Destabilized Saturday Edition #1

January 22, 2022

Jan 22, 2022

Hi and welcome to the first Interesting Reads Saturday edition of Destabilized. Every Saturday morning I’ll share a few of the best things I read about climate change, political instability, and adaptation. I’ll also link to one or two of my recent posts.

My Work

The climate crisis means destabilization, not doom, from this past week.

The printing press changed everything, so will the internet, from October. This piece is implicitly a response to the question, “Is it plausible to think the internet is so powerful it could disrupt the system of government we’ve lived under for 230 years?”

Interesting Reads

How Encanto Explains America

[T]wo years of pandemic parenting might be playing with my mind, but I think the writers of Encanto are trying to tell us something here. Having watched the new release (twice) with my little one recently—and then listened to its soundtrack on repeat ever since—the message seems fairly clear: America is broken (but don’t worry, all is not lost).

We Need to Think the Unthinkable about Our Country

Yet many Americans seem to be whistling past the graveyard of American democracy. In particular, there seems to have been little effort so far at think tanks, professional military institutions and universities to build and contemplate the dire scenarios that have become increasingly plausible. And the worst-case scenario is this: The United States as we know it could come apart at the seams.
The worst case isn’t necessarily the most likely, but there’s a natural tendency to assign a vanishingly low probability to events that appear to pose insoluble problems and catastrophic outcomes and thus to dismiss them as fanciful.

America is Falling Apart at the Seams

…the number of altercations on airplanes has exploded, the murder rate is surging in cities, drug overdoses are increasing, Americans are drinking more, nurses say patients are getting more abusive, and so on and so on.