Thanks so much for being you, and reading my now nearly 7-year-old newsletter — much copied, always free, never selling your private information, never using an algorithm to drive you to conspiracy theories!
For this end of year note, I’m sticking to a Five Paragraph essay plan to respect your time and to honour my favourite basic writing structure. Feel free to scroll to the bottom for my Betty White tribute (published before she died), but for good people provoking happy tears, watch this Tulsa video from SideXSide Studios.
Four Billion Reasons…
Paragraph 1. INTRO Our lives have to change. The global human population will exceed 8 billion in 2022, double its 1975 level. Adding 4 billion people means more waste, scarcer resources and, as it turns out, going beyond the Earth’s ability to regulate itself. But our systems have not yet adapted. In order to secure sustainable life on Earth there are basic tools we will need. Starting in 2022, we will need to trust each other more than ever as we work together on fundamental changes to global human society. The price of failure is existential because the three main challenges facing us are dire and systemic: climate change, Covid-19 and the global attack on democracy.
Paragraph 2. PROBLEM CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change is global: directly and indirectly. Directly, independent countries need to work together to have an effect — even if the United States were to go carbon neutral tomorrow that wouldn’t prevent disastrous climate change. Indirectly, the social effects of climate change will be felt way beyond their epicentres, not least through the record numbers of refugees for which nation-states are poorly constructed — already 1% of the world’s population is forcibly displaced. Though opinion is split about whether Syria’s 2006 drought — the worst in a century — was caused by anthropogenic climate change, it certainly demonstrates the dramatic possibilities of autocracy meeting climate change meeting a young, structurally disadvantaged population. Syria is now a failed country and, through European and American elections, fleeing Syrian refugees have changed global politics beyond recognition.
Paragraph 3. PROBLEM DEMOCRACY UNDER ATTACK The threat to democracy is evident everywhere as, encouraged by “social media”1 and propaganda media, people look to populist despots to mis-simplify a rapidly changing world. Anti-democratic heads of state like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping have tightened their grip, while leaders like Viktor Orbán, Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump have attempted to divide their more open societies using anti-women, anti-immigrant, anti-Black, anti-Jewish and anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. “Look,” they say, ignoring facts, “these other people are to blame for everything bad.” Crucially, too, they are also hobbling representational systems to make sure that they have an unfair chance to wield power. In a United States with millions more Democratic voters, Trump Republicans continue to undermine voter rights, remove voter access and unfairly rig the districts in a well-documented attempt to gerrymander electoral victory. Apart from his politics and social divisiveness, this is crucial because Trump is a major proponent of climate change denial and his pandemic incompetence has already had fatal impact.
Milwaukee activists in a video by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project
Paragraph 4. PROBLEM COVID IN CONTEXT In 2016, President Trump boasted that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters. Four years later, he left the White House after presiding over the deadliest year in America’s history. Nearly 1 in a hundred Americans died in 2020, hundreds of thousands of them because the pandemic required a number of skills that Trump — and populists like him — lack — long-term investment, belief in science, willingness to accept the blame for errors, willingness to accept responsibility for leadership in the face of the unknown, and competent delegation to experts. I, personally, believe that Covid will recede as a threat as the population racks up exposures in the form of infections or vaccinations, but, just as the virus exacerbates pre-existing conditions, the pandemic highlights pre-existing conditions in the system. The opioid epidemic, sky-high rates of medical bankruptcy, annual flu deaths exceeding 40,000 and diabetes rates (1 in 10 Americans) on the one hand and SARS, Mers and Ebola on the other should have scared us into understanding that we need comprehensive national and global health networks.
Paragraph 5. CONCLUSION The main challenge posed by the last 20 years has been the explosive growth in the world’s population. Most urgently, that challenge has taken the form of fighting climate change, but the larger context is one of scarcity of resources. Assuming, and fervently hoping, that we won’t kill billions through omission or commission, we have to transform our means of production, distribution and consumption to make sure that even at 9 billion souls we can still live within the Earth’s means. To effect the sweep of that transformation we will need fair, legally-secured governance; communication networks run by people who don’t profit from misinformation; effective national health networks that are proactively concerned for the nation’s collective wellbeing; and broad, deep international cooperation on science and medicine. We have to start remediating climate change before these fundamentals are all in place, but if we forget these priorities, we will not succeed.
Happy New Year!!
Some of the year-end writing I’ve done, from travel scotch to Betty White
If you go through an airport, you might find — wedged between Covid tests — a Glenmorangie Elementa, should you buy it?
Take a rollercoaster ride through 2021’s mostest science fiction book releases, including Kazuo Ishiguro’s first book since his Nobel Prize.
I review Louise Glück’s first book since her Nobel Prize. Don’t be fooled by the title into thinking that it’s really a book of recipes.
I write and talk regularly for the increasingly excellent Book and Film Globe. Here are my and some colleagues’ favourite books of the year.
News of Betty White’s death came as I was finalizing this newsletter. In November, while researching her life, I was constantly surprised and awed by her talent and achievements. I had hoped to testify on her 100th birthday (Jan 17) to her ability to be both affable and strong-willed. By now you might have read about her multiple household characters, her clean sweep of Emmy Awards and that she owned a TV production company decades before feminism. She was starring on the radio in 1930, before the Nazis or FDR had come to power and slightly before Jacob Schick invented the electric razor. She’s not Jewish, but I wrote a review of a Jewish century through the frame of White’s life. It was intended to be a joyous celebration, but it’s now tinged with sadness. Baruch dayan emet.
New Year Resolution: Help institute a different term from “social media” when referring to amoral, privately-owned, unaccountable, algorithm-driven communication networks.
"Mis-simplification" -- good turn of phrase. HNY!