Oh boy. #RoyScranton is good.
http://mustarinda.fi/magazine/post-fossil-fuel-culture/anthropocene-city
This article is a stunner. Not only is it superbly written, dense with facts about the toxic industries surrounding the Houston Ship Canal, clear about the political incompetence dealing with storm flooding on Texas coastlines, and a focus on #DarkEcology and #hyperobjects via a discussion with #TimothyMorton (another dark ecologist and complex thinker, but...
Cont.
It was written last April with portions from last October and foretells via hypothetic example the very situation that happened with hurricane #Harvey; except Harvey isn't even the big one yet that will inevitably let loose all the toxicity described and be America's greatest catastrophe to that point, and quite possibly shut America down by chain reaction through the economy.
Cont.
From Morton:
"The one thing that we need to be thinking right now, which is that as a human being I’m responsible for global warming, is actually quite tricky to fully conceptualize.”
There are so many things I want to quote from this article, but just read it. I will end with this, however, from Scranton. It should turn you into a dark ecologist too...
Cont.
"Thinking seriously about climate change forces us to face the fact that nobody’s driving the car, nobody’s in charge, nobody knows how to “fix it.” And even if we had a driver, there’s a bigger problem: no car. There’s no mechanism for uniting the entire human species to move together in one direction.
Cont.
"There are more than seven billion of us, and we divide into almost two hundred nations, thousands of smaller sub-national states, territories, counties, and municipalities, and an unimaginable multitude of corporations, community organizations, neighborhoods, religious sects, ethnic identities, clans, tribes, gangs, clubs, and families, each of which faces its own internal conflicts, disunion, and strife, ...
Cont.
"all the way down to the individual human soul in conflict with itself, torn between fear and desire, hard sacrifice and easy cruelty, all of us improvising day by day, moment by moment, making decisions based on best guesses, gut hunches, comforting illusions, and too little data."
Fin!
A more recent article in Esquire that covers the very political incompetence and looming catastrophe that Scranton wrote about with regard to Houston and hurricanes.
http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a57276/harvey-longterm-effects/
It doesn't have the eloquence of Scranton's piece, but it makes clear there's a long history of incompetent leadership in Texas. And that probably isn't surprising news, right?
H/T @risabee for link.
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