Dissenting Voices Never Fall On Deaf Ears

June 24, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Hong Kong could still swallow the dragon.

A cover story in the Wall Street Journal today was called “Hong Kong’s Flickering Hopes.” “Flickering” because to Gerard Baker, the Journal’s “editor at large,” it seems inevitable that Hong Kong’s rule of law and civic traditions—it’s utterly unique experiment in Asian democracy—will eventually be swallowed by the giant that surrounds it.

On the other hand, I think it’s far from inevitable.

Over the past month, millions of residents have taken to their City’s humid boulevards to protest an extradition proposal that would allow China’s resident proxies to arrest anyone in Hong Kong that it wants to, extradicting them to “justice” in the motherland—a “chilling effect” on critical thinking and democratic expression. But why I wonder isn’t the personal witness of millions of Hong Kong Chinese a ray of hope instead of a glimmer on the road to subjugation?

Hong Kong could still confound us because, despite having the hottest, wettest and least hospitable climate for masked protest I can imagine, millions of its citizens took to the streets to voice their dissent about this latest erosion of their rights to speak, assemble and disagree. Despite sweat and dehydration, pepper spray and water cannon, they have also managed to protest peacefully so that their resounding “No” conveyed a Confucian depth of confidence and resolve. Constructive instead of destructive.

On the other hand, and demonstrating even more of their British influence, the Hong Kong Chinese have talked and written their rationales for “No” everywhere that they could find a platform for doing so—patiently, painstakingly and exhaustingly—although the meat of their dissenting opinions has received little attention in the press. And finally, the City’s residents have sketched out futures that are not merely a return to the status quo that existed twenty years ago but instead are thoughtful re-workings of Deng Xiaoping’s “One Country, Two Systems.” Despite a divergence of details, their over-arching visions have one thing in common. All imagine a unified China that’s built around the pounding, life-giving heart of Hong Kong today.

Will (1) their acts of dissent; (2) the personal risks that have been taken by, and moral commitment of these dissenters; together with (3) their hopeful vision of a “different and better outcome” persuade the billions of non-Hong Kong Chinese to reconsider their acquiescence to “the Great Firewall,” the desirability of “good citizenship scores,” and the subjugation of a total surveillance state for something more like what these dissenters have in mind?

Could Hong Kong swallow the dragon?

One thing is absolutely certain: the steady, confident voices of Hong Kong’s Chinese dissenters are not falling on deaf ears. There are more than a billion of them, listening or trying to listen.

(In case you don’t recognize it, the image above is of Tankman, a sole protester confronting Chinese state power in Tianamen Square, 1989. The power of dissent. The power in a picture. Inviting us to imagine being that solitary Chinese man.)

Meanwhile, an old service station re-purposed as a coffee joint on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago.

1. Take a Sad Song and Make It Better

To all of you: I promise to get off this horse soon, I do, but there is a West Coast echo in this story of dissent too.

California, which is also the home of Silicon Valley, passed the toughest data privacy law in the US last year. (Its prohibitions and sanctions will go into effect at the beginning of 2020.) By giving individuals a way to protect themselves from the predations of surveillance capitalism, California’s leaders expressed their dissent from the silence and/or inability of our national representatives to do the same. Disappointingly, the same non-response has come from most other state governments too.

I’ve railed about data privacy repeatedly here because our personal information is being taken without our informed consent and used in ways that track us like animals (“These Tech Platforms Threaten Our Freedom”). I’ve argued that exchanging our personal data for “free” social networks like Facebook’s and “free” search engines like Google’s eliminates sources of potential income in a changing economy (“Blockchain Goes To Work”). And I’ve at least begun to make the case that theft of our personal data undermines our personal autonomy (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”). There are important issues here, and outside of a few leading jurisdictions most policymakers have been neglecting them.

“Leading jurisdiction” is lawyer-speak for “being in the vanguard” or “a dissenter from the prevailing view.” These places have tired of everyone else’s silence on an issue of importance that demands attention. They have talked about the values that drove them to raise their voices, and have painted a picture that speaks to how the future will be better—or at least more manageable—than it is today with their new laws or regulations on the books. They’re holding up their end of the conversation by trying to get their fellow states and the rest of the nation engaged in it.

California lawmakers passed a data privacy bill in 2018 that, among other things, includes an expansive definition of what constitutes personal information, gives the state’s consumers the right to prohibit the sale of their data to third parties, and also allows them to “opt out” of sharing their personal data altogether. It’s common for a new law’s effective date to be a year or more later to allow all parties affected to prepare for its various impacts. As interesting as anything about California’s recent action in support of data privacy has been Congress’s re-action.

According to a news report today:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthey backed the idea of national legislation to safeguard consumer’s data privacy, adding a prominent GOP voice to the bi-partisan support in Congress for tackling how technology companies amass and use that information.

‘There needs to be national-level regulation, not state-by-state on what we’re going to do about privacy,’ Mr. McCarthey, a California Republican said in an interview…

A data privacy law passed last year in California helped spur action from both Mr McCarthey and a bipartisan group of lawmakers working on privacy legislation in the Senate.

As a result of California’s commitment and template for action, Congress is wrestling with its divisiveness and dysfunction to pass a federal data privacy law that will go into effect before California’s to avoid a patchwork of regulation. From one vantage point, it’s like how many clowns can get in the phone booth before the bell goes off. But from another, more serious perspective: where would Congress be today on data privacy if a leading jurisdiction like California had failed to act?

A similar dynamic is currently at play involving state laws (like California’s again) that are aimed at reducing the likely causes of climate change. The impact on state residents of actions like this are immediate and direct, but the impact doesn’t end there. According to two scholars who have studied public opinion around climate change, those who have not bothered to act are also reluctant to be left behind. This is from another recent post:

Egan and Mullin cite research that proves ‘the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion’ and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those ‘watching but not yet acting’ are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard states.

When a commitment is grounded in values and acted upon (by speaking up, passing a law, taking any kind of objective step) to help realize a better future for everyone, others in the room, state or nation are more likely to be mobilized to define their own positions, to move the conversation forward, and sometimes to reach a new consensus than would never have been possible if those in the vanguard hadn’t taken a stand for their beliefs. in the first place.

An apartment building by Herzog & de Meuron in Tribeca

2. Taking a Stand Is Like Playing Jenga

Kids love the game Jenga. Many adults do too.

To play, you begin with a vertical rectangle of interlocking wooden pieces that are slotted in to create a stable structure. In each successive turn, a player attempts to remove one of the slotted pieces without destabilizing the structure and causing the remaining pieces to crash into a heap on the floor.

I’m convinced that the sound explosion of crashing pieces is key to enjoyment of the game. When you lose (or win), you do so shatteringly. There is no question that what you did made a difference.

The Tribeca apartment building above looks like a Jenga tower after—in mid-game—removal of some of the pieces has caused others to move and jut out a bit from the sides.

To harness the metaphor: the original Jenga tower is where prevailing opinion always starts. The room/community/state/nation is for something or against something. Then, in each successive turn, dissenters (along with the other players) modify the prevailing view.

Dissenters, leading jurisdictions, those who can’t keep their convictions to themselves are the key pieces that get removed. Every time they “make their case,” other pieces in the Jenga tower are impacted. Sometimes you can actually see their affect, because certain pieces jut out a little or a lot, their minds visibly beginning to change. Other times the change is imperceptible, but some pieces in the pile have become less stable as their original certainty has been clouded by doubt. Eventually, as the monolith begins to teeter, the moment of truth arrives and one final player’s testimony makes the original certainties dissolve.

Anyone’s turn can shatter the stability or inertia of the prevailing view.

Everyone’s turn affects other pieces either perceptibly or imperceptibly.

Anyone’s dissent can make the original certainties come crashing to the floor.

Anyone’s action can cause the crash that finally allows a different, better future to be built.

Dissenting voices like these are never as lonely or futile as they seem.

And they never fall on deaf ears.

This post was adapted from my June 23, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Face-Offs That Fuel Good Work

May 13, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Good work always has a long-term goal.

I’m thinking this week about long-term goals of mine, like acting to confront climate change and the assaults on knowledge by misinformation. Both goals are intertwined and both seem difficult if not impossible to impact. How can my actions advance either of these priorities?

I always have a lot on my To Do List, and my impulse is always to check off one big item and move on to the next one. Climate change and misinformation are big items. But then I remember that one of my jobs this time of year is groundskeeper. In the near acre around my home, I’ve learned the hard way to move away from bold, all-at-once kinds of goals like “give the whole place a haircut” to keeping my intentions smaller and closer to the ground.

Nature has forced me to become more modest when it comes to shaping its whims to my demands given the time, tools and sweat I can commit. I have more confidence than I used to that chipping away a little at a time will bring the landscape towards “what I have in mind” for this unruly plot in the middle of a city. Knowing that victories “only I can see” will eventually add up to the embrace of trees, hedges, plots and vistas in my imagination is what turns my job as groundskeeper into good work.

Groundskeeper lessons dovetail nicely with a couple of quotes from Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark about even more daunting challenges and where we find the hope to confront them.

in Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of boat owners rescued people—single moms, toddlers, grandfathers—stranded in attics, on roofs, in flooded housing projects, hospitals, and school buildings. None of them said, I can’t rescue everyone, therefore it’s futile, therefore my efforts are flawed and worthless, though that’s often what people say about more abstract issues in which, nevertheless, lives, places, cultures, species, rights are at stake.

Of course, it’s that first rescue that seeds the hope to become a rescuer again: the first act making your next act possible. Solnit gets lyrical here:

You row forward looking back, and telling this history is part of helping people navigate toward the future. We need a litany, a rosary, a sutra, a mantra, a war chant of our victories. The past is set in daylight, and it can become a torch we carry into the night that is the future.

“You row forward looking back”—even if only you can find anything worth celebrating in what you’ve done already—because you’ve turned what were once only good intentions into the on-going satisfaction of good work.

Whenever my values and priorities have me seeing the battle ahead as light versus darkness, I’ve had to re-learn the wisdom of Voltaire when he told me that “the best is the enemy of the good” and Aesop when he taught me why the tortoise beats the hare. They’re cold water on a hot parade every single time, but also the most sensible marching orders. Lately, I’ve been pondering how they should guide my “face-offs” with climate change and the ongoing assault on knowledge.

What actions will seed enough hope to fuel my next ones?

How does good work on both of these challenges get off the ground?

1. Confronting Climate Change

Celebrating the beauty and wonder of nature and reminders about the gorgeously nuanced ways that we used to talk about them (like Robert MacFarland does) reinforce those who are already believers in nature. Warnings based on the science or on what prophetic observers carry back to us from the frontlines also speak mostly to believers who were already open enough to hear the call (my recent post about Barry Lopez’s Horizon).

These celebrations and warnings only reach unbelievers when they’ve already made themselves available for persuasion—which is not often enough. Communing with believers can feel like a tent revival when most of those who need converting are still outside the tent. Given my experience as an advocate for clients and for new ventures in business and government, I’ve been looking for ways to persuade more of the unbelievers to come into the tent so they can hear the call too.

The challenge for would-be persuaders is enormous given our values (or “political predispositions,” since they are largely the same on an issue like this) and other priorities that we have as Americans. In a widely-read and research-intensive article called “Climate Change: US Public Opinion,” political scientists Patrick J. Egan at NYU and Megan Mullin at Duke describe Americans’ reactions to climate change as of 2016 from polling and other analyses they conducted:

The public’s level of concern about climate change has not risen meaningfully over the past two decades, and addressing the problem with government action ranks among one of the lowest priorities for Americans….Even liberals and Democrats who accept climate change science and express concerns about global warming’s affects rank the problem well below many other national priorities…In 2016, for example, Pew found Democrats prioritizing climate change lower than several concerns not traditionally associated with their party, including terrorism and crime…[So] the effort to slow global warming is additionally challenged by the fact that the issue has no core constituency with a concentrated interest in climate change.

It feels much the same today.

Features of climate change in particular have put the challenge of confronting it on a low burner. As examples, Egan and Mullin point to:

– our highly-politicized disagreement about whether there is really a problem with man-made climate change at all; as well as

-how a changing climate is difficult if not impossible for the average person to see;

-the difficulty of attributing events (like a particular fire or a storm) to the broader phenomenon; and

-the often-mentioned fact that the worst effects of climate change will happen in the future and be experienced someplace other than America.

Politics aside, the imperceptibility and remoteness of climate change make it difficult for most of the public to make the imaginative leap into actively addressing it.

I discussed one response that these authors recommend here last week. Within the conservative, libertarian and Republican “values” communities, formerly skeptical thought leaders who have become convinced that the threats of climate change must be addressed are perhaps the only ones who can enlist their communities’ support by “making hay” out of the same reasoning that persuaded them.

Egan and Mullin also identify two avenues for someone like me, who is already convinced about the urgency of the problem but is looking for a way to persuade the vast majority who, while not quite skeptical or politically-opposed, fail to see it as a priority that’s important enough to act upon. These avenues exist in places where the effects of climate change are (in all likelihood) being experienced already, or rely upon policy developments in states like California and New York where climate change has already seized a larger share of the public’s imagination.

According to the authors, the more that members of the public “correlate key weather events they have experienced with climate change,” the more important or “salient” the issue becomes to them. For example, those who experienced flooding in Staten Island or along the Jersey shore after Hurricane Sandy may not be convinced enough by the correlation to support a comprehensive national climate change policy but they probably want to “adapt” to its likely risks and become more “resilient” in the face of future ones.

If the connection between extreme weather and climate change is strengthened, this may expand the national conversation from mitigation alone to adaptation and resilience. Even under the most optimistic emissions scenarios, infrastructure investments will be needed to reduce the harmful effects of climate change on Americans

Since this article was written, correlations between climate change and practical responses to its likely risks have also been made by Americans who were impacted by the recent wildfires around Paradise California and are regularly inundated by high tides in Miami in the absence of any storm activity. There are clusters of Americans along its vulnerable coastlines and in the more fire-prone West who are correlating climate change with risks that are no longer theoretical.

As people pay the costs of what is probably climate change, the core, underlying problem becomes more of a priority. The “good work” of persuasion is more hopeful when done in places and around events where meeting some of its likely harms have already been bought and paid for. These communities have, in effect, been opened to persuasion by climate-related impacts that seem new to them and out of proportion to what they have experienced before. That means my advocacy to enlist their further commitment to mitigate climate change itself (and not merely react to it) holds out the hope of bearing fruit.

Egan and Mullin also cite research that proves “the very strong correlation between state policy and public opinion” and argue that states like California and New York are already influencing the national policy debate by acting alone. While the authors don’t say, I’d argue that it’s harder for fence-sitters on climate change to continue to remain uncommitted when majorities in other states are investing their tax dollars in targeted policies. Those “watching but not yet acting” are also susceptible to committing more deeply if the advocate they’re listening to avoids the partisan bloodletting while persuading them with arguments that have already succeeded in these vanguard jurisdictions.

Like my groundskeeper or Solnit’s rescuers during Hurricane Katrina, each patient step of persuasive advocacy can build hope in the next step until the core constituency to confront climate change has been assembled and activated by my good work and the good work of many others.

(While I recommend it highly, the Egan-Mullin article is dense with charts and annotations. To make it more accessible, one of its many fans created a comic book version that’s also worth a look.)

2. Speaking Up for What I Know

These days, even what we consider to be “knowledge” (that’s supported by evidence, is worthy of belief, and is accepted as true) isn’t safe in a world of communication that’s dominated by information-sharing platforms like Facebook, Twitter and You Tube.

In the climate change debate for example, conclusions that are based on carefully assembled scientific evidence often seem to be given the same weight and claim of legitimacy as the arguments of climate change deniers. Egan and Mullin illustrate how media channels have regularly allowed deniers to create an equivalence between their ignorance and the fact-based evidence that scientists have been gathering.

As the public was learning about the [climate change] problem in the 1990’s, the mainstream media’s adherence to the journalistic norm of balancing coverage between two sides of a dispute resulted in misrepresentation of climate change science [and] understanding the scientific certainty about [the] human contribution to the problem.

Danah Boyd is a principle researcher at Microsoft. Her recent speech to a group of librarians arises out of the same vulnerability that all “knowledge” faces in the current media landscape. She aims her argument at librarians because “[y]ou all are deeply committed to producing, curating, and enabling access to knowledge. Many of you embraced the internet with glee” because it promised to make what is “not yet knowledgeable” available to more people while reducing overall ignorance. But today she asks them:

-what if the internet and its on-line communities are being subverted by misinformation instead of liberated by knowledge?

-what if this misinformation is being manufactured in order “to purposefully and intentionally seed doubt” and “to fragment society” instead of enabling honest debate and our ability to move on together when the debate is done?

In her speech, Boyd describes how misinformation that is designed to divide is being deployed and what people who are committed to defending knowledge can do about it?

One of the best ways to sow misinformation is to make sure that doubtful and conspiratorial content is easier to access than evidence-based material. For example, she cites the gunman who recently massacred Muslims while they were worshipping in Christchurch, New Zealand. He exploited “the information ecosystem” we are all immersed in to ensure that his video recording of his killing spree was widely shared before content moderators could discover it. He filled “the data void” about his mentors and beliefs in a widely-reported counterpoint to those who condemned his actions, as if there were a legitimate debate about it. He “produc[ed] a media spectacle” by using the available channels to disseminate misinformation to millions who were susceptible to his disunifying message.

There are opportunities to provide misinformation whenever there is “a data void” created by the media’s’ (and the public’s) curiosity. Why did he kill Muslims? Why is climate change a hoax? One way to fill the data void is with words that are strategically created to muddle what we know and how we feel about it. Boyd talks about how Frank Luntz accomplished this with words and phrases that were designed to seed doubt around various issues. Luntz is a “public opinion guru” perhaps best known for developing talking points and filling the data void around Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America.

In the 1990s, Frank Luntz was the king of doing this with terms like partial-birth abortion, climate change [or the even more muddling, global warming] and death tax. Every week, he coordinated congressional staffers and told them to focus on the term of the week and push it through the news media. All to create a drumbeat.

All to engender emotional dissonance if not quite rational doubt.

According to Boyd, media manipulators also:

create [information] networks that are hard to undo. YouTube has great scientific videos about the value of vaccination, but countless anti-vaxxers have systematically trained YouTube to make sure that people who watch the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s videos also watch videos asking questions about vaccinations or videos of parents who are talking emotionally about what they believe to be the result of vaccination. They comment on both of these videos, they watch them together, they link them together. This is the structural manipulation of media. Journalists often get caught up in telling “both sides,” but the creation of sides is a political project.

So if “the other side” is misinformation, what should defenders of knowledge do? Here’s the straw man that won’t work:

You will not achieve an informed public simply by making sure that high quality content is publicly available and presuming that credibility is enough while you wait for people to come find it.

And here’s invitation from Boyd that I’m accepting:

You have to understand the networked nature of the information war we’re in, actively be there when people are looking, and blanket the information ecosystem with the information people need to make informed decisions.

+ + +

Moving from best intentions to good work is the biggest and most important step of all. For me, it involves discovering where and how to take it.

This post was adapted from my May 12, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

How to Engage Hearts and Change Minds in the Global Warming Debate

May 5, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Conversations that change minds always appeal to people’s priorities.

These are conversations we’ve had here about subjects like the risks of climate change (“An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World”), the current imbalances in the American economy (“The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken”), the impacts of innovation (“Whose Values Will Save Us From Our Technology?”) and their effects on workers, families and communities.

Unfortunately, many of us don’t talk to anyone about how a warming planet is already impacting us, how the risks are accelerating, and what each of us can do about it. “What has climate change got to do with me?” or more pointedly, “What has global warming got to do with what is important to me?”

What environmentalists consider a horrifying catastrophe barely registers as a concern for many of us, and much of that disconnect comes from how environmentalists have talked about it. It’s almost as if they think the health and beauty of the earth (remember “the snail darter”?) is more important than the freedom or prosperity of the people in it– when the challenge should never be expressed as an either/or.

Arguments about the sanctity of the biosphere that may seem obvious to me won’t persuade skeptics who are far more concerned about making a living off the land. So it’s fair to ask: why can’t the risks of global warming be conveyed in terms of its impacts on human freedom and prosperity—that is, through the lens of a very different set of priorities? Otherwise, we’re doomed to leaving half of the constituency that’s needed for change out of the loop.

Whether a skeptic is open to listening to someone who wants to persuade them is also key. I’m never going to change your mind if you don’t trust me already, and much of that trust comes from having credibility within a community that already shares at least some of your values. It’s how Nixon’s legacy as an anti-communist gave him credibility with conservative constituents when he wanted them to change their minds about improving relations with communist China in the 1970s.

Until recently, there were very few leaders in the community of global warming skeptics whose minds were changed by the environmental record AND who were also willing persuade others who share their values to change their minds too by discussing how they became convinced by the enormous risks that are involved. Whether the issue is climate change or something else, the stature of the persuader and his or her willingness to explain their evolution from skeptic to believer in a language that speaks to common values also matters.

Some recent polling data about the gulf between believers and non-believers when it comes to global warming speaks to the enormity of the bridge-building challenge.

According to a Gallup poll in March, nearly 70% of Republicans believe that alarm over a warming planet is “generally exaggerated” while nearly the same number of Democrats (67%) believe that global warming will pose “a serious threat” in their lifetimes. When political affiliation is removed from the polling questions, the results are equally compelling. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 60% of the public think that global warming will affect people in the US, only 40% believe it will affect them personally, and 2/3rds of those polled never talk about climate change with anyone else. For many people, climate-related threats to our way of life are not even on their radar.

Those most knowledgeable about climate science are almost unanimous in their alarm over global warming. But those who aren’t paying attention or are waiting to be convinced are unlikely to persuaded by “the facts” that fuel the experts’ alarm. On the other hand, they might be persuaded by someone they are listening to already and are open to hearing out.

This openness to persuasion was evident from studies Charlan Nemeth shared in her 2018 book on the power of dissent. I discussed her findings in a couple of posts (“Why Voice Your Dissent?” and “Dissent That Elevates the Group”) about how somebody who disagrees with you–often vehemently–can also change your mind.

As long as a group trusts you enough to “give you the floor and listen to what you have to say,” you’ll likely engage them in your argument when it’s grounded in your values, demonstrates your care about where the group is headed, and provides a glimpse of a better future for all of you if you succeed in persuading them.

You raise your voice because what you believe and what you know can’t stay silent any longer. You dissent because you care about being true to yourself and because you care about what will happen to the group if it doesn’t hear what you’re saying. [As a result,] the group will grapple with your knowledge and beliefs even when they don’t agree with them…In addition…the most productive dissent also contains at least a piece of the future that you are convinced that everyone in the group should want. A dissenter’s convictions engage our convictions about what we know and believe, but so does her hopeful vision about the future [we can] create together.

When dissenting opinions contain these three elements, those who disagree at first are more likely to open their minds and question their own positions. When you are “in it” together (whatever the basis for that commonality), people will listen to your reasoned testimony when they sense your heart is in it too. Someone else’s grounded, caring and hopeful dissent essentially creates the space for reconsidering what we think and believe to be true.

Of course, to persuade a skeptical group with your “dissenting” opinion, the group has “to give you the floor” in the first place, and the easiest way to receive that invitation is if you already share at least some of the group’s basic values. For example, to reach conservative, often Evangelical communities that have tended to be dismissive of the threat of global warming, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe grounds the facts she knows as a scientist in the biblical values she believes in as a Christian.

In her 2009 A Climate for Change: Global Warming Facts for Faith-Based Decisions (co-written with her husband who is a minister himself), as well as in her TED talk last December, Hayhoe’s persuasiveness arises from both her expertise and these shared beliefs.  She’s convinced that fear, even when justified by the science, only causes people to flee the issue or become demoralized because nothing they could ever do will really matter. On the other hand, a “rational hope” that individuals can make a difference when it’s tied to the values of her largely Evangelical audience has a much better chance to change minds and get her listeners to engage in solutions, even small ones.

The Bible calls on Christians “to serve the least of these”—the poorest and most vulnerable in the developing world, who are already among the most affected by global warming. Hayhoe utilizes her scientific knowledge to paint a vivid picture of the suffering that billions of the poorest people will face if the world continues to ignore the scientific evidence. The message in her book and when she’s speaking is always clear. She “connects the dots” between their shared values and why her readers and listeners need to confront the challenges of a changing climate.  “Doing something, anything, about climate change is a step in the direction of caring for people,” she says. It’s a reason to believe that her audiences can feel, understand and act upon.

Hayhoe’s expertise as a climate scientist gives her knowledge-based credibility with her largely Christian audiences. Many of Nemeth’s dissenters who changed skeptical minds also had (or managed to build) subject-matter credibility that could be harnessed to values they shared with the groups they were trying to reach. Jerry Taylor, originally a Republican global-warming skeptic, supplemented his authority by reviewing the evidence of climate change and convincing himself that the risks it poses to his priorities—like its impacts on private property and personal freedom—demand that it be confronted without any more delay. Taylor runs the Niskanen Center, a libertarian-leaning Washington think tank. Over the past 5 years, he and his colleagues have been quietly building support among Republican legislators and staff for an aggressive federal carbon tax.

Since Taylor’s commitment to Republican and libertarian values is unquestioned by his peers, his “change of heart” given the evidence of global warning and the carefully tailored carbon tax he proposes to address it have been taken seriously by his colleagues. “This is one of our own,” he knows what he’s talking about, we need to hear him out, and maybe open our minds to the persuasion in his arguments. The significance of overtures like his to global warming skeptics cannot be overstated.

An April 16 article in the MIT Technology Review argues for the “science” (or at least the method) that seems to be operating here. The article is “How the Science of Persuasion Could Change the Politics of Climate Change,” while its tagline is: “Conservatives have to make the case to conservatives, and a growing number of them are.” In order to change minds on a hot–button issue that has been reduced to partisan sound bites, several factors are relevant.

The first is understanding how political stalemates first arise. We become polarized when members of “our elites,” our so-called “thought leaders,” rally us in one direction or another. By the same token, to reduce political polarization the convictions of these thought leaders are the first convictions that need to be changed.

The real focus shouldn’t be on convincing the public, hitting people over the head again and again with the science and dangers of climate change. Instead, the goal should be to change the minds of the elites.

When they send clear and consistent signals, mass opinions that seemed strong and fixed can swing in the other direction”…. The good news is this means you don’t have to change as many minds. The bad news is the ones you do have to change can be particularly stubborn ones.

This is why Jerry Taylor’s conversion experience is significant. No one else changed his mind. He changed his own mind by studying the evidence around climate change, and, as a result, he and his allies are well-positioned to change similar minds in the elite government circles where they operate.

Another element in this kind of persuasion relates to the common values that the persuader shares with those who need persuading.

[Taylor] and his staff attempt to craft fact-based arguments designed to appeal specifically to their political interests, and present policies they can rationalize within their ideologies.

Notably, the Niskanen Center isn’t pushing the environmental regulations that conservatives despise. They’re advocating a revenue-neutral carbon tax, a market-based tool. Carbon pollution costs real people real money. It’s just that the polluters aren’t necessarily the ones bearing those costs. In a market that respects the property rights libertarians champion, that ‘externality’ needs to be priced in, Taylor says.

The MIT Tech article suggests that Taylor has been making headway with Republicans in Congress, but no one is “naming names” yet, suggesting that there is still “a ways to go” in getting these legislators out in front on America’s response to global warming.

To make their changes of heart even more palatable, the article also cites the so-called “co-benefits theory” advanced by some political scientists. In listing our gains once we cut greenhouse gas emissions, the newly converted can claim that they are also promoting goals like technological innovation, energy independence, national security, air quality, health and job creation.

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The necessary coalition to address global warming will never coalesce until respected leaders in skeptical communities engage with those who deny the seriousness of climate change.

A skeptical community can be reached by both expertise and potential solutions that are consistent with that community’s’ priorities and values.

This kind of outreach recognizes that people’s identities are tied up in their political certainties and how those certainties reflect their basic values.

An appeal to values can change hearts enough so that an expert’s appeal to reason can also change minds.

There is a “rational hope” today that a skeptical public can be engaged deeply enough so that we will be able to come together to address global warming as well as almost every other intractable problem that requires a critical mass of public engagement.

It’s about finding a few leaders who can reach enough people where they live.

This post was adapted from my May 5, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

The Social Contract Around Our Work Is Broken

April 23, 2019 By David Griesing 1 Comment

A growing part of the American economy—the part that’s harvesting and utilizing our personal data to drive what we consume—no longer depends on “the basic reciprocities” that once supported our social contract. In other segments of our economy, business is also profiting at worker’s expense and democratic capitalism’s promises to us about shared prosperity are regularly broken.

The mutual benefits of a capitalist economy were supposed to include our thriving as workers, being fairly compensated for our work and able to support our families and communities, while our employers also thrived when we used our paychecks to buy their goods and services. That virtuous circle has been the bedrock of capitalism’s social contract since Adam Smith first described it 300 years ago.

Today, its bonds are weakened, if not altogether broken.

A leading edge of the breakdown is tech platforms harvesting our personal data “for free” while selling it to others who use it to drive our decisions about what we consume. In what’s been called “surveillance capitalism,” we’re no longer valued at the front end of the exchange for what we provide (in this instance, our information). Instead our only value is at the back-end, determined by how much the companies that utilize our data can manipulate us into buying whatever they’re selling.

In this growing segment of our economy, largely exploitative exchanges have already replaced mutually beneficial ones. In addition to not paying us for our information, this economic model creates very few jobs in a departure from the consumer-oriented companies of the past. Its failure to value what we’re providing as workers and consumers relative to the enormous profits its trophy companies are reaping undermines both the health of the economy and the democratic institutions that depend on it.

In our economy’s more traditional jobs, we are also losing out today when it comes to the fair exchange of our work for its supposed benefits. A broader stagnation in the American economy results when the benefits that companies gain from pro-business policies fail to “trickle down” and benefit the vast majority of workers who lack the financial security to also be shareholders in these same companies. The result is a yawning wealth gap between the 1% (or, perhaps more accurately, the top 10%) and every other American.

Communities break down both economically and politically when we’re not compensated adequately for the work and information that we provide. What were supposed to be “a series of mutual benefit equations” between workers and employers, consumers and companies that sell us things, have become increasingly unbalanced.

The first discussion today looks at this breakdown in the social contract. The second part argues for a shift in priorities that can confront the perils of surveillance capitalism along with other distortions—like income inequality and stagnant growth—that harm all but a small percentage of those who participate in America’s economy today.

Instead of more failed attempts to increase economic opportunity through pro-business polices or to limit the harms of this approach with band aids for those it leaves behind, a far better alternative is promoting work for all who are willing to do it, while making the dignity of work (and the thriving families and communities that good work produces) our priorities. Rebalancing the economic equation for workers and consumers will enable the economy to benefit nearly everyone again while mending vital parts of America’s promise.

I took the pictures here in Germantown, a nearby “town” in Philadelphia where the Revolutionary War battle took place. Three centuries ago, America’s democratic capitalism began in places like Germantown. In the fabric of its old and repurposed buildings, it’s not difficult to find a metaphor when you’re looking for one.

In the side of one old factory, there is a bricked-in wall where there used to be a workroom. In the future of our work, I’d argue that bricked-over workrooms like this, where we used to benefit from our contributions as workers and consumers, need to be opened up and revitalized. We need to call out our increasingly feudal system for what it is, and reorient our priorities to restore basic economic relationships that are foundation stones for our way of life.

The Fundamental Breakdown

In a post from January, I discussed the arguments that Oren Cass makes in his new book The Once and Future Worker about how the mutually beneficial relationships between workers, consumers and businesses have broken down since the 1970s and our repeated failures to address the imbalance. As I said at the time:

[Cass] is concerned about the vast majority of urban, suburban and rural workers who are not sharing in America’s prosperity because of policy choices that have been made over the past 50 years by “the Left” (for more government spending on safety nets) and “the Right” (for its insistence on driving [business profits] over every other priority). Putting expensive band-aids on the victims of pro-growth government policies—when we could simply be making better choices—is hardly a sustainable way forward in Cass’s view.

Cass argues that propping up business to create a bigger pie for all has been a failure because those bigger slices are being eaten almost exclusively by business owners and their investors as opposed to their workers, their communities, or the economy at large. To counter this result, Cass wants policy makers to adopt entirely different priorities than the Right and Left have been embracing, namely, active, sustained promotion of “a labor market in which workers can support strong families and communities [as] the central determinant of long term prosperity.” Several of his proposals about how to do so, along with his views about the dignity of work and its importance to democracy, are set out in that earlier post.

Cass’s conclusion (and mine) is that America needs to change its economic priorities before the costs of failure get any worse.

In another new book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff focuses on a leading edge of the current problem: the stark imbalance in “behavioral futures markets” where data about what we “are likely to want next” has tremendous value to companies selling us products and services but which no one has been paying us to provide. For Zuboff, these tech platforms, along with the marketers and sellers who buy our behavioral information, have created “a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material” while implementing “a parasitic economic logic in which the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new global architecture of behavioral modification.” If the industry players can seduce you into giving enough information about your motivations and desires to your smart phones, smart speakers, social networks and search engines, they can persuade you to buy (or do) almost anything.

Zuboff discusses how economic theorists from Adam Smith to Friedrich Hayek legitimized capitalism as a system where workers needed to be paid well enough to provide for their families, be productive members of their communities, and have enough spending money left over to buy the products and services that companies like their employers were providing. In an essay that laid out her argument before Surveillance Capitalism was published, Zuboff cites economic historian Karl Polanyi for his views about how American companies after World War II were expected to offer a kind of communal reciprocity that involved hiring the available workers, hiking wages when possible, and sharing their prosperity rather than hoarding it.

Polanyi knew that capitalism was never self-regulating, could be profoundly destructive, and that its foreseeable human tolls needed to be minimized. To do so, “measures and policies” also had to be integrated “into powerful institutions [that were] designed to check the action of the market relative to labor, land and money.” Zuboff cites Polanyi’s post-War study of General Motors not only for for the ways that fair labor practices, unionization and collective bargaining preserved “the organic reciprocities” between its workers and owners but also for how much the public appreciated these shared benefits at the time.

In the 1950s, for example, 80 percent of [American] adults said that ‘big business’ was a good thing for the country, 66 percent believed that business required little or no change, and 60 percent agreed, ‘the profits of large companies help make things better for everyone who buys their products or services.’

It was a balance that persisted for almost 40 years until what Zuboff calls “the ascendancy of neoliberalism” promoted an extreme form of capitalism where owner profits and share price were paramount and a responsible commitment to workers and communities no longer held capitalism’s worst tendencies in check. Around 1980, Oren Cass notes a related shift. Instead of creating worker satisfaction through “the dignity of work,” there was an economic policy shift from promoting worker satisfaction through the quality of their jobs to keeping them happy as consumers by giving them more stuff to buy with their paychecks.

Zuboff argues that the surveillance capitalists stepped in once these established reciprocities were breached, with profound effects for individual Americans as workers and consumers, for communities whose vitality depends on them, and for our democratic way of life itself.

Instead of paying for the parts of us that they’re profiting from, the surveillance capitalists pay us nothing for our behavioral data. Given the enormous size and profitability of companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon, they also “give back” far fewer jobs to the employment market than a GM once did. Moreover, these companies feel that they owe us nothing in exchange for manipulating us into buying whatever they’re selling—what Zuboff calls a kind of “radical indifference.” Without so much as an afterthought, they take without giving much back to us individually, to the job market, or to the community at large. Capitalism’s ability to lift all boats was supposed to be a driving force for democracy and the genius of the American Dream.

The absence of organic reciprocities with people as sources of either consumers or employees is a matter of exceptional importance in light of the historical relationship between market capitalism and democracy. In fact, the origins of democracy in both Britain and America have been traced to these very reciprocities. [the citations I’ve omitted here are provided in her essay]

In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Zuboff describes the problem but doesn’t propose solutions. Cass, on the other hand, argues that capitalism remains the best hope for workers to reclaim their share of economic prosperity, but that we’ll have to change our public policies in order to restore the necessary reciprocities. As for surveillance capitalism, tech futurist Jaron Lanier made an early argument for countering tech company indifference and reclaiming the benefit of our personal data in his 2013 book Who Owns the Future? His proposals are even more feasible today.

The bricked-off memory of this old workroom seems more hopeful in the springtime.

Restoring the Balance

Cass’s Once and Future Worker is an important book because he backs up his ideological preferences with hard data. His solutions begin with the need for new government policies that aim to support thriving workers, families and communities by reinforcing the democratic give-and-take that is barely holding America together today. Along the way, Cass never loses sight of the real human impacts—for better and for worse—of economic forces and the policies that attempt to manage them.

For example, in his chapter “A Future for Work,” Cass argues that the workforce disruptions that will result from automation are a natural and positive effect of every innovation from the Industrial Revolution to the present. Learning how to do more with less is essential for economic growth. At the same time however, he argues strenuously that gains in economic productivity from new inventions and technologies (fewer workers producing the same amount) need to be matched by policy-driven gains in overall economic output (which will give displaced workers the ability to find new jobs as more wealth is created, living standards improve and consumer demand grows).

This is precisely what happened from 1947 to 1972, widely seen as the golden age of American manufacturing and the nation’s middle class. Economy-wide productivity increased by 99 percent; only fifty workers were needed by the end of the Vietnam War to do the work that one hundred could complete at the end of World War II. The result was not mass unemployment. Instead, America produced more stuff. The same share of the population was working in 1972 as in 1947, and men’s median income was 86 percent higher…[W]ith fewer workers required to produce the output of 1947, many could serve markets in 1972 that hadn’t existed a generation earlier or that had been much smaller.

Cass admits that these disruptions are hard for individual workers to weather but that expanding economic output always provides new jobs for displaced workers eventually. I’ve discussed the theory that at least some workers can prepare for disruptions like automation by developing skills “at the scalable edges” of their industries before their jobs disappear. But Cass also cites the introduction of ATM machines and fears about bank closures for an easier transition given the health of the economy at the time. In the years when ATM machines debuted, economic output (or an expanding economy) was matching productivity gains (and business profits). Since these ATMs lowered the banks’ cost of doing business, they repeatedly responded by opening more branches and creating new jobs.

Unfortunately, government statistics indicate that current productivity gains are not being matched by gains in overall economic output. It is a time when companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon are using their innovations to maximize corporate profits but provide relatively few jobs while exploiting free user data–giving back little (beyond convenience) that can enable workers, families and communities to thrive as well. So if you don’t feel like you’re “getting ahead” today, it’s not your imagination; the output economy that creates new economic opportunities and new jobs isn’t keeping up, and it hasn’t been doing so for years. Writes Cass:

From 1950 to 2000, while productivity in the manufacturing sector rose by 3.1 percent annually, value-added output grew by 3.6 percent—and employment increased, from 14 million to 17 million. During 2000-2016, productivity rose by a similar 3.3 percent annually. But output growth was only 1.1 percent—and employment fell, from 17 million to 12 million. Even with all of the technological advancement of the twenty-first century, had manufacturers continued to grow their businesses at the same rate as in the prior century, they would have needed more workers—a total of 18 million, by 2016 [if output had also been growing].

While he does not describe the problem in terms of “reciprocities” between workers, businesses and consumers like Zuboff, Cass would agree that the imbalances between them are at the heart of the problem and need to be corrected. Once again, several of the policy solutions he proposes are reviewed in my January post. All reject the failed economic policies of the Left and the Right in favor of new approaches that will help workers, families and communities to thrive even if we have to settle for making somewhat less money as an economy overall.

Long before Shoshana Zuboff was railing about “surveillance capitalism,” Jaron Lanier was arguing that our behavioral information has tremendous value to the tech platforms, marketers and sellers or what he calls the “Siren Servers” that are harvesting it, and that we should be putting a price tag on our personal data before they take any more of it for free.

Like both Zuboff and Cass, Lanier believes in an economy that is sustained by a thriving middle class with plenty of hard, fulfilling work. His quandary is finding a way that more livelihoods can be sustained “in a world in which information is king,” as his Guardian book reviewer put it.

To that end, Lanier fears that in the early days of the internet we spent too much time worrying about open access and too little, if any time worrying about the digital economy’s likely impacts on job security and the monetizing of user information. Lanier emphasizes the highly personal nature of this exploitation by arguing that our behavioral data “is people in disguise” and morally intertwined with the humans who supplied it.

Lanier’s corrective is to implement a system where we would each be given “nanopayments” for the use of our biometric property. In 2013, he envisioned more sophisticated archives to record where our data originates as well as what it should be worth. He takes over half of his book to describe this mechanism. For our purposes, what he envisioned five years ago can be reduced (although far too easily) to a series of blockchain-based payments for our provision of useful personal data, similar to the system discussed here in a post from last August. Lanier’s nanopayments to individuals whenever a company profits from their personal information would be daunting to implement but it would also go a long way towards restoring Zuboff’s “organic reciprocities” and bringing Cass’s broader economic growth into the business of surveillance capitalism.

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The mutual benefits that we once enjoyed as workers, consumers and business owners in exchange for what we were providing is no longer a reality. The reasons for that loss and the blame for those responsible are just the front-end of our thinking about what we’re prepared to do about it.

In the election cycles ahead of us, it is hard to believe that our nation will have the kind of reasoned debate that we need to be having about the future of our work and its impact on our families, our local communities and our way of life itself. But maybe, hopefully, a conversation along the lines I am arguing for above will begin alongside the shouting matches we are already having about the need to abandon democratic capitalism altogether.

Cass, Zuboff and Lanier all begin with the proposition—and it’s where I start too—that our future needs to be built by human workers and that the work we’ll be doing needs to enable us, our loved ones, our neighbors, our shared economy, and not merely a protected few, to flourish.

We have managed to do this before.

Many of us have experienced its mutual benefit in our lifetimes, and we can experience it again.

But first, we’ll need to restore the social contract around our work.

This post was adapted from my April 21, 2019 newsletter. When you subscribe on this page, a new newsletter/post will be delivered to your inbox every Sunday morning.

An Enabling Perspective for Our Wounded World

April 7, 2019 By David Griesing 2 Comments

What is most exceptional about Barry Lopez is his perspective and how he manages to involve us in it.

The remarkable prologue to his new book “Horizons,” finds him in the last place we expect to find him. For an author who has brought us with him to the most remote corners on earth—the iron mines of Aboriginal Australia, the unfathomable expanses of Antarctica, an archeological site on Skraeling Island, Banda Aceh after the tsunami, Cape Foulweather’s “ghosted landscape”—Lopez is reclining on a beach chair at a Hawaiian resort, playing with his grandson in the shallow waves, swimming off shore to show him the sunken battleship Arizona, remembering an odd encounter with John Steinbeck when he too was young and thinking about writing, watching “the pool water shatter into translucent gems” after a tourist’s spontaneous, arcing dive. They’re the reveries of a summer day. And then this, as he looks out from the dreamlike circle of his life and family:

I want to wish each stranger I see in the chairs and lounges around me, every one of them, an untroubled life. I want everyone here to survive what is coming.

Until now, Barry Lopez’ most acclaimed book was “Arctic Dreams.” It is part travelogue and part meditation on the fragility and resilience of a particular landscape, along with its wildlife and people. Since it came out in 1986, he has written hundreds of articles, along with fiction and essays, but “Horizons” is “Arctic Dream’s” non-fiction companion and successor. It took him more than 30 years to recast what he had to say back then in the face of the profound impacts humanity has had on the earth in those ensuing years.

Robert MacFarlane remarked recently about the strangeness of calling what Lopez does in both of these books non-fiction, thereby defining them by “their negative and restricting relation to fiction.” Lopez breaks open the possibilities of non-fiction for me in the ways that he does for MacFarlane: with often gorgeous prose that is “stylistic adventure,” “ethical address,” and “secular spirituality” where land, wildlife and the traditional knowledge of ancient people are “tutelary presences.” Lopez is the medium that gives them voice when we can’t hear them for ourselves.

In his own writing, MacFarlane lets us feel the land, its wildlife and people too, using “the particular words” that conjure their essences and interactions most evocatively in an age when we’re losing “the language” that we once used to talk about them and therefore “the descriptions” that helped us to connect more deeply to the world around us. Out of MacFarlane’s concern about the loss of these words and memories over the same 30 years, he sees Barry Lopez’ own “life journey” as one “from hope to doubt.”

What I found most fascinating about “Horizon” are the contours of Lopez’ doubt today and how he involves us in the only outcome that seems possible given the uncertainties.

How can you warn us on our lounge chairs without disabling, through a sense of hopelessness, those you are trying so hard to engage?

1. Thirty Years Ago – 1986

The Lopez of “Arctic Dreams,” and much of what he recalls about his observations since, come from his being a fieldworker, meaning that his approach to the places he has visited are those of “attention and interpretation.” This is what MacFarlane has to say about Lopez’ well-honed conjuring tricks in his review of “Horizon”:

In one of the few even faintly comic moments in the book, Lopez recounts how the Inuit hunters refer to him as naajavaarsuk, the ivory gull, a species distinguished by its habit of “standing on the perimeter of the action, darting in to snatch something when there’s an opening”. One might add – though Lopez does not – that he is also an isumataq, a storyteller who “creates the atmosphere in which wisdom reveals itself”. The achievement of Lopez’s work has always been ontological before it is political; a “redreaming”, to use his verb, of the possibilities of human life.

Lopez always seems to have believed that if he describes what he’s experienced well enough, his readers and listeners can experience it too, trusting them to draw their own conclusions and to decide on how they’ll respond. In other words, Lopez invites a state of mind where decision-making becomes possible.

The last time I wrote about Lopez here, he talked about one way that he’s thought about it.

I gave a talk once at the Athenaeum in Providence, Rhode Island, and I asked the man who was my host, what is it that Emerson and all of these people did on a Sunday afternoon at the Athenaeum? Did they talk about politics, or did they talk about science, or did they talk about sports? What was it that made these talks so much a part of cultural memory for us? And he said they just elevated — they brought the level of the conversation up. And I reflected on that and thought, well, that’s what I want [to do].

On his own page, Lopez describes the conversation partners he’s after in unusually intimate terms: my “family, friends, mentors, professional colleagues—to whom I feel most beholden.” They are “people with whom I imagine I share a common fate.” For them, as he elaborates in “Horizon”: “You feel while you are witnessing such things that you must carry some of this home, that what you’ve found are not your things but our things.” It’s deeply personal sharing–like you’d do around a campfire–while reimagining the possibilities that are ahead of you together.

As the younger man of “Arctic Dreams,” Lopez was concerned about the environmental destruction and loss of habitat that he saw on his travels but challenged those who feared extinction was inevitable, believing that we had enough courage to reverse our course, even if our actions might not bear fruit in our lifetimes. Some of it may have been trusting too much that the conversation he had elevated would spur all those others to follow through. As he writes in “Horizon”:

Looking back, I see that this ideal—to imagine myself in service to the reader—had me balanced on the edge of self-delusion. But it was at the time my way of working. It didn’t occur to me that taking life [my role?] so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?

The long road that Lopez took to “Horizon” involved going back to many of the places he had visited over the years to see what he had missed and to discover how the hope of “Arctic Dreams” could evolve into something sharper, with greater urgency and far less certainty.

2. Today

Lopez talked about this 30-year journey at the Free Library here on Tuesday, and during the hour and a half that he filled with his stories, I tried to track the emotions underneath them and how they have changed his role as an observer, interpreter and catalyst for those who are listening.

At the Free Library of Philadelphia on Tuesday night

I didn’t think that I’d ever get the chance.

As recently as a year ago, I’d heard that Lopez was gravely ill with a particularly aggressive cancer so I never thought I’d see him read from his work or sit in the same room with him. In addition to being something of a miracle, his appearance here this week was also a statement about his own resilience, the personification of survival in the face of his body’s self-destructiveness. He never talked about his illness, but his message was more intertwined with his own survival now and you could feel it.

Lopez is a tough old bird who’s been a relentless wanderer, a describer of all the shades of purple that the light reveals in a remote canyon, a professional diver, a chronicler of “the shock wave” of the Middle East, and the pilgrim who made his Pashtun guides take him to the empty niches at Bamyan where monumental statues of the Buddha carved from the living rock 1600 years ago had been blasted into oblivion by the Taliban–why?–because their voids called out to him. Voids like this are far more fixed in his vision today than they were 30 years ago.

It’s why MacFarlane describes “Horizon” as “a deeply wounded book” about “the throttled Earth.” Lopez seems less certain that he can reach the tourists in their lounge chairs around the pool and more reliant on networks of wisdom that still includes his “family, friends, mentors and professional colleagues” but now depends at least as much on the wisdom of traditional cultures that have found ways to survive in the face of war, environmental destruction and natural disaster. Unlike citizens of the developed world who act like children looking for heroes to save them, for thousands of years adults who know how to make decisions to care for everyone and ensure that no one gets left behind have guided “heroic communities” of indigenous people across the world. Today, Lopez tries to counter his doubts by imagining networks comprised of all the different communities that depend on adults with the knowledge to survive so that we can claim our uncertain future together.

When you face your own death and the death of the world you have lovingly observed and interpreted, there is far greater urgency in your message. From MacFarlane again:

The event horizon of climate change is swiftly narrowing its noose. Lopez’s writing throughout this book is pulled taut between his need to register the extreme urgency of the environmental crisis, and his long-held belief in time, patience and the careful observation of other cultures as the basis for a fix: “As time grows short, [writes Lopez,] the necessity to listen attentively to foundational stories other than our own becomes imperative.’

At the Free Library, Lopez talked repeatedly about the centuries of practical wisdom that enable traditional societies to repair themselves, to “go on,” whatever knocks them down. Instead of our Western view of progress—the confidence that things will always get better—he counters that the health of the world is following a very different path and that our only hope rests with those who already have (or are willing to nurture) the ability to start over again, to survive, even when they find themselves in the darkest places.

As I listened I found myself wondering: when is the last time that anyone I know had to figure out a way to survive from one day to the next?

And as with MacFarlane’s lost “words” and “descriptions of nature”: how much natural resilience and willingness to rely upon one another has our freedom, wealth and belief in progress allowed us to forget, but that we’ll need to remember if we’re to adapt and survive in this increasingly “throttled” world?

There were glimmers of anger, impatience and disgust in Lopez’ uncertainty on Tuesday night, but only briefly and they quickly disappeared behind his refusal to despair. In a recent interview, Lopez acknowledged these judgmental tendencies when he talked about why it took him so long to follow up on “Arctic Dreams”:

I think I had a greater tendency when I was younger to judge, to maintain states of anger. I had impatience. And I had to bleed all that off before I wrote ‘Horizon.’

In their place, this new book and his coming out to talk about it is more like one of the prophet Jeremiah’s Old Testament lamentations. Particularly in his fifth lamentation, Jeremiah tells of how the people of God lived through the destruction of Jerusalem but in the end stubbornly refuse to abandon their hope despite a deep uncertainty about their deliverance.

Lopez sounded like an Old Testament prophet when he said of himself a couple of years ago: “It is necessary to have people out on the edge calling back to us about what’s coming.”

Like others who have cried out to be heard from the wilderness, his perspective today is forged by his own survival, his willingness to look at the voids that chronicle our race towards destruction, his urgent recognition that we have limited time to turn the tide, and his refusal to despair because so many of those he has encountered as he’s wandered this earth have also found dignified ways to survive.

Without hectoring or drama, the prophetic perspective in Lopez’ current stories invites us to re-imagine the future in ways that—quite frankly–seem impossible for us to ignore.

This post is adapted from my April 7, 2019 Newsletter. You can subscribe here and receive it in you inbox every Sunday morning