Roshni and I had gone out on Saturday to buy plants for our apartment. We were young, recently married, and feeling just settled enough in our new place in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood that we could commit to a few CO2-breathing housemates. Late that afternoon, we chose one fine specimen to put outside our front door. We awoke Sunday to a text from our building manager.

He was polite but firm: No plants in the common area. There was acres of space between our door and the next, but this was non-negotiable. Living or dead, green friends were not allowed. Not even 24 hours had elapsed.

I wonder what he — or at least the owners who set the rules — would make of the building where Roshni and I are now staying in Kosice, Slovakia.

The second floor has a wall-mounted fern that has more body than David Bowie’s 80s hairdo. I had to touch it to confirm it was real. A third floor balustrade has been taken over by a climbing ivy. Give it time and it might stretch two floors, even three. On the fourth floor, one down from ours, someone has rigged a plank over the handrailing. On it are balanced pots holding geraniums and enough tomato plants to satisfy even my father’s canning needs.

I want to live in an apartment building with this kind of hallway.

Sure, the laissez-faire attitude has other manifestations. The people on the ground floor apparently prefer plastic greenery. Other tenants have stashed planks in the common area or dusty boxes. Potting soil bags hide behind some flowers.

But the life in the halls more than makes up the messy corners. If we were staying longer, I would go ask the fern whisperer to share their secrets. I’d plant my own climbing vine; maybe it would meet the other one halfway? Perhaps I could even make friends with the god of tomatoes living below us. Surely, they could spare a few for a friendly American? Better yet, I could cultivate my own handrail.

Far from moving in, I am soon to leave behind my new friends. My two weeks are nearly up. But during my stay, these plants have made each going and coming richer. I walk up and down the stairs and past each floor’s row of windows with a smile. I breathe the sweet pungency of the tomato plants, cheer on the climbing vine and am shocked anew each time by the sheer exuberance of that fern. All those flights up and down, and down and up again have left me pondering, more than I normally might, what exactly is putting a smile on my face.

It’s surprisingly hard to articulate those reasons. I’m tempted to cite scientific statistics about how humans feel when hanging around plants. (Spoiler alert: Happier, healthier, calmer, more relaxed…) I believe, though, that capitalism actually provides a more potent proof.

Consider the richest neighborhood of your hometown. In mine, you can find some of the oldest trees in town, not to mention extravagant landscaping. Imagine an ultra-luxury hotel, the kind most of us only see in The White Lotus. Even in your mind, it is packed full of plants, no? Or go further back still. Think about the world’s palaces. From Buckingham to El Badi, every one I have visited has been paired with lush gardens. Green is not just the color of wealth, but of health and well-being. Monarchs, then and now, know the power of marigolds and morning glories.

Modern life, however, has not taken these lessons to heart. Our buildings keep us warm against cold and sheltered against the gathering storms, but frequently omit the things that nourish us. They are too often sterile, antiseptic places filled with synthesized materials. Essentially oil from floor to ceiling. And that is at the root of the challenges we all face.

But the truth is we don’t need a palace or a vast estate to live like kings and queens. Our apartment in Kosice is not a luxury building. Paint peels from the yellow walls, which are scuffed from past move-ins and accidents. The floor — a hastily laid faux-wood vinyl — bubbles in places. The stairs are deteriorating. Yet the plants — and a colorscape that favors green, even on the building’s meter boxes — make each floor sing.

The simple truth is that with a little time — and really it is not much — we can cultivate our own garden. Even if it’s just one pot at a time. Start like I did, with snake plants and cacti. The only way to kill them? Too much water. I have only gradually become the parent of a fig, rubber plant and massive monsterra. I even have one plant I cannot name. This did not happen all at once. Or without tragedies along the way.

A fern in my hallway isn’t going to solve what we face. But it will make me happier. And maybe my neighbor, too. That is a good a place to start as any. So, I want to pledge to you: When I get home, I am going to put a plant outside my door. You too?

Take Action

drop | Put out a plant. If you don’t already have one, put a plant outside your front door. Who knows what’ll happen? I admittedly need to get the right friend, but I’ll share a photo as soon as I do.

ripple | Grow with friends. Join a community garden. Meet up with your neighbors. Talk plants with a friend. For instance, this Thursday I’m meeting with people from my climate group to talk about growing veggies in apartments.

wave | Support a greener world. Support an organization working with Indigenous communities or local peoples to protect more of the planet. My donation for this week went to Forest Peoples Programme.

Got even better ideas? Let me know. I’m new to this.

Gate A-4 | excerpt

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling of her life, patting my knee,answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemademamoolcookies—little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates andnuts—from her bag—and was offering them to all the women at the gate.To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like asacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, thelovely woman from Laredo—we were all covered with the same powderedsugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free apple juice from huge coolers and twolittle girls from our flight ran around serving it and theywere covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend—by now we were holding hands—had a potted plant poking out of her bag,some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

– Naomi Shihab Nye

Read in full at poets.org.

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and my proofreader, Steve Kay. All errors are mine alone.

“The lack of mobile and internet connection was quite scary,” wrote someone in one of my WhatsApp groups. Another called it an “end of the world” experience. A third messaged me to say he’d see me tomorrow ‘if I’m not eating the neighbour’s cat and siphoning fuel from the hospital.’

I’m pretty sure the last was a joke — that friend would definitely start with the neighbor’s dog — and admittedly there’s a bit of reflexive hyperbole in culture today. Everything is heightened.

But those reactions felt representative of the fear the episode awakened. For some, several hours without electricity and the internet — and the access to the outside world it brings — was destabilizing. A few started talking about apocalypse, the living dead or — the admittedly far more conceivable — regional war. “I guess this is how NATO has been knocked out and Europe is under attack,” said one person.

There are, of course, good reasons for such anxieties. Some were without power until nearly midnight or beyond, or without water until the next day. Others lacked — as on any given day I might have as well — either ready food to eat or cash with which to buy it. And the possibilities get much worse. There were people stranded far from home or even stuck in train cars and elevators. For anyone reliant on electrically powered medical equipment, I can only imagine the worry. The sirens echoing across the city brought this home. And who knows what country Putin will invade this year?

Yet despite all this, for many people, myself included, the power outage was an unexpected joy. I sat in the sun, ignored my almost useless phone and read a book. I later saw reports about people playing music in public parks, huddling for news around AM/FM, having long conversations with strangers and filling the city’s many squares. Granted, I was fortunate to be relatively unaffected, only missing a couple of work calls. That privilege allowed me to enjoy the quiet time. Not to mention I got power back in less than six hours. But I wasn’t the only one to come away feeling lighter.

“I know people who were seriously inconvenienced, but it was actually a beautiful experience for me; like going back in time,” wrote one person in my climate group’s WhatsApp channel. “I didn't feel pressured to do anything since I couldn't anyway, and I went out just to see how people were acting without having their mobile phones available. I had some beautiful conversations with both friends and strangers. And I was actually able to sit in the sun and read as well. For pleasure!”

Not that I want to imply a binary. I suspect that many people fall into both of these camps. Joy and fear often coexist. Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent most of my life trying to learn that we can choose between them. Buddhists, for instance, teach the concept of “first-arrow” pain. These are the traumatic events of life: losing your mother, your marriage, a job. These demand grief, require that you feel the pain. “Second-arrow” pain, by contrast, is worrying about the pain itself. Hard to stop, or even reduce, but what a relief if you can.

But how do we fuel the one (joy) and starve the other (fear)? I believe the answer lies, above all, in communities. If the photos I saw are any guide, those who made it to public squares to chat among neighbors and strangers, or listen to an impromptu saxophone solo or singer-songwriter performance, wore wide smiles and carefree looks. Camaraderie breeds calm. And close connections even more so.

Movies and fearful elites have fed an assumption that a breakdown in order, whether blackout or natural disaster, activates some inner savagery. The presumption is one of suspicion, hostility, violence. Yet the essayist Rebecca Solnit has written beautifully about the deep falsity of that unfortunately sticky narrative. In her book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster, she chronicles how fractures from the Arab Spring to Hurricane Season have driven people not to arms, but into each other’s arms and hearts.

One way to supercharge that process is to build community now, before disaster strikes. Sometimes these communities are ones of choice. For me, I feel fortunate to have met so many good folk through Let’s Talk About Climate Change, all thanks to showing up at a coworking space for a meeting a few years ago. It was that easy.

Others are of circumstance. I’ve seen during my time in Barcelona that many neighborhoods are remarkably tight-knit, from Gracia’s wild block parties to the sense that some people in Poble Sec know everyone else. One humbling personal reflection from el apagon: I don’t know several of my own neighbors. That makes for a new entry on my to-do list: a plate of nice-to-meet-you cookies.

For all the benefits and the beauty of the connections the internet brings, I hope this week’s power scare can also prompt us to remember the joys of living unplugged. I know this might sound hypocritical. First, I myself didn’t bother to go out during the blackout. Second, I have quoted here from WhatsApp messages (!) shared by a person I have mainly interacted with online (!) in a community organized on the internet (!). We definitely should keep all this. But maybe sometimes we should set it aside and read a book or go to the plaza.

In the words of Beibei, who was the one who hatched the idea for that fateful meeting I attended years ago, “life is also wonderful outside your phone, try to interact with someone in the real world too!”

I took inspiration from all of this to schedule an impromptu meeting of our climate group: When the Power Goes Out? Let’s Build Communities, Not Bunkers. For anyone out there in Barcelona, I hope you can join us on the beach — or, should it rain, in the warmth of a beachside cafe — on Saturday morning. That’s tomorrow!

Take Action

drop | Greet a neighbor. Ask about their day. Bring them cookies. Invite them to dinner.

ripple | Join a community. Go to a local meeting, be it at a bar, a bakery or the Barcelona beach.

Got even better ideas? Let me know. I’m new to this.

Power Out!

Power out! 
All dark and black . . .
Fret not
Body bumps 
Hands gliding softly 
Feet and the floor 
Rug! Another rug! 
Body bumps into another 
We mesh and dance swiftly 
Away in the dark!

– Hayley Broadway

Found at poets.org.

Worth Your Time

I finished my draft of this post on Friday morning, and called my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate. Not to talk about the piece but because, well, we’re married, and she happens to be out of town.

Her: The power outage is making me think about the importance of community. Me: Funny you should say that… and I tell her about it. After we hang up, I send her the draft.

An hour later, she texts me. I read it, expecting feedback: “lol I am liking this apagón content!” Next to it a link… to my dear friend Kevin Maguire’s post, El Apagón | The Blackout. Nothing like several hours without the internet to make us all think about life without the internet — or even civilization.

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. Many thanks to Roshni and my chief copyeditor, Steve Kay. All errors are mine alone.

Instead, for a hundred-plus pages, I had heard about how to prepare myself. Page upon page about evaluating values, personality type, self-care, community and more. It took me, I’m ashamed to admit, until the last chapter to truly appreciate the review. The thing is, sometimes you pick up a book to learn something, but in reading it you realize that what you really needed to learn is to drop your assumptions.

Williams’ slim volume offers a practical guide for creating the conditions for lifelong, regular activism. It is about packing your bag for the journey, preparing your mind and body for the trip of a lifetime. The guidance I thought I was seeking does eventually arrive — but by that time even I could see that such particulars are the least important part.

The 175-page book is simple and declarative in its advice. It is, as the activist and author Leah Penniman of Soul Fire Farm says on the back cover, “exceedingly practical.” Yet its focus also carries an important message for people like me: learning how to prepare is perhaps more important than determining exactly where you are going.

Williams helps us dispense with societal notions of what an activist does and doesn’t look like. Out with the shaggy haired activist with placard and patchouli scent and in with… well, everyone. “What if there are as many ways of being an activist as there are people on the planet?” she writes. “What if an activist looks like … you?”

I loved that she noted that “mistakes are part of the process.” As I read it, I thought of a similar call I have heard in anti-racism trainings. Mistakes can be painful, yet they are all but inevitable. For me, learning to accept they may happen despite my best efforts has freed me.

The world would do well, I feel, to extend this sensibility also to expertise. Look back 20 years, and many of the strategies taken by the experts at the best-funded environmental groups (let alone in other fields) are now seen as mistaken. Polar bears are noble and worthy creatures, yet they and other charismatic megafauna were not the best focal point in arguing for climate action. I try to remember this as my knowledge about climate science and the movement grows.

“For any activist, the most powerful wisdom is shared with humility,” Williams writes. “Know-it-alls in activist work are just as unpopular as they are anywhere else.”

Sprinkled throughout the book are interviews with micro activists, offering glimpses of what such a practice looks like out beyond the pages of the book. I found these conversations some of the most thought-provoking segments.

One interviewee quotes American prison abolition advocate Mariame Kaba: “Hope is a discipline.” As the book lays out, so is activism. As the anti-racist author, Layla Saad, reminds us in the introduction. “For our activism to be consistent, it must also be sustainable. As in, for a lifetime, not just a season.”

After all, there is a hard reality hidden behind Williams’ relatively sunny book. A Savannah, GA-based activist she interviewed expressed it well: “There’s no such thing as winning or losing. There’s just work. It’s hard and it’s rewarding and it’s daunting. Incremental victories followed by less incremental setbacks equal success.”

That’s why Williams puts so much emphasis on self-care, community, understanding your own limits and finding your truest motivations. This is a lifelong journey. For micro activism to really succeed, it has to be automatic, something you cannot help but do.

As she puts it: “Like brushing your teeth.”

What’s next?

Look for a path. Reflect on your values, origin, motivations. Consider your constraints, your activist archetype. Consult your friends, your community. List your skills and strengths. Is the way becoming clear?

Seek guidance. Look around for a group that appeals to you. Or find a couple, or a dozen. Attend a meeting or two. Go back to the ones that feel like the best fit. Perhaps your path is with them?

Got experienc

e doing this? Feel free to share ideas for future editions.

Poem for South African Women | excerpt

And the babies cease alarm as mothers
raising arms
and heart high as the stars so far unseen
nevertheless hurl into the universe
a moving force
irreversible as light years
traveling to the open
eye

And who will join this standing up
and the ones who stood without sweet company
will sing and sing
back into the mountains and
if necessary
even under the sea

we are the ones we have been waiting for

– June Jordan

Read in full at poets.org.

A few years ago, I arrived late for a gathering at a co-working space. I found the door open and the space all but empty. I thought briefly about heading home. Yet the lush plants, bathing under the skylight’s glow, felt like an invitation. I followed the faint sound of voices upstairs, reaching a glass-walled conference room. This was the meeting I had read about online: Let’s Talk About Climate Change.

I listened more than I talked that day. A little over a dozen people showed up and, since we were in Barcelona, they were from all over the world. We shared our names and home countries, our fears and hopes. If you had asked me, I would have told you that I went to meet people, not to ease my climate anxiety. And I would not have been telling the whole truth, because I did not know it myself.

After that inaugural session, the group kept holding meetings, and I kept going. I was often traveling or busy or ill, but I went when I could. I gradually got to know the organizer and some of the regulars. With time, I passed from an attendee to a regular to an organizer without quite realizing it. I mean, I know that it was last April that I held the first meeting of what I dubbed the Climate Action Book Club. But that initial gathering felt like a casual chat with friends. Maybe ten people showed up. Tops. And several were actually friends.

So when 85 people registered for the latest meeting, my thoughts turned to that long-ago first step. I had followed a weekend whim to a Meetup group. One meeting turned into several, and later to hikes and beach days and overnight trips to the Pyrenees.

Then I decided I wanted to talk with people about the climate books I was reading. I posted it online. I encouraged people to come for the discussion even if they had not read the book, and to bring friends. That resonated. Half a dozen meetings later, the group is threatening to get too big for the lovely English book store, Backstory, that hosts us. (Fortunately, only about a third of registrants show up to meetings.)

The journey has reminded me of the profound power in first steps, even small ones. That feels like an important reminder for all of us trying to help humanity make its way to, well, a cooler future. One oft-cited challenge to climate action is that any effort feels puny in the face of the threat. That is daunting, to be sure. To repeat a popular line, there are no silver bullets. There are, in some ways, only small steps. The good news is that everyone can take a small step.

I’m writing this to invite you to take one with us.

You might have noticed that the group is called the Climate Action Book Club. From the start, the goal has been not just to read books, but to inspire and organize action. Yet figuring out what that looks like has been tricky. I’ve hosted three special meetings on the topic, which have left me with many notes and little clarity. In part, the challenge is particular to determining the role for a group of English-speaking foreigners in Barcelona. But it also speaks to the reality that every climate action feels too small to be meaningful. Where to begin?

So what does a book club do when faced with such a problem? Read a book on it, of course. To shine a light on the possible paths, our March book club choice is Micro Activism: How You Can Change the World Without a Bullhorn by Omkari Williams. (Are you in Barcelona? Join us! There’s still space.)

Williams, a political consultant and life coach, does not lay out the path. But she does tell you how to prepare for the journey. What to carry in your mental pack, so to speak, whether your mission is climate change, reproductive rights, poverty or anything else. Her book is a guide, in essence, to how to turn first steps into second steps. It’s about how to keep walking, despite overwhelm and exhaustion.

Perhaps you are horrified by the recent fires in Los Angeles — or in Ghana, Australia or across South America. Perhaps you are wondering what to do as the Trump administration blowtorches American climate policy — and the rest of the U.S. government and international order. Or maybe you are disgusted by corporations following suit by cheerily combusting their own climate promises.

Maybe, like our group, you have been asking yourself a similar question for a long time: Where, exactly, to begin? An answer: With us. I invite you to read this book. Who knows what will happen after that first step? If there’s demand, I’d be happy to organize an online book chat. And I pledge, as I always try to do, to listen more than I talk.

For the record, the book is just 175 pages — and that’s counting a bunch of bulleted summary pages and an appendix. This is a cheerful, can-do canter through a world of potential and possibility, not a horrifying slog into climate reality. (Though if that’s what you want, I have recommendations. The first? Don’t begin there.)

As I wrote for the description of the very first book club: “The climate emergency will not be solved by reading books — but by coming together to read, educate ourselves, and share what we learn with friends and family, we can be a small part of the wave of change humanity desperately needs.”

Want to join us? Should I hold a call? Let me know.

Leave a comment

Take Action

drop | Read with us. Get a copy of the book. Let us know you will be reading it. And if we have an online discussion, please join us.

ripple | Recruit some friends. Get family, colleagues and other die-hards to read it with you. That’s what our club is, ultimately. A group of friends, even if sometimes we do not yet know each other.

wave | Start a club. I had never hosted a book club before until this one. I am sure you’re at least as competent as me, and probably more so.

I make this up as I go along. Suggestions are welcome.

Revolution is the pod (33)

Revolution is the pod
Systems rattle from;
When the winds of
Will are stirred,
Excellent is bloom.

But except its russet
Base
Every summer be
The entomber of itself;
So of Liberty.

Left inactive on the
Stalk,
All its purple fled,
Revolution shakes it
For
Test if it be dead.

– Emily Dickinson

Found at poets.org.

Worth Your Time

My dear friend Linda told the story of how Barcelona’s parkside cafes and teenager-designated train cars helps allow children (and parents) to be independent. Read it at Business Insider.

Many thanks to my editor in chief, Roshni Kavate, and my copyeditor, Steve Kay. Any errors, in judgement or grammar, are mine alone.

What caught my eye was a skinny pine. The two-story house’s bulky concrete balcony had been cast with holes to allow the tree to remain in place, untouched. It was the kind of detail that announced this was a house of import, one designed by an architect with something to say.

Yet this was hard for me to square with the boxy and plain structures themselves, which were covered in what looked like dull-brown stucco. I found them, to be honest, a bit ugly. Brutalist, as a visiting friend observed. Plus the property was thick with skinny pines and underbrush, native vegetation overrunning every square foot. So much so that, at first, I didn’t realize there were actually two separate buildings. Overgrown and untended, I thought.

But for some reason I could not stop thinking about the property. For the fortnight we stayed in Llafranc, the Costa Brava beach town of our home exchange, I walked by those houses and they they ran through my mind. It was not for lack of architecture to consider. Each day’s walk took us past scores of properties, from hotels to villas to apartment buildings. There were white-washed Mediterranean classics and modernist cubes. Some were beautiful, others dull, many unremarkable.

As I took more walks, exploring beyond Llafranc and the neighboring towns into undisturbed nature, I finally…

Read in full at NextCity.org…

Take Action

wave | Support change. Back an organization pushing for vibrant, sustainable, just and dense cities. I donated to Emerald Cities Collaborative for this issue.

Got other good ideas? Let me know. 

A House Called Tomorrow | excerpt

When you as a child learned to speak,
It’s not that you didn’t know words—

It’s that, from the centuries, you knew so many,
And it’s hard to choose the words that will be your own.

From those centuries we human beings bring with us
The simple solutions and songs,

The river bridges and star charts and song harmonies
All in service to a simple idea:

That we can make a house called tomorrow.
What we bring, finally, into the new day, every day,

Is ourselves.  And that’s all we need
To start.  That’s everything we require to keep going. 

– Alberto Ríos, Poet Laureate of Arizona

Read in full at poets.org.

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. Thanks to my eternal editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate. In the issue two months ago, I neglected to mention that I owe my photo in The Guardian to the help of Scott Paterson, who runs the fascinating Field Report newsletter. 

All errors are mine alone.

Facing thousands of dollars in repairs, I decided to take a leap into a different kind of existence: life without a vehicle in suburban America.

That leap turned out to be more of a short walk. At the time, my wife and I were renting a three-bedroom with two housemates in the South Berkeley flats. It was run-down, with a hole in the bathroom wall covered by a tarp. But it was only a few blocks from the nearest BART station, and now I had to take the train to work.

The 10-minute walk took me past a row of colorful houses and apartments, red-and-yellow nasturtiums poking from their yards. The crisp morning air hit my lungs like freshly brewed coffee. The train ride, too, gave me precious time to read. Before selling my car, I had never considered myself a morning person; a week or so after starting my new routine, I was often downright perky. The stroll became a highlight of my days. It bookended hectic workdays, a walking meditation that prepared me for the meetings and emails ahead and calmed me after a day of go, go, go.

After a few months of this, I wanted to…

Read the full article at Business Insider.

Take Action

drop | Go Car-Less. At least for a day. Try walking to work, or the store. Take a bus. Use your bike. Anything but driving.

ripple | Write Your Representative. Tell your representative to do everything they can to ensure infrastructure investments back pedestrians, bikes and equity. I took two minutes to write to Mark DeSaulnier of California’s 10th District. Find your rep.

ripple | Back Biking. Support your local bike group. Donate your money, time or your unused wheels. I once took my mom’s old bike to Rich City Rides, which got my donation for this issue.

Got even better ideas? Let me know. I’m new to this.

Would you like join the Climate Action Book Club?

I am part of a climate group in Barcelona, and I recently decided to try launching an in-person book club within it: The Climate Action Book Club. If you’re in the city, you can sign up to join us.

For all those who are not, I’m open to doing an online discussion, if there’s interest. The first book: Not Too Late, a collection of writings from some of today's most brilliant and inspiring environmental justice leaders and thinkers. See the in-person listing for more details.

Interested? Send me a message or leave a comment.

Leave a comment

Biking to the George Washington Bridge | excerpt

It sweeps away depression and today
you can’t tell the heaped pin-white
cherry blossoms abloom along
Riverside Drive from the clouds above
it is all kerfluffle, all moisture and light and so
into the wind I go
past Riverside Church and the Fairway
Market, past the water treatment plant
and in the dusky triangle below
a hulk of rusted railroad bed
a single hooded boy is shooting hoops

– Alicia Ostriker

Read in full at poets.org. 

Friends Doing Cool Things

My friend Scott Paterson has a newsletter, Field Report, that’s a fascinating dive into what’s crossing his radar and also an experiment in co-creating with AI. Plus if you find yourself desperately needing a headshot at the last minute, he’s your man. My photo in The Guardian was thanks to Scott.

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. Thanks to my editor at Business Insider for giving me the time to make the edits myself. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, for her wise counsel — and for making me stop to take a photo. And thanks to my copy editor, Steve Kay, for his careful review. All errors are mine alone.

On Substack

A bunch of different writers have written accounts of why they left or remained on Substack. My goal is to read them and then, at last, decide my next step. I still have not done that. But I will.

But we also usually have a couple things, or maybe more, that we justify as our inviolable luxuries. For me, one of those indulgences, which I held onto long past when I knew it was bad for my health and toxic for the planet, was cooking on gas. In other words, if you haven’t heard, I was a snob.

To be clear, the climate emergency is not an individual action problem. We get out of this mess by changing our behavior — and fossil fuel companies have long pushed that narrative as part of their denial-delay-deflect dance. BP, it cannot be repeated enough, invented the carbon footprint. 

Instead, the most powerful thing we can do is act together to build power and make policy. But it doesn’t have to be an either-or. There’s no reason we cannot simultaneously change our lives. 

My decision to give up gas was not one of a moral awakening. I only quit due to a frantic pre-lockdown apartment search. I shared that story in The Guardian this month in the hope that my own very tardy awakening might open someone else’s eyes. It ran under a headline that, as the son of two punsters, I wish was my own: “I was a kitchen snob who would only cook on gas. Now an induction hob is my new flame.”

The piece covers most of my feelings about gas stoves, but there’s a lot I couldn’t squeeze in. There are, for instance, dishes which will not be quite the same without the flame. For instance, I hope to one day make baingan bharta — the smoky, spicy Indian eggplant dish — half as well as my mother-in-law. Charring over a burner is ideal, even if my chances of matching hers are slim. (This example, incidentally, was cut by the editors from my original draft. Sorry ma!)

If you’re an elite cook, you might read my account with skepticism. I’ll be the first to admit that my culinary credentials are weak. But my wife, Roshni, has long earned rave reviews for her cooking. And not just for friends and family, but for yoga retreats and other events. She’s currently part of an artists collective, Mango + Okra, that has done food-centered installations at museums and art spaces in Barcelona, where we live. She most often cooks from our kitchen — and the calls keep coming. 

The piece also focused on the personal, in large part to push others infected with, but the more collective benefits are no less profound. I am deeply happy to no longer be contributing, no matter how small my share, to demand for natural gas — and therefore the ongoing push to build more pipelines through Indigenous lands and low-income communities, or upstream power plants or export terminals. Not to mention fracking that can leave the earth under your feet unstable.

In the end, it was of course impossible to fit everything I wanted to say about quitting gas into an 800-word piece. My editor at The Guardian helped me find the version that best fit the column, even if we had to kill some of my darlings along the way. My thanks to her for the guidance, not to mention saying yes in the first place.

What do you cook with — and why?

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Take Action

drop | Go electric. Replace your gas stove. Or make a budget to replace it in the future. Or tell your landlord you want a switch. Or make a date with a friend to try their electric hob. It might become your new flame.

wave | Stop a pipeline. Find a local project and lend a hand in any way you can. Money, time, Instagram post. I donated to the Pipeline Fighters Hub for this issue.

Got even better ideas? Let me know. I’m new to this.

Revolutionary Letter #3 | excerpt

hoard matches, we aren’t good
at rubbing sticks together any more
a tinder box is useful, if you can work it
don’t count on gas stove, gas heater
electric light
keep hibachi and charcoal, CHARCOAL STARTER a help
kerosene lamp and candles, learn to keep warm
with breathing
remember the blessed American habit of bundling

– Diane di Prima

Read in full at poets.org. 

Worth Your Time

Have you heard the incredible new podcast Mango and Gnocchi? It’s funny and moving, enlightening and sensual. If you can’t come to Barcelona, it’s also a lovely way to spend a little time with my wife, Roshni, who created it with her business partner. 

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. My proofreader extraordinaire is Steve Kay and my editor-in-chief is Roshni Kavate. All errors are mine alone.

In the last issue, I shared my gratitude for the LA Times editors I worked with, but failed to wish them well in their labor dispute with ownership. I hope the staff, which includes several friends and acquaintances from my time at The Daily Californian, find the best possible resolution soon.

On Substack

I am extremely overdue, but when I do make my final decision on whether to stay on Substack, I will let you all know. Either way, there will be no need for changes from your side.

A year or so later, my grandmother — her trademark scoff robust as ever, my mom’s patience less so — moved into her own place. Housing options for elderly people in California were slim then, as now. For those with little to fall back on, such as retired public school teachers — my grandmother taught art — it was particularly tough. Lacking the nest egg of a home whose value had skyrocketed, or much savings at all, she ended up in that often-mocked American community: a trailer park.

The Leisure Lake Mobile Home Park was my grandmother’s final home before she went into a care facility. She died in 2006, but I’ve been thinking about her final years lately, and about the ways we can age.

The park was, and still appears to be, a nicely landscaped warren of narrow roads lined with trailers, and a faux lake running through the middle. Her neighbors were pleasant, or at least private.

What sticks in my mind is the location on a suburban island. On one side ran the highway out of town, on the other a high-speed country road. The hum of cars was a constant low vibration, the pollution a hazy scourge. The other sides gave way to a driving range and a seasonal pumpkin patch and corn maze.

You could not safely walk to or away from the park. The two-lane country road that provided an outlet was favored by diesel pickups and tractor-trailers. Walking beside it would have been a terrifying sensory assault — if there was a walkway. But there was no sidewalk or dirt path, just a narrow shoulder sloping into a ditch.

In short, if you could not drive, you were trapped. In my uncharitable moments, I wondered if that was the point: Put your car-less parents here. They will not escape.

I left the Bay Area in 2019. Walking my dog in my current home of Barcelona, Spain, I often remember my grandmother. A few blocks away from me is the Residència Pare Batllori, an elder home. On a recent morning, two old men sitting out front reached over to pet my dog. Bon dia, we said to each other. I turned the corner, passed the popular nightclub and concert venue Teatre Apolo, and looked into the ground-floor windows of Residència Colisée Paral·lel, an assisted care facility. Through the glass I spotted a few senior women chatting in the rec room.

The park next door features bocce courts and a Saturday farmers market. A few blocks away is one of the city’s outdoor jewels, the Montjuic park, which still holds amenities from the 1980 Olympics. Within a couple blocks there’s a gym, bakery, yoga studio and several supermarkets. There’s a subway entrance a few paces from the door of one residence. Locals here not only have the basics within walking distance; they can go clubbing, too.

Density debates in the United States tend to focus on topics such as the climate emergency and the housing crisis — critical issues, of course. Yet I now see that those discussions are also about how we want to age. We are debating whether our future selves can live as part of society, and what it will take for families to come visit grandparents, parents and others.

There are walkable communities for older people in the U.S., and challenges to aging in Barcelona; too often money determines your comfort level. But my neighborhood reminds me daily that the options we give our elders are a choice. We can build for them to age near us and walk our streets. We’re just going to need enough housing to do so: more apartments, more density, more people in less space. In California especially, we need to rethink our single-family mandates, zoning restrictions and tendency to build out, not up, all of which foster isolation.

For about a year in my late teens, I spent most Saturday mornings ferrying my grandmother around town in her 1980s Toyota Celica, after her eyesight became too poor for driving. We went to Trader Joe’s to pick up port and eggnog, whenever they had it (she drank it yearround), to the library for movies and audio books (never Hemingway: “I cannot stand that man”), to the pharmacy for dye (to keep her hair aflame).

She would get all dressed up for each outing — lipstick, blush, silk blouse. It was clear she looked forward to it all week. That was probably in part about spending time with me. But it was also about getting off the island.

My dream is that by the time I am her age, living in the U.S. again and no longer driving, we will have fewer islands. I don’t want to be marooned — and I hope to still go dancing.

Published Monday, January 29, 2024, in the Los Angeles Times.

How did your parents or grandparents age? How do you want to?

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Take Action

drop | Visit an elder. Go see your grandmother. Or maybe a parent, or a friend who is mobility is limited. You might take them to buy some port and eggnog.

ripple | Write to your mayor or council member. Tell them about the vision you would like to see for your city. Share this article, if it helps. I wrote to Petaluma Mayor Kevin McDonald. Find your representative here.

wave | Back a new vision. Support a group advocating for a more mobile future for all — and repair for past and current inequities. To honor my grandmother, my choice for this issue is the Los Angeles-based Investing in Place, which is a member of the Transportation Equity Caucus.

Got even better ideas? Let me know. I’m new to this.

now i’m bologna | excerpt

my parents were born from a car. they climbed out
& kissed the car on its cheek. my grandmother.
to be a first generation person. 23 and Me reports
i am descendant of pistons & drive trains. 33%
irrigation tools. you are what you do. my first job
was in a lunch meat factory. now i’m bologna.

– José Olivarez

Read in full at poets.org. 

Gratitude

This newsletter is a collective project. My article was improved by the thoughtful feedback of my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and the editors at the Los Angeles Times. All errors are mine alone.

On Substack

I remain concerned about Substack’s response to the presence of hate groups on the platform. I’ve been focused on writing, but I will soon consider next steps. For readers, no changes will be needed, but I’ll keep you posted on what I decide.

In what felt like an act of powerful magic, reality transformed by incantation into fantasy, we swapped our Barcelona apartment for a flat in the seaside town of Lla Franc for 14 days — from before Christmas into the New Year. But in this case, we were the sorcerer, and our wand was a simple URL: HomeExchange.com. 

Part of the joy, admittedly, is that this spell cost basically nothing. Yes, we pay a yearly membership fee, $175. But compared to this two-week stay, our fifth exchange of 2023, that is effectively nothing. We have spent nearly two months in strangers’ homes since signing up last year, which comes to about $3 a night. Aside from occasional payments for firewood or a prearranged cleaning, it has not cost us another penny.

The more subtle pleasure is the feeling of being at home. These are beloved spaces, full of life and the imprint of their owners. We’ve stayed in some sparsely furnished rental units, but most of our swaps leave us feeling not like we are visiting a place, but that we are members of it. 

And yet we are also pampered guests. We have arrived to find bottles of wine and cava, fridges stocked with eggs and pasta, and once in Florence a panettone to celebrate the New Year. Hosts have shared drinks with us, picked us up from train stations, driven us to bus stations. We’ve stayed in a gorgeously minimalist Paris apartment and a Belgian attic that felt like a treehouse. 

It’s been, in short, a totally different way of traveling. I write all this in the hope that, as you have likely guessed, you too will sign up. Not because I’m hoping to benefit, but because I’m certain you will. 

Exchanges have changed us as travelers. Yes, freed from paying for travel, we now travel more frequently. Yet we also travel slower. We stay in one place, usually for a week, and live as semi-locals, visiting as widely as desired but returning home each day. We shop at local markets, pick up regional foods, cook more at home. We might rush around seeing sights, but may just take the rest we need. Often we do not even travel very far away, because when you go deep there is so much more to see.

This past trip marked the beginning of our second year on Home Exchange. We signed up after booking a trip to Italy, and after much searching landed stays in Rome and Florence. Next it was Sevilla in the spring. In the summer, the site made possible a month-long escape from the Spanish heat, spent in the Netherlands, and bookended by stops — this is starting to feel gratuitous — in Paris and Belgium. Now we’re in the Costa Brava. 

That list of destinations makes my head spin, and perhaps yours too. But that’s what’s possible. Nor is it simply a European phenomenon, requiring a place in some desired international city. A dear friend — whose enthusiastic endorsements of Home Exchange I ignored, much to my loss — for years parlayed a home in the hills of Sebastopol, CA into stays around the world. (Have no idea where that is? Exactly my point.)

I listed all those destinations to get your attention, to emphasize the potential delights. Yet this is not just about vacations, but about sharing. This joy, those daily sunsets, were made possible by exchanging what we have to share for what someone else can also spare. 

Two of the most well-known tech companies on the planet — Airbnb and Uber — started with that idea, and then strayed. I’ve used and appreciated both, yet I’ve also seen how they have upended communities around the globe: driven shortages of long-term apartments in many cities, pushed whole sectors into unstable gig work, congested traffic and driven up pollution. The original vision has been deserted, even perverted.

Uber and Airbnb demonstrate how the pull of the status-quo, of exchanging money for services, can seem irresistible. There is a place for that. But we should make more room for sharing, for enriching our lives by swapping what we already have. Every exchange is a reminder that we can all benefit when we share. That’s what dawned on me while watching the sun come up in the Costa Brava.

What’s your favorite sharing story?

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drop | Sign up. Join a sharing site. It could be Home Exchange, or another platform. Ask friends for recommendations — and sign up codes.

ripple | Try it. Do your first exchange — and tell your friends. Hopefully you liked it.

Night Train Through Inner Mongolia

Now the child is a runny-nosed stranger 
you've finally decided to share your seat with, 
and the whole thing keeps heaving into the dark.

The child sleeps unsweetly hunched against you, 
your side is slowly stinging, he has wet himself, 
so you do not move at all. I know you.

You sit awake, baffling about a quirky faith, 
and do not shift until morning. This is why 
you are blessed, I think, and usually chosen.

– Anthony Piccione

Found at poets.org.

This newsletter is a collective project. Each issue is improved by the thoughtful feedback of my editor in chief, Roshni Kavate (who also contributed one of the photos), and my proofreader, Steve Kay. All errors are mine alone.

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I’ve been deeply disappointed by Substack’s lack of meaningful changes since reporting in the Atlantic publicized that many Nazis and other hate groups host newsletters on the platform. If nothing else is done, I’ll be relocating this newsletter. I intend to wait a bit longer both in the hope the founders reconsider their stance and because even finding time to write this has been tricky, let alone making time for a technological migration. Either way, there should be no need to do anything to keep receiving it, but I’ll keep you posted on the switch.

Our front door opens onto an abbreviated hallway, kitchen to the right and the rest of the apartment ahead. There’s a chair in this passageway, where you can sit to take off your shoes. Look closely as you sit down and you can see flecks of white paint on the wood. That’s the first hint.

Beyond the chair, in what is visible of our living room, you can see a small chest of drawers, with a glass vase on top sprouting a bouquet of feathers. You might notice the finish has flaked off the base of the stand. That’s your second hint.

When Roshni and I heard we’d been chosen for our current apartment, we were walking home from a couple of neighborhoods away. It was the first unfurnished apartment we had rented in Barcelona, so on our way back we paid a little more attention to the day’s castoffs. We found that paint-speckled chair in front of a dumpster. Our coffee table too. The chest of drawers I found later, pulling drawers from a disordered pile to reassemble it. Other people’s trash became our treasure. Or, at least, our furnishings.

We bought furniture, too, though all of it was secondhand. (The exception: our mattress.) But the collection of objects that visitors see upon coming through the front door are a fitting introduction to our apartment – and to our approach to life. I love finding new uses for any attractive thing that passes into our hands.

Take that chest of drawers. A former bottle of Roshni’s favorite fancy tonic water holds a cutting, and a secondhand tea mug-turned-micropot features a succulent. The cork cup that holds loose change once held a candle. The balsa wood tray where I drop my wallet and keys came home from the supermarket full of fruit. The snarl of wood we discovered on a beach somewhere. The vase and feather duster are, well, Roshni’s finds.

I find something deeply satisfying about meeting everyday needs — a pot for this plant, a place to empty my pockets — not with purchases but with creative reuse. There is so much that cycles through our lives, intended for such fleeting use. Invite it to stay a while. The bottle that holds one half of your gin and tonic might make a good vase. That paper bag, with a salvaged ribbon, can be used for a future gift.

I get this impulse from my mother, and from hers as well. My grandmother (perhaps yours too?) was a master of reuse. Undoubtedly shaped by living through the Great Depression, she saved twisty ties and plastic planter pots and yogurt containers. It was, in part, a learned economic necessity. She had to stretch her truck driver husband’s limited earnings and, after their divorce, her own slim earnings as an art teacher. 

My mom carried on these traditions, in her own ways. She frequented a thrift store in town that was then named, in the classic tradition of secondhand shop puns, Saks Thrift Avenue. (No resemblance to the New York luxury department store.) She was far more delighted in a good thrift store find — look what I found! — than in something bought new. Roshni can confirm that spirit lives on in me. 

She did not talk about climate change — nor did anyone else during my childhood that I can remember — but she was disturbed by waste. The accelerating throwaway culture in those years disturbed and sometimes infuriated her. She frequented appliance repair shops and shoe cobblers. She knew that fixing what you had would mean one less thing manufactured for purchase — and one less item decomposing (or more likely not) in a landfill. 

But this responsibility should not — cannot, if we are to actually change — rest on our individual shoulders. We need companies to be responsible for the full lifecycle of what they create, for governments to require producers to pay for or process their own waste. Right now, society pays the price tag for all the plastic crap accumulating in landfills, subsidizing billion-dollar companies' ability to produce things that often cannot be repaired or reused. 

We need to move towards an ethic of, as the title of a seminal book put it, Cradle to Cradle. Mother Nature has that mastered. We should follow her lead. Right now, our culture still sees beauty in the new, the fresh, the untouched. But what if we celebrated the thoughtfully repurposed, the reimagined, the old made new? Sure, there is a time for new things. But right now we are drowning in them.

What writing this has pushed me to do is send some money out in support of that change. I hope we can move at the speed of policy, not just culture, because time is running short. I hope we can craft policies that favor reuse, and penalizes businesses premised on throwaway culture.

In the meantime, I try my best to model the world I’d like to see. I look for a second life for the wonders that come into my life, whether by turning discarded drawers into organizing trays, or pastry bags into compost liners. When friends come over for dinner and compliment our apartment, I tell them that we picked up some of our furniture off the street, and the rest at secondhand shops. And then I send them home with leftovers in a carefully scrubbed takeout container. 

What’s your favorite thing to reuse or repurpose? Do tell.

Leave a comment

drop | Reuse something. Carry home that curbside chair. Turn that sexy bottle into a vase. Give something new life.

ripple | For instance, this Nov. 4 repair fair in Petaluma looks cool.

wave | Support advocacy. Donate to a group trying to change our relationship with waste. I chose Reuse Alliance. 

Are you knowledgeable about the reuse movement? Tell us who you recommend.

a chair on a highway on a rainy afternoon | excerpt

a velvet chair
standing by itself
	      on a highway
a chair standing by itself on a highway
means its life is over
a life of ups and downs
	       before it was brought here
		             and left beside the grass

– p.k.

Read in full at poets.org

This newsletter is a collective project. My editor in chief is Roshni Kavate and my proofreader is Steve Kay.

I had no idea I would read about so many people dying, in such vast quantities, with such regularity, that the body counts would start to overwhelm me.

Last month, there were 4,000 dead and 9,000 missing in climate-fueled flooding in Libya. This summer, hundreds were killed by Cyclone Mocha in Myanmar, floods in Sudan and extreme heat in the U.S. Last year, 1,739 died in floods in Pakistan, 24,501 in Europe’s heat wave and 43,000 in Somalia due to drought. And every year, 7 million die from air pollution.

This is a very, very incomplete account.

I thought about this record of loss as the past few weeks have pushed me, and I suspect you too, to think even more about death. 

We know one toll: Hamas killed some 1,400 Israelis, most of them civilians, and kidnapped a reported 222 more. The other is larger and growing: Israeli forces and bombs have already killed nearly 6,000 in Gaza, many of them children. More bloodshed seems all but certain, with millions of Palestinians at risk in Israel’s ongoing bombing. Israel is preparing for a ground invasion of Gaza; Hezbollah is threatening on the Israel-Lebanese border; the threat of a spiraling conflict looms. 

For all the horror of these figures, they too offer a deeply incomplete account. They represent merely a moment in time, a snapshot of the most recent pain and horror, not the death and suffering stretching backwards into years past, and very likely forwards too. And while I hope the marches and the organizing move leaders to peace, it feels like decades, if not centuries, of choices make it all but certain that the bloodshed will continue.

The voices that I most respect all seem to espouse, in one form or another, the same message about the current situation in Israel and Gaza, and it’s one I agree with: We should denounce the immorality of Hamas, and grieve the victims of their massacre, while also condemning Israeli’s killing of civilians, its long occupation, and stand against it inflicting further suffering. Case in point: the UN Secretary General’s recent comments. 

In the early days of the conflict, I also heard many commentators repeat a similar exhortation: we must hold multiple truths in our heads at once. I wonder if we can extend the same courtesy to the lessons this tragedy holds for the climate emergency. 

Can we give these deaths the space and respect and consideration they deserve, on their own terms, while also allowing the meditation on death and responsibility that they demand to be a guide amid the ever-widening climate emergency?

After all, it is not often our collective discourse turns to such questions, plunging us into joint reflection on mass casualties on an incomprehensible scale. Even amid another major war, ie, Russia invading Ukraine (500,000 and counting), let alone ongoing conflicts in Sudan, Myanmar and Maghreb, this moment feels different. Yet I fear that we will have even more frequent reasons to do so in the coming years, a parade of death tolls sounding the failure of our actions and inactions on the climate emergency. 

Like the Israel-Palestine conflict, decades if not centuries of choices have made all but certain the climate we have created will continue killing us. And like the current bloodshed, it is those with the least power and the least money and the least say in what happens next who are most likely to lose their lives, or their loved ones, or their lands and livelihoods, in coming climate-driven catastrophes.

I believe that to solve either crisis will require less of our heads than our hearts. We must extend our compassion to all those at risk, but particularly those with neither money nor power to protect themselves, and consider what we would have the world do if we were in their place.

And that too is where, perhaps out of a need to find some measure of optimism, I see the potential for a brighter tomorrow. Untold suffering around the world has resulted from an inability to see ourselves in our neighbors, let alone in strangers. The climate crisis is a call to change that. We must feel urgency in the Marshall Islanders losing their homeland day by day, or Indigenous peoples in the Arctic losing the foundations of their culture. If we can summon that compassion — and more importantly act on it — imagine what could be next. 

The climate emergency is, ultimately, less a math problem than a moral challenge. Tons of emissions and measures of parts per billion are important for scientists and policymakers. For the citizens of Western countries — in other words, people like me, and likely you, whose lives and predecessors are responsible for nearly all the emissions that have brought us to this tipping point — it is a question of whether we are doing enough.

By now, you have probably chosen where you will send any donations, but in case you do not, here’s two thoughts. Know a good list of groups? Please share in the comments.

Back relief. Help address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, such as through UNRWA.

Support peace. Donate to groups of Israelis and Palestinians working hand in hand for a different future, like Standing Together.

This newsletter is typically a collective project, but this issue is a solo production. As always, any errors of fact or judgment are on me.

I could whine that the bunk beds were so narrow that sharing was out of the question. But how could I not go to sleep happy? In the morning, the ferry would drop us off in Mallorca.

We were headed to the island, which sits just off the coast from our home in Barcelona, for a week’s vacation. Most people tended to fly there. But we had decided — well, perhaps I had convinced Roshni — to travel by water, not air. 

There’s a logic that says that’s ludicrous. A flight would have taken under an hour and cost around €20 each. The ferry took nine and was several times more expensive, too. Yet my time in Barcelona has helped me see that to think that way is to do the math — and the morality — wrong. The fastest, cheapest option often saves neither time nor money. Nor is it remotely as fun.

We should all know by now that there is no such thing as a low-cost flight. The passenger may save a few bucks, but we all pay the environmental cost, which can be 80 times greater than making the trip by train, according to Greenpeace. Not to mention such fares encourage us to hop on a plane for a weekend trip. I’ve done it myself, jetting up to Portland. We’re seduced from our morals by the illusion of speed and ease. But is it really better?

Imagine we had caught a plane to Mallorca on Friday night. We would have got there in a hurry, only to go straight to bed. Add one more night’s accommodation to our bill, and one more day of car rental. We might have flown on Saturday morning, but it would have meant getting out the door at an ungodly hour or a much later start. Instead, we arrived early yet well-rested.

That brings me to our experience. Consider our meal. Sure, if we’d taken a plane we could have squeezed in dinner before the flight or after landing in Mallorca. But how can an airport meal compare to sipping wine while watching the coastal lights fade into the distance from the ferry’s dining room window? Not that we were on some cruise liner, this was a commuter ferry. But it doesn’t take much to improve upon the cattle-car experience of air travel today.

Transport that costs us all more — in its contribution to slowly cooking humanity and the rest of the planet — should reflect as much in the sticker price. We could, for instance, phase out short-haul flights that have reasonable alternatives. France recently barred some such trips, if not yet enough. 

In discussion of what travel might look like in a more climate-conscious future, the emphasis is often on how it will cost more and move slower. It’ll be so much worse, is the implication. It is true that traveling slower is usually better for the climate. Ferries, for instance, emit less per passenger than flights, as do trains, and better fuels and other technological advances should lower the difference further. Yet I fear we overlook all the ways in which traveling slower is also better for us. 

Alternatives to flying and driving are scarcer in the U.S., but they do exist. The last trip Roshni and I took before leaving California was from Oakland to Santa Barbara, along one of Amtrak’s many routes in the Golden State. The ride lasted more than 10 hours, twice what it would take in a car. But it’s not like we had to drive the train. 

Instead of two hands on the wheel and mind half preoccupied by traffic — i.e. ensuring we did not get crushed by a tractor-trailer — I spent the journey planning our future in Spain with Roshni. We read about history and culture, and made lists of day trips and hikes. I even read a couple magazines and finished a novel. And when I looked up for a break, instead of seeing gas stations and asphalt, I had a breath-taking view. The train, known as the SurfLiner, runs along the Pacific Coast. 

Travel thoughtfully, and you can curl up with a book or a TV show. You can enjoy a leisurely meal with your love, and get a good night’s sleep before you plunge into a new adventure. You can experience that rarest of modern luxuries: unscheduled time. Travel thoughtfully, and you might just find the journey is as pleasant as the destination.

drop | Travel thoughtfully. Book a local ferry ride. Take a trip on Amtrak. Try an overnight bus service.

ripple | Recruit others. Share your trip on social. Brag when you get home. Hopefully you enjoy it?

wave | Build power. Support a group that’s advocating for better and more equitable transit. PolicyLink’s Transportation Equity Caucus has a long list of options, such as TransForm in CA. That’s who got my donation this week.

Collaborators | excerpt

and this gentle litany tolls the schedule
of departing ferries that take us from

island to city and back again — 1210,
1245 — ferries where the whales bloom

a black and white skirt in our wake, ferries
we drive our big cars onto because now

we can go anywhere, ferries that took
the people from the clear shore of their lives

– Keetje Kuipers

Read in full at poets.org.

My friend Priya Joi just started a newsletter, Science Safari, which offers a witty weekly take on science in our everyday lives. Check it out.

This newsletter, as always, is a collaboration. Roshni Kavate is my editor in chief and Steve Kay is my proofreader. All errors are mine alone.

The first day I found out that the city’s most famous promenade leads to… another walkway. At the end of La Rambla, after crossing a traffic circle overlooked by a bronze Christopher Columbus on an incredibly tall pedestal, I found myself on a path running alongside a harbor full of yachts. 

The Spanish-sponsored Italian colonizer was just my first encounter. On a future run, I made it to a massive smiling lobster with a deep brown tan (really!). On another, I reached the base of a frowning pop-art face designed by none other than Roy Lichtenstein. 

Energized by the public art and fresh port air, I ventured even further. Run by run, I found out what came next. Spoiler: more walkways. There was a narrower pathway lined by ritzy restaurants looking out at megayachts. A wide-open tree-shaded area followed, with skateboarders and off-leash dogs cavorting under palm trees. No matter how far I went, there were more delights. All for pedestrians, only.

I realize now that some part of me assumed, unconsciously, that at some point I would come to The End. I.e., the point where this never-ending pedestrian paradise gave way to “normal” car-dominated city life. Surely, experience whispered to me, these walkways could not stretch on forever. 

It was not a conscious thought, just a learned belief. It was the product of, well, a lifetime of that being true. In California, no matter how lovely the path, you eventually have to get back in your car. You drove to get there, and you’ll have to drive home again. And yes, I did eventually come to The End. It was not, however, what I expected.

Successively longer runs had upped my limit. I could go further than ever. Getting off La Rambla was easy. Passing Mx. Shrimp and Mr. Lichtenstein, too. The fancy restaurants were a blur. I slowed a bit under the trees. Then I crossed the street for the first time and was pulled to a complete stop. 

Before me was the beach. Golden sand, open sky, the Mediterranean stretching to the horizon. There were volleyball players in action, yogis in poses, morning walkers in twos and threes all over. I felt like I’d run all the way to paradise. Of course, I realize now that I should not have been surprised. I was, after all, next to the port from the start. Yet I could hardly conceive of a world, a city, a reality where I could run to the beach.

I have been lucky enough, as a Californian, to live most of my life near the coast. When I lived in Berkeley or Richmond, I was actually about as close to a beach as I am now, yet it was never a trip I would make by foot. In the Golden State, which may be more responsible than any other place for making beaches famous, it always took a car’s ride to get there. That day in Barcelona, I was shocked because my own feet had carried me to the ocean’s edge.

This might just seem like yet another blessing of Barcelona. Add it to the list: pleasant climate, a live-and-let-live people, Roman ruins, Gaudi, vermouth on the plaza, the warm lake that is the Mediterranean, a giant fried lobster statue. ‘I get it, it’s really nice there,’ I can hear you saying. 

This is all true. But it’s also a choice. We have built our cities for vehicles, not humans. And it’ll be hard to change. It is a truism that it is hard to get almost anywhere in America without a car. Not to the beach, let alone work, home, the shops, nor out of poverty or isolation. We let cars dominate our cities and towns. We opt for so little density that there are hardly enough people to warrant more than a narrow sidewalk. We too often keep our natural beauty — whether sandy shorelines, lazy rivers, or verdant hills — functionally out of reach of anything but cars.

Yet there’s no reason we cannot change that. It is a long cheaper to lay a path than a road. I see reason for hope in Berkeley’s bicycle boulevards, streets that use bollards and other interventions to discourage anyone other than residents from driving on them, offer a low-cost model of giving streets back to the people, even if they’re focused on two wheels not two feet. Past visits to the still-growing Bay Trail, which snakes along the waterfront from Richmond to Oakland and beyond, always reminded me how much appetite there is for decent ways to traverse our coast by foot. And California took a first step by barring single-family zoning, which at best forces us to use land only for unaffordable solo-occupancy homes and at worst might be called red-lining 2.0. Hopefully the state continues down that path.

If we’re going to have any chance of preserving a habitable planet, we’re going to need to walk more. Particularly those of us in developed countries, living lifestyles that if everyone followed them would require two, three, four planet Earths. When walking is something you have to drive somewhere to enjoy, it’s time for some serious change. If roads reach everywhere, but every walk eventually reaches The End, change is overdue. 

drop | Take a walk. Walk to your local beach. Or river, hill, forest, meadow, lake, reservoir, etc. Bring a friend.

ripple | Ask for more. Go to a local planning meeting. Tell them about the future you would like to walk in. Find out who has a similar vision and get involved.

wave | Make it better. Join others in a local organization to stay abreast of local planning decisions and push for cooler, human-centered options. Don’t know of one? Look at the list from America Walks — which you can also join. I just did. There’s not only place-based groups, but identity-based ones as well, like Outdoor Afro in Oakland.

This is new to me — and I’m learning as I go. Know of a great way to make change? Let me know.

Crossing | excerpt

The water is one thing, and one thing for miles.
The water is one thing, making this bridge
Built over the water another. Walk it
Early, walk it back when the day goes dim, everyone
Rising just to find a way toward rest again.
...

– Jericho Brown

Read in full at poets.org

Some wonderful things — visiting family, a Friday-to-Sunday yoga retreat — and a very busy couple of weeks professionally kept me out of your inboxes for a couple weeks. My goal is to not let it happen again.

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, I’d be even happier. If you loved it, feel free to tell a friend. Pledges of support are completely optional.

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This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate; and my proofreader, Steve Kay. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.

Yet I never really thought about it. I would change my clothes, pack a bag and head to the metro. For months, I regularly took a 40-minute train ride across Barcelona to go play tennis, without realizing the true nature of my destination.

It took a rare car trip to open my eyes. At that point, I had walked to the courts from the metro station a dozen times, and biked a few times as well. I was heading out of town in a rental when it finally clicked. On the left, I saw the car dealership and dirt lots I walked by on the way to the courts. Wait, were those the courts directly in front of me and soon to be overhead? Wait, I play tennis on an overpass, atop six lanes of traffic?

After that trip, I began to realize that some of my favorite Barcelona experiences came on overpasses. One walk that Roshni, my wife, and I love runs from Raval — the neighborhood where we’ve lived since coming here – to the sea. One possible route goes along a raised bike path and pedestrian walkway dotted with public art and overlooking city buildings and yachts. Raised because underneath the pedestrians is not just a road, but the city’s main highway. It has been hidden in favor of dog walkers and tourists, kiddie parks and statuary.  

Another time, far from the city center, deep in an unfamiliar neighborhood after a hike, we were making our way towards a much-needed lunch. We wound our way through an attractive park, a sprawl of green among the density that extends even to the outskirts of Barcelona. I heard a faint echo of traffic and, looking farther along, saw a highway emerging from the far end of the park. The cars, once again, had been tucked underneath and out of sight.

I could share other examples, and I suspect there are still more destinations that I have yet to realize sit upon overpasses. That is, the highways are hidden so well that I cannot say for sure when I’m enjoying their absence. 

Overpass, by the way, is probably not the technical term for these structures. But I’ll tell you why I think it’s apt. I won’t claim to speak for all of the U.S., but in Northern California, I’ve only ever heard that term. And I’ve basically only ever seen one structure built over a highway: an overpass. Basically, aside from the rare pedestrian bridge, in the U.S. the only thing we put over big multi-lane roads are… more roads. 

Take my hometown, Petaluma, CA. It is bisected by Highway 101, and there’s a handful of overpasses, and long-running debates about adding more. But functionally the highway is a dividing line, separating the city’s East and West. As a teenager, there was no pleasant way to cross to the other side of town, either by foot or bike. What options existed vibrated with passing cars, the air thick and toxic. You might as well be walking over an open sewer.

I think of Richmond, Berkeley, Oakland, or any of the other East Bay cities where I lived or worked. There and elsewhere in California there are stretches of highway with ocean views, with lush trees, and with infamously maze-like tangles. But except where they go physically through a hill, those highways are noisy spewing scars on the landscape, hidden only by foliage or sound walls, if hidden at all. 

Of course, this is not really just about covering freeways. That’s a means, not an end. It’s about what we put ‘over’ and above, what we prioritize. In one of the richest states in the wealthiest country in the world, we put cars on top, not humans.

Not only that, but the racist history of highway construction means the noisiest, most-polluting stretches typically run through communities of color where incomes are low and political power lower still. Historically Black neighborhoods have often been bulldozed to make way for these toxic new tenants. And today a new wave of transportation investment threatens to slice up still more of our communities and landscape.

I played tennis for months in Barcelona without realizing a highway was running beneath the court. I could neither hear it nor see it. But more than that, I could not even imagine it. I could not imagine a park could be built atop a highway. The highways of California, it would seem, had not just bisected my town and overrun the land and air around me. They had, in some profound way, colonized my sense of the possible, of how we might live, of what should be put ‘over’ and above everything else. But there’s a lot of better ways to live. 

Have you done something (anything?) on an overpass other than drive? Do tell.

Leave a comment

ripple | De-highway your mind. Read about visions for a different urban future. For example, there’s Next City, whose tagline is “solutions for liberated cities.” I recently subscribed. 

wave | Fight a freeway. Join one of the local efforts to remove, prevent expansion of, or cover (!) a local freeway. I just found out about the Freeway Fighters Network. One group in Portland, OR is trying to put a “cap” on I-5, and was just awarded $800K to study the idea.

Involved in something like this? Know of another similar effort? Let me know.

Love-in-a-Mist | excerpt

On a cliff side there’s a poppyseed pile
of ants sputtering against the pavement,
overlooking the highway with its tangle of overpass,
and there’s a sweet smell of summerwine
from bush grass and cat tails half filled in.
Your liver’s out, Prometheus, eaten but
not getting any smaller...

– Bailey Willes

Read in full at poets.org.

I just learned my friend, Shabbi Joi, has launched a Substack. It’s called Fallen Muslim, and it’s a hell of a good read. Here’s what it’s all about.

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, that would be even better. If you want to pledge support, that will allow me to do more with this newsletter in the future. But if you would rather donate that sum, or if it’s not in the budget right now, that’s fine by me. And if you loved it? Feel free to tell a friend.

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This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate; my proofreader, Steve Kay; and my writing group friends, Tina Mason and Kevin Maguire. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.

Some mornings, troops of students arrive to make art. Together they prep a giant canvas and together — a half dozen hands in unison — they turn it from blank into beauty. Other times there’s a camera crew, or a single digital eye on a tripod, capturing the artist’s creation in process. Often it’s just a solo practitioner, spray can in hand, focused on their craft, back to the world.

The art studio is also a skatepark. In the evenings, skateboarders glide to and fro, clothing billowing. On weekends, sometimes others follow them with cameras. Occasionally large trucks park in the driveway, set up snack tables for the crew, unload a fortune in camera equipment and commence to film.

The art studio is also a dog park. There’s always a canine or two rushing around to sniff the art, with humans in tow. There’s a man who seems to come every morning with two dogs, one of which looks like an overgrown sibling of our four-legged child, Clyde.

The art studio is also a farmer’s market. Every Saturday, tables and awnings spring up all over, selling freshly baked bread, still-soiled produce, hot coffee from a bicycle stand. There’s a DJ most days and a woman offering kimchi and sauces below a short noren curtain. Early in the year, you can buy a ticket for a calcotada — a barbecue featuring grilled green onions in a romesco sauce — and sit down to eat it right there in the market. The whole thing is organized by a local slow food association, so take your time.

In the summer, the art studio becomes still more things. A concert hall: the concrete sprouts speakers and a stage and kegs, and pounding music commences for a multi-day neighborhood celebration. An evening bar: a tiny shed I hadn’t thought twice about recently started serving vermouth and cerveza. A cricket ground: I’ve had to cross through its grounds more carefully in recent months, to neither disrupt proceedings nor get brained by a ball.

In other words, the art studio is anything but a graffiti-tagged abandoned lot. Yes, a pair of skeletal structures tower over visitors, nets stretched across their unfinished bones. Yes, there are three towering brick chimneys, from a power plant shuttered more than three decades ago, that give the space its name: Les Tres Xemeneies, in Catalan. But this space has not been abandoned, it has been reclaimed. 

Anyone can paint the concrete walls. Dogs and skateboards and walker-pushing retirees coexist. You can buy carrots here and possibly cannabis too. You can learn to ride a bike here, and I’ve seen a few do just that. You could call it a park: there are picnic benches, ping-pong tables, bocce courts and a rarely-used dog run (they prefer to run around everywhere else). But it is so much more than most parks.

It’s a shame there are unfinished buildings in a choice location in a city where many residents find the rents rising out of their reach. You can see this too, as it is also a home, where you can find sleepers in tents and on benches most mornings. So hopefully the empty shells will be filled. For a park that already holds so much, several stories of residents would fit right in. 

To me, the site is a reminder of how our urban spaces, if we choose, if we put the work in, if we embrace our multidimensional communities, can be many things to many people. When we let zoning restrictions or short-sighted self-interested complaints block such co-locations of joy and creativity, we never even see how much we lose.  All that humanity bumping up against each other — the loose-limbed kids swinging cricket bats and the hipsters spraying walls and the old-timers sipping Estrella — makes us all richer. That’s the art of the city, you see.

drop | Enjoy a local space. Set up a canvas. Toss a frisbee. Pack a picnic. Jump on a skateboard. Bring your dog. Invite your other loved ones, too.

ripple | Work with neighbors. Attend a local group’s meetings. I’m across the ocean from my hometown, but I recently came across Petaluma Urban Chat. 

wave | Push for change. Join a regional group, like Bay Area’s SPUR. I just did.  

I want to followup these dispatches with actions, not more reading. But I’m new to this, and I’m figuring it out as I go. Involved in something cool? Let me know.

The Barcelona Inside Me | excerpt

I think I’ll move into Gaudí’s dream
of recycled mesh, walk barefoot
on his flagstone tiles
inscribed with seaweed
and sacred graffiti
from pagan tombs.
O, Barcelona of chamfered corners!

– Robin Becker

Read in full at poets.org. 

Know someone who might like this? Pass it along. And invite them to the park, too.

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This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and my proofreader, Steve Kay. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.

My father came to the United States from New Zealand in 1979. We never visited Hawaiʻi during my childhood, but our family’s steady vacation diet of camping trips gave way to the occasional international feast, nearly all of them trips to see his family and homeland. Reading about the wildfires that devastated Maui and Lāhainā, and the history that kindled those flames, has brought to mind something people often tell me about New Zealand: “It’s so beautiful there.” The same is often said of Hawaiʻi. And it’s true. Epically so.

In New Zealand, one can travel from one microclimate to another in an afternoon, or even a single drive. My dear friend Kay once took us, shortly after our plane touched down, from urban Auckland through the Waitākere rainforest to the black sand beaches of Piha Beach. There was even ice cream at the end of the 30-min ride. A week’s trip with my dad took us from sandy beaches to waterfalls to fiordland to a glacier (only while supplies last!). Aotearoa is smaller than Colorado but, as you might have seen on the silver screen, large enough to contain all of Middle-earth. That’s how magical it is. 

It is also, like Hawaiʻi, a deeply altered beauty. My last trip there took me through Wellington, or Te Whanganui-a-Tara, the capital, and to the wonderful Te Papa, the national museum. I had read about the country’s history before, but it was those exhibits that conveyed just how much my ancestors and other newcomers ravaged the land they found. Those rolling green hills where my grandfather once raised sheep and cattle are actually a denuded landscape, stripped of the forest that once blanketed the land. The kiwi is beloved, but many other native birds did not survive. 

I’ve been reflecting on this history as the last embers in Maui are put out. We know that our centuries-long experiment in warming the earth has sparked these fires. If common sense alone is not enough to tell you that U.S.’s deadliest wildfire in a century was a product of the hotter drier temperatures driven by climate change, there is plenty of recent science. 

But as you probably have heard, there’s another c-word that’s operative in the destruction of the original capital of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi: colonization. As Kaniela Ing, a seventh-generation indigenous Hawaiian living in O'ahu, told Emily Atkin of Heated: “on one hand, the climate emergency caused this. On the other, it’s also that history of colonial greed that made Lahaina the dry place that it is.” It’s a legacy that’s thankfully been covered in depth in The New York Times, The Guardian and The New Republic. Ing, a former state legislator who is national director of the Green New Deal Network, also had an op-ed in Time.  

After a lifetime of hearing Hawaiʻi and New Zealand celebrated as verdant paradises, the disaster and these writings were a fresh reminder to me of just how utterly such landscapes have been transformed by European colonization. Lāhainā, as Ing put it, was changed from a wetland into a tinderbox. Yet I feel the two islands stand out only in the contrast between perception and reality. The rest of the United States has also been altered, as have other nations.

Five syllables, dozens of countries, countless lives; colonization can feel overwhelming. Yet it is also a tangible history of blood, soil and extraction. It is invaders bearing arms and disease, native forests cleared for foreign crops and livestock, mountains pillaged for precious metals, hotels and swimming pools and golf courses sucking up precious water. And it is, for many of us, a personal story. 

I know relatively little of my father’s family history, and still have much to learn about the nation where he grew up, but there’s one tale that stays with me. My grandfather once met a Māori woman, then about 100 years old, who at age 7 had swam from Ōnawe Peninsula — where my dad was raised — to what is now the town of Akaroa. It was not a feat of daring, but an escape from an intertribal massacre, one supercharged by European muskets. The strip of land that was the site of her tribe’s last stand was part of my grandfather’s farm until, in 1998, a settlement returned it to the tribe, the Te Rūnanga o Ngāi Tahu.

It’s a story that deserves its own essay, which I will get to when I can better learn the tale, but I share it here in brief because we too rarely consider those inheritances. All of us on colonized lands live, to some degree, on bloody soil. Some of us can even draw a direct line from European impact to our own family’s acreage. Yet that long shadow touches us all, one way or another. For many Hawaiian families — whether of colonizers or colonized — it means homelessness today, thanks to a fire that ran rampant on a colonized landscape. As Faulkner put it, ‘the past is never dead. It's not even past.’

The good news — and yes, I do believe there’s some hope — is that those in power are waking up to what’s best for the land, and for all of us. Decades of organizing by Native activists has started to bend the arc towards justice. We can see it, most recently, in the coverage of the tragedy in Hawaiʻi. An enormous body of science, too, is convincing decision makers in places from government to philanthropy of a reality Indigenous peoples have always known: that they are the best caretakers of their ancestral lands. There is less deforestation, more biodiversity, and more carbon sequestered in areas managed by Native peoples. 

It’s unfortunate that self-interest is partly driving this late awakening, as a rush for climate solutions lends overdue support, rather than the moral imperative of returning what was stolen. To me, that puts extra weight on all of us to make sure this is the first of many steps, with Native people leading the way. A particular responsibility lies with those of us, like myself, who can count their own benefits from this history, however distant. New Zealand has done more than most nations, from reparations to naming, even if work remains. The United States, meanwhile, has barely begun.

I know more about this legacy than I did a few years ago, whether from reporting on land taxes and activism or simply learning the way to say and spell Hawaiʻi that I’ve used throughout this essay. It is an ongoing journey. I am writing not as an expert, but as one finding my way towards justice. No doubt I have written something here I will regret, phrased something in a way that will reveal my own ignorance and conditioning. Yet I have only learned by not being too afraid to make mistakes.

This is a newsletter about how the changes we need to repair our climate are also better for all of us. Returning land to Indigenous hands does not, of course, cancel out an inheritance of oppression. But it is a step towards, to use a phrase many Native peoples use, being in ‘right relationship’ with the land. My distant ancestors were part of a wave of Europeans who took territory by force. My grandfather built a life, like so many other white settlers and their descendants, on those seized lands. My generation, if we follow the lead of Indigenous activists, can be the ones who start to reverse that history. And that would leave us all better off.

Give relief. There’s an incredible list of funds from the Hawaiʻi Alliance for Progressive Action. (Hat tip to Aileen Suzara.) You can donate directly to individuals thanks to community-managed spreadsheets or to relief efforts by groups like the Hawaiʻi People’s Fund. 

Back resistance. Sign the petitions to stop land grabs and protect Maui’s water. I just did.

Vacation responsibly. Some Hawaiians have asked outsiders to stay away, while certain workers and unions want a return, with officials saying “respect the west but visit the rest.” Consider who your dollars will support.

Have other suggestions? Reply to this newsletter or email me to get in touch.

What’s your family’s history with colonization? 

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This Island on Which I Love You | excerpt

And when, on this island on which
I love you, there is only so much land
to drive on, a few hours to encircle
in entirety, and the best of our lands
are touristed, the beaches foam-laced
with rainbowing suntan oil,
the mountains tattooed with asphalt,
pocked by telescoped domes,
hotels and luxury condos blighting
the line between ocean and sky,

I find you between the lines
of such hard edges, sitting on
the kamyo stool, a bowl of coconut,
freshly grated, at your feet.

…

– Brandy Nālani McDougall, Poet Laureate of Hawaiʻi 

Read in full at poets.org. Want more? I found Pō and Star-Spangled Banner both hauntingly beautiful.

This week’s newsletter, more so than ever, exists thanks to my invaluable editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and, of course, my father and copyeditor, Steve Kay. Equally, please consider any missteps this week, of or punctuation, as mine alone.

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, that would be even better. If you want to pledge support, that will allow me to do more with this newsletter in the future. But if you would rather donate that sum, or if it’s not in the budget right now, that’s fine by me. And if you loved it? Feel free to tell a friend.

Share

My backpack might hold a pair of pants with a hole in the crotch or a coat whose cuff elastic has gone slack. Or it might carry a gnawed dog collar or a bag that I loaded with more than its seams could bear. 

No matter what I bring, I know that the man in the pint-sized office piled high with clothes will have an answer. My tailor wields powerful magic. With a wave of his needle and few revs of his sewing machine, he can reverse years of wear and tear. Wool or synthetic, denim or cotton, he fixes it all. 

After more than a year of frequenting his shop, it is a rare day that I am not wearing some piece of clothing or other — jeans, jackets, turtlenecks — that has been kept alive by his magic hand. Today, for instance, without any plan to sit down to write this, I am wearing both shorts and a shirt mended by his needle. I find there’s a special pleasure not just in saving something from the landfill, but getting to keep wearing a favorite, say, pair of pants.

This is, in truth, not the first time I’ve been lucky enough to have a, uh, sartorial surgeon at hand. I grew up with one in the basement, namely, my mother. In between dreaming up quilts and crafting original shirts for my dad, she would generously repair my torn trousers and leaking pockets. I wish, in hindsight, I’d asked for a tutorial or two in doing it myself.

In the intervening years, between my last years living at home and moving to Barcelona, there’s been no one to reliably turn to, whether in the basement or down the street. By contrast, in Raval, the immigrant-dominated South Asian neighborhood that I’ve called home since arriving here, there seems to be a tailor every few blocks. While that’s partly a story of culture and opportunity, even the more traditional corners of the Catalan capital have such shops. Yet I can barely recall seeing one in the East Bay. Granted, it would take a whole lot of patches to pay a commercial rent in, say, Oakland.

Barcelona has pushed me to reflect on the more classic elements of life in a city, what you might call the ‘hardscape’ of urban planning and design, i.e. bikes, trains, walkways. But just as a new generation of American politicians has made the case that our society’s infrastructure is incomplete without child care, it seems close-minded to ignore what is worn in the city and, perhaps more importantly, cast off.

It’s not that Barcelona has it figured out. Fast fashion is an especially Spanish phenomenon. The Inditex Group — which you might know for its flagship brand Zara, but also runs Bershka, Massimo Dutti, Oysho, Pull&Bear, Stradivarius and Lefties — was started by a Galician. The Mango brand was started by two Turkish brothers living in Barcelona, and another international label, Desigual, has its headquarters on the city’s beach.

In other words, a healthy share of the pants and pullovers polluting waterways abroad, piling up in dumps sites and turning rivers blue come from Spanish companies. Most, of course, first pass through the hands of a customer somewhere else, often in the United States. There may be tailors at seemingly every turn in Barcelona, but I’m not implying that everyone uses them, nor that they have substantially staunched the flow of throw-aways. 

Yet the city offers one version of how life might be lived differently. And it’s not solely a private sector solution. In our neighborhood, the city sponsored a “Reparatruck,” a sort-of tailor on wheels that visited neighborhoods to help residents with repairs. You can also drop off old clothes at staffed recycling centers across the city. More recently, it set up a clothing exchange, and it just launched a service to pick up used clothing at your door. 

America’s reactionary right-wing message machine has left enough particulate matter in my consciousness that, at first glance, such schemes give me a ‘nanny state’ vibe. Perhaps those same pollutants infect you too? Yet there’s no logic to accepting as a matter of faith that our governments pick up our plastics, but not our polyester.

Whether t-shirts or takeout trays, trash is another source of carbon emissions, all of which must be zeroed out. If we are to reduce the volume we throw “away,” we must increasingly think in waste streams – and one of those is clothing. A city program can pass your hand-me-downs to a needy neighbor — or at least divert them from the dump. A tailor, too, can prevent — or at least postpone — the demise of a garment. Even a little DIY needlework can do the trick. 

Leave a comment

drop | Mend something. Find a holey garment. Take it to a tailor. Or sew it up yourself.

ripple | Make an exchange. Donate some old clothes (in this case, without holes) to a secondhand shop. See if you can find something you’ve been looking for.

wave | Help make change. Support a campaign, like Fashion Revolution, that works to end fashion waste and maltreatment of workers. I just donated.

Have even better ideas? I’m new at this. Reply to the newsletter or email me to get in touch.

The Luzumiyat of Abu'l-Ala, LXXIV

Swathe thee in wool, my Sufi friend, and go 

Thy way; in cotton I the wiser grow; 

      But we ourselves are shreds of earth, and soon

The Tailor of the Universe will sew. 

– al-Ma‘arrī, a.k.a. Abū‘l-Alā (“the father of the sublime”)

Found at poets.org

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, that would be even better. If you want to pledge support, that will allow me to do more with this newsletter in the future. But if you would rather donate that sum, or if it’s not in the budget right now, that’s fine by me. And if you loved it? Feel free to tell a friend.

Share

This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate, and my proofreader, Steve Kay. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.

Below our fifth-story windows passed religious processions, rowdy protests, football hooligans (read: soccer) and a never-ending stream of visitors to the Catalan capital. Walking the street we caught snatches of French, Portuguese, Russian (it was pre-invasion) and a whole lot we could not decipher. Our fellow travelers flowed by in such numbers that stepping out the building’s ground-level door was, surprisingly often, like stepping into a nightclub. 

I had heard of La Rambla before we arrived. Every guide features it, for starters. George Orwell mentions it in Homage to Catalonia. And terrorism had put it in the news: a few years before we arrived, a 22-year-old drove a van into a crowd of pedestrians in 2017, killing 15 and injuring dozens more. When we told friends in California that we had landed the apartment, many had a Rambla story to tell us.

Once we’d arrived, it was hard not to be enchanted. Sure, there’s plenty to dislike. Tourism has driven out most local flavor and replaced it with, well, the grotesque. The restaurants that are left serve fluorescent ‘cocktails’ and beer steins the size of bird baths. In a city with blessedly little American fast food, our apartment was not far from a KFC and a McDonald’s. Spaniards still live on the street, including across the hall from us, but most do not seem to dine or shop at most of its establishments. 

Yet for all of that, I still find La Rambla gorgeous. Walking down its nearly mile-long length always feels to me like a respite, even as the city buzzes all around. Towering plane trees shade you on a pedestrian walkway as wide as a multi-lane highway, and handsome facades offer eye candy. One favorite of mine features dragons and umbrellas, the legacy of a former paraguas shop. There are mythical creatures at street-level, too, in the form of street performers performing for tips. And in our first week, we were stopped in our tracks by a piercing aria: the opera house had staged a walkway performance to sell tickets to that night’s show. 

What struck me most of all, as someone who likes to play-act as urban planner in my mind and is still in recovery after a lifetime dependence on cars, was the seeming absence of vehicles. There are cars on La Rambla, but they are given only single-width lanes on either side of the walkway. And every 20 yards or so they are forced to a stop by a traffic light or pedestrian crossing. Walking through the heart of the city, I almost forget they are there.

In short, on the most famous street in Barcelona, cars have been pushed to the margins. Pedestrians, instead, get center stage. Taking a car down the Rambla, as the occasional cab ride has shown me, is easily the most arduous and unrewarding way to traverse the street. The best? Walking.

It makes me think of the main streets in all the cities and neighborhoods I’ve lived and worked in across California. The boulevard lined with antique stores in my hometown of Petaluma. Berkeley’s funky and celebrated Telegraph Avenue, as well as Shattuck and University. Historic Washington Street in the Gold Rush town of Sonora, or Main Street in nearby Angels Camp. The series of strip malls down Vermont and Franklin Avenues in Los Angeles’ Los Feliz neighborhood. Oakland’s downtown grid of Broadway, Telegraph, and their numbered counterparts. Richmond’s alternately vibrant and vacant McDonald Avenue. (Perhaps you know one of these?) 

Every single one I’ve named puts cars in the center. That’s what we do in America. We put cars first, pedestrians second. Cars own the landscape, the soundscape, the smellscape. I can still taste the diesel in the air on Sonora’s Washington Street. I still recall the fear, as a kid, of the cars whooshing by on Petaluma Boulevard. I still wince with the memory of near misses with murderous LA drivers. 

There are flickers of hope. My hometown’s main street, Petaluma Boulevard, was narrowed in recent years. Oakland’s Telegraph got bright new bike lanes and planter boxes while I was still in the Bay. Market Street in San Francisco, too, has gone multicolor with new space for cyclists. 

What I long for is even more ambition. A landscape where walking or biking is always more pleasant than getting behind the wheel. A future California — and United States — in which living without a car is an easy choice, not a matter of steely determination. I want more streets that smell not like stale exhaust, but fresh leaves; that inspire not fear, but joy (and arias!); and where no car can travel fast enough to kill. 

As I write this, Barcelona has launched a major project to remake the bottom of La Rambla. It will open even more space for people and push cars into even more narrow channels. In other words, one of the most walkable cities in the world is not satisfied with its most popular pedestrian-friendly street. So why should we be with ours? Besides, it’s not like Barcelona has only one Rambla…

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drop | Take a walk. Leave your car at home. Walk your main street. How does it make you feel? Could it be better?

ripple | Talk about it. Ask your friends and neighbors what they think. Talk about what could improve — and how to make that happen.

wave | Advocate. Join or support a local group, such as WOBO. Read their emails. Sign their petitions. Attend their meetings. Don’t know of one in your area? Look through America Walks’ list.

Have even better ideas? I’m new at this. Reply to this email to get in touch.

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, that would be even better. If you want to pledge support, that will allow me to do more with this newsletter in the future. But if you would rather donate that sum, or if it’s not in the budget right now, that’s fine by me. And if you loved it? Feel free to tell a friend.

To summarize: I’m not after your money. Just your minds. 😉 

This issue was a collective effort. Thanks to my proofreader, Steve Kay, and my editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate. Any errors, of grammar or judgment, are mine alone.

Meanwhile, my wife and I were living a grand experiment. The year before we had quit our jobs (in nursing and nonprofit communications, respectively) and moved to Spain. With parents who had come from India (hers) and New Zealand (my father), a move abroad felt almost natural. And a new world of remote work opportunities made it all the more possible.

It went better than we could have hoped. Barcelona was (and remains) the beautiful, walkable paradise I’d dreamed of, and so much more. Living in the city — and Europe in general — has shown me, in ways a thousand statistics never could, how living with a lighter footprint could mean living an incomparably fuller life. We spend more time with friends, and less searching for parking. Going from A to B — whether across the city or a border — is typically a delight, not a chore. We buy less, and we laugh more. The vermouth helps, but that is only part of it.

Yet as I sought to learn my beat in those early days, diving deep into the climate emergency as a journalist, I mainly found doom and gloom. There’s a role for that, but often such scarcity narratives seemed to miss what I was experiencing. Namely, that what’s better for the climate is simply better for us all. Better for our health, our pocketbooks, our communities, our lives. 

This newsletter is born from the desire to share that conviction and, without ignoring the very real and urgent reasons for alarm, my sense of possibility for our future. I want to convey the immense pleasure I’ve found — and I suspect many of you have too — in living a life more compatible with a habitable planet. My fantasy? These dispatches will be drops in the wave of change that transforms America’s car-first, human-second, throw-away culture. 

It will, of course, be inevitably shaped by who I am: a married white American guy nearing middle age. And also: a reporter committed to learning from others and helping to build an anti-racist future.

Here’s what you can expect in your inbox each week:

My stories. We daily live the delights – and disasters – of how we’ve set up this modern world. This newsletter is rooted in those experiences. So you’ll be hearing a lot of my stories, to start. But I hope you (yes, you!) will also share your perspectives about our heavily emitting present — and the future you want to live in. Please get in touch.

Policies make our world. Individual action gives us an invaluable sense of control in a complex world. And it’s part of the bigger puzzle. But it has also been weaponized by the status quo to avoid systemic change. Without getting wonky, I want to look at how our lives are shaped by policy choices — and how we can advocate for a more liveable tomorrow.

Emotions before data. There’s lots of fantastic writing and reporting loaded with stats on the impacts of greener living, of climate-friendly changes. I may even draw on that work. Yet what can get lost is the emotional experience, the sheer joy of walking your community or reusing something headed for the landfill or rejoicing in a verdant pocket of urban greenery. I’m here for that.

Possibilities and problems. Our future can be better, but this is not an optimism-only zone. There are real and legitimate reasons to be worried, and we are going to see more with each passing month/week/day. Many publications have that well-covered, but I won’t ignore those. There are also shifts we should be excited to make, and that’s my North Star. 

Learning as we go. I am neither a climate expert nor urban design specialist nor transportation policy wonk. What I am is deeply fascinated with the way we’ve chosen — and been forced — to live. I do know what it is like, for example, to live without a car in the United States. I don’t have all the answers, or even half, but my goal is to learn alongside you.

Green must mean equity: Oodles of evidence shows that a greener society, if done right, can help shift our divides and disparities, racial and beyond. Trees cool streets, lower asthma rates, raise test scores. Walkable, bikeable communities work for those without cars, whether minimum-wage workers, seniors or those with disabilities. But such benefits are neither automatic nor without risks, and I’ll strive to highlight that.

U.S. focus. This newsletter will draw on experiences from everywhere I’ve been, and hopefully be relevant anywhere. At the same time, my main preoccupation is with my home country, the world’s #1 historical emitting nation, the United States. For all its benefits, I’m concerned with how humans there must live: hours-long commutes, car-dominated streets, neighborhoods devoid of trees, homes walking distance from nothing but other homes. So, at least to start, this newsletter will focus on change there. 

Short and sweet. I don’t know about you, but I never have time to read everything I’d like. My goal is that you can read each newsletter in about five minutes. My aim is not an exhaustive exploration, but to start a conversation with each issue, to plant a seed. On that note, we’re done for today.

These weekly dispatches are free. If they make you think, that’ll make me happy. If they make you act, that would be even better. If you want to pledge support, that will allow me to do more with this newsletter in the future. But if you would rather donate that sum, or if it’s not in the budget right now, that’s fine by me. And if you loved it? Feel free to tell a friend.

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Like most good things, this newsletter is a collective project. Thanks to my proofreader, Steve Kay; my branding manager, Kevin Maguire; my design director and editor-in-chief, Roshni Kavate; and my walking companion and relaxation consultant, Clyde. And thanks to all of you who have shared your wisdom and insights with me. Any errors, in grammar or judgement, are mine.