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A Neighborhood’s Death Foretold
News about the fire arrived in fragments. First, that the blaze in Eaton Canyon was spreading rapidly, then that a few homes in the foothills were consumed, then whole neighborhoods, including my former one on the southern perimeter of the Angeles Crest National Forest. The house I owned on Jaxine Drive, designed in 1959 by Randell Makinson, burned to the ground.
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Joe Biden and Dorothea Lange: Politics and Art Revealed!
About a month ago, I received an email with the subject heading “coffee date with me and Joe.” It was sent by “Kamala Harris” via info.contact@jorbiden.com. If I donated $35, I’d be entered into a contest to have coffee with Joe and his unpopular veep. I shouted across the room to my wife Harriet: “We’ve been invited to have coffee with Joe and Kamala” (long pause) “if we send them some money and win a raffle.” Harriet replied at once: “I can top that. I just got invited by Joe and Jill to the White House for a holiday reception. I can bring a guest. Do you wanna go?”
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We Need a Working-Class Environmental Movement
My wife, Harriet is a professional environmentalist. She has a degree from the University of London, worked in the UK government’s Sustainable Development Commission under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and then for the future King Charles. After moving to the U.S., she set up her own non-profit, Anthropocene Alliance in 2017. I’m A2’s co-founder and Director of Strategy. But my degrees are in all the wrong fields, I have no prior experience with environmental justice, and I only work on projects that suit me. In short, I’m an amateur.
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A Picturesque Tour of Toxic Waste Sites in Georgia and Alabama
Including examination of the racism that helped create them, conversations with residents and activists, and brief observations about the history, politics, music, art, architecture, and scenery of the region, illustrated with historic artworks and original photographs by the author.
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Filthy Lucre: Or, How Non-Profits Get Money but Lose their Souls
Until recently, the only thing I knew about non-profits was that they are poison for radicals. To paraphrase Gil Scott-Heron: The revolution will not be led by a 501(c)(3). Once you start hunting for filthy lucre (aka foundation support), militancy is out; it offends funders and alienates the leaders of other non-profits with whom you must collaborate. Your politics drift toward the center. And, while your table manners and dressing style might improve, your sex life will not. If you’re single and hoping for a date with a hot anarchist-atheist-vegan, you’re out of luck.
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Port Arthur and the Sublime
The most amazing place I saw during a recent tour of flood damaged towns and cities on the Gulf Coast, was Port Arthur, Texas. The ruin of its downtown, combined with the fury of its petrochemical infrastructure, can only be called sublime.
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The Streets of New Orleans
After 18 months of lockdowns and travel restrictions, we decided it was time to hit the streets and visit some of our “environmental justice communities” on the Gulf Coast. Environmental Justice Communities (EJC) are non-white or working-class neighborhoods that have been flooded, burned, poisoned, or impoverished by the petrochemical, biomedical, transportation, real estate, timber, animal agriculture, or financial service industries. Another way of putting it is that residents in these neighborhoods are the screwed of the screwed. Whereas poverty and discrimination typically expose people to substandard housing, poor municipal services and street crime, industrial pollution in EJC communities additionally subjects residents to discomfort.
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The Coronavirus Crisis is a General Strike!
The coronavirus pandemic is a de facto General Strike against a political and social order that privileges the few over the many. But this has been a largely leaderless strike in which almost no one has issued demands. Now, in the midst of the pandemic, there remains an opportunity for working people and their political representatives to challenge the health and environmental policies that created the crisis, and forge a more humane and sustainable future. Read our demands below:
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Letter to the New York Times
For the many disappointed Bernie Sanders supporters (including me), we need to keep our eyes on the ball: saving human civilization (and myriad animal species) from extinction. Here’s how: Bernie must call up Joe Biden now and tell him that if he will publicly and enthusiastically endorse a Green New Deal, Bernie will quit the race and work to unite the party.
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Un-natural Disasters
of most so-called “natural” disasters in the United States – excessive heat, fires, drought, and floods — have increased significantly in recent decades. The reason is that there is nothing natural about them. They are the result of higher levels of global greenhouse gasses (GGGs) in the atmosphere leading to higher temperatures. In the past decade, record high readings in the U.S. have occurred at twice the frequency of record lows. Large forest fires (those that burn more than 12,400 acres) now occur twice as often as they would without global warming. In the American West alone, wildfires have increased 400% since 1970. And the trendlines augur for even larger and more destructive fires in the future. The Camp Fire in Paradise, CA in 2018 killed 85 people and destroyed nearly 14,000 homes. This year, more than 250,000 acres have burned, leading to mass evacuations and rolling blackouts.
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What Today’s Headline Should Be
As expected, the first Atlantic hurricane of the season is a whopper. Coastal communities in North and South Carolina face the prospect of severe damage to homes, businesses and infrastructure, especially to the electric power grid. Inland agriculture, much of it given over to concentrated animal feeding operations (factory farms), may also be damaged, and neighboring communities along with them.
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Global Disclaimer
capital in the current class struggle enabled congressional Republicans and the president to pass a tax cut in 2017 which further enriched the wealthy, while reducing incomes for the poor. And whatever modest economic stimulus the tax cut may initially have had, it’s now clearly worn off, and the resulting budget deficit become a damper on the economy and a threat to the modest, social welfare net. To be sure, cuts to government social programs are driven most of all by neoliberal ideology not by deficit levels or interest rates, but the deficit numbers make the politics of investment more difficult.
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Flood Travelogue – Pensacola, Gulfport, and Biloxi
Harriet and I recently returned from a week-long road trip to Gulfport and Biloxi Mississippi. I’d only been to Mississippi a handful of times before, on the way to somewhere else, and had few impressions of the state. What I knew of it was mostly limited to national politics – it’s overwhelmingly Republican – and a childhood memory concerning the notorious murders in 1964 of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner in Philadelphia, MS. The latter two were from New York City, as I was, and their deaths led to an outpouring of grief in Jewish families like mine. Terrible as they were in themselves, the murders somehow triggered thoughts of the Holocaust, a catastrophe still fresh in collective memory.
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Vegan Ethics Now
The remarkable thing about current conversations concerning the ethics of veganism is that they so often turn into discussions about the necessity of veganism.[1] At a time of environmental crisis, human civilization itself may depend upon our willingness to protect animals and stop eating meat. Ethics in this case isn’t so much branch of philosophy as a means of survival.[2]
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The Meat Apologists Strike Back
A recent article in Quartz, an online magazine owned by corporate-apologist Atlantic Media, is an example of the growing backlash against the surging vegan movement, of which VGNPWR is one expression. The author, Chase Purdy, titled his piece “If the Entire Nation Went Vegan, it Would be a Public Health Disaster:”
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Taking on a Critic of the Anthropocene Concept
In a recent issue of the journal Earth (September 2017), published by the American Geosciences Union, the philosopher Christine Cuomo cast doubt on the validity of the Anthropocene as designation for the current epoch in geologic history:
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Doctor Strangeweather: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Climate Change
It’s a staple of spy and adventure novels and films. At the end of Goldfinger (1964, dir. Guy Hamilton), James Bond is handcuffed to an atomic bomb in Fort Knox. After managing to free himself, he frantically starts to pull some wires on the device when a scientist arrives, flips a toggle and halts the threat with 007 seconds to go.
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Hurricane Harvey and its Aftermath
Since our founding in April, Anthropocene Alliance established a powerful tool for helping individuals and communities hurt by flooding, Flood Forum USA, along with a Facebook platform called SPOUT! FFUSA has engaged over 100 community Flood Groups across 30 states in the US, representing 200,000 people, and initiated mitigation programs in 10 of them, assisted by the Thriving Earth Exchange of the American Geophysical Union. SPOUT! has become a go-to, speak-out forum for up to date information about mitigation and flood relief efforts across the country. This recent article in The Huffington Post illustrates the bravery and resilience of our SPOUT! friends.
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No Road Sign for Climate Change
The unfolding disaster in Houston and along the Texas and Louisiana coasts is a sign of things to come. Rain events are certain to get worse and more people are sure to be inconvenienced, displaced and even killed by flooding. Climate science proves it.
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Anthropocene Alliance is launched at a propitious moment.
Never before has the human role in environmental degradation been more widely acknowledged and understood. From great cities in the U.S. to small hamlets in rural China, people are discussing air and water pollution, the degradation of soils and aquifers, and especially, the looming crisis of global warming. People are poised to act.
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