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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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26 Dec, 7 tweets, 2 min read
This should scare the crap out of smart people, or even dumb ones.

The prospect of a lengthy dirty civil war in America, right as the world lurches into the depths of planetary crisis, bodes no good for anyone on the planet.

theguardian.com/us-news/2021/d…
America is the most potent geopolitical force in the world, and will remain so for years to come.

This conflict promises to make the international effects of that power (more) deeply unpredictable and irrational.

A politically unstable U.S. benefits no one (except maybe Putin).
Especially in climate/sustainability.

Predatory delay is the key war demand of a party we on the Left continue to define by their culture war extremists.

Saying this conflict is about those is like saying the last war was about states' rights or cavalier culture, not slavery.
All slow interests — those who now run the politicized right — have to do to win is control the pace of their own defeat.

Chaos and polarization are powerful breaks on progress, at home and abroad.
I should probably write a follow-up to this, with Post-January-Sixth realities at the forefront...

thenearlynow.com/trump-putin-an…
Too many of us wanted to believe that Biden's victory and Dem majorities meant predatory delay had been overcome.

Instead, events have confirmed the limits of what can be won without centering discontinuity and the politics of tempo.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-last-hur…
See also, our current civil conflict over masks, vaccines and the science of public health — and conservative efforts to both worsen the pandemic and convince people that the necessary solutions were, in fact, attacks on them.

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
27 Dec
Yes, you should watch #DontLookUp.

Yes, 3/4 of the critic's responses seem like hot takes written by jaded culture workers from an alternate universe in which the planet Earth was not in the early days of its most catastrophic upheaval in 100,000s or even millions of years.
It's not that climate chaos will end all life on Earth like a planet-killer comet.

It's that the planetary crisis has irrevocably altered every fact of your, my, everyone else's life... and is getting more intense... and we continue fuck around as if finding out wasn't a thing.
We're on a trajectory to crash the futures of most people on the planet and finalize the irreversible annihilation of a big chunk of the natural world because of a mix of predatory delay and terminal entitlement.

Making movies about that shit is hard. #DontLookUp is a great one.
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
24 Dec
Being someone who thinks about the future for a living, it's become a little tradition of mine, at the close of the year, to offer some thoughts about what's coming.

In that spirit:

2021 was the last year of the Twentieth Century.

We're not ready for what comes next.

(Thread)
The dividing line is continuity—the belief that things will be more or less like they are now for years to come.

That out assumptions, cultural beliefs, personal experience, professional expertise, etc. will remain valid for the foreseeable future.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
Popular thinking of the last century centered on the idea that history was an arc, a continuous curve from the Enlightenment to a future in which humanity would have chosen to create a more rational society for the betterment of all.

Of we'd blow it all up.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
23 Dec
Very little American urban progressives advocate for will matter if U.S. cities don't build millions and millions of new homes in compact communities over the next decade.

Our worst problems aren't solvable without rapidly-built abundant housing and reductions in autodependence.
This is before we even discuss climate brittleness, risk-driven relocations and climate refugees...

Most of the biggest barriers to rapid progress on inclusive and sustainable urbanism are purely political. They could be changed overnight, if we had the will.

Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
20 Dec
Nothing is external to the planetary crisis.

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.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
20 Dec
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.
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
18 Dec
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.

I'm sure they could use a few more contributions.

@RainierValleyFB

rvfb.org
Read 4 tweets

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