Road Ecology

9/30/21

Hello everyone:

This week in curated Anthropocene news, I have three recommendations:

1) Guess what? They Knew: The US Federal Government's Fifty-Year Role in Causing the Climate Crisis, from MIT Press.

2) Here’s a really big one to think about (it deserves an essay or two all by itself, so stay tuned): While our behavior matters, climate change will not be fixed by our individual behavior. We believe that our good, small actions will make a significant difference, but that fiction is largely the product of a relentless smokescreen from the fossil-fuel companies. There’s a long, successful history of this kind of propaganda from the packaging, cigarette, and plastics industries too. Business Insider has a good article on this. Here’s a useful quote:

They don't want a price on carbon, they don't want incentives for renewable energy, they don't want to block new fossil-fuel infrastructure," Michael Mann, an atmospheric scientist and author of the book The New Climate War, told Insider. "S…