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.

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. 

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. 

The Making of a Room Where it Happens

In my house these days, dish cleanup and homework groove to the bop of the Hamilton cast album. The album conveys the musical's tale of what happens when a person cast aside from the elect yearns to make history. You get tragedy, heroics, and this ongoing experiment we call democracy.  It bolts some lift into your heels when you have to snap on Tupperware lids, to remember that wars and compromises led us to overuse fossil fuel, overbuild sprawl, and grapple in stretches and struggles with the mandate to treat all humans with respect. 

The plot turns on a moment when Alexander Hamilton, the ferocious and far-thinking immigrant, cuts a deal with plantation-bred theorists Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Aaron Burr, the show's narrator and the man who killed Hamilton, busts out a show-stopper about craving access to deals like this- knowing how to lay out the terms and arrange the perks to make an agreement among rivals. "I want to be in the room where it happens," croons and growls Burr- and so does my family, with a broom or a pencil or a toothbrush for percussion. 

Well, as in the muddy young republic so it is today in the contracting one. With coastlines shrinking and solar power spreading, more talk turns on who gets a deal then on how the deal assembles. And that flows from the human longing for safety- we need to first feel protected before we can yield up the brain cells to figure out how to build the shelter. This time, though, the tragedy involves millions losing out on paths to durable urban living because they don't get to tap into political calculations.

And in that morass, a quote from architect Louis Kahn points toward some of the agreement techniques we need to teach our kids and ourselves.  An immigrant like Hamilton, Kahn explored how light can bring complex stories to simple walls. My architecture prof in college - or at least my notebook from that prof's lecture- quoted Kahn as saying that "a street is a room by agreement." The architect's romance in this quote never meant to describe political reality, of course- it sets forth goals for public design. When people share a space, they should be able to treat it as a space to which they claim equal rights and for which they divvy responsibility. 

All that depends on education, wellness, rule of law, a sense of history, and a sense of hope. And those psychological assets require a confidence that the systems determining your lot can open and can change to provide more safety, more light and more hope.

How do you teach that confidence? One method involves training young people to read the ecology as one of several systems affecting their well-being. Another involves teaching history, social studies and STEM with callouts for the ways one opinion can mesh with another opinion to produce a third approach. I've tested role-play means of getting kids to think critically about where they can intervene. Schoolwork can also include critical reading, reenactments, projects, service and applied science. Excellence in school- and in internships and in jobs- should reflect how thoroughly a student reads the systems around her and how precisely she pinpoints a way to make those systems more inclusive and stabler. 

Our kids and thousands of others thrill to Hamilton in part because it gives a rush to see the story of making America as a chain of ideals and deals, mutable and full of passion at all times. 

They stick with it because the play's final songs (no spoilers) bet firmly on the possibility of accord. People realize they can share space with their competitors and share credit with people who take different paths. Facing down climate change means laying bare some painful secrets- that prosperity burned our coastline, that safety for a few heightens danger for the many. The more we can use words and models and tools to open those secrets, the sweeter will be the light in all our (water-tight) rooms.