooting out people’s eyes. Now, in response to a community wanting a say over how public resources are used, they’re flagrantly violating peoples’ rights.
If you’re in the Atlanta area, consider showing up to city hall tomorrow. If you’re further out, and you have the resources, you can help by supporting the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, by signing on to the statement of solidarity with the movement, and by doing what you can to raise public awareness of what’s going on in Atlanta. Even if people don’t care about that city or the people in it, they should understand that everything happening there will happen everywhere else in the US as well, if they’re allowed to get away with it. I keep saying that those in power will use violence to keep that power, and this is part of that process. They are setting up to make cops more dangerous to USians, and they are flagrantly abusing their power to make sure that this goes through, no matter what the people of Atlanta want.
This is part of the climate fight, and it’s a battle we can ill afford to lose. A facility like Cop City is designed to make cops better at crushing movements for change, and in case you hadn’t noticed, we urgently need movements for change. Look into the issue if you haven’t, and try to find at least some way to help out. If you can’t do anything tomorrow, but you want to do something, there’s a week of action from June 24th to July 1st, and I believe actions outside of Atlanta, like demonstrations, are welcome as part of that. If you have questions, ask in the comments, and I’ll do what I can to provide answers.
Many years ago, I suggested to my parents that they might want to have plans in case of future wildfires. Their response was that New Hampshire got enough rain to make that pretty unlikely, at least for a while. They were right, of course, and New Hampshire has not had a serious fire problem in the years since. This is a good thing, of course, but it looks like that good thing might be on its way out, because Nova Scotia is burning.
I’ve been up there once, during a summer vacation in my childhood. We spent a couple weeks there, in public campgrounds, and one of my biggest memories from that trip was that it was gray and rainy the whole time. Nova Scotia is a peninsular province that sticks out into the North Atlantic ocean, to the east of Maine, and I think it typically gets a bit more rain than southern New Hampshire. Everywhere has fires from time to time, but it’s not an area historically known for being on fire, even in the more toasty era of the last decade. Unfortunately, history’s lessons fall short, in the face of a warming event unlike anything our species has ever encountered, and Nova Scotia is burning.
Officials and climate experts in Nova Scotia, Canada on Tuesday pointed to numerous climate-related factors that have contributed to the wildfires that are raging in the province this week, forcing the evacuation of more than 16,000 people and destroying roughly 200 homes and other structures.
The Tantallon fire in the Halifax area and the Barrington Lake fire in the southwestern county of Shelburne have burned through a combined 25,000 acres in the Maritime province, which, as one firefighter told the Canadian newspaper SaltWire, has historically been far less likely to experience such blazes than landlocked western provinces.
“This the worst fire I’ve ever been on,” volunteer firefighter Capt. Brett Tetanish toldSaltWire. “I’ve been on other large fires in Nova Scotia, Porters Lake, we lost structures there, but you don’t see fires like this in Nova Scotia. You see these in Alberta.”
Tetanish described a “surreal” scene as he drove toward the Tantallon fire on Sunday evening.
“We’re driving on Hammonds Plains Road with fire on both sides of the road, structures on fire, cars abandoned and burnt in the middle of the road,” he toldSaltWire.
Other witnesses, including a filmmaker, posted videos on social media of “apocalyptic scenes” showing fires destroying homes and huge plumes of smoke rendering highways nearly invisible to drivers.
“I almost died,” said the filmmaker. “The fire is spreading, it’s very serious. We couldn’t see anything.”
Halfway through 2023, Nova Scotia has already experienced more wildfires than it did in all of 2022, according to the National Observer.
Karen McKendry, a wilderness outreach coordinator at the Ecology Action Center in Nova Scotia’s capital, Halifax, told the Observer the province has experienced hotter dryer weather than normal this spring, making it easier for fires to spread.
“People haven’t always, on a national scale, been thinking about Nova Scotia and wildfires,” McKendry said. “What dominates the consciousness, rightly so in Canada, is what’s happening out West. But with a warming climate and some drier seasons, this is going to become more common in Nova Scotia. So more fires, more widespread fires, more destructive fires from a human perspective as well.”
The province’s Department of Natural Resources and Renewables (DNRR) also warned last Friday that the wildfires were taking hold in the region less than a year after Hurricane Fiona downed what Premier Tim Houston called a “significant” number of trees across Nova Scotia.
“Fires in areas where Hurricane Fiona downed trees have the potential to move faster and burn more intensely, making them potentially more difficult to contain and control,” said the DNRR. “At this time, needles, twigs, leaves, etc., support fire ignition and spread. With high winds, the spread can be rapid and intense.”
Scientists last year linked warming oceans, fueled by the continued extraction of fossil fuels and emissions of planet-heating greenhouse gases, to Fiona’s destruction in Eastern Canada.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau warned Monday that the situation in Nova Scotia is “incredibly serious,” prompting Saman Tabasinejad, acting executive director of Progress Toronto, to point to Trudeau’s support for fossil fuel projects like the Trans Mountain Pipeline.
“This would be a great time to end fossil fuel subsidies and invest in a Green New Deal!” Tabasinejad said on Twitter.
Yes, yes it would.
This doesn’t mean that the east coast of North America is now as fire-prone as the west coast. It’s not. What it does mean is that, as scientists have long predicted, the rules are changing. Climate-related disasters that used to be limited to certain parts of the world, are now showing up in new places. This is our world now. We’ve known this was coming for decades, and we know that it’s only going to get worse. That’s why I’m so convinced that we need to move farming indoors – where we grow our food right now depends almost entirely on historical climate conditions. This is happening right now, and the people running the world are all so stuck in the past, and so obsessed with their own power, that they are actively working to stop humanity from saving ourselves.
Mark Fisher describes “capitalist realism” as having an easier time imagining the end of the world, than the end of capitalism. It’s time we faced up to the fact that the capitalists have decided that if dealing with climate change requires an end to capitalism, then they would rather see the entire species killed off, than lose their power.
That should not be up to them
I do not like the Democratic Party. As an institution, they are corrupt and disingenuous servitors of the upper class, who will demand party unity one moment, then support the loser of a primary over the winner, the next. They claim to care about issues like climate change, but continue expanding fossil fuel extraction, well past the point that will totally destroy humanity. They claim to care about student debt, but refuse to actually do anything about it. They claim to care about reproductive rights, but support anti-choice candidates, and every time they came into power over the last half-century, they insisted that abortion rights were safe, and it wasn’t the time to codify them into law.
For 50 years they did that, in the face of an open campaign to do exactly what has now been done.
I do not like the Democratic party, but- they are still better than the GOP. Not on everything, of course. They’ve been full partners in the long history of attacking left-wing countries, and supporting some of the worst dictators and war criminals on the planet, for example. But even on the issues I listed in the paragraph above, they are better than the GOP, in a very material way.
I mention that because a lot of people on the left, at least online, insist that there’s no difference, and that the Democrats only serve to stabilize the ways in which the Republicans make things worse. Obama’s use of drone warfare comes to mind, as does the continued abuse of children at the southern border. There are issues on which you can absolutely make that case. The thing is, though, they are not the only issues at play. Minnesota is probably the best example right now. The Democrats there are not perfect, but look at what they’ve been up to, and tell me you’d ever get any of it if the GOP was in power there.
The problem, as I see it, is that those people on the left are still stuck on individualism, and on the fantasy of achieving revolutionary change within the infrastructure of a representative democracy. For the first part, I get it. The Democratic Party fights hard to avoid any kind of real working class power in the United States, and voting for them implies that I’m OK with that. I’m not OK with that, I just consider those feelings to be less important than the increased safety or wellbeing that can come from the policies that Democrats do support. I don’t believe souls exist, so I’m not particularly concerned with “tainting” mine. For the second part, well, I understand why people think that way, but I think that they are wrong.
Take the Green Party. I know some people see them as spoilers, and I’m willing to believe that some people fund them as spoilers, but they do actually have a strategy for change, based on the rules of the electoral system in which they exist. The goal of a Green Party presidential candidate, at this stage, is not to get them into the White House, but rather to win at least 5% of the vote. That, under the current rules, would qualify them for official recognition as a national party, and for federal funds for future campaigns. Once they get there, they’ll have a much easier time spreading their message, and increasing their vote share to become a real power for change in the United States. It’s a plan for long-term change, within the rules that currently exist, it’s actually pretty reasonable. Further, I feel I should say that the folks I’ve seen associated with the Green Party in day-to-day life tend to be more politically active than average, working to make the world better.
I do, however, have a couple problems with that strategy.
The first is that I think it is naïve to assume that the rules won’t be changed. I’m sure many Greens don’t assume that, but would say that if that does happen, that injustice will bring them more support and attention. That might be true, but I’m not convinced. My bigger problem is that we are running out of time. I’m a big fan of long-term thinking, but not if you don’t account for what’s going on outside of the electoral rules. Remember, their plan is to get 5% of the vote, and work to grow from there. They wouldn’t need a majority to influence policy, and force coalition-building, but it would still take them time to build support, and make any significant changes. What’s more, every time they fall short of the mark, they have to wait another four years for another shot, and we are running out of time. The global temperature is rising fast, and as capitalism reaches crisis-levels of wealth concentration, authoritarianism is rising as well, with the rich beefing up their goon squads to hold on to their wealth and power.
We need revolutionary change, and that cannot come from within an electoral system designed to prevent such change. To me, “revolutionary change” means a change to the political and economic system on a scale that is generally associated with a successful revolutionary war. It does not mean change achieved through war. I do not want war. I don’t think anyone who sincerely wants the world to get better does want war. My preferred method would be some form of general strike – bringing the country to a halt, until corrupt rulers are replaced, and laws are changed. The degree to which there ends up being violence will depend pretty much entirely on the people who currently hold power. They have a long, and uninterrupted history of using violence to crush movements for change, and I see plenty of reason to believe that they would use lethal force to prevent a left-wing movement from succeeding in its goals. When I wrote my neglected direct action post, I used a shield as a metaphor, because I think that any effort at real systemic change will be subjected to violence, and I believe that people have a right to defend themselves.
So, if voting won’t get the change we need, why vote at all? Well, because it can get smaller changes, that will save or improve lives in the short term, which is a thing worth doing in itself. There’s a sort of freedom in realizing that the system is so corrupt and entrenched that voting will never bring the change I want to see. It means that I don’t have to pin all my hopes on a candidate, only to feel betrayed when they fall short of my expectations. Sure, I still get disappointed or angry when bad things happen, but my hope comes from the work that people are doing to organize, and to take direct action. It’s not a guaranteed win, of course, but by organizing around smaller-scale problems, like working conditions or local laws, we build the capacity to work together on much larger problems.
This started out as me just posting a video, but then I had things to say. Beau of the Fifth Column posted a video responding to someone who was having trouble seeing a difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, and he said a lot of stuff that I agree with. It’s not surprising, considering that he’s been influential in my own political thought over the last couple years. It can be difficult to look at the world as it is, and not get sidetracked by all the complexity and horror, and I think Beau does a good job breaking it down.
There are a lot of changes we need to make, if we want to get control of how we affect the non-human parts of this planet. One of my favorites to talk about, partly for aesthetic reasons, is filling urban landscapes with plant life. While doing so isn’t enough by itself, and brings its own problems, it would improve the lives of city-dwellers in a number of ways, especially while there are still cars about. With that as my standing opinion, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that my eye was caught by a university press release claiming that “plants remove cancer-causing toxins from air“.
A ground-breaking study has revealed that plants can efficiently remove toxic petrol fumes, including cancer causing compounds such as benzene, from indoor air.
The study was led by University of Technology Sydney (UTS) bioremediation researcher Associate Professor Fraser Torpy, in partnership with leading plantscaping solutions company Ambius.
The researchers found that the Ambius small green wall, containing a mix of indoor plants, was highly effective at removing harmful, cancer-causing pollutants, with 97 per cent of the most toxic compounds removed from the surrounding air in just eight hours.
They go on to talk about the health problems caused by air pollution, which would be fine, normally, but when this research is explicitly in partnership with a corporation that’s trying to sell a product, it starts to come across more like fearmongering to drive sales. I want to be clear – I have no particular reason to doubt this research, on the face of it. They put their “green wall” in a sealed chamber with some car exhaust, took measurements, and got clear results. This is far from the first time that research has pointed to plants as a way to filter out air pollution, and so I’m certainly inclined to believe it, but…
This is also the exact result that a company trying to sell a product would want to get, which makes it all but useless as anything other than an advertisement. Even if it does end up in a peer-reviewed journal (it’s not right now, as far as I can tell – you have to give Ambius your email to get a copy of the report), nobody of good will can entirely trust it, and if it were included as part of a case for change, anybody of bad will could point to the blatant conflict of interest, and use that to derail the whole effort.
This is why public funding is so important, especially in a capitalist society. Between advertising and propaganda, it’s already hard for a lot of people to figure out what’s going on, and that confusion is wonderful for con artists, whether they’re trying to get a few bucks out of people, or trying to drive humanity to extinction for more oil money. We need clarity, right now, and while I’m sure that the business in question is trying to do well by doing good, this doesn’t help.
I may dig into this more later, but the Supreme Court has launched another attack in their war on humanity. They’ve gutted the clean water act, in a move that puts a huge portion of US wetlands at risk, at a time when we need them more than ever. I’ve been expecting this shoe to drop for a while now, but what I did not expect was that Brett Kavanaugh, of all people, would be on the right side of this, and would be the one to correctly warn of the damage this ruling will do. Credit where it’s due, I guess, but that doesn’t do anything to limit the harm. The common saying is, “it’s going to get worse before it gets better” applies here, but I can’t help but feel that we’re running out of time for things to do anything but keep getting worse.