I really liked @EricHolthaus newsletter today, which connected me with this important essay I missed: "How can we make sure that climate anxiety is harnessed for climate justice?" scientificamerican.com/article/the-un…
(It looks like @sjaquetteray is on Twitter, too -- tagging her here so you can follow her, as well!)
I recently backed the Climate Journal Project on Kickstarter (theclimatejournalproject.com) and now I have two journals to give away. If you'd like one, please reply with a link to a climate justice resource (book, podcast, group, website, etc.) and I'll choose two at random.
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Apparently I'm an "overpopulation denier" for pointing out the fact that consumption is the real problem, and that population anxiety is deeply rooted in racism and can lead to ecofascism. It's amazing how much people will cling to harmful ideas even when the data say otherwise.
For folk who would like to learn more, some links to help:
I'm excited to share our new paper, led by @erleellis. By combining global maps of human populations and land use, we found that ~75% of terrestrial nature has been shaped by people for at least 12,000.
Our main take-home points: 1) "With rare exceptions, current biodiversity losses are caused not by human conversion or degradation of untouched ecosystems, but rather by the appropriation, colonization, and intensification of use in lands inhabited and used by prior societies."
2) "Global land use history confirms that empowering the environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and local communities will be critical to conserving biodiversity across the planet."
@ClimateBen This is incredibly irresponsible and harmful. Tacking “BREAKING” onto an unattributed statement is bad enough, but you’re also misrepresenting Gavin—he never said that. You need to delete this. What you’re doing is wrong, Ben, and I think you know better.
@ClimateBen To support your first tweet, you link to two papers about impacts to support your statement, and you misrepresent and exaggerate the findings of both (neither of which Gavin was involved in). Most people won’t actually read the articles, let alone the papers you posted.
@ClimateBen The climate crisis needs no exaggeration to drive action. But threads like this make it harder and harder for scientists to debunk doomist narratives, and as a result, we’re getting attacked by people citing our own work on climate change, who accuse us of downplaying the crisis.
This was such a fun conversation, not only because we got to have Eric back on the show (as the founder of Warm Regards). Eric took a break from the podcast to work on The Future Earth, and it was really nice to be able to close the loop with a conversation about his book.
I also got to talk with one of my favorite authors about one of my favorite moments in one of my favorite books, and that's just not something one gets to do very often, if ever.
We hope you enjoy this first episode in our two-part finale, and we'd love to hear what you think.
I’m on the board of a non-profit, and we hired anti-racism consultants to do an assessment of our culture and practices. One thing that came up is this notion of how whiteness, as an identity, is constructed. You can’t “fix” racist structures without doing the “heart work” too.
Meaning, if you pit structural solutions (eg, “hire more Black people”), against a racist culture, the culture will always win out, and you will likely fail in your goals. The heart work — unlearning the deep programming of white supremacy—is not optional.
The kicker is, part of white identity construction involves emphasizing technical (acute) over adaptive (systemic) change. Meaning, how we are trained to approach problems in white culture? Often just exacerbates those problems. And that’s a problem if you actually want change.