Food for thought on the structure of change

Periodically there’s a flurry of discussion about ways people can help with a movement beyond being on the front lines. A lot of it goes into organizing and logistical work, but some also goes into much less involved forms of participation, even if it’s just wearing a button or something.

I don’t know how much of this is a description of what tends to happen, vs what is “needed” for a movement to be successful, but either way, I think it’s a pattern that anyone fighting for change should at least consider and account for. At the end of the day, those of us fighting for a better world have to rely on collective power, which means our chances of success go up the more people we have on board.

If Beau’s spear analogy describes a reliable pattern – and it seems like it is to me – then I think that the goal should be getting the shaft lined up behind the spearhead. BLM has done a pretty good job of that, showcasing the brutality and dishonesty of the police in a way that’s been increasingly difficult to wave away. That’s something we’d do well to think about when it comes to our own activism and communication.

Beyond local networking: Some thoughts on next steps for organizing

No matter how you look at it, those of us who want a better world are engaged in a struggle that has a decidedly asymmetrical arrangement of power. The capitalist class controls almost every aspect of our society, and even peaceful challenges to their power are met with brutal police violence, infiltration and espionage, rhetorical attacks from politicians, and even legislation that effectively legalizes the murder of activists. And remember – that’s just at the “imperial core”. When it comes to activism in the regions where the U.S. anti-Left war machine has influence, the story is often far, far darker. The U.S.-led war on any left-wing movement, no matter how democratic or nonviolent, has included terrorism, assassination, torture, sexual assault, disappearances, massacres, genocide, chemical warfare, and ecological destruction.

What I’m trying to say is that over the years, activists have learned that even the generally “acceptable” forms of resistance – marches and rallies – require planning, preparation, recruitment, protective equipment, defensive strategies, medical personnel, training, budgeting and fundraising, a press strategy, and more. That’s why I like the idea of mutual aid networks as an organizing tool. Even if the network itself never does anything beyond getting emergency help for those who need it, it can act as training for those involved. While I’ve engaged in a tiny amount of this kind of activism, most of what I know about this stuff comes from listening to those who’ve dedicated their lives to this important work, all over the world.

It seems to me that interest in organizing for political change outside of electoral politics is pretty widespread right now. To some degree it was always there – I knew many people growing up who were involved in activism around Palestine, the sanctions against Iraq, the SOA/WHINSEC, and so on – but in the last year I’ve seen more efforts at unionization, mutual aid groups, and discussions of alternatives to police, than at any point in my life. Along with that comes all of the knowledge-sharing that is part of those discussions. I’ve also seen a lot of people trying to feel their way through local organizing, even if it’s just making connections with other people who share that interest. That last category is who I’ve been thinking about as I’ve worked on my direct action post. I think many more people want change than know how to get it, and the concept of “local organizing” as the first step is pretty widespread. The concept of working with your community to improve that community is not new to anyone, but I think it’s hard for folks to see how that can lead to national change. You get your network of well-meaning folks, and then what?

This is my attempt to provide one answer to that question. This is not the only answer, just the path forward that seems best to me, based on what I currently understand about the world.

We’re facing an increasingly hostile climate, massive levels of waste and pollution all over the place, and a rise in fascism that feels sickeningly similar to the early 20th century. It’s not hard to see how a local – or even national – mutual aid network would make a huge difference in people’s lives, and maybe even counteract the way capitalism encourages mistrust and selfishness. What’s harder to see is how that can challenge the power of the ruling class, or push lawmakers to support legislation. In terms of activism other than protests, how do we go from group chats and local networks to coordinated national or multinational actions that attract attention, spread ideas, and maybe even bring some discomfort to the ruling class?

Flash mobs!

No, but seriously. Think about what you’re seeing in that video. Think about how those events came to happen. Think about the fact that many of those people were strangers to one another. Some of them may not have even known what they were going to be doing until shortly before they did it. Some of them had done flash mobs before, or had a pre-existing skill they used, but plenty of people may have participated in one flash mob, and never bothered to do it again. Some of those people organized that event, and some just showed up because they heard about it and it seemed fun.

Starting in 2003 a trend emerged in which a group of people would converge on a location, take some kind of pre-arranged action, and then disperse. A flash mob could be anything from suddenly filling an intersection with people wearing red shirts, or an unannounced theatrical performance, or even people all following instructions from their smartphones. Flash mobs happen without warning, and crucially they often happen without the participants knowing what they’ll be doing until they start. This last point is key, especially for doing things at malls, where security would try to prevent it if they had advance warning (people who control public gathering spaces like to either charge for events, or require an application). The people organizing flash mobs developed an approach to get around those obstacles by limiting who knew what, arranging events without visible leaders, and having immediate dispersal as a built-in part of the game. A core group designs and prepares for the activity, and then they put out a call, by word of mouth or by social media, for anyone who’s game to show up at a specific time and date. Tell them what to bring and where to be. Ideally, you want to have them gather somewhere “off stage” so you can go over the plan, hand out props, and do any rehearsing that’s needed. From there you can give the group the actual location of the action, and instructions for how and when to join in.

Whether you want to draw attention to a message, carry out a last-minute counter-protest, or just make people’s day a little more interesting and fun, it seems to me that flash mobs – including ones that are either limited to a simple message, or are entirely frivolous – are a great way to develop a useful skillset for collective action, while lowering the barrier to involvement for those who want to help but don’t have time or energy for organizing work. There are some elements that are common to any other form of organizing, but flash mobs tend to focus on accomplishing a specific goal.

At this point I want to leave the theoretical and talk a bit about what’s already going on. As I mentioned earlier, people all over the world have been working out ways to resist their rulers for centuries. As the tools and tactics of governments have changed, resistances movements have changed in response. Folks involved in protest – particularly those who’ve taking part in Black Bloc actions – are likely to be familiar with some or all of this stuff. For the purposes of this particular piece, I don’t want to go too deep into specific actions that have been taken, but I do want to focus on this description from a conservative woman who joined in on some Black Bloc activities to see what it was like:

There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what’s called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don’t let everyone know [what they’re going to do]. I didn’t know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, “Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action.”

That’s called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who’s dressed in black can come join the action.

To be clear – I’m not suggesting that people should burn down buildings, this is just a real-world example of that “flash-mob” style of organizing in action, as described by someone opposed to the group’s goals. These tactics are a tool set, and as with any tool a great deal depends on who’s using it and why. A similar approach could be used to hand out leaflets in a particular location, or to generate buzz about a particular word or phrase, or to crash a politician’s event, or to attract attention to a particular problem. Regardless of what you’re doing, practice and training will increase your odds of a successful outcome.

Flash mobs done for fun or to spread a simple message, are a safe way of practicing logistics and helping people practice coordinated action.  In a lot of ways, it’s practicing martial arts – you might be doing it in case you need to used those skills, but it’s also a fun activity by itself, and largely devoid of any kind of ideological commitment. The same can be said of running, or any other form of exercise. The same can be said of the kinds of marches and rallies we’ve come to associate with political activism.

Generally, those of us interested in organizing are involved with at least one group of like-minded people (if you’re not, you might find help on finding or making such a group somewhere in here). What would it take for that group to get a flash mob together? What are the obstacles? How much notice is needed?

What about having two flash mobs do the same thing at the same time in two different cities? What about more than two?

What would it take to have a flash mob do something in Washington DC at noon, and another do the same thing in London at 5pm? How many people could you get to join in without knowing precisely what was going to happen?

There are already groups that organize events across large regions, but we want to build the capacity for mass coordinated action that – and this is important – is not being run by the political organizations that uphold the power structures and policies we want to change. What I want is for you, dear reader, to have the capacity to do this in pursuit of your own goals. I’ve heard a lot of people over the last year saying that the Left needs a new leader, and while I disagree, I would say that leaders worth following tend to emerge out of work that’s already being done. If you want a leader to follow, then work hard to create a movement that will build up the leaders it needs. Who knows, maybe you’ll find that the real leader was you all along!

Returning to the topic at hand, I listed various tasks involved in organizing an event to underline the need for training. None of us just naturally know how to go about doing any complex action. Even the stuff that seems more or less built in, like moving and talking – all of that requires practice. There’s no reason to think that the skills involved in building and maintaining a just and democratic system wouldn’t be the same. The good thing is that it’s not hard to find basic instructions for how to do this stuff, and it’s not hard to practice it safely and legally, and you can even have fun while you do it!

You will also be practicing field-tested tactics from protest movements around the world. I mentioned this earlier, with the Black Bloc example, but it goes beyond that. During the 2019 protests in Hong Kong, in addition to ingenious use of things like umbrellas and laser pointers, protesters used flash mob tactics to avoid arrest and continue their protests:

Hong Kong protesters have deployed a new strategy of popping up in small groups in multiple locations across the city in an effort to avoid arrest, during their ongoing campaign against police and the local government.
Small flashmobs of protesters demonstrated across a dozen districts after a call for protesters to “blossom everywhere” on Sunday, with many staying closer to home where they could evade police on foot or by bus.
[…]
“We are Pien Dei Hoi Fa[blossoming everywhere],” she said, while behind her a group of fellow protesters smashed up a traffic light.
Crystal, another 21-year-old protester, said: “The police do not allow us to have a big group of people gathering together. They block all the MTR stations, where the police have arrested [us] many times. The police also stop and search at the MTR stations.” She wore a mask, cap and sunglasses to disguise her identity during the demonstration.
She said: “People they just stay around this area. When something happens they can still go home at night without being searched in the tunnel.”

In Chile, where police are notorious for deliberately mutilating protesters, women gathered to sing “Un Violador En Tu Camino”/“El violador eres tú”, as part of their efforts to end the destructive reign of neoliberalism that began with Pinochet. This chant has been taken up, and used in the fight against oppressive governments and patriarchy in other parts of the world as well.

In the 2011 Egyptian revolution, a similar approach to Hong Kong was used, and in the description, we can see how they put their “home field” advantage to work in their favor:

Starting in the alleys was not a random decision. It makes tactical and strategic sense regardless of the technology used to coordinate this. Starting small and away from the main protests is a safe way to pool protesters together. It’s also about creating an iterative approach to a “strength in numbers” dynamic. As more people crowd the smaller the streets, this gives a sense of momentum and confidence. Starting in alley ways localizes the initiative. People are likely neighbors and join because they see their friend or sister out in the street.

The guide also stressed the need to remain peaceful and not engage in sabotage. The discipline of remaining non-violent is instrumental in civil resistance. Engaging in violence provides government forces with the excuse they’re looking for to clamp down on protesters and delegitimize them in a public way. The guide also recommends that activists try to win over the police and army instead of attacking them. The protesters behind this guide were clearly well trained and knew what they were doing.

This brings up another reason I think forming strategy based on local conditions is crucial: trying to win over the enemy is not always a good idea. It’s definitely one of the tactics that’s been used by the BLM movement, but the opposition in the U.S. is not just agents of the State; it’s also the fascist movement. Fascism, as an ideology and strategy that relies on conspiracy theories and ethnic scapegoating, has mass extermination as its end goal. Fascists don’t want to get along, they want you to cease existing. Deradicalization is important work, but even if that’s something you want to do, it is not work that should be attempted in the setting of a public confrontation. In general, these are people who are more likely to be holding themselves back from violence that might get them in trouble, rather than forcing themselves to attack because of orders. Given that we know for certain that white supremacists have been deliberately infiltrating law enforcement in the United States, it’s worth considering whether the people you want to appeal to even consider you to be human. You and those around you are likely to have a better idea what you’re going to be facing in your city or your country than someone who doesn’t live there, so you can shape your tactics accordingly.

If you do a quick search for how to organize a flash mob, you’ll come up with a lot of sites with a basic guide. I definitely recommend looking at multiple guides, but the central theme is the process of recruiting people to show up at a designated time and place, and to join in. If you want to limit who knows about your action in advance, you can rely on personal networks – contact people you know and trust, and have them contact people they know, to find people who might be on board. If you want a larger group, and don’t care who sees, you can put out a recruitment call on social media. For the rest, success largely seems to depend on how much work you can do in advance. The less you need to teach the folks who join up, the easier the experience for everyone once things get rolling. Once you have some practice arranging things locally, you can try working with a group somewhere else to do the same thing in two locations, and get some practice coordinating events. As ever, be aware of what information you give out, and how you go about doing so. US law enforcement has been known to spy on some pretty innocuous groups when it comes to any activism left of center.

I said it before, but it bears repeating: when you’re first trying out this sort of thing, it’s probably better to aim fairly small, and err on the side of caution. Part of the point of using this form of political action is to maximize safety for the people involved, so they’re able to keep working. This approach to political change will be more effective if it can be done at a larger scale. “Blossom Everywhere” is going to make a bigger impact than “Blossom in a couple places”. That means that we want a growing number of people who know what they’re doing. Your wellbeing is a key part of that. There are times when putting yourself at risk is the right thing to do, but the risk is never the goal. So practice, have fun, and if I can impart a bit of wisdom from my brief stint in a youth circus, be willing to make a fool of yourself in pursuit of something worth achieving.

Thank you for reading, and if you found my work useful, please share it around! If you’re financially stable, please consider contributing to my patreon, to help me make ends meet. Due to my current immigration status, I’m not allowed to seek wage labor, so this is my only means of income. Fortunately, the nature of crowdfunding is such that even a dollar per month makes a difference!

As with other such pieces, I will probably update this over time to improve it. Suggestions or discussion in the comments can help a great deal with that process, so feel free to chime in. Thanks for reading, and take care of yourself.

A response to the IPCC report

In a lot of ways I feel like nothing has changed. The IPCC report confirms what we’ve known for a very long time, and I gave up on the world I know still existing when I’m old about a decade ago. We still need to eliminate fossil fuel use. Because the warming has gone so far, there’s also zero question in my mind that we need nuclear power – especially for industry, as one of my esteemed commenters has pointed out – as well as solar and wind power. The fact that the warming will continue for centuries or even millennia, unless we start pulling vast amounts of CO2 out of the atmosphere at a currently unattainable rate means that our survival as a species now depends entirely on our technology. All other tools of survival are dependent on the climate conditions under which we’ve evolved, and those are gone. For all practical purposes, they are gone forever. We may be able to re-terraform the planet and return the climate to a temperature that’s more optimal for humanity, but that’s at least a lifetime away, and in order to get there, we have to survive.

We also need to stop driving our entire society based on what generates profit for rich assholes. There is no way that the scale of change we need will be more profitable in the short term than a continuation of the trajectory we are on. That means that our ruling class, who got and maintain their power by sacrificing the lives and happiness of others and who clearly believe they are the best people in the world to decide our fates, will happily drive us to extinction while believing to their dying breaths that nobody could possibly have done better. We are out of time. In my view we have been for many years. If we leave it to those in power, our response to climate change will be increasingly authoritarian societies, mass murder, needless destruction of land and resources through warfare, and ultimately an extinction that may have been preventable. I know this sounds alarmist to some, but I’d like to point out that I got the same response a decade ago when I said people should start thinking about storing food against emergencies, for the sake of their communities. These days it’s getting harder to find someone who would call that alarmist. Capitalism is driving us to extinction, and fascism is on the rise on a global scale.

I also want to repeat that I think extinction may be preventable. Based on where our society is at, right now, I do not think the odds are in our favor. I do, however, believe we can change those odds. I still believe both survival and a better, more just world is possible, but the longer we rely on our current rulers (some of whom have been involved in politics for longer than I’ve been alive, and yet haven’t come close to dealing with this problem), the worse our chances will get. I also believe that we don’t have a lot of room to screw up, which is why I’ve been advocating that we start the process of building a better society right now from the ground up, as part of building the power to create the political change we need. We need that resilience no matter what’s coming, and taking that approach seems to me to be the best way to save lives through both climate change and political change.

It’s a lot. It’s too much, really. There is no justice to what’s happening. Those responsible still wield unimaginable wealth and power, and the people suffering and dying the most are the poorest among us, not just in those nations kept in poverty by the rich nations, but also within the rich nations. Add in the pandemic, and there’s a burden of grief upon everyone who understands what’s going on. It’s hard to see any hope at all sometimes. We’re stuck in a fog bank, and not only can we not see a way out, we know there’s a very real possibility that the fog now envelops the entire world. Insofar as the temperature is going to keep rising, we may be stuck in that “fog” for the rest of our lives. Our best hope to get out is to build new spaces that are fog-proof, so that we can actually see each other and be whole again. In the meantime, we do what people always do when stuck in the fog. We call to each other, so we know we’re not alone. We feel our way forward, and guide those around us to better footing. We build fog horns to call those beyond reach of our voices, and warn them of rocks, or direct them to harbor.

I’m planning to post science fiction much more often here, and more regularly to my patrons, because I think a lot of people have trouble imagining how human society could exist on such a strange and hostile world. Storytelling – narrative of one form or another – is a method of communicating information and ideas that seems to be universal within our species. Hopefully I can find ways of doing it that can help at least some of you in that regard. I also decided, based on comments, to engage a little more directly with bad news and the darker end of things. Beyond that, I’ll keep trying to make content that will help people figure out their role in all this, and I’ll at least consider requests if there are particular things someone wants me to look into.

On that note, I think I’ll leave you with Rebecca Watson’s video about the IPCC report, because I like the tone:

 

Mutual aid, 6th edition

Updated on the 1st of August, 2021

With the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, joblessness is increasing, and people are in need of help. This is particularly a problem in the US, but many others in other countries are also struggling, and it’s likely the number of people needing help will be increasing as the crisis continues. This isn’t going to be over any time soon, and the economic impacts are going to last even after vaccines have been widely distributed.

To that end, I’ve put together a list of different resources for people who are struggling to make ends meet. This is a mix of both ways to seek help, and ways to give help to those in need. I will update and re-post this at least once a week while the pandemic and associated economic fallout continue. This is currently mostly focused on the U.S., with some UK resources, but I want to expand it to cover anyone needing help anywhere if possible. There’s a lot here, and it’s currently not particularly organized, because I don’t currently have a system for doing so. I also haven’t included much about things like PPE crafting or distribution – this is mostly focused on aid relating to  food, housing, and other things that currently require money.

Because of the duration of the pandemic, and the lack of help from the US government, many of these may be running out of resources, so please help if you can! Supporting each other in times of need is how humanity has gotten this far, and for those who have more than they need, now’s the time to give back to the society that made that wealth possible. If you want to start a mutual aid network in your area, here’s a guide on how to do that.

I think it’s worth mentioning that if you’re doing OK, and you want to help, contributing to mutual aid efforts is one way to do that. Actually contributing your time and labor, in whatever capacity you’re able, is also likely to be valuable. Many of the initial projects to help people survive the combination of a pandemic and the cruelty of a capitalist system were short-term efforts to deal with what most expected to be a short-term problem. The pandemic continues, and in case you missed it, climate change isn’t going to give us any breathing room. Mutual aid can’t solve all our problems, but it can help people survive, and it can be a tool for networking and organizing. That’s something YOU will need going forward, dear reader, unless you want to be entirely at the mercy of the billionaires and their endless greed.

If anyone has corrections or resources I’ve missed, please include them in the comments and I’ll add them in to the next round. 

Twitter thread on resources for people facing eviction – share it around, and add to it if you have anything to add. 

  • From Bigdoorbrigade.com, who have done a great job pulling this stuff together. Look at this stuff, but check them out too, because they’ve got more on how to help, how to organize, and so on:

https://www.mutualaidhub.org/ – a map of mutual aid projects and requests around the United States. FYI, McAffee flagged this site as somehow worrisome. I’m not sure why.

https://mutualaiddisasterrelief.org/ – Mutual Aid Disaster Relief – solidarity, not charity. This is an opportunity to help, and by doing so you increase the odds that you’ll have help when the next climate disaster hits your region

It’s Going Down  is a digital community center for anarchist, anti-fascist, autonomous anti-capitalist and anti-colonial movements. They have a list of mutual aid efforts focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic across the United States as well as some in Canada.

This is a US-based google doc with a huge amount of resources linked, from guides, to counter-propaganda, to existing aid efforts. Tactics and info are relevant across the board, most of the linked aid efforts are centered in the US.

Coronavirus resource list “This kit is a collectivized document that will be updated as more mutual aid projects and resources appear online. Recognizing that not everyone will have access to great internet to access some of these, I encourage you to apply these offline as well as online.”

COVID-19 Mutual Aid UK – Mutual aid resources in the United Kingdom

For those interested, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now did an interview with Dean Spade, who created Big Door Brigade.

The Human Network Initiative is a collaboration between Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. They have put together this collation of local and state resources

The Asian American Resource Workshop has created a wider ranging sheet of resources and mutual aid groups. It includes a lot of information on how to combat prejudice and xenophobia in this unprecedented situation

The folks behind the news site Boston.org have set up the Boston Helps network

A neighborhood group has been organized for Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, with similar groups in many Boston neighborhoods

Just outside of the city, communities like Cambridge have also seen mutual aid groups being set up

Wildcats want to say a huge THANK YOU to everyone who has supported us so far! With your solidarity, we have raised just enough to take care of the basic needs of all 80 graduate student workers who were recently fired for grade withholding. Thanks to you, we have been able to rest assured that our rent, food, and other needs will be covered. Your donations also fed thousands of strikers and our allies on our month-long picket line and covered medical and legal expenses of those who were violently arrested by University of California police. This fund continues to be the foundation for our ongoing fight for a cost of living adjustment (COLA).

MAP staff are already doing all we can to support local medical services who are serving Palestinian communities living under occupation and as refugees. We have already provided emergency hygiene supplies to 1,200 vulnerable Palestinians living in Gaza. We anticipate further need for an emergency medical response in the weeks and months ahead. Please help us be there for Palestinians during this crisis with a donation today.

Your donation can help pay for:

  • Hygiene Kits
  • Antiseptics
  • Personal Protective Equipment (PPE)
  • Medicines and medical supplies

The chancellor’s announcement now helps millions of hospitality workers, but sadly still so many are not protected by this as they don’t have contracts, were paid off pay roll or dismissed by employers before the announcement. We decided to take action to help those that are still hurting. We have the technology, contacts & understanding to make a difference quickly.

We have created ‘The Hospitality Workers Emergency Fund’ to allow the kind hearted, altruistic & caring UK public to donate to an emergency fund to help the most vulnerable & in need in our sector during this time. Our mission was always to champion hourly paid tipped workers, we never imagined in this way…

  • This journalist furlough fund is trying to help journalists who’ve seen their pay stopped for one reason or another. You can donate here, or follow a link to request aid

Here are just a few other places to donate that I’ve seen floating around. There are likely more local efforts where you live.
Nationwide: UNITE HERE’s fund for impacted workers

I’ll keep updating this as I find new stuff, and as always, let me know if you come across things I’ve missed, and please consider donating to my patreon, as I’m barely making ends meet myself!

The US is facing an eviction crisis. Here’s a list of resources that you should share

Update: There are more dead links in the last mutual aid post than I was expecting, so I’m taking a little extra time to go through those and find what new resources I can. The new edition will be up on Sunday.

I’ll be updating my mutual aid post tomorrow, and this will be on it, but it merits its own post as well. Share this twitter thread as widely as you can to increase the odds of useful information getting to someone who needs it. It includes resources by state as well as federal resources. Congress continues to fail in their duties to the American people, and some may even thing that mass evictions will be “good for business”, as it’s likely to create a whole bunch of desperate people who’re more likely to agree to bad pay and bad working conditions. Some state legislatures may help, many will not. Also please keep in mind that, as a rule, you can’t trust landlords. They’ll make up cleaning bills to keep your deposit, and they’ll lie to you about your rights as a tenant if you let them. There are good people who are landlords out there, but they’re not who a majority of renters have to deal with. Know your rights, share information widely, and look for ways to help those around you.

We’ve known for decades that a climate refugee crisis was coming. Now it’s here, and we aren’t ready.

About a decade ago, I was part of a Quaker climate action group that was trying to get New England Quakers to take a leadership position – both in political activism and in direct action – to deal with the problems of climate change. We started with putting together a presentation that we’d do at various Quaker Meetings around the region. I don’t remember the exact format, but the basic approach was to simultaneously try to drive home the scale of the horrors we face, and then follow that shock up with discussion of constructive action that could be taken at the community level. We showed a video, and then the 3-5 of us there (it was a small group) would give our own presentations/perspectives on the issue. Mine centered around a discussion of the iguanas I got to help study in college, the dangers presented to them by sea level rise, for example. The video we used, called Wake up, Freak out, then Get a Grip, and I think it’s still worth watching now. The animations are well done, and I expect most of you will be able to see where we’re at in the series of events they forecast:

I think we have passed that point of no return. We can slow the warming, and maybe we can reverse it, but even if we do manage to end fossil fuel use by 2030, I think the temperature is going to keep rising, absent any new actions by humanity. In fact, as we stop using fossil fuels, the corresponding drop in particles in the atmosphere is going to cause a brief increase in temperature, as less sunlight will be reflected back into space before it can heat up the planet. There are proposals to deliberately increase particulate pollution to cool the planet, but they are likely to have bad side effects, and will really only kick the can down the road.

As I’ve said, we’re at a point where we need to work out how to live on this hostile new planet, while we work to make its conditions more hospitable to us and the ecosystems of which we are a part. That means infrastructure that’s either extremely resilient, or that’s designed to be very, very easy to relocate.

It also means finding new homes for billions of people, because where they currently live is fast becoming uninhabitable.

Apparently this hasn’t been clear to all of my readers, so I’ll say it outright – my goal is for humanity to thrive. That obviously requires survival, but more than that it requires that we keep fighting for a more equitable, democratic system. There’s little chance that this struggle will be over at any point in the next couple centuries, and if people try to set aside any issues of social, environmental, or economic justice “until we get climate change dealt with”, then not only will that mean billions will die never seeing justice – even if they all die of old age, which they won’t – it will also undermine or even destroy our efforts to deal with climate change. People who are oppressed will always fight their oppression. The more that work has to be done to deal with immediate survival, then less we will be able to pull together for the good of the species. Likewise, we need to take care of the ecosystems around us, and take action to reduce the scale of the mass extinction we’re currently causing.

As with slavery and genocide, simply ceasing is not enough. Reparations are needed.

And as with those other issues, reparations are not – and never have been – about punishing people for doing bad things. One can argue whether or not there’s a place for that, but it’s a separate issue. The point of reparations is not to harm the perpetrator, but to heal the victim. Material harm has been done, and that requires a material response. Simply apologizing for stabbing someone will not solve the problem – the wound must be cleaned, the damage repaired, and the attacker must be prevented from harming others. There are a whole host of actions that need to be taken before anything can be considered “resolved”.

For the rest of our lives, the fastest growing human crisis is going to be that of those killed by climate change, and those fleeing lethal conditions. To stick with the earlier metaphor, the wounds caused over the centuries by colonialism and capitalism never received treatment, and are now badly infected.

The way we have dealt with refugees historically is not acceptable. It has never been acceptable, and on a rapidly heating planet, incompetent and inhumane management will turn into outright extermination.

If you’ve paid attention to the current fascist movement in the United States, you will have gotten a taste of this already. Refugees are fleeing north from Central America. They’ve been forced out of their ancestral homes by colonialism and the neoliberal atrocities it birthed, but also by the changing climate. The response by American fascists has been not just a closed border, but an impenetrable wall (or the fantasy of one), with proposals to electrify the wall, shoot people who approach it, or even lay down landmines. In reality, all of that “active” violence is secondary and in service to the “passive” violence of an impenetrable border wall.

The goal is a desert full of the bones of those who reached the wall and died unable to cross it.

That’s also why they’ve been caught destroying supply drops meant to help refugees survive the already brutal conditions; in keeping with the long history of governments using the elements as a tool of mass murder, and the tradition of treating refugees as undeserving of life, they want anyone trying to flee to the US to die in the effort.

Even if we ended fossil fuel use tomorrow, that problem would not go away. No approach to this problem will succeed without simultaneously working to keep as much of the world habitable as possible, through the use of technology and through land management, but also to ensure refuge for those living in areas that are no longer habitable.

And more than refuge, we need to ensure that they have a say in decisions that affect their lives. The top-down approach has been a consistent failure, and in this new world, things like refugee camps, concentration camps, and “detention facilities” will all become death camps. Refugees need to be able to control their own lives, same as anyone else, especially because it’s a virtual guarantee that anyone in the position of being classified as a “refugee” was not responsible either for the warming climate, or for the decades of misinformation and obstruction that brought us to this point.

Those who are responsible should be held accountable, stripped of all power to harm others, and their resources should be used to help humanity, but that is a secondary concern to ensuring that their victims are made whole to the greatest degree possible. If we are fighting for a better world for humanity, then we must also be fighting for better a better world for those in it right now, not just for those in the future. That’s not to say that no sacrifices will be made. I don’t think that the ruling class will give up their power willingly, and cutting off access to vital resources has always been a favorite weapon of theirs.

I agree that we absolutely need immigration and refugee policies that value human life, but I’m pessimistic about our chances of getting that from the political systems we currently have, not just in the United States, but in many other places around the world. We need to take matters into our own hands, and work to aid and empower people all around the world. The one silver lining is that there’s so much work to be done, that there’s guaranteed to be a role that’s well-suited for just about everyone.

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Rethinking society: How can we redesign our lives and infrastructure to survive the rising heat?

From time to time, politicians are accused of taking the “don’t let a good crisis go to waste” approach, and while crises are often exploited by disaster capitalists and demagogues, they can also be exploited by people who want to make the world a better place for everyone. In that vein, I want to take advantage of the current crisis (or the current tiny part of the larger climate crisis), to ask you to imagine a different world.

Summer has arrived in North America with infernal temperatures, and the wildfires seem to be getting worse every year. Between the heat and the smoke, going outside is increasingly dangerous in growing parts of the continent, at least for part of the year. It appears that the bleak reality of climate change is setting in for more people every year now, and I think that makes this a good time to really think about the dangers facing us in a warmer climate, and how our infrastructure, lifestyles, and even clothing may need to change.

These changes have already been underway, at a reactive level. The COVID-19 pandemic may have caused a global increase in mask usage, but the areas affected by the growing wildfire problem have had masks on the list of recommended household safety gear for a while now, because of the problems caused by smoke inhalation. As temperatures rise, many chemical reactions will become more common. Air pollution in general is going to keep getting more dangerous, and wildfires make that problem worse not just by having more smoke in the air, but by burning human structures, waste, vehicles, and so on and releasing those chemicals into the air as well. We’re expected to have more pandemics in the near future, simply because of habitat destruction and climate chaos bringing humans into contact with new animal populations, but we’re also going to want to have masks around because hotter air is more likely to be poisonous.

It’s becoming harder and harder for anyone to believe that life as we’ve known it is ever going to return. We’re gazing into the unknown, and it’s natural for our minds to conjure images – to make spontaneous guesses for what might actually be out in the darkness. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and the shape of what follows has yet to be determined.

Let’s continue thinking about masks, for example. I’ve been wearing one in public spaces for 16 months now, and I generally dislike them. I don’t like the close, muffled feel or the way the masks press against my beard. They’re uncomfortable, but also necessary. I think that as the temperature rises, and the necessity for masks increases, I’m going to want to make a re-usable mask that fits more comfortably, and that’s not going to make me feel like I’m suffocating if I have to wear it during a heat wave. I’ve toyed with the notion of a mask with a rigid skeleton, washable filters, and maybe even a battery powered air pump or fan for circulation. If we’re gonna have to deal with a dystopian hellscape of climate chaos and late-stage capitalism, we might as well get a cool cyberpunk aesthetic to go with it, right? Guess I’d better add some infrared LEDs to mess with surveillance equipment while I’m at it.

Aesthetics aside, with the temperatures we’re starting to see, I honestly think we’re approaching a point where going outside is going to require a full-body cooling suit on some days. Liquid-based thermal suits have been around for a while – they’re most famously used by astronauts for the under-suit worn inside a space suit. The basic principle is that the clothing holds a tube against the skin, through which water or some other fluid is pumped, drawing heat away from the body. According to Wikipedia, garments like this are designed to

…remove body heat from the wearer in environments where evaporative cooling from sweating and convection cooling does not work, or the wearer has a biological problem that hinders self-regulation of body temperature.

For the rest of our lives, a growing portion of humanity is going to live in those conditions for at least part of the year. Hopefully the fact that parts of Canada are approaching those conditions has disabused most people of the notion that anywhere on the planet is going to be guaranteed to avoid those conditions. People are going to need to have reliable shelter from the heat, and are going to need protective gear for going outdoors, especially for things like emergency services. What remains to be seen is how easy it’s going to be to build and maintain such garments as the heat continues to rise.

Even if it turns out we can make temperature-controlled clothing easily and safely, we can’t simply exist in full body suits for our entire lives – we’re going to need places where we can just exist, without protective gear, which means not just air conditioning of one form or another, but also common spaces that can be accessed without going outside, or without spending more than a couple minutes between buildings. I think there are a lot of forms this could take, but probably the most familiar would be dormitories, apartment blocks, and “co-housing” setups like this Norwegian project: 

In Vindmøllebakken, the units are arranged around a central core of communal

Vindmøllebakken Cohousing Project by Helen & Hard Architects interior courtyard

Sindre Ellingsen

spaces, which are equally and jointly owned by residents. The main entrance is through a lofty, light-filled courtyard space with an amphitheater, all built with spruce timber and insulated with hemp, creating a warm and welcoming atmosphere for residents to sit or to chat.

For those who want to skip this area of socializing, there is a more direct path from the street to residences that is available as well.

Adjacent to the courtyard, we have a communal kitchen and communal open-plan dining area, providing a space for residents to cook and eat together if they so choose. There is also a lounge and guest rooms. Further up, we have open walkways leading to a library, greenhouse, and workshop.

The architects say that: “The sequence of rooms is designed to create visual connections between spaces and people and to provide freedom to how much and when to engage in communal life.”

Another thing that is already the norm in some areas is to have grocery stores build into apartment buildings. The AirB&B we stayed at in Frankfurt on our move across the Atlantic had a full grocery store in the basement. I’m sure the residents of that building aren’t the only ones who shop there, but if they’re ever faced with conditions that require them to stay indoors as much as possible – like a killer heatwave – they’ll be able to get necessities without ever setting foot outside. Add in things like the monstrous floating cities used by the cruise industry, and subway stations built into the lower basements of skyscrapers, and it’s clear that we have all the pieces we need for cities that can function pretty well with a majority of people never needing to expose themselves to lethal outdoor conditions.

At the same time, the conditions we’ll be trying to avoid are likely to cause problems for both agriculture and freight, all of which brings us back to my long-standing belief that we’re going to need to invest heavily in indoor food production. That can be hydroponics, aeroponics, aquaponics, algae or bacteria farming, insect farming, or even giant, artificially lit underground fields for all I care, but our food crops can’t survive these heat waves and fires any better than anything else can, and the cost of irrigating them is going to start rising exponentially as groundwater continues being depleted and temperatures continue to rise.

It may not be everywhere, and it should not be how we spend all of our time if it can be avoided (I think we need to maintain a broad personal connection between the state of the climate and the general population), but it will be necessary for survival in most parts of the globe at least some of the time. As we look into things like high speed rail networks, I think we might want to consider spending the extra resources to build those underground to protect our transit network from the rising climate chaos. The current above-ground arrangements for mass transit are currently melting, warping, or buckling.

But all of this is just what’s going on in my head, and I think we need as many people thinking about this as possible. How can we adapt ourselves and our society to the way climate change is affecting your region? What would be needed for that change?

What are the obstacles, and how might they be overcome?

What changes could we make at the same time to foster community building and organizing, and to improve everyday life, particularly for those at the bottom? How could we rebuild society to increase everybody’s free time?

We are in uncharted territory in a number of ways. The people in charge know the harm they’re doing, but they’re lying when they say they know what’s best for humanity – they don’t, and they never have. It’s up to us to figure out what needs to be done, and to make that happen.

Anyway, I’m curious what thoughts other people have on how we might change things to survive what looks to be a very tough time.

The image shows a portion of what looks to be a round, multi-story room. On the bottom story, and closer to the foreground, are shelves of plants growing under artificial lighting. The level above has cafe-style chairs and tables overlooking what appears to be a garden with a small tree or a shrub in the middle of it. It looks like both a pleasant bit of greenery, and a small source of food.

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Update: Lytton has burned.

On June 28th, I mentioned the incredible heat record in Lytton, BC. Two days later, and the entire town was on fire.

One day after it set Canada’s all-time heat record, a British Columbia village was devoured by flames.

A fast-moving wildfire roared over the village of Lytton on Wednesday evening, which shocked climate scientists when temperature there surged to 121 degrees on Tuesday, breaking Canada’s national heat record for a third straight day.

The blaze was a sobering symbol of a hellscape in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada, where hundreds have died and wildfires are erupting as temperatures climb to astonishing heights. One location in Canada’s Northwest Territories, hit 103 degrees Wednesday, the highest temperature observed so far north.

‘Our poor little town of Lytton is gone’: Village at center of Canada’s heat wave devastated by ‘catastrophic’ fires

The Lytton blaze prompted a mandatory evacuation order at 6 p.m. local time for the village of 250 people about 150 miles northeast of Vancouver.

“The fire, it took maybe 15 minutes to engulf the whole town,” Lytton Mayor Jan Polderman told NEWS 1130, a news radio station in Vancouver. “People, basically they just grabbed their keys, and ran out the door. That’s how quick the fire happened.”

Canada’s Global News reported that several buildings were destroyed and that an “unknown number of injured residents” were taken out of the village by ambulance.

“The town is about a kilometre [0.6 miles] long and there were flames from one end of town to the other,” Polderman told NEWS11. “I saw it with my own eyes.”

Lytton burned as more than a dozen wildfires erupted in British Columbia amid the most extreme heat wave recorded in the Pacific Northwest and western Canada.

This is what global warming looks like, and it is just the beginning. The areas that burn every summer are going to keep growing. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I think it’s likely that areas that were historically too wet for fires like this are going to burn as well. As always, there’s a long list of things we could be doing as a society to respond to this emergency, but we’re not going to for as long as the current system remains in place.

They’re welcome to prove me wrong by using their wealth and power to solve the problem, but rather than hoping they’re going to do that, we should be working taking away their power.

How corporations go about the business of causing death for profit

As I hope you are all aware by now, the United States has a bad habit of pretending that any problem that existed in the past is no longer a problem. White supremacy, misogyny, abuses of power, genocide, colonialism, and the list goes on. All of these things are treated at various times, by various people, as being “in the past”, in the same way that Ancient Greece is in the past. It’s facts we might learn about, but we shouldn’t let it interfere with working on the future!

It’s all bullshit. It always was. The “former” colonies are all still being plundered and oppressed, it’s just that the tools and tactics have changed. Misogyny still exists at a systemic level. White supremacy still holds power at a global level, and causes countless deaths every day. The feudal dynasties whose abuses led their apparent loss of power are mostly still wealthy and powerful. Slavery continues. The same goes for corporate abuses within capitalism. There’s a long and bloody history of both the lethal working conditions imposed by capitalists, and the literal battles fought for workers’ rights. There’s also the horrific record of industrial pollution, and the ways in which it has killed, maimed, or otherwise harmed people all around the world. These things happened in the past, but they are not of the past. They never went away, they just made some cosmetic changes, and spent a lot of money repeatedly telling people that all that is in the past.

The same is true for the crimes of the fossil fuel industry. The fortunes they spent misleading the public and buying politicians are how we got to the point we’re at today, but they’re also why we continue to see a total absence of any real urgency in government. You could barely even call it a conspiracy – it’s almost completely in the open. At the same time, it can be a bit jarring to actually see and hear what actually happens as these people work hard to ensure that more people die, so they can keep getting richer:

These problems will continue to plague us, and continue to drive us closer to extinction for as long as anyone is allowed to hold that kind of power. For the survival of humanity, we need to eliminate the power of the ruling class, and not replace it with new rulers. It won’t be pleasant or easy, but it needs to be done.

John Oliver: Prison Heat

This is the second of what’s looking to be a series of posts on heat. Very often, when we talk about climate change, there’s a lot of focus on things like sea level rise, big storms, crop failure, and so on. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like there’s less focus on the simple fact that larger and larger portions of the planet will start having regular heat waves that exceed what humans can survive. There’s a time, possibly not too distant from now, when being caught without artificial cooling for too long will lethal to anyone. Maybe it’s just too grim to bear thinking about for very long. Regardless, we’re at the point where we’ve got to think about it, and take action.

If you care about justice, and recognize the problems with the American justice system (or those of other countries with which I’m less familiar), then the relentless rise in global temperature is creating a horrific human rights crisis as we speak:

It’s going to get worse, and we need to prepare.