Thanks for making these important and terrifying points, Patrick, and for tying the climate emergency in with war. We're so far away from a peaceful, flourishing world. I hope we can get on the right track.
Grappling with an entire world system gone awry, we need leverage points where we can get in that right track. That’s why I’m emphasizing building the future in the places where we live.
We're working on starting an environmental group in the community I moved to recently. I agree that where we live is where we understand things best and have the most power.
Thanks for the encouragement to keep hope alive and focus on creating the infrastructure for a more positive future. Always looking for places to plug into these efforts.
The advocacy group House Our Neighbors took the first step Tuesday toward creating a new tax on businesses that would fund permanently affordable, publicly owned housing. The group filed paperwork with the Seattle City Clerk’s Office for its “Let’s Build Social Housing” ballot initiative, and will begin collecting signatures with the hopes of getting the measure on November’s ballot.
If successful, the measure would levy a 5% “excess compensation” tax on employer payroll expenses for each Seattle-based employee paid over $1 million in annual compensation. In other words, an employer would pay a 5% tax on any dollar over $1 million in total employee compensation. Total compensation includes base salary, stock and bonuses.
That money would pay for Seattle’s newly created Social Housing Developer, the voter-approved public development authority that will build, acquire, manage and maintain permanently subsidized, mixed-income affordable housing. House Our Neighbors, which also spearheaded last year’s ballot measure to create the Social Housing Developer, expects the proposed tax to raise about $53 million annually.
Reading these particulars about the climate situation resulted in a sort of "final straw" shift of perspective on what is sometimes called "climate collapse". I'm now convinced that it will not be possible to prevent a near term collapse of our present (global) civilization.
I'm still wanting to work for a better world, and for mitigation. But now I'm living in a world in which collapse seems to be fully baked into the cake.
My next piece is on best and worst case scenarios, how building the future in place relates to both. Civilizational collapse is on the worst end. (Though there are worst worst cases where nothing will matter such as total climate runaways.) In the case of collapse we are going to be driven back to our home communities and in order for it not to be totally Mad Max we need to have evolved networks of mutual aid and solidarity. That’s a key element that’s been driving my thinking.
The tack not taken is what we might do to get us on a positive track in timely fashion. There isn't even any conversation about that. After a year on Substack trying to spark conversation about ideas of mine, I hit paydirt, not to get attention to my ideas but to get people thinking via money prizes for an essay contest about what we could do. "It's 2050, the world is working, how did we get there, starting with something you did?" 175 entries later, here are the winners of $12,000 in what's now a community strangely grateful for being asked to think: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/the-big-announcement.
I completely agree with those last two sentences in your response to my comment, Patrick. It's utterly and completely urgent that we prepare communities for the coming rather dramatic, and unavoidable, changes. And we have to do so on an emergency basis, rather like boarding up windows before evacuating a house in the case of an approaching hurricane. Our losses will be so, so much worse if we are not prepared for what is very likely coming.
My biggest worry is that local food growing will become very, very much more challenging at the time in which industrial farming on a world economy scale implodes. These are going to be hard times ahead!
I should mention here, also, that there are many possible scenarios of collapse, and the world "collapse" has no singular, universal meaning or interpretation. So we're going to have to discuss "collapse" in its full complexity.
As it is, also, overwhelmingly most people (where most of us live) are just not informed about any of this stuff, nor are they paying attention. So we have a difficult educational task ahead of us.
Thanks for making these important and terrifying points, Patrick, and for tying the climate emergency in with war. We're so far away from a peaceful, flourishing world. I hope we can get on the right track.
Grappling with an entire world system gone awry, we need leverage points where we can get in that right track. That’s why I’m emphasizing building the future in the places where we live.
We're working on starting an environmental group in the community I moved to recently. I agree that where we live is where we understand things best and have the most power.
Thanks for the encouragement to keep hope alive and focus on creating the infrastructure for a more positive future. Always looking for places to plug into these efforts.
I hope to point in some directions. In our city, the initiative to fund the new social housing effort is pretty exciting:
https://crosscut.com/politics/2024/02/seattle-social-housing-advocates-want-excess-compensation-tax
The advocacy group House Our Neighbors took the first step Tuesday toward creating a new tax on businesses that would fund permanently affordable, publicly owned housing. The group filed paperwork with the Seattle City Clerk’s Office for its “Let’s Build Social Housing” ballot initiative, and will begin collecting signatures with the hopes of getting the measure on November’s ballot.
If successful, the measure would levy a 5% “excess compensation” tax on employer payroll expenses for each Seattle-based employee paid over $1 million in annual compensation. In other words, an employer would pay a 5% tax on any dollar over $1 million in total employee compensation. Total compensation includes base salary, stock and bonuses.
That money would pay for Seattle’s newly created Social Housing Developer, the voter-approved public development authority that will build, acquire, manage and maintain permanently subsidized, mixed-income affordable housing. House Our Neighbors, which also spearheaded last year’s ballot measure to create the Social Housing Developer, expects the proposed tax to raise about $53 million annually.
Reading these particulars about the climate situation resulted in a sort of "final straw" shift of perspective on what is sometimes called "climate collapse". I'm now convinced that it will not be possible to prevent a near term collapse of our present (global) civilization.
I'm still wanting to work for a better world, and for mitigation. But now I'm living in a world in which collapse seems to be fully baked into the cake.
My next piece is on best and worst case scenarios, how building the future in place relates to both. Civilizational collapse is on the worst end. (Though there are worst worst cases where nothing will matter such as total climate runaways.) In the case of collapse we are going to be driven back to our home communities and in order for it not to be totally Mad Max we need to have evolved networks of mutual aid and solidarity. That’s a key element that’s been driving my thinking.
The tack not taken is what we might do to get us on a positive track in timely fashion. There isn't even any conversation about that. After a year on Substack trying to spark conversation about ideas of mine, I hit paydirt, not to get attention to my ideas but to get people thinking via money prizes for an essay contest about what we could do. "It's 2050, the world is working, how did we get there, starting with something you did?" 175 entries later, here are the winners of $12,000 in what's now a community strangely grateful for being asked to think: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/the-big-announcement.
I will read them!
I completely agree with those last two sentences in your response to my comment, Patrick. It's utterly and completely urgent that we prepare communities for the coming rather dramatic, and unavoidable, changes. And we have to do so on an emergency basis, rather like boarding up windows before evacuating a house in the case of an approaching hurricane. Our losses will be so, so much worse if we are not prepared for what is very likely coming.
My biggest worry is that local food growing will become very, very much more challenging at the time in which industrial farming on a world economy scale implodes. These are going to be hard times ahead!
I should mention here, also, that there are many possible scenarios of collapse, and the world "collapse" has no singular, universal meaning or interpretation. So we're going to have to discuss "collapse" in its full complexity.
As it is, also, overwhelmingly most people (where most of us live) are just not informed about any of this stuff, nor are they paying attention. So we have a difficult educational task ahead of us.
How to build up local and regional food networks is on my research agenda. Regeneration offers a good summary of options. https://regeneration.org/nexus/localization
Excellent piece.