Kermit O — Community Researcher & Educator

Tag: climate change

  • Philadelphia Resilience Hubs: A Strategy for Long-Term Thriving

    Philadelphia Resilience Hubs: A Strategy for Long-Term Thriving

    Philadelphia has become known as the “poorest big city” in the nation, a leader in gun violence, a city contending simultaneously with food apartheid [1]Gripper, A. B., Nethery, R., Cowger, T. L., White, M., Kawachi, I., & Adamkiewicz, G. (2022). Community solutions to food apartheid: a spatial analysis of community food-growing spaces and … Continue reading and widespread housing insecurity, at the same time as real estate development is in a pitched battle against the city’s long history of urban agriculture [2]Stanko, H., & Naylor, L. (2018). Facilitating (?) urban agriculture in Philadelphia: sustainability narratives in the inequitable city. Local Environment, 23(4), 468-484 as a means of community self-determination [3]Gripper, A. B. (2023). Practices of Care and Relationship-Building: A Qualitative Analysis of Urban Agriculture’s Impacts on Black People’s Agency and Wellbeing in Philadelphia. International … Continue reading. Above all, Philadelphia is a city straddling massive divides of income inequality and disparate qualities of life, across lines of race, class, and citizenship. 

    As the climate crisis continues to make the city hotter and wetter [4]Malter, S., Rockwell, J., & Maimone, M. (2017). Climate change and precipitation: Applying global climate model projections to local precipitation time series data in Philadelphia. In World … Continue reading[5]Weber, S., Sadoff, N., Zell, E., & de Sherbinin, A. (2015). Policy-relevant indicators for mapping the vulnerability of urban populations to extreme heat events: A case study of Philadelphia. … Continue reading, straining both its aging infrastructure [6]Kessler, R. (2011). Stormwater strategies: cities prepare aging infrastructure for climate change. Environmental Health Perspectives and residents’ bottom line due to increased rent, utility, and maintenance costs [7]Kenner, A., Skula, A., Mankikar, D., Zimmermann, I., Nobles, E., Menzo, J., … & Zerbo, R. (2020). The Climate-Ready Home: Teaching Climate Change in the Context of Asthma Management. … Continue reading, persisting struggles will only be exacerbated. To say Philadelphia is in crisis understates the point, because the very word crisis implies a moment, a turning or tipping point, rather than the long continuity of disinvestment, racist policy and practices that undergird the city’s seemingly intractable woes [8]Hoffman, J. S., Shandas, V., & Pendleton, N. (2020). The effects of historical housing policies on resident exposure to intra-urban heat: a study of 108 US urban areas. Climate, 8(1), 12.; [9]Schinasi, L. H., Kanungo, C., Christman, Z., Barber, S., Tabb, L., & Headen, I. (2022). Associations between historical redlining and present-day heat vulnerability housing and land cover … Continue reading; [10]Jackson, K. L. (2022). Urban Agriculture and Critical Environmental Justice: A Case Study of Gardens and Growers in Philadelphia and Camden (Doctoral dissertation, Rutgers, The State University of … Continue reading. Yet it is also an overstatement, because it is not “Philadelphia” as a whole that suffers — indeed, some quarters are doing quite well — but rather the same neighborhoods time and again which bear the brunt of social, economic, and ecological degradation. There is a clear correlation and continuity between historic disinvestment via redlining and a wide variety of disparities in health and quality of life [11]Wilson, B. (2020). Urban heat management and the legacy of redlining. Journal of the American Planning Association, 86(4), 443-457., from the condition and availability of housing in Eastwick, and the higher risk of flooding [12]Cahn, A. L. (2014). On retiring blight as policy and making Eastwick whole. Harv. CR-CLL Rev., 49, 449., to higher rates of asthma or heat stroke hospitalization in North Philadelphia, to the extremes of the heat island effect (Figure 1), with temperature differentials between neighborhoods as high as 22 degrees [13]Shokry, G. (2021). Competing riskscapes of climate change, gentrification and adaptation in Philadelphia’s Hunting Park neighborhood. In The Green City and Social Injustice (pp. 225-238). … Continue reading.

    All of that is the bad news. The good news is that there are many strategies coursing through the ideosphere which offer Philadelphia a real chance to get its head above water — literally and figuratively speaking. Any serious strategy would have to take a holistic approach, addressing both the immediate social and material needs of overburdened communities, as well as provide a pathway to long term economic and ecological sustainability: building the collective capacity to thrive into the indeterminate future. One such strategy is the Resilience Hub, a singular facility situated at the nexus of climate mitigation, adaptation, and equity to enhance and improve community sustainability [14]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network, which has the capacity to channel “existing community action and resources towards building resolve and strength in the face of climate injustice” [15]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan.

    Figure 1: Side by Side Comparison of the 1937 Home Ownership Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining map (left) and an index of heat vulnerability in the city today (right). The red areas on the HOLC map are those the corporation deemed “hazardous” investments, while heat vulnerability increases from light to dark red.

    Resilience Hubs as Philadelphia-Specific Strategy

    Resilience Hubs are trusted and well-used infrastructure, such as community centers, churches, recreation centers, parks, which build and enhance their capacities to meet community needs on a daily basis, and in preparation for significant disruptions and recovery from long-term crises [16]Baja, K., McKinstry-Wu, S., Oxnam, G., & Fitzgerald, G. (2019). Guide to Developing Resilience Hubs. Urban Sustainability Directors Network.. The specific offerings of resilience hubs are contextual, geographically specific, and when done well, designed at the direction of the community itself. Yet there are certain features which are broadly consistent across diverse implementations of the model throughout the country:

    • Programs and Services — providing culture, community, and connection for residents; these are usually in place before the site’s evolution into a hub, and what makes them a trusted resource; optimal hub planning enhances and expands these features.
    • Energy — the ability to provide heating, cooling, electricity year-round, often utilizing a “Hybrid Resilience System (HyRS)”, or solar plus a storage system that can provide energy for at least a few days during grid failures. 
    • Water — On site water collection, sourcing, and storage, from the municipal system, local catchment, and/or advance purchase. 
    • Food — Local production, preparation, distribution, and storage, in the form of community gardens, dry storage, community kitchens, and/or food box pickup and delivery
    • Communications — Free Wi-Fi, telephone service, ham radio, and/or walkie talkies, as a means of receiving and distributing valuable information to and between members of the community, directing them toward resources or sharing safety measures and protocols. 

    Philadelphia’s enduring problems — stressors impacting people’s everyday ability to thrive — only stand to get worse in the face of looming shocks, “major disruptions…that can disrupt a variety of critical systems.”[17]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. The COVID-19 pandemic offered Philadelphia a preview of how shocks and stressors can be mutually reinforcing, casting racial and economic disparities in sharp relief, and exposing historical and structural continuities, driven by the primacy of capital accumulation, and the doctrine of “economic growth”. The lackluster and inconsistent government response to the pandemic also revealed a critical inflection point, the approach of a “choose your own adventure” scenario as the burgeoning climate crisis presents a mandate for building resilience. 

    When Philadelphia’s public schools closed to reduce COVID-19 transmission rates, unquestionably saving many lives in the process, it also had a devastating cascading effect, for the fact that schools operate at the nexus of multiple community needs. For Black, Brown, and low-income families, who make up the vast majority of the public school population, school closings meant a loss of free “childcare”, and reasonably safe places for young people to be while parents were working, a loss of access to social services, and potentially the loss of two daily meals, with most schools offering students both breakfast and lunch. 

    Families struggling with unemployment, underemployment, or loss of employment due to the pandemic, for whom the free meals were a necessity, suddenly had to scramble to fill the gaps created by school closures [18]Kinsey, E. W., Hecht, A. A., Dunn, C. G., Levi, R., Read, M. A., Smith, C., … & Hager, E. R. (2020). School closures during COVID-19: opportunities for innovation in meal service. American … Continue reading. Parents who were able to continue working, whether because their jobs were deemed “essential”, or because they were able to transition to working from home, also endured unanticipated financial hardships, both around childcare and daily sustenance. As the city and various nonprofit partners worked to set up meal sites to provide young people with the meals they were no longer able to receive at school, the communications and logistics were haphazard at best, and left many families in the lurch for about two weeks. The social and emotional impacts of these cascading impacts are easy to surmise, and remain the subject of ongoing research [19]Bhamani, S., Makhdoom, A. Z., Bharuchi, V., Ali, N., Kaleem, S., & Ahmed, D. (2020). Home learning in times of COVID: Experiences of parents. Journal of education and educational development, … Continue reading[20]Uzun, H., Karaca, N. H., & Metin, Ş. (2021). Assessment of parent-child relationship in Covid-19 pandemic. Children and Youth Services Review, 120, 105748.. 

    While the pandemic itself did not discriminate, existing structural inequalities concentrated its impacts in the neighborhoods and communities already overburdened by intersecting and overlapping social, ecological, and health struggles [21]Anaele, B. I., Doran, C., & McIntire, R. (2021). Visualizing COVID-19 mortality rates and African-American populations in the USA and Pennsylvania. Journal of racial and ethnic health … Continue reading[22]Poteat, T., Millett, G. A., Nelson, L. E., & Beyrer, C. (2020). Understanding COVID-19 Risks and Vulnerabilities Among Black Communities in America: The Lethal Force of Syndemics. Annals of … Continue reading. These are communities which need not just relief, but a clear pathway to a thriving future now, in the face of surging violence, displacement, high morbidity for chronic illness, piling trash and epidemic dumping, drug addiction, food and housing insecurity. These are the same communities, by every metric and in every projection, that will be most devastated and resource-starved by the climate crisis. While resilience hubs cannot solve all of these problems in one fell swoop, the model embodies the required logic for building holistic community resilience, rather than relying on isolated one-off solutions.

    Lessons from Detroit

    Case studies in Detroit offer particular insight into the value of resilience hubs for Philadelphia, due to the marked commonalities between the three cities in terms of demographics, topographies, histories of divestment, racist policies, and the projected impacts of climate change. Detroit, like Philadelphia, has already seen more frequent flooding, “major precipitation changes, unseasonal temperature variation, extreme heat, and extreme cold”. It has also seen more days with temperatures above 90 degrees, which intensifies the heat island effect, and can “contribute to heat-related illness and death, exacerbate asthma, and increase the total number of people with asthma and other respiratory illnesses stemming from air quality.”[23]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan

    In yet another similarity, Detroit uses a combined sewer system, which during flood events causes sewage and industrial waste to empty into the river, the same river from which much of the city sources its drinking water, occurrences known as combined sewer overflows (CSO). The recent chemical spill into the Delaware caused widespread alarm [24]​​Sharber, C., & Lamb, A. (2023, March 26). Officials warn of possible advisory Tuesday, encourage residents to begin storing tap water. WHYY., and yet the regular occurrence of waste water entering the river — made more frequent by climate change — barely registers in the public consciousness. This is due in part to the fact that the CSO is a known quantity, with the city confident in its ability to clean the water before it is distributed to homes and businesses, and for that not making a point of sending out emergency alerts and holding press conferences. 

    Then there’s the Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood of Detroit, which “experienced severe flooding in 2014, 2016, and 2021 and 96% of properties in the neighborhood are at an extreme risk of flooding in the future”, which evokes the troubles of the Eastwick neighborhood in Southwest Philadelphia, in which over 70% of homes and business are at major risk of flooding. For the people of Detroit, who also have a high level of distrust in their government, and are therefore uninterested in utilizing existing community shelters in the event of an emergency, resilience hubs have enabled them an alternative resource, one “deliberately designed to overcome this mistrust, [by] placing control in the hands of community leaders.”[25]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan 

    In one example, a church was set up stormwater catchment to support a tree nursery and vegetable garden, as well as solar + battery storage to provide clean energy everyday and boost resilience during power outages. In addition to local resilience, such hubs reduce the strain on city emergency response services, as hubs are ideally designed for “self-governance, agency, and autonomy”[26]Muir, M., George, A., Oesterle, M., & Pew, J. (2022). Detroit Resilience Hub Framework: Best Practices for the Implementation of Resilience Hubs in Detroit, Michigan.

    A Hypothetical Happy Hollow Hub

    Happy Hollow Recreation Center in the Germantown section of Philadelphia, is the city’s oldest recreation center, first opened in 1911. It has a playground, two basketball courts, two tennis courts in disrepair, and 2 acres of open land. As a community fixture, Happy Hollow offers a wide variety of community services, including sports, gardening, cooking, and computer classes. It has also gained some repute over the years for producing a series of NBA-caliber basketball players through its coaching programs.[27]Dent, M. (2017, July 7). From Happy Hollow to the NBA: Philly’s oldest rec center is a basketball hotbed. Billy Penn at WHYY. In spite of this history, it has experienced turns of repair and neglect. Most recently it has been slated for renovations as a Parks and Recreation capital project, and was allotted funding through the city’s Rebuild program to finalize those updates. The city website is vague on the details of the renovation, and the project is in the “Pending” phase — a designation which is equally unclear.

    Figure 2: Progress of Rebuild Projects as of July 2022

    As a beloved community center, Happy Hollow is a prime candidate for transformation into a resilience hub. For improving residents’ everyday quality of life, the rooftop real estate is enough to host some solar + storage infrastructure, the installation of which offers both employment and educational opportunities for the community. The surrounding land could be allocated to any number of fundamental community needs, such as an urban farm and/or food forest, complete with beehives and chickens — to provide fresh, local food, and to further enhance existing gardening classes. Programs could be expanded to include training to help residents build resilience, such as counseling on how to access state and federal funding such as the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) or Whole Home Repairs Act (WHRA) to renovate and retrofit their homes. Taking cues from nearby Mt. Airy Learning Tree, community members could participate in regular skillshares, in those faculties which enhance quality of life today and help people prepare for future stressors and shocks. 

    Stormwater management infrastructure — permeable pavers, rain gardens, etc — in addition to a rain catchment, purification, and storage system, could encourage residents to implement similar solutions in their own homes through the city’s woefully under-utilized Rain Check program. As residents come to understand the value of local air monitoring, additional sensors might proliferate throughout the city, and encourage officials to be more granular in their approach to air quality — addressing disparities in vulnerable neighborhoods. 

    Figure 3: Happy Hollow Recreation Center in Germantown

    These improvements to residents’ everyday quality of life, building upon the benefits Happy Hollow already offers, would have a wide impact. Increasing young people’s access to recreation is often cited as an antidote to violence, which has become a critical issue in the city. By implementing a resilience hub model, expanding the site’s green space, improving community nutrition, and simply creating more opportunities for neighbors to build relationships with each other, would have a compound effect on reducing violence. 

    In times of disruption, people might come to Happy Hollow for first aid, temporary shelter, or emergency food and water provisioning. Although Germantown is not one of the more vulnerable neighborhoods with respect to the heat island effect, Wayne Avenue, on which the center is located, is a commercial thoroughfare with very little tree canopy, and on a particularly hot day, Happy Hollow might offer cooling stations — of particular value for elders and young children. On poor air quality days, the center could provide some reprieve for residents with asthma or other respiratory challenges. The recent scare around the chemical spill in the Delaware also presents a perfect use-case, as a Happy Hollow resilience hub could’ve provided clean drinking water sourced from rain catchment or purified through relatively low-cost on-site infrastructure such as Lifestraw technology, and forestalled the run on local stores for bottled water. 

    Figure 4: LLM-generated Mockup of Happy Hollow Recreation Center renovated into a Resilience Hub, with solar power and food production capacity on site

    Finally, a Happy Hollow hub, where it regularly provides programs, services, and resources that improve quality of life and help residents build resilience, would also be well-positioned during recovery from a devastating or enduring shock. An on-site tool library could help residents repair damaged homes, with help from a Citizen Repair Corps, trained in carpentry or electrical at Happy Hollow through the community skillshare. And because Happy Hollow is a trusted community location, it would be well-suited to coordinate disaster response with other agencies, and to provide a gathering space during recovery planning.

    Funding

    Happy Hollow has been named as a site to receive renovations through the city’s Rebuild program. Instead of merely restoring the existing facilities, additional funding from Rebuild, coupled with additional resources from the federal government, such as the IRA, could go a long way toward reimagining the recreation center as a resilience hub. More funding still might be secured from the William Penn Foundation, which has placed sustainability initiatives at the top of its list of targeted projects [28]William Penn Foundation (2023). What We Fund., or from long overdue PILOTs — payments in lieu of taxes [29]Leland, P. (2005). Payments-in-lieu-of-taxes: A revenue-generating strategy for central cities. Revitalizing the city, 201-225. — extracted from universities and corporations.

    Community Engagement

    Philadelphia has a poor reputation for community engagement, for while the city ostensibly asks for resident feedback in many fora — testimony at City Council, public comment at various commission meetings, and various community design processes — less transparent, or even evident, is how this feedback gets incorporated into the implementation of the city’s plans [30]Hargrave, L. (2022, August 29). The process of Washington Avenue’s redesign falls short of democracy and fairness. Grid Magazine.. One of the seven stages of development in the Rebuild program is “Public Engagement and Design”, aligning with the process of creating a resilience hub, which must be driven by community input in order for it to be effective.[31]Baja, K. (2018). Resilience hubs: Shifting power to communities and increasing community capacity. Urban Sustainability Directors Network. People don’t use services they don’t need or want, and so it would be crucial to “rebuild” Happy Hollow at the community’s direction. 

    There is even precedent in the city for a participatory budgeting process [32]Murphy, D. (2020, December 3). How would you spend $1M in city cash? Philly wants residents to shape next budget. WHYY., which allowed residents to weigh in on how to allocate funding for community facilities and public infrastructure. Missing from this process, however, were regular cycles of feedback and reflection and a clear articulation of how community input translated into how money was ultimately spent. 

    A truly participatory process would recognize that valuable knowledge can be actively produced by the community. This recognition would need to be made explicit at every stage of the process, from the collection of data, to the analysis and application. A more authentic and robust engagement process could increase the existing social capital of Happy Hollow, and strengthen its stature within the community as a trusted resource. 

    Conclusion and Additional Policy Implications

    The creation of resilience hubs in Philadelphia would not only do a great deal in meeting the city’s sustainability targets, it would foster short and long-term quality of life enhancements for local residents, and prepare us for inevitable stressors and shocks during the long march through the climate crisis. 

    A hub at Happy Hollow could act as a pilot for implementing the model citywide, which, aside from its many clear benefits to community and environmental health and well-being, could also kickstart broader policy conversations. For example, where a hub makes the advantages of solar energy more widely understood, it may cultivate enough political will at the local and state level to push for the legalization of community solar in Pennsylvania [33]Glabicki, Q. (2022, September 20). PA needs new solar energy laws. Here are where the bills stand. PublicSource., itself a strategy for building resilience through lower energy costs [34]Corby, E., & O, K. (2023, April 19). Community solar can propel Pa. Toward an equitable clean energy future. Pennsylvania Capital-Star.[35]Chan, G., Evans, I., Grimley, M., Ihde, B., & Mazumder, P. (2017). Design choices and equity implications of community shared solar. The Electricity Journal, 30(9), 37-41. and creating infrastructure redundancies in case of grid failure.[36]Deng, S., Hansen, A. V., Hiltbrand, G., Maddex, S., & Sinclair Lecaros, S. (2019). Evaluating Viability of Community Solar Microgrids for Resilience in Puerto Rico.[37]French, C., Van Kirk, J., & Messick, A. (2022). Solar Microgrid Implementation in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Partnership for Action Learning in Sustainability (PALS)

    Finally, through the resilience hub co-development process, the city could set a new standard for community engagement, and where the process translates into direct, material, quality of life enhancements for residents, it could do much to reverse long histories of justified distrust toward city officials [38]Atherton, T. L. (2017). Mitigating distrust: Trauma and redevelopment in Eastwick, Philadelphia. University of Delaware..

    Notes & References[+]
  • The Cynical Manipulations of the Gatekeeper

    The Cynical Manipulations of the Gatekeeper

    The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they divert attention away from the actual conspiracies playing out in plain sight, albeit obscured by the labyrinthine mechanisms of capital. While people are worrying about pedophilic sex cults, tracking chips hidden in vaccines, or musicians using human sacrifice to accumulate fame, there are less arcane and far worse things taking place.

    There is also an interesting dynamic wherein certain figures are situated at one of two extreme poles in popular discourse: as maniacal supervillains or selfless philanthropists. Usually, neither is an accurate characterization, and the truth lies somewhere along the spectrum, though seldom in the “middle”. This polarization also overlooks the ways in which these figures might sit at both poles simultaneously, to accumulate both capital and power. It is probably obvious by now, if the title didn’t already give it away, that I am talking about Bill Gates.

    Bill Gates at the Munich Security Conference in 2017

    What I want to propose is that the actual Gates agenda, far from facilitating the rise of the lizardmen, depopulating the world, or tracking everyone with microchips, is more…basic. Pretty much everything he does can be be viewed through the lens of accumulating profit and control, and his primary means is by situating himself as a gatekeeper.

    It is easy to get carried away, finding connections between things that aren’t really correlated, all to support a narrative you already believe. So in the spirit of transparency, and to open my analysis to critique, I will admit that I have an intense animosity toward Bill Gates, and that this animosity informs the context of my interpretations. I almost reflexively assume the worst of him, and “the worst” almost always bears out, in spite of paltry evidence to the contrary. My hostility toward Gates is founded upon his status as an ultra-wealthy person, because I understand that such wealth is always based on the exploitation of people and the natural world. There is literally no wealthy person on Earth who earned their wealth through a strict conversion of their own intellectual or physical labor into material assets. At multiple (countless) junctures along the trajectory of their ascension, both temporally and spatially, someone was exploited, or something was extracted, under threat or actualization of violence.

    From that foundation, I also take issue with Gates frequently injecting himself into spaces where he does not belong and where he is not welcome, both because he has no real knowledge or expertise in these areas, and because there is always some ulterior motive, again toward profit or control. Such is the case with his relentless attempts to influence education reform or alleviate poverty in Africa.

    More than his generosity, what Gates’s “philanthropy” reveals is his cynicism and his arrogance. These traits are mutually reinforcing, because on the one hand, Gates does not trust in the capabilities of other people, and on the other he thinks himself to be uniquely capable. In my hometown of Philadelphia, Gates is best known — besides his status as one of the world’s wealthiest men — as a driving force behind education “reform”, physically manifest in the “School of the Future”, a public high school which was supposed to model Gates’s theory that technology could solve all problems.

    School of the Future in Philadelphia, PA

    Like most schools, Future is both a product and a reproducer of the broader society. The experiment, to outfit a school with enough technology to meet the vaunted goal of 1:1, hoping that would somehow reconcile deep historical and systemic inequities for the mostly-Black student population, was an epic failure. Today, the school is the same many others in Philly, doing next to nothing to change the material conditions of young people, nor much at all to alter their prospects. This in spite of the noble efforts of individual teachers, who in their relative isolation can only hope to reduce harm. “School of the Future”, in retrospect, was a rather ironic name, because rather than some gleaming exemplar of “reform”, it represents another reproduction of the relations of domination within the city and country at large.

    Gates’s cynicism and arrogance, blended in equal parts with white liberal racism, create a cocktail of paternalism by which he sees himself as the savior of the “darker nations”, be they Black children in Philadelphia, Africans dying from malaria, or farmers in the two-thirds world dispossessed by a changing climate.

    He is the physical embodiment and ideological convergence — an avatar — of white supremacist patriarchy. Yet due to his vast sphere of influence, namely his accomplices in mass media, he has been able to style himself as a philanthropist icon. Under the pretext of generosity he is able to deflect critique, and valid lines of inquiry get drowned out in the cacophony of conspiracy theory.

    So, in case it wasn’t clear, I don’t like Bill Gates, and I am skeptical of everything he does. In spite of all that, I think the case I want to make here — inklings of a specific and rather grotesque agenda — will stand on the merits.

    Earlier this year, Gates published a book about how to avoid climate disaster, the culmination of many public comments he’s made on the subject over the years. That a man who is not a scientist, environmental or otherwise, nor working in any of the sectors actively problem-solving around climate change, would publish a book claiming to know the “solutions” is sheer hubris. The arguments he makes are generic, easily cherry-picked from any number of articles published on the subject for the past ten years. Yet none of his solutions point toward what every climate scientist and activist knows is necessary: pumping the brakes on the runaway extractivism of capitalist production. By framing the discussion in terms of surface level actions, rather than root causes, Gates is able to maintain his guise as a concerned citizen and caring philanthropist. But the sleight of hand is revealed when we investigate what he gets up to when he thinks no one is looking.

    Recently, it was discovered that Gates has been secretly — through proxies — buying up acres upon acres of farmland. To what end? It’s a question that many have been asking.

    The principal danger of private farmland owners like Bill Gates is not their professed support of sustainable agriculture often found in philanthropic work – it’s the monopolistic role they play in determining our food systems and land use patterns.

    In his new book, Gates talks about how smallholder farmers stand to bear the brunt of the devastation caused by climate change, while being those who contribute the least. We have already seen these consequences play out, driving civil conflict and desperate migrations. It was one of the lesser known variables contributing to the war in Syria, and one of the underlying reasons why Central American migrants made the perilous march north. In all his tender concern for smallholders, Gates writes:

    And we need new seeds and other innovations to help the world’s poorest people— many of whom are smallholder farmers—adapt to a warmer climate.

    In the mind of Gates and other technocrats, it will be innovation that saves us from all manner of crises. These “innovations”, invariably, will be developed behind proprietary firewalls, where for-profit corporations decide how and where they will be deployed based on market logic — that is, who has the means to pay. What Gates does not talk about in his book is how he has positioned himself as a gatekeeper between the smallholder farmers and the “innovations” that might protect their livelihoods, and also between people and their ability to produce food at all in a “post-climate” world.

    Gates has successfully accelerated the transfer of research and seeds from scientific research institutions to commodity-based corporations, centralizing and facilitating the pirating of intellectual property and seed monopolies through intellectual property laws and seed regulations.

    Monopoly capitalism is kind of Gates’s “thing”. There is a clear through-line of monopoly control extending from his war against open source to his behind-the-scenes battle to keep the COVID-19 vaccine distribution under the command of corporations.

    Gates has been tacitly and explicitly defending the legitimacy of knowledge monopolies since his first Gerald Ford–era missives against open-source software hobbyists. He was on the side of these monopolies during the miserable depths of the 1990s African AIDS crisis. He’s still there today, defending the status quo and running effective interference for those profiting by the billions from their control of Covid-19 vaccines.

    The depredations of Gates described so far are merely the facts. The conspiracy comes when we consider these three things — control of farmland, seeds, and vaccine distribution — altogether against the backdrop of looming climate catastrophe, pandemics, and world hunger. All three exist in a close relationship with one another, and stem from the same rotten core of capitalism and white supremacy.

    The Pyramid of Capitalism System by “Nedeljkovich, Brashich, & Kuharich” (1911)

    Climate change drives ecosystems change and the displacement of various animal species, which in turn increases potential contacts between these animals and humans, and the opportunity for zoonotic transfer. The destruction of the natural world through extraction, including arable farmland, and the increasing trend of privatization contributes both to global warming and hunger. People driven off of their farms — by climate change, by land theft, by “market forces” and “trade agreements” which privilege the movement of capital — migrate to survive, and end up being used as fodder in the culture wars. There are more connections still.

    Gates’s public persona, the one that publishes condescending books about how to stop climate change, and wastes no opportunity to discuss his plans to “give away” his money, hides a bad actor whose cynicism and arrogance informs any number of nefarious activities. Why would Bill Gates hide the fact that he is buying up wide swaths of farmland? What follows is conjecture, but I believe it proceeds from a rational observation of the facts at hand.

    Gates understands that his “wealth” is fictional, a wager placed by our economic system that he can and will continue to generate value. It consists of numbers on a network of computers, and only a relatively small percentage translates to anything material. Through this lens, his magnanimous decision to “give away” his wealth appears rather vacuous.

    Given that he has been speaking publicly about climate change for years, Gates clearly understands the threat it presents, not just to people and the planet, but to the fragile economic conditions that sustain the illusion of his wealth. In a world beset by extreme weather, mass migrations, famine, war, and pandemics — all leading to widespread death in a real four-horseman scenario, the bets placed on Gates, Bezos, Musk and their ilk, will amount to scratch. What might be the sources of wealth — real, material wealth — in an apocalyptic world? Seeds to grow food. Arable farmland in which to plant them. And control over the technology to stave off rampaging viruses.

    Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse by Viktor Vasnetsov

    That Gates is positioning himself and others in his class to maintain monopoly control over these vital resources would appear to be a genuine full-blown conspiracy. Even as he writes books laying out the “solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need”, his cynicism prevents him from actually believing any of it. Not only does he have no faith in people to muster the collective will to prevent climate catastrophe, he has neither faith in corporations to abandon their centuries-long commitment to extraction and exploitation, nor in his own ability to “innovate” a way out. In light of this, he would seem to be preparing for inevitable disaster, and in his arrogance, would situate himself as an arbiter of life and death.

    Unlike the delusional plutocrats who believe they can wait out the catastrophe in underground bunkers with finite supplies of food, or the whimsical ones who dream of viable colonies on Mars, Gates is a shrewd pragmatist. It is my sense that while he is not the smartest man, he is smart enough to know his own limitations. And like most wealthy men, he has learned how to capitalize on the talents and labor of others. It is likely the council of these others that gives structure to his conspiracy. And it is these others who have also helped construct around him an illusion of ingenuity, coated in a patina of good will. The entire project is a rather fragile deception, which crumbles beneath any serious scrutiny.

    And that is the end to which I write this post. To throw another stone from outside the glass house. To get a few more people to peer behind the curtain and see the wizard for what he truly is: a self-righteous fraud who pantomimes nobility while actively restraining our collective ability to find a way through crisis, or to build collective resilience in the dangerous new world he helped create.

    *UPDATE 4/28/2021* Shortly after I wrote this piece, calling for more attention to Gates’ machinations, he gave an interview to Sky News in which he doubled-down on his monopolistic position toward COVID vaccine distribution. That interview, in turn, solicited a ton of negative media coverage. It feels almost serendipitous. While I hope this inspires more scrutiny and a few more cracks in his facade, memories are short, the news cycle turns at light speed, and there is no shortage of mainstream media outlets willing to sacrifice their integrity to fend off any enemies at the Gates.

  • From COVID to Climate Change: Herd Immunity vs. Institutional Distrust

    From COVID to Climate Change: Herd Immunity vs. Institutional Distrust

    There is no shortage of comparisons between the dual crises of COVID-19 and climate change. Many people see COVID, and the patchwork and highly inconsistent global response to it as analogous to and also predictive of how we might handle the climate crisis. Some trace their analysis, rightly, to the origin of both crises: the ravages of capitalism — the 500 year problem — which has caused systematic and persistent destruction for both people and planet. While I do not have much to contribute to the conversation by way of expertise or sophisticated analysis, recent experiences have brought to mind an interesting analogy, which may at least offer perspective on mustering the mass mobilization we know is necessary to stall, if not prevent climate catastrophe.

    As the COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed at an increasing rate, there remains a significant portion of the population who are agnostic, or worse, completely refuse to be vaccinated. Putting aside the absurdity of vaccination being a political wedge issue, much like the challenge of getting people to wear masks, there is a fundamental misunderstanding among many people about the role they play in public health — that is to say, the health of other people. If you — anyone — choose not to wear a mask or to get a vaccine, because you do not feel you are at risk for COVID, you miss the point that you may in turn be a carrier for the virus and pass it onto someone who is higher risk, maybe even someone in your own family. We’ll never know how many of the 500+ thousand people who died were infected by those closest to them, but for anyone who has lost someone to the disease, it should inspire some reflection about how our own actions or inaction render us complicit in the spread.

    The hope now seems to be that if we can vaccinate a significant portion of the population, that everyone will be protected through “herd immunity“, the idea being that all the vaccinated people effectively form a barrier that prevents the virus from spreading so wildly. This only works, however, if a high percentage of the population is vaccinated. The threshold varies by pathogen, and we do not have enough data on COVID yet, but it stands to reason that the vast majority of people will need to be vaccinated.

    Diagram of Herd Immunity

    Diagram of “herd immunity” shows how high percentage of vaccinated people insulate unvaccinated people against the virus

    Even in that situation, people will still catch it, and some of these will die, but the global crisis will become manageable. There is a question of how much of a loss of life is considered within the parameters of a “managed” crisis, but that’s a topic for another day.

    Just as vaccination has a society wide impact on health, so will the systems-change work we need to do in order to address climate change. And just like there are people who “do not believe” in COVID, or who refuse to be vaccinated, there are and will continue to be people who deny the realities of climate, and who refuse to make any changes to our social and economic systems in order to prevent its worst impacts. Even as evidence points to the climate crisis already being underway, as with the uncharacteristic snowstorms across the country, urban heat islands in cities, or the tornadoes that somehow got lost in Georgia on their way to Oklahoma.

    The vaccine refusers and climate deniers — and by these I mean the regular citizens, not the ultrawealthy with a financial stake in denial — have one crucial thing in common. While both may be susceptible to conspiracy theory, or lack adequate education on either subject, or have been encapsulated by filter bubbles generated by Youtube or Facebook algorithms, none of these are the most important. The critical commonality instead is a deep — and justifiable — distrust of institutions.

    Just as there are people unable or unwilling to get vaccinated, they may also be skeptical of systems change efforts around climate, or have some other barrier to engagement. This resistance is particularly powerful for people whose immediate needs are so urgent that adopting a systems lens, or looking ahead five or ten years is outside their capacity, or beyond the vanishing point.

    It is important to note here that while some people in the United States are choosing not to get the COVID vaccine when it’s available, there are many countries around the world which simply do not have access to it. This, of course, is analogous to the reality of the U.S being as the second highest volume carbon emitter, at the same time as too many of its citizens choose to ignore the global impact, which will fall disproportionately on countries contributing much less to the problem.

    Also important is the fact that the overwhelming bulk of the responsibility for carbon emissions and other forms of environmental degradation lies with industry. In spite of their attempts — echoing conservative talking points for the past half a century — to convince the general public that it’s an issue of “personal responsibility”. That the environmental costs of production — particularly waste and pollution — are externalized to vulnerable communities within the United States, is a microcosm for how the United States, in turn, exports that same waste to the two-thirds world.

    So I am not writing this to join the chorus of people excoriating the vaccine avoiders and climate deniers. Because, in truth, I feel the blame lies with the institutions — governments and corporations mostly — which have betrayed the public trust, and grievously failed in any stated commitment to public health or well-being. Instead I want to make the case that as we attempt the greatest mobilization in human history to address the climate crisis, we — the big, global we — need to protect everyone, even the deniers, and more importantly, those who for whatever reason remain skeptical of our efforts, or lack the means or capacity to participate.

    Whatever technologies, models, and organizational structures we develop, to orient ourselves toward social and economic justice, we must also make space for the unwilling and the unable to be independent, self-determined, and safe. This means insulating them against the violent death throes of our system of capitalism, white supremacy, and imperialism, as we replace it with something better. Many things better. Institutions and new relationships at the local, regional, national, and global levels that cultivate enough trust and build enough capacity for everyone to participate equitably. This could function much like “herd immunity”, while we do the more difficult work of education and rebuilding trust.

    Maybe eventually we can get to a point where we are all willing — and able — to do our part, for each other, for all life, and for the planet we share.