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Everyday Utopia: Putting Modern Utopian Movements into Historical Context

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Kristen Ghodsee is no stranger to communism— or at least, “closet communism.” That is what her family called it when her and her daughter, conveniently the same size,  began sharing their clothing freely during the Covid 19 pandemic. 

In her book Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life, Ghodsee leads with the impact  Covid had on her family life to unpack how political and economic upheaval can drive people to seek alternative experimental lives—or, in other words, to seek utopia. 

Ghodsee’s so-called “closet communism” reflects the fundamental point of Everyday Utopia: we engage in the kind of open sharing that is demonized as “communism”—only that it is limited to the context of our own homes. 

A professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Ghodsee  has written several books on the topic of communism and socialism. In Everyday Utopia Ghodsee takes a step back, surveying  the multitude of experimental living that has existed for millennia: the utopia. 

Covering a wide range of concerns that have faced experimental living communities, Everyday Utopia starts with the feminist, intellectual community of Kroton, founded by Pythagoras (better  known for his works on triangles) around 500 BCE and concludes with the modern cohousing and family expansionist movements of the 2020s.

Over the course of Everyday Utopia, Ghodsee encourages the readers’ imagination  and gives us concrete examples of how to change our own lives, either radically or hesitantly, into our own utopias of experimental living. As she writes, “change is always fueled by the perseverance of those who believe that we can do better. Hope is a muscle we must use.”

 Experimental living is by nature, experimental, and as such range far and wide in their ideologies. Ghodsee makes the argument that early monasteries, both Christian and Buddhist, served as models for the experimental living communities that followed. Some, like Charles Fourier’s combination factory and housing units in France in the late 1700s, supported an integrated form of communal living to maximize productivity. Others, like the 19th century Oneida Community in Upstate New York, were organized around radical or ‘heretical’ religious beliefs, such as non-hierarchical worship or women’s equality.

As a feminist scholar, Ghodsee is uniquely able to incorporate the role that women have played in these movements, both as intellectual drivers of experimental living, and also as beneficiaries of models of labor, child rearing and domestic life that characterize many experimental living initiatives. This sets her approach apart from earlier studies.  Around the world, women have been and still are expected to do the unpaid labor of cooking, cleaning, child rearing, and providing emotional support. Given this, experimental living often aims to make these shared tasks, giving  freedom to women who want to spend their time elsewhere. 

Ghodsee skillfully unpacks even the most radical ideas for  structuring interpersonal relationships.  For instance, the polyamorous, so-called ‘complex marriages’ of the Oneida perfectionist religious community, where all unrelated men and women were considered to be married, are still considered radical almost two centuries later. In giving attention to these alternative relationships, she challenges the reader to question the societal ideals of monogamy and the nuclear family. 

Still, Everyday Utopia shies away from some of the downsides of utopias and the failures of those who strive to create them. And when experimental living goes wrong, it causes real harm. For example, Charles  Fourier’s  antisemitism in his communal living spaces was pervasive and furthered an already deeply anti semitic streak in 18th century French society. Other communities that have engaged in polygamy often have issues with sex-based violence and can intensify patriarchal control, as some sects of mormonism. The isolation of many intentional communities also makes it difficult for vulnerable people to get help and support if leaders abuse their power.

 Ghodsee does address the challenges associated with living apart from broader society, and how functionally difficult it is to transform culture. Parents worry about being able to afford their kid’s college education. Children are bullied or  feel alienated from their peers in school. Local zoning laws make it impossible to have composting toilets or to live together in one house or on one property. 

Throughout the course of her research, Ghodsee interviewed adults who had been raised in communal living and then left, those who did a brief stint in a communal living environment, and those whose experimental living projects have since gone by the by. Almost all speak of them fondly on their experiences with experimental living, but few stay in the long run or plan to return. 

Even as it acknowledges the downside, Everyday Utopia is asking the question “can’t we do this better?”, in search of what everyone is seeking: the good life.  Maybe someday, we’ll find it.

Degrowth: End of Society or Vision of the Future?

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Image Source: Kamiel Choi

Degrowth is a bit of a buzzword these days. Some of the press is bad, like the WIRED article titled “Why Degrowth Is the Worst Idea on the Planet.” Some of the press is good. Bestselling books like Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto by Kohei Saito and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel make that case. And like all hot button ideas these days, degrowth is hotly debated on X.

What is degrowth?

Degrowth, in the most limited sense, questions  ‘growth’ as the goal of economic policy. In modern day politics, economic growth is considered not only to be a net good, but a hallmark of a healthy society. In fact, this is one of the few issues both presidential candidates Harris and Trump can agree on. Trump said this explicitly in the 2024 debate, promising a “bigger, better and stronger” economy and Harris got more specific with her highlight on growing the “clean energy economy”. In a political climate so polarized, growth is good is something most everyone seems to agree on. 

The idea of degrowth has been around since the 1970s, but until now it hasn’t gained much traction in a culture that leads with ‘growth is good’.The French economist André Gorz coined “degrowth” in the 1970s when looking at economic policy specifically. Since then, different people have defined degrowth in different ways.

Public vs personal approaches

The personal politics of degrowth deal largely with individual choices that shift families and communities away from relying on a system of infinite economic growth to a low consumption model of living. Think vegan food influencers and reduce food waste TikToks. 

As concern about climate change comes more into the mainstream, people trying to live with less impact on the environment often adopt terms like degrowth that come from academia, to describe the lifestyle choices that they are promoting. Zero-waste, slow living, communes, intentional communities, anti-consumerism, right-to-repair, ‘live local, think global’ and de-influencing are all social and personal approaches to the degrowth movement. 

The other camp that degrowthers end up in is far closer to Gorz original usage of the term, i.e. the public policy of degrowth. Proponents push for economic and social policies for degrowth, such as moving away from GDP as an indicator of prosperity, and redirecting efforts from sustainable development in the global North to sustainable degrowth. 

In contrast to their vegan, anti-consumer counterparts, policy degrowth advocates usually focus on national and international investment and subsidies systems, over individual consumer choice. Some like Jason Hickel do advocate for a complete overhaul of the global economy, but most take a more moderate approach, asking that governments stop using a booming economy as an indicator of wellbeing, and instead focus on human needs.

Why are people so mad? 

The majority of the people who take to the Internet to complain about degrowth are responding to political degrowth supporters, but are spreading their message using the imagery of personal degrowth advocates. For many contemporary economists, degrowth is a dangerous movement that threatens to crash the economy and spread some quasi-Maxist, socialist, global one world order. 

Pragmatic environmentalists also oppose degrowth because, however valuable it might be, they see the total overhaul of the economy as dead-in-the-water in the current political landscape. Instead, they argue that harnessing the power of economic growth and incentives will save the planet from all its climate change woes.

Feminist opposition to degrowth is lesser known, but also important.  The current ‘washing machine debates’ give a snapshot of how these conversations about individual degrowth are shaped by personal privilege. The washing machine transformed the lives of women starting in the 1950s. They along with other time-saving appliances allowed women to work outside the home, while still fulfilling traditional  roles as wife and mother. There is an implicit belief underlying critiques of personal degrowth that only those who have forgotten the struggles of past generations would choose to give up these technologies that shape the world today.

Another issue that comes up for degrowth, specifically personal degrowth, is how people with disabilities are reliant on systems for medicine and adaptive technology. The vast system of international shipping that fuels the global economy also delivers ingredients for the manufacture of life-saving medication, like insulin. Aspects of consumption like plastic straws and disposable paper towels are a convenience many enjoy, but can play a huge role in a disabled person’s day to day life. Unequivocally, the type of personal degrowth choices that are promoted are at odds with technologies that empower disabled people to have agency in their own lives. 

These two critiques of degrowth get tangled in the current debates, clouding both the meaning of degrowth as a term, and sending these two different communities sailing past each other, fighting a strawman army of their own making. 

Why should people care?

While people on the internet have a lot of thoughts about degrowth, it may seem out of touch with the current struggles and needs of people on the ground. Political degrowth is an abstract idea being debated in even more abstract terms, where thinkers throw around acronyms like GDP and ILO. Even the personal degrowth of pristine, zero waste households plastered over the internet that are used to sell metal straws and reusable coffee cups seem out of touch.  Why should anyone with a job, bills, family to worry about, care about degrowth?

One reason is that, for better and for worse, economic policy shapes the lives of everyone. Conversations around tax rates, development, sustainable or otherwise, inflation reduction, and budgeting all start with an implicit assumption that growth is good; growth will bring more people health, wealth and happiness. 

How do we go forward?

Popular eco-friendly ideas like sustainable development, degrowth, buy-less, and the Green New Deal, are often seen as a panacea to the problem of climate change. This thinking is understandable. Human suffering, particularly at the hands of the natural world, is scary. An uncertain future is scary. And people respond with the hope that if we just find the right solution, the silver bullet, weed out the bad apples, and then we will be okay. 

In focusing on washing machines and other conveniences, we fight amongst ourselves, stuck in a cycle of judging, justifying and defending. The degrowth debates, in their chaos, remind us that it is easy to talk about big ideas on the Internet, it is easy to make sweeping generalizations about how people should live, and it is easy to be distracted by tech bros on X. What it is hard to do is think critically, imagine a better world and fight to create it, present with the now.

As Andre Gorz reminds us, “theory always runs the risk of blinding us to the shifting complexities of the real world. [Instead, we should] live completely at one with the present, mindful above all of the wealth of our shared life”. 

Cultivating Hope: Community-Owned Regenerative Agriculture as a Way Forward

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Birdsfoot Farm remains a sturdy, if subdued, tribute to an alternative way of living and farming.

Next to the slightly peeling Obama 2008 bumper sticker sits a small white and blue quotation.

 “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” 

The quote dots the eight or so cars parked in front of the 150-year old barn of Birdsfoot Farm in Canton, NY. Founded in the 1970s as part of the Back to the Land movement, the farm now supports a small cohousing community, a K-12 school, and vegetable plot that supplies produce  to local families and businesses. They host Maypole Dances, an annual Garlic Festival, and weekly potlucks in the main kitchen. They live mostly self-sufficiently, with the occasional luxury bar of chocolate and movie night in town. It is, in many ways, an agrarian utopia.

This image is not the reality for the vast majority of agriculture that occurs in the United States today. Instead, the food and agricultural landscape is dominated by farms that span millions acres, plant corporation-patented seed corn, and rely on massive center pivot irrigation systems.  Many pay starvation wages to largely undocumented migrant workers who lack the political power to advocate for better conditions. 

Additionally, the switch to industrial farming has dovetailed a shift to majority cash crops, animal feed, and ethanol production, leaving only 2% of American agriculture dedicated to fruits and vegetables, like Birdsfoot. Of that 2%, the majority of it is in California, with produce then shipped to other states for distribution. 

Industrial agriculture, according to a 2022 special feature review article from the journal Sustainability Science, is a major contributor to “climate change, biodiversity loss, and severe impacts on soil and water quality”, all of which are increasing in intensity and human impact. Around 34% of all greenhouse gas emissions come from the food system, with the majority of that being from industrial agriculture. It also causes harmful algae blooms and ‘dead zones’, like the Gulf of Mexico dead zone which spans 6,705 miles. 

In addition, competition from imported fruits and vegetables is making farming financially unviable for many families. Dulli Tengeler, the primary farmer at Birdsfoot, is grappling with that reality. In 2019, her total income was $3,200, with two kids in college. “We had a great year working together in the gardens and I am happy, and the happy factor is not to be underestimated, but it is not sustainable.” 

Dulli (right) and Goldie (left), in a back field at Birdsfoot Farm.

The solution, according to the article’s authors, Cathy Day and Sarah Cramer, lies in what is called regenerative agriculture. 

Regenerative agriculture is a departure from the massive industrial agriculture that has become the American standard of food, feed and ethanol production. Regenerative agriculture focuses on improving “the ecological conditions of a farm, while also producing food”. Farms that practice regenerative agriculture use fewer external soil amendments, smaller fields, and more diverse crops.  resilience in the face of climate change.

Regenerative farming is not a new concept.  Remember the six inches of topsoil and rain model of cultivation on those  bumper stickers? Farms like Birdsfoot demonstrate what a more regenerative  model of farming looked like.

The researchers  investigated how this model can be expanded on, and made more viable for struggling farms. Day and Cramer focus on unpacking regenerative agriculture policy, adoption and education. Given how powerful industrial agriculture is, policy that supports smaller farmers is a tough sell to many legislatures.

Shifting laws, especially within the Farm Bill, which subsidizes industrial agriculture heavily, is key to making regenerative agriculture viable. Making no or low-interest loans available to farmers who use regenerative practices or subsidizing labor costs are both policy changes that could have a real impact.

Outside of policy, modern approaches for community and support, like farm to table networks that help fund farmers making the switch and internet communities for sharing ideas. Encouraging farmers to explore new financial models and sharing approaches that work locally are also essential. 

At Birdsfoot farm, a CSA model has been the main reason they remain viable. Birdsfoot also hosts young farmers to come and learn regenerative agriculture techniques who will then continue to bring those principles and techniques to their own farms, highlighting the role of educational networks for farmers. 

While it is by no means a solution to all of our environmental problems, switching from an industrial agricultural model to a regenerative one would reduce the ways in which the current systems perpetuate harm and leave communities vulnerable to climate change and soil degradation. 

There still exists the fundamental problem of how to implement these changes in a way that doesn’t lead to the creation of food shortages or or more economic hardship, given that cost-saving is a real asset of industrial agriculture. Food produced organically and on a smaller scale through regenerative agriculture is often prohibitively expensive to consumers. Expanding EBT benefits to cover CSAs and other models of food distribution is key to reducing harm for those undergoing this shift. Farmers themselves also play a role in accessibility, such as Birdsfoot’s “Buy a Share, Give a Share” program.

When moving forwards to regenerative agriculture, Birdsfoot Farm specifically, can serve as an inspiration, a path, rather than a destination.

Farmers Market and Foraging: Eating Local Could Reduce Metric Tons of Emissions

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The frozen shrimp prepared at the worst buffet in town have traveled more than most Americans. It’s a questionable food choice and questionable from an environmental perspective. 

 

A recent study from Nature Food shared how groceries create upwards of three billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions a year from transportation alone. This is 8% of all global emissions. Trying to measure carbon emissions from transporting food is not new, but this study accounted for all supply chains. This includes emissions from every country, not just a few. It also handles more complex trades that involve multiple countries. Their estimate is more than triple previous studies’. This number comes from the international shipping of food.

 

Current supply chains span countries and continents. China and the United States are separated by the largest ocean on earth, but trade between them is common. The US trades with Canada, Brazil, most of Europe, Vietnam, Thailand, South Korea, Japan, and others. Year-round cravings for seasonal vegetables like zucchini and tomatoes and tropical fruit like dragon fruit, mangos, and lychee are indulged. Trucks, ships, vans, and planes all emit greenhouse gasses as they travel thousands of miles between countries to deliver this food. As world trade increases, emissions are rising.

 

Take, for instance, frozen shrimp in Massachusetts. Shrimp raised in Ecuador is shipped to Shanghai (10,000 miles). The shrimp is packaged and sent to Los Angeles (6,400 miles). This is then taken by truck or train to Boston (2,900 miles). Altogether, that is over 19,000 miles for some frozen shrimp. 

 

These emissions are being driven by the US and other high-income countries. High-income countries represent 12.5% of the global population, but 46% of international emissions from food transportation. Having a wealthy consumer population means foods are brought from around the world to satisfy cravings for tropical fruit and out-of-season food. While these global foods are undeniably delicious, they cause an inordinate amount of harm. It does not have to be this way. 

 

There is still a way to get healthy, diverse, and delicious food while reducing emissions. The researchers recommend eating locally. Consumers would still get a wide variety of fruits and vegetables year-round from the area, just not the ones with high emissions. Changing to a more local diet could curb excessive greenhouse gasses. Eating food made in state would carry a lower emissions tag than shipping food across the country. 

 

One way to supplement this is foraging. Collecting berries, mushrooms, nuts, roots, and leaves growing in parks, backyards, and mountains would reduce emissions further. These can be found everywhere, including in cities. While wild plants are most abundant in the spring and summer, food can be foraged at any time of the year. They provide nutrition without the emissions of grocery stores. It’s also free and acts as an alternative to the highly consumerist and globalized food system currently in place. There is still a variety of new, healthy, exciting flavors to try, but it comes from where people already live. 

 

Reducing emissions needs to come from all over, and food consumption is a great place to start. As the researchers showed, eating local is one solution to a larger problem. Working to limit international transportation of food may be the thing the Earth needs to fight back against climate change.

Waking from the Good Life; Agrarian Movements and Their Legacy

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For many young adults, the threat of climate change looms large. Questions that used to worry  young adults, like career choice, moving out, and the planning for the future have taken on a surreal quality to them, as many young adults believe they don’t  have a future, economically or biologically. In response, some choose nihilism. Others channel their energy towards social causes. Some just post videos of themselves making bread on TikTok. 

Figuring out what do do in response to ecological collapse, overconsumption, economic hardship and disconnection from the land is seemingly part of every young persons psyche these days, manifesting in the cottagecore aesthetics, frenzy around foraging, and the rise of homemaking and farming media that gain millions of views on social media. And of course, a call to return to the land, to live in agrarian communities, close to neighbors, in harmony with the earth. 

Whatever TikTok and other social media may imply, this generation is not the first pining to get back to the land. The idea of an agrarian utopia is a common thread throughout the history of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a yeoman nation of small farmers lie at the heart of much historical republican thought. Amish and Mennonite communities in the U.S. offer a religious version of the same dream. 

In the 1970s, swaths of people moved to rural areas. They started co-ops, communes, and intentional communities in what is referred to as the Back to the Land movement. They painted signs and hung prayer flags. The Back to the Land movement was a part of the social upheaval of the 70s. Gary Snyder and other famous thinkers wrote inspiring manifestos about a return to agrarian ideals, local communities, the commune model, and self sufficiency. This wasn’t a movement of farming communities reaffirming their livelihood, but choosing a separate more ecologically driven lifestyle. 

The dream of the agrarian utopia is often a far cry from the reality of disconnecting from our modern systems of consumption. There is a reason most of us in the United States think of the Back to the Land movement as failing. Some of these communities still exist, with Maypole Dances, Garlic Festivals and CSAs, but the farmers are aging out of their work, and their children are either not able or interested in continuing their parents’ ideologically driven lifestyle. 

More recent newcomers to these communities often stay for a few years and then when the stresses of either the work or the chafing of a close community become too difficult to manage, they leave. Agrarian communities that have persisted prior to and after the Back to the Land movement are communities like the Amish, which impose a strict, often religiously backed social code of conduct. The liberal, secular, self-sustaining communities of like minded people that were hoped for in the Back to the Land movement have dulled. Financial troubles and mass exodus of jobs meant that most communities founded as part of this movement have since been abandoned, farms sold and families departed. Their beautiful signs proclaiming “fresh veggies, warm hearts” have started to peel. Prayer flags fraying. 

Given this history, it seems that this recent resurgence of back to the land thought and images of agrarian utopia online are destined either for failure or religious orthodoxy. In light of the climate crisis and the economic fears that hang over this generation, it is worth exploring what it is that caused these previous movements to fall so far from their idealistic beginnings. If we can learn from the past, perhaps we can avoid some of the pitfalls that those before us struggled with. The goal of this project is to explore the rise, success and fall of so-called Back to the Land movements, and unpack both the missteps and virtues of the new online discourse of agrarian utopia.

How to Change the World: a Review of “Under a White Sky”

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Image: Lacey Berg

There are two ways to deal with an environmental issue: do nothing, or do something. 

We’re at a critical moment in deciding the fate of the planet as we know it. Since we joined the planet’s cast of characters, human activity has changed the course of rivers, driven species to extinction, and altered the composition of the atmosphere. Climate scientists have identified a 2 degrees Celsius increase in the planet’s average temperature as a tipping point beyond which climate catastrophe is unavoidable. “Business as usual” is projected to raise average global temperatures by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius. 

But we aren’t totally doomed. In the past year, I’ve witnessed humanity weather a pandemic and widespread political unrest. Through all of the worst parts of it, I learned that like it or not, we’re here to stay on this planet and the least we can do is try to make life better.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, examines what happens when someone decides to do something to make life better. You might recognize her dry humor and candid descriptions of frightening climate scenarios from her 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction. Under a White Sky continues to explore how people have changed the earth.

She argues that human civilization is essentially an experiment in defying nature that has entirely reshaped the world. Since the advent of agriculture, people have been making large-scale changes to their environments in the hopes of improvement. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch defined by the impact of human activity. 

Ten thousand years later, Kolbert examines how “people try to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”

 Kolbert chronicles some truly ingenious human interventions in nature: electrifying the Chicago River to kill invasive carp, building a replica of a unique hot spring in California to save a rare fish, and breeding “super corals” that can withstand marine heat waves, to name just a few. Spoiler alert: none of these ideas went according to plan.

The great limitation to the remarkable cleverness of people is that we can’t predict the future. Imagine explaining the consequences of planting some grains to somebody 10,000 years ago. Now try to imagine what humanity might look like 10,000 years from now. Kolbert proposes enormous philosophical, existential questions, then inserts her voice to remind readers of what it’s really like to live in the world every day. We’re ill-equipped to answer questions of thousand year consequences when thinking about what’s for dinner feels like planning in advance.  

But we can try. And we do try. And we will continue to try.

Under a White Sky ends with a cutting edge idea for saving the planet: solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering sounds simple enough: block out some sunlight to keep the planet from warming too much. Many people are philosophically opposed to geoengineering because of the dangers of “playing god,” but we already live in a world that’s been fundamentally altered by human presence and activity. 

Instead of asking whether or not we should blast sulfates into the stratosphere, Kolbert wonders what it would be like to live under a white sky, in a world with a little less sun. She calls on history for a little clarity. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, killing tens of thousands of people and filling the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, one of the compounds popular among geoengineering researchers. The eruption had cascading effects worldwide. 1816 was known in New England as the “year without a summer.” Crops froze in Massachusetts in August. The gloom inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There were also brilliant sunsets.

Dan Schrag, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard, tells Kolbert “people have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not.” In his view, “the highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”

And there are so many ways it could go wrong. While scientists make recommendations about geoengineering, ultimately the implementation of any project will be a political decision. How will governments address issues of environmental justice when implementing geoengineering? Who will fly the planes that spray sulfates into the atmosphere? Where will they spray them? When will they stop?

My argument for geoengineering boils down to this: we’re probably screwed anyway, so we might as well try. But I read this book on a series of brilliantly sunny spring afternoons, and I shivered thinking about how awful the weather would have to be to inspire Frankenstein. Even though Kolbert’s frank and funny tone steers the narrative away from nihilism, I’m left wondering if humanity could survive a dark age. 

In the final pages of the book, Kolbert uses ice cores from Greenland to reveal the surprising history of earth’s climate. Air bubbles in the ice cores are time capsules for thousands of years of climate history. The past ten thousand years have been fairly stable, climate-wise, save for the centuries since the Industrial Revolution. But before the last ice age ended, the climate fluctuated wildly; temperatures swung up and down by as much as 8 degrees Celsius at least 25 times in a period of about 3,000 years. 

Human civilization’s short history coincides perfectly with a stable climate, a novelty we’ve mistaken for the norm. Now, we have to figure out how to define our future on an unfamiliar planet.

Kolbert’s conclusion departs from more traditional environmental sentiments about restoring nature. The world is different now than it used to be– we changed it. In the future, the world will be different than it is now. Maybe we’ll embrace geoengineering to help stabilize the climate. For all the things that go wrong, I think we owe it to ourselves to also imagine how things could go right. 

It’s Time to Rescind This Trump-Era Restriction on the Clean Air Act

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Photo: Gene Daniels, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration

 

I, like 7% of US kids, grew up with asthma. One family road trip to California turned into a nightmare when we stopped for gas just inside the San Joaquin Valley. I had barely hopped out of the minivan when I felt my lungs tighten. Within seconds, I was doubled over, wheezing. Every inhale felt like needles were poking into the walls of my lungs, and every exhale was a pathetic little puff. Luckily, I had easy access to my rescue inhaler, and I made it out of the situation safely. But the memory will always stick with me.

This was my first run in with the realities of air pollution, but this isn’t a story about me, or even about the San Joaquin Valley, where twice as many kids have asthma compared to the national average. It’s about an arcane system of environmental rules that leaves us all vulnerable to such threats

Like me, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Michael Regan was once an asthmatic kid. Now, the EPA he leads has the power to improve air quality for all of us, asthmatic or not. And you and I have the power to help him do it.

In December 2020, after Donald Trump knew he’d be leaving office and President Joe Biden would be his successor, the Trump White House raced to cement its legacy of environmental deregulation.

One of their last-minute actions is especially concerning. It has the unfortunately long title “Increasing Consistency and Transparency in Considering Benefits and Costs in the Clean Air Act Rulemaking Process.” From here on out, I’ll just call it the Cost-Benefit rule. Trump’s EPA Administrator, Andrew Wheeler, touted the Cost-Benefit rule for improving consistency and transparency in rulemaking.

The rule requires EPA economists to split up the expected economic improvements from any new Clean Air Act rule into “benefits” and “co-benefits.” Benefits are narrowly defined as improvements directly targeted by a new rule, while every other improvement gets relegated to co-benefit status.

Let’s say a new rule targets sulfur dioxide emission to reduce acid rain. But reducing sulfur dioxide emissions will also likely reduce fine particulate matter emissions, which are correlated with use of rescue inhalers for asthma symptoms.

But all of the dollars saved when folks with asthma breathe easier as a result of our hypothetical rule don’t count under the Cost-Benefit rule. They’re just co-benefits.

Industry stakeholders flooded the EPA with public comments in support of the Cost-Benefit rule, giving the Trump EPA an easy way to rationalize the rule. Under the rule, polluters could push back against Clean Air Act measures by excluding co-benefits, which can play an important role in justifying new environmental regulations.

Excluding co-benefits made it easier for polluters to challenge Clean Air Act measures in court, slip out from underneath them, and continue polluting. If co-benefits can be ignored, or downplayed as they were under the Trump administration, new Clean Air Act measures are harder to justify based on cost-benefit  analysis  alone.

A decade after my asthma attack outside that California gas station, 82 million Americans still live in counties with air pollution above national standards. There is still work to be done. Lives are on the line. Counting co-benefits can save lives.

This is where the Biden EPA’s effort to rescind the Cost-Benefit rule comes in. It’s where we the people have the power! The EPA under Trump used public comment from industry to justify the creation of the Cost-Benefit rule, and the EPA under Biden can use public comments from you in its rationale for rescinding the rule.

From now until June 14, 2021, the EPA is collecting public comments on rescinding the Cost-Benefit rule. Please, for all of us who will breathe a little easier knowing that the EPA can use the best information available to make rules to protect us, submit a comment. When you submit a substantive comment, the EPA is required to respond to your concerns  in the text of the final regulation.

It’s time to take a stand against conservative politicians and corporate polluters weakening our environmental protections. The EPA is and should be for the people. We’re taking it back.

Can we geoengineer hope?

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Image: NASA Earth Observatory

 

I’ll admit it: I’m scared of the future.

By now we’ve all heard frightening speculation about a future of rising carbon emissions and intensifying climate change. I often find myself overwhelmed by the unrelenting reality that humans have thrown the entire planet out of whack and now we’re paying the price. Some days I see human extinction as the only possible outcome. Life in the meantime seems futile.

I’m not alone in my climate despair. Last year, the American Psychiatric Association reported that over two thirds of Americans are anxious about climate change. Young people especially are struggling with imagining a future in a world that seems so unstable. 

Resigning ourselves to climate doom won’t solve climate change. It makes us apathetic and unmotivated to look for innovative solutions or push for emissions reductions. If we want to stave off complete climate catastrophe, we need at least a little bit of hope.

Enter solar geoengineering, the brilliant and controversial idea to release reflective particles into the atmosphere to block out some sunlight and slow down the greenhouse effect. No other proposed climate solution would be anywhere near as fast, effective, or cheap.

A lot of people, including climate scientists and environmentalists, think it’s a terrible idea; it’s slapping on a bandaid while corporations continue to hemorrhage fossil fuel emissions. If geoengineering provides any relief, people might stop feeling the sense of urgency that’s driving other climate action.

There is a lot that could go wrong with trying to engineer the climate. Right now, the research is mostly computer models and speculation. A leading research group at Harvard had planned to conduct some of the first field experiments in Sweden this summer, but they were shot down by Swedish environmental groups and the Saami Indigenous people for failing to consider the interests of local communities.

There’s certainly merit to the criticism. Geoengineering shouldn’t be entered into lightly or without engaging local communities and prioritizing justice and equity. But as I teeter on the edge of a pit of climate doom, the idea that we could buy ourselves more time to get our act together is tantalizing, and I think we should consider it.

Reducing emissions on the scale we need to, in the time we need to do it, seems impossible. Even if the Green New Deal hadn’t crashed and burned two years ago, implementing its massive structural changes to zero-out carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner would be enormously expensive and challenged by conservative politicians at every step of the way. 

Geoengineering could give us a positive action to rally around and make us feel like we’re doing something. Even if it doesn’t work like we expect it to, it could reinvigorate climate action and pull us back from the brink of climate fatalism. 

Maybe we don’t need to geoengineer our way out of a climate catastrophe– just our climate despair.

Nobody can predict what a geoengineered future will look like, but we need to try to imagine it. Last summer, I learned a lot about prison abolition, and something I’ve been carrying with me is the importance of imagination. According to Angela Davis, imagination is one of the most important tools for solving big problems like the prison system. This works for climate change, too: imagine what you want a geoengineered world to look like, then think about what needs to happen to make that a reality.

I’m imagining a world where we’ve embraced geoengineering. It’s a world where fewer people have to move inland to escape rising sea levels, where coral reefs have time to adjust to warmer water, and agricultural belts continue to thrive. It’s also a world where I could hope to see a glacier in real life one day. Sure, it’s just speculation, but I think attitude matters. Geoengineering offers us the opportunity to reframe climate change as an opportunity to build a world we want to live in.

If we really want to stop climate change, we need to stop burning fossil fuels. But a simple answer isn’t always the easy one, and energy transition is going to turn our world upside down. Geoengineering could buy us just enough time to make that  transition thoughtfully, not frantically.

Geoengineering isn’t our only hope– it’s not even a real solution– but it could give us some hope when we desperately need it.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a baseless conspiracy theory. Here’s what you need to know about the chemtrails conspiracy.

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Photo by Erik van Wees

What are chemtrails? 

First and foremost, chemtrails don’t exist. 

But Suzanne Maher disagrees. Maher is the founder of chemtrails awareness group Bye Bye Blue Sky. According to her website, chemtrails are toxic compounds sprayed into the atmosphere to “direct and control our weather for military purposes and global domination.” 

She sees the evidence in the wisps of white exhaust from planes criss-crossing the blue sky, lingering, and dissipating into a thin cover of clouds. According to chemtrail believers, this exhaust is laden with compounds like aluminum, barium, and strontium that’s intentionally being pumped into the atmosphere.

Maher’s billboard on display in Woodstown, New Jersey. Photo by Sharon LePere.

In reality, the trails left behind airplanes are just condensation, or contrails. When hot, moist engine exhaust hits cold, high-altitude air, condensation forms, the same way you can see your breath in the air on a cold day.

What exactly is the chemtrail conspiracy, and where does it come from?

People are drawn to the chemtrails theory for a variety of reasons. Some think the chemicals are controlling the weather. Others think they’re controlling our minds. Regardless of the specifics, chemtrail believers see a sinister government plot in the clouds.

The most popular and recent version of the theory posits that the chemicals are being sprayed into the atmosphere to block out the sun and slow global warming. This idea might sound familiar if you’ve heard of solar geoengineering. David Keith, a leading geoengineering researcher at Harvard, is investigating the potential of albedo modification; his team proposes that injecting sulfate compounds into the atmosphere to reflect some sunlight back into space, like chemtrails allegedly do, could save us from climate disaster. But their work so far is entirely speculative; there is no active testing or implementation of albedo modification. Keith also reminds chemtrail believers that “the Internet is filled with people who are completely sure about stuff that just isn’t true.” 

Still, a 2016 study in Nature reported that 20-30% of Americans thought the chemtrails theory was “somewhat true.” 

The most compelling conspiracy theories always have a grain of truth. The U.S. started experimenting with cloud seeding in 1946. Cloud seeding introduces compounds to the atmosphere to induce precipitation, but nowhere near the scale that chemtrail believers would have you think. A 1996 paper from the U.S. Air Force speculated about how weather manipulation could be used as a military tactic. Though this work was purely speculative, internet forums of the late 90s became the breeding grounds for accusations that large scale weather control was already underway. 

How did this theory gain traction?

Open platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter make information (and misinformation)  accessible to everyone with an internet connection.

Despite scientists emphatically rejecting the chemtrails theory, the majority of popular YouTube videos about climate modification actually embrace and spread the conspiracy theory. Facebook groups and Twitter help circulate false information about chemtrails. Most people don’t scroll through their feeds with a critical lens. Many take such misinformation at face value.

The Trump era did wonders for fake news and the conspiracy-minded; widespread mistrust of the government and media makes people susceptible to believing in a sinister plot to control the masses. On the left, die-hard environmentalists are quick to believe that the government is destroying the planet. Instead of following predictable party lines, chemtrails unite people from all walks of life.

Even though the evidence against chemtrails is overwhelming, many Americans still believe in them. That has consequences.

What are the dangers of the chemtrails conspiracy?

The most immediate consequence of the chemtrail conspiracy theory affects legitimate geoengineering researchers. Chemtrail theorists have hijacked the terminology of geoengineering research because of the similarities in proposed albedo modification projects and the alleged implementation of chemtrails. 

Geoengineering is already controversial. The effects of albedo modification are under researched, and a lot of people, including climate scientists, worry about interfering with environmental processes. The chemtrails theory asserts that large-scale geoengineering projects are already underway, recklessly endangering our health and our planet. This misguided belief has contributed to anti-geoengineering sentiment and researchers like Keith are stuck cleaning up the mess.

The chemtrails conspiracy theory is also a gateway to general mistrust and paranoia. If the government and scientists are conspiring to secretly control the global climate, what else could they be hiding? 

Perhaps the most dangerous part of the theory is how it mirrors the fundamental truth of climate change in a terrifying fun house sort of way. By continuing our reliance on fossil fuels, the government and corporations really are pumping toxic compounds into the atmosphere that are harming our planet and our health. By focusing their energy on the fake plot, conspiracists misdirect action away from the real problem.

How can conspiracy theories be countered?

Swaying hardcore chemtrail believers is hard– maybe even impossible. Mainstream reporting on the science that disproves the chemtrails conspiracy takes an overwhelmingly condescending tone, which only strengthens the conviction of conspiracy believers. Dedicated believers like Maher only seem to double down when faced with criticism. 

Still, the chemtrails theory might have had its day in the sun. Google searches for chemtrails peaked during the 2016 election cycle, and the uptick this year is mostly attributed to Lana Del Rey’s new album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club. 

Like many of us, geoengineering researchers hope that we can restore our trust in science. Staving off climate disaster requires innovative solutions and early geoengineering studies show a lot of promise. It might not even work, but I prefer an optimistic future to a false reality.

Geoengineering could save the Arctic, study finds

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Image: NASA

The Arctic is our planet’s refrigerator. It’s also warming six times faster than the global average.

The Arctic’s snow and ice reflect much of the light that reaches it, helping to keep the planet cool. As the planet warms, ice melts and the Arctic reflects less light. Warmer temperatures also mean that permafrost, or soil that is frozen year-round, begins to thaw out. When it does, frozen organic matter begins to decay, releasing carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere, which intensifies the greenhouse effect, leading to more warming, which leads to more permafrost thawing and… you get the point. 

This cycle, called permafrost climate feedback, drives the higher rates of warming at the poles. Arctic permafrost contains twice as much carbon as the atmosphere. A melted Arctic would release this carbon into the atmosphere, leading to catastrophic effects for the entire planet. 

So, we need to keep the Arctic frozen. But how?

A study in Nature  by Yating Chen and her colleagues at Beijing Normal University examines a radical solution: increase albedo in the Arctic to prevent warming and permafrost thawing by preventing sunlight from entering the atmosphere. 

Known as solar geoengineering, this strategy aims to mimic the cooling effects of a volcanic eruption by injecting sulfur compounds into the atmosphere. These compounds reflect some sunlight back into space before it has the chance to enter the atmosphere.  

Solar geoengineering is controversial partly because the effects of sulfate injection are under researched. But don’t worry; Chen’s study is just a simulation. By using what we know about environmental processes, Chen and colleagues  built an earth system model that mimics the conditions of life on earth, then manipulate the conditions to predict the future. This study uses a geoengineering model that’s popular because it models a sudden injection of sulfates into the atmosphere. If we embrace geoengineering only as an emergency solution to climate change, sulfate injection will probably happen quickly as a last-ditch attempt to save the world, so this model is realistic.

In addition to modeling sulfate injection, this study incorporates a moderate emissions reduction framework that projects the climate stabilizing at a global average of 1.8 degrees Celsius warmer. This keeps our climate just under the 2 degrees C of warming that has come to represent a point of no return for the global climate. If the climate stabilizes at 2 degrees C, the models predict that 40% of Arctic permafrost will melt. Under moderate emissions reductions, 35% would melt. With the sulfate injections, this figure plummets to just 15%.

Putting a price tag on the Arctic is tricky, but the permafrost climate feedback could result in  $13.8 trillion (trillion, with a tr) in economic losses, even under the reduced-emissions scenario. Sulfate injection would help save about $8.4 trillion. 

There’s still a lot we don’t know about sulfate injection. What are the ecological impacts of more atmospheric sulfur? How would people living in the Arctic, especially Indigenous communities, be affected? What does maintenance look like? What would happen if a solar geoengineering project was suddenly interrupted? 

Critics raise these questions to discredit geoengineering, but the immensely promising results of this study should spark interest in more research using models to explore the effects of sulfate injection. Nobody can predict the future with certainty, but models can give us a pretty good guess. 

There is no silver bullet to stop climate change, but this study shows that the combination of reduced emissions and sulfate injection are key in preventing permafrost thawing. Stabilizing the climate is a daunting task, but the Arctic is a good place to start.