Front Cover: The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion by Adrian Bardon
The climate change issue is a perfect storm for conservative personality and conservative ideology. It is a form of impact science that represents a massive threat to the existing social and economic order, and in so doing, incidentally threatens demographic identity groups invested in the status quo. Solutions will require massive government intervention, the prospect of which is particularly threatening to the especially individualistic, small-government aspects of American conservative ideology.
Excerpt from “Science Denial” (Chapter 2, p.109), The Truth About Denial: Bias and Self-Deception in Science, Politics, and Religion by Adrian Bardon, Oxford University Press, New York, USA, 2020.
DR. ADRIAN BARDON is a professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, where he teaches courses on political philosophy, philosophy of religion, philosophy of space and time, and the history of philosophy. He is the author of A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time (OUP 2013), as well as numerous scholarly articles on time, perception, politics, and the history of philosophy.
Iranian American Poet Kaveh Akbar Photo Credit: Poet’s Website
My Poetry Corner October 2021 features the poem “My Empire” from the poetry collection Pilgrim Bell: Poems (Graywolf Press, 2021) by Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar. Born in Tehran to an American mother and Iranian father, Kaveh was two years old when his family migrated to the United States, first settling in Pennsylvania. When Kaveh was five years old, they moved to the Midwest, living in Wisconsin and later Indiana. Since his parents only spoke English at home, the poet speaks little Farsi, his first language.
Akbar earned his MFA at Butler University in Indiana and a PhD in creative writing from Florida State University. He currently teaches at Purdue University (Indiana) and in the low-residency MFA programs at Randolph College (Virginia) and Warren Wilson College (North Carolina). Since September 2020, he also serves as the poetry editor of the progressive magazine, The Nation.
Pilgrim Bell is Akbar’s second poetry following his recovery from alcohol addiction. In “Seven Years Sober,” he writes: Trust God but tie your camel. Trust / God. The bottle by the bed the first / few weeks. Just in case. Trust…. He acknowledges in “Cotton Candy” that his mother wept nightly for eight years / my living / curled its hands around her throat / not choking exactly but like the squeeze / of an outgrown collar…
I was so consumed with the COVID-19 pandemic that I paid no attention to the lack of rainfall in the early months of 2020 and 2021. To tell the truth, I enjoyed the dry winter months. I got to spend more time gardening. Cold and damp days kill the joy of being outdoors. Then, on May 10, California Governor Newsom grabbed my attention when he placed 41 counties, 30 percent of our state’s population, under a drought state of emergency.
“With the reality of climate change abundantly clear in California, we’re taking urgent action to address acute water supply shortfalls in northern and central California while also building our water resilience to safeguard communities in the decades ahead,” said Governor Newsom. “We’re working with local officials and other partners to protect public health and safety and the environment, and call on all Californians to help meet this challenge by stepping up their efforts to save water.”
Learning that water storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell has now fallen to about 35 percent of their capacity is also alarming. America’s two largest reservoirs, created by dams along the Colorado River, provide water to 40 million Americans and irrigation for more than 4 million acres of farmland across California and six other states—Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming. Twenty-nine Native American Tribes also depend upon theColorado River Basin for their water supply and preserving fish and wildlife habitats. The Bureau of Reclamation has forecast that the Lake Mead reservoir will hit a historic low of 1,065 feet by the end of 2021. The future of this reliable water resource is now at risk.
City of Los Angeles – California – USA Photo by Enric Cruz Lopez on Pexels.com
These past 15 months under lock-down, social distancing, and mask-wearing due to the COVID-19 pandemic have tested my mental and physical health. Weekends spent outdoors gardening have saved my sanity. To my knowledge, only five neighbors got sick with the coronavirus. None of them were hospitalized. I give thanks that they have all fully recovered.
I got my first dose of the Pfizer vaccine on February 25 and the second dose on March 18. Though the vaccine is now readily available to all Californians 12 years and over, my adult sons have yet to receive their first shot.
The County of Los Angeles is now dangling Vaccination Sweepstakes. Those who get vaccinated from June 11 to June 17 will have the chance to win a pair of Los Angeles Rams, Los Angeles Chargers or Los Angeles Clippers season tickets for next season. If you’re a resident of Los Angeles County, is 18 years or older, and is a football fan, now is your chance.
The State of California’s vaccine incentive program, Vax for the Win, is better yet! All Californians who have had at least one vaccine dose are automatically entered. On June 15, ten more winners will be selected to receive $1.5 million each. That’s not money to ignore in these harsh economic times. Since the program was launched, roughly 2 million people have reportedly taken the shot. As at June 11, our state has administered nearly 40 million vaccines. Over 70 percent of Californians 18 years and over have received at least one dose.
Front Cover: Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto by Bill Ayers Photo Credit: Haymarket Books
Choosing hopefulness is holding out the possibility of change. It’s living with one foot in the mud and muck of the world as it is, while another foot strides forward toward a world that could be. Hope is never a matter of sitting down and waiting patiently; hope is nourished in action, and it assumes that we are—each and all of us—incomplete as human beings…. We can choose to see life as infused with the capacity to cherish happiness, to respect evidence and argument and reason, to uphold integrity, and to imagine a world more loving, more peaceful, more joyous, and more just than the one we were given—and we should.
Excerpt from Demand the Impossible: A Radical Manifesto by Bill Ayers, Haymarket Books, Chicago, Illinois, USA, 2016.
Bill Ayersis a social justice activist, teacher, and a retired distinguished professor of education and senior university scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is the author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy.
Former Minneapolis Police Officer Derek Chauvin during trial for death of George Floyd Photo Credit: KTIV Television
Guilty. Guilty. Guilty.
On Tuesday, April 20, I was relieved when the jury declared Derek Chauvin guilty on all three counts for the death of George Floyd. Would the Floyd family have obtained justice without national and international outcry? However, there was no justice for George Floyd. Trading with a twenty-dollar counterfeit bill was all it took for his summary execution by a knee chokehold. The CEOs on Wall Street, who took down both the US and global financial systems and destroyed the lives of millions of workers and mortgage holders, were too BIG even for a trial much less the death penalty.
Considering that the police continue to kill blacks without due process, I think it foolhardy to believe that Chauvin’s guilty verdict is any sign of progress towards police reform. While institutionalized systemic racism persists, police killings of black and brown bodies will persist.
How complicit and guilty are we as a nation in the training given to our police force that has no qualms in eliminating black and brown offenders, however trivial their alleged crime?
Our centuries old, racist, social-economic system extends way beyond policing. This entrenched system determines where we live, the schools our children attend, our access to a healthy diet, the health care we receive, our exposure to toxic air and water, and much more. We need to address these inequities in our policies and actions to Restore our Earth, not just for a few but for the 99 Percent.
For how long can we continue to enjoy the benefits of an unjust and inequitable system and not share collective guilt?
Earth Day 2021 – Restore Our Earth Official Earth Day 2021 poster by Brazilian Street Artist Speto Photo Credit: Earth Day Official Website
April 22, 2021 is Earth Day. The theme this year is Restore Our Earth, an optimistic outlook given the ongoing challenges humanity faces with a climate emergency, now coupled with yet another year of a global pandemic.
“Restoring Our Earth is about solving climate change through the world’s natural systems, such as regenerative agriculture practices and reforestation, as well as through existing and safe technologies,” said Kathleen Rogers, President of EarthDay.org. “Restoring our planet will also require commitment of our world’s leaders to support climate literacy and civic skill building so that we can create a global engaged and active citizenry, a green consumer movement, and an economy that is just and equitable across all countries and across all demographics.”
There will be three days of climate action, beginning on Tuesday, April 20, with a global climate summit led by Earth Uprising. In the evening, the Hip Hop Caucus and its partners will present the “We Shall Breathe” virtual summit.
On April 21, Education International will lead the “Teach for the Planet: Global Education Summit.” It will be a multilingual virtual summit spanning several time zones. If we’re to solve the climate emergency, we must learn about it. We can’t build a sustainable environment without educating the next generation. That’s why EarthDay.org is spearheading a campaign to have “compulsory, assessed climate and environmental education with a strong civic engagement component in every school in the world.”
Do join me in signing the petition as an individual in support of universal climate literacy.
On the big day, Earth Day Live: Restore Our Earth will be streamed live beginning at 12:00 p.m. Eastern Time on April 22. You can tune in on EarthDay.org, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and GEM-TV. For those of us who live on the Pacific Coast, this means tuning in earlier at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time.
Joining forces with EarthDay.org, TED Countdown will premiere several original TED Talks during the livestream, providing additional top-tier content by climate leaders.
We can restore our Earth with reforestation. It’s one of the cheapest ways to sequester atmospheric carbon and tackle our climate emergency. But reforestation is not easy. It has its pitfalls. Learning from past failures, EarthDay.org developed The Canopy Project.
Human activities have destabilized Earth’s life systems. The signs are all around us. It’s time to restore the balance. Tune in to one of Earth Day’s events. Learn. Engage. Let’s make a difference. Act now.
My Poetry Corner April 2021 features the poem “Cruel Radiance” from the debut poetry collection A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press, 2020) by Cambodian American poet Monica Sok. Born in 1990 in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Sok is the daughter of refugees. She is a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and teaches poetry to Southeast Asian youth at the Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants in Oakland, California.
Sok dedicates her poetry collection to her grandmother Bun Em who arrived in the USA in 1981, two years after escaping genocide under the Khmer Rouge regime with her four daughters and two sons. A master silk weaver, Bun Em’s loom, grief, joy, and perseverance infuse Sok’s real and imagined collective memory.
In “The Weaver,” Sok transforms her grandmother’s grief into nourishment for others around her. It made her happy / as she worked on silk dresses / and her hair never ran out. / Sometimes, when she was tired, / she’d tie it up / and let all the tired animals around her house / drink from her head. Her loom becomes an old friend and an ancestor she prays to in the poem “Ode to the Loom.” Her grief is re-imagined as nails falling like rain in the darkness, so that when her hair falls / not as rain does / but as nails the evening hangs on, / and her hands slip no longer / from silk but on walls in the dark / hall to her room…
As the daughter of genocide survivors, Sok grew up with familial silence. Her poems came out of silence, she told Danny Thanh Nguyen during an interview in May 2020. “I’m writing about the genocide, but I’m writing more about the inheritance of that trauma…. I had to give myself the permission to write the stories and I went into myth-making, tried to mythologize my family’s narratives.” But the narratives are not just about her family’s experience, she noted. Rather, she was working towards a collective history of all Cambodian families.
The psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work can never be underestimated. There is a very low value placed upon Black women’s psyches in this society, which is both racist and sexist. […] If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.
Excerpt from “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” as fully published in How We Get Free: Black Feminism and The Combahee River Collective, edited by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Haymarket Books, Chicago/Illinois, USA, 2017. Her book received the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Nonfiction.
The year 2017 marked the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, which introduced to the world terms such as “interlocking oppression” and “identity politics.” The Combahee River Collective (CRC) was a radical Black feminist organization formed in 1974, growing out of the antiracist and women’s liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s. It was named after Harriet Tubman’s 1853 raid on the Combahee River in South Carolina that freed 750 enslaved people.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylorwrites on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. Her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the 2016 Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book. Her articles have been published in Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, Jacobin, New Politics, The Guardian, In These Times, Black Agenda Report, Ms., International Socialist Review, and other publications. Taylor is Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University.
According to the NOAA National Climate Report 2020, issued on January 12, 2021, last year was the most active wildfire year on record across the West. In California, thousands of firefighters battled five of the six largest wildfires in our state’s history. Nearly 10,000 fires burned over 4.2 million acres. The August Complex fire alone burned over 1 million acres, an area larger than the state of Rhode Island. In Colorado, three extensive wildfires, burning over 500,000 acres, also broke the state’s historical record.
For 2020, the average temperature of 54℉ (12.2℃) for the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) ranks as the fifth warmest year in the last 126 years on record. On August 16th, temperatures soared to 130℉ (54.4℃) in California’s Death Valley—the hottest CONUS temperature recorded in 2020. Most of the contiguous U.S. experienced above average temperatures. Ten states across the Southwest, Southeast, and East Coast had their second-warmest year on record.
East Coast residents also faced several record-breaking storm events. Thirty named storms formed in the Atlantic Ocean, breaking the record of 28 set in 2005. Tropical storms Cristobal, Marco, Laura, Delta, and Zeta made landfall in Louisiana, the most storms on record for any state in one year. Hurricane Laura generated a storm surge of over 17 feet (5.16 meters) above ground level, which would be the largest on record for Louisiana.
The Midwest was not spared. In August 2020, the region was hit by a historic derecho, a destructive thunderstorm complex. The derecho raced across the Central States, causing damages estimated at $11 billion, the costliest to hit the region in four decades.
Perhaps, like me, you have not yet experienced loss of property, livelihood, or a loved one due to some climate disaster. Yet, we the working people all suffer the consequences of the economic costs of these weather and climate disasters. America’s annual loss in 2020 exceeded $95 billion, the fourth highest cost on record. Twenty-two of these events caused losses amounting to more than $1 billion each, shattering yet another annual record of 16 events made in 2011 and 2017. The total cost of U.S. billion-dollar weather and climate disasters over the last five years (2016-2020) exceeds a record $600 billion.
Unless we change the way we live and work, these weather and climate disaster events will continue to intensify and cripple our state and local economies, already under stress due to the global COVID-19 pandemic. On the upside, the lockdown and reduced economic activities in the U.S. and worldwide have led to a drop in global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. But, it is just a short-term reduction.
At the time of completing their Emissions Gap Report 2020, released on December 9, 2020, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) reported that 126 countries, covering just 51 percent of global GHG emissions have net-zero goals that are formally adopted, announced, or under consideration. If the U.S. adopts a net-zero GHG target, as announced by the Biden Administration, the share would increase to 63 percent.
Apart from the USA, only ten other G20 members have set net-zero emission goals by 2050: Argentina, Canada, China (before 2060), European Union, France, Japan, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Based on pre-COVID-19 projections, only nine G20 members are on track to achieve their unconditional nationally determined contributions (NDCs).
Without a firm commitment to significantly reduce GHG emissions, as set out in the Paris Climate Agreement, we the people of Earth will face a temperature increase of at least 3℃ (37.4℉) by the end of this century.
As at October 2020, global COVID-19 fiscal spending continued to promote high-carbon economic production. In planning the recovery from COVID-19, governments worldwide have an opportunity to catalyze low-carbon lifestyle changes by disrupting entrenched practices. (Clearing forests to rear cattle for beef consumption comes to mind.) Based on UNEP’s consumption-based accounting, around two-thirds of global emissions are linked to private household activities. Moreover, the richest One Percent of the world’s population account for more than twice the combined share of emissions of the poorest 50 percent. The report further notes that our participation as members of civil society is essential to bring about wider changes in the social, cultural, political, and economic systems in which we live. We have to change our lifestyles if we are to bridge the emissions gap. (Emphasis is mine.)
Watch the UNEP’s video, “Emissions Gap: A Turning Point,” released on December 9, 2020 (duration 1:35 minutes):
Change is inevitable. More so when we set the change into motion. In 2020, COVID-19 forced us into lockdown mode, bringing the global economy to a standstill. In the USA, our inability as a nation to agree on a strategy to combat a highly contagious, mutating, deadly foe will cost us more lives. Our economic recovery will take longer. Meanwhile, time is running out on tackling a global climate crisis that is gathering force with each passing day. Staying safe in place may not be an option.
