Everything we eat and drink, buy and use, every object and every service we depend on—even those objects and services we so take for granted that we call them "the landscape" and "nature"—is now immersed in rapid ecological upheaval.
It's amazing to me how (comparatively) little it'd take, even now, to avoid truly ruinous coming decades— how materially better off we'd be— if we acted at scale and with speed.
Bold climate action/preparation will never be this cheap (in true and total costs) again.
We're going to end up acting — at bigger scales, with greater speed.
It's just going to cost us not only the price of change, but the (by then many times greater) costs of inaction.
And that is what we should be fighting to protect people from: Inaction. Delay. Slow change.
Ecological illiteracy shows in the belief that the planetary crisis can be broken down to its parts, prioritized, solved sequentially or ignored altogether until people reverse it later. ...the belief that ecological imperatives will mold themselves to our desire for continuity.
The consequence of ecological illiteracy is to find ourselves incapable of seeing the discontinuity that's here, all around us, and unable to form perspectives and plans that offer tools for successful action as change accelerates.
The deepest damage of ecological illiteracy is to understand climate/environmental impacts as being limited to "the environment" somewhere out there, and not ripping through every certainty in every human system everywhere in the world, including your own life.
It's not quite the Winter Solstice, but I want to repeat my annual suggestion that if you have some extra in your life right now, please you send a few bucks to your local food bank.
There are few more direct connections between your kindness and help for a person in hard times.
You can literally Google "local food bank" to find one close to you.
No need to comparison shop. In my experience, any small group trying to feed the hungry in their own community is likely worthy enough of your trust for a small donation.
If you're not connected to a specific place right now, but still want to offer some help, I give to this Seattle project, and have never regretted it.
New Zealand mandates acceptance of three-story, three-unit townhouses on most lots in its major cities, with six stories around urban transit centers, and no parking requirements.
PwC estimates 105,000 new dwellings in next 8 years.
Rapid urbanism is needed almost everywhere, but especially in NZ, which has Bay-Area-level property craziness.
"New Zealand experienced the third-highest property price increase in the world in the past year according to statistics compiled by the IMF..." stuff.co.nz/business/12716…
Rapid urbanism is the key to deep climate emissions reductions, the smartest means for providing housing justice, and economically critical in regions trying to ruggedize against climate impacts.
It's also eminently achievable, now, almost anywhere.