Beth Gibbons: "Climate work is hard. Good social work is hard. It was a relief to feel support from the federal level for the last couple of years. Not having federal support is the reality we're going to be in. We'll make it work.
Your budget is a reflection of your values. You can't make it a conversation of climate versus housing. You find ways to do integrated work. That's what's necessary. In Michigan, we've had strong state leadership."
Vanessa Williamson: "Is it important for people to understand climate change is driving these changes?"
Lustgarten: "It's critically important. If we don't have agreement what the problem is, we can't make a collective decision on how to address it."
Beth Gibbons: "I'm frustrated by the language of 'climate refugees'. It's not a real term. When climate and migration are combined, it creates a greater fear of migration. We need to not encourage a reaction of fear and othering. Our futures are linked."
Shana Tabak: "I also dislike the 'climate refugees' framing. Legally, there's no such thing. I would like this question of climate and habitability to take place within the context that none us are able to escape the climate."
Audience question: "How can places with a high cost of living be prepared for displaced individuals without exacerbating the cost of living?"
It feels to me like "build more housing" can't be the answer. You almost might as well say "make more land". It's not a durable solution. And it doesn't address the many other aspects of society that need to be addressed. Jobs food commerce in general, schools, the nature and flow of community itself.
A favorite quote comes to mind.
"Better implies different."
--Amar Bose, at an MIT Enterprise Forum event
(He was trying to explain to sales people at stores that would sell Bose speakers why they had to make changes in how they set them up. "Couldn't they just do what they'd always done?" The people would ask. They were used to that and did not want to change. He was trying to explain succinctly why you can't just radically improve something and leave it the same at the same time. So he, explained, that slogan had emerged.)
Surely higher population density at some point means using existing resources differently. I'm not pushing an agenda here, but I am observing that higher density feels less compatible within every person for themselves and traditional-ownership / rent-taking-for-profit model. Surely that brings a 2-tiered citizenship and breeds discontent/danger as inequality simmers.
In computer science, we talk about building systems that scale, planning for higher traffic. This could really be done in a system that did not plan for scale without the architecting the system entirely, and I've even seen some of pine that every factor of 10 in scale requires a redesign.
Sometimes the architectural plan is indeed to just add servers, but that has to be planned in, and there has to be a source of servers, and the system architecture has to be structured such that in the new model, all the necessary flows will happen correctly and resources won't be cut off from each other or too hard to access or too expensive.
"Build more housing." does not sound like the kind of answer I could give in a job interview and expect to be hired, with the hiring manager saying "this person has clearly demonstrated their understanding of operating at scale". The answer is not of a shape that seems right to me, nor does it offer sufficient detail.
A lot of capitalism seems to operate on a theory that you just twist some knobs and everything will just happen right without coordination. I think this is less and less true as either populations grow larger or resources grow smaller or resources become more stressed.
I did not write the accompanying article specifically to address this issue, and yet I feel like it says some important additional things I might say here if I were to ramble on. It is not a complete discussion of scale, but more discussion of why I don't think the traditional ways of thinking about just turning a few knobs is likely to keep working.
Losing Ground in the Environment
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2019/09/losing-ground-in-environment.html
It also just not addressed the issue of urgency, and the way in which urgency materially changes the set of usable solutions. I did try to address that issue here:
The Politics of Delay
https://netsettlement.blogspot.com/2024/10/the-politics-of-delay.html
#climate #ClimateMigration #SystemsThinking #scaling #ScalingSoftware #Community #Housing #LateStageCapitalism #capitalism #population #collapse #inequality #sustainability #SocialPolicy #SafetyNets
@kentpitman @climatebrad I don't think it's the whole of the solution, or even the right place to start, but I do think it's still an important part.
My advice would be 'Build the capacity to build stuff, including housing.'
I'm not opposed to the idea of assuring adequate infrastructure, but if there's not any repurposing, then the community into which this is injected is not participating in the solution, just being extended, and that's a form of climate denial.
I'm already worried. In a sense, when I hear "build", I hear "consume", and any real solution to climate is as sustainable and consumption-free as possible.
So, to borrow another analogy, it's like telling the people of New Orleans that the solution is bigger levies. It may help for a while, but it just doesn't feel solution-like.
@kentpitman @climatebrad What infrastructure do you want to repurpose? Edenicity wants to majorly cut down on roads, which I sympathize with. And I think a lot of office space is unnecessary. On the whole though, I think we need to build a lot more in order to have space for everyone.
See Edenicity on city design: https://www.youtube.com/@edenicity/videos
Brad Johnson
Kent Pitman
Angleđź–‡