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.

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.

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.