Short List

• Somini Sengupta, It’s Some of America’s Richest Farmland. But What Is It Without Water?

By 2040, the San Joaquin Valley is projected to lose at least 535,000 acres of agricultural production. That’s more than a tenth of the area farmed.

And if the drought perseveres and no new water can be found, nearly double that amount of land is projected to go idle, with potentially dire consequences for the nation’s food supply. California’s $50 billion agricultural sector supplies two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts and more than a third of America’s vegetables

• Ezra Klein, Saul Griffith, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Sheila Jasanoff, Kim Stanley Robinson, What if American Democracy Fails the Climate Crisis?

Klein:  Of late, I’ve been obsessing over a single question: What if political systems, in the United States and internationally, fail to curb climate change?… That is not to say there is no reason for optimism or hope… And so we convened this panel of climate experts with different backgrounds — technological, literary, political, academic — to try to reconcile the reality of our political progress with the scale of the emergency.

• Natalie Blais, Joanne Comerford, and Daniel Sosland, Stop sweetheart deals with state utilities

Today, utilities earn income based not on how well they serve residents, but on how expensive it is to run their companies. As expenses for maintaining the grid go up, utilities regularly ask the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities (DPU) for approval to increase customer rates to help cover costs. Regulators usually approve these requests…  Since 2018, Eversource has received an additional $95 million in revenue from cost increases to Massachusetts residents – without any requirement that the utility give them any additional benefits in return.

• Dan Drezner, My one column about Critical Race Theory

• John Ganz, The 1619 Project Revisited

Covenant nationalism comes from the self-consciousness of the Northeastern Calvinists: “Emerging from New England, it ultimately sought to constitute all of America as an offshoot of the Puritan experience…”… What I find so interesting about the Hannah-Jones essay, and why I think it was so upsetting to many, was its implicit participation and reversal of this Covenant tradition of American nationalism…. I think the issue for so many people is that [Nikole Hannah-Jones’ essay] cleaves so closely the sources of American political imagination but just inverts them.

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Top of the List

• Sen. Bernie Sanders, Washington’s Dangerous New Consensus on China

The administration of U.S. President Joe Biden has rightly recognized the rise of authoritarianism as a major threat to democracy. The primary conflict between democracy and authoritarianism, however, is taking place not between countries but within them—including in the United States. And if democracy is going to win out, it will do so not on a traditional battlefield but by demonstrating that democracy can actually deliver a better quality of life for people than authoritarianism can.

• Russell Arben Fox, Regarding Mutualism, Cooperativism, and Other (Interstitially) Anti-Capitalist Alternative

What is meant by mutualism and cooperativism, and why should they be understood as standing distinct from the usual capitalist routines of our economy? The simplest answer is that any organization of economic activity that has woven egalitarian and communitarian practices into their daily operations—whether in terms of ownership, production, decision-making, pricing, wage scales, distribution, or anything else—is, to one degree or another, pursuing a path which gives place to something other than profit-maximization and consumer-individuation, and thus is departing from the ideal capitalist form. That doesn’t mean that profit and consumption never matter to communes or co-ops or credit unions or anything else crowd-sourced; the human desires and pressures that give rise to markets can’t ever, and shouldn’t ever, be ignored… “Private property is an aberration, though under the conditions of fallen human society…a necessary arrangement.”

• Maanvi Singh, ‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’: scientists on the scorching US heatwave

It’s surreal to see your models become real life.

Also Worth Reading

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Short list

• Noam Chomsky on postmodernism
• Peter Sutoris, The climate crisis requires a new culture and politics, not just new tech
• Timothy Snyder, 9/11 and 1/6
• Angie Schmitt, How Fire Departments Stopped Worrying and Embraced Safer Street Design

Also worth reading Continue reading →

If the cultural landscape becomes too different from the actual landscape, then we will make practical errors that will be destructive to the actual landscape or of ourselves, or both.

-Wendell Berry, “Two Minds”

Top few:

• Barbara Moran, ‘I Wanted To Be On Land’: A Conversation With Urban Farmer Kafi Dixon
• Shawn McCreesh, In My Hometown, Opioids Are Still Stealing Lives
• Mike Gecan, How to Lose a Union Drive
• Joe Klein, Daniel Patrick Moynihan Was Often Right

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Some noteworthy pieces from the past couple months:

• Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Policy Basics: Where Do Federal Tax Revenues Come From?
• Alexander Stockton and Lucy King, Death, Through a Nurse’s Eyes (“The short film… allows you to experience the brutality of the pandemic from the perspective of nurses inside a Covid-19 intensive care unit.”)
• Joshua Pauling, When Innovation Runs Out: The Vindication of Maintenance

Every sector of modern life drips with the language of innovation. Technological progress, disruptive innovation, and economic growth remain unquestioned, continually parroted by entrepreneurs, city planners, educators, and countless others. In The Innovation Delusion, Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russell challenge the entire innovation narrative and make a strong case that the mundane reality of maintenance is actually what sustains economies, schools, homes, and communities in the long run.

• George Scialabba, Last Men and Women

Modernity imperils another set of virtues… I suppose I’d call them the yeoman virtues. I have in mind the qualities we associate with life in the early American republic—the positive qualities, of course, not the qualities that enabled slavery and genocide. In 1820, 80 percent of the American population was self-employed. Protestant Christianity, local self-government, and agrarian and artisanal producerism fostered a culture of self-control, self-reliance, integrity, diligence, and neighborliness—the American ethos that Tocqueville praised and that Lincoln argued was incompatible with large-scale slave-owning. Today that ethos survives only in political speeches and Hollywood movies. In a society based on precarious employment and feverish consumption, on debt, financial trickery, endless manipulation, and incessant distraction, such a sensibility seems archaic.

• Luke Savage, Liberals Are Choosing Convenience Over Workers (“The Prop 22 episode reveals the tectonic shift undergone by American liberalism—and the Democratic Party—since the 1980s.”)

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John de Graaf, A Conservative for Our Time

By all accounts, including his own, Stewart Lee Udall (1920-2010) was an unabashed liberal. And without doubt, he believed that government could improve lives, a philosophy that came from watching the New Deal transform his hometown of St. Johns, Arizona, bringing electricity and running water to scores of poor ranchers and farmers. This belief motivated his long public service as the Interior Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and in recognition of his influence, his name now adorns the Department of the Interior building in Washington D.C.

But after a year of research into Udall’s life and work to develop my upcoming documentary film, Stewart Udall and the Politics of Beauty, I have come to believe that Udall was actually in many ways, a conservative whose creative ideas may help point America’s way forward in a turbulent, polarized, and destructive time. Above all, Udall was devoted to conserving the land and the beauty of the American landscape. He believed they were fragile, endangered by so-called “progress.” Our future was dependent on their care and protection.

Beth Tilston, Literacy of the Fingers

The leaven is sour with me when I get it out of the fridge after its five month holiday. There is an inch of dark hooch on the top.  I pour it off, confident that I know how to sweeten it up. For four days I get rid of half and feed what’s left with warm water and rye. It bubbles over the top of the jar in appreciation.

Back at my desk, starting to write this essay, I think back to my first sourdough loaf. It was dense, wholemeal, overly-acidic from being left to prove for days. It was made at the start of what I have come to think of as my ‘apprenticeship of the hands’. The apprenticeship started after I had emerged, idea-battered, from a master’s degree in English Literature. My degree certificate told me that I had a distinction, but all I felt qualified to do was to build castles in the air. This was 2008; the year that everything broke. I looked at myself and realised that I could write 20,000 words on the Derridean idea of the archive, but I couldn’t bake a loaf of bread. I was an expert in frame narratives but I felt completely unable to look after myself. Theory-sick, I turned my back on the world of ‘thinking’ and embraced the world of ‘doing’. And I found that I was terrible at it.

How did this happen? How had I reached the age of 28 without being forced to develop at least some practical skills? The short answer is, it was allowed to happen; in fact, it was encouraged.  Despite gardening and cooking with my mum as a child, despite helping my dad to put the family’s collection of bikes in good order, I was given a strong message by the society I grew up in that the head ruled the hands. That the thinkers of the world were superior to the makers and the menders. Two millennia on from Aristotle, we had indeed made the architects more estimable than the artisans. It suited me fine: I was good at being a thinker.

This mind-body problem has a long philosophical heritage. René Descartes grappled with the idea in the seventeenth century and came up with the notion that we now know as Cartesian dualism.  Descartes thought that the mind and the physical brain were two separate entities. In his view, it was the mind that was the seat of intelligence rather than the brain. It was the mind that was conscious and self-aware. He did concede though that whilst mind and matter are separate, they are irrevocably linked. The mind cannot exist outside of the body – and the body cannot think. This, I think, is the view that many of us hold of ourselves: disembodied, thinking minds encapsulated in dumb meat. It explains why it seems logical to raise the mind above the meat.

As the machine age has progressed, the number of things that we are required to do for ourselves has gradually shrunk. Thanks to machines, and – crucially – to abundant oil, 21st century Man (unlike any of his ancestors) is now able to blithely declare himself ‘not a practical person’. Unhandy Man has been born. We live in a culture which has turned us into children, unable to look after ourselves, unable to decipher even where to start. Practical skills are often spoken of now as if they possess some sort of magic that only a few salt-of-the-earth folk can master. Continue reading →

The goal of democracy is not unity. The goal of democracy is productive disagreement and conflict management through legitimate elections and representative government.

-Lee Drutman

Transactional leadership is no less important that transformational leadership.  We need both.  Joseph Nye, Good Leaders Don’t Always Need a Vision:

Two centuries ago the newly independent American colonists had a transformational leader in George Washington. Then, they invented a different type of leadership when James Madison and other transactional leaders negotiated the US constitution. Madison’s solution to the problem of conflict and faction was not to try to convert everyone to a common cause but to overcome division by creating an institutional framework in which ambition countered ambition and faction countered faction. Separation of powers, checks and balances, and a decentralised federal system placed the emphasis on laws more than leaders. Even when a group cannot agree on its ultimate ends, its members may be able to agree on means that create diversity without destroying the group. In such circumstances, transactional leadership may be better than efforts at transformational leadership.

One of the key tasks for leaders is the creation, maintenance or change of institutions. Madisonian government was not designed for efficiency. Law is often called “the wise restraints that make men free” but sometimes laws must be changed or broken, as the civil rights movement of the 1960s demonstrated. On an everyday level, whistleblowers can play a disruptive but useful role in large bureaucracies, and a smart leader will find ways to channel their information into institutions such as an ombudsman. An inspirational leader who ignores institutions must consider the long-term ethical consequences as well as the immediate gains for the group.

Lewis R. Gordon, Trump Loyalists Want to Uphold a Long American Tradition: White License:

Want a democratic republic? Inaugurate a systematic overhaul of institutions that are premised upon disenfranchising whole groups of people, and radicalize voting and access to other forms of political participation for all.

Said change would be transactional leadership as well as transformational leadership.

On the Media, Why Appeasement Won’t Work This Time Around  [Ed.:  Appeasement has never worked.  There’s no reason to believe it will work now either.]

If historic parallels about white resentment and violence are useful for understanding Trumpism and other contemporary expressions of white supremacy, they may also help us to figure out what to do — or not to do — next. We can start with the contested election of 1876, when Southern democrats — then the party of slavery — alleged fraud in the election of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes and his Republican Party, meanwhile, alleged massive voter suppression of southern blacks.

On Wednesday night, in his attempt to delay certification of Biden’s election victory, Texas Senator Ted Cruz asked: why not do what his 19th century predecessors did? Back then, white southerners called it “redemption.” To Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, founder and executive director of the African American Policy Forum, it was a catastrophe of appeasement and an object lesson in the politics of reconciliation.

Nye is right.  Gordon is right.  Crenshaw is right.  Our challenge is to square that circle.

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Excerpts from the pieces at the top of my reading list from the past week follow below.

Don’t Let This Week’s Events Distract Us From Other Critical Issues

Jim Aloisi, We cannot be passive actors in COVID recovery

The choice before us is unambiguous: we can be passive actors in the process of COVID-19 recovery, or we can be active participants engaged in “building back better.” Passive actors let others make the choices for them or rely on the “marketplace” to collectively choose what recovery looks like…

We can’t build back better without transportation, land use, and housing policies that squarely meet the demands of an extraordinary time. My objective here is to address the transportation component of that triad…

Our destiny remains in our hands, and we can build a better post-pandemic metro Boston only by developing broad consensus and taking decisive action. That is what leadership is all about. Passivity is no answer. Retreating to the false comfort of the pre-COVID status quo is no answer. History, and future generations, will rightly judge us harshly if we fail to take up the task of rebuilding a better, more sustainable and equitable society following COVID-19. There is no time to waste.

Miriam Wasser, Want To Know If Raw Sewage Gets Dumped In Your Local River? There’s A Bill On Baker’s Desk About It

Among the many bills sitting on Gov. Baker’s desk is one requiring cities and towns to notify residents any time raw sewage ends up in a local river or water body... The bill, if enacted, would require wastewater operators to send out email or text notifications to local and downstream residents within two hours of discovering a sewage discharge, and updates every eight hours for as long as the problem persists. They will also have to publish information online about how much sewage-laden water was released and put up signage near problem areas.

Send Gov. Baker via this link – https://www.mass.gov/forms/email-the-governors-office.

Call and leave a message on Gov. Baker‘s Constituent Services line – (617) 725-4005.

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I’m a couple days late this week.  When I went through my ‘worth reading’ list for the week there were a higher than usual number of environment-related pieces.  Environment-related pieces are first and then a handful of others follow.

Before the links to those pieces:  It doesn’t appear that Gov. Baker is going to sign it before the legislative session expires in several hours but the MA Legislature passed an excellent climate bill by huge margins in the House and Senate several days ago.  It’s a damning statement on leadership that they didn’t pass it soon enough to force Baker’s hand.  When the legislative session ends at midnight the bill is dead if unsigned.  He can ‘pocket veto’ it or actually veto it.  Despite the bill passing by a veto-proof majority when the legislative session ends there’s no legislature to override his veto.  They’d need to pass a new bill next session.  Legislative sessions run two years in MA so a new bill may be a while coming.  Unfortunately, we don’t have time to waste.  The bill is S.2995, An Act creating a next-generation roadmap for Massachusetts climate policy.  WBUR story on the bill here.

Worth Reading

Will Collins, Paul Kingsnorth’s Surprising Conservatism

To certain readers, especially those familiar with Kingsnorth’s background as an environmental activist and climate change Cassandra, this might sound like left-wing ecological primitivism. Alexandria’s environmental message will certainly resonate on the left, but there is also an idiosyncratic strain of conservatism running through the book. One expects a modern fable set in a small religious community to valorize characters who violate taboos and question the established order. Kingsnorth neatly inverts this expectation. In Alexandria, the received wisdom turns out to be true. Those who ignore the community’s strictures and wander off into the forest are lost.

A profoundly traditional view of human nature lurks just below the surface of Kingsnorth’s fiction. In Alexandria, taboos and customs are vital guardrails against our darker impulses, the same impulses that nearly destroyed the planet some 900 years ago. This apocalyptic pessimism echoes the Catholic science fiction of Walter Miller, who imagined a community of monks painstakingly preserving scientific knowledge after a nuclear holocaust in A Canticle for Leibowitz. Miller’s book ends with humanity rediscovering science, ignoring the church’s warnings, and promptly destroying the world all over again. The apocalyptic visions of Miller and Kingsnorth are quite different from each other, but both authors take a dim view of technological advancement and humanity’s capacity for collective restraint.

Kingsnorth has said that, “The central question that runs through the novel—the question that has riven humanity and created an entirely new world—is to what degree humans should live within the bounds that nature has set for them, and to what degree they should attempt to break them and remake the world in their own image.”

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Just three things on my Must Read list this week:

Masha Gessen, One Year After Trump’s Election, Revisiting “Autocracy: Rules for Survival”  (Ed.: From Nov. 2017):

Trump has moved faster, assaulting our senses in more ways and more often than I (and, I think, most other people) expected. The sun still rises every morning, but an early-morning barrage of Trump’s tweets might obscure it. The word “Presidential” has gradually faded from the conversation: no one expects the President to live up to the standards of speech and behavior that his office would seem to demand. Instead, we have settled into constant low-level dread: a state in which a person can function, but can hardly be creative or look into the future. A Russian writer who blogs under the name Alexander Ivanov-Petrov, writing of a different time and place, has called this state of living “provincial time.” It is a time in which people continue to think and create, but “in some fundamental way lack agency or the ability to be fully aware of themselves.”

Fred Bahnson, The Gate of Heaven is Everywhere:

Like the Kardashians, the American Christian family has become obsessed with its own profile. It has become faith as public spectacle, faith as political engagement, as party affiliation, as reputation—anything but faith as paradox, as mystery, as the hidden and seductive dance between spiritual desire and satiation, the prolonging of a hunger so alarmingly vast and yet so subtle that it disappears the moment it’s made public.

In early monastic Christianity, that hunger was acknowledged and channeled, given shape and form and expression. It went by different names—contemplatio (silent prayer) or hesychia (stillness)—which led first to an inner union with Christ, and then to a deep engagement with the suffering of the world. The order was important. In John Cassian’s Conferences, a fifth-century account of the early Christian monastic movement in the deserts of Egypt, a certain Abba Isaac describes how the monks modeled their prayer on Jesus’ practice of going up a mountain alone to pray; those who wished to pray “must withdraw from all the worry and turbulence of the crowd.” In that state of spiritual yearning, God’s presence would become known. “He will be all that we are zealous for, all that we strive for,” Abba Isaac said. “He will be all that we think about, all our living, all that we talk about, our very breath.”

What the early monks and the Christian mystics who followed sought was union—an intense experience of inwardness that is glaringly absent in what many of us get from American Christianity today. Perhaps this absence is the real reason for the mass exodus from churches. Perhaps it is not Christianity that many followers are disappointed in, but Christendom…

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