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.

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. 

Reflections in a Cold Brew

I had the surreal experience yesterday of drinking velvet-smooth espresso and cold brew to match, on a Modernist table, with service by someone in an Australian accent. These usually land me in the sea of signifiers of a "frontier" neighborhood just becoming unaffordable. But this time they found me in the tweedy neighborhood where I grew up. It's surreal to begin with to consume so much carefully harvested coffee in a carefree spending habit. But this neighborhood, Manhattan's Upper East Side, looked like a refraction of itself. This was Manhattan's "safe" neighborhood when I was a kid, while industrial zones of Brooklyn and Queens registered for me like soundstages for the urban horror movies my parents wouldn't let me see. 

Wake up in 2016- former industrial zones have become prime ground for real-estate investors. Big quick glassy towers rose there in the past few years, with the result that renters no longer can afford the numinous "edge" of these coasts. And they make their way to the six-story walkups of the neighborhood where I grew up safe. And coffee vendors open branches where these renters land. On one front, it's the least remarkable "trend" story you could brew. 

Look deeper in the cup, though, and you see some patterns that can cause jitters. (And that's plenty of coffee puns, for today anyway.)

We participants in the market for land, such as it is, have sanctioned a pattern of marking territory in New York.  A lease to an espresso bar, a pilates studio, a food store selling "essentials" like sriracha and salmon- these show a place caters to folks whose income either will grow geometrically in the near future or doesn't need to grow at all. No disdain for those goodies or their vendors comes with that observation. But neither does a sense that a neighborhood's full breadth, or anything like its potential social strength, plays out in its commercial changes. Developers and owners look for income security- which comes from promising lifestyle security.

Somewhere in there a chance for neighbors to meet and build something that enriches everyone's health turns to steam. (Oops. That's a metaphor, not a pun.)  Drinking coffee in a neighborhood that bored me as a teen excited me because it reminded me how human work can change the city's stock of services. But the excitement faded. It would have stayed if I'd found a workshop teaching kids art or coding, or a space like the Lower East SIde Girls' Club, or some hint that the mix of aging German-speakers and faithful Silk Stocking dwellers and newcomers were finding ways to work together on coastal design or street cleanup or programs for youth. 

They may be doing all these things, or they may yet. (The espresso's smooth enough that I will come back alert.) But the visit reminded me that neighborhoods change thinly when they become cool. They risk becoming brittle if that's all they become. 

And with more heat waves, floods and cracking infrastructure on the way, they need to become fuller of skills, lines of communication and open exchange. The market can recoup human investment in these things- even if it takes a little while to steep.  

That pun seemed worth going out on a sweet note.