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.

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. 

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. 

"I solved two problems with one answer!"

I lucked out this week and got to bring a mini-version of the AllBeforeUs role-play curriculum to a rigorous public high school in Brooklyn that focuses on community responsibility and perseverance. My kind of place.

I learned how ready kids are to redraw the canvas that surrounds their school building.  Kids came up with savvy ideas on day one for making a public space up the street more resistant to floods and more conducive to good moods. Without much prior training in urban planning, they latched on to what planners call cobenefits- those single changes on the landscape that can free a wave of changes in daily life. These cobenefits become cost-effective under climate change because they can reduce stress and encourage trust, which people can cash in during fast crises (like hurricanes) or slow ones (like power outages). 

I also saw how much space we can find in science education for learning about how governments fund things in the real world. On day two I prepared roles for kids to assume at their tables. Some were stay-at-home parents, some were politicians. All instantly got that they could bargain from different points of influence. The parent spoke out loud for better lighting, confident that the system would respond. The activists appealed to kindnesses to fundraise and organize. The mayor appealed to a broad audience. Nobody took the bait and offered to pay for the whole operation. This is not so different from what happens in real life. 

Next week the students will vote on a compromise plan. A cue comes from the discussion on day one, when students reasoned that replacing asphalt with spongy pavement could create jobs. And when they got to the idea that a roof, maybe green, over the playground could absorb water and increase park use- which could reduce health problems and promote trust in the neighborhood. 

"I solved two problems with one answer!" said one student in this discussion. Climate change, as it plays out, looks more like a systemic shakeup than like a separable problem. The more goodwill we can wring from each investment we make to live with climate change, the safer we can be. And the more we can learn.