Not all in your head: New answers on the chemistry of mental fatigue

I’ve always found it irritating that mental effort can be so exhausting. As someone whose work has revolved around reading, thinking, and writing for over a decade now, it never ceases to annoy me the way my brain will sometimes just shut down when I try to do work. I’ve found it to be a major obstacle k for as long as I can remember. I’ll try to re-focus on something that I want to get done, and my I’ll suddenly have a hard time even staying awake. It’s not every time, of course, but it’s often enough to be annoying, and it does tend to happen more when I’ve been working hard for a few days.

I’ve never really thought much to the brain chemistry behind this problem, but now that I’ve seen this research, it makes sense that there would be chemical reactions going on there that are causing the mental fatigue:

“Influential theories suggested that fatigue is a sort of illusion cooked up by the brain to make us stop whatever we are doing and turn to a more gratifying activity,” says Mathias Pessiglione of Pitié-Salpêtrière University in Paris, France. “But our findings show that cognitive work results in a true functional alteration — accumulation of noxious substances — so fatigue would indeed be a signal that makes us stop working but for a different purpose: to preserve the integrity of brain functioning.”

Pessiglione and colleagues including first author of the study Antonius Wiehler wanted to understand what mental fatigue really is. While machines can compute continuously, the brain can’t. They wanted to find out why. They suspected the reason had to do with the need to recycle potentially toxic substances that arise from neural activity.

To look for evidence of this, they used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) to monitor brain chemistry over the course of a workday. They looked at two groups of people: those who needed to think hard and those who had relatively easier cognitive tasks.

They saw signs of fatigue, including reduced pupil dilation, only in the group doing hard work. Those in that group also showed in their choices a shift toward options proposing rewards at short delay with little effort. Critically, they also had higher levels of glutamate in synapses of the brain’s prefrontal cortex. Together with earlier evidence, the authors say it supports the notion that glutamate accumulation makes further activation of the prefrontal cortex more costly, such that cognitive control is more difficult after a mentally tough workday.

So, is there some way around this limitation of our brain’s ability to think hard?

“Not really, I’m afraid,” Pessiglione said. “I would employ good old recipes: rest and sleep! There is good evidence that glutamate is eliminated from synapses during sleep.”

There may be other practical implications. For example, the researchers say, monitoring of prefrontal metabolites could help to detect severe mental fatigue. Such an ability may help adjust work agendas to avoid burnout. He also advises people to avoid making important decisions when they’re tired.

Since I’ve come to accept that my brain is “disordered”, I’ve had a much easier time turning a desire to act into actual action. It helps to be able to recognize what my brain is doing, and then shift to working out how to dismantle that mental block, rather than trying to just push my way through it.

But knowing that I can do that doesn’t mean the mental blocks aren’t there anymore. The problem is that my primary tool for detecting those mental blocks is the same lump of meat that’s experiencing them. When I’m in the middle of a problem, I often don’t notice what’s happening – all I have is the experience of my brain resisting me. I’ve also had to accept that that’s going to keep being an issue, at least until I can afford diagnosis and treatment. At the root of it, there are times when my brain has a “knot” like you might get in your neck or back. You can’t brain your way out of a brain problem.

From what I can tell, this research shows that that’s true for everyone some degree, but I’d guess that it’s more so for certain people under certain conditions. I think that the panoply of neurotypes and mental problems is largely due to the complexity and plasticity of the brain. Muscles can be trained, and there’s a great deal of flexibility and diversity when it comes to what you can train them to do. Brains seem to go way, way beyond that, so it’s frankly not shocking that they can turn out so many different ways of processing, interpreting, and interacting with the world.

My worst period of mental burnout was a few years back, and I did not notice it coming. I’d been working hard, but I was feeling good about working hard. I was getting good feedback, and respect from people, and I was feeling good about my life.

And then I started sleeping through all my alarms. I just couldn’t wake up when I wanted to. I wasn’t just late for work, I’d sleep through half the day, and wake up to realize I’d missed a meeting, even if I’d gone to sleep at a reasonable hour. My brain just stopped cooperating. It didn’t matter how many alarms I had, or where I put them – I could either shut them off without ever gaining full consciousness, or sleep through them.

I was lucky to be in a forgiving work environment when that happened. I know a lot of other jobs would have just fired me, even though it wasn’t under my control. As a rule, people only matter in our society for the work they can do for someone up the ladder. I think it’s very telling that despite that rule, so many put so much of their time and energy into making life better for other people.

This also underscores the degree to which our current political and economic system is both unjust, and unsustainable. It turns out that the culture of pushing people to work past their limit never went away. The kinds of jobs changed (in the U.S.) as manufacturing and resource extraction was increasingly done overseas, but the same fundamental demand – that you work as hard as you possibly can – has never gone anywhere. Ever hear the phrase “mind over matter”? Ever hear someone be told they’re just lazy, or they just don’t want the job badly enough?

We’ve created a world in which it’s expected for everyone to push at least some part of their body to the limit on a daily basis, and if we don’t – or if our limit manifests in the wrong way – we deserve all the bad that comes to us. There is no way that this system is ever going to lead to a society that values human life or flourishing. There is no way that this is the best that we can do as a species.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Man the tredges! We must protect children from air pollution!

Every once in a while, I like to talk about the benefits of incorporating plant life in and our buildings and cities. In addition to the mental health benefits, which I think are reason enough, there’s ample evidence that more plant life can reduce the harmful effects of air pollution. This is another one of those times when it’s so obvious something’s a good idea, I find it perplexing that more cities aren’t investing more heavily in urban vegetation. I know a great many cities around the world have been doing just that, but as ever, it’s not enough to satisfy me.

So, here’s some more evidence that we should have more plants around us:

A team of researchers led by Barbara Maher, Emeritus Professor at Lancaster University, and supported by Groundwork Greater Manchester, installed ‘tredges’ (trees managed as a head-high hedge) at three Manchester primary schools during the summer school holidays of 2019.

One school had an ivy screen installed, another had western red cedar and the third school had a mixture of western red cedar, Swedish birch and an inner juniper hedge. A fourth school, with no planting, was used as a control.

The school with the ivy screen saw a substantial reduction in playground particulate matter concentrations, but an increase in black carbon. The playground with the mixture of planting saw lower reductions in air pollution to that of the western red cedar.

The biggest overall reductions in particulate matter and black carbon were shown at the school with western red cedar planted. The results showed almost half (49%) of black carbon and around 46% and 26% of the fine particulates, PM2.5 and PM1 emitted by passing traffic were captured by the western red cedar tredges.

The tredges also significantly reduced the magnitude and frequency of acute ‘spikes’ in air pollution reaching the playgrounds.

Professor Maher said: “Our findings show that we can protect school playgrounds, with carefully chosen and managed tredges, which capture air pollution particulates on their leaves. This helps to prevent at least some of the health hazards imposed on young children at schools next to busy roads where the localised air quality is damagingly poor, and it can be done quickly and cost-effectively.”

I could never have predicted that becoming a writer would one day lead me to learning the word, “tredges”. That said, I’m not surprised that I’m learning about this from researchers in England.

It seems pretty clear that this is a good investment. It also seems like the kind of thing that parents interested in direct action could band together to demand, or even just do. I’m not speaking from experience, but I expect this would be hard for local politicians to oppose, and easy to unite parents around, regardless of ideology. There may be parents out there who wouldn’t support better health for their children, but I doubt there are many.

There are a lot of small things that most communities are capable of doing for themselves, but that don’t get done. I think at least some of that is people just not realizing that they have the resources they need, but a lot of it is the likelihood that any good will be undone by the system that’s supposed to be working for us. Where that system is working against us, it may be worth doing something like – in this case – putting up a hedge, without waiting for permission. If one were to do that, I imagine it would be best to have signs attached to it, explaining what it’s for, and encouraging people to fight to keep it. Even if one lost such a fight in the short term – if the hedge (or tredge) is destroyed because the right paperwork wasn’t filled out, then that would become something around which you could rally support.

There are a lot of problems in the United States caused by activist parents making noise at school board meetings and other such local political events. This seems like a way to activate people in a more constructive direction by using similar tactics (assuming that getting your tredges isn’t as easy as I think it ought to be). Getting a hedge put between a play area and a road is a small enough change that I think most people will believe that it’s within reach, which will make them more likely to put in the effort to make it happen. I also believe it that the conversation about the benefits of greenery for children could fairly easily be turned to conversations about air pollution and greenery in general, waging a campaign like that could well make people think about what other things they could accomplish by working together. I don’t know whether good fences really make good neighbors, but good tredges definitely make better neighborhoods.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Former cop, police abolitionist?!

The concept of police and prison abolition is scary for a lot of people. We’re taught that police are what keep society together, by upholding order and solving crimes. The reality is that the order they uphold tends to mean chaos for those at the bottom, and if we think that social harmony is a goal worth fighting for, the current law enforcement system is counter-productive. We can do better. This video is an approachable intro the topic, from someone who worked as a cop.

Tegan Tuesday: Another day, another dollar stolen from creatives

HBO Max’s decision last week to scrub 36 titles from the internet has sent shockwaves throughout a lot of people either involved with, or emotionally invested in the arts. It’s not surprising, per se, when considering the merge with Discovery+, the discussion of how the streaming service had already lost the streaming wars before it started, or of course the shock from earlier this month how the new Batgirl movie would not be released, ever. There are rumors that 70% of the development staff for the media conglomerate will be laid off.

Media companies closing doors is hardly news. Media companies cancelling beloved shows is hardly news – remember Firefly? But what is new is the way that Warner Bros Discovery (the media conglomerate with more assets than I can shake a stick at) has handled the cancellations: silently removing the media without even telling the creators. An article from before the quarterly reports came out stated the issue quite plainly:

Like other streaming services, HBO Max issues monthly updates about titles being added and removed — for example, it announced that all eight original “Harry Potter” films will be exiting HBO Max at the end of August, while it’s also adding a big bucket of content including 28 films from A24 such as “Room” and “Ex Machina.” But none of the Warner Bros. original films purged from HBO Max were included in recent updates.

And, ok. Sure. Don’t announce to the general public that you’re doing shady business. That’s standard operating procedure for every corporation. But not even telling the artists? The creators of the most recent wave of cancelled shows mostly found out via twitter.

There are more tweets – from more creatives – as most of animation twitter was in mourning last week, but I feel these give enough of a flavor without dwelling in abject misery. Adding insult to injury, none of these creators even have copies of their work. If they want to watch their own creations, their own artwork, they now have to pirate the media. The art director of cancelled show Tig N’ Seek, Levon Jihanian tweeted as much last week.

This seemingly-bizarre disconnect between artist creation and the artist actually viewing their work, led many to wondering how, why, and what caused this situation. In response to such questions, an anonymous industry animator described the draconian working conditions of animation on tumblr:

https://kibbits.tumblr.com/post/693162180367007744/i-just-said-this-on-twitter-but-im-a-bit-awed-at

And these are only the shows that are completely scrubbed from the web, aside from piracy. Shows which remain on the streaming site might still lose more than 200 episodes, like Sesame Street had happen. Sesame Street — ah yes, what a useless show that no one ever watches. I’m sure that no parent or child noticed those missing episodes.

A media conglomerate pulling titles after a merger feels familiar, however. Where have I seen companies putting newly acquired media into vaults before… Ah yes — good ol’ Papa Walt, the champion of ridiculous copyright law and the vigilante against evil daycare centers. The primary difference that I can see between the Disney/20th Century Fox merger in 2019 and the HBO/Warner Bros Discovery merger of this year is that Disney was vaulting older, repertory titles. Warner cancelled existing shows that had already created their new episodes. Keep in mind, I hate both actions. But at least when The Name of the Rose (1986) or Cocoon (1985) were pulled from US markets in 2020, all creatives involved had already been paid. (Although the Vulture article linked above discusses the negative impact on small, local, repertory theatres.) I wonder if animation is likely to be the next media industry to see massive amounts of people leaving the industry for good. Digital effects artists have already started that process and I could easily see animation being next. Apparently it was industry practice to show examples of your work on streaming sites as part of your portfolio — how can you do that when all references to the media have been pulled?

At this point, many people from within and without the industry have begun speaking louder and louder about the value of owning physical media and pirating digital media. The more copies of any given item, the more likely that it will exist in the long run. There are many examples of lost films being found in attics or buried in archives, and media conservation is a serious issue. In a discussion on the value of media preservation via piracy, conservation policies were brought up:

https://renthony.tumblr.com/post/693041372584886272

Please – let’s try and keep modern media and culture available. Buy physical media, pirate digital media; don’t let corporations and streaming services decide what’s important. If art is important to you, it’s worth saving.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: Carbon offsets

Since the environmental movement gained popularity, corporations have been finding ways to profit off of people’s reasonable desire to safeguard the ecosystems around us. These greenwashing tactics tend to be actively counterproductive. They encourage people to believe that the problem is being solved, often by the very people who are causing it. This absorption of movements for systemic change has been extremely effective in preventing that change from actually occurring, and the same has been true of climate action. Carbon offsets are a part of this. The idea makes sense in a vacuum. If you assume that society is making a good-faith effort to deal with climate change, there will still be some fossil fuel use for at least another few decades, and one way to reduce that harm is to actually work to capture carbon, to balance it out.

Works in theory, but unfortunately, everything is still run by capitalists, who have a powerful motivation to make sure nothing changes in any meaningful way. As always, John Oliver does an excellent job breaking down exactly why carbon offsets are a scam.

Farmer: It looks like we’re avoiding mass famine this year.

The Majority Report has a farmer who calls in regularly from Nebraska, mostly to talk about the state of grain production both in the US, and globally. I’ve posted some of his calls before, because I find them useful. Longtime readers will know that I’ve been worried about the state of global food production for a while now, and that worry was increased by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, plus the many, record-breaking droughts that have been happening around the world this past year. As with a lot of good news relating to the climate, this is good because it means we’ve probably got a bit more time before catastrophe becomes unavoidable. That means more time for countries to try to change how they grow food.

I’ll be going more into this soon, but when it comes to food shortages, the middle and upper classes of rich, mostly white nations will see prices rise, but we are unlikely to actually starve at this stage. What will happen instead, is that food that would normally go to countries in Africa, in particular, will be diverted to places like the United States, Western Europe, and so on. It’s good that we’re probably not there yet, but make no mistake – that will come if we don’t change things. I’ve included a partial transcript of the video below, to cover Kowalski’s reasoning for this sort-of-rosy prediction.

[…]
It is looking like the U.S. is going to be producing very similar to last year. Not exactly a record, [but] mildly above average, which is good. Commodity prices have been coming down lately. There’s some good signs out of China that [their] summer crop was a bit better than they were expecting, but I personally won’t believe that until about December, when we know that definitively. They’ve done this before in order to drive down prices to buy South American grain cheap, but it looks like they probably are doing all right.

But aside from that. just there’s been too much heat in Europe. but they’re probably going to be okay. The U.S., the droughts in the southwest are still not great but there’s enough irrigation for now, so probably no major famine, but food prices will probably be up, especially in places like the Middle East and East Africa.

A lot of this is not good long term. If the fertilizer situation is not resolved… Basically, the ground can store nitrogen for a while, but from what I’ve been reading, a lot of places especially with marginal ground (particularly in like Africa and South America; [tropical soil is not as good as temperate soil, so] they rely more heavily on artificial fertilizers in order to have […] a crop that would be considered pretty poor in the States, and if they don’t get more fertilizer. they’re just there there isn’t going to be any left in the soil to use next year.

I know this might feel bleak for “good news”, but it’s important to remember that the fact that we know this stuff, means we have the ability to do something about it as a society. As ever, the goal is to build up our ability to wield collective power, so that we have the leverage to create change even if those at the top don’t want it.

Video: America’s coming Weimar moment

Does the title have your attention? Does it fill you with a feeling of dread?

It should.

Over the years, I’ve heard a lot of conflicting narratives about how the Nazis came to power, but at this point I think the biggest obstacle to understanding history might be the way we’re taught history through the lens of so-called Great Men. Everyone wants to focus on Hitler. I think it’s no accident that this perspective on history came about in viciously hierarchical societies like the ones that brought us the world as it exists today.

I think this is a bad approach to history because as we are currently seeing with the fascist Republican Party, while “charismatic” leaders are a key component, they are also eminently replicable. This is why the notion that getting rid of Trump will “cure” the GOP is little more than a childish fantasy. Trump is not the cause, he is the current vehicle. The party base loves him passionately, and will defend anything he does, but if he leaves the picture, they’ll happily transfer that worship to whoever wins the next dick-swinging contest. Trump’s continued power in the GOP is not required for the United States to become a fascist regime. The oligarchs will happily find a new vehicle if he can’t go the distance. I also think they honestly would be fine with Trump dying in prison (though I doubt that’ll happen), because it’ll be such a useful propaganda tool for them.

So it’s useful to look at the larger system, and in this case, the judiciary. Hopefully by now you are already alarmed about the U.S. Supreme Court, and their naked abuse of power, but I’m here to make clear that you’re probably not alarmed enough. Well, I’m here to encourage you to listen to the Iron Dice podcast, and learn about how conservative politicians and judges sabotaged the aspiring democracy of Weimar Germany, and brought the Nazis to power:

Tegan Tuesday: Danish commitment to Ukrainian city is a reminder to keep looking forward to a better future

It has been almost six months since Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24th. Buckets of ink have been spilled about this war, with most of the discussion centering around bad news. One of the hardest hit cities was the southern coastal city Mykolaiv. As the NYT described the situation:

Few places in Ukraine have experienced the kind of sustained barrage of Russian fire as this city on the southern coast. Since the war began nearly five and a half months ago, there have been barely two dozen days free of violence.

The attacks have destroyed about 1,200 homes and apartment buildings, according to the city’s mayor, Oleksandr Senkevych. Since the war began, he said, 132 residents have been killed and more than 619 injured in Russian attacks.

Daily, I see updates on social media about the extensive shelling and the destruction of the city, and it’s been heartbreaking to see. Cue my actual surprise to see that the Danish government will be sponsoring (and paying for) the reconstruction of Mykolaiv. The Ukrainian city mayor has spoken with Danish officials, stating that Ukraine looks North for inspiration, and they want to make a “new Copenhagen” on the Black Sea. This is a two stage process: while Ukrainians want to build a modern, green city, there needs to be a city to build! The primary issue that Denmark will work on (while the war lasts) is water. Mykolaiv residents are without potable water. The primary pipeline for water access was bombed and the alternative water supply is not purified. The Danish government will install 100 water purification systems throughout the city in an attempt to ease this burden from the Ukrainians. Further support for Ukraine in general will also come from Denmark, including support for their EU bid, Danish petroleum products and agricultural supplies.

This isn’t just a whim of the Danish — this is one of the early steps in fulfilling the Ukrainian Recovery Plan, U-24 as discussed in Lugano July 4-5 of this year. The conference organizers had already scheduled talks regarding the modernization of Ukraine prior to the the outbreak of war, but the invasion changed the focus of the talks to recovery. In order to afford the massive effort to rebuild, Ukraine is reaching out to many different individual countries and requesting ‘sponsorship’ for specific regions or cities. The original presentation of the Ukrainian Recovery and Development Plan offered a potential division into twelve areas and sponsors that included Ireland supporting the Rivne region, the US and Turkey tackling Kharkiv’s destruction, and Sweden and the Netherlands rebuilding the Kherson region. The proposed plan was enthusiastically greeted, and the Lugano Declaration, published July 6, 2022, indicate that the plan for recovery will move forward, although no official sponsorship will occur just yet. Just a little over a month later, and Denmark is the first country to begin working with Ukraine.

Projects like this are political as much as they are humanitarian, and it’s worth remembering that. As with discussion of joining NATO, this is part of much larger geopolitical contests. It would not shock me to learn that Ukraine requesting European investment is a pointed reminder that Ukraine is a part of Europe, and therefor merits support from the rest of the continent. That said, it seems clear that projecting power and influence by building up other countries is much better than doing so with war. The situation is still on-going, but I hope that this is one step of many such cooperative moves in the near-future.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!

Video: A future beyond capitalism? Socialism explained.

In the most general sense, the various forms of socialism, to paraphrase Richard Wolff, are united by the belief that we can do better than capitalism. There are a lot of different visions for how that might work, ranging from the various efforts we’ve seen in the past, to today’s plans for a better future. That diversity of thought also means there’s a great deal of disagreement, and people who a liberal or conservative might lump together could well be offended by the association.

I have my own opinions, which shift as I learn more and gain new perspectives. The thing I’m really pinning my hopes on is the idea that we can come up with far better ideas than I can. It’s no coincidence that the most useful parts of my direct action post are the work of other people. In a very real way, humanity has a collective consciousness that is capable of far greater feats of philosophy and discovery than any of the so-called Great Men of history.

All of this is to say that when I present a vision of “socialism”, or of ways in which the world could be better, I’m not declaring that to be the best option, or even the one that I personally prefer. It’s more about having ideas in circulation, so that we can think about them, and how to improve upon them. Anyway, here’s a video I think is neat:

Welcome to The Age of Endless Recovery! Climate change is now a permanent drag on economic growth.

Some time back, I started thinking of the era we’ve entered as The Age of Endless Recovery. The basic concept is more or less what it sounds like – the severity and frequency of climate disasters is going to keep increasing, which means that we’re going to keep falling increasingly far behind in terms of recovery. Even if the same place isn’t hit every year, enough places around the world are being hit that just dealing with climate disasters is already imposing a sort of tax on everything we do. It’s not currently the primary cause of economic deprivation around the world – that’s still the profit-obsessed system that’s driving climate change – but it is making everything more difficult, even for those of us who are not directly recovering from a disaster.

The idea first occurred to me well over a decade ago (I’m sure I probably got the idea from someone else, but I have no idea who), but it wasn’t until the last three or four years that I felt pretty certain that we had entered that stage of global warming. I think to most people who’ve been paying attention, this isn’t exactly a radical suggestion, but for any who might think I’m exaggerating, well, now there’s research to back me up on this.

The study found that economies are sensitive to persistent temperature shocks over at least a 10-year time frame. It also found that climate change impacts economic growth in about 22% percent of the countries analyzed.

“Our results suggest that many countries are likely experiencing persistent temperature effects,” said lead author Bernardo Bastien-Olvera, a Ph.D. candidate at UC Davis. “This contradicts models that calculate metrics like the social cost of carbon, which mostly assume temporary temperature impacts on GDP. Our research adds to the evidence suggesting that impacts are far more uncertain and potentially larger than previously thought.”

Previous research examined the question by estimating the delayed effect of temperature on GDP in subsequent years, but the results were inconclusive. With this study, UC Davis scientists and co-authors from the European Institute on Economics and the Environment in Italy used a novel method to isolate the persistent temperature effects on the economy by analyzing lower modes of oscillation of the climate system.

For example, El Niño Southern Oscillation, is a three to seven-year temperature fluctuation in the Pacific Ocean that affects temperature and rainfall in many parts of the world.

“By looking at the GDP effects of these types of lower-frequency oscillations, we’re able to distinguish whether countries are experiencing temporary or persistent and cumulative effects,” Bastien-Olvera said.

This is what climate scientists and activists have been trying to avoid for decades. Now, in addition to the enormous task of changing our society to stop destroying our environment, we also have the additional burden of constantly rebuilding and recovering from ever-more-frequent disasters.

The upside is that we can respond to this proactively. As with so many other problems these days, we knew this was coming, and that means that we also know how to start getting out of this trap our “leaders” have led us into. This will sound obvious to some, and drastic to others, but if we want to get ahead of this problem, we should invest in relocating people. We should build housing in areas that are likely to be able to support more people (in the United States, that would probably be places like the Northeast, and over to the Great Lakes region. Nowhere is climate-proof, but we should be moving to areas that are going to have an abundance of fresh water, to avoid drought to whatever degree we can.

But we do need to move people. Ideally, cities like Miami won’t just be evacuated, but we’ll also dismantle them, to re-use the materials, and to reduce the amount of pollution that would come from just leaving the city to crumble into the rising seas. It would be a huge, costly endeavor. It would also be far cheaper to invest those resources to do it now, than to just “let the market decide” through countless lives being destroyed. As I keep saying, the world into which most of us were born is gone. That world has ended, or if you prefer, it’s in the process of ending. It a very real way, we are living through an apocalypse – a period of ending, and of revelation – and it may be that there’s nothing we can do to prevent that.

What we can do is lay the groundwork for a better world on the other side, and hopefully in doing that, we can find ways to make this era, well, less apocalyptic.

If you like the content of this blog, please share it around. If you like the blog and you have the means, please consider joining my lovely patrons in paying for the work that goes into it. Due to my immigration status, I’m currently prohibited from conventional wage labor, so for the next couple years at least this is going to be my only source of income. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month (though more is obviously welcome), to help us make ends meet – every little bit counts!