Reckonings: a journal of justice, hope and history

Barbara Kingsolver and the Pledge of the American Climate Corps

Barbara Kingsolver and the Pledge of the American Climate Corps

(from Grist.org)

Barbara Kingsolver has been weaving her concern about the environment into her books ever since she started writing novels in 1988. Her 2012 novel Flight Behavior explored how climate change might affect the monarch butterfly, and the 2007 nonfiction work Animal, Vegetable, Miracle recounted her family’s experiment eating only food grown near their home in Virginia.

She recently applied this skill to a new, much shorter genre: pledge-writing. The coordinators of the American Climate Corps — President Joe Biden’s signature green jobs program — invited Kingsolver to pen the promise new members would recite when sworn in. “I told them, ‘This will be the first vow or pledge I’ve written since my wedding vows,’” Kingsolver said. Last month, the first 9,000 members of the Climate Corps committed to Kingsolver’s oath:

I pledge to bring my skills, respect, and compassion to work every day, supporting environmental justice in all our communities.

I will honor nature’s beauty and abundance, on which we all depend, and commit to its protection from the climate crisis.

I will build a more resilient future, where every person can thrive.

I will take my place in history, working with shared purpose in the American Climate Corps on behalf of our nation and planet, its people, and all its species, for the better future we hold within our sight.

The inaugurated members have spread across the country to install clean energy, restore habitats, and build trails. The Biden White House expects to employ 20,000 young people over the first year of the program, inspired by the Civilian Conservation Corps, which President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched in the 1930s to help the country recover from the Great Depression. 

Kingsolver believes that the reimagined version will make history, too, calling it “one of the most exciting things that’s happening in the country right now.” In a call with Grist, she discussed her vision for the American Climate Corps and how it connects to the themes in her novels: nature, empathy, and class. This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

1. What was the thinking behind the language you used in the pledge?
2. In less than 100 words, I tried to bring in the most important parts of this initiative — that it’s about respecting and bringing justice to communities, it’s about respecting and honoring the environment and our connection with it, and it’s about taking a part in history. I read it aloud to myself as I worked, because a pledge is more like poetry than anything else. It has to sound right spoken aloud, and it has to sound like you mean it. Like a wedding vow!
3. You’ve said that you believe writing can promote social change. Is that part of why you wrote this? 
4. Words are what I have to offer. That’s my way of giving blood. I think that advocacy and literature are two very different things, and this was a chance to really jump on advocacy, which I’m delighted to do. I feel this rising sense of worry and paralysis among younger generations as they look at the world they’re inheriting. And I’ve always thought that worry can be a paralyzer or an engine that puts you to work, and that you’ll go farther and feel better if you put your worry to work.
5. I know you’ve been writing about climate change in your novels for a long time. What have you learned about how to communicate about it in an approachable way?
6. I think the most important thing to remember, no matter who you are, whether you’re a policymaker, or a novelist, or just a friend or a relative entering a conversation, is that nobody likes to feel judged. People take information from sources that they trust, and trust involves respect. So if you open a conversation with the words “you idiot,” that conversation is already over. 

I write with the assumption that my readers are all at least as smart as I am. I never talk down because there’s no reason I should. I might have some fact that other people don’t have, or some skills that other people don’t have, and likewise, they have facts and skills I don’t have. So I go into this as an equal exchange. I think that if more people remembered that on social media, the world would be a happier place.

1. In Demon Copperhead, your most recent novel, a through line that surfaces is how coal companies have exploited Appalachian communities. Can you talk about what inspired you to write about climate change, and if the history of the region had anything to do with that?
2. Well, I’m a rural person. I grew up playing in the woods as a largely unsupervised child. So, the woods, the fields, the water, the river — this is always going to be part of my world. I don’t think of the world as a place of only human interest and occupation. I think of myself as a species among the species. I studied biology, so I have this awareness that every breath I take, the oxygen that I breathe, was manufactured by trees. So, it’s going to be part of my writing, always. It’s part of my thinking, always. 
3. Poverty and class are often central themes in your books. Thinking about the Climate Corps, part of its purpose is to revitalize areas of the country that have long been neglected. What role do you hope it will play?
4. I think this is a really class-conscious endeavor, encouraging kids from everywhere, from every class, in every geographic part of the U.S., rural or urban, to have opportunities to engage with conservation, to engage with the future in this way, and to be really clear that enjoying the environment is not a privilege of the elite.

Kamala Harris’s Best Campaign Surrogate Is Donald Trump

This piece from The New Yorker by Susan Glasser describes Trump's classic foot-in-mouth behavior and confirms the good reason Harris replaced Joe Biden as the Democratic Party's presidential candidate.

 

__________________

 

On Thursday, in a crowded auditorium at Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, President Joe Biden appeared in public with Vice-President Kamala Harris for the first time since his decision, three weeks ago, to pull the plug on his reëlection campaign and endorse her instead. There were smiles all around, a hug, loud cheers. Harris, speaking first, called Biden an “extraordinary human being.” She beamed. Biden put his hand over his heart. The crowd chanted, “Thank you, Joe! Thank you, Joe!” The vibe was warm and not too awkward, considering the circumstances.

When it was Biden’s turn to speak, the President flashed that toothy grin of his, then started in on a story about his unfinished work from 1973, on a health-care bill with Senator Frank Church of Idaho—a riff that surely reminded more than a few listeners why Biden had so recently been pushed into retirement by his own party’s leaders. Was he really name-checking a senator who has been in the grave since 1984 before even mentioning his party’s newly anointed Presidential nominee? With fewer than ninety days until the election, the point of the anecdote was supposed to be about Harris—his heir apparent and handpicked successor. He caught himself. “Folks, she’s going to make one hell of a President,” he said.

But in truth, it was an aside. Thursday’s speech—a victory lap to celebrate the Administration’s successful negotiation of major price cuts for ten widely used drugs by seniors—was just the sort of wonky stem-winder that Biden loves. Harris played little more than a cameo in his history of the deal—a loyal Veep who cast the tiebreaking vote two years ago on the measure in the Senate that authorized the Medicare program to conduct negotiations with pharmaceutical companies. There was no effort to rewrite Harris into the foreground. Some audience members, who were excited to see their new candidate, left while the President was still talking. (“Crowd leaves joint Biden-Harris event early after VP hands off lectern to lame-duck prez,” the New York Post, more than a little churlishly, reported.)

This can’t be an easy moment for Biden. He and Harris played to the crowd like the pros that they are, but there was little doubt, watching the President, that he’s more comfortable in valedictory mode than playing the role of her patron; it must surely sting such a proud man to see the jubilant crowds that have greeted Harris at every stop since his exit from the race. No doubt recent reporting is correct that Biden is still angry with Nancy Pelosi and the other Democrats who sought to get him to end his campaign—the Times disclosed just before Thursday’s event that Biden, despite everything, still believes that he could have hung on and won both the nomination and the general election against Trump. In a brief eleven-minute interview with CBS on Sunday, his first since dropping out of the race, Biden had strikingly little to say about his Vice-President. He promised to campaign with her and to do whatever would “help most,” but he had nothing to say about why Harris would make a good President other than that she had picked a “great guy” in Tim Walz as her running mate and that together they would make “a hell of a team.”

Biden’s legacy is on the line if Donald Trump is returned to the White House. Aside from Harris herself, nobody has more riding on her election than Biden. But the two appearances showed, with painful clarity, that he has not yet made the transition—if he ever will—to being a successful advocate for her ascension. There are many more valedictories in Biden’s future, including on Monday night at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. But watching him on Thursday, it’s clear that the old campaigner hasn’t yet accepted that his is not the name at the top of the ticket.

It may not matter. If Biden is not yet Harris’s cheerleader-in-chief, these last few wild weeks have established that there is no better surrogate for her campaign than Trump himself. Every time Trump opened his mouth since Biden stepped aside, the ex-President made the case for his own manifest unfitness for office; what better assistance could she ask for?

Consider just the past few days. On Sunday, Trump claimed in a social-media post that Harris’s campaign had faked a crowd of fifteen thousand people who had showed up for a recent rally at a Detroit airport hangar. “Nobody was there,” he insisted. She “CHEATED,” and the crowd, a figment of artificial intelligence or something, “DIDN’T EXIST.” Very stable genius, right? The fact checkers dutifully weighed in with witness accounts and video proof that Trump was out of his mind. Sometimes you have to wonder whether there is a secret agent for the Democrats covertly advising Trump when he posts this stuff. On Monday night, in a two-hour conversation on X with its owner, Elon Musk, Trump went off on so many tangents that it was almost a relief when he mentioned his apparent plan for self-exile to Venezuela if he lost to Harris—though it did sound a bit ominous when he warned that, should that happen, “it’ll be a far safer place to meet than our country.”

By Wednesday, in a speech in North Carolina, Trump—once again—made a mockery of Republican leaders who have been publicly pleading with him to abandon personal attacks on the Vice-President in favor of a more substantive policy-focussed case for himself. (As if.) The speech, Trump’s first in a battleground state in over a week, even as Harris has built up new polling leads, was billed as an “economic” manifesto for a second Trump term. Or, as the former President himself explained,

This is talking about a thing called the economy. I wanted to do a speech about the economy. A lot of people are very devastated [by] what’s happened with inflation and all the other things. So we are doing this as an intellectual speech. We are all intellectuals today. Today we are doing it. And we are doing it right now. And it’s very important. They say it is the most important subject. I think crime is right there. I think the border is right there, personally. We have a lot of important subjects. . . . They say it is the most important subject. I am not sure it is. . . . Inflation is the most important. But that is part of the economy.

Very intellectual stuff, at least compared with much of the rest of the speech, which touched upon such matters as Harris’s laugh and the artist who painted her portrait for this week’s Time magazine cover. As for substance, Trump offered not policy proposals so much as magic potions and miracle cures—a Day One Presidential executive order to his Cabinet to immediately bring prices down, new tariffs, overnight elimination of government regulations. In the reality-based world, new reports that same day showed inflation falling and crime statistics plummeting in most major U.S. cities.

In a press conference on Thursday afternoon, Trump mocked Harris as a “communist” who is going to ruin the entire world if she is elected. “Beyond the number of one hundred percent” of new jobs in the Biden years has gone to migrants, he said. He talked about the horrors of wind power and the evils of electric trucks. He talked and he talked and he talked. He complained about crooked judges and crooked prosecutors and the fake news media. After nearly an hour, the press conference had not yet addressed a single question. “I think I’m entitled to personal attacks,” Trump said when he finally took a reporter’s query about his flailing campaign strategy. Well, O.K., then.

When Trump began attacking Harris in earnest a couple of weeks ago, she condemned his remarks about her racial background as “the same old show.” I say, Let the show play on for at least a few more months. Every time Trump talks, he’s making the case for her. 

The Trump Bible: perspectives from The New Yorker

Dear readers of Reckonings (https://www.reckonings.net),

Many of you will know that Donald Trump is selling a "God Bless the USA Bible" for $60. I did not and shall not purchase one, so I have some questions about the project. It's not entirely clear what cause the proceeds will serve, but you can imagine, as have I.

As to the Trump Bible's contents, we know there are two Testaments, both bearing a distinctive resemblance to their creator or one of his minions, with a little biblical know-how and a sense of humor for which he is, to my knowledge, wholly lacking. So I offer you the challenge of resolving my quandary, and would be grateful to hear from you. 

Bruce Headlam and Stephen Sherrill, who offer that sense of humor Trump lacks, provide their own best guesses in The New Yorker's current issue. Judge for yourselves, as always, and if there are any of you who forked over the $60, please let me know what you received for your hard-earned cash.

I want to make clear that the following text is from the pages of The New Yorker. If any of you are not familiar with the real Bible and its contents, Old Testament and/or New Testament, and take umbrage or worse at making fun of it, please do not read on. If there are any of you who truly accept that advice, please proceed at your own risk. Here is the word for which I'd been seeking: Godspeed. 

 

The Great Flood

Now, Noah was very faithful, so God commanded him to build a mighty ark, telling him, “Take your family and two of every living thing.” But there was one animal that Noah couldn’t catch, and that was the beautiful unicorn, a white horse with a horn on its head. They’re very tricky, those unicorns. They hid from Noah and perished in the flood.

Noah became very sad and spoke to God: “Lord, why have you forsaken the unicorn? Especially when you have other creatures here I don’t care for, frankly.”

After forty days, God kept his promise and the rain stopped. Noah and his family stepped out of the ark and into a new world. But he couldn’t stop thinking about unicorns.

Imagine if we had unicorns today. Wouldn’t that be something?

 

The Testing of Abraham

“Abraham!” God commanded. “Take your son to the mountain and make of him a sacrifice to me.”

But Abraham had a multitude of sons by many wives. That’s how they did it back then. Many wives. Some say it was better that way.

“Lord,” Abraham replied, “can you tell me which son? I have so many.”

“Your firstborn.”

“Just the one, Lord? Really, there are so many I don’t remember all their names.”

“Just the one. It’s not a big deal.”

“Are you sure? Honestly, Lord, I can’t find them all jobs as it is.”

“O.K., fine. Take a couple.”

“The firstborn and one other?”

“It doesn’t matter. You choose.”

Then Abraham was seized by fear and beseeched the Lord: “Please spare my daughter. For I say unto you, she’s quite a looker.”

And God replied, “Let’s just forget I said anything.”

 

The Feeding of the Multitude

After Jesus finished preaching, a great multitude of people came to him with tears in their eyes, because it had been such a beautiful speech. But it was also very long, and they were hungry.

The apostles had only seven loaves of bread and a few fish. Jesus told them, “Collect money from the multitude for food. Then bring it to me and I’ll show you a miracle.” And because he liked to test his followers he added, “The apostle who brings the most money can ride with me on my donkey into Jerusalem.”

When the apostles had done what he asked, Jesus broke the loaves and fish and put them into baskets. When the apostles saw what he had done, they cried, “Lord, there are still only seven loaves and a few fish. They’re just in smaller baskets. That won’t fool anybody.”

Jesus put the money in his robe and said, “Tell the multitude if they go home now we’ve got something much better than loaves and fish for them. They’re going to be very happy, trust me.”

The apostles told the five thousand what Jesus had said and, lo, they were satisfied and left without eating. The apostles threw themselves on the ground and praised Jesus, for they had witnessed a miracle.

Afterward, Jesus didn’t mention the donkey ride again, and nobody asked.

 

The Resurrection

After Jesus was arrested, the crowd brought him before Pontius Pilate.

“Tell me, Jesus Christ,” Pilate said. “Are you King of the Jews?” Which wasn’t that strange a question, because even today a lot of people don’t know that Jesus was actually Jewish.

“You say that I am,” Jesus replied, but, again, you couldn’t tell just by looking at him. “This trial is very unfair. You are a corrupt judge, and your wife is a very nasty woman.”

“What does my wife have to do with anything?” Pilate asked.

“I don’t want to say,” Jesus replied. “But I’ve heard some rumors.”

The crowd dragged Jesus away, while Pilate pondered the comment about his wife. Jesus was crucified and left to die.

Overcome by grief, the apostles left for Galilee, where to their amazement they found Jesus in splendid white robes waiting for them.

“Lord!” they cried. “You have fulfilled the prophecies and risen from the dead.”

“What prophecies?” Jesus replied. “I’ve been here the whole time.”

The apostles didn’t understand.

“While I was carrying the Cross, someone stopped to help,” Jesus said. “Simon. Shimon, maybe. Sounded foreign. The next thing I knew, the crowd had crucified him instead, so I just left.”

The apostles exulted, and the sky opened up. “I am ascending to Heaven now to sit at the right hand of the Father,” Jesus told them. “And when I return I’m not going to be in such a forgiving mood. Judas, the Pharisees, Pilate—they will feel my wrath on Day One. I’m not so happy with Thomas, either, who I heard said some very bad things about me. And this will be a sign unto you: the lamb will lie down with the lion. And you’re not going to want to be the lamb, believe me.”

With that, Jesus ascended to Heaven, speaking his final words: “I’ll ask one more time about the unicorns. But I’m pretty sure the answer is still no.” ♦

 

 

 

 

 

Helen Cox Richardson: an absorbing and intriguing critical essay

I am an avid reader of Heather Cox Richardson's writing, primarily her fine book, Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America, and her regular Substack columns entitled Letters from an American. 

 

I am taking the liberty of sending you Richardson's column dated yesterday, April 8, 2024. It is, in my view, the best brief perspective on the current state of the Republican Party and its capture by an increasingly wild, vicious, and deteriorating Donald Trump. The column is also a reason to thank Substack and publications like the Washington Post for their journalism.

 

Here is Richardson's column without the notes citing her sources, which are available in the original. If you haven't already, I highly recommend subscribing to Letters from an American.

 

April 8, 2024 

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON APR 9

READ IN APP

On Sunday, Representative Michael R. Turner (R-OH), chair of the House Intelligence Committee, said it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor,” he said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Turner was being questioned about an interview in which Representative Michael McCaul (R-TX), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told Russia specialist Julia Ioffe that “Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.” McCaul blamed right-wing media. When asked which Republicans he was talking about, McCaul answered that it is “obvious.” 

Catherine Belton and Joseph Menn reviewed more than 100 internal Kremlin documents from 2022 and 2023 obtained by a European intelligence service and reported in the Washington Post today that the Russian government is running “an ongoing campaign that seeks to influence congressional and other political debates to stoke anti-Ukraine sentiment.” Kremlin-backed trolls write fake “news articles, social media posts and comments that promote American isolationism, stir fear over the United States’ border security and attempt to amplify U.S. economic and racial tensions” while claiming that “Biden’s policies are leading the U.S. toward collapse.”

Aaron Blake pointed out in the Washington Post that Republicans are increasingly warning that Russian propaganda has fouled their party. Blake notes that Russia specialist Fiona Hill publicly told Republicans during the 2019 impeachment inquiry into Trump that they were repeating “politically driven falsehoods that so clearly advance Russian interests,” but Republicans angrily objected. 

Now Senators Mitt Romney (R-UT), Thom Tillis (R-NC), and John Cornyn (R-TX) and a top aide to Senator Todd Young (R-IN), as well as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley and even Trump’s vice president Mike Pence, have warned about the party’s ties to Russia. Former Representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) has said the Republican Party now has “a Putin wing.” 

Trump has hinted that he has a plan to end Russia’s war in Ukraine in 24 hours. Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf, Josh Dawsey, and Michael Birnbaum reported in the Washington Post on the details of that plan: he would accept Russian annexation of Ukraine’s Crimea and the Donbas region. He refuses to say how he would negotiate with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, who has been adamant that Ukraine will not give up its territory to an invader, or Russian president Vladimir Putin, who has claimed all of Ukraine, but after meeting with Trump last month, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán said Trump told him he would accomplish “peace” by cutting off funds to Ukraine.

Trump’s team said Orbán’s comment was false, but it is worth noting that this plan echoes the one acknowledged by Trump’s 2016 campaign director, Paul Manafort, as the goal of Russian aid to Trump’s campaign.

Fiona Hill told the Washington Post reporters that Trump’s team “is thinking…that this is just a Ukraine-Russia thing…rather than one about the whole future of European security and the world order.”

Trump’s MAGA loyalists in the House of Representatives have held up funding for Ukraine for six months. Although a national security supplemental bill that would fund Ukraine has passed the Senate and would pass the House if brought to the floor, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) refuses to bring it to the floor. The House returns to work tomorrow after a two-week recess but is so backed up on work that Johnson is not expected to bring up the Ukraine measure this week.  

Clint Watts, the head of Microsoft’s Threat Analysis Center, told the Washington Post’s Belton and Menn: “The impact of the Russian program over the last decade…is seen in the U.S. congressional debate over Ukraine aid…. They have had an impact in a strategic aggregate way.” 

The Trump loyalists, echoing Russia, who have taken control of the Republican Party, appear to be hardening into a phalanx around the former president. Still, even as they do so, Trump himself appears to be crumbling. 

In the week since Trump posted a $175 million appeals bond, halting the seizure of his properties to satisfy the $454 million judgment against him and the Trump Organization, multiple problems with that bond have come to light. It is possible the bond isn’t worth anything, and New York attorney general Letitia James has filed papers requiring Trump’s lawyers or the bond underwriter to show that it’s good within ten days. A hearing is set for April 22.

Meanwhile, Trump’s trial for election interference in 2016, when he paid people with damaging information to keep quiet before the election and falsified business records to hide those payments, is set to begin on April 15. Evidently very worried about this trial, Trump has already tried eight times to delay it until after November’s election, and today his lawyers tried yet again by requesting a delay so he could fight to get the trial moved to a different venue, but an appeals judge rejected the attempt.

Aside from Trump’s personal problems as a presidential candidate, the Republicans face strong headwinds because of their deeply unpopular opposition to abortion rights. Trump has openly bragged about being the instrument for ending the rights recognized in the United States since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Since then, abortion bans have galvanized opposition, and the Republicans are trying to find a message that can bring back angry voters without antagonizing the antiabortion white evangelicals who make up their base. 

After months of waffling on the issue, Trump released a video trying to thread that needle today by echoing the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. Trump said in the video that states will decide the issue for themselves, a statement that reflects the Dobbs decision. 

This was a dodge. In the video, Trump appealed to the antiabortion loyalists by telling the ghoulish lie that women are “executing” their babies even after birth. He also ignored that Republicans are already calling for a national ban, extremist antiabortion Texas judge Matthew Kacsmaryk has tried to take the common abortion drug mifepristone off the national market by challenging its FDA approval, and legislatures in many Republican-dominated states are refusing to implement the will of the people to protect abortion rights even after they have voted for such protections. 

Still, antiabortion leaders, including Mike Pence, immediately slammed Trump’s statement.

The video did, though, make an enormously interesting and unintended point: Trump is communicating with voters outside his carefully curated bubble almost exclusively through videos, even on a topic as important as abortion. At rallies, his speeches have become erratic and wandering, with occasional slurred words, and observers have wondered how he would present to more general audiences. It appears that his team has concluded that he will not present well and that general audiences must see him in carefully curated settings, like this apparently heavily edited video.

The Trump takeover of the Republican National Committee (RNC) also appears to be in trouble. This weekend, Trump claimed to have raised $50 million in a single night from billionaires, but that number is conveniently a little more than double the new record of what President Joe Biden raised at an event last week with former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It is long past time for everyone to stop believing anything Trump says about money. 

More to the point, The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell reported today that the RNC’s aggressive purge of the staff to guarantee that positions are held only by Trump loyalists means that “the RNC has been left without people with deep knowledge of election operations at the Republican party’s central committee.” Lowell notes this lack is especially apparent in the RNC’s data team, which is being moved from Washington, D.C., to Palm Beach, Florida, near Mar-a-Lago.

And yet Trump loyalists continue to block aid to Ukraine, threatening the existence of the rules-based international order that has helped to prevent war since World War II. Last week, even Trump’s former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, warned Speaker Johnson against “abandoning our Allies at this time of great need, when they are staring down enemies of the free world.”

Bennacht - John O'Donohue's lovely blessing

In earlier years, here in the pages of Reckonings, I offered this deeply moving blessing by the late John O'Donohue, an Irish poet, author, priest, and philosopher who lived from 1956 to 2008. He is best remembered as a student of Celtic spirituality, a tradition rich in meaning and worthy of lingering reflection. O'Donohue's books include Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom, Eternal Echoes, To Bless the Space Between Us, and Walking in Wonder.

See also the writing of John Philip Newell (https://www.earthandsoul.org), the preeminent living scholar of Celtic spirituality. I recommend his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul (2021).

Finally, I've greatly enjoyed reading about the early (5th century) Irish saints - Patrick, Brigid of Kildare, Columba, Brendan - whose lives are buried in history but reawakened in deeply informed and wonderfully engaging novels; for example, Frederick Buechner's Brendan (1987).

I wish I could include O'Donohue's own reading of "Bennacht" here. His Irish English is lovely to hear. He read the poem in a conversation with Krista Tippett in On Being: https://medium.com/@onbeing/beannacht-a-poem-8c2c29a4d14e. 

The only two (Gaelic) words readers may not know are the poem's title, which means blessing, and the word "currach" in mid-poem. A currach is an Irish boat used for sailing in the west of Ireland. The Oxford English Dictionary describes a currach as: "A small boat made of wickerwood and covered with hides [later, canvas], used from ancient times in Scotland and Ireland, and propelled with a paddle, a coracle."

 

With that brief introduction, here is John O'Donohue's "Bennacht."

 

 

 

 

 

Bennacht

by John O'Donohue

 

On the day when

The weight deadens

On your shoulders

And you stumble,

May the clay dance

To balance you.

 

And when your eyes

Freeze behind

The grey window

And the ghost of loss

Gets into you,

May a flock of colors,

Indigo, red, green

And azure blue,

Come to awaken in you

A meadow of delight.

 

When the canvas frays

In the currach of thought

And a stain of ocean

Blackens beneath you,

May there come across the waters

A path of yellow moonlight

To bring you safely home.

 

May the nourishment of the earth be yours,

May the clarity of light be yours,

May the fluency of the ocean be yours,

May the protection of the ancestors be yours,

 

And so may a slow

Wind work these words

Of love around you,

An invisible cloak

To mind your life.

 

 

 

 

 

E.B. White on turtles, in 1953 (The New Yorker)

We strolled up to Hunter College the other evening for a meeting of the New York Zoological Society. Saw movies of grizzly cubs, learned the four methods of locomotion of snakes, and were told that the Society has established a turtle blood bank. Medical men, it seems, are interested in turtle blood, because turtles don’t suffer from arteriosclerosis in old age. The doctors are wondering whether there is some special property of turtle blood that prevents the arteries from hardening. It could be, of course. But there is also the possibility that a turtle’s blood vessels stay in nice shape because of the way turtles conduct their lives. Turtles rarely pass up a chance to relax in the sun on a partly submerged log. No two turtles ever lunched together with the idea of promoting anything. No turtle ever went around complaining that there is no profit in book publishing except from the subsidiary rights. Turtles do not work day and night to perfect explosive devices that wipe out Pacific islands and eventually render turtles sterile. Turtles never use the word “implementation” or the phrases “hardcore” and “in the last analysis.” No turtle ever rang another turtle back on the phone. In the last analysis, a turtle, although lacking know-how, knows how to live. A turtle, by its admirable habits, gets to the hard core of life. That may be why its arteries are so soft. ♦

Readers wishing to know more about E.B. White could do no better than peruse an interview in The Paris Review in its Fall 1969 issue; and read, of course, his classic books for children, Stuart Little and Charlotte's Web. For readers with an ambition to improve their own writing, go first to his collaboration with William Strunk, Jr. on The Elements of Style. In its last chapter, White presented 21 "suggestions and cautionary hints" to help writers develop an effective style. For example, "Usage seems to us peculiarly a matter of ear. Everyone has his own prejudices, his own set of rules, his own list of horribles. The English language is always sticking a foot out to trip a man. Every week, we get thrown, writing merrily along; English usage is sometimes more than mere taste, judgment, and education — sometimes it's sheer luck, like getting across a street.

Here are brief concluding passages, drawn from Kate DiCamillo's foreword to Charlotte's Web, and from one of White's closest colleagues and friends, James Thurber.

Kate DiCamillo quotes White as saying, "All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world." White also loved animals, farms and farming implements, seasons, and weather formats.

James Thurber described White as a quiet man who disliked publicity and who, during his time at The New Yorker, would slip out of his office via the fire escape to a nearby branch of Schrafft's to avoid visitors he didn't know:

Most of us, out of a politeness made up of faint curiosity and profound resignation, go out to meet the smiling stranger with a gesture of surrender and a fixed grin, but White has always taken to the fire escape. He has avoided the Man in the Reception Room as he has avoided the interviewer, the photographer, the microphone, the rostrum, the literary tea, and the Stork Club. His life is his own. He is the only writer of prominence I know of who could walk through the Algonquin lobby or between the tables at Jack and Charlie's and be recognized only by his friends.

— James Thurber, E.B.W., "Credos and Curios"

 

It's Earth Day, and the News Isn't Good

New reports show that ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are melting faster than anticipated, and other disasters loom.

Elizabeth Kolbert

The New Yorker

April 22, 2023

Over the past three decades, Greenland's ice loss rate has increased sevenfold. Photograph by Kerem Yücel / AFP / Getty

 

The Greenland ice sheet is, quite literally, a relic of the last ice age. It consists of snow that fell year after year, century after century, and never melted; at the bottom, some flakes fell more than a hundred thousand years ago. The ice sheet is so enormous—at its center, it's more than ten thousand feet tall—that it creates its weather, which is one of the reasons it survives and also one of the reasons it's so vulnerable. As the world warms, the ice sheet is shrinking; as it shrinks, it's losing elevation. At lower elevations, the air is warmer, so it shrinks more, and the cycle continues.

Just in time for Earth Day, a team of scientists funded by NASA and the European Space Agency has released the results of what might be thought of as the ice sheet's latest checkup. The patient is not well. Over the past three decades, the researchers found, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has increased sevenfold. In one hot year—2019—Greenland shed four hundred and forty-four billion tons of ice; these tons contained enough water to flood the entire state of California to a depth of three feet. The researchers found that the melt from the West Antarctic Ice Sheet has been accelerating; since the early nineteen-nineties, the rate of ice loss from West Antarctica has more than doubled. The new figures "are pretty disastrous, really," one of the scientists, Ruth Mottram of the Danish Meteorological Institute, told the Associated Press.

The latest study, published in the journal Earth System Science Data, follows close on the heels of another study forecasting catastrophe, which appeared last month in Nature. A team of Australian and American scientists calculated that ice melts off Antarctica could dramatically alter ocean circulation over the next few decades, with knock-on effects that would affect everything from sea levels and marine habitats to weather patterns over land. Matthew England, a co-author of the Nature study and an oceanographer at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, said that the team was startled by its conclusions. "It's way faster than we thought these circulations could slow down," he told the Guardian. Bill McKibben summarized the study's findings as: "The South Pole to Planet Earth: Drop Dead."

I could go on here—global sea-surface temperatures recently hit a record high; a study released earlier this month reported that sea levels along the southeast coast of the United States have been rising at the astonishing rate of half an inch a year—but I won't, since I'm sure that you get the picture. The world is on track for disasters on a scale that humans have never before experienced. Scientists keep warning us to get off this track, yet we seem unwilling—or at least reluctant—to do so. "Greenhouse gases continued to increase rapidly in 2022," the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced earlier this month.

The original Earth Day, in 1970, was an exuberant, urgent, and bipartisan event. Some twenty million Americans participated—roughly ten percent of the country's population. Representative Pete McCloskey, a California Republican, helped organize the day; Senator Bob Packwood, Republican of Oregon, spoke at American University; and Senator Charles H. Percy, Republican of Illinois, spoke in Chicago. "Considering the immense problem we are faced with, we have to come up with some new, bold, different ideas," Percy said. By the end of that year, the Republican President, Richard Nixon, had created the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Air Act. Two years later, with overwhelming support from both parties, Congress passed the Clean Water Act.

 

Since then, Earth Day has devolved into a rote (and often ill-attended) exercise; the G.O.P. has become the party of “let them eat oil,” and, in Congress, one piece of environmental legislation after another has died in committee. (The Inflation Reduction Act, approved last summer, was an important exception to this trend; it passed without a single Republican vote, and this week House Republicans introduced a bill that would roll much of it back.) Seeing how a political system as distracted and divided as ours can deal with a problem as immense and complicated as climate change is difficult, but, one way or another, it will have to. Rising sea levels will compel some coastal communities—possibly even entire cities—to relocate. Changing weather patterns will force state and local governments to invest in costly new infrastructure. Drought will remake American agriculture. Just last week, in an effort to prevent the country’s two largest reservoirs—Lake Mead and Lake Powell—from shrinking so much that they become useless, the Biden Administration released a plan that could cut water deliveries to Arizona, California, and Nevada by six hundred and fifty billion gallons a year.

At a certain point, lurching from crisis to crisis, Americans will wish they had heeded all those scientific warnings and taken action sooner. There is still, perhaps, a chance to avoid melting most of the Greenland ice sheet and shutting down major ocean currents. But only if Americans of both parties—and, indeed, people around the globe—heed the message of Earth Day. Considering the immense problem we are faced with, we truly have to come up with new, bold, different ideas. ♦

 

 

Chavruta

My son Joshua and I gather in a weekly chavruta. The word is Hebrew or Aramaic, and literally means fellowship or group of fellows, and is a traditional rabbinic approach to Talmudic study in which a small group of students meets to analyze, discuss and debate a shared text. Joshua and I meet online, as he lives in New York State and I in northern California. Our chavruta is devoted each week to the work of one poet, and we've sometimes spent several weeks if our imagination is particularly taken by the work of a given poet, as it was most recently by the writing of Emily Dickinson. 

I wanted to speak here of our hour this morning. We had agreed to focus on the poetry of one of our favorites, Jane Hirshfield. We chose her work because Joshua had read, and proposed that we discuss together this morning, a wonderful interview of Hirshfield by Ezra Klein of The New York Times, on March 3, 2023. Klein is known as a skillful and insightful writer and podcaster, and this interview Klein entitled "The Poet Jane Hirshfield Invites Us to Embrace Habits of Deep Noticing and Attention⸺and Observe the Beauty that Unfolds."

Klein begins their discussion by introducing Hirshfield to his listeners: "She's the author of many collections of poetry, including her most recent "Ledger," which is probably the book of poetry I've gifted to others most often. She's also the author of two very beautiful books of essays on poetry and how it works and the poetic mind. And if you are intimidated by poetry, I really recommend these, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. 

I'll end this brief discussion with the first poem of Jane Hirshfield that Ezra Klein asked her to recite during the interview. It is a 2014 poem illustrative of Hirshfield's increasing attention in her work to the climate crisis.

 

Let Them Not Say

 

Let them not say:    We did not see it.

We saw.

 

Let them not say:     We did not hear it.

We heard.

 

Let them not say:     They did not taste it.

We ate. We trembled.

 

Let them not say:     It was not spoken, not written.

We spoke,

We witnessed with voices and hands.

 

Let them not say:     They did nothing.

We did not-enough.

 

Let them say, as they must say something:

 

A kerosene beauty.

It burned

 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,

read by its light, praised

and it burned.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Hotter Planet Takes Another Toll on Human Health, by Bill McKibben

A Hotter Planet Takes Another Toll on Human Health

A new hypothesis about heat waves, redlining, and kidney stones.

By Bill McKibben

January 19, 2023

The planet is getting steadily hotter, and large swaths of it are moving past the point at which it’s safe to do heavy outside labor in the middle of the day.Photograph by Dominique Berbain / Getty

Shortly after the New Year, the Washington Post ran a story with a headline that would have seemed inexplicable, even runic, to most readers just a few years ago: “The world’s torrid future is etched in the crippled kidneys of Nepali workers.” But we’re growing used to the idea that the climate crisis, in Naomi Klein’s phrase, “changes everything,” so why not the internal organs of Nepalis? Remarkable reporting by Gerry Shih tells a series of unbearably poignant tales: young Nepali men, struggling to earn a living in their impoverished homeland, head to the Gulf states to do construction work in the searing heat, some without access to sufficient water, some until they collapse. (Other reporting also shows that some Nepalis who work abroad resort to the black market for a transplant that might keep them—and the families that depend on the money they earn—alive.) The piece ends with a man coming back to the care of his sister, who donates her own kidney to save him. The costs of the medical procedures require that he sell his half-built house, and that he give up his life’s dream, which was to get married.

The Post was right: the world’s future is likely encapsulated in this story. The planet is getting steadily hotter, and large swaths of it are moving past the point at which it’s safe to do heavy outside labor in the middle of the day. A 2022 study estimated that six hundred and seventy-seven billion working hours a year were already being lost because it’s too hot to go outside and build things or farm. The researchers assessed the cost at more than two trillion dollars annually, but, of course, it could also be measured in other units—in vital organs, or dreams.

But it’s not just the future that’s illuminated by such studies; it’s the past as well. Unless you’ve been keeping up with your issues of Current Opinion in Nephrology and Hypertension, you may have missed a recent article titled “Redlining has led to increasing rates of nephrolithiasis in minoritized populations: a hypothesis.” I saw it only because one of the medical experts who wrote it—David Goldfarb, who runs the dialysis unit at New York’s V.A. hospital and teaches at New York University’s School of Medicine—is an old family friend. He forwarded it to me, and it fairly blew my mind.

“Nephrolithiasis” is the technical term for the development of kidney stones, those small formations that, as they pass, can cause excruciating pain. (I’ve never had them, but I know more than one man who has said he came away from the experience with a newfound appreciation for what his wife had undergone during labor.) Doctors have long known that higher temperatures lead to more sweat, which reduces urine volumes and thus increases “the saturation of the insoluble salts that cause kidney stones.” During heat waves in the U.S., it takes just three days before emergency-room visits for kidney stones begin to spike.

For reasons that remain unclear, kidney stones have traditionally been more common among white people, but, in recent years, doctors have noted huge increases among Black Americans and a significant rise in Latino communities. The authors of the new article looked to the past for a possible explanation—particularly to the nineteen-thirties, when a federal agency, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, graded all of America’s neighborhoods and deemed some of them “hazardous” for investment, essentially because they were home to large minority communities. This grading system (from A for “best” and B for “still desirable” to C for “declining” and D for “hazardous”) underlay what came to be known as redlining. The grading system led to “chronic disinvestment” in the lower-rated neighborhoods, resulting, over time, in less of everything from parks and green spaces to street trees and air-conditioning in homes.

Now the results can be measured with a thermometer: in Portland, Oregon, the authors report, neighborhoods that were graded A in the nineteen-thirties now “average 8 degrees Fahrenheit lower than the city’s mean temperature, while D-graded neighborhoods average 4.8 Fahrenheit degrees warmer.” Actually, you don’t need a thermometer—that’s a thirteen-degree gap that anyone can feel just by walking across town. No one has carefully studied the incidence of kidney stones among these different neighborhoods, but the authors, in their hypothesis, point to research now under way. Similar work on asthma, another heat-related disease, has shown emergency-room visits are 2.4 times higher in redlined tracts.

Indeed, Goldfarb’s son Ben—an environmental journalist who this year will publish a book called “Crossings,” on the environmental impact of roads—writes that the HOLC grading program produced all kinds of deleterious health effects. In Syracuse, Miami, Minneapolis, and other cities, large parts of neighborhoods that the agency had redlined—and whose residents were mostly Black—were bulldozed to make room for interstate highways. He told me, “Minorities today disproportionately live near the urban freeways that displaced them, and suffer as a result. Air pollution causes asthma and cancer; noise pollution increases the risk of heart disease and stroke; and the physical fragmentation wrought by highways shatters local economies. It’s heartbreaking, though hardly surprising, that disastrous policy decisions made decades ago continue to destroy bodies and communities today.”

It’s true that everyone is going to pay some price as the planet cooks. The authors of the nephrology study predict a likely additional cost to the U.S. health-care system of at least a billion dollars a year. But some people are going to be hit much harder than others because of history. Doing justice in the present requires taking that past seriously—understanding how we ended up where we are, and why we must put those with the least first, as we try to address the future. But we’re at a moment in this country when the idea of historical responsibility is increasingly seen not as logical and obvious but as some kind of invidious political correctness.

In April, 2022, Governor Ron DeSantis, of Florida, signed the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act, or the Stop WOKE Act. (In introducing the bill, he had said, “In Florida we are taking a stand against the state-sanctioned racism that is critical race theory,” adding that “we won’t allow Florida tax dollars to be spent teaching kids to hate our country or to hate each other.”) A preliminary injunction was issued against the act, which includes a dictum against any school teaching that “a person, by virtue of his or her race, color, sex, or national origin, bears personal responsibility for and must feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions, in which the person played no part, committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin, or sex.” But, even if you can silence teachers, legislation can’t muffle the effects of history. On a hot summer’s day in Jacksonville, Florida, where DeSantis was born, the temperature in A neighborhoods is 5.5 degrees below the mean, and it’s 4.4 degrees above the mean in the D-rated communities. ♦

The American Response to the Holocaust

Ken Burns Turns His Lens on the American Response to the Holocaust

Commemorating the Holocaust has become a central part of American culture, but the nation’s reaction in real time was another story.

By James McAuley

September 18, 2022

The New Yorker

When we begin “The U.S. and the Holocaust”—a six-and-a-half-hour, three-part documentary about America’s actions during one of history’s greatest atrocities, the Nazis’ attempted extermination of the Jews—we find ourselves in 1933 Frankfurt, where a bourgeois German-Jewish family is going out for an afternoon promenade. This is the Frank family, whose youngest daughter, Anne, has yet to begin the diary, chronicling her days in hiding until her capture and eventual death in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, that will one day make her a household name around the world. In 1933, all of that is still to come: the inhuman brutality of the Holocaust is still beyond the comprehension of well-to-do Jewish families like the Franks, and indeed of most everyone else. But now, after the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, in January of that year, it is clear that something in the air has shifted. The Franks knew they had to leave the country in which at least some of their ancestors had lived since the sixteenth century. By early 1934, the whole family had settled in Amsterdam, with plans to move to America—“only to find,” in the words of the film’s script, “like countless others fleeing Nazism, that most Americans did not want to let them in.”

“The U.S. and the Holocaust,” directed by Ken Burns and his longtime collaborators Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, is an examination of what Americans—politicians, journalists, and civilians—did and did not know about the Holocaust, and how they responded to it while it was happening and after it was over. Burns, now sixty-nine, is perhaps the most acclaimed American documentarian of his generation. He has used his work to investigate some of the most powerful symbols and totems of American life—in 1982, he won an Academy Award nomination, his first, for “Brooklyn Bridge;” in 1995, he won an Emmy for “Baseball.” Other topics since have included “The West” (1996), “Jazz” (2001), “The National Parks: America’s Best Idea” (2009) and “Muhammad Ali” (2021), as well as several other series about America’s wars—the Civil War, the Second World War, and Vietnam.

This latest project is both a departure from and a continuation of the Burns œuvre—a departure because he focuses, for the first time, on an atrocity that occurred far from the nation whose myths he regularly interrogates and advances; a continuation because he seeks to show that the Holocaust, too, forms part of a decidedly American history. If the film has a thesis, it is delivered in a line from an interview with the historian Peter Hayes: “exclusion of people, and shutting them out, has been as American as apple pie.” This new documentary lays bare how the United States government was mired by domestic politics during the war and how the American public was largely indifferent to the Holocaust at the time. It sets that indifference against a homegrown tradition of racism, tracing the xenophobia of the nineteen-twenties right up to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, in 2017, and the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. If Holocaust memory seems well established today, the film nevertheless arrives at a moment when the nature—and the future—of historical truth, about the Holocaust but also about everything else, is in acute jeopardy.

The documentary is an enormous undertaking, and it enters a crowded field of Holocaust-related documentaries, a genre since at least the mid-nineteen-fifties, with Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” which features footage of the abandoned camps of Auschwitz and Majdanek and whose script was written by the survivor Jean Cayrol. Burns, Novick, and Botstein are especially indebted to Claude Lanzmann’s monumental, nine-and-a-half-hour “Shoah,” released in 1985: their film recycles portions of Lanzmann’s famous interview with the Polish diplomat Jan Karski, who in 1943 met with Franklin Roosevelt in the White House and pressed the President to do what he could to save the Polish Jews—at least three million of whom the Nazis would murder by the end of the war. “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is not a typical Holocaust documentary per se, in the tradition of Lanzmann or even Marcel Ophüls, whose masterpiece “The Sorrow and the Pity” examined Nazi collaboration and resistance in and around a French city during the war; unlike the former, it offers no new meditation on how to treat survivor (and perpetrator) testimony, and unlike the latter, it has nothing new to say about the role of the filmmaker in constructing a trauma narrative. This is more of a useful public primer, a parallel story about a foreign power’s responses to events overseas, in which the actual catastrophe is referred to responsibly and respectfully but only whenever necessary.

In its first episode, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” begins with a long examination of America before the Holocaust, a country with its own tradition of anti-Semitism and anti-immigrant xenophobia as well as a perverse and all-consuming obsession with white supremacy, long after the abolition of slavery. Indeed, as the script reminds viewers, the fundamental racism at the heart of American life was a source of inspiration for Hitler, as he imagined a “pure” society devoid of Jews and other allegedly undesirable elements: following Hitler’s lead, Nazi advisers looked to the segregated reality of the Jim Crow South as a model worthy of emulation, as the professor James Q. Whitman, not interviewed in the film, has pointed out in “Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.”

Burns’s classic style—a blend of historical images and footage narrated by voice-overs, often from prominent actors, such as Paul Giamatti and Meryl Streep—carries us, in the second episode, right into the wartime policies of the U.S. government under Roosevelt. It is an indisputable fact that the U.S. took in more Jewish and other refugees than any other sovereign nation between 1933 and 1945, but many other Jewish refugees who sought to come were excluded because of immigration quotas enshrined by the infamous Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. The film portrays Roosevelt as both mindful of isolationist public opinion as well as committed to winning the war to stop fascism and the Nazi assault on democratic freedoms, which in his mind would also apparently be the surest way to save the Jews, among other objectives. As viewers might expect, the so-called Voyage of the Damned, the May 1939 voyage of the M.S. St. Louis—a ship that carried nine hundred and thirty-seven passengers, most of them Jewish refugees, from Hamburg to Havana, only to be turned away by Cuba (where only twenty-eight passengers were able to disembark) and then by the American port of Miami—is a major focal point in the film.

The film’s third installment follows the American perspective through the Final Solution, the Nazi decision to attempt a total extermination of the Jewish people, with particular attention to the reactions of American Jewish leaders, such as the October, 1943, rabbis’ march to Capitol Hill to plead for Presidential attention. The script goes back and forth between Europe and the United States, following the devastating stories of individual survivors and their families. One of them, the story of Shmiel Jäger, a Polish-Jewish meat merchant from the Polish town of Bolechów, is particularly illuminating.

Jäger is the great-uncle of the writer Daniel Mendelsohn, who previously explored his life in “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million,” a haunting and beautiful family history. Jäger’s story is a rare example of a Jewish refugee who actually made it to the United States long before the war, as early as 1912, only to return to Poland about a year later, disgusted by the squalor and the daily humiliations of the Lower East Side. Along with his wife and four daughters, Jäger was ultimately murdered in his home town nearly thirty years after his return. But his story—which is not the only example of reverse immigration—is a necessary complication to the myth of America as the goldene medina, a land of opportunity, justice, and equality. Of course, this country offered a refuge for many Jewish families, and American Jews like me tend to grow up with a certain optimistic image of our country. But was America really a paradise for Jews, or is paradise an illusion constructed in hindsight? As Mendelsohn put it to me, “I think stories like [Jäger’s] are useful because they disrupt the fantasy and historical narrative of the inevitability of America as a refuge where everyone was always going to end up.”

In a documentary of more than six hours that examines America’s response to the Holocaust, a crucial part of the story is still somehow missing: the postwar era, in which “the Holocaust”—specifically under that name, a name now rejected by some within the Jewish world for its implication both of Jewish passivity and of a divinely sanctioned sacrifice—became in many ways an American fixation. From the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann until the present day, what we have come to call “the Holocaust” has become a national frame of reference, a constant source of comparison, and even at times a Cold War morality play whose final act has yet to be written.

In “We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962,” the historian Hasia Diner, whose voice would also have been welcome in this documentary, dispels the pernicious idea that American Jews were somehow quiet or passive about the horrors of the Final Solution in the immediate aftermath of the war. But beyond the Jewish community, American public responses to the Holocaust coalesced into a narrative shaped by the sensibilities and the naïve self-image of an ascendant superpower. Look no further than the immensely popular miniseries “Holocaust,” which first aired in 1978, and whose depiction of two families in Germany, one Jewish and the other Christian, was the first time many Americans grappled with the Holocaust as a distinct narrative. Despite its public splash, many survivors attacked the show as kitsch. Reviewing the series for the New York Times, Elie Wiesel said that it “transforms an ontological event into soap-opera.” The question is why so many Americans were–and are–still attracted to this “soap-opera” rendition.

As with any historical atrocity, narratives about the Holocaust, its meaning, and its relevance are not handed down from on high; they are actively constructed. What we talk about when we talk about the Holocaust—or the Shoah, the Hebrew word for catastrophe or utter destruction, as the event is often referred to in countries such as Israel and France—differs wildly from nation to nation, and indeed the story that Americans now tell about one of history’s greatest crimes diverges significantly from the stories told in Israel, the former Soviet bloc, and Western Europe.

“There is no such thing as collective memory,” Susan Sontag observed in “Regarding the Pain of Others.” Rather, she argued, “what is called collective memory is not a remembering but a stipulating: that this is important, and this is the story about how it happened.” A missed opportunity of “The U.S. and the Holocaust” is examining the emergence of an extremely American stipulation. How, exactly, the Holocaust went from a nameless catastrophe that, as the film amply demonstrates, did not initially appear to sway the hearts of all that many Americans, into a trauma commemorated in a major museum just off the National Mall—years before America’s own historical crimes, such as the enslavement of African Americans, were ever similarly addressed—is an important story that would have greatly enriched this film.

In fact, the film coincides with an ongoing exhibition at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Americans and the Holocaust,” and was developed with the assistance of the museum’s historians (many of whom appear in it) and rich archives. But the museum itself, established by an act of Congress in 1980 and officially opened in April, 1993, in the midst of the Bosnian war and the Rwandan genocide, is an impressive institution whose story belongs in any broad look at American responses to the Holocaust. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, the museum was—and remains—the U.S. government’s official response. I can think of no better example of what has become of the American response to the Holocaust than the museum’s own dedication ceremony. Wiesel—also largely absent from this film, although few people were as influential in shaping a durable Holocaust memory in the United States—turned to President Bill Clinton as they were both sitting in the rain outside the new museum. “And, Mr. President, I cannot not tell you something,” Wiesel said. “I have been in the former Yugoslavia last fall. I cannot sleep since for what I have seen. . . . We must do something to stop the bloodshed in that country! People fight each other and children die. Why? Something, anything must be done.” In America, the Holocaust is now often seen as a “lesson.” It means “never again”—although both genocide and the menace of anti-Semitism have continued regardless.

In its last twenty minutes, the film returns to the story of Anne Frank, who serves as something of a leitmotif for the entire six-hour documentary: a young girl who might have come to America and been spared the brutal fate known to the millions of readers of her diary, one of the most iconic and well-known pieces of Holocaust literature. We follow the American publication of the diary, in 1952, and the prominent Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt, now the U.S. government’s official anti-Semitism envoy, walks the viewer through the ways in which the subsequent Broadway and Hollywood adaptations essentially tried to gloss over Anne’s story of Nazi violence and murder. “It’s not the story of the Holocaust, it’s not the story of the Shoah,” Lipstadt says, quite rightly. But the film might have gone deeper into Anne Frank’s American reception, especially given its interest in the true feelings of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt and the fact that, shortly after this segment, Eleanor Roosevelt’s reflections on visiting a displaced-persons’ camp in 1946 are read as a voice-over. “I have the feeling that we let our consciences realize too late the need of standing up against something that we knew was wrong,” the former First Lady observed in that instance. But it was also she who penned the introduction to Anne Frank’s diary for its American edition, a text that bears revisiting.

The destruction of the European Jews, in Eleanor Roosevelt’s telling, was not really about the Jews: it was a parable for right and wrong, a “teachable moment” about perseverance in the face of adversity—could there be anything more hopelessly and terminally American than that? As Roosevelt wrote, Anne’s diary was among “the wisest and most moving commentaries on war and its impact on human beings that I have ever read. . . . Despite the horror and humiliation of their daily lives, these people never gave up.” Anne, she concluded, “tells us much about ourselves and our own children.” Not once did Eleanor Roosevelt use the word “Jew”; the story of “these people” was not the point. By then, the Jewish catastrophe was everyone’s to claim, and the “lessons” of the Holocaust were already in the process of becoming a strangely American form of national self-help.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, a generation of survivor-historians, whose lives were forever altered by the unspeakable horrors they had endured and who are responsible for much of what we now know about the atrocity, tried to preserve the facts of the Holocaust from the tidal wave of self-serving narratives about it that they already saw coming. No one said it better than the writer Rachel Auerbach, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto who risked her life preserving evidence of Nazi persecution as a part of the Oneg Shabbat task force, and who later became the head of the testimonies department at Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem. “The mass murder, the murder of millions of Jews by the Germans, is a fact that speaks for itself,” she wrote. “It is very dangerous to add to this subject interpretations or analyses.” One wonders what Auerbach would have made of America, circa 2022.

“The U.S. and the Holocaust” takes a keen interest in the American political landscape of today, and it rightly sees chilling parallels between the rise of fascism and the Trump Administration’s assault on American democracy. These comparisons have been made in newspaper columns for the last five years, but they can never quite be made enough, especially those that speak to institutional fragility. All throughout, the film points out certain historical antecedents to the “great replacement” conspiracy theory and the decidedly anti-Semitic “America First” slogan, originally popularized by the likes of Charles Lindbergh, which has since become a rallying cry of the Trump movement.

But if contemporary America is of interest, there is an important institutional story to tell here as well, about the U.S. government’s ultimate embrace of Holocaust history beginning in the late nineteen-seventies, when a commission established by President Jimmy Carter proposed the creation of a national Holocaust museum. And also a strange story about a civil society in which a very particular tragedy became universalized and mass-marketed, leading people who may have little or no connection to Jewish life to feel entitled to make a Jewish catastrophe about themselves. Examining the evolution of that uniquely American obsession might have strengthened the film in its final installment. After all, America is stillresponding to the Holocaust, and often in troubling ways.

The persecution and mass murder of European Jews between 1933 and 1945 loom so large in our culture that even our own homegrown brownshirts now have the Holocaust on the tips of their tongues. In recent years, a sitting member of Congress, Marjorie Taylor Greene, has styled her enemies as “Nazis” and posted a video of a fake-looking President Biden with a Hitler mustache. Beyond the arena of electoral politics, a number of ordinary people wore yellow stars on their lapels to protest coronavirus-vaccine requirements. Given its interest in the contemporary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust” might have confronted, or at least acknowledged, these fixations and distortions. They, too, turn out to be as American as apple pie. ♦

 

What Planet Do I Live On?

What Planet Do I Live On?

A Little Bit of a Rant

 

Bill McKibben

The Crucial Years

September 16, 2022

Yesterday, Rep. Ro Khanna’s energy subcommittee of the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee released a tranche of documents from various Big Oil companies, designed in part to build support for a windfall profits tax on the huge sums that these firms have sucked in this year thanks to Vladimir Putin’s war. The documents show how mercenary and devious the companies have been, pretending to back climate action like the Paris climate accords, but in fact working to make sure they are a dead letter.

But I confess I got stuck on the very first document the committee released. I got stuck because it’s…about me, and who doesn’t, in their heart of hearts, love/hate reading what people think of you? 

From what one can decipher from the email chain, a woman named Virginia Northington, who once had worked for the great historian Douglas Brinkley, later joined something called the Brunswick Group which “helps companies navigate a complex array of societal challenges, as well as articulating a company’s ‘purpose,’” and whose “Climate Hub helps businesses respond to climate change.” There Ms. Northington went to work “advis[ing] American, British, and European clients on litigation and crisis mandates,” which in the spring of 2016 (i.e. right after the Paris climate accords) apparently meant clipping out opeds from me and forwarding them to a long list of BP executives. One of those executives, Robert Stout, now a vice-president for regulatory policy and advocacy, responded that the essays he’d passed around was a “must-read,” which is a nice thing to say but I don’t think he meant it that way. One of his employees, the director of communications and external affairs, responded in more heartfelt fashion. As Mr. Tom Wolf wrote to a long list of colleagues as follows:

I'm sorry, I live on earth so I don't get what planet this guy lives on. We all know his diatribe has many holes in it...but his biggest one is the infrastructure piece. Americans are fighting pipelines, but they are also fighting transmission lines that would bring wind energy and solar energy to market....they are fighting utility solar farms in the desert because it affects the desert turtle, they are fighting home solar that looks ugly.

Simply put, Americans have a Dire Straits mentality. They want their money for nothin' and their chicks for free.

For the record, as readers of this newsletter know, this is one issue where I’m not a hypocrite. I fight for solar even if someone thinks it looks ugly , and I’ve been doing it for a long time. And in fact my home has solar panels all over the top, and on a couple of poles in the yard—they’re not as pretty as the surrounding trees, except when you think about what they mean, which is that we can now get the energy we need from the sun instead of, say, ripping a hole in the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico which then leaks for six months in what was the largest oil spill ever. 

But it was Wolf’s language that really got me thinking. “I don’t get what planet this guy lives on,” he asks, and so let me answer.

I live on a different planet than the one I was born on. That one had plenty of ice at each pole, and lots of coral reefs in between. The great glaciers of the Alps and the Himalayas and the Andes were locked in icy grandeur; the seasons, in my home parts, stretched on as they had for millennia, ever since the retreat of the last Ice Age.

But now I live on a planet—I called it Eaarth once, in the title of a book—that looks somewhat like that old one, but is irrevocably changed. The first pictures we ever took of it, the ones that came back from the Apollo missions, are now hopelessly out of date: there’s a lot less white and a lot more blue up top because most of the sea ice in the summer Arctic is gone. The pH of the oceans on this new planet is different, and so is the chemical composition of the atmosphere: the air now holds much higher concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane, and as a result the temperature has gone well beyond what humans have ever experienced before. On this planet, people starve—right now, this year—because it doesn’t rain anymore where they live, and they go hungry because it rains more than it’s ever rained before. On this planet, the sea level has begun to climb, threatening to wipe out entire nations. On this planet, tens of millions of our brothers and sisters are already on the move, because they can no longer live in the places where they were born. 

It’s a deeply unjust planet, because the people who caused the temperature to rise are not usually the people who suffer the most from that rise. And it’s an arguably insane planet, because so many of the people who run it ignored for decades the clear warning of scientists that we faced a stiff but surmountable challenge. Worse than ignored—the leaders of the fossil fuel industry, at the time the biggest and richest industry on the planet, suppressed and denied the truth. Few were more disgusting about it than BP, which originally sought to rebrand itself as Beyond Petroleum (doubtless advised by someone like the Brunswick Group) and then decided that wasn’t making enough money so they dropped the idea and returned to just plain old Petroleum. It invested heavily in shale fracking, and in Alberta’s tar sands, literally the dirtiest possible oil. 

But it’s also a planet filled with remarkable people, who have rallied by their millions to stand up to people like Mr. Wolf, trying in the process to write a new future for this planet. While he’s sat around commenting sardonically on opeds, they’ve marched, gone to jail, and often won (when they beat the Keystone pipeline, they cost those tarsands investments real money). There are far more of us than there are of him; in a world where BP’s billions didn’t buy politicians, we’d have long since won these fights.

And we will win those battles, or at least keep trying. Because we live on a planet that, though degraded by the greed of Big Oil, still has such heart-searing beauty. It’s a world where creeks still tumble down mountainsides, where trees still spread their branches to make shade in the heat, where hummingbirds and anteaters remind us of the whimsy of evolution, where people love and protect each other, family and strangers both. It’s a good world still, and worth defending. Complex, buzzing, cruel, mysterious, sexy, alive. For a while yet anyway, no thanks to BP.

Oh, and Dire Straits? I mean, come on. Just because you flak for an oil company doesn’t mean you can’t find someone with a bit more groove to frame your social commentary. Let me nominate Mr. Marvin Gaye, who might have been thinking of BP when he wrote lyrics considerably more immortal than anything from the Knopfler brothers.

Ah, things ain't what they used to be 
Where did all the blue skies go?
Poison is the wind that blows
From the north and south and east

End of rant. I’m glad they read what I write, and I’m glad they pass it around, and I’m glad that it scares them and makes them sad. I’ll keep at it. 

In other climate and energy news this week:

+A landmark new report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis looks at carbon capture projects around the world and finds they…don’t work. Instead:

• Failed/underperforming projects considerably outnumbered successful experiences.
• Captured carbon has mostly been used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR): enhancing oil production is not a climate solution.
• Using carbon capture as a green light to extend the life of fossil fuel power plants is a significant financial and technical risk: history confirms this.

+David Wallace-Wells is really using his new platform at The New York Times to advance critical parts of the climate story, and this week’s coverage of China is no exception:

China also seems to occupy a confusing place in the landscape of climate geopolitics because that landscape has shifted lately as well. Ten years ago, or even five, climate diplomacy often meant rhetorical appeals to global cooperation mixed with realpolitik efforts to move more slowly than your rivals. Today, decarbonization is still happening much too slowly, but fast enough to move the diplomatic dynamics away from a rivalry of inaction toward an apparent rivalry of action. Climate investment is booming in the United States, and with the CHIPS act and the I.R.A. climate bill now passed into law, the country has affirmatively joined what Politico recently called a new “green-energy arms race.”

+A group of blue-state treasurers has against efforts by their fossil-fueled counterparts to limit environmentally responsible investing:

The blacklisting states apparently believe, despite ample evidence and scientific consensus to the contrary, that poor working conditions, unfair compensation, discrimination and harassment, and even poor governance practices do not represent material threats to the companies in which they invest. They refuse to acknowledge, in the face of sweltering heat, floods, tornadoes, snowstorms and other extreme weather, that climate change is real and is a true business threat to all of us.

We disagree.

Disclosure, transparency, and accountability make companies more resilient by sharpening how they manage, ensuring that they are appropriately planning for the future. Our work, alongside those of other investors, employees, and customers have caused many companies to evolve their business models and their internal processes, better addressing the long term material risks that threaten their performance.

+Yvon Chouinard is an awfully good guy. Thanks!

+It was the hottest summer on record for Europe and for China. Thanks BP! Thanks Brunswick Group!

On the Outside Looking In

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/on-the-outside-looking-in?r=6x70p&s=r&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email

How Bad Is It?

How Bad Is It?

 

by Bill McKibben

September 8, 2022

 

I got a phone call last night, from a person I admire as much as anyone I know; she’s spent her life working, with great effectiveness, for a wide variety of progressive causes. I turn to her for guidance on dozens of questions. But last night she was turning to me, and with a simple, despairing question: “is it just all over for the climate?” 

She’d been reading stories from the past week about the truly horrific flooding in Pakistan (watch this video, please—it’s the single best depiction I’ve seen of what the crisis feels like, and though it’s on CNN, the most mainstream of media, it does not shy away for a second from talking about the blame that falls on the global north for the climate crisis, and the need for reparations), and about the giant Thwaites glacier in the Antarctic retreating twice as fast as scientists had thought, and about a new study showing that even if we stopped emitting carbon now melting ice on Greenland would produce almost a foot of sea level rise. 

I heard from one of the co-authors of that study, Jason Box, a few days later. He sent me photos of a spot where we’d camped on the Greenland ice sheet a few years ago; he’d been back there over the weekend, he said, when his team had to decamp fast because an unprecedented melt was underway. September 1 is supposed to mark the end of the melt season on Greenland, but all of a sudden temperatures were soaring—above freezing even at the very summit of the ice sheet, which is almost always safely below zero. “While rushing down the ice sheet, we felt surprisingly warm pulses of air on our faces, like the Chinook winds I remember from Colorado,” he wrote. As a result of the anomalous warm weather, the Washington Post reported, As a result, “tens of billions of tons of ice were lost — an event that could further Greenland’s already significant contributions to rising sea levels.” As another researcher explained, “Greenland’s ice margin can’t tolerate the conditions that are becoming increasingly common for it. This event is typical of those destabilizing conditions.”

So. There’s an ongoing, sometimes acrid, debate in climate circles about ‘doomism’ versus ‘hopium,’ which I have no desire to join. (As usual, count me with Rebecca Solnit, who spends her time highlighting the fights we are winning: that seems to me entirely useful, because it motivates). I've been fighting this battle for so many years now that sometimes the largest-scale questions don’t even occur to me; but they occur to others, obviously, and they deserve answers. Given events like those of the past few weeks (I haven’t even mentioned what may be the most prolonged heatwave in human history that hit China this summer, nor the current raging heat in the American west) it is a fair question to ask: are we reaching the point where events are so far out of control that our efforts to stem the tide are pointless? 

So let me just lay out my own sense, in case it’s helpful to anyone else

1. We are not getting out of this crisis unscathed, or anything like it. It’s been many years since “stopping global warming” was on the menu. We’ve raised the temperature a degree celsius already, and that’s way too much because—well, see above. A degree is a mess
2. It will get worse. Even if we do everything right at this point, there’s enough momentum in the system to take us near two degrees; that’s going to be far far worse. Not just twice as bad—damage increases exponentially, not linearly, as we head past various tipping points.
3. If we don’t do everything right, that “near to two degrees” will actually be nearer three degrees Celsius, which is five or six degrees Fahrenheit, which is a world where civilizations won’t be able to function in the ways we’re used to them functioning. That civilizational breakdown—a political and human phenomenon, not a scientific one—could come sooner; we don’t know where the civilizational red lines are, only that we’re close. 
4. Which means: despair is not an option yet, at least if it’s that kind of despair that leads to inaction. But desperationis an option—indeed, it’s required. We have to move hard and fast.
5. The most obvious place we have to move is the energy transition. Physics means we have to go fast; economics means going fast will focus for now on sun, wind, and batteries because they are cheap and available. The fossil fuel industry, desperate to maintain its business model, is in the way; they must be fought.
6. But we also have to shore up civilizations in all the other ways we can imagine, especially by sharing resources and technologies. Our systems are too brittle now; places like Pakistan just lack the resilience to deal with a crisis they did not create. Global solidarity is not kindness; on a small world it’s a survival strategy. 

I did not tell my friend: drop everything else you’re doing and work only on climate. But I did tell her: all our other dramas now play out on the stage of climate change. For the forseeable future—for as long as our lives last—the rapid rise of the temperature on the planet of our origin is the overriding human story.

In other climate and energy news:

+Today’s the day: big demonstration in DC trying to stop the dirty side deal that Joe Manchin is trying to extort from Congress. He wants a pipeline for his buddies; there’s no reason to give it to him. Livestream here; follow @powhr_coalition and @ThirdActVa on Twitter as the day progresses. At the American Prospect, David Dayen is optimistic we can win this fight. Oh, and that pipeline Manchin wants to build? The pipe has been sitting out in the weather for years now, corroding. If you want more background, including on the reasons that blue state residents actually have some power in this fight for once, here’s an interview I did yesterday with the remarkable Jim Braude and Margery Eagan on that effervescent radio show, Boston Public.

+You know that thing Herschel Walker said about trees? Bay area arborist (and superb activist) Joe Lamb provides a mighty riposte from a few branches up. 

+Too often the media has turned AOC into a caricature, but this profile from GQ reminds us once again that she’s a remarkably supple political thinker. 

“This generational tension has existed among virtually every single social movement in American history, in labor, in suffrage, in civil rights, in marriage equality,” the congresswoman said. “And it is a tension between history and the present moment. It’s a tension between inside and outside. It’s a tension between what we can learn and what we don’t know. Any sort of criticism of the Democratic Party is immediately cast as helping the right or ‘You’re disrespectful’ or ‘Don’t you know everything that these people have done?’ And we do, but we are also allowed to learn from the outcomes of those victories and the unique dynamics of the present moment, to also say that we have to change tack and we can’t just do the same thing for 30 years.

+Who’d a thunk it? The electric utility industry gleefully joined their fossil fuel brethren in the devastating climate denial campaigns, as this new study makes painfully clear. 

Before 1980, electric utilities' messaging was generally in line with the scientific understanding of climate change. However, from 1990 to 2000, utility organizations founded and funded front groups that promoted climate doubt and denial. After 2000, these front groups were largely shut down, and utility organizations shifted to arguing for delayed action on climate change, by highlighting the responsibility of other sectors and promoting actions other than cleaning up the electricity system.

+Excellent news: The batteries in electric cars are lasting far longer than predicted (or warrantied). Most outlive the cars they’re in, with plenty of life left to be used as backup storage in big solar arrays. “At the end of the vehicle’s life—15 or 20 years down the road—you take the battery out of the car, and it’s still healthy, with perhaps 60 or 70% of usable charge,” one expert explained.

+Americans are continuing to move to the hottest, driest places. This will make the inevitable counter-migration all the more intense when it comes. 

+From Hannah Laga Abram, a great account of an under-appreciated aspect of the climate crisis: what happens when heavy rains fall on land scarred by fresh forest fires? (Floods and slides, since there’s nothing to hold the water back)

The last two months forced brothers Zack and Marck Romero to become professional weathermen. 

From the moment the rain starts falling in the mountains — and it's fallen almost daily — they know it will take the flood between 45 and 48 minutes to reach their creekside land in this small town near Las Vegas.

First, they hear a roaring. Then, for two to three hours, their driveway transforms into a churn of dark water and tangled debris. No one can get in or out. When the water level drops enough, the brothers attach a chain with a tire on the end to their tractor and drag it through the creek bed to clear out the culvert in preparation for the next day’s deluge.

+Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, has a very-worth-the-read column in the Financial Times on the planet’s current energy woes post Putin’s invasion. Money graf:

I talk to energy policymakers all the time and none of them complains about relying too much on clean energy. On the contrary, they wish they had more. They regret not moving faster to build solar and wind plants, to improve the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, or to extend the lifetime of nuclear plants. More low-carbon energy would have helped ease the crisis — and a faster transition from fossil fuels towards clean energy represents the best way out of it.

+Odd Canadian philosopher (and hugely influential social media presence) Jordan Peterson turns out to be a climate denier too. Why is this always a part of the package?

+To understand how we got so deep into the climate crisis without acting, it’s worthwhile understanding just how dysfunctional the economics profession was in the early days of the fight. A great account in the New York Times points out that the most widely used model from the beginning was drawing criticism for underestimating the havoc that climate change would wreak. Like other models, it has been revised several times, but it still relies on broad assumptions and places less value on harm to future generations than it places on harm to those today. It also doesn’t fully incorporate the risk of less likely but substantially worse trajectories of warming. 

+Farmers are getting much better at working around solar panels.

+Abrahm Lustgarten at Pro Publica interviews Jay Famiglietti, the executive director of the Global Institute for Water Security, about water in the west. He’s not hopeful.

I don’t think we’re talking about sustainability. I think we’re talking about managed depletion. Because it’s impossible to keep growing the food that we grow in California. It’s agriculture that uses most of the groundwater. The math just isn’t there to have sustainable groundwater management. If you think of sustainability as input equals output — don’t withdraw more than is being replenished on an annual basis — that’s impossible in most of California.

 

The Man Who Found His Inner Depths

The Man Who Found His Inner Depths

August 18, 2022

By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

New York Times

One morning in the fall of 1936, 10-year-old Frederick Buechner and his younger brother were playing in their room. Their father opened the door, checked on them, and then went down into the family garage, turned on the engine of the car and waited for the exhaust to kill him.

Buechner and his brother heard a commotion, looked out the window and saw their father on his back in the driveway. Their mother and grandmother, in their nightgowns, had dragged him out of the garage and were pumping his legs up and down in a doomed attempt to revive him.

There would be no funeral, or discussion of what happened. Their mother just moved the boys to Bermuda to escape. The rules in that family were, “Don’t talk, don’t trust, don’t feel.” They became masters at covering themselves over.

Many decades later, after his mother had died, Buechner wrote of her: “The sadness of other people’s lives, even the people she loved, never seemed to touch her where she lived. I don’t know why. It wasn’t that she had a hard heart, I think — in many ways she was warm, sympathetic, generous — but that she had a heart that for one reason or another she kept permanently closed to other people’s suffering, as well as to the darkest corners of her own.”

Buechner went the other way. He realized that the problem with steeling yourself against pain is that you simultaneously close yourself off from being transformed by the power of life itself.

 

Buechner, who died this week at 96, became a master of uncovering his inner depths. The titles of his books speak to the mission he set for himself: The Sacred Journey, The Longing for Home, Telling Secrets, The Eyes of the Heart.

His books are understated, not narcissistic. By and large, they don’t make arguments. Buechner’s books tell stories, let you experience another person’s experience, let you get involved with the deep parts of one person’s life to see where it rhymes with and differs from your own.

He modeled how a person can experience life more fully, which is a process of scraping off some of the ways adulthood teaches us to see. As Philip Yancey wrote, Buechner “tries to reawaken the child in people: the one who naïvely trusts, who will at least go and look for the magic place, who is not ashamed of not knowing the answers because he is not expected to know the answers.”

In one of his frequently quoted passages, Buechner wrote: “Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery that it is. In the boredom and the pain of it no less than the excitement and the gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.”

His first novel was a great success. After his second, he came to faith. He was attending a church service in New York where the pastor was talking about how Jesus is crowned amid confession, tears and great laughter. “At the phrase great laughter, for reasons that I have never satisfactorily understood, the great wall of China crumbled and Atlantis rose up out of the sea, and on Madison Avenue, at 73rd Street, tears leapt from my eyes as though I had been struck across the face.”

He spent the rest of his life as a border-stalker, too literary for many Christians and too Christian for the literary set. His faith was personal, unpretentious and accessible. “Faith is homesickness. Faith is a lump in the throat. Faith is less a position on than a movement toward.” It is sensing a presence, not buying an argument.

He described the Gospel as a great fairy tale that happens to be true. The fairy tale has pain and danger, goodness is pitted against evil, people are transformed, and in the end all the characters are revealed for who they really are. To live within this fairy tale is to experience the “joy and beauty and holiness beyond the walls of the world.”

Christians, he wrote in one novel, should get up every morning, read The Times and ask themselves, “Can I believe it all again today?” If you say Yes 10 days out of 10, he wrote, then you probably don’t know what believing means. But on the days you can say Yes, “it should be a Yes that’s choked with confession and tears and … great laughter.”

One of Buechner’s often cited observations is that you find your vocation at the spot where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need. Perhaps like many others, I struggle to experience my inner life in the quiet, patient, deep and old-fashioned way that Buechner experienced his. So much of the world covers over all that — constant media consumption, shallow communication, speed and productivity. Sometimes I think the national obsession with politics has become a way to evade ourselves.

Buechner’s vocation was to show a way to experience the fullness of life. Of death, he wrote, “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Democrats Finally Deliver

 

The Senate’s passage of a sweeping, if imperfect, climate-change-and-health-care bill is a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking.

John Cassidy
The New Yorker
August 8, 2022

When Joe Biden departs on Wednesday for a vacation on Kiawah Island, South Carolina, he will have reasons to be cheerful. Last Friday, the Labor Department reported that employers created more than half a million jobs in July, confirming that Biden was right when he said the economy isn’t in recession. The House of Representative looks set to pass the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 later this week; Senate Democrats voted the legislation through over the weekend, and it includes parts of the President’s Build Back Better policy agenda.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about the new legislation, which provides extensive tax breaks for clean energy and authorizes Medicare to negotiate the prices of certain prescription drugs, is that it survived at all. Just a month ago, when Senator Joe Manchin told Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, that he wouldn’t support the bill, it seemed dead. Thanks to Manchin’s change of mind and Schumer’s cat-herding, the bill was resurrected and rushed through the Senate before the summer recess, a feat that prompted at least one Democratic senator—Brian Schatz, of Hawaii—to shed tears.

Going into the midterms, Biden and the Democrats will also be able to tout other legislative accomplishments. In June, Congress passed the first gun-control bill in thirty years, which tightened background checks for young buyers and provided incentives for states to expand “red flag” laws that allow the authorities, with the approval of a judge, to disarm dangerous individuals. In the past couple of weeks, two more bills have been passed. The CHIPS Act provides more than fifty billion dollars to encourage the manufacture of semiconductor chips in the United States. A new veterans’ bill creates an entitlement program for veterans who may have been exposed to toxic waste from fires on military bases known as “burn pits.”

Taken together, these pieces of legislation should put to bed the notion that Biden and the Democrats can’t get anything done, and they also demonstrate that his election pledge to pursue bipartisan initiatives wasn’t an empty one. Despite the hyper-partisanship in Washington, three of the four bills gained some Republican support. And Senate Democrats, after months of disarray, held together and passed the Inflation Reduction Act on a party-line vote of fifty-one to fifty using the reconciliation process. “I was one of the folks who was first in supporting now President Biden when he was candidate Biden and I think he’s done good things for our country,” the Delaware Senator Chris Coons told ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. “I think he’s got a strong record of accomplishments to run on.”

The Inflation Reduction Act—so-named to placate Manchin—contains the biggest effort to tackle climate change that the U.S. government has taken. Right now, thanks largely to the retirement of coal-fired electricity plants, the country is on track to reduce its carbon emissions by about thirty per cent by 2030, compared to 2005. By providing about $370 billion in tax credits over ten years for solar and wind producers, as well as for the purchase of electric vehicles, the new bill will increase the emissions reduction to about forty per cent, according to several expert analyses.

Although hitting that figure would fall short of the White House’s initial target of a carbon reduction of fifty per cent, it would represent a historic move in the right direction. In addition, the bill should boost employment in the clean-energy and clean-manufacturing sectors, which are already attracting significant private investment. How big a boost? A study, from the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, says that the new legislation bill would create more than nine million jobs in this sector over the next ten years.

Another important element of the bill is that it would empower Medicare to use its heft to negotiate lower prescription-drug prices. Other public health-care systems, such as the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, have long haggled over the prices that they pay pharmaceutical companies. In this country, the Big Pharma lobby has managed to maintain a system in which drug companies can largely dictate their own prices. At last, Congress has challenged this cozy arrangement, albeit in a modest way. The new legislation would cover ten drugs starting in 2026. As critics have pointed out, that’s not very many. But it seems likely that this number will expand once the general principle is accepted.

The legislation also places an annual cap on prescription-drug outlays for people covered by Medicare. In this way and others, it reflects some long-standing progressive priorities. “The best that can be said of the bill is that it represents a significant reorientation of policy in a number of areas,” Felicia Wong, the president of the liberal Roosevelt Institute, told me. “It starts things in the direction we need to be going.” As additional examples, Wong cited the eighty-billion-dollar boost to the I.R.S. budget, which is designed to enable the agency to go after wealthy tax dodgers more effectively; and the taxing of stock buybacks, which is intended to incentivize corporations to invest in capital equipment and research rather than boosting their stock prices.

Wong also emphasized that the new spending bill doesn’t go far enough—a point that is indisputable. For all the worthwhile things it contains, many others got left out of Biden’s original agenda. A short list incudes the enhanced child income-tax credit, which dramatically reduced child poverty before being phased out last year; paid leave; guaranteed pre-school for four-year-olds and expanded child care; a reversal of the high-income tax cuts in Trump’s 2017 tax bill; and an end to the carried-interest loophole for private equity and hedge funds, which represents another indefensible blemish on the tax code.

The common theme is that efforts to tackle pressing social problems and rising inequality got left out. Unlike private-equity tycoons, poor and working-class families don’t have the entire Republican Party, platoons of highly-paid lobbyists, and a certain Democratic senator from Arizona looking out for their interests. Unlike green-energy producers and manufacturers of electric vehicles, they aren’t making hefty investments that need tax breaks to succeed in shifting the economy away from fossil fuels. As often before, their needs will have to wait.

That’s more an endemic failing of the American political system, and a fifty-fifty Senate, than of this particular piece of legislation. In making a serious commitment to green energy, the enactment of the bill would be a landmark moment in U.S. policymaking. In demonstrating that this generation of Democrats can pass major legislation unaided, it would upend the previous narrative of a faltering Biden Administration. Relative to where things stood a couple of months ago, the change seems momentous. ♦

Congress looks set to finally pass historic climate legislation

August 8, 2022 issue of The New Yorker:

Congress Looks Set to Finally Pass Historic  

Climate Legislation

 

The bill, now supported by Joe Manchin, reflects the growing strength of the environmental movement, but also the lingering influence of the fossil-fuel industry.

 

By Bill McKibben

July 31, 2022

The longest-maintained temperature readings of any location on earth are in the Midlands of England. A monthly tally began in 1659, and the daily record dates back to 1772. One can imagine mutton-chopped clerics and ruddy-faced retired colonels, in the centuries since, tromping out to take those readings; some days it was hot and some days it was cold, but, until last month, the highest daily mean ever measured there was 25.2 degrees Celsius, or about 77.4 degrees Fahrenheit, in August of 2020. Then, on July 19th, as an epic heat wave swept across the British Isles, the mark was reset at 28.1 Celsius, or 82.6 Fahrenheit. If that hadn’t happened, topping the previous high by a full 5.2 degrees Fahrenheit would have seemed statistically impossible. The fact that it did happen is frightening—a sign of a world coming unstuck.

But, more happily, a different sort of record fell last week—the thirty-four-year stretch that saw no major legislative action on the climate in the U.S. Congress. It began in 1988, when the NASA scientist James Hansen informed the Senate of what was then called the “greenhouse effect,” and it appears to have come to a close last Wednesday, when Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, finally agreed to President Joe Biden’s big budget reconciliation package. The bill contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits and grants for the transition to solar and wind power, electric vehicles, efficient home heating, and more. The package—the remains of what started out as the Green New Deal, before slimming down to Build Back Better, and, now, the Inflation Reduction Act—looked dead last month, when Manchin flatly rejected parts of it, including the climate protections.

The pushback was severe, however—among other things, the President suggested that he might declare a “climate emergency” and enact what measures he could by himself. Now, assuming that the Democrats stand together, as early as next week we could see an end to that long legislative drought. The bill penalizes oil and gas companies that fail to cut methane emissions, but it doesn’t actually pressure energy utilities to abandon coal and gas. (Manchin vetoed that provision, the Clean Electricity Performance Program, last year.) Still, analysts say that it would cut emissions to forty percent below 2005 levels by the end of the decade.

Taken as a whole, the bill is a triumph. It would be the most ambitious climate package ever passed in the U.S., and would allow the country to resume a credible role as an environmental leader.

Yet it reflects not just the growing strength of the climate movement but also the lingering power of the fossil-fuel industry, containing provisions such as one stating that, for the next decade, no offshore wind lease can be sold unless an offshore oil and gas lease of a certain size has been sold during the previous year. The political trade-off is worth it, in carbon terms, but there’s no denying that it will set a problematic example around the world.

Last week, the Democratic Republic of the Congo announced that it hopes to become “the new destination for oil investments,” and scheduled an auction of oil and gas leases in its vast rain forest, including parts of the biologically diverse Virunga National Park, a sanctuary for endangered mountain gorillas. The government also aims to allow drilling in the nation’s extensive peatlands, which are an effective storehouse for carbon; in fact, they hold as much carbon as the entire world emits in three years.

Opening the region up to drilling wouldn’t just add fuel to the fire—it would shut off a hose that fights the flames. Still, in addition to doing whatever is possible to dissuade the D.R.C. from allowing that, it’s worth viewing the announcement as a trolling of other nations, such as this one, that continue to think they have a right to expand fossil-fuel production. Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Congo’s longtime climate representative, has been at every big global climate meeting since 2007, so he no doubt knew exactly how much controversy he’d unleash when he told a reporter from the Times last week that his country’s priority is to generate revenue to fight poverty—“not to save the planet.”

It seems likely that the D.R.C.’s goal may be to sweeten a multiyear agreement that it entered into last November, at the Glasgow climate conference, to protect the rain forest, in return for five hundred million dollars in international investments. (The oil beneath the forest is doubtless worth far more.) If so, the gambit is a powerful one, because few countries have the moral standing to tell Congo off. In April, for instance, Canada announced plans to allow drilling in a basin off the coast of Newfoundland and Labrador that could access three hundred million barrels of oil. The Biden Administration itself last month signaled support for the Trump-era Willow project, on Alaska’s North Slope, which could produce six hundred million barrels of oil. As scientists pointed out in a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland, the project would be a “carbon bomb” of enormous proportion.

What’s the difference between the D.R.C. and the United States or Canada? For one thing, the gross domestic product per capita in the D.R.C. is less than six hundred dollars, versus sixty-nine thousand dollars in the U.S., and fifty-two thousand in Canada. For another, the average resident of the U.S. emits some fifteen metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, while the average Congolese emits about 0.03 metric tons. In other words, the average American is responsible for about five hundred times more climate damage than the average Congolese is.

The right response, then, is to provide the climate aid that the Global North has long promised to the Global South but has not delivered in full. In the case of Congo, that means helping develop, as safely and benignly as possible, the mining of cobalt, which is used in batteries that are crucial to clean-energy technology. But we must also prevent new fossil-fuel boondoggles of our own. It’s possible that the reconciliation package has exhausted Washington’s energy to tackle the climate crisis for the time being, but politicians aren’t the only players. When the Trump Administration rushed to auction off parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, no major oil companies submitted bids, in part because environmental campaigners made the project too toxic for them and for their potential financiers. Civil society will need to continue stepping up in the years to come, because, if countries keep digging up their oil and gas, every record broken will likely be a baleful one. ♦

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

For the Third Time in Three Decades, Congress Punts on Serious Climate Legislation

Joe Manchin tanks Congress’s big chance to cut the heat.

By Bill McKibben

The New Yorker

Saturday, July 16, 2022

NASA just declared that this June has tied with that of 2020 for the hottest we have ever measured. At the moment, forecasters are predicting that, on Monday, the United Kingdom, which maintains the longest instrumental record of temperature in the world, may see the hottest day that nation has ever recorded.

This was the backdrop to the news on Thursday that Senator Joe Manchin, Democrat of West Virginia, won’t support climate legislation, bringing to an apparent end his long and excruciating flirtation with Joe Biden over the climate portions of the Build Back Better bill, the President’s ambitious economic package, which contained the most sweeping climate measures ever to reach the Senate floor. To provide the even more excruciating context: this is the third time in the past thirty years that Congress has balked at serious climate legislation.

In July, 1997, the Senate voted 95–0 (led by another West Virginia Democrat, Robert Byrd) to pass a resolution stating that the United States should not be a signatory to what became the Kyoto Protocol, arguing that it asked too much of this nation and too little of developing countries. Vice-President Al Gore came back from the Kyoto Climate Change Conference that December with a treaty, but President Bill Clinton didn’t even bother sending it to the Senate, knowing that it would be rejected, and other attempts to pass climate legislation never reached the floor.

In 2009, “cap-and-trade” legislation passed the House by a narrow margin—more than forty Democrats joined Republicans in siding with the fossil-fuel industry. The bill limped to the Senate, where John Kerry, of Massachusetts, and Barbara Boxer, of California, could not find a Republican co-sponsor. They didn’t even bring the bill up for a vote, knowing that it would lose; private whip counts at the time indicated that they would be lucky to get forty votes.

And now this failure, which is all the more painful for having been so close to success. The Democratic Party, pushed hard by young activists in the Sunrise Movement, rallied behind Build Back Better, passing it through the House with almost no dissenting votes among the Democrats (a good thing, given the narrow margins that the Party currently enjoys there). That reflected a deep Party-wide consensus; during the 2020 Presidential primaries, climate change was a top priority for Democrats, and Biden used it skillfully on the way to winning the White House. His closing ads in the general-election campaign included ones about climate; his stance helped bring him wide (and crucial) support from young voters.

Manchin didn’t do Biden the favor of saying no up front. Instead, he got the President to strip the sticks from the bill (the clean-energy pricing plan that would have forced utilities toward clean energy) and then he nibbled away at the carrots. He used the hope of his vote to get the more fossil-fuel-friendly Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act passed, and he used the fear of his rejection to keep Biden from invoking executive authority to block federal oil leases and pipelines. Although the sentiments of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, are always hard to read, it appears that there was a solid forty-nine-vote bloc for the climate actions in the bill. But forty-nine gets you precisely nothing.

So now we’ve struck out three times. The country that historically has put more carbon in the atmosphere than any other, and whose scientists played the lead role in figuring out the climate crisis, has refused to do anything about it. Our Congress—the place where, in 1988, Jim Hansen sounded the first truly public alarm about global warming—has never passed major climate legislation. The most distressed person in all this might be John Kerry, who is now the President’s global climate envoy. He’s been using the prospect of serious American action to try to rouse the rest of the world to action, and without that card in the deck he’s left mostly with jokers. (You think that Xi Jinping isn’t fully aware of what Joe Manchin just did?)

But there are plenty of other people mourning, too. The policy analysts who have spent the past two years recasting the legislation every time Manchin made another demand, only to see their work be for nought. The engineers and entrepreneurs who were counting on the infusion of money from the bill (a tiny fraction of the subsidies that have been extended over the decades to fossil fuel) to jump-start the rapid transition to renewable energy. The young people who have to live in what geologists may someday dub the Manchinian epoch. There is no chance now that the U.S. can meet even the modest targets for emissions reduction that Biden had promised for this decade, and hence the temperature will rise far higher than it must. Most of the bad decisions that politicians make are forgotten in the fullness of time—there have been Manchins before, and there will be Manchins again. But this Manchin, in 2022, will never be forgotten, not as long as humans are grappling with the most fundamental challenge we’ve ever faced. ♦

 

Stuck: Our politics is in a rut, and it will take new energy to climb out

STUCK

 

Our politics is in a rut, and it will take new energy to climb out.

Bill McKibben

May 27, 2022

In the mountains of the northeast, where I’ve spent my life, we have a season in between winter and spring—mud season, it’s called, when snowmelt and rain can turn the region’s dirt roads into quags and mires from which escape is difficult. (And sometimes impossible, with nearly fatal consequences). Driving down a mud season road, the ruts just keep getting deeper—and either you reach a patch of dry ground and escape, or you sink into the muck till at some point your tires start to spin or the undercarriage of your car hangs up. At which point you need a friend with a tow chain and a truck. 

The worst parts of the Uvalde and Buffalo massacres, obviously, were the massacres: dozens dead, families broken, survivors scarred forever. But there was also the secondary horror that, as usual, nothing happened in response. Unlike a long list of other countries that dramatically tightened their gun laws after mass shootings, our politicians lapsed quickly into their well-worn grooves: it’s a mental health problem, perhaps we should only have one door at schools, let’s arm teachers. Maybe Joe Manchin is right when he says “this time it feels different” and that a bipartisan group of Senators will deliver gun legislation. But since that same Senator Manchin said he would not do anything to override the Senate’s filibuster rules, color me skeptical. (The filibuster, he said memorably, was the “only thing that prevents us from total insanity.” Okay.)

This type of lather-rinse-repeat cycle is also familiar to those of us working on the climate crisis, where we’re also deep in a policy rut. At this point, each new forest fire or heatwave produces a reliable series of quotes about how we must change and a reliable lack of action from…anyone. In fact, we’re clearly getting farther from serious change: earlier today the Times had an important piece on the ways that the financial industry is backtracking from earlier promises to work on climate change. Blackrock is the biggest beast in the planet’s financial jungle, and it may have the smallest spine: after protests from officials in Texas and West Virginia, it said it would support fewer shareholder proposals on climate going forward. “We are perhaps the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel companies, and, as a long-term investor in these companies, we want to see these companies succeed and prosper,” the company wrote Texas regulators in a particularly craven example of capitulation; meanwhile, banking giant HSBC wouldn’t even say whether they’d suspended a key executive who’d memorably explained why the bank continued to fund the fossil fuel industry: “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?” Who indeed? 

Our country has fallen into a rut where we expect stalemate and inaction. It’s not that we lack popular support: huge majorities favor climate action and gun regulation. It’s not that we lack technology: renewable energy is now so cheap that as a new study pointed out this week adopting it en masse would save our economies trillions. But each time we get stalemate and inaction the rut deepens—people become more hopeless and cynical. If you’re the NRA or Exxon, that’s the best possible outcome: you want the status quo to drag on as long as possible. A mass shooting or an enormous forest fire is a challenge, but if you make it through the initial outcry you’ve strengthened your hand. If you hate the idea of government, then government inaction proves your point.

This means it’s up to the rest of us to figure out how to jump our society out of those ruts. It requires organizing, and obviously we’ve seen lots of it: after the Parkland shootings there was a huge upsurge in (mostly youthful) protest about gn policy; it was soon echoed by the Greta-inspired youth uprising over climate. These efforts were powerful—for a year or two, corporations actually made promises about carbon. But they weren’t powerful enough. So either we give up, or we organize to make them bigger.

I don’t know precisely what that looks like with gun control: my sense is that millions of Americans keeping their kids out of fourth grade for a week might start to put real pressure on the system, but of course, that’s hard to organize: it disrupts daily life, and takes a little of the commitment that, say, powered the Montgomery bus boycott. 

I don’t know for sure on climate change, either. My suspicion is that the banking and financial system is the weak point. If supposedly engaged corporations like Google and Apple would stand up to their bankers and demand they stop lending to Big Oil, and if normal citizens were protesting regularly inside and outside many of the 30,000 bank branches across the country—well, that pressure might produce a reaction. Or not—there’s only one way to find out, and we’re doing our best at Third Act. 

But we need our leaders to be willing to dare as well. Instead of just repeating their bromides about the horror of it all, do something unexpected. At the moment, thanks to Joe Manchin, the Biden administration has little to show for its climate advocacy. It continues on with a business-more-or-less-as-usual approach: at Davos this week Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry was touting a new “buyer’s club” where big companies would buy more climate-friendly products. Ford pledged that by 2030 it would get…ten percent of its aluminum from low-carbon producers. That’s spinning the wheels.

Say, instead, the Biden crew really wanted to shake things up. They could, for instance, embrace the lawsuit from 21 young plaintiffs that demands climate action from the federal government. It’s been working its way through the federal judiciary for years—the Obama administration opposed it, and the Trump administration, predictably, did everything it could to squash the lawsuit. So far Biden’s DOJ has followed their lead. “There was zero shift when Biden took office, zero shift from the Trump administration,” the plaintiff’s lead lawyer told reporter Julia Rock. But why? Why not endorse the plaintiff’s contention that youth deserve a working climate system, and enter into negotiations to make it happen? It would, at the very least, put a new set of variables into play. 

In the end, however, it’s not sensible to count on congresses or courts, CEOs or commanders-in-chief. We activists and organizers have to push in ways that really challenge the status quo, making full use of the panoply of tools that nonviolence provides. Instead, movements too often settle into an uneasy stasis of their own, repeating old actions even as they make at best marginal gains. If we want to pull our society out of its rut, we need to be the ones with the tow chain and the (electric) F-150 pickup. I’m not sure it’s doable—vested interest and inertia have created a truly formidable quicksand. But I know we better try, and in new ways. 

More news from around the world of climate and energy:

+The wonderful Svitlana Romanko, writing from besieged Ukraine, reminds us that Putin’s invasion offers us a real chance for change:

Because I live on the front line, I see clearly that this is a decisive point in modern history. We can make the wrong turn back to fossil-fueled colonialism. Or we can properly start the green transition. The fight for Ukraine’s freedom can lead us to what science has told us we must do: stop burning coal, oil, and gas right now.

+An important new series of calculations show just how much the world’s pension funds stand to lose if we follow science and keep coal, gas, and oil in the ground:

The researchers estimated that existing oil and gas projects worth $1.4tn (£1.1tn) would lose their value if the world moved decisively to cut carbon emissions and limit global heating to 2C. By tracking many thousands of projects through 1.8m companies to their ultimate owners, the team found most of the losses would be borne by individual people through their pensions, investment funds and share holdings.

The analysis also found that financial institutions have $681bn of these potentially worthless assets on their balance sheets, more than the estimated $250-500bn of mispriced sub-prime housing assets that triggered the 2007-08 financial crisis.

+Iraq, ranked as one of the five countries on earth most vulnerable to climate change, is dealing with horrific sandstorms—and as the desert continues to dry out and heat up, experts say that by 2050 300 days a year could be marked by the apocalyptic scenes. The dauntless writer Alan Weisman adds some reflections of his own from the once Fertile Crescent. And here’s a truly fine diary on what it’s like to live through the killer heat waves afflicting the Indian subcontinent:

4 p.m. Temperature: 41°C | Feels Like: 43°C

Madhu is frustrated. The 62-year-old grandmother just received news that government tankers meant to deliver water to her slum in southwestern Delhi have been canceled. The settlement hasn’t been recognized by the authorities, and as a consequence there’s no tap water available. “The heat has left us to the mercy of the water mafia,” she says, referring to private dealers who charge between 100 rupees ($1.29) and 200 rupees per 20-liter jerrycan. Today’s delay means Madhu and her neighbors will have to spend hours standing in long lines the next day to secure extra water. It also means lost work hours and forcing children to skip school to make sure their families get enough to drink.

+A bright spot: Exxon failed once again in its efforts to stop a Massachusetts lawsuit attacking its long record of climate lies. With the Supreme Court controlled by radical reactionaries, state constitutions may afford the best chance of actually holding climate criminals accountable.

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Outrage and inaction: how the push for US gun control rises and falls with each school shooting

Also from The Guardian, focused more on the failure of the United States government to control the use of guns.

Outrage and inaction: how the push for US gun control

rises and falls with each school shooting

Map of US with circles where there have been school shootings. Composite: Getty Images

The country experiences a mass shooting nearly every day while federal gun control legislation remains a distant dream.

 

Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon

The Guardian, 26 May 2022

On Tuesday, an 18-year-old shot and killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. It was the second deadliest school shooting in American history, behind the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting when 20 children and six adults were killed.

Mass shootings are so common in America that most of these tragedies barely make a blip in the gun control debate.

The country experiences a mass shooting nearly every day, and once every three weeks someone is shot on school property, according to data from the Center for Homeland Defense and Security. The large majority of these shootings don’t get coverage in national media outlets, and after a day or two, the media moves on to the next story, politicians put gun control legislation on the back burner and Americans get apathetic about gun control.

Among the few things that keep gun control in the public consciousness are school shootings with large death tolls.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, gun control stayed in the news cycle for months, according to data from the GDELT project which analyzes closed caption text. An extended political debate eventually led to 23 executive actions from President Barack Obama which, among other things, created a more robust background check system. Soon thereafter, Congress nearly passed bipartisan gun control legislation.

A similar thing happened after 17 people were killed in the 2018 Parkland school shooting. After extensive media coverage and political handwringing, federal legislation stalled but state legislators passed a flurry of gun control laws.

It took many children being killed in their classrooms for media coverage to stay focused on gun control, for more Americans to search for gun control online and, ultimately, for more Americans to support gun control measures.

Still, these political sentiments have yet to translate into even milquetoast federal gun control legislation.

After the Sandy Hook shooting, a 2013 bipartisan bill co-sponsored by Democratic senator Joe Manchin and Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican, would have required federal background checks for guns purchased at gun shows and on the internet. It lacked a ban on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, with the hope that it would appease enough Republicans to pass. But even that compromise bill failed to garner the required 60 votes in the Senate.

After the Parkland shooting, a 2019 bipartisan effort stalled when Democrats sought to impeach President Donald Trump.

And last week after a shooting in Buffalo where 10 people were killed, Democrats renewed their push for more robust background checks but there was little hope any gun control legislation would get through Congress.

In 2012 after the Sandy Hook shooting, President Barack Obama spoke to the victims’ families and said, “We can’t accept events like this as routine … We can’t tolerate this any more. These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change.”

The data shows Americans are willing to change their opinions on gun control after these tragedies – that the majority of the country supports stricter gun laws, especially in the aftermath of deadly school shootings.

Congress, however, has been unable to enact what the majority of Americans want.

 

 

America is Killing Itself

The following is an excellent short summary from The Guardian of the catastrophic and virtually unique toll of gun possession and misuse in the United States.

This week’s mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was one of more than 3,500 mass shootings since the Sandy Hook shooting a decade ago. It was America’s 215th in 2022 alone. It came as the nation still reeled from another massacre, this one targeting Black Americans, in Buffalo, New York, just a week prior.

The horror of 21 people, including 19 small children, being killed in their classroom is hard to grasp, but for one former firearms executive, it’s not a surprise. Ryan Busse, who spent his career in the industry and now advocates for gun control, published a powerful op-ed in the Guardian arguing that contrary to a familiar refrain, America is not broken – it’s working as intended.

“The truth is that Americans now live within an escalating system of radicalized gun tragedy that is working exactly as expected,” Busse writes. He argues that the profit motives of the industry, along with the extremist rhetoric of the National Rifle Association, has fueled a warped incentive structure that rewards “conspiracy-mongering, racism and fear campaigns” while spitting out voices like his that call for responsible policies. Whatever it takes to sell more guns.

Republicans remain in thrall to the NRA and call for more weapons after mass shootings – even though the presence of armed police didn’t stop the Uvalde shooter – and typically block even the mildest gun control measures. In an explainer we just published, the Guardian’s Alvin Chang and Andrew Witherspoon visualize the debate around gun control in the last decade – how it intensifies in the aftermath of the mass shootings that penetrate the national conversation, and quickly recedes after efforts at legislation die in the Senate.
 

As a global organization, we pay attention to the pulse in other countries, and I found this roundup of what international publications wrote about Uvalde incredibly insightful for the mirror it holds up to a uniquely American tragedy.

“If there is still an American exceptionalism, it is to tolerate its schools being regularly transformed into shooting ranges, sticky with blood,” reads an editorial in LeMonde. “America is killing itself, and the Republican party is looking elsewhere.” El Pais notes that the US has 4% of the world’s population, but almost half its pistols and rifles. “It’s a recurring drama, to which America’s lawmakers seem unwilling to put an end – even though they could.”

But no matter how ritualized mass killing in America is, and no matter how hopeless efforts at reform seem, we are not desensitized. We will continue to report relentlessly on the communities most impacted by gun violence, and not only after a mass shooting, through our long-running Guns and lies series. We’ll explore why places like Canada that also have relatively high rates of gun ownership don’t see these kinds of tragedies, and how parents in the US talk to their children about them. And we’ll track fresh efforts at reform even when they feel doomed. Politics are never static, and we won’t stop imagining a different future.