The development of a science is not uniform but has alternating 'normal' and 'revolutionary' (or 'extraordinary') phases. The revolutionary phases are not merely periods of accelerated progress, but differ qualitatively from normal science.
-Thomas Kuhn (paraphrased)
Modern Economics is a form of brain damage.
- David Suzuki
There is a crack in the frame of climate doctrine.
It’s formed by water.
Water as cycled, or not, by plants as mediated by human land use, at bioregional scale.
54 degrees F, or 30 degrees C, is one of the more extreme yet not uncommon surface temperature differentials recorded between an urban-forest interface. This means you can crack an egg into a frying pan in the forest and it just sits there runny, warm, but entirely uncooked. Walk this egg/pan situation out of the forest and into the middle of a Walmart parking lot and it will start to sizzle and cook. Unload a pop-up food-forest from the back of a semi onto that parking lot and you go from sizzle death to bearably hot, from death to most life to survival of most life. This frame switch did not come from finger wagging at some terrifying, omnipotent collosus, but from thoughtful observation and a small well designed action.
In this context plants wither, soil desiccates, the whole system hemorrhages water, and exponentializes the oxidation and volatization of carbon. The closest word we have to describe this phenomenon is drought. But this word fails to offer any nuanced understanding of the situation because droughts are commonly understood to have macro-climatic origins and clearly urbanization, and its evil step-children, deforestation, scorched earth agriculture and overgrazing are the overwhelming variables that make a macro-origin heat wave either a mildly unpleasant icy lemonade kind of afternoon or an apocalyptic hellfire of withering death.
Yet the overwhelming rhetorical dominance, and subsequent funding and action, focus on the macro-climate/greenhouse gas story who’s actionable thesis is to buy more Teslas. This isn’t to say we shouldn’t think and act on this important issue but we need a paradigm shift in understanding that planetary climate resilience is an aggregate of bioregionally prepared ecosystems. If our goals are to lessen suffering, human and non-human, then community led restoration and regeneration is the only guaranteed path to safety.
And maybe, just maybe, if we are all out in the sunshine joyously replanting eden, then perhaps a bioregionally vertically integrated supply chains are reframed as a multi-layer food forests that supplies the raw fiber, food, fuel and medicine for a revitalized maker economy, dragging us off our screens and into our workshops, where were probably happier anyway.
And stop trying to pigeonhole me as some sentimental neo-primitivist. What I’m really talking about is fully automated luxury permaculture in a maker led economy. Keep building cool apps and software, smart-chain, blablabla, but build it on fair trade hardware.
Know your power. Or better said know our power, because at the end of the day shifting from the hero/saviour peak-narcissism-complex to inter-connected social weaving actions is a lot less cringey and much more joyful.
So why, why, why, why are the wonks and the overwhelming majority of enviros so egregiously captured by this inescapable anomaly within the climate movement. Could it be the crushing conventions of individualist conformity? Our pay grade is perched upon a pedestal of regurgitated rhethoric? Is consortium with the dirty fingernailed, the rust-belt, the outsider scientist blasphemous to the unspoken pacts of class climbing?
How do you say cultural revolution without saying cultural revolution?
