Climate change action – all in our heads?

The psychology of climate change. Why aren’t we doing more?

Guest blog by Neil Kitching

My readers know that we should be taking climate change seriously, very seriously. We are educated, articulate, care for the environment, care for each other, and claim to care about future generations. Why are our emissions not falling faster? Please note that this article is for those based in ‘high income’ countries; ‘low income’ countries have more justification to concentrate on economic growth. I have added links (in brackets) to my previous blogs for those that wish to delve deeper.

I am no expert, but it seems that psychology and social norms trump science. The science is clear. Any warming over 1.5 degrees is ‘dangerous’ (Global Climate Report), yet we are already nudging that level and committed to much more. Impacts will be unpleasant at best, and some will be irreversible. For example, melting ice sheets, sea level rise, and changes in ocean currents (Sea Level Rise).

We lead busy lives, with a range of priorities and pressures. Just getting on with our lives can be enough. Some people have spare money, some get by some struggle. But more wealth doesn’t seem to be a key factor in taking decisive action. Rich people may invest in solar panels, but overall, they create more emissions (The Super Rich).

Parts of the fossil fuel industry must take part of the blame. Like the smoking industry(Smoking and Climate), they have stifled research, misled the public and politicians, and convinced us that there is no alternative. Many politicians, particularly in the USA, receive funding from the fossil fuel industry. Some have run a successful campaign to cast doubt and to delay environmental regulations. Yet, the fossil fuel industry only exists because we continue to buy their products. We now need the experts who work in the fossil fuel industry to invest their talents into renewables and better solutions.

I’m not sure we can place the blame on politicians. Most are good at reading the public mood. Yes, they can be unduly influenced by lobbyists, but they also react to public pressure. They simply don’t receive enough of that pressure.

Public opinion is hard to measure. Whilst polls indicate a majority in favour of more action to tackle the climate crisis, change is never easy. People don’t like being told they must buy an electric car, or a heat pump, or to eat less meat. Even when the majority is in favour, local campaign groups spring up to prevent or delay action, for example, campaigning against new transmission pylons to transport renewable electricity.

The traditional television and newspaper media have switched their approach in the last few years. Most no longer feel the need to provide a false balance – one story questioning climate change for every story in support of climate change. Of course, there are exceptions, with some newspapers readily taking up any story that criticises the switch to electric vehicles or heat pumps. But overall, the media has ‘got onboard’ in the last few years.

Social media is a can of worms. There is good and bad in it, what else can I say? The unfortunate fact is that it is an ‘echo chamber’ where like-minded people get together, so it stifles polite and meaningful debate. It raises fears or sows the seed of doubt in people who otherwise may act more decisively.

Community groups can, and should be, be part of the solution. But they are often trying to push a boulder uphill. They struggle to make an impact beyond a small group of activists. They can help to enact local change if the conditions are ripe, but we need politicians and businesses to create the right environment for local community action.

Individual lifestyle changes can have an immediate impact (How to Slash your Carbon Footprint). Choosing to share a house will reduce our home emissions, whilst where we choose to live can have a significant impact on our need to travel. However, many of us still perceive it to be desirable to move out of cities into suburbs or the country. Dietary changes (The Mediterranean Diet) are difficult for many and have not been adopted by the majority.

Buying less, and producing less waste, sounds easy but we are bombarded with marketing adverts and cheap products (Can we, should we, buy less Stuff?) and have access to poor recycling facilities.

The cost of changing to low carbon solutions is a concern, although sometimes misplaced (Insulate your Home), and based on short termism. Electric cars may cost more but their lifetime costs are now lower than petrol cars. The good news is the dramatic falling cost of solar pv, wind power and batteries are beginning to have a real global impact on carbon emissions (The Electric Tipping Point). However, some solutions are still more expensive, and some will always be so based on current global economics. For example,

decarbonising steel and concrete manufacturing is expensive. Meanwhile farmers have doubts about the practicalities of using fewer artificial fertilisers and pesticides. Economics and capitalism may be an underlying problem. But we are not ready to change tack dramatically. Politicians still espouse economic growth, or, if we are lucky, ‘sustainable economic growth’. There is a concern that if one country stopped economic growth, they would lose competitiveness and strength in a hostile world. However, our economy is based on continued growth which requires ever more energy and raw materials. Efficiency and recycling help but are not enough. And the ‘rebound effect’ is powerful. If, for example, I receive a government grant to invest in energy efficiency at home, this will reduce my energy bills. What will I do with my spare money? I could save it, in which case a bank will invest it in a growing company, or I could spend it. On an overseas holiday perhaps?

Businesses are integral to climate action. In our economy it is businesses that provide the goods and services that we all use. Given the right conditions they can act fast and enable radical changes to happen quickly. For example, new regulations quickly transformed the manufacture of home fridges and freezers to be far more energy efficient. But businesses are still obsessed with growth and this growth often overwhelms the good that they do – they now encourage us to buy larger fridges and freezers (with constant chilled water on tap), then we come under pressure to extend our houses and kitchens to have space for our larger fridges.

Solutions must be practical before we will adopt them. The first electric cars had insufficient range for most people. Today people are still worried about the lack of charging infrastructure. Fortunately, these challenges are being steadily overcome (EV’s: An Honest Assessment). Innovation and government investment can help to lay the foundation for more practical solutions.

With rare exceptions humans act when they perceive an immediate threat. We are not good at long term planning even if it is good for us such as investing in our pensions or looking after our health. Climate change impacts seem like something for the future, although it is already happening faster than predicted. We all claim to care about our grandchildren, but are we acting that way? Short termism is a real problem. So, you can see that there is no shortage of reasons and excuses for us not acting as fast as we should. But I think there is one more, based on psychology. This is the ‘herd mentality.’

We act based on social norms. No-one else seems to be panicking about climate change. People still buy petrol cars, go on foreign holidays, eat meat. We see adverts for cheap foreign holidays, marketing campaigns to buy ever more stuff which will somehow make us happier. Most people are not out demonstrating and demanding change from politicians. I think we are hoping that it will all somehow be ok, that action will be taken, perhaps the scientists are wrong, perhaps new technology will come to our rescue. It was cold this week where I live, perhaps climate change is exaggerated. Is this wishful thinking? Sorry, but yes is the answer.

Conclusions

Imagine a future conversation with your grandchild. They ask you three questions:

1. “Didn’t you know that you were killing the planet?”

2. “Why didn’t you stop?”

3. “What did you do to tackle the climate crisis?”

Will you be proud of your answers?

In conclusion, I think we need psychologists to work alongside scientists and economists to come up with solutions which are radical, but acceptable to the public (What if?).

Further Reading

ISM (individual, social, material) is a free to use tool to understand and deliver behaviour

change. It draws from economics, social psychology, and sociology.

The Climate Psychology Alliance is another useful source.

A clean energy revolution in the Derbyshire Dales

The first community-owned solar power in the Derbyshire Dales has been installed on the roof of Twiggs Stores in Matlock, thanks to a partnership between Derbyshire Dales Community Energy (DDCE) and the Big Solar Co-op. This will be the first of many renewable energy projects in the region that harness the potential of communities to power a sustainable future.

We celebrated this pioneering “small step” for the planet and humankind last week at Matlock Town Hall’s Imperial Rooms. We invited almost 50 people -Councilors from all political parties and business leaders along with the committed Community Energy Derbyshire Hub members some of whom spoke about their ongoing Community Energy funded project work

The Derbyshire Dales have a long-standing cultural connection to renewable energy thanks to its rich industrial heritage, when water mills in the Derwent Valley powered the production of high-quality silk and other textiles. The installation on Twiggs represents an important next step in the Dales’ journey – recapturing a strong history of community and sustainable energy, with a modern twist. Established almost 120 years ago, Twiggs is a well-loved family business which provides steel and a vast array of building supplies and tools to local people. Their solar panel installation consists of 165 panels with a generating capacity of 57kW. It should produce around 47,000 kWh per year – equivalent to meeting all the electricity needs of 18 houses each year.

“Twiggs has been privileged to be part of the community energy driven decarbonisation programme in the Derbyshire Dales. It’s been a real pleasure to be their first solar PV installation on our retail premises in Matlock – saving us money and leading the drive to tackle the impacts of climate change.” Richard Tarbatt, Managing Director at Twiggs

Working with Twiggs was a natural partnership, as Steve Martin, Co-Founder and Co-Chair of DDCE, outlines:

“We couldn’t ask for a better partner for our first project than Twiggs. They are an institution in Matlock: a family business genuinely connected with and supportive of the community. This project will support them as they support us – reducing their energy bills and making a very real contribution to achieving Net Zero by 2050. It shows what is possible, and we look forward to working with more local businesses for our next projects.”

The following video gives more details about action across the Derbyshire Dales, including Richard Tarbatt, Managing Director of Twiggs, giving his view on what solar means for the company and the community. https://vimeo.com/872297302

The Case for Growth Agnosticism

A useful guide to anyone interested in the current debate by the new labour government on economic growth-A commentary by Michael Albert of the University of Edinburgh

Can the needs of the planet be reconciled with the need for economic growth within our capitalist economy?
This is one of the biggest questions that divides sustainability researchers. Broadly speaking, there are three main positions in this debate: green growth, degrowth, and growth agnosticism (or “a-growth”).
The green growth position is currently dominant among mainstream economists and policymakers. It believes that there is no fundamental contradiction between economic growth – measured in terms of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – and sustainability. The key argument here is that GDP growth is not inherently reliant on environmentally damaging practices. Instead, we can “decouple” growth from environmental damage – in other words, we can continue to grow the economy while reducing CO2 emissions, energy consumption, raw material extraction, and land-use practices that destroy intact ecosystems to make way for agriculture or mega-infrastructure projects.
As evidence, green growthers show that many rich countries – including the UK – have absolutely decoupled their GDP from emissions and energy consumption. This means that emissions and energy consumption have stabilized or declined even as GDP continues to go up in these countries. They also show that the world economy as a whole has relatively decoupled from energy and emissions – meaning that the latter are still growing, but at a slower rate compared to global GDP. At the same time, they argue that more ambitious climate and environmental policies can help accelerate these trends to create truly green growth. For instance, rich countries can coordinate and raise carbon prices while bolstering public investment in renewable energy infrastructure, thereby bringing down emissions more rapidly. They can also invest in “circular economy” practices in which waste products are recycled and used as inputs in other forms of production – such as by creating electric vehicle batteries that are easier to recycle, thus decreasing the need for primary extraction of lithium, cobalt, and other minerals that are currently needed to produce these batteries.

In sum, the green growth argument is that we are already seeing trends towards green growth (particularly in rich countries), and that these trends can be accelerated through more ambitious policies. Furthermore, they claim that green growth is not only possible but necessary, since they believe that GDP growth is essential to eliminate poverty, fund public services, invest in climate mitigation and adaptation, and improve collective welfare overall.In contrast, degrowthers argue that the green growth position is less empirically substantiated than its proponents believe. First, degrowthers do not contest the fact that many rich countries have achieved absolute decoupling from emissions and energy use. But they argue that these statistics obscure the energy, emissions, and raw materials embodied in their imports, since they only reflect those produced within their territories. Furthermore, degrowthers show that global energy and material use continues to rise at the global scale – which they argue is really the scale we should be focusing on, since this is what is ultimately driving our planetary crisis.
And as the global economy continues to expand at a compound rate – meaning that it would be roughly twice as large as today by mid-century, and five times larger by the end of the century – they fear that efficiency improvements and gains from circular economy policies would be wiped out by the dramatic increase in economic activity as a whole. Second, degrowthers argue that the real question with emissions is not whether they can be absolutely decoupled from growth, but how rapidly. For instance, one study shows that the rates of decarbonization achieved in even the best performing countries – including the UK and Sweden – are nowhere near fast enough to achieve their net zero by 2050 targets. Furthermore, they show that a “net zero” by 2050 target is insufficient from the standpoint of global climate justice: if the whole world needs to reach net zero by 2050 in order to stabilize global temperature increases around 1.5°C, then rich countries – who have already used far more than their “fair share” of the planet’s carbon budget – would need to get there much faster, as early as 2030 according to some studies.
For degrowthers, the likelihood that rich countries could achieve such ambitious climate targets while continuing to rely on economic growth is vanishingly small (if not impossible). Third, in direct opposition to the green growthers, degrowthers believe that green growth is very unlikely if not impossible, but also unnecessary in the first place (at least in rich countries). This is because GDP – as many economists recognize – is a poor measurement of social welfare: it measures the scale of monetary transactions and profits that accrue within an economy, which tells us little about whether quality of life is actually improving for most people. It also includes many “bads” that are harmful to quality of life: for instance, if most of us work 70 hours a week, this would boost GDP while also fuelling exhaustion and burnout rather than improved well-being. Degrowthers thus believe that GDP growth is a circuitous and inefficient way to improve collective welfare, especiallyin rich countries that already have high levels of per capita income and material consumption. Instead, they argue that alternative economic models are possible that focus on reducing our material footprint while alsoenhancing collective welfare – such as by shortening the work week, increasing our leisure time, guaranteeing access to basic necessities, and investing more deeply in the “care” sectors of the economy, such as mental and physical health care, elderly care, education, affordable housing, and ecological restoration.

Finally, the growth agnostic (or a-growth) position falls somewhere between these two poles, though it is closer to the degrowth position in many respects. This is the position that many of us at CMP advocate. A-growthers agree that GDP is a poor measurement of social welfare and doesn’t deserve to be the lodestar that guides economic policy. We agree that our main goal should be to halt the climate and mass extinction crises while improving our overall health, well-being, and security, whether or not this involves an increase in GDP. We are more agnostic, however, on whether “green growth” in some form is fundamentally impossible. For one, many of us believe that the most urgent problem is not necessarily aggregate GDP growth itself, but rather the growth of particular industries that are overwhelmingly responsible for destroying the planet – mainly the fossil fuel industry, but also the livestock and commercial fishing industries, which are predominantly responsible for the biodiversity crises plaguing our lands and oceans. We also recognize that it is possible for solar and wind energy to enable a different kind of “growth” that is less extractive and more circular – since these technologies require less material extraction compared to fossil fuels, and can be recycled more effectively. At the same time, we recognize that the renewable energy economy is already perpetuating many of the same forms of ecologically damaging and socially unjust forms of growth that characterized the fossil fuel economy – including dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems to make way for solar and wind farms, new mines for transition metals like lithium and cobalt, and new battery storage and transmission lines to integrate intermittent renewables. The nature of the renewable energy future-to-come will not be the result of technological change alone. Rather, it will also be shaped by social struggles and policy choices, which could lead to a more circular, democratic, and just renewable energy economy, rather than one that perpetuates socially and ecologically damaging extraction and enriches investor-owned utilities while foisting higher electricity costs onto the rest of us.
Whether or not a more just and sustainable renewable energy economy would be compatible with continuous GDP growth is debatable, and arguably besides the point. What matters is that we build it as rapidly as possible; what happens to GDP is a secondary concern.
Still, we should also recognize that the green growthers have a point: at least within our current economy, GDP growth is indeed necessary to create jobs, reduce unemployment, fund public services, and thus ensure economic security for workers and businesses alike. It is thus understandable that many experts believe we must find a way to make growth compatible with sustainability, however long the odds might seem. But like the degrowthers, we do not see economic growth as inherently necessary to achieve these critical objectives. Instead this is a question of how we design our economies. Our current economy is indeed designed to rely on growth, but there is a new generation of heterodox economists showing how we can create a different kind of economy that achieves social and ecological objectives while ditching GDP, such as by creating a different kind of monetary system in which governments would not need growth to fund public services: they would spend it directly into the economy, while using a mix of taxation and supply-side policies to manage inflation risks. We do not claim to have all the answers here. We do not know exactly what a post-GDP economy would look like. But we can reasonably assume that it is possible and desirable. In terms of political feasibility, our immediate near-term objective is to create a more sustainable and inclusive form of growth in which the gains are broadly shared, rather than accruing to a small elite. In this we agree with the green growthers. But if the growth imperative continues to prevent us from undertaking the actions needed to reverse the planetary crisis and invest in the things that directly improve people’s lives, then it must be ditched.

To riff on a well-known cartoon from the New Yorker, we do not want to look back on the 21st century thinking: “well, the planet got destroyed. But at least for a beautiful period in time we sustained 2-3% annual compound GDP growth!” A piece by Michael Albert (University of Edinburgh)

The right have hijacked Englishness. Can it be reclaimed?

I spent Saturday morning listening to an exceptional former Green MP Caroline Lucas talk about England and being English and how distorted our electoral system has become. She is a formidable and eloquent analyst of how our system has become a bandwagon for the right and how we might change this dynamic by transforming many of our outdated systems including the absence of a separate parliament of England! She spoke at The Buxton Book Festival to a packed audience in the Opera House- and received a fully deserved massive ovation. She will undoubtedly be missed in parliament-but hopefully she will find a suitable and appealing platform to advocate for transformative change which will embrace and catalyse localism and energy democracy through the evocative and compelling stories on Community Energy Groups like those in Derbyshire.

Her new book “Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story”

With the UK more divided than ever, England has re-emerged as a potent force in our culture and politics. But today the dominant story told about our country serves solely the interests of the right. The only people who dare speak of Englishness are cheerleaders for Brexit, exceptionalism and imperial nostalgia.

Yet there are other stories, equally compelling, about who we are: about the English people’s radical inclusivity, their deep-rooted commitment to the natural world, their long struggle to win rights for all. These stories put the Chartists, the Diggers and the Suffragettes in their rightful place alongside Nelson and Churchill. They draw on the medieval writers and Romantic poets who reflect a more sustainable relationship with the natural world. And they include the diverse voices exploring our shared challenges of identity and equality today. Here, Caroline Lucas delves into our literary heritage to explore what it can teach us about the most pressing issues of our time: whether the toxic legacy of Empire, the struggle for constitutional reform, or the accelerating climate emergency. And she sketches out an alternative Englishness: one that we can all embrace to build a greener, fairer future

Interdisciplinary campus battles UK sector status quo

London Interdisciplinary School has geared its courses around tackling real-world challenges, but some students seem reluctant to step outside the traditional higher education sector

June 28, 2024

Street Entertainer unwrapping a person wrapped in cling film in Covent Garden, London to illustrate Problem of prestige dogs interdisciplinary campus

Source: Grant Rooney / Alamy

Three years after the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) opened its doors to students, its dean, Carl Gombrich, describes its curriculum as “radical but simple”.

The institution offers only a single course – Interdisciplinary Problems and Methods, which draws on skills from such diverse fields as English literature, mathematics, neuroscience and political science to study “real-world challenges”, including sustainability and the ethics of artificial intelligence, holding that a cross-disciplinary approach is needed to prepare students to tackle multifaceted global issues.

In 2021, LIS became the first higher education institution in the UK since the University of Warwick in 1965 to be given degree-awarding powers at inception, but it did not come without its challenges. While there was “a lot of goodwill” from regulators as LIS worked to establish itself, Professor Gombrich, alongside founders Ed Fidoe and Chris Persson, discovered that current regulation was geared towards single-discipline approaches.

According to Professor Gombrich, who set up UCL’s first interdisciplinary arts and sciences degree course before joining LIS: “Interdisciplinarity as a theme doesn’t really exist as a learning outcome in education,” which makes “innovation naturally quite difficult” for any institution that wants to challenge traditional degree structures.

While the Conservative government may have tried to make it easier for new institutions to establish themselves through the Higher Education and Research Act 2017, Professor Gombrich said he “did not appreciate” the challenge that LIS would still face after three years in terms of winning recognition and status in the conservative and hierarchical UK higher education system.

“The prestige thing is huge,” he said. Potential students can be “suspicious that we can be, or are, as intellectually demanding, fulfilling and, ultimately, as useful to them as a traditional intellectual degree or a Russell Group university”.

A cost-of-living crisis in which students are focused on getting value for their investment could certainly make this hurdle harder to overcome, Professor Gombrich conceded. While renown and recognition can come with time, “the question for us internally is, do we want to wait that long? Definitely years, if not decades?”

The students LIS does attract “are not from privileged backgrounds – they’re just brave”, he said. Of its 151 students, 82 per cent attended state schools. Meanwhile, its master’s course has “taken off like a house on fire”. Having started with just nine MA students in 2022, the university counted 42 in its most recent cohort.

“They just get the need for interdisciplinarity much more,” Professor Gombrich said. “They’ve been out in the world. They’ve worked. They see that studying one thing at university was nice in many cases, but really not that helpful or important for their careers.”

And LIS has had some notable successes. With its first undergraduate cohort graduating this summer, its students have lined up some impressive positions. The first job offer received by any of the class was for Goldman Sachs’ competitive graduate scheme, with other students gaining sustainability advisory roles and software engineer positions.

Professor Gombrich made clear that the LIS approach “isn’t for every university”. But there should be the choice, he said, and LIS should form part of a healthy ecosystem of higher education providers.

“With 600,000 people a year at university at least, there has to be a big space for students who go just because they want to get a job out of uni. And there has to be a big space for students to go just because they want to study medieval poetry. Both are possible. And there’s a third space, which should be big too, for extremely bright, talented, purpose-driven students who want both.”

Ultimately, this tension goes to the heart of the purpose of higher education: as graduates increasingly complain about feeling ill-equipped to enter the workforce, are universities there to prepare young people for their first job, or to provide a quality education that will set them up for their working lives and their place in wider society? Professor Gombrich said it did not have to be “black or white”.

Problems surrounding AI and sustainability are not “going to be solved by shouting in the streets or some technical solution”, he said. “[They are] going to be solved by some very smart person who gets the concept, who gets the history, who gets the data and is able to organise or set up a business which tackles this problem. So I don’t like the dichotomy between education either as instrumentalist for work or ivory towers. It’s clearly not [that simple].”

People will need a variety of complex skills and a range of knowledge to compete in a changing jobs landscape, he continued. “The jobs of now are already hyphenated,” he said, underlining the need for an interdisciplinary approach. Citing digital health, cybersecurity and sustainable fashion as examples, he said: “Hyphenation and hybridisation is inherently interdisciplinary.” Encouraging students to engage in a multidimensional approach prepares them for the lateral thinking needed in the workplace, he said.

But those championing such change can find themselves stymied by how higher education is viewed within the UK. Pressure on sixth forms and colleges to get students into Russell Group universities means that “there are some very powerful, locked-in incentives in terms of targets and perceptions”.

What the country needed instead, Professor Gombrich continued, was a “national conversation” about the role of higher education, and whether traditional degrees are inculcating the diversity of thought required of students and wider society.

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com

What does progress look like on a planet at its limit?

Putting endless growth above our wellbeing and the environment is no longer tenable-from a Guardian Culture article by Kate Raworth

Here’s a question for our times: how should we imagine the shape of progress? In the twentieth century the answer may have seemed to be very clear. It was growth, measured in terms of national income, or gross domestic product (GDP). And that growth was to be endless, an ever-rising curve. No matter how rich a nation already was, its politicians and economists would consistently claim that the solutions to its problems depended on yet more growth. As this article powerfully sets out, this last-century promises that economic growth will enable high-income countries to overcome their problems – whether problems of poverty or pollution – has not delivered. It is clearly time to reimagine the shape of progress and, with it, the policies that could bring about a twenty-first-century prosperity for a fractured humanity on a destabilized planet.

Stepping back, it’s useful first to recognize the appeal of growth. It is, after all, a wonderful, healthy phase of life, which is why people the world over love to see children, gardens and trees grow. No wonder the Western mind so readily accepted it as the shape of economic progress too, and simultaneously adopted the very twentieth-century mantra that ‘more is better’, both personally and nationally.

Yet if we look to nature, it’s clear that nothing in the living world succeeds by growing forever: anything that seeks to do so will, in the process, destroy itself or the system on which it depends. In nature things that succeed grow until they are grown up, at which point they mature, enabling them to thrive, sometimes for hundreds of years. As the Biomimicry pioneer

Janine Benyus reminds us, a tree keeps on growing only up to the point that it is still able to send nutrients to the leaves at the outermost tips of its branches, at which point it stops. Its pursuit of growth is bounded by a greater goal of distributing and circulating the resources that nurture and sustain the health of its whole being. Although we can appreciate the nuanced role, value and limits of growth in the living world, when it comes to the design of our economies, we have been acculturated to perceive growth as a constant aspiration and necessity. Thanks to the availability of cheap fossil-based energy in the twentieth century, the rapid and persistent economic growth that this enabled in industrialized countries soon came to be seen as normal and natural, indeed as essential. Its continuation over many decades led to the creation of institutional designs and policies – from credit creation to shareholder dividends to pension funds – that are structurally dependent on growth without end. In other words, we have inherited economies that need to grow, whether or not they make us thrive.

This requirement for endless growth has become so locked into economic theories, political narratives, and public expectations that, over recent decades, governments have made clear the desperate and often destructive measures they are willing to go to into order to reboot growth when it becomes elusive. They deregulate – or rather re-regulate – finance in the hope of unleashing new productive investment, but often end up unleashing speculative bubbles, house price hikes and debt crises instead. They promise corporations that they will ‘cut red tape’ but end up dismantling legislation that was put in place to protect workers’ rights, community residents and the living world. They privatize public services – from hospitals to railways – turning public wealth into private revenue streams that so often undermine the very services they claim to provide. They add the living world into the national accounts as ‘ecosystem services’ and ‘natural capital’, assigning it a value that looks dangerously like a price. And, despite committing to keep global heating ‘well below 2 degrees C’, they open new licensing for fossil fuel exploration, while failing to make the scale of transformational public investments needed for a renewable energy revolution. These policy choices are akin to throwing precious cargo off a plane that is running out of fuel, rather than admitting it is time to touch down and instead create post-growth economies that focus on delivering social and ecological health and integrity.

The insistent pursuit of growth in high-income countries is not only preventing carbon emissions and material consumption from being reduced at the speed and scale that these times urgently demand. It is also failing to tackle poverty and endemic social inequalities – the very problems for which growth is so often offered as the remedy. Indeed, the key message is that the pursuit of growth has become ‘counter-productive’ to the mission of tackling poverty. The policy tools that are so commonly used to stimulate growth – creating ‘business-friendly’ environments through privatization, commodification, and trade liberalization – in fact have all too often widened inequalities and created the very social exclusion that growth was promised to address.

Instead of pursuing endless growth it is time to pursue a thriving well-being for all people as part of a thriving living world, with policymaking that is designed to be in service to this goal. And this means putting human well-being and ecological integrity at the heart of our vision for economic success.

Starting with the goal of human well-being within planetary boundaries results in a very different shape of progress: in the place of endless growth we find a dynamic balance, one that aims to meet the essential needs of every person while protecting the life-supporting systems of our planetary home. And since we are the inheritors of economies that need to grow, whether they make us thrive, a critical economic challenge in high-income countries is to create economies that enable us to thrive, whether they grow.

Tackling and reversing inequalities needs to be at the heart of a new eco-social contract because doing so can deliver major impacts, both in terms of improving well-being – including self-expressed life satisfaction– and in terms of reducing nations’ ecological footprints, due to the well-documented links between social inequalities and consumption impacts. Tackling inequalities is also critical for reasons of political economy. One of the most damaging consequences of growth that exacerbates economic inequalities is the concentration of wealth and economic power in few hands. This can all too easily be converted into political power to influence elections and policymaking processes, to ensure that policies are retracted, enacted, or recrafted to preserve the systemic advantages of the already wealthy. There is, in other words, a tacit market for political influence, and it is used to ensure that inequalities of wealth, power and voice are perpetuated.

When we turn away from growth as the goal, we can focus directly on asking what it will take to deliver social and ecological well-being. And while many of the policies that this brings to the fore were, only a decade ago, considered too radical to be realistic, they are now gaining public interest, leading to animated discussion and serious policy consideration.

Kate Raworth

Climate Emergency and the WOLDS Development

After nearly 5.5 years the Wolds Planning application for 430 new homes on the hillside above Matlock came to a full planning meeting of Derbyshire Dales District Council on Thursday 28 March-The application faced bitter opposition on many fronts not least the fear of surface water flooding in the town itself. I was involved in the discussions of this site for most of those years and invited to offer my thoughts on the impact of Climate Change on the flood risk-this is my evidence I presented to the Planning Committee and to a packed audience:

Good Evening-my name is Dr Steve Martin – for almost 40 years I have been an Agricultural Scientist and Environmental Consultant – advising various parts of government and many businesses and universities.

My comments are a summary of why this site should never have been put in the local plan. It was a serious misjudgement of the devastating impacts of surface water flooding on Matlock- its residents and the businesses it supports – examples of which we have routinely experienced because of recent housing developments.

Climate change impacts on the water cycle by influencing when, where, and how much rain falls. It also leads to more severe weather events over time.

We are now repeatedly experiencing the serious impacts of global warming. The more heavy and intense rain we are seeing in recent years are only the beginning. As warming beyond 1.5 degrees- takes place we can expect and experience more of this –much more rain and much more flooding. Enhanced warming is predicted soon to be anything from 3 to 4 degrees.

This is because levels of greenhouse gases are not falling, they are increasing- Carbon Dioxide, Methane and the warming impacts from evaporating water vapor and transpiration from vegetation.

In preparing for this meeting, I read the most recent weekly Environment Agency’s bulletin on rainfall and river flow from March 2024 – this is what it said-

It has been another wet week across England, although slightly less so in the east and south-east. River flows increased at more than 85% of the sites we report on. Seemly hardly anything to worry about?

But tell that to the residents of Old Hackney Lane where I live and where 3 to 4 new springs have surfaced in homeowners’ gardens and now pour gallons of water onto the lane and have caused the removal of a huge chunk of tarmac off the lane – lifted by surface run off and increased the depth of numerous potholes.

In summary surface water flooding is the most widespread flood risk in England, affecting 3.2 million properties.

It is caused by a combination of factors including intense rainfall, soil permeability, topography, drainage system capacity(and the capacity of aquifers) and maintenance, and physical barriers such as buildings.

But the assessment of risk is very difficult-even impossible at a local level– because all the factors mentioned above have not been adequately researched and in anyway quantified by the Environment Agency- which makes risk assessment hugely problematic and, in my view, impossible.

This is why I object to this development and any future attempts to build on this site.

Of Sandboxes and Hourglasses: Reflections of a Young Person in Times of Change

Author: William Capps, University of Bristol

Will is a 23-year old sustainability advocate and recent graduate from the University of Bristol. With a critical perspective on Higher Education, he is keen on exploring the more-than-necessary radical and disruptive ideas about how universities can lead the transition to a more just, equitable and environmentally sound future.

The cycle continues its familiar pattern. A reliable month of March I can count on—though days grow shorter and starker, soon enough longer, warmer days will return. Just as surely new growth will replace fallen leaves and still branches. There is reassurance in these cycles, in nature’s inherent regeneration. But as the seasons reliably shift, our world now seems full of uncertainty—will current hardships pass or persist as new normal, will balances regain or chaos grow? On wet, dull days doubts creep in.

It’s on days like this when I do silly things like ask ChatGPT to create the image you see.

I have long been keen on confronting questions of the role of Higher Education for sustainability. And this gave to me the metaphors of sandboxes and hourglasses. At first, I chuckled at the whimsical image. However, as a young person wading through dizzying prospects of global change, the metaphors of the sandbox and the hourglass soon took on a different meaning. Speaking to my own learning process for sustainability. Acknowledging the two seemed key when grounding myself and living well.

The sandbox invites me to take risks, build and remake, to think without worrying about immediate answers. Exploration and process take precedence over definitive truths. And like shifting sands that reshape to fill spaces, insights and truths can self-organize amidst complexity if I relax into uncertainty. To a child, sandbox play holds significance, entire worlds created and destroyed in an afternoon. And present moments mirror this sandbox, where change feels dramatic and immediate. Where I may forget small sandcastles – taking risks, being creative and unbound – when the tide of adulthood sweeps me toward real world demands.

The hourglass, however, flows according to its own timeline – I see it as the epochs turning long before we arrived and continuing long after we depart. New equilibriums form, like grains in a tipping glass. Where this goes beyond humans to acknowledge the myriad more-than-human species, entities, and systems that shape and are shaped by deep time. And so, we speak of mystery and uncertainty, of humility in the face of vast and dynamic systems.

Of late there has been an increasing awareness that ideas and connections are old. This relates to the erosion of stone into sand, and how the grains are windswept and fall in different places. Which is a nice way of describing how integrating new perspectives is natural when engaging with subjects like sustainability. Or other subjects that get to the root of what it means to live a good life.

Sand speaks to how I navigate ideas and construct knowledge. Bits of information and insight reversibly filling asymmetries, reconfiguring perspectives over and over. Which is an exhausting process. Increasingly Sisyphean. Yet this thing about sand reconnects to the ancient coupled with the adaptive new. Acknowledging what came before, while cultivating capacities for shifting worldviews as the ground itself shifts underfoot.

It makes sense to me at least. And although, again, it’s exhausting. I’ve made peace. With simple priorities enacted here and now. Showing up reliably. Listening often. Sharing time. And continuing to tell the truth as I understand it to be.

What do faculty owe future generations?

By Sharon Stein, originally published by Resilience.org

January 30, 2024

I’m a millennial faculty member. The millennial generation – also known as Generation Y – came of age with 9/11, followed by the US-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and then the 2007/8 financial crisis. While we were growing up, promises of perpetual progress and prosperity abounded. However, as we entered adulthood, we confronted the harmful realities and precarious nature of the prevailing social and economic system. It became clear to many of us that these were not only false promises but they also came at a high cost. Yet when we expressed our disillusionment, some from previous generations suggested our generation was the problem, not the system itself.

I have been able to connect with many of my students over this shared experience. My home academic department exclusively offers graduate programs, so for the first part of my career, most of my students were fairly close to me in age. For these students, my invitation to engage critically and self-reflexively with existing systems has been generally well-received. But last year, I taught my first undergraduate course, made up primarily of the generation that followed mine, Generation Z (“Gen Z”).

Most undergraduate students today are from Gen Z, and they will soon make up an increasing number of graduate students, too. Teaching Gen Z, just one generation removed from mine, was a learning curve. Issues of social and ecological justice that were important to me have an even deeper urgency for them. Initially, I did not fully appreciate the differences between their experiences and those of my generation, and because of this, it took me a while to gain their trust. I realized how easy it was to do to Gen Z students what others had done to my generation: minimize their concerns and fail to recognize the underlying reasons for their frustration, fear, and grief.

Facing difficult truths

After centuries of people borrowing (some might say, stealing) from the future to pay for comforts in the present, the bill is coming due, and it is younger generations who will have to pick up the tab. In brief, this is because our finite Earth cannot sustain an economic system premised on infinite growth and consumption. Young people are acutely aware of this. In a recent survey of youth from 10 countries, 75% said they think the future is frightening and 83% said people have failed to take care of the planet.

As a result, many young people are asking us to see what we would rather not see, to turn toward things as they are, rather than as we would like them to be. They are asking us to admit to ourselves what they cannot deny: that escalating wars, economic inequality, extreme weather, biodiversity loss, food insecurity, and mental health crises are a product of our existing system; that the problems created by this system cannot be addressed using only the tools created by the system itself; and that there is a very real possibility of social and ecological collapse within their lifetimes, if not ours.

This is not something most faculty are generally interested in hearing. While some parts of us may be aware that things cannot continue as they are, our other, less mature parts tend to deny the potential for collapse because we fear being overwhelmed and immobilized by the depth and magnitude of the problem. That is an understandable fear, but it is not a legitimate justification for denial. To ignore these concerns is not only a mistake but also a refusal of our responsibilities as educators, and as human beings.

Accepting the stark realities of our collective predicament is not just about confronting the unsustainability of our current system. It is also about un-numbing to the pain that comes with possible systemic collapse, as well as to the pain that has already been created by this system. This includes the pain we ourselves have caused, given that centuries of economic growth in the Global North have been directly enabled by exploitation, extraction, and expropriation in the Global South, and in Indigenous communities around the world. In this way, at the same time as we accept the possibility of systemic collapse, we would need to also accept responsibility for many collapses that have already happened – the ecocides, genocides, and epistemicides – so that the beneficiaries of the current system could enjoy ever-expanding comforts and securities.

The education of older generations, including my own, has not prepared most faculty to hold these harsh truths and process these heavy emotions in generative ways, and thus, the education we offer our students is not preparing them to do so either. However, many students are seeking this kind of support. Thus, it is no surprise when they question the relevance of the education they are currently receiving. Effectively, we are educating people to “refine a system that operates by undermining the conditions of possibility for our biophysical survival.” As one student put it,

“Should we even be wasting these last fleeting years of our youth in a classroom when our elected leaders are leading us down a path toward total climate collapse?”

This is not just about the content we include in our courses, but also whether we make space in classrooms and campuses for students to pose challenging and uncomfortable questions. Recently, we have seen a rise in the suppression of students’ academic freedom. In response, a student in one of my courses observed,

“While education should be a realm of openness and exploration, the current situation suggests the opposite, creating uncertainty about where I stand in this educational equation.”

Holding space for unanswerable questions

We do not have to agree with everything our students say or believe in order to create educational spaces in which they can ask difficult questions of us, themselves, and the world around them. In my experience, the most important thing for many students is not that we agree with them, but that we be brave enough to walk alongside them as they meet the many unknowns and unknowables of the current moment. However, this request is not necessarily welcomed by those of us who were socialized to expect comfort, security, certainty, and the affirmation of our intelligence and relevance.

Thus, to collectively navigate current and coming challenges with our students, faculty would need to deepen our capacity to hold what is complex, heavy, uncertain, and uncomfortable. We would also need to develop the stamina to continue this work when it feels easier to just enjoy the excesses of the current system for as long as they last. And we would need to accept responsibility for unpaid intergenerational debts, but also the debts that are owed by the Global North to the Global South, and by settlers to Indigenous Peoples. When discussions about these responsibilities arise, many of us focus on what we stand to lose. But what might we gain if instead, we accepted young people’s invitation for us to grow up and face our complicity in harm?

Last fall, I attended a conference and was asked to present on a panel with fellow Gen Y scholars. The discussant, a professor from Gen W (the generation born in the years following World War II), noted with gratitude that they felt genuinely challenged by our papers. In their closing remarks, they encouraged us to respond with the same level of compassion and humility when the next generation of scholars inevitably challenges us: to welcome not just new ideas, but also the general spirit that it is possible, and often necessary, to do things differently than we have done.

This professor’s example of academic “eldership” gave me a glimpse of how intergenerational relationships in the academy could be otherwise – more generous, self-reflexive, and accountable. It would not be easy, but it is possible to create the conditions in which we can have difficult conversations without relationships falling apart. If we can learn to do this, we will likely be better prepared to coordinate responses to complex challenges in ways that prioritize the well-being of current and coming generations of human and other-than-human beings. Systemic violence and ecological catastrophe did not begin with my generation, nor with any of the generations that are alive today. But we have a responsibility to make different choices than those that came before us, rather than continuing to pursue the same perceived entitlements.

Stepping back and showing up

I do not romanticize younger generations, believe they have “the answers”, or place all hope for the future in their hands. Doing so would be naive of me, and unfair to them – a deflection of my own and other generations’ responsibility for engaging in the tough work ahead. We are all part of the problem, and we are all still learning.

None of us know exactly what to do in this liminal space between a system in decline and whatever comes next. But we each have a small role to play as we figure it out and we have much to learn from each other in the process. This may be uncomfortable for professors who have crafted not only our professional identities but also in many cases our self-images around being the ones with “the answers.” Thus, we would need to lose our academic arrogance by stepping back from familiar patterns and showing up instead with humility as the full, flawed people that we are if we want to do the intergenerational relationship-building that is needed in this transitional moment.

This includes holding space for young people to process their fears, grief, insecurities, and traumas. Older generations would need to process our own as well and to share the insights from that processing with younger generations. Together, we might collectively learn from the mistakes of the existing system so that we do not repeat them, discern what from that system should be preserved and what needs to be “composted,” and develop a practice of ongoing collective experimentation with emerging possibilities that will inevitably lead to new mistakes but also new learning.

If all generations could commit to this work, together we might have a chance of interrupting the cycle of irresponsibility and immaturity that led us to this crisis point in the first place, and enabling something different and possibly wiser to emerge. Although faculty are not required to do this work as part of our formal job responsibilities, current and future generations will pay the price if we don’t. We owe each other more than that.

Teaser image credit: Youths protest in Toronto as part of the School strike for climate movement in 2019. By Dina Dong – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=86006664

Sharon Stein

Sharon Stein is an Associate Professor in the Department of Educational Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is a co-founder of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Collective and author of Unsettling the University. She is grateful to the people from four different generations who reviewed drafts of this text.

Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change

“Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite.”

By Rebecca Solnit

January 11, 2024

“To see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.”
–Georgia O’Keeffe
*

Someone at the dinner table wanted to know what everyone’s turning point on climate was, which is to say she wanted us to tell a story with a pivotal moment. She wanted sudden; all I had was slow, the story of a journey with many steps, gradual shifts, accumulating knowledge, concern, and commitment. A lot had happened but it had happened in many increments over a few decades, not via one transformative anything.

People love stories of turning points, wake-up calls, sudden conversions, breakthroughs, the stuff about changes that happen in a flash. Movies love them as love at first sight, dramatic speeches that change everything, trouble that can be terminated by shooting one bad guy, and other easy fixes and definitive victories. Old-school radicals love them as the kind of revolution that they imagine will change everything suddenly, even though a change of regime isn’t a change of culture and consciousness.

Maybe religion loves them too, as conversion, revelation, and sudden awakening.

Saul falls off his horse with the strength of his revelation and gets up as St. Paul, the Buddha gets enlightened in one intense session under the Bo Tree, Muhammed gets a visit from the Angel Gabriel—but at least with the latter two, the story has to include the long journey of intention and exploration leading to the sudden event. I love dramatic stories too, but I think they tend to mislead us about how change happens.

I’ve found in my twenty-something years of messing about with Buddhism is that what it has to teach is pretty simple; you could read up on the essentials in a day, probably in an hour, possibly in a quarter of an hour. But the point is to somehow so deeply embed those values, perspectives, and insights in yourself that they become reflexive, your operating equipment, how you assess and react to the world around you. That’s the work of a lifetime—or of many, if you’re inclined to believe in reincarnation.

Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.We are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now.

We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Maybe this is the task at which novels and biographies excel.

In the scope of a substantial novel is room for someone to grow up, to change, to learn, for Pip to come to understand how his love for Estella was all tied up in other people’s suffering and his own upward-mobility ambitions and class shame, for Elizabeth Bennett and Fitzwilliam Darcy to see that their own first impressions were mistakes born of hubris and fall in love with each other, for the nun at the beginning of Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse to undergo extraordinary transformations, heal others, find and lose love, and grow old, for the formation of characters, the building and tearing down of relationships, the arrival of those revelations that can only arrive slowly.

Anyone who’s gotten over a heartbreak or a bereavement knows that there aren’t five stages of grief you pass through like they were five whistlestop towns on the train route. You are more this way one day and more that way the other, looping and regressing, and maybe building reconciliation or acceptance like a log cabin while living in sorrow, rather than sliding into it like you were stealing third base.

You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient.

And we are impatient creatures, impatient for the future to arrive and prone to forgetting the past in our urgency to have it all now, and sometimes too impatient to learn the stories of how what is best in our era was made by long, slow campaigns of change. Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that “the arc of history is long but it bends toward justice,” but whichever way it bends you have to be able to see the arc (and I’m pretty sure by arc he meant a gradual curve, not an acute angle as if history suddenly took a sharp left). Sometimes seeing it is sudden, because change has been going on all along but you finally recognize it.The expectation that change will be swift and the failure to perceive it when it’s not impacts politics for the worse.

Maybe you’ve had those moments when you suddenly see that someone you love has changed in condition or character, and your picture of them is out of date, or those moments when someone absent for months or years reappears and points out a change to a person or place or system unseen by those who adjusted to without perceiving tiny increments of change that added up. But the change itself wasn’t sudden.

The expectation that change will be swift and the failure to perceive it when it’s not impacts politics for the worse. A common source of uninformed despair is when a too-brief effort doesn’t bring a desired result—one round of campaigning, one protest. Or when one loss becomes the basis for someone to decide winning is impossible and quitting—as if you tossed a coin once and decided it always comes up tails.

Another immense impact of this impatience and attention-span deficit comes when a political process reaches its end, but too many don’t remember its beginning. At the end of most positive political changes, a powerful person or group seems to hand down a decision. But at the beginning of most were grassroots campaigns to make it happen. The change got handed up before it got handed down, and only the slow perspective, the long view, lets you see the power that lies in ordinary people, in movements, in campaigns that often are seen as unrealistic, extreme, aiming for the impossible at their inception.

The best movie I’ve ever seen about this is a 2022 documentary called To the End. It traces the creation of the Sunrise Movement—the US climate organization for people under 30, started in 2018—and their launch of the Green New Deal, showing how it influenced the Biden campaign’s climate platform, deserves credit for Build Back Better, and finally—yes, in reduced and compromised form, but still—crossed the finish line in 2022.“People who do nothing, people who have not even canvassed or anything, they start critiquing your strategy to win.”

That is, by taking a five-year time frame it shows how what ended up as a piece of legislation began as young idealists dreaming of change, and by tracing that trajectory shows that young people, grassroots campaigns, and radical new ideas can have power. The short-term version gives you politicians giving us nice things. The long-term version shows you movements shifting what’s considered possible, reasonable, and necessary, setting the stage and creating the pressure for these events, offering a truer analysis of power.

There’s a wonderful scene in To the End in which Alex O’Keefe, then creative director of the Sunrise Movement, declares as he unloads a station wagon, “People who do nothing, people who have not even canvassed or anything, they start critiquing your strategy to win. ‘But how are you gonna win, what’s your strategy, is it realistic, can we win?’ Who cares if we can win, man? We’re just unpacking boxes. You do things step by step.”

His patient commitment reminds me of Greta Thunberg’s famous 2019 declaration “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” It’s an analysis that says, as I understand it, two important things. One is that addressing the climate crisis is a longterm project calling for many kinds of labor. The other is that we must work toward a post-fossil-fuel world knowing that the solutions continue to evolve—for example solar and wind were expensive, wholly inadequate technologies early in the millennium and are now cheap, effective, and being implemented at a dizzying rate while battery storage and materials are evolving at dazzling speed.

In this lies the secret of why, if you crave suddenness or can’t keep your eye on the slow, destruction seems exciting, construction boring. Of course there’s slow destruction and what the environmental historian Rob Nixon called “slow violence”—the decline of wildlife populations, the destabilization of the seasons, the dismantling of the progressive economies of the mid-twentieth century. These catastrophes are often too gradual for those with no clear baseline or long attention span or strong news summary to perceive—literally they’re not new enough for news.

For climate this means that the metabolic tendencies of news is often ideally suited to tell you that something sudden and maybe unanticipated happened last night—a flood, a fire—and it was bad. A lot of climate good news is both wonky—a technology breakthrough or a regulation passed that will eventually have positive consequences—or incremental.

Describing the slowness of change is often confused with acceptance of the status quo. It’s really the opposite: an argument that the status quo must be changed, and it will take steadfast commitment to see the job through. It’s not accepting defeat; it’s accepting the terms of possible victory. Distance runners pace themselves; activists and movements often need to do the same, and to learn from the timelines of earlier campaigns to change the world that have succeeded.

To be able to see change is to be able to make change. I’m an advocate for slowness, not in the sense of dragging your feet or delaying your reaction but in the sense of scaling your perception to to perceive the events unfolding, because I’m an advocate for making change.

Featured image: “Deauville, Low Tide,” Eugene Louis Boudin (1860-1865)

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

http://rebeccasolnit.net