Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing.
We all have bought into this lottery, and we all are at risk of winning it. So, if there is to be finger-pointing, let’s do it facing the mirror. And in the meantime, fill your bathtub with water, stock your larder, and prepare for landfall.
While U.S. centrism is a sad, frustrating reality of the world we live in, and something this very bulletin aims to counteract, we must also guard against false dichotomies and be wary of crocodile tears from people who would rather we remain isolated in our suffering than express true solidarity with each other as victims of a system hell bent on exploiting us and the nature around us. It is precisely at times like this that we must fall back on simple but profound notions like compassion, like camaraderie and solidarity, for we are all connected.
The Red Cross estimates that 14 million people have been affected by flooding in India; over 7 million in Bangladesh and 1.5 million in Nepal. The United Nations puts the total number of people affected by floods and lindslides at total nearly double that at 41 million.
Yes, we should be having the conversation about climate change and Hurricane Harvey, and anyone who tells you otherwise probably has ulterior motives. But before we go there, we need to show the people of the Gulf Coast that we genuinely care about them. Could our shared value be the lives of Texans who are hurting?
Success is not a matter of wishing, however—if it were, beggars would be kings and I would be handsome and rich. Experience and the findings of attitudinal and behavioral research suggests increasing active voter participation requires a better understanding of how people receive, consider and interpret information.
In our current political climate, there is little appetite to build and resource huge new bureaucracies. Talent, expertise and the funding already exists within most transportation agencies. We simply have to re-tool the apparatus that was so successful in creating the high-speed network in the 20th Century.
I regret the lazy oversimplifications of our time. As our world becomes ever fuller withaccessible information, ever more porous, ever more pressing with demands for our attention, so our subtler semiotic capacities appear to stall before the task. Our attempts at interpretation and meaning-making are overwhelmed: more information means less meaning.
In the midst of the maelstrom named Trump, environmental advocates are finding solace in numerous opinion polls released over the past year or two. From these surveys, it appears one of the few things Americans agree on—more or less– is the reality of climate change and the need to combat it. As a card-carrying curmudgeon, I tend to look at the numbers and see a glass half empty.
A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.
A comic novel about climate change? Anymore, it’s either laughter or tears. The comedy here works as a sweetener to help the reader swallow a harsher message. That climate change threatens not only our external Mother Earth, but also our internal planets. Thus, the main character, Gil Moss, a psychologist, proposes a new category of DSM diagnoses: Eco-Mood Disorders. One symptom being the loss of any ability to feel ‘at home’.
Weather and climate don’t cause disasters—vulnerability does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this means that the widespread discussion as to whether the Hurricane Harvey disaster was caused by climate change becomes a dangerous distraction.
