Speak, Memory, in Memoryspeak

Overnight, wondering whether government by the people could in fact erode like tooth enamel, I blinked awake thinking about if and how Americans learn about corporate greed in school. The silence choked my logic, as it often does at 2 am. Then I remembered taking intro-econ on Monday evenings at Georgia State University in central Atlanta in early 1996: I heard the professor’s grinning aside about “greed.” But I couldn’t tell you how I’d gotten there.

I mean, I could tell you why. I’d applied to professional school and the school said I could enroll if I showed up having learned the 101.

I can see the classroom and hear the lectures. I remembered sitting on slate-blue chairs, remembered the prof whose name was Dr. Gissy, remembered his emollient voice and thick black beard, remembered a young woman two rows ahead. As I thought about it some more, I remembered not remembering where I got my notebook, but cobbled something about a stationery store near my downtown workplace. But how did it get onto my calendar - which was a book sometimes and usually in my head? How did I find out about the class and how did I enroll?

GSU press release

I can picture in sharp relief how I walked to the walnut credenza in my office and Googled the school, but that didn’t happen in 1996. I foggily see myself pushing buttons on the base of my office phone, dimly hear someone taking my information on a call, picture a paper syllabus through the mist.

These confabulated routine memories pounce on us daily. How did you read a map? How did you learn about a job opening or about a party in the neighborhood? Papers flapped, envelopes arrived in the mail, and most keenly people spoke. We spoke a lot more, and more often. And in the speaking we would ask for clarification, we would redirect our speech, we would wait out someone else, and we would repeat ourselves in bright tones.

You’ve read laments on what may have abounded then that goes missing now in terms of compromise, meeting-in-the-middle, nuance. More simply, there was just more sound.

The inside of Taco Mac, courtesy https://tacomac.com/locations/1006-n-highland-ave-ne-atlanta-ga-30306/

When we begin trying to reconstruct the cognitive bridges, canals, ferries, and roundabouts we used to maintain among other humans, the share of images or sounds in any experience will form a tell as to how close we can get to comity. Consider:

A little earlier in my Atlanta years, I shared an apartment with a woman who had been dating one of my best friends when we co-signed the lease. He and she broke up within a month of our moving in together, and over the following months she and I became closer. And I was 24, and the crew in which I ran indulged in some jolly will-they-won’t-they.

Point being, one Saturday night neither my roommate nor I had much to do - I think we had called (!) some of our friends and they hadn’t been home (!) so we left voicemails (!). I had just gotten back from a conference and there was nothing to cook, so we went down the street to Taco Mac for a 1990s-yuppie-Atlanta sampler of craft beer and greasy chicken wings.

We sat and talked about, I think, our favorite bands for probably 20 minutes. At some point she looked across the room, whispered “oh!” and laughed as she tucked her chin. I followed where she was looking and saw three of our friends at a table, where they had been staring at us for who knows how long, looking for tells about whether our status had changed. Our high-top had extra chairs, so they all came over and that was more or less that.

Teleported into today, those friends would remain inquisitive but principled, and would never have shared pictures of us even if they carried cameras in their pockets and the Internet cloaked us all. But would they have taken a picture for their archive, or texted me to let me know where they were? And would they then have carried evidentiary booty of something that had not happened and was none of their business if it did? Would a picture have conferred some status on a maybe wavelength that made my roommate and me crabby? To the extent that their watching seemed harmless and overlookable then, would a picture have made it needling or like an act of muscling in?

Pictures tend to linger and separate from their memories. So do conversations, and when conversations become thinner and more exhausted then we all start feeling more defensive and more like forces are prodding us from here to there.

I’m lucky that I experienced so much of my life as steps that showed new places, dialogue that called up new verbiage, and moments that led to more questions. I talked about it a lot, not always clearly, but always gaining perspective from talking. I hope the kids in intro-econ can climb close to that now.

My Bustling Manhattan Boulevard, often sounding soundless

Pulling Through Nazareth

What happens in the split second when you realize that the person facing you has no desire to photograph or label you and is indeed standing there hoping to learn what’s troubling you? I can tell you. I’ve seen it on hiking trails, shimmying around boulders. I’ve seen it spill across paths and beaches on Rhode Island’s Newport tourist trail. And I’ve seen it as I’ve walked through American suburbs, getting out the vote.

It’s a lowering of shoulders, a raising of a chin, a break in the imaginary. It’s an invitation to discard the avatar and attend to the actual. It’s not close to an elixir for the silence and the suspicions that shroud most American days these days, but it’s palliative and has potential. I’ll zoom in on two moments of the smile here, and leave the essay unsure of what lingers.

And I’ll tell you what unspools below the cerulean photo even as I update this the morning after Donald Trump decisively won the presidency. The outcome, which I sought to forestall, underscores how fragile is the moment I want to hold onto. To keep its contours in place, you have to nestle it under something stretchy and reflective and hold it hard.

The same goes for civility itself.

So in October 2023, I was walking around Sterling, Virginia, canvassing for the Sister District Project. A guy in his garage saw me approaching. He raised his shoulders and narrowed his eyes. He said no thanks.
He was fixing the chain on a little kid’s bike, which lay at his feet. Other bikes leaned nearby. I said all I wanted was to ask if he would find time to work on my kid’s bike. And then the reaction occurred. I welcome it and have seen it many times.

The man squints for a moment, letting himself affirm that all that arrays before him is a friendly different man. He lowers his shoulders. He engages with a smile or chuckle.

When this happened in Sterling, I made my pitch for the state-legislative candidate I was supporting. (Her name is Russet Perry. She won.) We chatted for about 45 seconds. He said he was planning to vote for her. I thanked him and moved on.

The work my companions and I do for Sister District each year involves marshaling volunteers from politically predictable places to support Democratic contenders in close state races. We get to talk to voters on their doorsteps about things like public school funding, opening hours for county job offices, industrial zoning. That is, we get to talk about life.

There is a moment where it sinks in: all there is before you is someone with nothing to sell, with an opinion and some positions for you to consider, with appreciation for your time. If I could bottle that moment and deliver it as a pill, I would take it every day I bike to work and I would hope for the government to stockpile it.

One outcome to note is that people can gain pep and calm in a perfect soft-serve-chocolate-vanilla swirl not necessarily from seeing their side win, but from sharing genuinely friendly behavior. This confers a privilege.

When you get to speak to people, you also get to listen to them. A number of preconceptions pop into the autumn air. One voter thought my candidate hadn’t done enough in office - and he was right, because she had never held office. I know not how he chose to vote in 2022, but I know he was nodding as I spoke and making calm eye contact as I said goodbye, and I know the candidate I supported won by 58 votes.

It also delivers surprises. On a sunny September Saturday, I walked around an upscalish community talking mainly to registered independents and Republicans about my candidate’s commonsense proposals on zoning and lowering property taxes.
The canvassing handbook says you accomplish most in pairs and that individual men garner the fewest conversations, but I spoke to 13 folks for what you can technically measure as a good long while.

I later guessed with my wife and friends that seeing a middle-aged white guy just wanting to be helpful seemed so refreshing that people let down their guard. But people generally let down their guard, once they see that you are there to learn and collaborate. They don’t generally change their minds, but they sometimes do, and your assumptions change.

I’m the lucky one in these moments, because I get to share an envelope of time in which I and the other man stop being types, or demographic signifiers, or others, and start being neighborly. I wish I had taken more time to learn what goes on in these neighborhoods- and in the future, I will try to do that.

These moments when the guard falls are real, and twinkle in instant memory. In Nazareth, PA on the first Sunday of November, I was canvassing for Sister District again with my son at my side. The neighborhood looked at times like a chess board of Trump signs and Harris signs. People walking their dogs said hello, sometimes with a clipped inflection that translates to “I see you there on the landing, with your flyers, I see you squunching at the addresses on your app.” As we walked along, a guy at a corner was hosing down his car in the sunshine.

“Hey,” I called, and pointed toward my son. “His room could use a cleaning, too.”

“WHAT?!” said the man. I repeated the joke.

Again, the shoulders lowered and the eyes relaxed. He made a joke at the same level (which is to say, pacific and instantly forgettable) and on we walked.

Now. History acts as a terrier on our terry-cloth impressions, and as it happened the 2024 campaign saw thousands of enthusiastic volunteers knock on doors of millions of unenthused voters. We lacked time and basis with which to earn some of their enthusiasm. We didn’t know, or didn’t acknowledge, what we didn’t know.

When you start conjuring moments of friendliness as pulses of emotional glucose, it cues you to start wondering why the taste in your mouth remains bitter. One factor to consider involves how rare these moments are - intensely in tight-packed Manhattan, where you can course through new parks like the one below and never share a nod.

And that deficit rears back, like a shadow over what I had tried to assume in my writing. I had tried to assume that magic escapes into the air when shoulders lower, but I now see that the friendly current remains just one ingredient of what we all breathe.

Hard conversations, not easy ones, form footholds to the mesa where the lowering shoulders and emerging smile can become pulses of light. When someone sees you as an equal and not as a would-be teacher or preacher, you two can stand on equal foggy ground, ready to name and then define what you don’t know and need to know.

We’ve got a long way to go, if you measure by our expectations. Five nights after Election Day, we were in the suburbs of my town to celebrate my dad’s 88th birthday at the restaurant where he and my mom were once regulars. My son wanted the Knicks game on one of the TVs crowning the bar, which were both showing out-of-town NFL action. He decided on his own to ask the bartender if she would change the channel.

So off he went. When he came back, he said that she had agreed - and that a guy at the bar (one of three folks perched there) had said to him: “Good for you.”

I smiled. “I think he thought it was surprising that I was talking to people,” my son said.

The next week, I was biking from Manhattan to my Brooklyn cubicle. A woman ahead of me was waiting for the light to change. I said “on your left, please” and she said “thanks” and I felt my chest lift as if I had pulled a shivering child from a frozen brook.

My son and I used to come to the dinner table with stories of “nice interactions” we’d had that day on bikes - just as I held onto the moments on canvasses. But now I see the moment curdles if it remains a moment. If we’re going to keep poison out of the air and the discourse, talking to strangers at any age needs to become a lot less surprising.

What is the Sound of No Horn Honking?

It was Halloween morning on the warmest October 31 this New Yorker could remember, and he was pedaling his bike on the path past the block-sized supermarket within the Brooklyn Navy Yard when a gleaming white minivan turned from the road into the parking lot, not pausing to let him go as drivers normally did.

Habits dig and scratch, so the New Yorker yelled “Yo!” while seizing the brakes and pausing. Inside the car was invisible, coated in sunlight. Some force crawled up from the New Yorker’s shins to his shoulders. He pointed the back of his right hand toward the car and folded four fingers toward himself, a gesture that means “go ahead.” The driver had stopped and now had to back up, but then the gleaming white minivan sailed into the parking lot.

A woman stood nearby and seemed to smile moments earlier. The New Yorker made a summary comment about the moment, free of rancor, and looked again at the woman. She had earbuds in and, if she had been smiling, was now just squinting and not looking at the spot where no collision had happened.

Communication failed: it was instinctive reaction that saved drivers and the guy on the CitiBike from a crash.

A few blocks east at the entrance to Steiner Studios, nearly the same dance occurred - and nearly the same confusion clouded our New Yorker, as he thought people would smile or wrinkle their noses or comment. They always had before.

Now they all had buds in their ears. A few couples further along the path spoke quietly as they walked in workout clothes. But for most of the ride, two miles and some change to go, one heard no noise and saw no shared glimpses.

You can rightly fret that people don’t talk to people with whom they disagree. But nest that fret in a sob that it often just seems like people don’t talk.

Know the Low Down That's Coming Up

Twice this week, I’ve joined seminars that turned out standing-room-only. The first occurred when I helped support four experts who led a session at the National Adaptation Forum in St. Paul. They were explaining approaches to evaluating climate-adaptation projects. The second occurred at the local Waterfront Alliance’s Waterfront Conference yesterday. I sidled into a discussion on resilience metrics. Again, the metric of “enough chairs” needed revising. Lots of us are determined to find ways to measure how we adapt.

People who need to reckon with how heat, floods, and volatility will upend their economies - which is to say, “people” - manifestly yearn for a strong method to gauge how their adaptive investments are meeting the moment. And the moment barely registers, because the future unfolds in fog. The claim that “doing something is enough,” if it ever gained traction, has popped like yesterday’s carnival soap bubble.

In the session I supported and the one I watched, experts agreed that the metrics we all seek come in multitudes. They apply to land, transportation, and heat-protection projects - and like those projects, they need to evolve across time to reflect what people in the places undergoing upheaval say they see and hear.

To intuit why and how that draws crowds, consider this photo I snapped during a morning workout in St. Paul, on a little island in the Mississippi River that you reach by ramp or winding stairs from a bridge across the street from my hotel.

You’ve got a freight train burning effluent, a bridge or two that’ll need shoring up, a river whose level will rise, some plants I can’t identify, and a downtown business district whose hoteliers sell the sight of that river. I didn’t photograph the “Path Closed Due to High Water” sign that someone had left out after the fact or the fiftysomething guy who one day will need to adjust his workout routines to the heat.

Later at the Watefront Conference, I learned from New York City coastal resilience chief Laurian Farrell to construe rising seas the way she said she learned to confront a cancer diagnosis in her 20s. That’s by preparing for any eventuality without terror but also without avoidance of what Farrell called “the hard truth.” The truth, as I’ve written elsewhere, is that unknowing comprises the fabric we’ll share in the future. Huddling over fantasy phone worlds won’t atomize that fabric, and outsourcing decisions to bots will only make it itchy.

(For the elsewhere, see this essay. I really wanted you to finish that last paragraph.)

The quest for blazes along the trail feels familiar to us humans. One day in ninth grade when we should have been parsing the rules of algebra, a buddy and I passed notes trying to decipher the lyrics to REM’s “Can’t Get There From Here.” There was no Lyricsfreak back then. We agreed on “When your world is a monster/bad to swallow you whole,” then something something, then “throw your troubles out the door.”
As I left St. Paul, I thought that our troubles are now outside our door, and that those of us who can lock ourselves in only crank up the sweat for everyone else and defer it for ourselves. Then I thought of the REM song’s chorus, where keening reassurances bounce off a grunted “can’t get there from here” before ending with a hint of a New Orleans funeral. (Rolling Stone critic Parke Peterbaugh noticed this at the time, and his review left an impression on me ever since.)

In a changed climate, and in a world where smartphones can outrace humans in the setting of frames, none of us has been there. Professionals’ appetite to think and talk about sound ways to evaluate projects boosts the case for getting into there, and through there, to here, together.

Al Smith Never Had Sea Level to Worry Him

Most mornings, I run around Lower Manhattan timed roughly to the sunrise. For several months it’s meant careering through pylons, Jersey barriers and construction fences as city and private workers take to buffering the waterfront from rising seas. Call it a daily preview and status check of adaptation in the world’s richest country’s biggest city.

Sometimes a Romantic fade to blue sky or similar light show spurs me to stop and frame a picture on my phone. Today, chugging through Alfred E Smith Playground next to the school where my daughter went to pre-K, I photographed the statue of this former governor and presidential candidate as he seemed to look toward a church across the street.

Smith, a first-generation American, grew up nearby and built his political legend by working hard to refashion government as a more-or-less competent servant to all people. He rooted out inefficiencies but never demonized business. He wanted his constituents to work. In this way, he could sing in harmony with President Biden and the many (correct) public officials who see the construction and deployment of clean energy as sparkplugs for decent, honorable work throughout American classes and counties. (The same can go for civil-engineering public works to temper unlivable heat and floods.) But the confident twinkle Smith got from his sculptor would likely turn to a squint today.

He’d have to address the people with bad information, on whom bad actors plant the bad idea that climate survival conflicts with commerce and comfort. And he’d have to grapple with the fact that transforming the physical world moves at a slower tick than the climate changes.

The scaffolds and pylons under the highway nearby hew to a project aiming to blunt sea level rise. (The highway above the work takes its name from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who beat Smith for president and squelched his political model. The memorials coexist peacefully.) It’d be spoiled to complain that this work “takes so long,” especially when I see the workers in hardhats doing it while I run by. But it’s sober to note that it does take a long time - while campaigns still spit out campaign promises on the regular.

If today’s hero-makers want politicians to project a sense of confidence, they’ll wisely tune their ears to calls for patience and explanations about process. FDR ventured that the only thing we had to fear was fear itself, unaware as he was of wildfire smoke or rainstorms that flood houses or social-media bots. Smith, though Roosevelt backhandedly saluted him as “the happy warrior of the political battlefield,” governed in some ways as more of a realist.

And on mornings between trash and implementation, when temperature swings in double-digit directions from one day to the next, I’m inviting us voters to focus on the horizon while both insisting that we change our foundation and realizing we’ve got a long way to look before things look stable.

When Hiding Exposes You Even More

This post comes on a rattling commuter train, just now chugging past a cemetery to the north and a brick warehouse with rooftop solar panels on the south. It tries to map an analogous place between honoring what’s lost and finding what’s possible.

It also comes hard, as musings about “us” learning to “get along” ring hollow while innocent people die in war. My Jewish tradition teaches that any innocent life lost comprises a lost world. So these suggestions about surviving the next few climate-warped decades come from a mournful spirit. I hope that earns them a few turns in your mind.

Riding around Manhattan, you notice posters with red banners showing portraits of murdered Israelis and shrines to innocent Palestinians, including one under a Palestinian flag in Cooper Square. You also see robin’s-egg-and-canary Ukrainian flags and off-color Putin repudiations. I haven’t seen dialogue, in part because war represents the failure of dialogue and these physical howls comprise part of a war. But as I’ve lamented in other posts, you generally don’t see dialogue in subway stations or in bars or in workplaces. You generally see people with heads down, perhaps producing posts instead of posters.

Dialogue remains possible, even at humanity’s limits. Were that not so, wars would crop up even more than they do and cities would convulse. And even if dialogue over something as raw and complex as the Israel-Palestine conflict comes especially hard, dialogue over things like public space or public schooling should lie in most adults’ reach. Yet on those things, too, the grammar runs to statements.

Consider trees. In a resilience project that many watchful citizens have rightly criticized in public meetings, New York City cut down a buncha (to use a technical term) tall trees in East River Park. And many more citizens plastered the park with posters charging the government with “ecocide” and urging folks to tie themselves to the trees. Jeff Goodell’s book The Heat Will Kill You First notes the worry that “tree people” will stymie many honest attempts at flood-prevention planning, and a planner I admire has privately worried to me about these same “tree people.”
When the management in my apartment complex proposed cutting down a tree that it said was digging up roots, staff ran off a poster to explain the decision. A poster from a nameless resident followed within days, urging us to email the board in defense of a tree.

The lack of dialogue in war roars out in bombs, slaughter and loss. The lack of dialogue in adaptation dribbles out in empty seats at public meetings, unformed words from people who’ve conditioned themselves to tap out emojis instead of hashing out compromises, and unexplored processes through which people can honor ones we’ve lost while fostering safety, visible work, and brighter tomorrows for those of us still sharing space.

Dialogues of the Dammed

Something recently ruptured the currents of air that I always pictured surrounding conversation. Helping my teenage son make plans to see his friends helped me see how texting about hanging out on the weekend puts you in a different stance than you’d have taken if you were calling about hanging out on the weekend. We’ve sworn fealty to the practice of tapping words onto a screen, usually very few, to chart our real lives. We should reconsider why- and how texting fractures the thoughts we humans share.

Before smartphones and apps intervened, when we primarily spoke, ideas emerged and built on each other in a flow. (Sometimes.) Now that we primarily text, an idea burbles out from one of us and crashes into a dam when the other one replies with an “ok” or a cartoon. Kids in my orbit learn how to talk on the phone over the course of their teens, like teens in the 1980s would have learned to pop a wheelie or bake a blueberry pie. For any kid, the test of your daily intake of sunlight and audible laughter begins with how fully you can shake off the “nah” in a text chain and hatch another plan - or just go outside.

This change plays out every day. Say you take a notion to meet your neighbor, who once mentioned having competed in double-Dutch as a kid, for a jumprope meetup in the park. You write your neighbor, evoking the walking-the-dog tricks you’ll learn, the shade on the oval where you’ll gather, the butter seeping through the bearclaws you can pick up afterward. The text goes at 9 am. 14 hours and 11 minutes later, you get a “busy” and a shrug emoji.

Do you call the person? Then or the next day? Or do you say to yourself and anyone in earshot that if the person weren’t too busy for another meetup, the person would have said so? When in fact the person didn’t say anything?

You’re left with no plan and no knowledge of how you’d have learned or grown closer. Without dialogue, the prospect of fresh double-Dutch memories dips and disappears like the sun in the picture you see below of a conversation I was lucky enough to have in real life a couple of years ago.

Once upon a time, your busy friend would have been on the phone and you would have said: huh, well, how about next Sunday? And your friend would have hemmed and hawed and gradually owned up to not liking double-Dutch anymore, indeed to having piercing memories of a coaching barking at her in the rain the night before her senior Prom.

I know you can play all that out on text if you stick with it, but we rarely do - and when we follow up on texts the conversation splinters into emojis and blurts faster than we can track. And we spend more time not making plans, not making memories, and not making progress at the requisite scale on climate.

Yes, climate. From agreeing on where we bury electric transmission lines to hearing out priorities about where we limit parking to investing time and program-design iterations to employing people who will build the physical bulwarks and shade trees we’ll need, a whole lot of back and forth needs to flow before billions of dollars and millions of lug-nuts move forward. And I keep thinking that the fractured grammar we use to talk blocks that dialogue’s ability to spawn fresh approaches.

That’s because building renewable energy at scale, or reusing land so it can soak up the carbon in the overheating air, requires tradeoffs and messy math. Any decision with force to replace a chunk of our energy source or heal a swath of our fractured landscape will cue some major inconvenience and will carry some environmental harms. Wind turbine towers displace trees. Solar arrays contain chemicals and fossil fuels. And on we go. Perfection won’t wait around the corner - but dialogue and survivability imbue the rooms where we meet to talk through how to evaluate and how to iterate the future we choose to bear.

(For context, Energy Innovation’s Sonia Aggarwal recently told clean-energy pundit Dave Roberts that clean energy production involves less than a fortieth of the pollution that comes from building new energy on fossil fuels. That’s a talking point that can blossom into a talking volley, if people keep talking.)

So saying what you “have to say” and assuming your account closes there leaves you in the dark about who has heard you, what the hearer brings to your words, and how you can embolden the hearer to sharpen or exalt your idea.

And if this disjoint slew of statements defines how we’re teaching our kids to talk, imagine how they will rely on that staccato voice in future floods, heat waves, and fires. And I keep thinking that this vocabulary will exalt the imaginary world of the phone at the expense of the real world, a real world whose soil and forest and coast all need TLC if humans are to keep feeding off them. Nature doesn’t interact in bursts. Neither do peacemakers.

The great psychological scholar Sherry Turkle discussed navigating the whitewater and weakening the dam with my colleague Julie Scelfo at a recent All Tech is Human event that you can watch here. They don’t tie the pathology that Turkle has named to the danger of climate cocooning, but I hope you will. And then I hope you’ll take your phone and use the keypad, and call someone, dig into the and-then-what-and-then-what, and go with the flow.

My son, when texting runs to inertia, has set it up with certain friends that calling makes optimal sense for planning social time. He’s also learned to take a basketball to the park when text chains snap, and ends up having fun with other kids for whatever amount of time.

Any word, indeed any glance, can open a dialogue if the person receiving it detects a hint of invitation or the prospect of empathy. Those hints can splat against the screen, leaving you in the company of your shadow like the image above.

There’s too much to talk about in too little time to entrust our plans and promises to those stingy text balloons. I wish us all patience, good fortune, and long conversations.

Adaptations Large and Small

Stop me if you’ve heard this one. A freelance writer and a concert pianist climb into an Uber in Trenton, NJ…

Back in March, you see, I’d bought an Amtrak ticket to and from Philadelphia so I could attend a panel of Chief Heat Officers from around the world at UPenn. I was thinking more about how cities and communities can clash or collaborate as they adapt to extreme heat, and I thought (correctly) that I’d take thorough notes on what I learned if I passed up the Zoom invitation and put myself in the room. Then, on the way home, I put myself in the path of a wave of brush fires that roared onto tracks in Edison, NJ and stalled all service between Philadelphia and New York. (You can look it up.)

You hear how public servants from Greece, Chile, Sierra Leone, and Florida are advocating for a lot more notice and a lot more shade, and then the commuter rail catches fire. You can’t make this stuff up, nor can you ignore it.

Well, I had the afternoon ahead of me and I could have milled about on the platform in Trenton, or walked around New Jersey’s capital looking for stories. But I saw a woman stride off the train, onto the now-crowded platform. She asked if anyone was going to New York and wanted to share an Uber taxi. And I thought I could add more net value at home - you know, sauteing greens, filling seltzer bottles, editing stories - than on the scene. So I volunteered to join her.

We walked through the russet-brownish station to the busy semicircle out front, where at least a dozen people were beseeching their GPSs to tell them how long it’d take them to make headway north. I told her I didn’t have a lot of cash, and she clapped me on the back and said: “You look trustworthy.” We introduced ourselves by first name. I hadn’t calculated the take for an Uber from Trenton to Manhattan during a rail failure, but the worth in sparking trust seemed higher. She told me she had to get to a concert at Columbia by 7. I assumed she had tickets to watch it. Turned out she was performing it.

Being a partway self-taught reporter, I pulled out my phone to check for a concert at Columbia that night. There it was. Being a lapsed musician, I had stuff to discuss with my new buddy.

Now, it took us more than a minute to say adios to Trenton, but once we crossed onto I-95 we came in for smooth sailing. The pianist and I talked about her growing up in Baltimore, her love for New York, and the abstract-expressionist path of my career. When a friend called to wish her well in the concert, which she seemed likelier and likelier to reach on time, she told the friend that she was riding with a “writer for the New York Times,” which is charitable.

Meanwhile, back at Penn…

The talk I watched served as the first dose in a longer conference looking at extreme heat. That means fires that come every year for months, that worm into peoples’ lungs rather than worrying their commutes, and that millions of people can’t spend their way into avoiding. It’s hokey for me to now think of how famously the concert pianist and I got along, or about how kindly she asked after the driver as he swiveled his shoulders to stretch a little once we emerged from the Lincoln Tunnel.

And yet openness, friendly introductions, and the space to commit to getting yourself home so you can be accountable to others have to factor into the urban heat elixir. We can smell lots of fires on the tracks ahead. We could do much worse than to assist neighbors who have music to share.

Questioning Who Steers the Boat and Who Stands in It

These days, it’s sometimes all you can do to blink into the real world. It’s hotter than you remember, people are suffering more than you can take in and the people who aren’t suffering seem often to be dropping our necks to gaze into our phones. Who’s going to steer us away from the gorge that keeps getting closer? A project I started years ago aims to understand the men Americans have entrusted with the presidency. I read biographies of every president, and along the way became active in state-level politics. It all taught me what climate stress and cascading crisis also teach: for stability and for robust decisions, we should treat all public officials less as celebrities and more as employees.

I’m shopping a proposal for a book that recounts my twin journeys as a newbie historian and an as-needed activist. This excerpt from the first chapter, I hope, delivers ideas about how you can join with your neighbors or with people experiencing need in your city to ask how sharply public officials are seeing and hearing the public’s needs and demands. Here goes:

”But on our way that morning, I kept my daughter and her best friend company on a whispery subway as they quizzed each other for an upcoming Spelling Bee. I peeked at the phone of the guy wrapped around the pole beside me: “Stayed up all night watching this debacle.” And my sleep-addled brain then said: “Debacle. D-E-B-A-C-L-E. Debacle.” 

I was at that point reckoning with Ron Chernow’s six-pound Alexander Hamilton biography, which I thought would give context to the political strategists who created the presidency in the first place.  I hung with it, between emailing old friends, classmates, and cousins with details about new civic groups, and taking up the practice of marching and chanting. Not to mention poster fabrication.  The lime-green table centering our new family room, which we’d conceived as a place where our kids could make birthday cards without sitting on the floor, became home base for postcards, posters, and phone calls.  When we crashed, my wife and I would sleep for a few minutes and then one would sit up. “But what about…?”
We joined marches nearly every weekend in the winter, and I stopped by rallies at senators’ offices and plazas during the week.  At the protests, when people called out, “Not my president!” I thought, correct, but ours. As I was learning from Chernow, Adams ranked as few peoples’ preferred presidents, including Washington’s—but he was our president, and whatever happened on our national record happened through or in spite of him.  

By February, my wife and I had helped co-found a local branch of Sister District, a nationwide nonprofit that marshals volunteers in deeply Democratic areas to support contenders in close state races.  I ginned up a weekly newsletter called “Many Paths to Justice,” serving jiggers of courage and three actions to take to a mailing list of 150 or so friends, relations, and simpatico volunteers. We joked that marching and sign-making had become so routine that “protesting was the new laundry.”

Election Night 2017 found me in a white-box hotel in Boston’s seaport district for a business trip, drinking Scotch with cylindrical ice cubes.  I’d driven to Delaware and PA to knock on doors and my whole family had called voters in Virginia.  Would any of it be enough to stem the tide?  Having finished the Hamilton and Washington books, I was pecking at the early pages of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and lifting my phone every other paragraph for news updates. 

Our candidate, and the Democratic slate atop the ticket, won.  

The next day I rode Amtrak home taking comfort in the truth that even the most despotic presidents confront a federal labyrinth.  When sailing into state-guarded canals, locks, and culverts, in a yacht, a skiff, or a raft, they could all capsize. George Washington had known this and, with his battlefield halo firmly affixed, pedaled back from arbitrating the question of whether the states or the federal government claimed final authority. 

On that train, I knew what Washington had known all along. No president can decree a whole interlocking system according to his specs. Nor can any president assume that public servants will reach some equilibrium free of opportuning and faction. Each president could only interpret the mess and try to steer it based on the successes and failures of what came before.  And all their interlocking efforts created a path for the current plunderer-in-chief. How?”

Democracy hinges on the idea that people who share a place can start from a constellation of concerns and collectively appoint other people to take and see through hard decisions whose tradeoffs and investment optimize common values and overall well-being. Our democracy hitches a lot of that responsibility on the president - which flips a lot of the true responsibility back to the voters and the constellation of people representing them.

The water will stay choppy for the duration. The story of my biographical and political journey, which I hope to tell, shows the weight of knowing the quirks and weaknesses and attentiveness of the people with the cred to steer whatever boat carries us.

After the Tap, Admit and Adapt

Don’t envy me my acrobatic skill, but since an early age I’ve managed to carry more than one conflicting thought in my head at all times. These opposing ideas resolve when I focus, and that track record perhaps led me to want to work in helping groups harmonize competing claims amid climate stress. And they swirl in my head (and outside it) everywhere these days.

To illustrate: on a lucky two-week stretch of vacation along Rhode Island’s oceanfront this summer, I’d work out in the mornings by running along low stone walls past cliffs to the coast. I’d think: This place will inspire people for centuries. And an SUV would bellow past, and I’d think: This can’t last another decade.

The path we face contains the road between those realities. People, even when we rely on code to find our way and categorize our memories, rush to the horizons and coves that my biophilic friend Bill Browning calls “prospect and refuge.” And people will not prosper for long in the triple-wide cars or the quadruple-width houses on which I and other fortunate ones have grown up. The storms and fires and heat unspooling from the overcarbonized atmosphere guarantee a redesign covering the whole world. Even if you wanted to set up a fortress where you could order all your Pinots and chia seeds and stream all your inputs into the palm of your hand, the cost of transportation and insurance and human suffering would soar too high and would likely make you feel yucky.

And don’t take my word on that: consider the rolled-up newspaper that greeted me at the end of one of my more humid morning workouts.

So what to do? An instant switch looks unfair. People drive the cars they drive because they think they need them, and real estate occupies its reality thanks to a mix of design ideals, controlled-market enthusiasm, and sometimes dubious zoning laws. You can’t and shouldn’t level a vacation town and gin up a commune, and you shouldn’t begrudge people their time near the ocean or in the mountains, away from the concrete mazes we mostly know. The overriding task collapses to a word that’s coating investment and policy decisions as fully as foamy saltwater coats the shore: adapt.

Adaptation means, for government budgets, investing billions in capital to help people move when their homes no longer stand above water or can no longer stand heat. It also means reorienting trade routes, and fuels, and trip lengths, and ideas about personal prerogative, to a reality where everything is aflame or flooding or might be nearing one of those extremes.

Adaptation also means training mental muscles to sleep well at night knowing that knowledge and context change both gradually and suddenly. I’ve gotten used to the tap, in my vacation time and my parenting time and my organizing time. You likely have too. You tap to correct your way on a drive, learn where you can find coffee, grok what world leaders have decided to do about a given conflict. But codes only yield facts and imminent steps. Adapting the way you live, invest, vote and argue means admitting that sometimes you need to explore strange physical and psychological places, step by step. Doing that shows you where both the crevasses and the anchors sit.

And last, perhaps it means a call to ease off lightswitch narratives in which things are OK or not OK. A year ago, I read the Inflation Reduction Act as it became law and whistling air filled my chest. This year, I read about how local landowners’ misgivings about projects and a lack of thorough dialogue stalls deployment of clean energy projects, and a rock plunged in my stomach. But if you’re adapting, then you can balance your proverbial feet on the law’s ambition and the polity’s ambivalence. You can commit to thinking up ways to discuss, advocate, invest in and redesign solutions that bring carbon pollution down without bringing mistrust to new heights. You want a sense of peace, you lose it - and as you adapt, you do work to define the addressable problem.

And you recalibrate your demands, perhaps, of public servants. Demanding that the American president “get climate done” carries the same weight as demanding that coal mining continue as it did before renewable energies gained a cost advantage. Public servants should assess accurately, address honestly, and adapt constantly. We’ll have to carry conflicting costs in our heads as we invest and work and vote to demand that sort of attention from politicians. But here’s a secret - anyone can carry thoughts that way. If you couldn’t, few would feel romance in looking at an ocean that can swallow them.

The ocean needn’t swallow anyone who has a guardian or who knows how to swim. Our loneliness, brittle debate, and scorched climate needn’t swallow anyone either. The carbon weight bearing down on the town I love has to change, like the ocean does.

That means any number of conflicting impulses and thoughts to carry at once into the future. I’m wishing us all courage, patience and glimpses of beauty along the way.

Do People Fear Losing More Than We Lose Fearing?

Headlines about hovering heat registered this summer like wailing sirens until the familiar New York swelter felt like the ambulance screeching to a halt to open its doors where I was walking. But as I square my shoulders to this summer’s first New York heat onslaught, I sweat less at the heat and shiver more at the sight of fellow cyclists pedaling up a bridge ramp, fixing their eyes on the phones in their free hands.

I start to wonder whether the force that community leaders are seeking in managing heat wilts away when so many people can elect to check out of the overbaked or soggy world and take up residence in the swipe settlement on their devices. You just can’t feel fear in your knuckles and you likely can’t map out steps in an organizing campaign when you lose track of what you were learning and who was telling it to you.

(This post has no hyperlinks, for reasons I hope seem clear, but draws on ideas from Jonathan Haidt, Jaron Lanier, and others.)

Now, everybody senses the heat or the flood or the fires. Everybody suffers from it - even if you’re lucky so far, as I have been, and suffer only in mind. And laudable people are working to make the broiling-and-burbling future safer for communities on those communities’ terms. Policies are gelling with that aim. Investment will follow. Yet and still, the option of stepping out of a feverish reality into a dopamine dream didn’t seem so prominent when ecological innovators started decades ago in thinking about how to muster a response to climate chaos.

So what really seems unknown is how people in relative comfort will align. Will enough of them make common cause with people living on mudslides, working in broiler-like air, renting apartments with no air-conditioning? Will this solidarity include using phones only to summon help, raise funds, make introductions that play out in the real world? Or will the critical blob of people who can survive the chaos fail to demand changes in how society works just because we can more or less ignore it?

I don’t presume to know - and if I had to bet, I would ask you about the odds you’re giving me. I do know, and take some comfort in, the fact that humans have always moved across awkward unfamiliarity by voicing questions about the weather. “Hot enough for ya?” we say.

It’s too hot for too many of us humans and for the systems that have trained us to seek placidity in quick hits. A key to the attitude for sustaining peace and hope in the decades ahead involves feeling the heat and reaching, sometimes, not for a phone but for a fan.

When Crisis Pitch Scales New Heights Daily, Crunch and Slam and Repeat

When my New York City went into mourning in spring 2020, I had been clenching at the prospect of living with the climate crisis for decades. I had written about designs that would save us, and I had tried to run farther or lift harder every morning for 17 years.

In the year that followed lockdown, I learned to repeat exercises hundreds of times with guidance from a neighbor and in the company of other neighbors, in a playground behind my apartment building. The Covid chill receded and the climate got crazier. And thinking about what I learned from those exercises, which means thinking about the patience that accrues from repeating doable things, helps me step into the much bigger crisis. 

You see, Covid found me having spent many years thinking about climate change, and always looking for the gleaming portal away from landslides and heat strokes and war.  I used to write magazine profiles about architects who sketched silent cities where everyone glided around on hovercraft.  Then I taught kids to conceive bold strokes in the face of rising seas: often, they designed spongy waterfront parks with solar-powered trash compactors.  I wanted to deliver a sentinel that would snag everyone’s attention and show them the path away from parched earth.  I wanted the great escape, the pan out, the one bright shining moment. 

Now I want to help you vote, and know where to find a higher-quality stove, and get around without gasoline. Again and again and again. 

Thank the change in my exercise routine that fall 2020 impelled. I had been working out, alone at 5 am for decades, counting on these morning runs to both codify some “me time” and nourish the illusion that I was helping the city wake up. I always wanted to run farther, or all the proverbial way to the Bronx. By September 2020 I was daydreaming no more. I was watching empty elevated trains rumble past, making Pavlovian grabs at my neoprene mask when a runner passed in the other direction. Getting farther seemed like running in place because I was so sick of being alone. 

Around that time, I spoke with a neighbor who I had seen around in the gym before lockdown. He has little kids and I have big ones, and he told me that another neighbor named Minh Duong would teach a kids’ workout class once a week after “school.” 

The class got our kids outside, and got them pulling tires down the street, and got them repeating knee-tucks. At a November kids’ showcase with kids swinging kettlebells and dancing with styrofoam noodles, buzz began among parents. And one adult at a time, we started taking his class in the very early morning. 

Photo courtesy of minh duong

So I went to the back lot of our building and met Minh in the dark. A couple who lived across the lawn showed up too - the guy’s an architect and the woman teaches middle school. They were of course both locked into routines of drafting floor plans and lesson plans from home these days. 

We exchanged hellos and nods and followed Minh’s raised and lowered arms as he guided us through a warmup gantlet of jumping jacks, skips, bends and pushups. Then came the “WOD,” the workout of the day, which ran on a loop unlike the peak and step-down of a morning run. You did something dozens of times: bend your knee while holding a dumbbell, squat and slam a puckered ball on the ground.  You learn the quirks of the equipment: the difference in heft across 6, 8 and 10-pound balls, the spacing of the balls’ perforations, the gravity of an iron kettlebell increasing below your knees much faster than just above your knees. The precision squeezes out the abstraction. 

 For a stretch, it was just the middle school teacher and I meeting at 6 am in the dark  with our masks on, under the grey scaffolding beams behind our brick building. Her twins are a year older than my daughter. We both had greyer hair than we used to and a habit of wisecracking on especially hard exercises.  The kids’ styrofoam noodles were nowhere in sight. In one class, at about 28 degrees and sleeting, we huddled under scaffolding and executed the “Century Club.” 

That’s, as Minh had whispered with his wheedling staccato and his fixed eyes, 100 reps of a list of exercises. We did chinups, pushups, and of course slamballs with our gloves chafing our hands and our masks scratching our faces. After a while, the count syncopated with a pause to huff and puff four times. But more than halfway through, you know you can finish and you can start paying more proximate attention to your form.  It started to occur to me that even when these Covid rhythms eased, something else would spin off kilter.  Every minute since spring had shown me something that tempted me to spit - that fall, it was seeing twentysomethings drink in bars while the mayor padlocked the city’s public schools. With reps rather than range as my guiding metaphor, I started thinking of responses I could mete out by the minute.

As with becoming literate, or reliable at slicing scallions so their flavor seeps into rice, or turning a wrench on a spigot, so it goes with destabilizing the biosphere. We got into climate chaos by repeatedly pouring extra carbon to hang heavily in the air while repeatedly hoping that someone - a physicist! A celebrity! Al Gore!- would unroll a ladder to lift us above our habits. And we will get out of it by repeatedly leaving things on the supermarket shelf, repeatedly leaving the car at home (maybe to charge), repeatedly reading the electric bill to see where using power from the sun would pay off at once, repeatedly asking our insurance agents and our town councilmember what’s going on with the floodline. Too much carbon has built in the atmosphere for anyone to erase it. We can instead hold it in place and shrink its effect, day after day after day after day, sometimes clumsily but always again. 

Minh never tells you to be a hero. If he does, he’s joking, He tells you what to adjust - “feet further apart” or “keep your wrist above your elbow”- here and there. When your body keeps resisting the angle your mind knows it should reach, you’re building muscle. 

Likewise, when you make sure you go to a public hearing and turn off your phone so you can hear your neighbors talk, you are building strength ahead of the next power outage. When you vote and bring an elderly neighbor to vote with you, you are building strength against fossil-fuel courtesans who try to stop clean energy. When you shop in person for food you won’t waste, you are building strength to eventually shrink landfills. And on and on.  

One thing you learn from repetition is attention. Minh’s instructions speak to a specific, rather than issuing a catchall “you can do it.” Sit down a  lot more…elbows behind your ears…both feet at the same time.  The balm of repeating things involves the specificity that becomes clear when you’ve reached your nth act. When you become more aware of where you’ve placed your elbow - or how you’ve sprinkled your salt or trimmed your cactus’ spores or purled your stitch, or whatever - then you become more aware of how your decisions play out in the material world. You give less weight to slogans like “go green” and more weight to where you go and how you get there. 

 The climate crisis prevails because leaders repeated the mantra of wanting more until it choked the world.  Reversing it requires repeating a lot of actions: installing batteries to store power from the sun and wind and switching them on, and electric car chargers  lining up at every road, and heat pumps rolling cold air out and warm air in. This all depends on repeated votes for people who care about these priorities, and repeated audits of those people.

Changes in who’s in power come from repeated phonebanks, walks around neighborhoods, votes.  And changes in how we vote comes in repeated changes to how we define success. The future depends on how routinely and correctly the vast majority of us do many things differently -  again and again and again. 

The Law of Conservation of Energy

I've been writing about major investments in low-carbon living this fall. One of the biggest involves valuing land for its carbon-soaking potential, as this article in GreenBiz explores. 

Another involves valuing the democratic process, and working to convey the majority of Americans' interest in low-carbon solutions through a sometimes sclerotic government system. My current piece on Flippable, an activist blog devoted to fair districting in state elections, profiles a Pennsylvania lawmaker who's out to knock oil and gas off its perch. 

As always, these pieces come out in favor of dialogue, deliberation, and mutual respect. With a hat tip to hunters and strummers- we're all in the same rising seas. 

#WeAreStillIn...First Place and We Like It There

What do you get when you harness peoples' desire for a safe future with their conditioning to follow big corporations' leads? You get a path to a low-carbon future that may or may not run as straight or as fast as a path set by policy would. 

This week I got to cover events at Climate Week for GreenBiz, an authoritative source for executives building sustainability into business strategy. As you'll see, I learned that low-carbon costs constitute a prize in a new great game for transportation, finance, energy and consumer-goods companies. Many corporations co-signed the #WeAreStillIn pledge after Donald announced the US would be moving away from international leadership on climate. I went to events trying to chart how the corporate take on progress differs from the political one. 

And I thought to ask whether the frame that holds climate readiness as a moral must can fit inside the one that holds decarbonization as a profit strategy. I'm pretty sure the frames do fit together- but that a depressed, divided or misinformed citizenry can shatter the frames and the picture emerging inside. 

No Puns Please. We're Discussing Power

Of all the domains where turning information to bits can pay off for the ecosystem, electricity excites me most. If people can efficiently produce, swap and tailor their electricity, you can imagine all sorts of positive loops beginning: less power dies along transmission lines, leading to less carbon buildup. More low-income families can afford or finance the power they need to start businesses or support a shifting schedule  And small companies can prime multibillion-dollar utilities to provide clearer information about cheaper and cleaner products. 

This article in GreenBiz peeks at how these changes might speed up and spread out. It's the sort of scene I could imagine students or screenwriters creating, but it's all there for you to explore. 

Controlling Your Energy

The center famously can't hold in post-digital society: magnets of admiration from presidents to movie stars to CEOs all reveal a habit of sliding to the edge of reason. One source for this discord may spring from an improvement in how we run our buildings: it's more feasible than ever to store power when you don't need it and run it down when you do, saving wear and tear on the energy grid. 

I'm looking harder at how owners and neighbors trade power at what experts call the "grid edge." It seems like a metaphor for how we can organize our neighborhoods, our budgets for money and carbon, and our ideas of whom to trust in a crisis. This story in GreenBiz looks at one approach. Stay tuned- more will follow. 

The City Trade: Trading What You Know for What Others Ask

Why put up with the inequality, the noise, the lumbering traffic and the stink? The answer depends on what you consider valuable. In my curriculum, I guide kids to the premise that collaboration across skills, interests and attitudes creates the strongest odds for sustaining  human society peacefully as climate and employment churn. 

In this essay just published on the Atlantic's redesigned CityLab, I dig into what I hope my wife and I are teaching our kids each December when we send them on a scavenger hunt that obliges them to talk to strangers. The essay runs to the sentimental, but the ideas it stirs should get you uncomfortably close to questions about fairness, access, and bias. 

It should also work as a fun read. If it clicks for you, and/or if it prompts hunts of your own with partners of any age, I hope you'll let me know. 

Living With the Difference is the Hope

These days, sidestepping the shadow of hate feels like bathing in sunshine. So when Emmanuel Macron became president of France, besting a candidate who seemed sure to turn immigrants into victims, I took it as prompt to breathe easy. That betrayed my bias, of course, and I bet it shows more about my need for comfort than my command of Euro geopolitics. We humans mainly feel more thoroughly than we assess - but maybe we can find a way to turn that feeling to productive ends. 

That's because one application from France amounts to acting as if people will support the idea of living with people unlike themselves.

I don't know you, I probably never will meet you, but I can't escape knowing you're part of my day. 

the crises trapping our politics might seem impossible to square without volumes of study and boatloads of luck. Few among us can map how to shore up health insurance or stoke business without coddling big banks. Unlike times of slavery or cold war, we scrape against differences of degree and design. Can you replace coal jobs with solar ones? Can you draw wealthy young families to cities without edging out older low-income ones? Can America snap the opioid epidemic? The answer always comes back to: well, I think so, but I dunno...

And here's where a simple jolt like a pluralist victory in France can act like a flashlight in whatever course you're trying to manage. Because the course toward brokering compromises on public policy might just start with the commitment to live with people unlike yourself. 

We've read about the "great sort". The finding shows that more Americans cluster among people who share our attitudes in virtual life - but we also live, work and go to school with think-alikes. Small wonder that a guy comes along and succeeds by exploiting electoral math with the message that nobody has to try to understand people on the divide's other side. 

In that chilly context, the commitment to design cities and schools so that people live and learn with people of different backgrounds feels like a radical vision. Programs like free (you know, subsidized) college tuition, or urban codes that downplay parking, or incentives for communities to set up their own solar networks turn negotiation on and leave it on. They make for at least some conflict, some adjustment, and some progress. 

And so the faith in urban design that sustains these pages sticks with me, even as politics challenge my faith in psychology. Poke around this site and see how you can make use of the premise that designing places for contact ups the odds of governing places with confidence. 

Context for Caring, Caring for Context

I learned, with tens of thousands of other marchers this past weekend at the People's Climate March, that you can travel by human blob from the US Capitol to the White House  in about 80 minutes. A normal mile's walk takes a quarter that time, and an earlier march moved more slowly. In this case, temps reached 91 degrees and marchers carried parachutes. The heat and the breeze offset each other.  My son, pounding his heart outside the White House, judged it all worthwhile. 

Did we change anybody's mind about how to address climate change? The fact that I set up a dangling rhetorical question betrays how thinly I can tease out an answer. For sure I saw more signs decrying offenses than proposing compromises. Compared to what I try here, the march drew a line: government that claims to represent the American people will not get away with lying about what pollution does to our habitat. 

But how do you get people ready to engage in the dealmaking, restating, listening and experimenting that can make the debate about "coal jobs" into a work session about safe jobs? It starts by understanding what it's like to live in a town where coal built schools and streets, and by understanding what it's like to still believe everyone deserves a livelihood that absorbs what we've learned from science about coal's effect. You can sympathize and stand firm at the same time. It feels itchy, but with good health and lots of company it feels motivating. 

A piece I wrote in January gets at a relevant principle: when you speak to traumatized youth about their trauma in the course of training them for jobs, those jobs become easier to keep and often become the seeds for careers. 

It turns out the insight driving Hopeworks, the organization I covered, spreads throughout funding and reform in public health and job training. Everyone you meet, a learned friend tells me, comes from a context he or she can't unwire- and to steer all of us onto terrain we can co-use, you'd better find ways into that context before you presume to get anyone out of it. 

I hope this page, this story and this writing help us before the heat makes more of us weak. 

Learning to Steer (Without Fear)

FastCoExist, part of the Fast Company network, runs my article today on the New York Harbor School and its partnership with the Billion Oyster Project. Of all the fascinating ideas in this model, I think most about Pete Malinowski's contention that kids can learn to communicate and manage with "authentic problems to solve." 

That requires knowing strangers, knowing your style, and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. All of which can feel plodding or lonely on dry land as well as on water- but all of which can come through any effort to connect systems so that everyone in them can get healthier. 

Read the article and let me know what you think about how we should steer learning on the coasts and upland.