Good Efforts and Good News
8/19/21
Heather and I are away on an island here in Maine this week, right where we want to be: unplugged, off-grid, on the water, and beyond reach. I’m setting this week’s newsletter to launch automatically on Thursday the 19th, and with any luck it will do just that. I’ll find out when I return on the 21st…
This week I have a short curated list of good efforts and good news for your reading pleasure. The list could be much, much longer, but to give you a vacation too I’ll keep it short. I’ll try to do more of this in the future as a counterbalance to my usually heavy writing. For now, anyone who has good suggestions to add to the list, please do so in the Comments.
Take care, and have a good week.
Jason
1. Dive into Project Drawdown’s long list of solutions for reducing CO2. They range from the personal to the global and structural, and they are all assessed and described by the experts at Drawdown. If you want to see a lot of the action-based pieces to the puzzle for dealing with climate change, this is probably the best place on the internet to do so. It’s not a perfect list, but it’s incredibly thorough. And as they note, it’s a work in progress: “Certainly, more solutions are needed and emerging, but there is no reason—or time—to wait on innovation. Now is better than new, and society is well equipped for transformation today.” https://www.drawdown.org/solutions
2. Here’s a beautiful short film – Life in Syntropy – about a very promising agricultural strategy for reducing both climate change and biodiversity loss: syntropic agroforestry. It’s a fancy term for mixing farming with forestry in a way that mimics ecology. Syntropy (the creation of form, complexity, diversity) is the opposite of entropy (the degradation of energy and form in a system). Syntropic agroforestry is farming blended with forestry in a way that enriches soil (rather than depleting it), supports biodiversity (rather than evicting it), increases CO2 absorption, and generally works with natural processes rather than against them. The film highlights the work of Ernst Gotsch (and those who have learned from him) in long-term projects in Brazil:
- The website for Ernst Gotsch and his work: https://agendagotsch.com/en/
3. Want an intelligent, concise, thorough, scientist-approved list of FAQs about the climate and ecological crises on Earth? Want to connect with an organization working in the streets to get governments to Tell the Truth and Act Now? Try Extinction Rebellion. They’re based in the UK but there’s a lot for anyone to learn on their site. Here are the FAQs: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/the-emergency/.
- And here’s their main site: https://extinctionrebellion.uk/the-truth/
4. How to fight climate despair, from Vox: https://www.vox.com/22595896/climate-change-fire-heat-wave-anxiety
5. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has created a Green List to help scientists and governments around the world assess the progress toward recovery of species in decline: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/07/new-green-list-provides-road-map-species-recovery
6. Want to help reduce the plasticizing of the Earth? Upstream is an excellent organization on the front lines of the battle to eliminate single-use plastics: https://upstreamsolutions.org/
7. “Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.” The Climate Justice Alliance works to bring about the transition to a climate-friendly economy with justice, equity, and ecological sensibility: https://climatejusticealliance.org
8. Politics, politics, politics: No systemic change happens without changing the system. Given the slippery Anthropocene slope we’re on, it’s worth correcting the truism “all politics are local” to “all politics are environmental.” In the political moment now are a) the massive infrastructure package the Democrats are wrestling into existence, with some decent large-scale efforts at preparing and avoiding climate change; b) the two crucial voting rights bills the Democrats are also trying to keep alive; and c) considerable chatter among NGOs and progressives to convince the Biden administration to drop the billions of dollars in subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry. Without massive investment in climate-friendly infrastructure, without a healthy voting system that is inclusive of the poor and struggling folks hardest-hit by climate change and biodiversity loss, and without a short, sharp exit by the oil and gas companies from the helm of civilization, there is no way to keep the atmosphere from heating up past 1.5C. The warmer it gets, the more life on Earth (including us) suffers, and the more chaotic politics will become. Now is the time to call your representatives and support these efforts. Donate to organizations taking the lead to push American politics in the right direction. There are many, but for today I’ll direct you to Common Cause: https://www.commoncause.org/