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Alex Steffen Profile picture
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Oct 25 • 3 tweets • 2 min read
This is staggering:

In the southern Sierra Nevada, from 2011-2020, "due to the combination of wildfires, drought, and drought-associated beetle epidemics, 30% of the region's conifer forest transitioned to non-forest vegetation..."

#discontinuity #adaptiverestoration
We need to completely reimagine forestry and ecological restoration as a large-scale, hands-on undertaking, ruggedizing for what's coming, remaining aware of how we got here in the first place.

Important point about fire management in the face of climate/ecological discontinuity.

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More from @AlexSteffen

Alex Steffen Profile picture
Oct 2
In a worsening planetary crisis, the claim that because no place is *completely* safe from (climate-intensified) risks, every place (no matter how great the risks it faces) is worthy of huge public investments in rebuilding and future protection is either uninformed or predatory.
"No place is completely safe, so we shouldn't judge people's choices about where to build and how"

combined with

"we must make every loss whole"

is brittleness denialism.
The vast majority of people in every society are harmed more severely by slow and disjointed climate action and response than they would be by the fastest and most quickly-spreading transformations.
Read 5 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Oct 1
I worry that a political system incapable of letting investors lose when their climate-impacted investments fail will grow more rapidly brittle than it would have otherwise.
"One thing I've learned in my years of whining about Florida’s unsustainable trajectory in the climate era is that most Floridians don’t care."

But, since it's your money they're spending to grow, rebuild, and eventually buy-out and bulldoze, you should.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…
Also, every nation on Earth — and every state and province and autonomous region, every county and parish and municipality — has. within it, it's own Florida.
Read 9 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Sep 19
On the need to grapple with the sheer scale of the ruggedization challenges facing us now:

"The more the government shelters people from the true and increasing cost of the choices they make in the face of global warming, the bigger the eventual bill."

washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/…
tl;dr: steepening costs add the brittleness "find out" to the climate triangulation "fuck around."
Worth remembering: we don't know how to confidently price the magnitude of damage at the nexus of "slow action severely worsens the current planetary crisis" and "nations do little to ready their governance and ruggedize their systems."
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Aug 29
Describe an ecological discontinuity:

"Literally, one-third of Pakistan is underwater right now, which has exceeded every boundary, every norm we've seen in the past... a crisis of unimaginable proportions."

We're not yet ready... etc.

bbc.com/news/world-eur…
See also: a 72-day heat wave.

independent.co.uk/independentpre…
We're unprepared for the world we now live in.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
Read 4 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Aug 18
None of us can afford to plan our futures as if the planetary crisis weren't here — and getting worse fast.

I'm teaching a 10-week course on how to make better personal choices in the face of discontinuity.

It's something we all need to get ready for.
🧵
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/this-letter-…
We are in the early decades of an all-encompassing planetary crisis.

We should do all we can to limit the magnitude of future loss by taking bold action on climate and ecology.

No matter what we do, tho, we face a lifetime of unprecedented, rapid change.
alexsteffen.substack.com/p/were-not-yet…
The world we've built is no longer suited to the planet we've made.

No matter what we do now, we cannot avoid the consequences of that reality, and those consequences will be deeply tragic for vast numbers of people.

alexsteffen.substack.com/p/the-transapo…
Read 12 tweets
Alex Steffen Profile picture
Aug 18
A baseline goal for a city's climate plan: that there are enough homes for all its residents, and that every home will remain insurable as the impacts of the planetary crisis worsen fast.

In most places, this means large-scale building, ruggedization, and some triage/retreat.
More in this thread...

Also, in a great many ways, building compact housing at scale, ruggedizing for climate realities and dropping urban emissions/ building sustainable prosperity are the same jobs... at least if you're doing them right.

Read 5 tweets

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