As the continents’ frozen burden dissipates, the ground deforms — not only in the immediate area, but also in far-flung locations.
The loss of melting ice from land masses such as Greenland and Antarctica is causing the planet’s crust to warp slightly, even in spots more than 1,000 kilometres from the ice loss.
What qualities help assure that a community can survive the threat of disaster? The population density of cities leads to inherent vulnerabilities to mass climate disasters: such as single point of failure transit systems and utilities built prior to today’s environmental realities. At the same time the resources of cities offer tremendous potential for preparation and innovation.
As a sociologist, Klinenberg brings insights on how neighborhood dynamics (what he calls “social infrastructure”) can help individuals & communities prepare for extreme weather including flooding and heat waves. He discusses how cities can be wiser and think more long-term by planning traditional infrastructure projects which also enable such social infrastructure in their design.
“Climate Change and the Future of Cities” was given on March 07, 02017 as part of The Long Now Foundation’s “Conversations at The Interval” Salon Talks. These hour long talks are recorded live at The Interval, our bar, cafe, & museum in San Francisco. Since 02014 this series has presented artists, authors, entrepreneurs, scientists (and more) taking a long-term perspective on subjects like art, design, history, nature, technology, and time. To follow the talks, you can:
Firefighters battling the Dixie Fire have also been facing a second enemy: a serial arsonist who went on a spree of setting fires in July and August — and who sought to trap fire crews with his fires, according to agents from the U.S. Forest Service. They allege former college professor Gary Maynard is the culprit, citing their tracking of his movements and other evidence.
“Where Maynard went, fires started. Not just once, but over and over again,” the government said in a court memorandum arguing for Maynard to be denied bail.
LINK TO FULL ARTICLE: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/11/1026700103/former-college-professor-arson-charges-california-dixie-fire
One of the Writer/Director’s of Antrum said about Xen: The Zen of the Other:
…wildly creative experiments with form…through a down-to-earth lens and with a sense of humor. … I felt spoken to many times as Ezra articulated his own frustrations with life and with his own expectations of the world. – DAVID AMITO, award-winning Actor. Writer, Producer, Director of Antrum
Working for the app, which feeds users local crime information, ‘is very traumatic’ and the managers ‘don’t appear to care’
“There’s nothing that tells me that that wouldn’t happen again,” one employee said. “It’s a private security force controlled by a bunch of really rich white men who have no concept of the communities that they’re supposedly protecting because all they want is money. What could go wrong?”
Link to full story: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/02/citizen-app-employees-mental-health
Psychotherapists figured out a long time ago that a roundabout approach is necessary if you want to tease out the origins of any serious psychological problem. You won’t get there by any direct approach, since the defensive maneuvers the patient uses to keep from thinking about the real source of his problems will keep you from getting there either. That’s why dreams, slips of the tongue, and the like played so large a role in psychotherapy, back before the medical profession stopped helping people understand their problems and settled for the more lucrative option of drugging them into numbness instead. That strategy is also a viable option when the craziness we need to understand belongs to a society—ours, for example—rather than an individual.
LINK TO FULL STORY: https://www.ecosophia.net/rice-and-beans-in-the-outer-darkness/
A few days ago, millions of tons of super-heated gas shot off from the surface of the sun and hurtled 90 million miles toward Earth.
The eruption, called a coronal mass ejection, wasn’t particularly powerful on the space-weather scale, but when it hit the Earth’s magnetic field it triggered the strongest geomagnetic storm seen for years. There wasn’t much disruption this time — few people probably even knew it happened — but it served as a reminder the sun has woken from a yearslong slumber.
While invisible and harmless to anyone on the Earth’s surface, the geomagnetic waves unleashed by solar storms can cripple power grids, jam radio communications, bathe airline crews in dangerous levels of radiation and knock critical satellites off kilter. The sun began a new 11-year cycle last year and as it reaches its peak in 2025 the specter of powerful space weather creating havoc for humans grows, threatening chaos in a world that has become ever more reliant on technology since the last big storms hit 17 years ago. A recent study suggested hardening the grid could lead to $27 billion worth of benefits to the U.S. power industry.
“It is still remarkable to me the number of people, companies, who think space weather is Hollywood fiction,” said Caitlin Durkovich, a special assistant to President Joe Biden and senior director of resilience and response in the National Security Council, during a talk at a solar-weather conference last month.
READ THE FULL ARTICLE: https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/05/solar-storms-are-back-threatening-life-on-earth-as-we-know-it.html
If you’re reading this now, in these early stages of New Maps, you’ve probably found your way here from Joel Caris’s Into the Ruins or John Michael Greer’s blog Ecosophia. Thanks for coming. I’m excited to be starting this new project, and making sure good deindustrial fiction will keep getting out into the world.
The first issue of New Maps is planned for early this coming winter—I’m aiming for January of 2021. Until then, though, it’s not just all me. There are some things you can do to help make the first issue as terrific as I know it can be.
First and foremost, I’m looking for stories! If you’ve written for Into the Ruins, or if you always wanted to but never got to it before the last issue was announced, I want to hear from you. For that matter, I want to read your story even if you’ve just arrived here from none of the places I mentioned above, and you’ve never even heard of deindustrial fiction before, but you’re intrigued by what you see, and want to take a crack at writing some of it. Just head over to the contact and submissions page and get in touch.
I hope you’ll consider subscribing to the first year of New Maps. Each issue will be available for individual purchase, but everyone who subscribes early helps make this magazine more possible and better from the get-go. You can subscribe now, and order single issues once they come out, at the order page.
I’m looking for letters to the editor to make up the first issue’s letters section. I realize that without any previous letters or stories to respond to, obvious topics to write about are somewhat thin on the ground, but I hope the beginning of a new publication, as well as some of the interesting new manifestations of the long decline that have shown up around us lately, will provide enough material to go on. As I keep building this site and laying more groundwork for the magazine, I may also pose some questions here. Info on how to get in touch is at the contact page.
If you’d like to keep abreast of the latest, including questions for readers to weigh in on, progress, and the occasional sale, sign up for the New Maps email list, which will keep you updated whenever news is posted here or when a new issue is on its way. (I plan to keep the amount of email manageable: likely an email every one to three months.)
Thanks, and I look forward to creating a magazine you’ll love to read.
LINK: https://www.new-maps.com/news/2020/08/a-welcome-to-new-maps/
Our nineteenth book revolves around the theme of death, lament and regeneration.
With escalating reports of species extinction, the loss of habitats, and now a global pandemic, many people are waking up to the grief and loss that have threaded through the work Dark Mountain Project since it began. During a decade of descent, the books have appeared like small arks bobbing on a dark ocean, containers for creative work that mourns both ecological and cultural collapse and celebrates the beauty of a vanishing world.
LINK: https://dark-mountain.net/product/dark-mountain-issue-19/
Our core question we took with us as we began this voyage: How can we face and properly lament what has gone?
Shrouded, like a moth inside its cocoon, this collection sets out to hold ways to collectively mourn the loss not only of our fellow humans, but the wild world that has always succoured us. Our forebears knew the effect the dead have on life and the importance of grieving, of keeping the dead close. Our task was to find the words and images that mark the loss in ways we might have forgotten but still lie deep buried within us: how we might, like Caroline Ross, fashion our own Grave Goods out of deerskin and bronze, occupy the Houses of the Dead as in Fawzia Kane’s poems, and bear witness as Stephanie Krzywonos does, watching a penguin walk to its death in the arid Antarctic interior. How we can encounter the currents of the mythic beneath the ordinary world on a South Dakota highway as Samantha Wallen reminds us in The Death Mother.
The book has been created as a memorial by 60+ artists and writers, a gathering of testimonies from people and places, grief walkers and haunted lands. Ringed by the ashes of the burned forests of Australia and the Americas, entwined with the now-vanished tree roots of Deru Anding’s native Borneo, it enshrines the broken bones of dead creatures, reconfigured in ceremonial staffs by Jim Carter or intricately observed drawings by Kathryn Poole, the fallen feathers of the gyrfalcon, the wren and the black grouse, the testimonies of ancient grains and antediluvian fossils, wreathed by leaves of roseroot from Greenland and milkweed seeds from Ontario, the sharp scent of Mexican marigolds that light our way to the Underworld.
Words and images to take with us as companions into the dark…
