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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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3 Jan, 4 tweets, 2 min read
This fantastic @lizweil piece on fire and California's future — and, by extension, about living in a planetary crisis — is this week's must-read story.

This is climate journalism that gets what time it is. Honored to be a part of it.

nytimes.com/2022/01/03/mag…
If you're interested in the ideas I share in the story, I have a newsletter for you:

alexsteffen.substack.com/subscribe
Also, great photos by @MeridithKohut.
If you're wanting to read more on the planetary crisis and discontinuity, this is a good place to start:

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
2 Jan
Important points in this @dwallacewells piece, for those thinking about how we build and personal ruggedization.

“It wasn’t a wildfire in the forest, it was a suburban fire. The Costco we all shop at, the Target we buy our kids’ clothes at — all damaged.”
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
"Though the fire did not begin there, it quickly jumped to a strip of big-box stores and their parking lots — to most Americans perhaps the very picture of an inflammable Anthropocene."
If you jack the climate/ecological extremes enough, exurbia becomes the new wildland-urban interface...
Read 8 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
28 Dec 21
Also, seems worth noting that #DontLookUp is the #1 movie, worldwide, on Netflix.

There is a massive, under-served audience, hungry for stories about the real world we actually live in, which is one of planetary terror, absurdity, and chaos— and heroism in the face of it all.
Acknowledging the scale of the planetary crisis is a cultural discontinuity. It shifts once-authoritative perspectives from the center to the periphery.

No one likes that, including critics, academics and journalists who feel their value cast into doubt.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-expertis…
OTOH, just as in every other industry and endeavor on this fast-changing planet, the refusal by some (those currently benefiting from the status quo) to accept even the idea of the need for change creates massive opportunities for those who take the need for change for granted.
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
27 Dec 21
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
26 Dec 21
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.
Read 7 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
24 Dec 21
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 21
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

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