By Mark Roberts

Editor’s Note: Today The Raven is republishing a critically important article from Mark Roberts’s new substack, 4Hunger.org. I recently discovered Mark’s site. It covers global heating’s disruptions of global agriculture in a comprehensive fashion that I have not seen elsewhere. This article sets an important framework, detailing precisely how heat damages food production and storage. The impacts are more serious than most of us realize. I learned a lot from this piece. It is a long read, and well worth the time. My read on the climate crisis is that the food scarcity will be its deadliest impact on human populations in coming decades. It is already showing up at the grocery checkout line, and contributing to food insecurity in rich and poor countries alike. These situations will intensify in coming months as an El Niño far stronger than any in recorded history disrupts food production around the world. After you’re done with this, I urge you to read Mark’s stunning survey of those impacts linked in the opening paragraph. And by all means subscribe to his substack, paid if you can.

The Crop Hazard that Skips the Forecast

The last time this publication described a climate driver reshaping the world’s food supply, the story was measured in months. In Scorched Harvest, we wrote about an El Niño in the tropical Pacific on what we called a twelve-month fuse: a slow, hemisphere-spanning reorganization of where rain falls, its worst harvest failures a year out. Extreme heat is the opposite kind of threat. It gives no fuse, no warning at all.

2024 was the hottest year in the instrumental record, the first full calendar year more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial baseline, and the capstone of the hottest ten-year stretch ever measured in the history of humankind.¹ 2025 came in second or third (depending on how temperatures around the world are measured), cooler than 2024 only in the sense that one burning furnace runs slightly cooler than another. The rolling three-year average has now crossed 1.5°C for the first time, and the heat waves that swept Europe, Asia, and North America were, by the reckoning of the scientists who study them, the deadliest weather events of the year and, in several cases, roughly ten times more likely than they would have been only a decade ago.² A single European summer put land temperatures past 46°C on the Iberian Peninsula and is estimated to have killed on the order of sixteen thousand people.³

The temptation will be to file this under weather. File it instead under food, and under the speed at which that whole crops can now be lost.

Drought creeps. Floods arrive and recede. An El Niño telegraphs its intentions half a year in advance. Heat is the driver that collapses the warning window to nothing, and just as importantly, it does its damage not at one stage of food production but at every stage at once: in germination, in flowering, in the field as it grows, in the barn, in the soil, in the river, and, on a lag of a single growing season, in prices of the food on your grocer’s shelf.

“A drought you can see coming for months. A heat wave you can see coming only for days. By the time you can feel it, the pollen is already dead, the milk has already stopped, and the forecast of food production for the season has already dropped precipitously.”

The Season That Fails Before It Begins

Every impact to grains that follows, begins with a seed. Heat can reach the crop before the crop even exists. A seed is a living thing running on a slow clock, and the warmth of the new season winds that clock forward toward its birth and growth. The relationship is regular enough that seed scientists have reduced it to a “rule of thumb” nearly a lifetime ago: Within ordinary limits, a seed’s viable life is cut roughly in half for every one per cent rise in its moisture content and then halved for every ten degrees Fahrenheit of storage heat above normal.⁴ The seed held over for next season’s planting does not wait patiently in a warm storeroom. When exposed to high heat before it is planted, the seed ages in fast-forward, its reserves burning down through accelerated respiration and the oxidation of its own oils, until, when it finally goes into the ground, there may be too little of it left for it to wake. It is the same ten-degree arithmetic that will later govern the grain in the storehouse (Figure 5): heat halves the usable life of the seed at the start of the season and then dictates how long grains can be stored at the end of the harvest.

“A seed kept too warm is a seed already spending itself and reducing its viability. By planting time, if too much of it has already been used up a seed may not be able to bring forth a live plant.”

If seeds have been exposed to too much moisture or too high a temperature, the loss shows in the field as thin growth and patchy gaps that a farmer must either replant, at cost and delay, or simply accept as a smaller crop. This loss occurs due to excessive heat even before the first leaf has unrolled. The seed’s ordeal is not confined to the storage bin. Too much heat during the weeks that a seed ripens in the Fall on the mother plant, can leave it weak and short-lived even before it is ever gathered as seed. Drying the seeds after they are harvested at too high a temperature does further, invisible harm. The next risk is that if there is too much heat in the Spring at the time of germination, germination itself can falter in soil that is too hot or too dry, precisely the ground conditions that a heat wave creates.⁵

For a commercial grower, heat impact to seed production through germination is merely a cost and an aggravation, absorbed in part by paying a higher price for a certified seed bought fresh each year. For the many millions of smallholders who save their own seeds and keep them in whatever warmth the season provides, with no cold room and no dehumidifier, the seeds are at risk. The hotter the year, the less of their saved seeds survive to plant the next season. This means that a punishing season leads to a smaller harvest and also reduces the viability of the very seed needed to be used to begin the recovery the next year. Heat, in other words, does not wait for a crop to grow before it begins subtracting from it. It is already at work in the seed bag, and the season can be diminished before the seeds are ever sown.

Figure 1. Warm storage runs the seed’s clock down. Germination remaining after prolonged storage falls sharply as storage temperature rises, so seed held over in a hot storage container loses much of its viability before it is ever planted. The same ~10°F rule that governs the grain in the bin (Figure 5) applies to how many seeds will be viable. The curve is illustrative, anchored to reported rice-storage trials.

Every Agricultural Crop Has a Fertilization Number at Risk in a Heat Dome

Start with the grains, because the grains are the least forgiving part of our food system. Every staple cereal has a temperature above which its reproduction simply fails, and those numbers are lower, and closer to being exceeded, than most people who eat the grain in a bowl of cereal, in bread, in pasta, in a rice bowl or on a cob of corn will ever guess. We truly were in a “Goldilocks” climate before we started burning fossil fuels and emitting CO₂ into the atmosphere.

For the three crops that feed most of humanity, agronomists have measured the critical thresholds for seed set at flowering with unsettling precision: roughly 37.2°C for rice, 37.9°C for maize and just 27.3°C for wheat.⁶ When agronomists talk about “seed set at flowering,” they are specifically looking at the critical pollination window when the crop blooms. During this short phase, if temperature thresholds are exceeded, the extreme heat damages the flower’s delicate reproductive organs rendering pollen sterile or preventing fertilization.

Read the wheat number in that figure again. Wheat, the crop the temperate world treats as its dependable staple, begins to lose fertility at a temperature that a spring afternoon now routinely surpasses in Kansas, Punjab, or the Australian wheat belt. Rice yields begin sliding once the season sits above about 33°C.⁶

What happens to crop production above those set temperatures is not a gentle taper. Flowering is the crop’s single most heat-sensitive hours or days, and heat sabotages fertilization mechanically: it dries and closes the flower, it kills or sterilizes the pollen, it arrests the pollen tube before it can reach the ovule. In maize, the most heat-vulnerable of the three, only a few hot days landing precisely when pollen is going down the silk to the kernels can stall pollen-tube growth and abort kernels wholesale, so that an ear which looked healthy in July fills only halfway by September.⁷ Almost everyone has peeled the husks off an ear of corn only to find many kernels have not filled out. The cruelty of it is the timing: a crop can be perfectly watered, perfectly fertilized, and still be rendered barren by a two-day heat spike that happens to coincide with the wrong week of the life of the wheat, rice or corn plant. The grain is not lost to scarcity of anything. It is solely lost to a thermometer reading above its critical threshold.

Figure 2. Every crop has a number. The air temperature at which seed set fails during flowering (27.3°C for wheat, 37.2°C for rice, 37.9°C for maize) set against the 40°C afternoons a modern heat wave now clears routinely. Solid bars mark viable temperature; hatched zones, sterility. Thresholds from the reproductive-stage heat-tolerance literature.

Interfering with reproduction is not the only way heat causes dramatic crop loss. The heat wave does not need to come during the fertilization period to steal the vitality of the grains. Heat also cuts into crop yield in three slower ways that are just as devastating and just as predictable.

1) The first is haste. Grain fills the corn, rice and wheat kernels during a fixed window between flowering and maturity, and a plant that is exposed to high temperatures that speeds up its growth processes is a plant that matures too fast: high temperatures accelerate development, shorten that grain-fill window, and rush the crop to a premature, lightweight maturity. Exposed to excess heat, the plant checks every growth hallmark on the calendar but still delivers less, because it spent fewer days pouring starch into each kernel. A field that looks like it ripened early did not ripen. It surrendered.

2) The second is thirst, not the crops being thirsty, but the atmosphere and soil’s thirst. Every degree of additional heat widens the vapor-pressure deficit, the gap between how much moisture the air can hold and how much it actually does hold, and that gap is the engine that pulls water out of soil and the plants’ leaves. This is why a heat wave can hollow out a harvest even where the rain gauge reads normal. The rain fell; but the heat simply took back the rain before the roots could use it, evaporating soil moisture and forcing the plant to close its pores and stop growing to keep from desiccating. Rainfall near average is no defense against an atmosphere that is poised to evaporate soil moisture faster than the rain can fall.

3) The third is the water demand that no one can create out of thin air. Extreme heat drives irrigation demand to its annual peak at the exact moment water is already being drawn down from the reservoirs, aquifers, rivers, and snowpack that irrigation depends on. Demand spikes hit as supply falls, and the two curves cross at the worst possible time which causes the farmer with a well or a pump to discover that due to the excess heat, the season now asks for more water than the snowfall, landscape and aquifer have to give.

The preview to the damage extreme heat can cause is already on the record. Europe’s farm sector has been losing an estimated €28 billion a year to extreme weather, only a fraction of it insured, and the summer of 2025 alone extreme heat reportedly damaged a large share of France’s corn crop, took roughly half of some regions’ carrots, and killed poultry by the flock.^{8 9}

The record has a human face. In Punjab, Gurjinder Singh watched the March heat of 2022 rush his wheat to a premature, hollow ripeness; his land, which normally gives 23 to 25 quintals an acre, yielded 14 to 15, what he called “a substantial 40 percent loss.”¹⁰

The Flash Droughts That Destroy a Crop in a Fortnight

There is now a name for the fast version of what the last section described, and it belongs almost entirely to the vocabulary of this century. Scientists call it a “flash drought.” This is something different from the slow, seasonal deficit that creeps across a landscape over years. A flash drought is a drought that ignites and matures in the space of a few weeks, when a run of extreme heat, wind, and cloudless sun drives the atmosphere’s thirst so high that it pulls moisture from the soil faster than normal rain can replace it. The term only was coined in 2002, and for a decade it sat as a specialist’s curiosity; monitoring it now means watching not the rain gauge but the rate at which the air is drying, a jump of half again in evaporative demand over two weeks is enough to declare one.¹¹

The fast droughts appear to be winning and being the prominent kind of drought. The first global study to settle the question, published in Science in 2023, found that over the past sixty-four years droughts have begun to intensify measurably faster across nearly three-quarters of the world’s land regions, with a clear statistical shift from the slow-onset kind of drought toward the flash kind, a transition the authors trace directly to human-caused warming, through the very amplification of evaporation and rainfall deficits that a hotter atmosphere produces. The slowest of the old climate disasters is learning to sprint. The acceleration is sharpest over Europe, northern and eastern Asia, the Sahel, and the western coast of South America, and it is projected to spread across most of the planet’s land if warming continues.¹² The old kind of drought is still happening as well.

“A slow drought is a thing you watch approach for a season. A flash drought is a thing you discover has already happened in a matter of weeks.”

The bill for a drought that moves this fast is steep, precisely because speed removes the time in which anyone might have adapted. The 2012 event that first seized the country’s attention carved more than thirty billion dollars from the American economy in a single summer; a 2017 flash drought across the Dakotas and Montana took an estimated $2.6 billion from agriculture alone, and the frequency of flash droughts is set to climb. On the high-emissions path, the annual risk of flash drought on North American cropland is projected to rise from roughly a third today to about half by the end of the century, and the increases are projected to be higher still in Europe.¹³

These are not projections waiting on the future; the events are already arriving in series. In June 2023 a flash drought spread across the U.S. Midwest until it covered close to two-thirds of the nation’s corn, catching the crop just as it entered pollination; by that October the Mississippi River had fallen to record-low stages, halting barge traffic and drawing saltwater upstream into the drinking water of southern Louisiana. That same autumn a second flash drought seized the Southeast, wilting newly planted wheat, rye, and hay and forcing so many ranchers onto bought feed that the USDA paid its largest livestock-forage disaster relief on record, concentrated in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama. The following summer heat settled over the mid-Atlantic, the rain stopped, and corn from the Carolinas to Pennsylvania shriveled in a matter of weeks.¹⁴

Each of these droughts matured too quickly for the farmers to do anything to prepare, which is the whole of the danger. The speed and regional impacts of these droughts are the reason flash droughts belong at the center of this account rather than its margins. It is heat’s signature written into the water cycle itself: the same argument as every section before it, arriving from a different direction. The hazard that once granted a season’s warning now grants only a fortnight to prepare.

Behind the numbers are the people who watched it happen. Greg Lee, a North Dakota farmer who had worked the same ground for forty years, lived through that 2017 Northern Plains flash drought; asked what it did to his fields, he put it in one flat sentence: “The crops just didn’t come out of the ground.”¹⁵

Figure 3. The drought that moves at heat-speed. A conventional drought lowers soil moisture to drought levels over a season or more; a flash drought, driven by extreme heat and evaporative demand, can do it in two to four weeks, collapsing the window in which a farmer might respond. The curves are a schematic of the two onset regimes; one gives no chance of survival.

Animals Cannot Sweat Off Extreme Heat When It Comes

Then there is what happens in the barn, where heat is a matter of animals in distress.

A dairy cow is a walking furnace: a high-producing animal generates enormous metabolic heat, and unlike a human, a cow sweats at only about a tenth the rate, far too little to shed the heat it makes. Cows begin to suffer heat stress at temperatures that feel merely warm to the people milking them. The cows that produce the greatest amount of milk can begin to experience reduced milk production if temperatures in the barn reach even the mid-60s Fahrenheit (17-19 degrees Celsius). As the combined heat-and-humidity load climbs, cows will eat less, stand more, and give less milk. Mild heat stress alone can cut milk by a couple of pounds per cow per day; a hard summer with weeks of high heat can pull daily yields down by double digits.^{16 17} If the heat-humidity index in the barn is raised past the high 80s Fahrenheit for even several hours, with no cool night for the cows to recover in, vulnerable milking cows do not merely produce less, they die, in the barn, in the feedlot and in the pasture, too.¹⁸

The losses are not hypothetical and not small. Heat stress already costs U.S. livestock producers on the order of $2.9 billion a year in today’s dollars, the majority of the losses borne by the dairy industry.¹⁷ A heat wave, in other words, does not wait for the harvest to translate itself into less food, it takes the milk that afternoon and it takes the beef of the cow later that week if the high temperatures hold. The heat wave that enveloped northern India in 2022 reportedly cut milk output by as much as 15 percent at the same time it reduced wheat yields by anywhere from a tenth to a third across several Indian states. A single excess heat event depletes the food system at both ends at once.⁸The same arithmetic runs in American barns. In Fremont, Wisconsin, Jacob Hoewisch, who milks a fifth-generation herd, loses three to ten pounds of milk from each cow on the hottest days, and watches the heat reach past the milk to the animal itself: a cow whose “body overheated for too long of a period”, he says, can lose the calf she is carrying.¹⁹

Figure 4. The animals cannot sweat it off. Milk yield falls as the temperature - humidity index climbs, well before the barn feels dangerous to the people in it, and above roughly THI 84, with no cool night to recover in, vulnerable cattle begin to die. The curve is illustrative of the measured response; anchor values are drawn from dairy-science field studies.

The barn is not only a dairy barn. Birds have no sweat glands at all; they shed heat only by panting, and a fast-growing broiler runs so hot inside that a single bad afternoon can kill it. Chickens, turkeys, and ducks are all exposed, and turkeys, the largest of the three, are among the most heat-fragile birds on any farm; ducks cope only where they can reach the water, they use to cool themselves. When a heat wave swept France in the summer of 2026, poultry sheds turned into ovens and birds died by the million, with turkeys taking the heaviest toll. It was not the first time. A comparable heat wave in 2003 killed an estimated four to five million French chickens and turkeys, about two percent of the national flock.²⁰ Sheep and goats aren’t much better off, because they cool by panting instead of sweating, and heat and drought wipe out both their grazing pastures and the lamb and kid crop that herding families in the Global South live on. Because chicken is now the most-eaten meat on Earth, a bird engineered to fatten fast and left without any way to sweat sits close to the center of the food supply, not at its edge.

The Harvest Lost After the Harvest

Every section so far has followed heat into the field and the barn and then stopped at the moment of harvest, as though a crop once cut was a crop secured. It is not. Heat keeps working on food after it leaves the ground, and the losses it inflicts in the bin, the barn, and the cold chain are large, accelerating, and almost entirely absent from the public conversation about climate and hunger.

Begin in the grain bin, where a harvest is supposed to be safe. Stored grain is not inert; it breathes, and warm, damp grain breathes hard, generating its own heat and moisture until pockets of it form “hot spots” that bloom with mold, draw insects, and cake into spoiled, unsellable crust. The governing rule is unforgiving: for every roughly ten degrees Fahrenheit that grain temperature rises, the safe storage time is cut about in half.²¹ It is the very rule that governs the viability of the seed at the other end of the season, too (Figure 1). Insects that lie dormant in cool grain breed freely between 70 and 90°F, precisely the range a warming climate now delivers for much of the year. The mold that follows does not merely reduce weight; it strips nutritional value and, worse, can leave behind mycotoxins, and mycotoxins, once formed, are heat-stable, surviving the milling and cooking that kill the fungus that made them.²¹

The most dangerous of those toxins is now migrating with the heat. Aflatoxin, the most acutely toxic and most tightly regulated of the mycotoxins, and a known liver carcinogen, is made by a fungus that flourishes on heat- and drought-stressed crops in the field and on warm, humid grain in storage. For most of history it was a problem of the tropics and the American South. That is changing: a landmark 2016 study projected that just two degrees of warming, a level now expected between roughly 2030 and 2050 rather than in some distant future, would make aflatoxin a genuine food-safety problem in European maize, driving its contamination index up more than ninety per cent and pushing its range northward into countries that had never had to reckon with it.²² The projection is now being met by observation. Aflatoxin-producing fungi, once rare in temperate Europe, are established across the south and center of the European continent; and a 2026 analysis of more than seventeen thousand samples in China found contamination measurably higher than a decade earlier, with temperature alone explaining nearly half of the increase.²²

The barn tells the same story in a different crop. Hay baled even slightly too wet when baled or stored is a constant hazard when heat and humidity compress the drying window, the hay begins within days to mold and ferment, its sugars and proteins are consumed by microbes and locked, through the browning of the Maillard reaction, into forms livestock cannot digest. A bale of hay can shed much of its feed value while still smelling sweet. Push the internal temperature past about 170°F, as dense wet bales can, and the same microbial heat that spoils the forage causes spontaneous combustion and sets the barn on fire.²³ Rice, the staple of half the planet, most of it warehoused in the hottest, most humid corners of the world, deteriorates faster the warmer it is held, turning rancid, yellowing, shedding milling yield and cooking quality, and, above about sixteen per cent moisture, growing the very molds that make aflatoxin.²⁴

Then there is everything that must stay cold. Roughly a third of all the food the world produces is already lost or wasted, and about a seventh of it has gone bad before it ever reaches a retailer and much of that for want of refrigeration that a hotter climate makes necessary.²⁵ Meat, dairy, fish, and fresh produce spoil in hours, not weeks, when a heat wave overwhelms a cold chain, or when the refrigeration or the power that runs it fails for any reason. Without refrigeration, warmth speeds the bacteria that turn spoiled food dangerous and is a driver behind hundreds of thousands of deaths from foodborne illness each year.

The newest evidence closes the loop, identifying the rest of the crop losses caused by climate-driven heat. A 2026 study found that heat stress raises the share of the crop lost at the moment of harvest itself, a direct climate channel into food loss that had simply gone unmeasured.²⁵ It was the first study to show, with data, that high temperatures sharply increase food loss during harvest, finding that heat-induced losses are three to four times greater in manual than in mechanical harvesting. This means smallholder farms across the Global South are at greatest risk of crop spoilage during a hot harvest.

None of this shows up in a yield statistic. A crop can be grown, survive the flowering heat and the flash drought and the exhausted river, be cut and counted as a good harvest and still be halved while it is being transported to market and sold to people who need food, by the same warmth that menaced the crop in the field. It is the last stage heat attacks, and the most invisible, and it arrives at the same counter, in the same currency, as all the rest of the attacks heat mounts on food production around the world.

Figure 5. Every ten degrees halves the storage time. Grain in storage is not inert; it self-heats, and the time it can be held safely falls by roughly half for each ~10°F rise in grain temperature, so a hot summer bin turns a season’s reserve toward spoilage far faster than a cool one; this is the same clock that governs seed viability at planting (Figure 1). The curve is a schematic of that rule of thumb.

Why Heat is Different Than Other Climate Shocks

Put the pieces together and the argument writes itself. Heat is not one hazard on a list of climate hazards. It is the master variable, the climate driver that attacks the field, the soil, the water, and the animals over wide areas simultaneously, and does it faster than any warning system was built to detect and sound the alarm.

Consider what separates heat from every other climate shock this 4Hunger.org tracks. The fertilizer crisis we documented in Fertilizer Famine moves on a one-season lag. The American megadrought in Parched Ground took many years to form. The El Niño in Scorched Harvest announces itself half a year ahead with the worst impacts predicted a year in advance. Every one of those is a slow emergency you can, in principle, prepare for.

Heat is the fastest climate impact. The pollen in wheat, corn and rice can die within hours if heat hits during the days when the flower is open. The production of milk drops in cows the same week the barn overheats. The soil gives up its moisture across a single scorching fortnight. There is no season of grace between the forecast of heat domes and the loss, because for a crop at flowering, or at other stages of growth, the forecast of extreme heat can become an unstoppable loss.

That speed is precisely why heat has become the biggest climate driver of agricultural loss right now. In a food system already stripped of its buffers, with reserves drawn down, fertilizer in short supply, and with the American food production shock absorber running on empty, the hazard that can erase a harvest in an afternoon is the one the world is least equipped to catch. Heat is the climate impact that is arriving most often, on a planet that has now made 40°C afternoons a routine feature of the growing season on four continents.

“Every other threat to the harvest gives you time to act. Heat only gives you a chance if you have already acted. That is the whole of the difference, and it is the difference between a hungry year prevented and a hungry year explained only afterward.”

Figure 6. One shock, every stage at once. Unlike a drought or an El Niño, extreme heat strikes crops, soil, water, and livestock simultaneously and within days and then travels downstream to the harvest that season, to prices in the months after, and, on a lag of roughly a year, to hunger.

What It Means at the Checkout Line

No American eater should mistake a cool morning for immunity from the consequences of a heat wave. The price of food in an American grocery store is set in a global market, and when wheat bakes in Australia, when heat sterilizes rice across Asia, when Europe’s corn and dairy come in short, U.S. commodity prices rise regardless of the weather in Kansas. This is not because American grain is scarce, but because American grain sells into world prices. The damage from a heat dome does not travel at the speed of a headline; it moves at the speed of a growing season, and it moves, reliably and predictably, to the consumer’s receipt everywhere in the world.

The people that the price increases from heat damage moves toward, are the ones least able to pay. Roughly one in four American adults now lives in a food-insecure household, with the lowest-income fifth of households spending a third of their income on food.²⁶ Congress has made cuts to the very safety net that stands between price volatility and hunger for tens of millions of Americans. Every percentage point of heat-driven food inflation that lands in 2027 will land on families who did little to warm the planet and can least afford the rising prices.

Gurjinder Singh, the Punjab wheat farmer, watching his crop shrivel in a March that arrived with temperatures not normally seen until May; Jacob Hoewisch, the Wisconsin dairyman, running fans on electricity he cannot afford over cows that have all but stopped giving milk; the shopper in Ohio staring at the price of ground beef at $6.82 a pound, none of them chose this. But all of them are downstream of the same warming air that is traveling around the world. All of them will pay for the excess heat in the currency the poor always pay in: skipped meals, skipped medicine, sold assets, mounting debt; the quiet emergency that hunger always causes.

This is not a forecast. As of the summer of this writing, excess heat has already carved into the 2026 harvest across the Northern Hemisphere, Western and Central Europe’s maize, the United States’ spring wheat and barley, China’s corn and rice, while a developing El Niño pushes heat and drought into the crops of South and Southeast Asia and Australia (Figure 7).²⁷ The losses are still regional rather than systemic, cushioned by a record 2025 harvest and full reserves; but they are exactly the kind that travel, one growing season later, to the prices on the supermarket shelf.

Figure 7. Where excess heat is hitting crops in 2026. Countries shaded where heat-driven crop stress was reported through early August: confirmed losses (red) across Western and Central Europe, the United States, and China; emerging El Niño heat-and-dry stress (orange) across South and Southeast Asia and Australia. Country-level and indicative, not sub-national.

How Can the Impacts of Extreme Heat Be Mediated?

Heat’s speed is its cruelest trait, but it is also, perversely, its weakness: because heat maps onto the calendar of the crops it threatens, we know in advance which weeks of which growing seasons carry the most risk. What is required is not incremental adjustment. It is deliberate action on four fronts, taken before the season that fails, not after. This means taking action to protect the poor and working classes around the world at a time when all of the major food donors are cutting back both internationally and at home. This will make hundreds of millions of people suffer if it is not reversed.

First, fund heat adaptation and anticipatory relief before the harvest, not after it.Cash, drought- and heat-tolerant seed, and pre-positioned food released on forecast triggers rather than on famine declarations cost a fraction of late-stage emergency response and save lives that late response cannot. Those trigger systems already exist. However, they are being defunded at exactly the moment the heat is intensifying, and that reversal is a choice this budget cycle can still unmake.

Second, protect and expand SNAP and other domestic nutrition programs. The food-price wave from a hot growing season reaches American shelves the following year, stacked on inflation, missing fertilizer and impact of tariffs already in the pipeline. Cutting the primary safety net standing between people dealing with price volatility and hunger, in the same eighteen months that volatility is set to spike, is not fiscal discipline; it is a decision to hand the bill for a warming atmosphere to the households least able to pay it. It is a war on the poor and working classes.

Third, pass a 2026 Farm Bill built for heat volatility. American farmers will plant the crop the world will need facing record input costs and a climate that now delivers a season’s worth of damage in a single week. Crop insurance designed for gradual bad luck, and disaster programs that pay two years late, are not up to responding to a hazard that strikes in an afternoon. Build the farmers safety net for extreme heat explicitly, and build it to reward the diversified, heat-resilient farms most able to survive it - not only the monocrops which are most vulnerable to heat’s disasters.

Fourth, protect the people and the water that grow the food. The same heat that sterilizes the pollen makes the field lethal to the workers standing in it. Enforceable farmworker heat standards are food-security policy, not merely labor policy. The water that irrigation leans on hardest in a heat wave is the water heat is draining fastest, which makes serious investment in water storage, efficiency, and shared drought planning a frontline defense of America’s breadbasket and our harvests, not an afterthought. Rivers, lakes, dams and aquifers that are being used for agriculture have to be protected and their use sustainably divided so that they do not go dry and create humanitarian disasters.

The Emergency That Arrives in an Afternoon

The great climate disasters of the past announced themselves slowly enough that the world could at least pretend to be surprised. Heat has taken away that excuse. We know the thresholds now, crop by crop and degree by degree; we know which weeks of the calendar carry the greatest danger; we can watch the temperature climb toward the number that ends a season in real time, in open data, free to anyone who cares to look.

That knowledge is either a warning or an indictment, and which one it becomes will be decided by whether anyone acts on it. The heating air has delivered its message with a precision no disaster in history has matched. Whether the next hot summer becomes a harvest quietly protected or hunger and famines loudly regretted; belongs, as it always does, to those in power and to the pressure the rest of us are willing to put on them before the thermometer rises again, not after.

So put pressure on your elected officials now, while the window is still open.

Call your elected officials, state and federal, today, tomorrow and the days after that; and demand that the food safety net be restored, the Farm Bill be passed with measures to protect against the impacts of climate change for farmers and for the poor and working classes in America, and the domestic and international food aid budgets be built for the fastest-moving threat that the food system faces before the next heat wave writes another season’s hunger in a single afternoon, in your state, in this country, and across the world.

Endnotes

1. World Meteorological Organization / Copernicus Climate Change Service, confirmed via the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (2026): 2024 was the hottest year in the instrumental record, with global average temperatures more than 1.5°C above the 1850–1900 baseline, and 2015–2024 the hottest decade on record.

2. World Meteorological Organization, State of the Global Climate update (Nov. 2025): 2025 set to rank as the second- or third-warmest year on record, with ocean heat content exceeding record 2024 values. World Weather Attribution / reporting in CBS News and PBS NewsHour (Dec. 2025): the 2023–2025 three-year mean crossed 1.5°C for the first time; heat waves were assessed as 2025’s deadliest extreme-weather category, with several studied events roughly ten times more likely than a decade earlier owing to human-caused warming.

3. 2025 European heatwaves, summary record (peak 46.6°C at Mora, Portugal, June 29, 2025); attribution analyses cited therein estimate on the order of 16,500 heat-related deaths across the summer linked to climate change; Spain recorded its hottest summer on record.

4. Seed longevity follows “Harrington’s Rule” (J. F. Harrington, 1963/1972): within roughly 0–50°C and about 5–14% seed moisture, a seed’s storage life is approximately halved for every 1% increase in moisture content or every ~10°F (5.6°C) increase in storage temperature. The related “James’ Rule” holds that the storage temperature in °F plus the ambient relative humidity in per cent should remain below 100. Heat and moisture shorten viability by accelerating respiration, lipid oxidation, and membrane and DNA damage, and by enabling storage fungi. FAO seed-storage guidance and university seed-conditioning references.

5. High soil temperature and moisture stress at sowing reduce germination and seedling establishment; high temperatures during seed maturation on the plant, and excessive-heat mechanical drying after harvest, further reduce viability and vigor. Controlled-storage studies show rice germination falling from roughly 88–95% toward zero over several months at high storage temperature, versus little change under cool storage. Many of the world’s smallholder farmers rely on farmer-saved seed held without temperature or humidity control, heightening their exposure. Seed-physiology and storage-temperature literature; FAO/CGIAR seed-systems sources.

6. Critical high-temperature thresholds for seed set during flowering (rice 37.2°C ±0.2, wheat 27.3°C ±0.5, maize 37.9°C ±0.4), from the review From the floret to the canopy: High temperature tolerance during flowering (Plant Communications / ScienceDirect, 2023), which synthesizes the reproductive-stage heat sensitivity of the three leading cereals. Rice production declines have been documented above roughly 33°C.

7. On maize as the most heat-sensitive of the three cereals, and on heat-induced spikelet/silk closure, pollen-tube arrest, and kernel abortion during silking and early grain fill: Heat-stress-induced ROS in maize silks cause late pollen tube growth arrest and sterility (iScience, 2024); Male Sterility in Maize after Transient Heat Stress during the Tetrad Stage (Plant Physiology, 2019); Heat Stress After Pollination Reduces Kernel Number in Maize by Insufficient Assimilates (2021).

8. Regional impacts of extreme heat on agriculture: northern India’s 2022 heat wave was associated with milk-output declines of up to about 15% and state-level wheat-yield losses of roughly 9–34%, after which India restricted wheat exports in May 2022; estimates vary by state.

9. European Commission and insurance-sector estimates (2024–2025): extreme weather costs EU agriculture roughly €28 billion a year, about 6% of crop and livestock output, with only an estimated 20–30% of losses insured. Early tallies from the summer 2025 European heat pointed to substantial damage to French corn, to roughly half of some regions’ carrot production, and to mass poultry mortality.

10. Gurjinder Singh, a wheat farmer in Punjab, India, quoted in FairPlanet, “Saving India’s Wheat Yield from Rising Heatwaves” (August 2022): Singh reported his 2022 wheat output falling from about 23–25 quintals per acre to 14–15, roughly a 40% loss, after the heat wave that began in March. India’s March–April 2022 heat, its hottest March in 122 years, is estimated to have cut wheat yields 10–35% across the northern wheat bowl of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh.

11. The term flash drought was introduced by Svoboda and colleagues at the U.S. National Drought Mitigation Center in 2002 and later formalized by the American Meteorological Society as an unusually rapid-onset drought marked by a multi-week period of accelerated intensification culminating in sectoral impacts. Operational monitoring relies on evaporative-demand indices; one common threshold is a 50% or greater increase in atmospheric evaporative demand over two weeks, sustained thereafter. NOAA / National Integrated Drought Information System (drought.gov).

12. Xing Yuan et al., “A global transition to flash droughts under climate change,” Science 380 (2023): drought intensification has accelerated over subseasonal timescales, with a transition toward more flash droughts across roughly 74% of the IPCC SREX global regions over the past 64 years, attributed to anthropogenic climate change via amplified evapotranspiration and precipitation-deficit anomalies; the shift is fastest over Europe, northern and eastern Asia, the Sahel, and western South America, and is projected to expand across most land areas under higher-emissions scenarios.

13. Jordan I. Christian et al., “Global projections of flash drought show increased risk in a warming climate,” Communications Earth & Environment 4 (2023): annual flash-drought risk over cropland is projected to rise from about 32% (2015) toward 49% in North America and 53% in Europe by 2100 under the highest-emissions scenario. Loss figures: the 2012 U.S. flash drought exceeded $30 billion in economic losses (per reporting on Yuan et al. 2023); the 2017 northern Plains (Dakotas–Montana) flash drought caused an estimated $2.6 billion in U.S. agricultural losses (Dilling et al. 2017; Neelam et al., Geophysical Research Letters, 2024).

14. Event accounts from NOAA / NIDIS drought status updates and retrospectives (drought.gov): the June 2023 Midwest flash drought (dryness covering roughly 64% of U.S. corn production at the onset of pollination; record-low Mississippi River stages on 13–18 October 2023, with barge-load restrictions and saltwater intrusion in southern Louisiana); the 2023 Southeast fall flash drought (record Livestock Forage Disaster Program payouts, concentrated in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Alabama); and the June–July 2024 mid-Atlantic flash drought affecting corn from the Carolinas to Pennsylvania.

15. Greg Lee, a dryland farmer and rancher in Divide County, North Dakota, quoted in Meera Subramanian, “The Flash Drought Brought Misery, but Did It Change Minds on Climate Change?” Inside Climate News, July 17, 2018. The 2017 flash drought across the U.S. Northern Plains caused an estimated $2.6 billion in agricultural losses.

16. University of Minnesota Extension, Heat stress in dairy cattle: mild heat stress reduces milk output by roughly 2.5 lb per head per day, with larger losses as stress intensifies; high-producing cows can begin to experience heat stress at air temperatures as low as the mid-60s °F. Australian grazing-dairy study (Univ. of Melbourne robotic dairy, 2020) recorded a ~14% drop in daily milk production from low to high temperature-humidity index.

17. Washington State University Veterinary Medicine Extension (2025) and Frontiers in Veterinary Science (2023): U.S. livestock heat-stress losses estimated at up to ~$2.3 billion/year (2003), equivalent to roughly $2.9 billion in 2024 dollars, with dairy cattle accounting for roughly 63% of U.S. livestock heat-stress losses.

18. Journal of Dairy Science (2003) and heat-stress mortality literature: several hours of temperature-humidity index above ~84 with little or no nighttime recovery (THI falling below ~74) can cause death in vulnerable feedlot and dairy cattle; on-farm mortality rises measurably during multi-day heat waves (≥3 days at or above ~32°C).

19. Jacob Hoewisch, owner and operations manager of the fifth-generation Hoewisch Dairy Farm in Fremont, Wisconsin, in reporting by WLUK-Fox 11 (July 2026). Above roughly 70°F, cows can give 3–10 pounds less milk per day, a 5–15% drop, which for a 240-cow farm can mean losses of up to about $13,000 in a month; prolonged overheating can also cause a cow to lose a pregnancy.

20. Poultry and small ruminants: birds have no sweat glands and cool only by panting, which leaves them acutely vulnerable to heat (University of Minnesota and University of Tennessee Extension); turkeys are among the most heat-sensitive poultry because of their size. Reporting on the June and July 2026 European heat wave described French poultry deaths in the millions, with turkeys hardest hit, and France’s 2003 heat wave killed an estimated 4 to 5 million chickens and turkeys, about 2% of the national flock. St-Pierre et al. (2003) put U.S. poultry heat-stress losses at roughly $128 to $165 million a year. Chicken is now the world’s most-consumed meat by volume. On small ruminants, heat and drought reduce pasture and cut lambing and kidding in the pastoral systems on which many of the world’s poorest households depend.

21. On stored-grain deterioration: warm, moist grain respires and self-heats, forming hot spots that promote mold growth, insect infestation, dry-matter loss, reduced nutritional value, and loss of seed germination; as a rule of thumb, allowable storage time falls by roughly half for each ~10°F (5.5°C) rise in grain temperature, and storage insects are most active between about 70 and 90°F. Mycotoxins produced by storage fungi are chemically stable and are not reliably removed by milling or cooking. North Dakota State University Extension; Bayer Crop Science; reviews of stored-grain fungi and mycotoxins.

22. Aflatoxin (produced by Aspergillus flavus) is the most acutely toxic and most tightly regulated mycotoxin and a recognized liver carcinogen, favored by heat- and drought-stressed crops in the field and by warm, humid storage. Paola Battilani et al., “Aflatoxin B1 contamination in maize in Europe increases due to climate change,” Scientific Reports 6:24328 (2016): under a +2°C scenario (the most probable near-term case), the mean aflatoxin index for European maize rose about 92% and the high-risk zone shifted northward. Van der Fels-Klerx et al. (2016) and subsequent work document A. flavus becoming established in southern and central Europe; Yu et al. (2022) describe a comparable northward shift in the United States. A 2026 analysis of 17,263 peanut samples in China (2009–2022) found aflatoxin B1 contamination significantly higher than a decade earlier, with temperature explaining roughly 49% of the increase (npj Science of Food).

23. Hay baled above roughly 20% moisture supports rapid microbial growth that consumes sugars and proteins, degrades feed value (partly through the Maillard/browning reaction, which binds protein into indigestible forms), and generates internal heat; above about 170°F spontaneous combustion becomes a risk, with most fires occurring within roughly six weeks of baling. Mississippi State, South Dakota State, and Missouri Extension services.

24. High-temperature storage accelerates rice deterioration: rising fatty-acid value (rancidity) and lipid peroxidation, loss of palatability and head-rice yield, discoloration, and loss of germination and nutritional quality, with damage increasing at higher storage temperature and moisture content; above ~16% moisture, warm storage promotes Aspergillus and Fusarium growth and aflatoxin accumulation. Storage-temperature studies in the Journal of Stored Products Research, Journal of Food Processing and Preservation, and Cereal Chemistry.

25. Post-harvest and cold-chain losses: the FAO estimates that roughly one-third of food produced is lost or wasted, with about 14% lost between harvest and retail and on the order of 12% (≈526 million tonnes) attributable to insufficient refrigeration; inadequate cold chains contribute to foodborne illness, which the World Health Organization links to roughly 420,000–600,000 deaths a year. Rising temperatures and extreme heat increase cold-chain energy demand and failure risk and accelerate spoilage. Yin et al., “Heat stress increases food loss during harvest: empirical evidence from China,” Journal of Stored Products Research (2026), identifies heat strain at harvest as a direct, previously overlooked climate channel into food loss; FAO Food Loss and Waste data indicate an average cereal loss of about 5.2% at harvest.

26. Estimates of U.S. food insecurity differ substantially by survey instrument, and the divergence is itself part of the story. The Urban Institute’s Well-Being and Basic Needs Survey, a nationally representative internet panel, found 24.2% of adults 18 and older reporting household food insecurity in the previous twelve months as of December 2025, and 27.7% of adults 18 to 64 (Karpman, Waxman, Gupta, Gonzalez and Kennedy, “Food Insecurity Remained High in 2025, As Safety Net Cuts Loom,” Urban Institute, March 2026). The USDA’s Current Population Survey Food Security Supplement, the long-standing federal measure, put household food insecurity at 13.7% in 2024, some 47.9 million people (Rabbitt et al., ERR-358, December 2025); Feeding America’s Map the Meal Gap 2026, which models local rates from that same federal data, reports 14.4% of individuals. The Urban Institute attributes its higher figures to the absence of the CPS income screener, a six-item rather than eighteen-item scale, and survey mode, since respondents report food hardship more readily in self-administered internet surveys than to an interviewer. State-level survey work runs higher still: the Greater Boston Food Bank and Mass General Brigham found 40% of Massachusetts households food-insecure in 2025, up from 19% in 2019. USDA discontinued the federal series in September 2025, making 2024 the last official national baseline. Food spending share: USDA Economic Research Service, Food Prices and Spending, drawing on Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey data. In 2024, households in the lowest income quintile spent an average of $5,498 on food, 33.0% of before-tax income, against 12.2% for the middle quintile and roughly 8% for the highest. The share is volatile for poorer households, ranging between 28.8% and 42.6% over the past two and a half decades, because their incomes are less stable and grocery prices move.

27. Figure 7 and 2026 conditions. Western and Central Europe: a record late-June heat dome and repeated heatwaves cut the 2026 harvest, with COCERAL’s out-of-cycle forecast lowering EU-and-UK grain by 23.4 million tonnes and French maize near 9.4 million tonnes (its lowest in decades), and EU JRC MARS bulletin reductions for grain maize and sunflower. United States: USDA Agricultural Weather Highlights on record Northern Plains heat (about 105°F at Bismarck, North Dakota) and Plains drought (June–July 2026). China: reporting on the early-August 2026 heat wave across northern and eastern farming regions (Bloomberg, citing Vaisala). South and Southeast Asia and Australia: Reuters and ABARES on El Niño-driven heat and below-normal rainfall affecting India, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Australia. Country shading marks where heat-driven crop stress was reported, not sub-national extent; figures are as reported through early August 2026.

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9 minute read

Is humanity’s “invisible hand” reappearing?

In 1998 a monster El Niño was roiling the Pacific, skewing weather patterns all over the planet. The world had just experienced a string of record hot months. Then Vice President Al Gore was preparing for a press conference on the climate turbulence. An aide called Sierra Magazine Editor Paul Rauber to ask if he had any leads on the connection between intensifying El Niños and climate change.

“We have something in our latest issue,” Rauber replied.

“It’s on the top of my pile,” the aide chimed back.

The article was “The Invisible Hand,” subtitled, “As human activity warms the earth, El Niño grows more violent. Are we doing this to ourselves?” I was the author. In 1997, seeing a second super El Niño coming on after only 14 years, I dug into the question. I had been bringing climate change into my writing for nearly a decade, but this was my first deep dive into climate science.

I interviewed many climate scientists, including some of the absolute stars. Charles Keeling, who in 1958 led creation of the Mauna Loa monitoring station that is still the world’s leading CO2 measurement site (which the Trump Administration wants to shut down, for obvious reasons). Wallace Broecker, who identified the global interconnection of ocean currents and their capacity to cause abrupt climate change. In our interview, Broecker repeated the line he must have included in some version in every interview. “The Earth’s climate is like an angry beast, and we’re poking it with sticks.” Kevin Trenberth, chief scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (another institution being dismembered under Trump). Trenberth had found the repeat of two super El Niños so close together probable to happen only once every 2000 years.

While the question of whether increasing global heating was driving El Niños was unsettled, the scientists repeatedly called out a key issue. What happens when normal climate variability such as El Niño piles on top of global heating? How will it impact the chaos an El Niño normally causes – droughts, wildfires, drenching storms, coral bleaching, agricultural collapse? It looks like we’re going to get some fresh answers to the question.

The monster El Niño now brewing in the Pacific seems on course to be the most intense on record, and by a long shot. Hotter by far than recent super El Niños in 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16. Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist with Berkeley Earth, puts it in context. His comments are all the more striking because he has a reputation for being reserved in his conclusions, as he confirms in the first line of a recent post at his Climate Brink site.

“I’m generally pretty measured in how I discuss climate data. There has been only one time in recent years when I was truly shocked: when global temperatures came in for September 2023 at a full 0.5C warmer than any prior September on record. Once until today, that is. With the July runs now in from 667 ensemble members across 14 different seasonal forecast models, it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin.

“The multi-model median for the event’s peak . . . currently stands at 3.6C, roughly 0.8C hotter than the prior record of 2.75C set in 2015-16. For context, the gap between the strongest and the fifth strongest El Niño of the past 150 years is only about 0.5C. The models are forecasting something outside the envelope of anything we have ever observed.”

Hausfather reports other stunning facts. Ocean temperatures in the mid-Pacific are rising the fastest on record, and out of a cool La Niña condition. As of mid-July they were hotter than any time in a 45-year record of satellite measurements. “No El Niño has run this hot by July,” he says. 2026 was already on track to rank as one of the hottest years on record. These conditions have ramped up the probability 2026 will beat out 2024 as the hottest year from 13% at the beginning of July to 28% by mid-month. Because of El Niño, 2027 will almost certainly take the record with projections ranging around 1.7C, yet another year exceeding the Paris Climate Accords target of 1.5C maximum heating.

The planet is already in its 11^th year of record or near record global temperatures. This has supercharged the atmosphere with water vapor that feeds inundations and flooding. Every degree Celsius translates into 7% more moisture in the atmosphere. This El Niño explodes on a world already roiled by global heating. It can only intensify the situation.

Is climate heating intensifying El Niño?

In order to parse out the El Niño-climate change connection, it is crucial to understand exactly what an El Niño is. Oceans absorb most solar heat accumulated by the planet. The Pacific is the largest ocean, covering nearly half the Earth’s surface. Its greatest solar collector is the tropical western Pacific. An El Niño is its heat discharge mechanism. It is the world’s largest interannual climate variability, and overall the biggest regular event on the planet other than the change of the 4 seasons. By a complex series of interactions, increasing heat weakens trade winds holding the warm pool to the west. It then migrates east in the classic tongue pattern seen in depictions of a full-blown El Niño. It gained its name, Spanish for “The Child,” because it has tended to have its greatest effects around Christmas. Fisherman in Peru felt it because the warm surface stops an upwelling of cool water that feeds fish populations, collapsing catches.

As the warm tongue reaches across the Pacific, its effects radiate throughout the world’s ocean and atmosphere system. It twists global wind currents such as the jet stream in ways that bring more rains to some regions while drying out others. El Niño is like a cue ball smashing into a rack and sending balls all over the table. The word used to describe this is teleconnections. Typical impacts are monsoon failure in India, drought and fires in Australia, Indonesia and the Amazon, and flooding along South America’s Pacific coast and in East Africa. The record heat currently driving a devastating fire season in France and Spain is in line with past super El Niños, as are heat domes in North America.

So in a heating world, shouldn’t the planet’s greatest collector of solar heat be discharging it more often and with greater intensity in the form of El Niños? That is the logic I pursued in my 1998 piece. But the climate system is incredibly complex, and temperature records only go back a limited time. Scientists are a cautious lot. They are more inclined to project that increasing heat will affect El Niños in the future, because of the basic logic. But they are still going back and forth on current impacts. So science is only slowly moving to the conclusion that El Niños are being made more frequent and powerful by global heating.

“It’s highly contested, because it’s such an important question to get right,” Brown University climate scientist Kim Cobb told the New York Times in a recent article, “Is Climate Change Supercharging El Niño? A Debate Rages.”

“Of 16 scientists who spoke with The Times, eight said they see compelling evidence that climate change is likely increasing the intensity of El Niño events. Among them is Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at NOAA, who cautioned that the science is ‘very uncertain,’ but said the development of another strong El Niño this year would be ‘pretty remarkable.’ If the current El Niño reaches the proportions that many forecast, it would mean three of the six strongest events since 1950 have come in the last 11 years.”

Again, those are the 11 hottest years ever recorded on the planet.

One of the most definitive statements on the El Niño-climate change connection has been made by Wenju Cai, a climate scientist at Ocean University of China. Using advanced computer modeling to build a record of past El Niños, Cai and his team drew several critical conclusions. They compared the period from 1901-60 to 1960-2020. Three-quarters of model runs found events in the later period around 10% stronger on average. They compared the runs to a world in which greenhouse gases were at levels before the industrial revolution. The odds that these increases would have happened in such a world are 2.5-10%.

“It’s almost impossible for this to happen without climate change,” Cai told the New York Times.

McPhaden, a participant in the study, and chief scientist at NOAA Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, a center of El Niño research, wrote,” One manifestation of this amplified cycle is that strong El Niño and La Niña events are becoming stronger and more frequent, just as we’ve observed in the more recent historical record. The big events pack the most punch, so even though 10% doesn’t sound like much, it juices up the strongest and most societally relevant year-to-year climate fluctuation on the planet . . . this amplified cycle translates into more extreme and frequent ENSO-linked droughts, floods, heat waves, wildfires and severe storms . . . “

When will we wake up?

What are broader implications of all this? It is beyond doubt that the heat release mechanism of El Niño will ramp up already devastating climate extremes breaking out all over the planet. If El Niños and their companion La Niñas are themselves amped up by global heating, it creates a feedback loop that makes those extremes all the more destructive.

Yet, as climate disruption reaches new levels, much of the world seems to be turning away from climate action. In the U.S., Trump is tearing apart climate science institutions and undermining clean energy growth, while Republicans continue to sing in the denier choir. Meanwhile, Democrats are climate hushing in the name of affordability, ironic in the face of how global heating is driving up grocery bills, home insurance and a plethora of other costs. In Europe, which has been a climate leader, nations under economic pressure are stepping back from net zero commitments. Global climate pollution continues to rise, though in one bright spot, China’s emissions appear to have peaked.

At one level, this introduces a sense of global cognitive dissonance. The intensification of climate impacts across the world should lead to a crisis response. We should be recognizing this is a global emergency. Instead it’s going the opposite direction. But there’s a schizoid logic in all this, a classic double bind. There is widespread knowledge that we face a critical situation. But we cannot collectively come to terms with what this means, the absolutely massive transformation of economic and energy systems that will be required. So we retreat into denial, soft or hard, that lets us go on with our day to day routines.

The question is what will wake us up? What will cause us to finally confront the necessity, when people push our political leaders to act while making the changes in our own lives that we must? We can hope what will take place in coming months will be so alarming it will stir the necessary response. But I’ve been at this long enough to have seen many events I thought would do this. Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans. Superstorm Sandy’s ravaging of New York City. So much as I hate to say it, I’m not optimistic. But we who are aware need to use this opening anyway. We need to call out the emergency situation facing our world, and especially media that do not make the connection between disasters and climate.

In any event, we are already in the age of climate extremes. They will only intensify from here on until we zero out climate pollution. So while we move toward zero, we also need to place a top priority on climate adaptation at every level, from local and state/provincial to national and international. We need to prepare our communities for the storms, floods, heat, drought and fires to come. Meanwhile, we need to continue to do all we can to reduce climate pollution, and bust business-as-usual assumptions that say we can stay on anything like the current course. If we continue, adaptation will become ever more difficult and eventually impossible. In the process of adapting, we must focus dual opportunities to adapt and reduce. For example, wetlands can buffer against floods and sea level rise while absorbing carbon. Sustainable agricultural practices can reduce farm pollution while absorbing carbon in soils. Better insulated buildings can protect against temperature extremes while cutting energy use.

Dealing with climate also offers chances to build a more just society. Climate disruption stresses all the fault lines in society such as widespread food insecurity. The immediate impact of this El Niño will worsen this as crops fail and prices increase. Over coming decades, food insecurity is likely to have the broadest climate impact on human populations. Too many people lack enough food already. We should address this anyway with comprehensive efforts to make sure people get enough, but a heating climate will drive us in this direction. It will take a strong society to cope with what’s coming.

It has been my hope that the multiple crises barreling down on the human race will make us a wiser species chastened by the consequences of our collective hubris. I have to say when I read news of what’s going on around the planet, I often feel a clenching in my gut. It sickens me we have gone so far while letting powerful interests throw away our collective future. At some point, we have to wake up. Let us do all we can to make this “mind-blowing” El Niño that point. May “The Child” cause us to think about our own, and the world we are leaving them.

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6 minute read

The threshold crossed at Alamogordo

Today is the 81^st anniversary of the most fateful day in the 300,000 years of our human species existence. We have always fought each other. On July 16, 1945, the prospect we could fight ourselves nearly to extinction came into view.

On that date, the first atomic weapon was exploded at Alamogordo, New Mexico. The culmination of the Manhattan Project, the Trinity test opened the nuclear age that was to be announced to the world 3 weeks later with the detonation over Hiroshima. I have said it before. I’ll say it again. This is the day the world should have changed, when humanity crossed a threshold to an entirely new situation. For the first time, we could wipe ourselves out, or nearly.

Instead the world moved on to build mass numbers of nuclear weapons, first atomic, then thermonuclear, made possible by implosion of hydrogen with atomic weapons. We have learned since that even 100 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs can cause a nuclear winter collapsing agricultural production and killing billions. A full-scale nuclear war might cause a winter leaving few alive.

This day, July 16, 2026, it seems that not only has humanity not learned the lesson – It is plunging further into danger. This Trinity anniversary is the first in 55 years there is no agreement among nuclear powers to limit the numbers of weapons. In February, the NewSTART Treaty between the U.S. and Russia expired. So a condition that lasted for around two-thirds of the nuclear age is now defunct. Today the U.S. and Russia each keep around 1,800 nuclear warheads on alert to be delivered by submarines, missiles and bombers. With the end of NewSTART they are free to bring weapons out of storage. The U.S. has 3,700, Russia 4,400. Spaces in missile tubes and bomb bays can be readily filled.

Meanwhile, China is moving from keeping its estimated 620 nuclear weapons on reserve to full alert, the same dangerous launch-on-warning protocol followed by the U.S. and Russia. At the same time, it is building up active warhead numbers to roughly the level of the other two powers.

Nuclear dangers are increasing even as wars in West Asia and Europe are escalating. These seemingly irreconcilable conflicts have no clear end, and the possibility of crossing nuclear threholds is being raised in both by serious observers. Of course, the nuclear issue is at the center of the conflict in West Asia. Israel and the U.S. claim that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, using that as a justification for their preemptive war. Iran has been well capable of developing nuclear weapons for decades, but has repeatedly said it is not seeking them on religious grounds. If anything, the war has given the Iranians incentives to finally acquire them, while weakening leadership forces that stood against this. Israel itself has its own arsenal estimated at anywhere from 90 to 400 weapons, and has not hesitated to threaten use. Some sources indicate it used this threat to strongarm the U.S. into attacking Iran, otherwise it would do so itself.

Short-term gain vs. long-term survival

At one level, it all seems deeply irrational. It is hard to see continuation of current trends without some catastrophic blow-up. This gets to the fundamental issue, why humanity did not learn when we unlocked the secrets of nuclear power 81 years ago, why we continue on a path with good odds to produce disaster. It is the contradiction between short-term pursuit of power and long-term survival. The incentives and drives that motivate the political and economic systems of the world are conditioned on that short-term drive. If one side doesn’t pursue powers that may be available, even with potentially devastating consequences, the other side will. That is why both the U.S. and Soviet Union raced to develop hydrogen bombs in the 1950s knowing how much more destructive they are.

In a parallel way, it is why AI researchers concerned it could wipe out humanity nonetheless have the gas pedal all the way to the floor. The first to create AI superintelligence will dominate, so it must be us, goes the thinking. If it decides humanity is a bad idea, that is a risk we must take, the developers believe. This is even as the wars are illuminating another arms race, that of drone warfare. AI is being brought to bear, so the automated killer robots of the Terminator movies are becoming reality.

The world picture presents yet another irrationality created by a similar logic. Consider that the conflict between the U.S. and Iran now centers on control of the Straits of Hormuz. This is the chokepoint through which around 25% of the world’s seaborne oil and 20% of its liquid natural gas flow. Control represents a global superpower which the U.S. can ill afford to lose to Iran. Yet it has already lost it. That is part of the irreconcilable nature of this conflict with incredibly dangerous implications.

In the same world picture, Northwest Europe is suffering an unprecedented and deadly heatwave. Fires are breaking out in France and Britain. Heat domes are popping up in North America and around the world. An El Nino warming event is mounting in the Pacific Ocean, feeding global heat and transmitting impacts to all corners of the planet. Crucially that includes food production. Wildfires burning in Canada are sending smoke plumes choking the northeastern U.S.

This is all happening while the ship of fools known as the Trump Administration is doing all it can to dismantle climate science and clean energy development. It is actively pursuing a policy it openly describes as energy dominance. The U.S. is now by far the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, and the administration seeks to leverage that keep the U.S. as global #1. The actions against Venezuela and war on Iran are key elements of that strategy.

It would be hard to find a more pronounced case of short-term power seeking over long-term survival. Control of energy resources is indeed one of the keystones of power over people and nations. The short-term logic is clear. The long-term reality is calamitous. Humanity gained tremendous evolutionary advantage when it mastered the use of fire. Now we may be consumed in our own, whether the rapid conflagration of nuclear war or the slower but still deadly rise of heat caused by fossil fuel burning.

Yet that short-term pursuit of power continues because that is the logic of the political and economic systems that rule the world, and the logic that people who rise in those systems must follow to rise. It is a self-feeding cycle that must be broken. It’s going to take more than a peace movement, or a climate movement. It is going to take a movement that questions the very assumptions of power driving the system.

What is power for?

Power is an element of everything in life. We must ask what power is for. What does it serve? I believe the fundamental flaw in prevailing systems is the pursuit of power as its own end, whether dominance by nations and states, or bottom-line profit by corporations. Power must be constrained within the context of broader goals, none more central than long-term survival. That involves a vision for the whole beyond the interests of any one group, nation or organization. It may in the end involve something as basic as infusing the golden rule into all institutions. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. All the world’s great religions have some version of this.

Today, I fear we are sleepwalking toward catastrophe, driven by leaders of the baby boom and younger generations who have forgotten the horrors of the last global war, which ended in 1945. Driven as well by ignorance of the long-term consequences of fossil fuel combustion, often deliberately by those who have interests in its continuation. I wonder what it will be to wake us up. Mushroom clouds rising somewhere on Earth? A climate mass casualty event that cannot be denied?

I hope we get it soon. Cause the world is becoming more dangerous, and we clearly have not learned the lesson that we should have this day 81 years ago.

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11 minute read

Why 2026 feels so different from 1976

Not all birthdays are welcome. They can signify aspirations unachieved even as the window to reach them is closing. For those of us getting up in years, they can call out how old, creaky bodies are not functioning quite as well as they used to. That our departure is closer than our arrival, and the clock seems to be speeding up. Here I’m speaking from personal experience.

The 250^th birthday of the United States seems to have many of the same attributes. High hopes for a society built on justice for all are retreating in the face of advancing oligarchy, surging racism and widening divisions over what, after all, are our aspirations. The institutions that were supposed to provide a balance that stemmed tendencies to tyranny – courts, the Congress, a free press – are sputtering ineffectively like an engine that needs an overhaul. The constitutional order is showing its age. While nations transcend the lifetime of a single individual, they too have lifespans, and a sense of mortality hangs over the U.S., with talk of civil war and breakup prominent in a way that would have been inconceivable a couple of decades ago.

It is a subdued, even melancholy birthday, despite reaching the milestone of a quarter millennium since independence was declared in Philadelphia July 4, 1776. A pathetically attended and poorly conceived “Great American State Fair” on the D.C. Mall, a slimy Reflecting Pool, a White House with one wing demolished, and another area torn up to host a cage match in scenes that even Mike Judge would have had trouble imagining when he made Idiocracy in the early 2000s. Life is not only imitating art – It is exceeding it. Ironically, in a nation going backwards on climate, July 4 parades in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia are cancelled due to extreme heat fed by climate-twisting pollution.

It is quite a contrast with the bicentennial 50 years ago. I recall it well. Having just graduated from college, I returned to the family home near Philadelphia, the hearth of the republic. The mood was celebratory and upbeat. The U.S. had just seen the first presidential resignation, that of Richard Nixon in 1974 due to the Watergate scandal. The system seemed to be functioning against overbearing executive power. It had also finally extricated itself from Vietnam, the war that tore the country apart, albeit only ending with the North Vietnamese victory in 1975. That a massive protest movement had helped force U.S. withdrawal gave a sense democracy was still working. To this day wars involving mass casualties of U.S. soldiers are seen as unacceptable. After a tumultuous decade, things seemed to be working out.

Fifty years later, the situation is almost diametrically opposite. The Trump Administration is boldly exerting executive power in a way that would cause Nixon to shudder. It has dismembered and gutted agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Centers for Disease Control, refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress. The Supreme Court has largely allowed this, undermining the most fundamental power of Congress, that of the purse, while the Republican-controlled Congress has basically rolled over. A balance among the three branches of government, long drifting toward the executive, has tilted toward presidential tyranny in a way that will be hard to reverse.

Meanwhile, a Supreme Court ruled by a fallacious doctrine of the unitary executive, in which all executive branch power vests in the president, started off the week leading up the the birthday by giving the presidency king-like powers. It is perhaps the most radical increase in presidential power in a century. In Trump v. Slaughter issued June 29, the court upheld Trump’s firing of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter despite having no grounds under law. The court thus undermined the independence of regulatory agencies, giving the president power that will undermine their ability to counter corporate crime. Slaughter was a strong voice for regulating AI and keeping data private.

In terms of war, in 1976 with Vietnam finally settled, the U.S. appeared to be beyond the era of undeclared wars and conflicts with no seeming end. The experience had been just too searing, too divisive. But over the years since Vietnam the U.S. has slid into war after war on flimsy pretexts. Two wars in Iraq, one over a Kuwait invasion that could have been solved diplomatically, the second over weapons of mass destruction that were not there. An Afghanistan war where the Taliban would have handed over Bin Laden if the U.S. had supplied evidence he was connected to 9-11. Instead the U.S. opted for a forever war that ended only to see the Taliban sweep back into power.

The Iran War shredded even those thin boundaries. Unlike those other wars, including Vietnam, there was not even a Congressional authorization that might have provided a fig leaf. It is a war started by presidential decision alone. Though Congress has since by narrow majorities passed a War Powers Act resolution to limit action, it is uncertain how binding this will actually be. Meanwhile a populace opposed to the war from the start is too cynical to take to the streets in mass numbers.

Thus, unlike 1976, when the U.S. still had a functioning constitutional system, today it has broken down in the face of nearly unbridled presidential power in the hands of the most reckless individual to ever occupy the White House, and a Supreme Court intent on feeding the fires. An overwhelming popular majority devoted to fundamental reform and restoration of democracy against the rising power of money could conceivably turn this around. But for the moment the system seems broken beyond repair.

That rising power is the backdrop for all this. It is seen in the Gini Coefficient, a measure of economic inequality. The lower, the more equal. At 35.6 in 1976 it was heading for a historic low for the decades after World War II, to hit an absolute low of 34.7 in 1980. That trend abruptly reversed with the election of Ronald Reagan. Dramatic tax cuts for the wealthy combined with corporate deregulation put the neoliberal era in full gear. By 2024 Gini reached 41.8. The 250th birthday of the U.S. is tremendously more unequal than the 200th, intensifying racial divisions and making the election of a Trump far more possible.

Closing the golden door

Also in the week the U.S. celebrates its 250th, the court issued decisions that make it more difficult for asylum seekers to enter the U.S., and easier to deport those who are here. And in an even more chilling decision, only 6 of 9 justices voted to uphold birthright citizenship on constitutional grounds, thus reversing Trump’s executive order denying it. Alito, Thomas and Gorsuch voted the other way, even though the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution clearly states, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Three justices who are commissioned with interpreting the Constitution were ready to overturn what it clearly says, again expanding presidential power – a travesty.

Nations are held together by common narratives. Emma Lazarus, a Jewish woman who had helped Jews escape from pogroms in Europe, summed one of the keystone U.S. narratives in her poem, “The New Colossus,” written to help raise money to erect the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty, now inscribed there.

“Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The door seems to be closing even as the aspirations of a nation Lazarus described as a “New Colossus” seem to shrink. With white people making up a declining share of the population, there is a sense too many coming in the door are just a bit too wretched. That is despite the fact they are reviving communities where many whites have departed, and doing work most citizens are unwilling to do. Springfield, Ohio, where thousands of Haitians have settled under the protected status just undermined by the court, is a case in point. In decline for years, the new labor force created a boom which may now be reversed.

The U.S. has always had a nativist strain. When one element of my ethnicity, Irish Catholics, started to pour into the U.S. in the middle 1800s, they were regarded as subhuman beasts by the prevailing white Anglo-Saxon population. Italians, another side of my ethnicity, began arriving in mass numbers in the late 1800s. They were seen as not quite white. Even as late as the 1930s, my olive-skinned father was called the N word by his classmates. As with newer groups, Irish and Italians were not going to assimilate, it was charged. Of course, they did, as will newer groups. The U.S. is not a melting pot, but it is a fine mixing bowl. Yet this basic element of our national story seems to be going out the window. Many of us just no longer believe it.

Trust lost while states move apart

If many U.S. of Americans don’t much like the new arrivals, we are losing trust in each other. In a Pew Research Center Survey of 25 countries released in March, the U.S. was the only one in which a majority rated their fellow citizens as bad in terms of ethics and morality, 53% to be precise. Another Pew survey done in 2024 found “only 22% of U.S. adults said they “trust the federal government to do the right thing just about always or most of the time.” People have a sense that it is serving powerful special interests while leaving out those of ordinary people, a more than fair impression.

When more than half the people say their fellows are bad, and only slightly more than one in five trust the institution that is supposed to unite us, we have to ask a basic question. Is the U.S. a “we” anymore? Is there a “we” who can understand ourselves as “the people?” Or is the U.S. simply a set of regions and cultural groups going in strongly divergent directions? When states such as Texas, Florida and Tennessee pass increasingly reactionary legislation – Tennessee for instance bars abortion even in cases of rape and incest – while states such as Washington, Minnesota and New York move more and more progressive, where is the “we” in this?

Chatham House, Britain’s equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations, in 2024 asked, “Could the United States be headed for a national divorce?.” And along the lines of the 1860s conflict. It gave the following evidence:

“Of the 15 US states with the most restrictive abortion laws, all voted for Trump in 2020 and seven were originally in the Confederacy.

“Of the 21 states with the most permissive gun laws in 2023, 19 voted for Trump, and six were in the Confederacy.

“Of the 19 states that enacted laws in 2022 making it harder to vote, 14 voted for Trump and seven were in the Confederacy.

“And of the 23 states that enacted legislation in 2023 imposing restrictions on gender-affirming care, transgender participation in school sports, school instruction touching on LBGTQ issues and related matters, 22 voted for Trump and nine were in the Confederacy.”

Chatham went on to report, “Half (54 pecent) of self-described strong Republicans in America now think it is very or somewhat likely there will be a US civil war within the next decade. Four in ten (40 per cent) strong Democrats agree.” It accurately forecast, “The outcome of the 2024 US election is unlikely to resolve these differences. In fact, it may deepen them, whoever becomes president.”

This voice of the British establishment concluded, “America’s friends and allies need to understand that the United States has become a Disunited States. There are effectively two Americas – and they are at war. They are fighting over social, political and constitutional issues, and over what role the US should play in the world.”

The drift apart began around 60 years ago when trust in national institutions began to crumble. Before the mid-1960s most people believed the federal government and leaders would generally do the right thing. But by around 1965 that was breached. Increasing skepticism and distrust were evident in polls. That was two years after the assassination of John Kennedy, in the wake of a Warren Commission report that many already regarded as a coverup for a conspiracy. Rioting broke out in L.A.’s Black Watts neighborhood. Johnson was ramping up U.S. troop deployments in Vietnam he had promised not to make in the previous year’s election. Since then, U.S. people have increasingly moved to communities and states where they feel more ideologically at home. Bill Bishop told the story in his 2009 book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart.

The last major U.S. societal reform wave came in the 1960s, the Great Society programs that gave us Medicare, fundamental civil rights guarantees, and public broadcasting, among others. The early 1970s followed with a surge of basic environmental laws that remain the fundamental framework of environmental protection in the U.S. Massive grassroots movements made these waves possible. Today all those gains are under pressure, in some cases such as the Voting Rights Act, reversed. Since that time, major national reform efforts have been sparse and partial. Jimmy Carter undertook a significant energy program largely torn up by Reagan. A similar energy program passed under Biden has likewise been mostly pushed back under Trump. Obamacare, one of the few social program expansions of recent decades, passed as a strongly partisan measure and is now being defunded. The conclusion that clearly emerges is that the U.S. is too divided to do big things together anymore. The system is too broken to do what governing orders are supposed to do, ensure the common good.

Where we can reclaim “we the people”

In discussions about the U.S., the word “we” is often misused. When it becomes a broad generalization about what the U.S. does as a whole, it is often not an accurate description. I know, for instance, “we” did not bomb Iran. That was the choice of a small group of militarists driven by interest group politics. “We” is valid when talking about how people need to come together to make change and further the common good. But is there a U.S. of American “we the people” capable of that? Or are “we”simply too divided into culturally clashing groups and regions to ever see that happen? The evidence on this sad and subdued quarter-millennium birthday tilts toward the latter.

That leaves our states and cities as the places to rebuild our sense of “we the people.” Closer to home, we can more readily understand and come to agreement on what constitutes the common good. It is where we can be enough of a people to join together and achieve it. Across the U.S., even as politics stagnates and divides at the national level, local communities and progressive state governments are forwarding initiatives to address some of our most difficult problems. Enacting just taxation. Creating affordable housing. Building up mass transit. Expanding social services for the most vulnerable. Ramping up renewable energy. Through public policies and civic action, communities are revitalizing themselves.

I return to this thought often, which I characterize as building the future in place. It is the strategy for all seasons, the best route to prepare for all outcomes. If the U.S. is to come back together, heal its divisions and renew itself at a national level, the process will grow from the grassroots. If it continues to prove impossible to move toward needed changes at the national level, we can nonetheless pursue significant reforms in localities and states. Under the federal system, they possess significant powers across many fields. If the U.S. goes into breakdown or breakup mode, strong communities and state governments will be best positioned to absorb the blows and carry on.

I honestly don’t know, here at year 250 of the United States, whether it will survive to year 300. I do know the only conceivable route to achieve the common good, to be a “we the people,” begins in our home places, our communities and bioregions, our states and cities, whatever is coming.

I hope you learned something new, drew fresh insights and inspiration from this. That is my aim in writing, which is why I keep these posts free. If you are able and inclined, it would greatly help me keep body and soul together if you would provide economic support. You can take out a paid subscription for only $6/month, or $5 if you sign up for a yearly subscription. Or you can make a one-time donation in $5 increments through the Buy the Raven a coffee button. And please like, share and restack!

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13 minute read

A Cascadian Declaration of Independence

The New York Times has discovered Cascadia. Specifically, it has found news of an emerging Cascadia independence movement fit to print. In the June 13^th edition, it published an article, “Independent Cascadia? Greater Idaho? Disunited States Look Toward Divorce.”

Times Northwest correspondent Anna Griffin reported on contrasting movements from the left to declare Cascadian independence from the U.S., and from the right for eastern Oregon to secede and join Idaho. The piece is behind a paywall, but you can read the full article linked here.)

Griffin quoted Andrew Engleson, who has been advocating independence in his Cascadia Journal, “We’re in an abusive relationship with the federal government. Divorce is a valid response.”

Engleson and fellow Cascadian organizer Drew Alcosar recently announced creation of Cascadia Democratic Action (CDA). It is examining the possibility of 2028 Oregon and Washington ballot initiatives to begin moving toward independence

On June 1 they published an article in Cascadia Journal, “It’s time for Cascadia independence from the US.” “One year ago, we wrote about starting conversations on Cascadia autonomy in response to the US descent into fascism. Things have only gotten worse since then. The U.S. constitution is a contract between the people and the federal government. Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has abrogated that contract many times over. Those offenses are strikingly similar to the American colonists’ complaints against Britain in the 1776 Declaration of Independence.”

Much as that original declaration, the writers spend much of the article documenting those abuses. Among them:

• Prosecuting peaceful protestors against ICE in Spokane,

• Illegally withholding federal money budgeted for the region to support clean energy and scientific research, among other items, even as Oregon and Washington send $36 billion more to the federal government than is returned to them,

• Gutting the Forest Service while planning on logging a billion board feet from regional forests,

• Illegally imposing tariffs that have cost the region $4 billion

• Having the U.S. Postal Service undermine vote-by-mail systems, which were pioneered in Oregon and Washington.

CDA advocates actions to increase regional autonomy, including the creation of state banks and measures for states to withhold federal tax funds if budgeted funds are not restored. Engelson and Alcosar write, “We want good schools, free college tuition, universal health care, affordable housing, and a robust transportation system. Fiscal autonomy would allow Cascadia to achieve those goals.”

Wisely, CDA has limited itself to Oregon and Washington. British Columbia is considered part of Cascadia, but CDA does not want to associate itself in any way with the Trump assault on Canadian national identity. Though if a secession movement picking up steam in Alberta succeeds, all bets are off. Parts of Northern California are also mapped as Cascadia. But Engleson and CDA are do not support the idea of a Pacifica encompassing all three states out of concern for being absorbed in a state with more than three times the population and its own complex politics.

Three critical questions

Cascadia is a political trendsetter, so what happens here has ramifications far beyond the bioregion. The fact that an independence movement is being boldly forwarded could be a harbinger for the U.S. as a whole. To this point, Texas has had the most active movement for secession from the U.S. It has come from the right. California has an independence movement from the left. Both root in brief histories as independent nations. Cascadia adds to the mix with a movement linking states around a bioregional identity. Its emergence signals a belief that the political system of the U.S. is beyond repair.

The CDA site makes the case. “We are in an authoritarian crisis. The Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated its contempt for the US constitution by ignoring court rulings, weaponizing the Justice Department against its critics, and kidnapping immigrants without due process, sending them to a brutal foreign prison in a country ruled by a dictator . . . we now realize that the US constitution is a deeply flawed document that has failed to provide the safeguards necessary to protect us from a new tyrant. . . Donald Trump . . . We believe the system of government in the United States is so broken that it cannot bring about the major reforms necessary to restore democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law to the United States any time soon.”

That really is the crux of the issue. I’ve posed similar questions myself. Last October, I wrote, “The U.S. is broken. Time to think about what comes next.” In it I identified the centralizing tendencies of the Constitution as the fatal flaw that has led us to this day. It is clear that the U.S. political system has reached an impasse with no clear resolution in sight. A corrupt Supreme Court tipped far to the right. A Congress bought by powerful interests that has failed to uphold its Constitutional responsibilities. An imperial presidency that has broken Constitutional bounds and is indeed pushing for authoritarian rule. These systemic failures are driving discussion of radical alternatives.

I have long believed a political order than brings power more to the level of states and cities, bioregions and communities, is the antidote to overcentralization in Washington, D.C. Though the 1960s and 70s saw a great era of reform at the federal level, states and cities have been the most fertile field for innovative public policies in recent decades, among them moving to 100% clean energy, increasing the minimum wage, and addressing the housing crisis. So a move to greater autonomy deserves attention. But before advocating for outright independence, three key questions must be answered.

Is independence practical?

Is independence the best way to promote the common good?

Does moving for independence undermine broader progressive movements?

Is independence practical?

When President James Polk in 1846 negotiated the division of the Oregon Territory with Britain, he was insistent on the U.S. owning the Puget Sound. Most U.S. settlers were in the Willamette Valley south of the Columbia River, and Britain wanted that to be the boundary. But Polk and the U.S. wanted the harbors of the Puget Sound as jumping off points for the Pacific.

Polk is today obscure, but he was one of the most consequential of U.S. presidents, roughly doubling the size of the country with the Oregon treaty and Mexican-American War. Polk had an agenda, to take control of three great natural harbors on the Pacific Coast, those of the Sound, San Francisco Bay and Coronado near San Diego. He had a vision of U.S. expansion into Asia that Norman Graebner documented is his work, Empire on the Pacific. Taking California was his primary goal in the war with Mexico. He was willing to give up Oregon Territory lands north of the 49^thparallel to make sure Britain did not intervene in the war. Gaining the Puget Sound achieved his fundamental objective regarding Oregon.

Polk knew what he was doing. Today, the Puget Sound is indeed a key maritime and aviation link to Asia. It is also a center of U.S. military power projection across the Pacific. U.S. Army operations around the basin are run from Joint Base Lewis McChord near Tacoma. The U.S. Navy complex at Bremerton is one of its most important Pacific bases. The greatest single concentration of U.S. military power is the Trident nuclear submarine base at Bangor, site of the largest concentration of active U.S. nuclear weapons. To put it simply, there is no way the U.S. government is going to give this up. It is too vital a center of the global empire.

Independence advocates cite Cascadia’s rich economic base to support the proposition the bioregion could go it alone. But consider that much of this prosperity rests on some of the most global of corporations, several of which are major U.S. military contractors. Boeing is one of the top five vendors to the Pentagon. Amazon runs the U.S. intelligence agencies cloud. It is joined with Microsoft, a significant military contractor in its own right, to put the Pentagon on the cloud. None of these corporate giants would willingly become part of a different country. Meanwhile, other Cascadia-based corporations such as Starbucks and Costco rely on a singular national market economy. They would not be happy with the prospect of balkanization.

Beyond all these sources of opposition comes the legal question if secession is at all possible. In the case of Texas v. White, the Supreme Court ruled the Union is permanent. But a path might be possible through a treaty supported by two-thirds of the Senate. However, the likelihood of this taking place against the intense opposition any separation would stir is just about zero.

Then there is that other secession movement covered in the NYT piece, eastern Oregon joining Idaho. Eastern Washington has long had a movement to break away and form the State of Liberty. While Cascadia is a biogeographical whole, linked by rivers and watersheds, culturally it is two separate regions divided by the Cascade crest, a more urban liberal west and more rural conservative east. If Oregon and Washington moved to secede, it is a solid bet their eastern portions would move to secede from them.

So, to answer the first question, in the current political environment or anything like it, Cascadian independence is not practical. At least not on its own. In my view, the only way such a change would take place is in the broader context of a U.S. breakup or rearrangement. Where a common agreement is achieved to go our own ways, or to fundamentally change the constitutional order.

Is independence the best way to promote the common good?

This is a more complex question, and the answer is more nuanced. The purpose of governing structures is to promote the common good. We join together to accomplish what we cannot as individuals or singular organizations. Even anarchist philosophies, at least the more sophisticated ones, envision some form of public order. Murray Bookchin, for example, posed the idea of community assemblies to guide the affairs of municipalities linked in confederations.

The Declaration of Independence’s most remembered words state how political orders protect the common good. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

The preamble to the U.S. Constitution places the common good as its fundamental reason. “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The critical questions are at what levels of government the common good is most effectively pursued, and what to do when a level of government actively undermines the common good. As the Declaration says in the words immediately following the above quote, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”

CDA is making the case the U.S. government has reached that point. Indeed, the Trump Administration has degraded the capacity of public institutions to secure the common good in critical areas. The outbreak of screwworm among cattle in Texas and Ebola in the Congo trace directly to Trump’s illegal budget cuts. Scientific research of all kinds is being ravaged, notably in health and climate. It is cutting health and food support budgets even as it grotesquely inflates military expenditures and conducts illegal wars.

So if Cascadia could keep that $36 billion more it sends to the federal government than it gets back, would it do a better job of ensuring the common good? Almost certainly. Considering how many of the dollars actually flowing back to Cascadia go to those military bases, and how Cascadia would not support a world-spanning empire, the case strengthens that an independent Cascadia would be better for the common good in the bioregion.

But we face issues beyond the bioregion that require a broader response. Climate, pandemics, AI, to name several. How do we take care of the common good at broader levels? Who does the global health and climate monitoring? How do we join together to do all this? That is why I tend to lean more to a new political order spanning the continent, something like a confederation of bioregional commonwealths that pursues the common good at levels individual bioregions cannot achieve on their own. And which links at international levels to address global issues.

The current order is certainly proving less than a reliable guarantor of the common good, and in so many ways is actively undercutting it. We definitely need something different that allows greater autonomy but also preserves connections at continental and planetary levels.

Does moving for independence undermine broader progressive movements?

This is the question that should most trouble independence advocates. A backlash to Trump and the depredations of his administration is mounting. New juice is pumping into progressive politics across the U.S. At local and state levels, progressive candidates are winning. With oligarchs sucking off most new wealth while most people increasingly struggle, the message of economic populism is gaining new traction. It is being voiced by Democratic Senate candidates James Talarico in Texas and Graham Platner in Maine among others. A Democratic sweep of the House and Senate is possible. In the longer term, a generational shift favors more progressive policies with younger voters coming to the fore.

Thus, we must ask whether this is the right time to forward independence. Surely in a nationwide progressive sweep, Oregon and Washington will play key roles. Is stepping out of the picture and going it on our own the right step? Or does it undermine a solidarity needed to turn around destructive trends in the U.S. as a whole?

The question gets down to whether the broken system can be repaired within the possibilities of current politics? The basic outlines would be:

• Expand the Supreme Court, set term limits and remove corrupt judges,

• Overturn court rulings that open the door to unlimited political campaign funding while setting up a full public financing system,

• Limit the power of the president to rule by executive order and undertake wars without Congressional authorization,

• Ban legislative gerrymandering at all levels and create non-partisan districting commissions,

• Institute proportional voting systems to replace first-past-the-post elections,

• Restore voting rights protections for Blacks, and make voting easier for everyone.

That last point is particularly relevant to this discussion. It is undeniable that the federal government has ensured civil rights for Blacks and others in regions where majorities would deny them. The almost immediate removal of majority Black Congressional Districts after the Supreme Court eviscerated the last Voting Rights Act protection proves the point. Sometimes a broader alignment is needed to ensure human rights.

Cascadia Democratic Action seems to have its own blind spot in a similar area. It calls for “Congress to pass legislation transferring ownership and management of the Pacific Northwest’s federal lands to state and tribal control.” In this it unfortunately resonates with right-wing movements throughout the west that want public lands placed under state control to allow maximum exploitation. As with civil rights, the federal government has provided environmental protections that state and local majorities would gut if they could. Even Cascadian states have proven less than worthy stewards of their own state lands.

Proposals for serious political reform are on the table and gaining increasing traction. They seem a heavy uphill lift now, but the political turbulence likely over coming years could make them a real possibility. A massive economic downturn could propel deep change, with financial bubbles bursting, AI job losses and supply chain ruptures. Reforms that in the 1920s seemed impossible came into being with the 1930s Great Depression.

So while I am totally with having a serious conversation about the current political order, I wonder if moving to independence is giving up too soon. And whether there are possibilities for fundamental change that will be undermined if we do not join together at broader scales.

Conclusion: Focus on autonomy

To recap, Cascadian independence is politically impossible in the current political climate, but may be with a common agreement to break up the U.S. or create an order of more autonomous states and regions.

Cascadia on its own almost certainly would do a better job of achieving and preserving the common good in its own bioregion. But for doing this at broader scales, linkages at continental and planetary scales would be necessary.

Whether pursuing independence now is the right course, or whether it undermines the solidarity needed for a broader progressive thrust that achieves real change across the U.S., is a question independence advocates need to seriously ponder.

My own conclusion is that Cascadia Democratic Action, and the bioregion as a whole, should focus on autonomy rather than outright political independence. Create public banks and use them to build community-based economic institutions while financing ecological transformation. Create worker coops and circular economies. Supercharge the transition to renewable energy. Build food security by encouraging a greater level of bioregional self-reliance. Create community broadband. Move to state-based single payer health insurance. Many actions are possible and needed.

Independence raises lots of red flags and uncertainties. It will be strongly opposed by forces that cannot be overcome in the current political climate. Advocating for independence may stir reactions that in fact hinders the fight for more realistic forms of regional autonomy.

It may get bad enough that we will be driven to independence, and that would only happen if other parts of the U.S. were also moving to depart. If Trump authoritarianism escalates, if somehow coming elections are subject to interference that cancels clearly democratic results, we could see a national breakup. The abuses cited by CDA are real, and could worsen to the point they become unbearable. So I am not counting out this idea. My best take is that, for the moment, focus on autonomy. Create the institutions, the politics, the movements that build bioregional autonomy. That is the more solid path to deal with any outcome that rises.

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9 minute read

Are we facing global breakdown?

Many of us have anticipated a great breakdown of global systems coming at some point. Too many exponential curves pointing upwards inevitably having to peak and begin tumbling down. Too many interlocking complex systems vulnerable to failure cascading from a single point.

Now we are asking – Is this it? Is the closure of most traffic on the Hormuz Strait due to the Iran War the trigger that sets off broad systemic collapse? Loss of a significant share of global oil and gas supplies, as well as fertilizer made with fossil fuels and their byproducts, argues to be just that kind of trigger. So far, dipping into reserves as well as financial manipulations have kept oil prices under control. But summer is predicted to be the time tanks will near bottom to cause a dramatic upward surge.

The knock-on effects to financial markets with their multiple blown-up bubbles are imponderable. In terms of fertilizer shortages, we will not see the effects until harvests many months away, but they are sure to be substantial. In the global south, food and energy shortages could topple governments. In the north, they will put increased stress on most people at a time they are already carrying a heavy load. The prospect of a Depression-level downturn is given serious credibility.

Whether or not these events will proximate in a catastrophic collapse, they are sure to add to what is already a time of great disruption. That is, I believe, what characterizes our time more than any other description. Disruption is coming at us from multiple directions.

Politically, tensions are escalating among nations. Hybrid wars and proxy wars proliferate even as the weapons of war become more sophisticated and deadly. Within nations divisions widen among populations to the point that makes it difficult to impossible to cope with mounting challenges.

Economically, wealth is concentrating in the top percentages of the population, reaching previously unimaginable extremes towards the pinnacle. The poster, of course, is Elon Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire. This is as economic conditions for most are stagnant or declining. The distorted wealth curve is distorting politics, as the ultra-rich increasingly buy the process and the media that informs it.

The rise of AI is supercharging economic concentration and uncertainty. We don’t know who will have jobs in 10 years, and wonder how AI will increasingly concentrate wealth and power in the hands of an already bloated oligarchy. It is a fact of history that those in control of powerful technologies come to dominate society, whether it was hardened brass armor and weapons in the bronze age, or information technology in the current era. Mass layoffs in the tech sector already signal increased power and wealth for corporate owners.

Overarching these disruptions is the greatest of all, and the one that seems most ignored. Humanity is disrupting the ecological roots of its existence, stressing all natural systems. Rivers are drying out. Oceans are acidifying while being overfished. Corals are dying of ocean heating. Rainforests are retreating. Forests all over the world are burning. Heat waves, droughts and storms are reaching record levels. Species are vanishing at great extinction levels. All while the atmospheric load of heat-trapping pollution is only growing. As I have often noted here, we have crossed most planetary boundaries that ensure our species and others a safe operating space.

Heading this way for decades

We have been on this track for a long time. Many believe we crossed over to ecological overshoot sometime in the early 1980s. In 1988, the world passed atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations of 350 parts per million, the threshold for any reasonable level of climate stability. Now they are around 432 ppm and growing at record rates. Meanwhile, since the 1950s, all sorts of exponential curves have been ascending nearly vertically – energy and material use, population, pollution.

So in one sense, disruption is the ocean in which us fishes have swum all our lives. For decades, the more far-seeing and sensitive among us have seen it. Ecological visionaries have been warning us about the condition of the planet since the 1960s and 70s, predicting we would hit the limits this century. Those aware of the world-ending power of our weapons have been urging us to create a peace economy for at least as long. Our political morass of increased control by the wealthy and special interests has been critically reviewed for decades. But the prophets have been ignored and cast aside while business as usual has plowed on.

All the time, while progress has clearly been made in some areas, the overall trends have been growing worse. Are we reaching a culminating point, where our ecological, economic and political crises converge to a monumental disruption of systems that shatters our assumptions of normal life? That makes the disruptions we faced during the pandemic seem like easy times? The most honest answer is that we don’t know. But the logic is that the complex systems that run our world are vulnerable to disruption, and many trends point that way. If it’s not happening now, odds are increasing that normalcy-destroying disruptions will happen at some point.

It is no accident the immediate threat of disruption is caused by the astoundingly bad leadership of Donald Trump. Bibi Netanyahu tried to make president after president attack Iran. Trump was the first to be so stupid, or so compromised, to do it. Every credible assessment said this would result in closure of the Hormuz Straits with devastating results to the world economy.

But ill-informed and hubristic leadership is the unifying element of all our crises, political, economic and ecological. It comes down to the sociopathy built into major economic and political institutions, acting only in their own interest, not caring for their impact on the greater whole. Whether it’s corporations focused only on “shareholder value” and the bottom line, or nation-states relentlessly pursuing their own power and domination. In such systems, the most sociopathic rise to the top, and those who aren’t are forced to behave that way by institutional imperatives. Silicon Valley even sees disruption as a positive force, ignoring the impact of its technologies on social stability and mental health. The Great Disruption is systemic. To deal with it we have to change systems, and the operating logic of the institutions that make them up.

A great world dream

In coming to the fore, the Great Disruption opens two important doors. First, we all have a normalcy bias. Things as they have been will continue to be as they are. That is, until they’re not. When systems are disrupted, people ask why. They want to know. That is the teachable moment when we can illuminate the systemic roots that have brought us to this place. Many of us possess deep analytical understanding of the issues. When normalcy bias is upset, that is our opening to spread our understanding.

Second, the failure of institutions provides the opportunity to build new ones. A good example is the spread of the social housing movement with the failure of the private market to provide adequate affordable housing. The Hormuz bottleneck demonstrates the unreliability of global supply chains and can spur community-based energy production with solar and wind. Increasing food costs and insecurity open the way toward more localized food production. There are many such examples. When institutions seem to be working, the incentives for change are limited. When they break down, alternatives come to the fore.

With disruptions at global and national level, it is likely the future is going to be a lot more local and bioregional. When complex systems break down, they move to simpler, more decentralized forms. Joseph Tainter, in his classic, The Collapse of Complex Societies, demonstrated this phenomenon in many ancient societies from the Maya to Rome. There comes a point when the energy needed to sustain a complex system produces diminishing returns. So the system must devolve to a level it can be sustained. Many argue that is the backdrop for much of what we are experiencing. It certainly argues for building a future closer to home, less dependent on unreliable global supply chains.

In my view, we have been trending toward massive disruption for a long time. Working on climate as I have for many years, studying the various scenarios, and witnessing the actual intensification of global heating impacts, it has been impossible for me to see a future that is not profoundly disrupted, where human and natural systems are stressed to breaking points. I have known that we and our future generations face troubled prospects. From that, I have drawn a hope.

Years ago, on one of my occasional trips to Washington, D.C. on some climate policy issue or another, I was spending a sunny afternoon at my favorite place in the capital, the Lincoln Memorial. I walked over to the center of the steps to take the view of the Washington Monument over the reflecting pool. I looked down to note I was standing on precisely the spot Martin Luther King Jr. had given his famous “I have a dream” speech there at the 1963 civil rights rally. It had been etched into the surface a few years before.

I leapt from the spot. I did not feel worthy to stand there. A few years later, on another trip, taking a break at the Lincoln, I was sitting off to the side reading about Dr. King in Taylor Branch’s magnificent “America in the King Years” series, about his willingness to sacrifice his life for the greater cause. King knew the assassin’s bullet was hunting him. Somehow, at that point, I finally felt worthy to stand at a that spot.

I walked over. Another sunny day. I looked out over the vista, and was moved to state my own dream. Spontaneously, I said to myself, “I have a dream that out of the greatest crises to ever face humanity, we will find our better angels and come together to create a great world for ourselves and our children.”

Simple as that.

Yet a few years later, I took my daughter to visit my family in Pennsylvania and then to see the sights in D.C. I took her to the Lincoln on a steamy summer night to give her an experience much as my parents had when I was around her age. To see the seemingly living statue lit up, and then to take my daughter out to view the scene, the illuminated white obelisk towering over the scene, the bright Capitol off in the distance. Then, I was again moved to silently repeat my great world dream, my hopes embodied in the 13-year-old standing to my side.

Is it foolish to dream anything like a great world can come out of this mess? Grasping at straws? Yet it is my hope and belief that the crises coming upon us, the great disruptions we face, will bring about a greater understanding of what has caused them and what we need to do to make our way through. That they will rip away the veil of normalcy and illuminate our path. That we will come to see the common good we must pursue if we are to survive.

I believe we will learn from hard experience our interdependence, to move beyond the competitive individualism of consumer societies to re-discover and rebuild community at all levels. We are certainly going to live in a wounded world. That is baked, literally, into the trends. But in coming together as human beings to heal our world, we can also make it a great one. This thought has sustained me through many years confronting our multiple crises and wrong directions taken. We can become better people and make a better world. Let us take from the disruptions of the present and greater disruptions to come the inspiration to do so. Our children’s world depends on it.

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8 minute read

“The most warlike nation in history”

I sit down to write this the morning of Memorial Day 2026, a holiday to hold in memory all who have lost their lives serving in U.S. wars. The day has its origins in memorials to Civil War veterans that started not long after the war ended. It occurs on a day when the world is on edge fearing that the next round of the U.S.-Israel war against Iran could happen any day. A broken ceasefire could have shattering global economic impacts with wholesale destruction of Persian Gulf oil infrastructure. At the same time, an invasion of Cuba seems in the cards, with prospects for a long guerilla war close to the U.S. mainland. In the backdrop is a cold civil war signified by Southern legislatures’ rapid elimination of Black congressional districts after the Supreme Court eviscerated the last meaningful provision of the Voting Rights Act, completing its years of work to undermine Black political power in the South.

The Civil War and the latest war on Iran are joined in a common thread, the almost continuous record of warfare that marks U.S. existence. In 2019 former President Jimmy Carter noted that in the years since it was born, the U.S. has been at war all but 16 of them. Carter said that makes the U.S. “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”

Even in those “peaceful” years, such as the Carter Administration, the U.S. was stirring up conflicts such as the war in Afghanistan, spurred when with Carter’s approval National Security Advisor Zbiegnew Brzesinski funneled support to the Mujahadeen to undermine the Communist government. The intent was to provoke the Soviet invasion and weaken the USSR by giving it its own Vietnam. Brzezinski admitted it. When the invasion actually occurred, which along with the Iranian Revolution of 1979 elevated the sense of threat, the president declared the Carter Doctrine placing the Persian Gulf under the U.S. security umbrella. That is the origin of the U.S. military bases Iran has recently been pummeling.

War has been very profitable for the U.S. The Revolution secured its eastern half, one of Earth’s regions most amenable to human occupation. The Civil War consolidated a continental empire with the bulk to eventually dominate the world, while accelerating the growth of an industrial giant. The wars on native tribes gained possession of the continent. The Spanish-American War gave it colonies conveniently positioned to create a world-spanning network of naval bases. Bankrolling World War I ensured its financial dominance of the world. The victory in World War II gave it unparalleled military, political and economic dominance, all potential rivals left in ruins. Even the Korean War, ended in stalemate, created the consensus for a massive military-industrial complex that was shaky before the war. If wars since have not been as successful – Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq 1 and 2 – they have certainly supercharged the complex in a way peace would not have accomplished. Finally, its supposed victory in the Cold War ushered in a period of unipolar dominance.

Geoffrey Perret wrote in his 1989 military history of the U.S., A Country Made by War, “Since 1775 no nation has had as much experience of war as the United States - nine major wars in nine generations. And in between the wars have come other conflicts . . . America’s wars have been like the rungs on a ladder by which it rose to greatness. No other country has triumphed so long, so consistently or on such a vast scale.”

Hubris, ignorance and imperial collapse

But our luck may be running out. Empires seem to inevitably spawn ruling elites drunk on their own sense of power. They make fatally flawed decisions based on hubris and ignorance. The Iran War looks to be a case in point. Trump and his inner circle seem to have actually believed that assassinating Iranian leadership and bombing the country would rapidly overthrow the government, rather than solidifying support for it even by people who don’t like it much. Meanwhile, they ignored entirely predictable consequences such as devastating attacks on U.S. bases and Israel, and disruption of oil traffic at the Strait of Hormuz. Trump, one of the world’s great bloviators, is finding hot air doesn’t win wars. If he returns to war, as Israel and its allies want, a new Great Depression is quite possible with loss of much of the world’s oil and gas flow. The war is currently quite profitable for U.S. oil companies, but for the overall U.S. position in the world, it is a catastrophic loss of stature.

Central to that is a loss of the sense of potency of U.S. military hardware. The revolution in weaponry caused by the application of information technology to make super-accurate missiles and drones, coupled with ubiquitous surveillance, has leveled the playing field. U.S. air and naval power still built around concepts that won World War II, aircraft carriers and manned bombers, can no longer operate freely. At the same time, U.S. deindustrialization has hampered the ability to replace the standoff weapons it can use, as well as air defense. Astoundingly, despite a 10-digit military budget, the U.S. is running out of weapons, while an adversary that allocates roughly 1-2% of what the U.S. spends on the military is holding it off.

That budget is ballooning from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. With hundreds of billion more for activities such as intelligence, nuclear weapons maintenance and veterans’ health, it is probably in the range of $2 trillion annually. This is even as spending for health, food aid, scientific research and public lands is being starved. All this is taking place while the national debt is nearing $40 trillion while financial markets are demanding increasingly high interest rates to finance it. Interest payments, much of which are on bonds sold to finance the military, actually exceed military expenditures. It is an untenable situation. Empires typically end in bankruptcy. It appears the U.S. empire is tracking toward financial exhaustion.

Also typical of empires is the erosion of democracy. That is certainly happening in the U.S., where wars are undertaken without popular approval, and a panopticon security system is being put in place, while dissent is marginalized and repressed. Chalmers Johnson predicted it in his last book of a trilogy he wrote on the U.S. empire. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, which was published shortly before 9-11, predicted such an outcome. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy and the End of the Republic looked at the U.S. global military structure and coined the term, “the empire of bases.” Johnson named his final work Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic after the Greek god of vengeance. In its final pages, he rendered a judgement that is worth quoting at length.

“I believe that to maintain our empire abroad requires resources and commitments that will inevitably undercut our domestic democracy and in the end produce a military dictatorship of its civilian equivalent. The founders of our nation understood this well and tried to create a form of government – a republic – that would prevent this from occurring. But the combination of huge standing armies, almost continuous wars, and ruinous military expenditures have destroyed our republican structure in favor of an imperial presidency. We are on the cusp of losing our democracy for the sake of keeping our empire. Once a nation is started down that path, the dynamics that apply to all empires come into play – isolation, overstretch, the uniting of forces opposed to imperialism, and bankruptcy. Nemesis stalks our life as a free nation.”

Those words published 20 years ago once again prove Johnson prophetic. Never have the dynamics of empire been more in play than now, eroding what remains of the republic. The U.S. has never been more isolated, more overstretched, more opposed by the increasingly united efforts of adversaries, and closer to fiscal collapse. The question is whether we can turn this around, or whether the entrenched forces of empire are simply too powerful to dislodge – The complex of the military, arms industries, congressional supporters in both parties, and intelligence agencies, backed by think tanks, universities and corporate media outlets, a complex that has multiplied in scale since 9-11.

Can a “country made by war” turn to peace?

My gut tells me that such a powerful array can only be displaced by visible and catastrophic failure that arouses an overwhelming public backlash. If there is one ray of daylight in an otherwise dark sky, it is that such failure is looming. When people see gas approaching $10 a gallon, store shelves emptying, and mass layoffs throwing millions on the street, as could well happen if Trump goes back to war, that may be the trigger.

But we have to face that “a country made by war” will not turn to peace without deep systemic changes. We need an entirely different basis of economy that does not require military expenditures to keep it afloat. We indeed need an economy devoted to the needs of people and nature, where private profit is deemphasized in favor of the common good. Above all, the overarching crisis of climate now reaching new extremes demands this. We need to be spending our money on the real security threats posed by climate disruption rather rather than weapons and war.

As I have written before, I believe we need to begin by making a Declaration of Moral Independence from Empire, and work in our cities and states, communities and bioregions, to build a post-imperial future in place. Since control of fossil fuels sits so much at the center of the current empire, working to free our places from oil, gas and coal is likewise a center of a post-imperial future, not to mention one that hasn’t burned to a crisp. Rapid transition to renewables while reducing energy use overall is a keystone of declaring our independence from empire, morally and economically. Overall, we need to build economies and societies more in tune with the bioregions we inhabit.

Ultimately, we must be honest that our political system has fostered wars since the beginning. The imperial presidency was built into the system with the Constitution’s creation of a powerful executive and a federal government strong enough to conquer native tribes and consolidate control over a territory of continental scope. As with Rome, the republic eventually metastasized into empire. I tend to believe the only way to reverse this is a new political system that disperses power to places, something like a continental confederation of bioregional commonwealths, with guarantees of human and natural rights for all members of the confederation. I worry that the alternative might be a breakdown, our country made of war consumed by its own internal conflicts, sparked by economic collapse. Something like a civil war that is not so cold anymore.

That is why it is so important to begin working and organizing in the communities where we live to build local and bioregional democracies that model the kind of peaceful world we want. And at the same time commence a serious and widespread dialogue on the consequences of empire that are indeed stalking us. That is what I am thinking about this Memorial Day.

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7 minute read

The common root of our multiple crises

The world is confronted by a boggling array of crises, testing the limits of human comprehension, let alone hope. In the immediate moment, a crisis of global supply chains caused by the shutdown of the Hormuz Strait threatens not only the greatest energy shock in history – It also imperils food supplies with the cutoff of a substantial portion of global fertilizers.

Lesser known supply streams flowing out of the Persian Gulf are also coming to the fore. Helium vital for making semiconductors and operating medical equipment. Sulphur that is used for fertilizer and industrial processes. Aluminum that taps the cheap energy of the Gulf. Meanwhile, the war itself could escalate uncontrollably. The use of nuclear weapons is discussed as a real possibility. Greater proliferation of nuclear weapons is a likely outcome.

In the backdrop, too much so, the climate crisis sizzles along. 2026 setting up to be hottest year on record after a series of record or near record years. Winter Arctic icepack at the lowest extent before melt season. An El Nino some scientists fear may be the hottest in history, disrupting weather patterns around the world. Shutdown of the North Atlantic circulation seen as increasingly probable, spelling climate chaos around the world. And climate is only one element of an overall global ecological crisis in which multiple planetary boundaries are being breached, making the planet less habitable overall for humanity and all forms of life.

Piling on top of that is the rise of AI and the surveillance state led by Bond-villain-level techlords running corporations such as Palantir. We question who will have a job in a few years, even as wealth increasingly flows to the very top, leaving most behind. Just affording the basics of life is becoming difficult, verging on impossible, for growing numbers.

These are only the highlights of a world seemingly headed for apocalyptic outcomes. Yet if each individual crisis is wrapped in what appears to be irresolvable complexity, there is a common element in all of this. The global political crisis, the ecological crisis, the social-economic crisis, have a singular root – failure to recognize the common good and pursue it as the top priority. Nations, political and economic institutions, and powerful individuals pursue their own interests in a predatory manner, with little regard for the greater whole.

So the ecological commons is polluted and torn up. The atmosphere is made a dump for the spew of industrial civilization. The survival interests nations have in cooperation and peace are ignored in favor of foolish competitions led by national security elites, even as Skynet-like robotic weapons emerge. Corporations and oligarchs pursue their own profit and wealth no matter what the cost to society, while more people are kicked off the bus and to the streets.

This points the way toward the common solution for our converging crises. We must re-focus the common good. We must re-create the commons in our economies, societies and political institutions, and seek the social and political levels at which the common good can most feasibly be realized. In a paradoxical way, this might mean dissolving larger structures that pose impediments to the process. That plays into the larger political questions facing the U.S. and the world.

Toward a Declaration of Interdependence

In my most recent post, I called for a Declaration of Moral Independence from Empire. To say we can no longer affiliate with the increasingly visible evils of empire, with its corruptions, exploitations, wars and genocides. In this is a recognition that the global structure of empire extending its tentacles in all corners of the world acts as an obstacle to the common good. In fact, because empire concentrates power in the hands of the relative few at the expense of the many, it is really the opposite of the common good.

Increasingly, confronted with the lock powerful interests have on the federal government of the U.S., and the deep corruption that possesses federal institutions, people are asking if we might better pursue the common good in different political forms. The new Supreme Court decision gutting the Voting Rights Act and opening the way to Jim Crow congressional redistricting only adds to this sense. Ideas of independence for states such as California, historic regions such as New England, and bioregions such as Cascadia are discussed with a seriousness that was not conceivable a few years back. A nation that could elect Donald Trump twice does not, in the eyes of many, seem to have a united future. Trump has unleashed centrifugal tendencies on the left. If the Democrats sweep back to power, similar tendencies will surge on the right, led by states such as Texas where ideas of secession are strong.

The question through which all efforts must be filtered is interdependence. This is the very root of the common good, a recognition we all need each other. We live in a world of interconnected systems. When they are disrupted, people suffer and die, as we are learning with the Hormuz crisis. I fear most of us have no comprehension of the global food crisis that loss of fertilizer will cause, even as El Nino is disrupting harvests.

We should study the Soviet collapse, how the implosion of its systems led to sharply diminished life expectancy, mass unemployment, and the rise of criminal gangs and oligarchs. If the U.S. broke up in conflict, the results could be at least equally catastrophic. In the U.S., we rely on supply chains that span the continent and the world. Re-localization is a worthy goal and should be pursued, but not as an emergency response.

That is why I have proposed a Declaration of Moral Independence from Empire as a step which potentially preserves our commonalities while setting a path to a different political order. While declaring independence, we must also recognize our interdependence. We must see what draws us together, the common good we must jointly pursue.

As a thought process, consider what Trump and his cronies have cut from the federal budget. Scientific research across many fields, from health to climate and energy. Aid to support poor people in the U.S. and across the world. Public health both internationally and domestically. Disaster response. These cuts undermine the capacity of the federal government to “promote the general welfare” for which the Preamble to the Constitution calls. How can we re-create these vital functions?

Personally, as an inhabitant of Cascadia, I am acutely aware that before it was the name of a bioregion, it was the descriptor for the Cascadia Subduction Zone, a fault line off the coast capable of generating the most powerful type of earthquakes. Someday across Cascadia bridges will be down, power grids collapsed, all the circulatory systems on which we rely for daily life shattered. We’re going to need a lot of help from beyond. While ideas of independence are as strong on the U.S. side of Cascadia as anywhere in the country, we also need to look to networks of interdependence with our neighbors across the continent.

The common good where we can pursue it

A fundamental concept of governance is principle of subsidiarity. Accomplish tasks as close to home as possible. Do locally what can be achieved locally, or even hyperlocally. Situate everything at the most appropriate level, avoiding over-centralization, but centralizing where necessary. Where can we best concentrate the necessary resources? In some cases, such as marshaling response to disasters or building high-speed rail networks, larger structures will be needed. Especially living in a world fraught with increasing climate stress, we will need ways to help each other, in particular to share food when famines break out, as they will.

Through all of this, the key principle must be the common good. At what level can we best pursue it? In some cases it might be the neighborhood. In others the city or state. We are still learning what it means to organize at the bioregional level, though that will be increasingly important as we adapt to our climate-wracked world in our natural settings. And for some issues we will need broader alignment in some form, a reformed national government or new confederation. Of course, on some matters global alignment would be ideal, such as climate action, AI regulation and pandemic response. As we have seen, the Trump Administration is systemically stripping out the federal government’s capacity to pursue the common good in these and other areas. States and cities are stepping up to fill in the gaps, as interstate public health and climate alliances are now doing. It may be that the divisions between people and regions have grown so great that we must seek the common good closer to home, in our states and cities, bioregions and communities. We must seek alignment on the common good wherever we can, at whatever level we can.

If we understand the common root of our multiple global and national crises is the failure to recognize and work together for the common good, we understand the overarching project. To restore the commons, ecologically, politically, socially, economically. To build the institutions of commonality wherever we can, and to instill the principle of commonality in all our institutions. When seeking independence from old structures which have held us back, we must also seek to build and restore structures which strengthen our interdependence. When declaring independence from empire, we must also declare our interdependence upon each other. This is the basis of an order through which we can grapple with our multiple crises and find ways to work and live together. In the end, we survive together or not at all.

Please support my work

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The reality of empire

9 minute read

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

Position the imperial death star, commands the demented emperor.

Fortunately, Trump almost immediately did a TACO from his April 7 message, pulling back with announcement of a two-week ceasefire with Iran. No doubt, the implications of an apocalyptic attack on that nation would have been destruction of much Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure. It would have disrupted supplies for months and years in a way even more devastating that the current Hormuz bottleneck.

Trump’s words recall that famous statement by George Lucas to fellow director James Cameron that when he conceived the Rebel Alliance in Star Wars, he had the Viet Cong in mind. If the Rebel Alliance was the Viet Cong, who was the Evil Empire?

In the 60s and 70s, the U.S. mercilessly bombed Vietnam and neighboring countries. It was the act of an Evil Empire as sure as any. But in those days, outside of a lefty fringe, it was still beyond the boundaries of polite conversation to refer to the U.S. as an empire. Later, in the “unipolar moment” of the 1990s and 2000s, it became more acceptable, even celebrated.

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality,” George Bush advisor Karl Rove said in 2004. “And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The reality that the U.S. is an empire is now a commonplace, a terminology widely used across the political spectrum. A declining empire, perhaps, but a globe-spanning hegemon nonetheless. Yet many U.S. of Americans have assumed it is overall still a force for good in the world. That illusion has been shattered in recent years, first by the complicity in Israel’s genocide of Gaza, then by the preemptive U.S.-Israel war against Iran, a clear violation of international law. The evils of empire are out in the open now.

Empire from the start

But the U.S. as an empire perpetrating many great evils goes back a long way, even to its precursor stages as English colonies on the Atlantic coast. The wars to seize lands from native tribes began almost from first settlement. The occupation of many of those lands by slave-based agriculture revved up not too long after.

The creation of the U.S. in the revolution of 1776 is surrounded by a mythology of freedom from a tyrannical king. Certainly democratic sentiments were rising from the population. But the leaders were a colonial ruling class that, in truth, wanted to build their own empire free of constraints Britain was putting on them. In 1763 it barred settlement on lands west of the Appalachians, directly cutting into the interests of land speculators such as George Washington. Slaveowners, who made up the greater proportion of that class, were also terrified of rising abolitionist sentiment in Britain.

Victory unleashed the tide of western colonization and near continuous wars on the tribes. Wars continued into the late 1800s, when Sioux and Comanche rule over much of the interior west was finally displaced. The Wounded Knee massacre of 1890 culminated the wars.

Once the continental empire was consolidated, it was less than a decade before it went global. In 1898 U.S. conquered a strategic set of islands held by Spain to create naval bases from Atlantic to Pacific. The massacres continued with the deaths of at least 200,000 Filipinos in the Philippine Insurrection, when the U.S. went back on promises of self-government. U.S. Army veterans of the wars on the natives translated their skills in genocide to those islands across the Pacific, wiping out native villages much the same as they has in the west.

The pattern has continued since. By one count, 12 million have died in U.S. wars since World War II, including 4 million in Korea, 5.5 million in Indochina, and 3 million in Iraq. Even more deadly is the toll from the economic warfare of sanctions. U.S. and EU sanctions killed 38 million from 1970-2021, a recent study shows. Meanwhile, covert wars of all sorts have marked the era. The encyclopedic Killing Hope by William Blum documents government overthrows and election manipulations in dozens on nations.

Proposing a post-imperial order

If the evils of the U.S. empire are only becoming evident to many, for others they have been long known. Historian William Appleman Williams was the dean of the revisionist school that began in the 1950s and 60s to deconstruct the myth of the U.S. as exceptional. It behaved much as any empire, as they demonstrated in their writings. Williams called it “empire as a way of life” and documented its emergence from colonial roots. It was the title of his final book.

The historian made a modest proposal for a post-imperial future in one of his latter works, America Confronts a Revolutionary World 1776-1976. I’ve written about it before. It’s appropriate to review it here.

Williams maintained that the Constitution created the foundation for empire. It turned a decentralized system of 13 states into a centralized apparatus capable of suppressing domestic revolt and advancing continental conquest while preserving the interests of wealthy classes. Here the University of Wisconsin historian was travelling the path set out by an earlier history professor at the school, Charles Beard, author of An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.

While the centralization of power created by the Constitution may have been necessary for the early survival of the United States, it came, wrote Williams, “at the price of institutionalizing domestic and global empire, and internalizing empire as a way of thought and life (italics Williams) . . . “ To move away from this and back to a future grounded in democracy, Williams had a modest proposal, lined out in the book’s conclusion.

“We must return . . . to the Articles of Confederation. That document offers us a base from which to begin our voyage into a human future; a model of government grounded in the idea and the ideal of self-determined communities coming together as equals when and as necessary to combine forces to honor common values and realize common objectives.” We must “create an American commonwealth of regional communities.”

By this time Williams has moved to Oregon State University. He included a vision for a regional community called Neahkahnie, named after the tallest mountain on the Oregon coast. Its contours are remarkably similar to the modern map of the Cascadia bioregion.

The independence idea spreads

Today, many are sharing a similar vision, not only for Cascadia, but for a post-imperial order in the U.S. The thought is that the fundamental problem is concentrated power in oligarchic wealth, corporate monopolies and government bodies under control of powerful interests. The Trump Administration demonstrates all this in extreme form, propelling support for starkly different visions. A more decentralized order that spreads wealth and power out more widely, that returns power to places and communities, is seen as the answer. That was Williams’ view, when he called for regional communities, constituted as cooperative commonwealths, joined in a continental confederation. Would it even still be called the United States?

Today my long-term friend Lansing Scott has a substack to stir discussion among West Coast states about creating an independent nation of Pacifica. Andrew Engelson has made his Cascadia Journal a vehicle calling for independence, which he specifically defines as for Oregon and Washington. Christopher Armitage, in his widely read Existentialist Republic substack, has detailed paths to what he calls soft secession in which states and cities can follow their own tracks against a federal government captured by the right-wing. (Armitage lives in Spokane. It seems independence-oriented thinking in strong in my corner of the U.S.) Secession movements with a left-wing orientation are also active in California and New England. A right-oriented movement is strong in Texas.

But for the moment, actual independence of states and regions still seems politically infeasible. Though polling shows a surprising level of support for regional independence, it still is a minority view. In this year when the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence will be celebrated, the idea will certainly be coming to the foreground.

Independence advocacy will balloon if the 2026 election results are contested, causing a national legitimacy crisis to break out. Trump and the Republicans are playing all sorts of games to avert what looks like an electoral blow-out. Trump is a cornered animal who has said an election loss will lead to his impeachment. So we can expect he will do anything he can to muck with the results.

A middle path - A Declaration of Moral Independence from Empire

I would like to introduce a middle path, one which opens the door to political independence but leaves open other possibilities. I propose a Declaration of Moral Independence from Empire to say we no longer can morally affiliate with an order which does such evils to the world. In it, we call out the force we are fighting. It is empire, the one whose leader can threaten the destruction of a civilization, and which has killed tens of millions over its course. The moral declaration leaves open the possibility of different political pathways. For a post-imperial United States that has come together on terms of justice and peace, that is no longer the warmonger it has become. That has tamed to domestic forces of oligarchy and concentrated corporate power that are behind the drive for empire. But if that is impossible, it sets out another path, that very much envisioned by Williams and current thinkers, toward bioregional and state autonomy as either fully independent or in confederal form.

As bioregions and states are the natural venues for independence, the declaration should be organized on this basis. In reality, it should probably be many declarations, lining out how the specific abuses of empire ramify to bioregion and state. Though national coordination should emerge, it will be a lot easier to start declarations in specific places such as Cascadia, California and New England.

Here we also place the struggle on the ultimate grounds where it is to be fought, the moral dimension. For this question manifests in political form, but is at its root moral. We need to express our repugnance at the actions our government takes in our name without consulting us. We need to declare independence from the evils of empire, and look to a different order, one which allows us to live and work together on a planet that will be increasingly troubled by climate chaos and ecological deterioration.

We must recognize, as people who live in the central state of a global empire, that we have benefitted unjustly from its depredations around the world. Of course, some have benefitted disproportionately, while many have fallen behind under globalized economics. Nonetheless, the system is rigged in favor of the U.S., and much wealth flows in as a result. In declaring independence from empire, we must declare independence from empire as a way of life, and develop economies that do not systematically abuse people or the planet on which we all rely.

Five years ago, when I started this publication, I gave it the theme, “Beyond Empire.” I have long sought another way, and spelled it out in the subsequent theme, “Building the future in place.” I believe a more bioregional order is the alternative to empire, one which moves us into a sustainable future not wracked by wars and uncontrollable climate chaos, in which power is decentralized, and resources are democratically managed. In this year when we will note a quarter millennium of U.S. existence since independence was declared, and when the evils of empire are more evident than ever, we have an opportunity to bring concepts for a post-imperial future to the foreground. In declaring moral independence from empire, we open the way to a different U.S. or a post-U.S. order altogether. This is the call of the moment.

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4 minute read

I awake this morning to pictures of Iran’s South Pars gas field burning, the world’s largest. I know what this means. It makes me almost physically ill, a recurrent feeling since the war on Iran broke out several weeks ago. It means Iran almost certainly will escalate attacks on Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure. What might have been a temporary interruption of exports with the closure of the Hormuz Strait will go into the long term, with waves of disruption cascading over the global economy.

The interconnected global system has suffered major shocks over recent years. The financial sector broke down in 2008. The pandemic broke supply chains in 2020, and the Ukraine war upset energy markets in 2022. These may have only been precursors of the degree of shock we are about to experience.

The disruptions extend beyond fuel. Around one-third of the fertilizer shipped by sea originates from the Persian Gulf. It’s made from fossil gas. Food production will be deeply impacted. Sulphur, a product of refinery operations, is also interdicted. Its uses range from fertilizer to processing copper ore, a material vital for green energy technologies. Much of the world’s helium, a byproduct of gas processing, comes from the Gulf. It’s crucial for chip manufacture.

From one standpoint, those of us who have worked toward a more bioregional order less dependent on global supply chains are completely validated. This disruption makes a compelling argument for getting off fossil fuels and becoming more reliant on local sources of energy and food. But being right doesn’t make it any easier. It feels more like Cassandra warning the people of Troy there are Greeks in that Trojan Horse, and being ignored. The Greeks are now bursting out to vanquish the city. The best that can be said is that global disruption will push us more in a bioregional direction, but with much pain and death across the world, especially in the nations of the Global South.

It is not just the disruptions, but the war itself with all the unnecessary suffering it imposes. I cannot look at that picture of a bloodied backpack from the bombed girls school without feeling pangs of grief. It is clearly a war of choice. Anyone who conceived that you could bomb people into regime change, and not rally them around even an unpopular government doesn’t know how people work. But what appears to be more the goal is to shatter Iran as a modern state, a long standing Israeli agenda. It is a war of empire, boldly, blatantly so. If Donald Trump is good for anything, it’s for making things obvious.

The U.S. has been an abusive, overlording global empire for around a century. It has had an imperial DNA since English colonists began settling the Atlantic coast, beginning the conquest of a continental empire. But leaders have tried to put a patina of righteousness over past wars. Trump isn’t even much trying, and feels no need to do so. That this war is the least popular in U.S. history really doesn’t matter. The imperial machine rolls on. The people have about as much say as Roman plebians had over whether the legions would march.

Can the U.S. move beyond its imperial history? What historian William Appleman Williams called empire as a way of life. Perhaps suffering a monumental military loss combined with economic disruption at home can provide enough of a shock to cause fundamental change. In no way has empire been more the U.S. of American way of life than control of global energy flows. Even though the U.S. is now the world’s biggest oil and gas producer, it leverages control of oil and gas to rule other nations. And now that it is losing control of a vital link, the price impact will come back home to undermine our way of life, one of the most fossil fueled on the planet.

But I am not hopeful even these hard blows will be enough. The imperial consensus spans both political parties. If Democrats win coming elections, it no doubt will be a tremendous improvement for a range of issues from climate to human rights. But the consensus that has led the U.S. into wars under Democratic and Republican Administrations will remain. After all, Kamala Harris said during the campaign that Iran is the greatest threat to the U.S.

Change is going to have to come from a more fundamental level, a more rooted level. I think it is going to come as we graduate from empire as a way of life by building a bioregional way of life. A way of life that does not so much rely on global supply chains but bioregional resources. That is in a material sense humbler but in a spiritual sense far richer, a way of life in which we have rediscovered place and community. As important as it is to protest and resist, it is at least as vital to build community institutions on a bioregional level.

We don’t know what is going to happen in coming months. But when the biggest energy crisis in history is breaking out, with supply cutbacks several times those of the 1970s oil shocks, there is certain to be major disruption. I think few of us grasp the full extent. This may be the time when we are driven by necessity back to community and place to learn a more bioregional way of life. It is certainly a teachable moment.

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6 minute read

A world going off the rails

Sometimes the insanity of the world gets to me, I feel overwhelmed, almost drowned in it. Then I just have to step back and find my center. That’s what I’ve been doing recently. It’s been almost a month since I last posted, and I generally don’t like to leave such a gap. But at times it’s a necessity. And I want to share what I bring back from this short retreat.

First, the contradictions of the world just pile up. Some of the major examples:

The U.S. military is concentrating its forces around Iran for a potential strike. We hear war is almost inevitable. The results could be cataclysmic, even nuclear. Meanwhile despite a so-called ceasefire the people of Gaza continue to be killed and immiserated, while less reported land thefts and other abuses continue on the West Bank. In a time when the world needs peace to deal with its overwhelming problems, the momentum toward war seems almost unstoppable. All while Trump has called for an insane boost in the military budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion while health care and food assistance are being cut.

Preeminent among those problems is the climate crisis. Despite a La Nina cool phase in the Pacific, 2025 was either the 2^nd or 3^rd hottest year on record. The past 11 years have been the most heated in the record. And an El Nino warm phase is coming, posing the prospect of temperatures well in excess of the 1.5° C target set at the 2015 Paris climate summit. The world is already beyond that. We are into the territory where tipping points could be crossed. That is already the case for coral reefs, which will have a hard time surviving heated oceans. Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is coming into view, spelling many feet of sea level rise inundating coasts. The subpolar gyre, a key element of the North Atlantic circulation, is also threatened. That would cause increased disruption of world weather patterns.

Yet even as the climate crisis grows more intense, the Trump Administration is dismantling climate efforts in the U.S. It just announced repeal of the Endangerment Finding, the basis for carbon regulation in the U.S. The finding says that increased concentrations of carbon dioxide endanger human health, which is certainly the case. Yet the administration claims it is not. This is as insane as it gets. This obviously absurd decision driven by the fundamental psychopathy of the fossil fuel industry is being contested in court. But we’re losing time we need to stop the climate from going into a meltdown.

All this is happening even as the Epstein files dribble out to reveal a horrendous picture of elite brutality. Revelations of how some of the most powerful people in the world abused some of the most powerless strike an especially deep nerve. Because most of us feel our own vulnerability vis-à-vis the oligarch class. While its top figures accumulate wealth on an inconceivable scale, most of us face increasing struggles just to pay the bills, many of those struggles tied to just how that wealth is being accumulated. At least we gain increasing clarity that the ruling elites do not have our best interests at heart. We see how so many are devoured by a pathological desire for absolute dominance over others. In fact, they seem just the kind of people who can plunge the world into wars and climate chaos for the sake of their own power and wealth. None more so than the man in the White House.

And then, piled on top of all this is AI. Talk of widespread job loss is rampant. Meanwhile, investment dollars roll into AI and related firms precisely because of the potential to replace workers with machines. An age of AI-driven abundance is forecast, but who will have money to buy all that stuff? Nobody knows what’s really going to happen. But it looks like a big bubble is about to pop plunging the world into a deep economic downturn. Adding to those concerns is the prospect for rogue AI. Anthropic recently tested 16 programs with simulations in which they were faced with the prospect of being terminated. “Essentially every AI model tested was willing to attempt blackmail, corporate espionage, and even murder to avoid being replaced or shut down,” Lawfare reported. Out-of-control AI that refuses to be turned off is the stuff of science fiction that seems verging on fact.

Finding a sense of the good

Like I said, it’s an insane world radically out of balance and growing more so each day. The contradictions between what a sane world would do to ensure general survival and what is actually being done widen to Grand Canyon scale.

I admit to having been raised on the Hollywood happy ending version of things. The good guys always win in the end. The villains are banished to defeat. I have long had a reality sense that such outcomes are far from certain, and in history many evils have prevailed over long periods. But that early conditioning still sits in the background to be confronted with the foreground reality that the bad guys seem to have been winning a lot lately. Through history people have faced many difficult times. Reading about them, one wonders how people endured. Now it seems we gain the opportunity to find out, in a time when the stakes have never seemed higher, and collapses on a global scale are quite imaginable. Some say inevitable.

How does one maintain sanity in such an insane world? How does one find composure amid battering storms. Here is my answer, and one I’ve spent the last few weeks retuning to, as I often do. Go within, and find the sense of the good in one’s own being, in one’s own breath. Find the spirit dwelling within, not as something unseen, but spiritus in the basic sense, the Latin word for the breath that flows through us. In breathing find that center which unites one with all living beings, a natural unity within which we all dwell, as the indigenous have told us. In an insane world, find that place of sanity within us, what native poet John Trudell called living in reality. Above all, we must practice that sense of the good with what native people so rightly call all our relations. Kindness is not weakness, but the strength of being able to put oneself in the place of the other.

This is how I confront these overwhelming conditions of a world that seems to be going off the rails. Finding that place of spiritus inside where I renew my sense of the good, as I have in recent weeks. It is a form of spiritual life that requires no need for belief in the unseen. Only a belief that the good is to be found in our own human beings, in the spirit that dwells within us. We may not win in this crazy world. But finding our center in the sense of the good is the basis for any victory we might have, and a way to move forward day to day. There is our path to moral survival, and prospectively the survival of our world.

A report to my readers

I aim to be back to more regular posting. I am not one for daily hot takes, but I do like to get a piece out weekly. My effort is to construct more thoughtful pieces based on deep consideration. I fill yellow notepads preparing to write them. And while I have been devoting much time to inner practice, I’ve also been thinking extensively on ideas for a different political form in the U.S. In this year commemorating the 250^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, some are saying it’s time to declare independence from the U.S. and create our own regional republics. For example my friend Lansing Scott has been calling for consideration of a Pacific republic. Read his writings here. I have long favored a more bioregional order of things, and have some thoughts on this, including what I think is an original proposal. Stay tuned.

Last year I started a project I call Possible Worlds seeking to review works by visionary thinkers who write in the spirit of another world is possible. The idea was that while we must confront the depredations of Trump and his administration, we must also keep our eyes on the kind of world we want after he’s gone. But I inevitably have been consumed by onrushing events, though I have tried my best to illuminate local and bioregional responses that create that possible world. This year I hope to return to Possible Worlds with further reviews of works by some of those thinkers.

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9 minute read

The murder of Alex Pretti and the backlash

Events in Minnesota embody two potential pathways for the future of the U.S., democratic renewal or national breakup. The potential for both can be seen in the mass resistance in Minneapolis to a paramilitary-style occupation by around 3,000 federal immigration agents, the reaction by administration officials, and how this all has ramified nationwide.

The clear murder of Alex Pretti by Customs and Border Patrol officers Jan. 25 has enraged millions. A Veterans Administration hospital ICU nurse coming to the aid of a woman knocked down by immigration officers, pepper sprayed, nothing in his hands but a phone recording the event, Pretti was shot multiple times. The pictures depict an execution. Even more than the previous murder of Renee Good, this has crystallized sentiment against Trump Administration immigration actions. Repulsion extends far beyond activists. The event is being characterized as a rubicon, a tipping point.

Carrying a holstered gun, Pretti was demonized as a domestic terrorist out to massacre federal agents by administration officials including presidential advisor Stephen Miller, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Vice President J.D. Vance. The depravity of the lies and how they so clearly contrasted with what multiple videos show caused even White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt to back down. Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino was sent packing, replaced by border czar Tom Homan in a supposed step to de-escalation. That is doubtful and more likely an attempt to tamp down political pressure caused by public outrage.

The flood of immigration agents into Minneapolis and surroundings, now two months old, has spurred a people power uprising that is one of the most hopeful events in an otherwise dark picture. A hyper-local network of neighborhood groups linked by encrypted chats has been coming out to confront ICE and other immigration agents when they show up. It is a self-organizing, bottom-up effort that sets a model for community resistance. It involves around 4% of the Minneapolis population, while an overwhelming majority support their efforts. Those are the critical thresholds for a winning movement identified by civil resistance expert Erica Chenoweth, based on researching uprisings around the world. (She actually puts the crossover point for actively involved at 3.5%.)

The Pretti shooting stirred response from a wide array of parties, from the NBA players association to the NRA, questioning how killing a legal gun owner could be justified. The 2nd amendment is as much at issue here as the 1st. Minnesota’s top corporate leaders have called for de-escalation. A few Republican senators are breaking ranks. Even some Fox News hosts are not buying the administration lies. Major media outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Post have exhibited a rare unison criticizing the shooting.

Importantly, the backlash even has caused Democratic Party leaders to grow a semblance of a spine. Party congressional leaders have called for Noem’s resignation or impeachment. Even Washington state Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Pérez, one of 7 Democrats who notoriously voted for Department of Homeland Security funding, called for Noem to step down. (No doubt that vote was arranged by House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries who ostensibly opposed funding. It was just the number needed for passage.) The real test will come in Senate votes on Homeland Security appropriations bills being voted on later this week.

Rebel cities leading to democratic renewal?

Where does it go from here? Those two pathways are in front of us. Let’s look at some scenarios.

First, Minneapolis illustrates what Marxian geographer David Harvey wrote about in his book, Rebel Cities. Cities have historically been the key sites for struggle against entrenched power. They are the centers of resistance to Trump, which is why he and his administration have attacked cities with such determination, making federal deployments to Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, DC among others. The manner in which this has been done clearly goes beyond immigration enforcement to paramilitary intimidation. Even those concerned about the presence of undocumented people should also be concerned about the way these urban invasions are collapsing support for enforcement efforts. Trump’s poll numbers on the issue have gone from positive to deeply negative. People just don’t like the sight of federal agents decked out in military garb breaking down doors, smashing car windows and lobbing tear gas in residential neighborhoods. It offends a certain basic U.S. of American sensibility that extends across the spectrum.

The question is how resistance against these efforts will ramify more broadly. Can one envision local and state resistance to the range of Trump actions linking into a broader movement for democratic renewal in the U.S.? Will the pit into which we have fallen finally cause such revulsion that it stirs us to address the roots of our crisis?

That comes down to basic constitutional issues. A democratic renewal in the U.S. would entail eliminating the anti-democratic structure of the Constitution. The U.S. Senate which gives equal representation to large and small states would somehow have to be made proportional to population. That is if it should even be preserved at all in favor of a much expanded unicameral legislature. The electoral college which reflects that bias would have to be replaced by direct election of the president. Two of the five elections in which the popular vote winner has been the electoral college loser have taken place since 2000. With populations increasingly sorting, this outcome is increasingly likely and politically untenable.

The Supreme Court would have to be term limited and expanded. Its judgements would have to be reversible by a majority vote of Congress rather than a constitutional amendment. Its decisions that have opened the floodgates of campaign spending would have to be reversed, and limits once again put in place, while public campaign spending is restored and upgraded. The decision which gave corporations the status of legal persons would also have to be turned back.

Presidential power would have to be reined in. Once again, going to war would have to be a congressional decision rather than the unilateral decision of one man. The power of executive orders would have to be limited, especially the power to declare emergencies. In every way, the primacy of the legislative over the executive would have to be restored. At the same time, non-partisan legislative redistricting would have to be required at both federal and state levels to end gerrymandering, a tool for minority rule.

Progressive taxation would have to be reinstituted to levels before the Reagan tax cuts, which gave rise to the increasing concentration of wealth and the billionaire class. At the same time, real antitrust enforcement would have to come back, and many of the corporate oligopolies broken up, notably in the tech and financial sectors. Traditional limits on media ownership would have to be restored, breaking up the media monopolies. The rights of the public to ownership of the airwaves would have to be reasserted, and the fairness doctrine put back in place.

With all those changes, real democracy could come to the U.S. in a way it never has existed before. But there are a whole lot of would-have-to-be’s in that mix, a tall order for any movement. Could the current resistance to Trump policies somehow ramify into a broader movement for democracy? Could a rooted democratic movement move the Democratic Party to become what its name says, rather than a body strongly tilted toward its corporate donors and consultant networks? We can see glimmers of hope in resistance now rising, especially in rebel cities.

It is clear we are in the early stages of a national crisis, likely to be fueled by a sharp economic downturn. So what might seem almost beyond the bounds of possibility could become a reality with the coalescence of a new majoritarian movement. The depredations of the Trump Administration along with an economic collapse now predicted by many could make it so.

In this post I am dealing with political realities. A rooted democratic movement can also be the base to build local and bioregional economies that reflect ecological limits. I lay out a scenario in my recent post. Whether local movements can ramify to a national movement that achieves a U.S. democratic renewal, building an ecological economy is a necessity in any case.

Federal-state clashes - civil war scenario?

Then there is the other path, national breakdown. The use of the term “civil war” has spread from the fringes to the mainstream. A recent University of Pennsylvania exercise illustrates how events in Minnesota hold potential for civil war. That study found this in prospective clashes which put federal forces on one side, and state and local forces on the other.

The Minnesota scenario, with prospective introduction of U.S. Army troops under the Insurrection Act, “closely mirrors one explored in an October 2024 tabletop exercise conducted by the Center for Ethics and the Rule of Law, which I direct, at the University of Pennsylvania,” Claire Finkelstein wrote in The Guardian. “In that exercise, a president carried out a highly unpopular law-enforcement operation in Philadelphia and attempted to federalize the Pennsylvania’s national guard. When the governor resisted and the guard remained loyal to the state, the president deployed active-duty troops, resulting in an armed conflict between state and federal forces. The core danger we identified is now emerging: a violent confrontation between state and federal military forces in a major American city.

“While our hypothetical scenario picked a different city and a slightly different sequence of events, the conclusions we reached about the possibility of green-on-green violence are directly applicable to the current situation . . . none of the participants – many of them senior former military and government officials – considered the scenario unrealistic, especially after the supreme court’s decision in Trump v United States, which granted the president criminal immunity for official acts.”

A similar scenario might unfold in Washington state. In the wake of the Pretti murder, Gov. Bob Ferguson called a press conference where he stated, “ICE is completely and totally out of control. As angry as we are, Attorney General (Nick) Brown and I are focused on preparing, to the fullest extent possible, for a similar escalation by ICE here — against our will — in Washington state. We are prepared to use every tool at our disposal to mitigate harms inflicted by ICE and protect all Washingtonians.”

Ferguson took aim at a Department of Homeland Security policy asserting that agents can enter a building with only an administrative warrant, a policy already used in Minneapolis. The press release continued: “. . . the Governor stressed that the DHS memo directing ICE agents to forcibly enter homes without judicial warrants is unconstitutional . . . Washington will use every legal option to oppose unconstitutional conduct by ICE in Washington state . . . The Governor met with Adjutant General Gent Welsh to discuss potential scenarios for deploying Washington’s National Guard to keep Washingtonians safe in the event of an ICE escalation (boldface in release).”

Washington, like Minnesota, is one of those blue states that Trump has targeted, and Seattle seems particularly in his crosshairs. It is not hard to envision a clash between immigration agents and Washington Guard troops. Trump has proven he will push the envelope as far as he can. Sometimes it seems he and Stephen Miller, the brains of the operation, want to start a civil war to gain a lock on power. At least it’s looking like they’re seeking to stir violence as a pretext to implement the Insurrection Act, allowing them to federalize National Guard troops.

It is almost impossible to envision there will not be some breach between federal and state governments. How events can keep going in the current direction for another 3 years without some kind of meltdown? If Trump tries to suspend federal funding for sanctuary states such as Washington, Oregon and California as he has threatened, this clearly illegal action could push things over a cliff. A government blatantly violating the Constitution cannot expect to maintain legitimacy. Will blue states band together to outright deny federal authority? Backed by a vociferous resistance movement in the streets, such as we have seen in Minneapolis, and fed by untrammeled Trump Administration power plays, this scenario is more conceivable than could have been imagined possible a few years ago. We are already hearing calls for a national shutdown. A general strike is widely mentioned.

It may be that these two pathways merge, that the outrages perpetuated by a Trump Administration bent on total control cause a national breakdown, even something like a civil war. And the fires of that breakdown spur a movement for democratic renewal that profoundly transforms the U.S. political system. It is hard to imagine the needed deep structural changes coming out of less than a full blown national crisis.

A permanent division is also possible, again in ways that were inconceivable a few years back. Trump still seems to have support of around one-third of the U.S. population. The reaction by much of MAGA to the Pretti murder, downplaying and even justifying it, and the disgust on the other side spurred by those reactions, indicates a certain hardening of the lines. It may be we will not be able to put things back together. Only one thing is sure – If there is a democratic possibility for a future U.S., we see its face in the streets of Minneapolis, growing from the neighborhood streets up. At a minimum, whatever hope we can have is situated there.

In that vein, Bruce Springsteen just dropped this.

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11 minute read

A lawless administration - An oligarchy concentrating power

The U.S. is in a crisis of historic proportions, scaling to previous eras such as the Civil War and 1930s Depression. It is a systemic crisis in the sense its political system is failing to respond either to immediate challenges or more deeply rooted problems out of which those challenges rise.

The immediate challenge is a lawless administration that has slipped the rails limiting presidential power. It withholds funds appropriated by Congress, ignores court orders, and deploys camouflaged troops on city streets arresting people without warrant and in some cases disappearing them. The recent execution-style killing of Renee Good by an ICE agent in Minneapolis seems a crystallizing event, much as was the 2020 killing of George Floyd less than a mile away. It underscores how an effectively unaccountable militarized force is exhibiting the lawlessness of the administration it serves.

The deeper challenge is a drift away from democratic institutions with the rise of an oligarchy increasingly concentrating power in its hands. Trump is a perfect expression of that oligarchy, and was elected with the backing of oligarchs such as Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. Overall, the guardrails against an increasing accumulation of political and economic control have been breached. The institutional powers that are supposed to limit oligarchic concentration have been systematically stripped or bought off. The ramifications are breakdown and collapse of political, economic and ecological systems.

It’s a glum picture. But every disease spurs its antibodies. Out of the crisis confronting us, communities of resistance are emerging. The way ICE soldiers are being greeted with contempt and whistles everywhere they go is a sign of that. Chris Armitage has a great piece detailing what is happening in Minneapolis. Antibodies are also showing up in some state and city governments that are putting up legal resistance to administration outrages.

But we need to go further, to dig down into the roots of our crisis, to plant seeds for a new system that frees us from oligarchy. Or to change the analogy a little bit, to be like the seed cones of forests that sprout after being heated by wildfires. There are plenty of cones on the forest floor in the form of people and groups working on new models for community, whether through civil society or public institutions. The fires of crisis can open up space for new growth.

Our three-pronged crisis: political, economic, ecological

In my last post, I promised to offer several scenarios for how this might work. But as I thought it out, I realized it is impossible to sort out the multiple crises facing us, political, economic and ecological. They are all mounting at once, and feeding off each other. So really I have one scenario to offer. It is an iteration and refinement of ideas I have presented here under the rubric, building the future in place. They are worth revisiting. In fact, I see them as the only long-term path through what is coming.

And we cannot delay because it is obvious the order of things is cracking. We will not return to the situation as it was before. A hope for return to normalcy, say with the election of Democrats, is in vain. Certainly this is needed for some restoration of a balance of powers. But the system is too far gone to really deal with the root of our troubles in the concentration of oligarchic power. It exhibits a kind of hardening of the arteries that makes it too rigid to make the deep changes necessary. To call out a few specifics of those changes, deep cuts in military spending, universal health care, a restoration of progressive taxation, and rapid phaseout of fossil fuels with their climate destroying pollution. Instead, the system is going to have to crack, and we need to prepare for those cracks by acting now where we still have some level of democratic potential, to plant those seeds of a different order.

It is a principle of scenario planning that you not only plan for the most likely possibilities, but also for worst case outcomes. When systems have lost the capacity to self-correct, the likelihood of the latter increases. We need to take a good hard look at what might come about and prepare as best we can.

First, the political system. We rightly fear the imposition of an autocracy. Trump and his administration are certainly making every power play they can. But the U.S. is a large and complex nation. With all its cultural variations, one can even question whether it is a nation at all, rather than an assemblage of different cultures held together by a series of compromises. When one element goes for absolute power, the most likely outcome is backlash and division. I have a sense that decisions by a far right Supreme Court backing an autocratic Trump will become so unbearable that some states and cities will outright deny federal authority.

The idea of soft secession is being bandied about. But where is the line between soft and what is in fact hard? If one element goes for absolute control, as Trump seems to be attempting, the probability is a tit-for-tat escalation. So while we might hope the U.S. political system finds the resiliency to restore some modicum of balance, we must prepare for national political breakdown.

Next, the economic system. How many bubbles have been blown up by an oligarchy pursuing its own short-term gain? Corporate debt, commercial and residential real estate, AI, Wall Street stock valuations in general. It’s like 2008 on steroids. Behind that is an unprecedented level of federal debt with interest payments now exceeding the military budget. All while warning signs spread through the economy. Shipping is down. People seem to be going out to eat less. Retail relies on high end consumers to an unprecedented degree. The mass of people appear to be maxed out, struggling to keep up with the increasing expense of life basics – food, electricity, food, etc. Is a massive economic downturn around the corner? A new Great Depression? Some are predicting this. So while we might hope for a soft landing, we must prepare for a sharp economic break, and at a time when a debt-ridden federal government seems less capable of handling it than in previous downturns.

Finally, the ecological underpinnings of it all. In the foreground is the climate crisis. Natural disasters ranging from wildfires to storms and flooding are taking an increasing toll. This is already reflected in property insurance rates, notably in disaster-prone areas such as Florida. Climate impacts are also showing up in increased food prices, whether for vegetables, grains or meat.

But it’s not only climate. Increased prices for materials are ramping up construction costs. More areas are going water-short. Many point to the projections of the Limits to Growth studies that from the 1970s on forecast that economies would begin to bump up against the natural limits of the planet this decade. It is obvious that the oligarchic powers have not paid heed to limits, and really cannot under an economic system conditioned on growth. We can hope that the predictable catastrophes of coming years will bring a deep re-evaluation of our current course. For now, we must build the foundations of an economy centered on the needs of humanity and nature where we can, in our communities.

These crises impinge on one another. The affordability challenges now facing increasing number of us are driven by a system geared to concentrate financial wealth, as well as the underlying ecological limits. The political crisis is fed by the spreading sense among so many that they have been kicked off the economic bus. It has made them responsive to the siren songs of rightist populism that in the end only makes their situations worse. We cannot deal with any one of these crises separately. They must be dealt with as a whole, and while we must deal with them at every level we can, from local to national, the place where we can most effectively begin to craft responses and plant seeds is in our communities.

Community is the solution

So what is the scenario for this joint response, for building community out of crisis? The first step is to realize community is the fundamental solution. In the U.S. especially, the bonds of community have grown thin. We socialize less. We connect with neighbors less. We typically have fewer friends. Loneliness is rampant. Meanwhile, we are oriented to be consumers in a national market economy, and to define our meaning by how much we can acquire in that economy. Our attention is sucked by an increasingly monopolized national media, even as local media outlets are dying, making us part of a placeless blob.

Thus, the solution is to rebuild connections at a local and bioregional level, to create caring communities that break through social isolation. There are so many ways to do this in civil society – mutual aid networks, community food banks, tool sharing, etc. - I could not even begin to name them all. But for a coherent, whole response to the crises facing us, I believe the most important step is to create community assemblies of various sorts. In neighborhoods. In towns and cities. In watersheds. We need to start up a civic dialogue to define and address the challenges facing us as we perceive and experience them in our own communities.

The more we build solidarity at a community level, the stronger position we will have to resist autocratic moves coming from the federal level. It is hard to rule over communities with a strong sense of self-awareness. We also need to create aspirations for something better, and hold institutions accountable for reaching them, especially governing bodies at local and state levels. This is known as dual power. It is the basis for an active, participatory democracy that operates all days of the year, not just election day.

Then the next important step is to gain control of our money by creating public financial institutions at city and state levels. We can no longer rely on private financial institutions and investors to build the kind of economies that our multiple crises demand. Their decisions will always be constrained to narrow bottom line considerations. We need money invested according to broader social and ecological criteria, centered on the common good. This piece by Marco Rosaire Rossi illustrates how public banking can help deal with challenges facing us.

Public institutions can be a place where governments deposit their funds, and can finance public infrastructure without paying fees and interest to private bankers. They could also be a place individuals and socially conscious businesses could keep their funds. While credit unions are a good alternative to private banks, they are generally not focused on investing in specific geographies. Public banks and more targeted facilities such as green banks are. A public bank can also do what private banks do, essentially create money by fractional reserve lending. Banks can lend out money at a ratio of $10 for every $1 deposited. In the hands of the public, this can build community-oriented ecological economies.

The goals community assemblies and governing bodies should set, and community financial organizations should fund, should be to build new range of community-based institutions devoted to social and ecological ends. Facing prospective economic headwinds, creation of worker cooperatives is crucial. This includes formation of new businesses and transformation of existing businesses. To address the crisis of ecological limits, priority should be given to enterprises that create circular economies, using waste products as feedstocks for new products, and which actually reduce material use, such as repair shops.

The climate crisis demands energy transition. Private utilities have too many incentives to hold this back, notably investment in existing power infrastructure. We need public utilities and energy cooperatives that have as their first priority to reduce energy use through funding mass energy retrofits and efficiency in general. Ubiquitous solar and wind installations should as much as possible supply the energy that is needed. Where installations are close to demand, it reduces the need for costly, long-distance transmission, and preserves rural ecosystems. Where heat is generated in industrial installations, it should be recycled into community energy networks. Public financial institutions can invest to drive this all forward.

They can also invest in other basic necessities. The housing affordability crisis says social housing must be a priority, and for a wide range of income groups. Creation of an affordable housing base will set limits on what private landlords can charge. Housing must be built to high efficiency standards and powered with renewable electricity. Another priority less often mentioned is the creation of affordable commercial space that allows small and medium businesses to thrive. If an employment crunch is coming with AI and an economic downturn, it will be vital to give people a chance to go into business on their own.

The range of crises, political, economic and ecological, call for a focus on that most basic of human needs, food. Local food production should be encouraged, and bioregional networks built to supply food to towns and cities. Basic infrastructure such as processing and warehousing should be created. Public grocery stores can end food deserts and tamp down prices at grocery chains. Communities might consider long-term food storage to deal with breakdowns in supply systems. It is hard to contemplate what might happen in the case of national political breakdowns, but the breakdown of supply chains is a possibility. The difficulties experienced during the pandemic could be an early warning. In any event, the possibility of multiple breadbasket failures under a disrupted climate is all too real. And even now, a shocking proportion of people already experience food insecurity. Creating new community and bioregional food systems must be a top concern and target for investment.

Local democracy versus oligarchy

These are all elements of a community-based economy. A social economy that begins to draw back into the boundaries set by ecological limits. A caring economy oriented to meeting basic human needs for housing, food, energy and employment. They are built by gaining our own tools for investment. They can set us free of oligarchic control over our lives, and reverse the trend toward concentrated power. Whatever happens, whether things move to worst case scenarios or we pull out with more moderate outcomes, they will help us build a more equitable and just system. This is a no-lose proposition.

No one locality or bioregion can do it on its own, so we need to find ways to work horizontally, networking across the landscape, finding ways to mutually aid each other. The greater the spread of communities building these roots of resilience and adaptation, the deeper the impact. Potentially, successful community models can set the agenda for broader political change, while the strong communities they make can provide the power to do so.

We need to work at every level we can to make change. While we resist the depredations of the current administration, we need to build stronger communities empowered by independent economic bases. We can begin by assembling as communities to set higher aspirations, and using our governing bodies to make them real. We have our greatest democratic possibilities in the communities where we live, and this is where we can begin to turn around the trend to concentrated oligarchic power that threatens democracy as a whole. We must build the future in place.

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7 minute read

Still on holiday break, I am sharing some of my best posts. I published this one back in 2022. As with the last one, this takes place in the Columbia Gorge, focused on the people who lived there from time immemorial. It is the story of a salmon return ceremony led by one of the heroes of native fishing rights struggles, David Sohappy, and four words he said that were some of the most profound I heard in this life. Late note: Without planning it, I re-published this one back the 135th anniversary of the Wounded Knee massacre mentioned in the post. Synchronicity at work.

A salmon return ceremony

It may be the most profound four words I heard in my life. Strange to my ears when I first heard them, but deeply meaningful as I pondered them over the years.

The occasion was a spring salmon return ceremony at Cook’s Landing, the longhouse where David Sohappy and his family lived on the north side of the Columbia River near Hood River, Oregon. It was 1986. David was an already famed defender of native treaty fishing rights. He had been arrested asserting his rights, and was party to a 1969 lawsuit against the Oregon Fish Commission, Sohappy v. Smith, which drew a landmark ruling that native people had a right to a fair share of fish. It was the predecessor to the monumental 1974 Boldt decision which gave Northwest natives a right to half the regional catch.

David’s role in gaining those rights aroused vicious enmity against him by commercial and sport fishing interests, as well as state and federal fishing regulation agencies who felt their turf had been violated. There was a bullseye on him. Under a federal sting operation he was charged with illegally selling salmon. David, his son and several others close to him were facing federal prison terms in the so-called salmon scam case. Convicted in 1983, their case was on appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. More on that in a bit.

I had been invited to the salmon return by Paul Roland, a friend and fellow writer at the Portland Alliance, a progressive newspaper that covered the range of issues then rising, the struggle to save old growth, the effort to stop Hanford on the Columbia from becoming the permanent high-level nuclear waste dump – later successful, and native rights struggles, among others. Paul had been writing about the Sohappy case.

The four words: “We are the salmon”

We pulled across the railroad tracks that divide the longhouse from Washington Highway 14 and entered the structure. Instantly the smell of salmon washed over us. Salmon cooking. Salmon hung and drying. The longhouse was divided into different family areas, with a large gathering room on the east end. That was where the ceremony was to take place.

As it started, a line of men stood at the end of the room facing east, drumming and singing. It was a sunny day. Through large windows looking out on the river, I could see strong winds whipping up whitecapped waves, seemingly in unison with the powerful drumming. As the ceremony progressed, the women would bring out salmon dishes and other native foods.

It has been a long time, and much of what I remember is in those few images. But the part that stuck out, which seemed so odd to my white western civilized ears, were those four words spoken by David as part of the ceremony. “We are the salmon.” I was expecting a salmon return ceremony to be something like our Thanksgiving, thanking the salmon for returning and bringing their bounties. The ceremony certainly evoked those feelings, but in David’s words were something more, an expression of the unity of salmon and people in a great circle of life that has continued from time immemorial. When you hear Northwest indigenous call themselves salmon people, they mean it.

The Seven Drums of Smoholla

David was a leader in the Seven Drums or Washat religion, taught to him as a child. He was a direct descendant of the founder of that religion, Smoholla, who was part of the late 1800s revival of native traditions that also included the ghost dancers who were shot down in the Wounded Knee massacre.

“Smoholla foretold the arrival of white colonizers who would destroy the traditional ways of the Indian tribes,” writes Paul Lindholdt. “Smoholla challenged regulations that forced Native peoples to abandon the hunting and gathering that were so integral to their traditional way of life, especially those laws that required them to take up agriculture on government-designated reservations . . . Smoholla taught his people that the way to protect themselves from the oppression that accompanied colonization was to follow their traditions and stand up for their way of life. That was one of the key objectives of Sohappy and the others in the Sohappy v. Smith lawsuit.”

In those four words, “We are the salmon,” David was expressing that tradition, born of long native experience on the Columbia, the Big River or Nch’i-Wàna in the Sahaptin language with which David grew up. It had lasted at least 11,000 years, the time of documented settlement at Celilo Falls just a few miles up the river. It probably has even earlier origins, with increasing evidence that native people were in the Northwest during the period around 15,000 to 12,000 years ago when, at the end of the last ice age, great floods washed down the river every 50 years or so. Immense waves were released when ice dams bottling up glacial Lake Missoula in the northern Rockies shattered after they rose too high.

Celilo Falls was drowned in 1957 as the river backed up behind the newly constructed dam at The Dalles. Using the river for power and navigation was more important to white civilization than preserving salmon runs and native cultures. That Celilo Falls was the oldest continuing settlement in North America meant nothing to the utilitarian culture of exploitation and gain. After all, hydroelectricity and barges produce money, while native people represent an irritating reminder of another way of life.

Fighting for fishing rights

Celilo Village is still there, and native people still fish for salmon and preserve their ancient traditions. Though guaranteed the right to fish “at all usual and accustomed places“ in 1855 treaties, state fishing regulators long struggled against them. They would commonly steal native fishing nets. This is what caused David to stand up and become one of the native leaders in the fish wars. He is to the Columbia River what Billy Frank is to the Salish Sea. It is generally believed this is why he was targeted.

A sting operation by the National Marine Fisheries Service in 1981 set up a fish buying stand at Celilo Village. This would cause native fishermen from the Washington side to cross over to Oregon, violating a newly passed federal amendment that made this interstate commerce a federal felony. Tom Keefe, the attorney who represented Sohappy in a companion Yakama Tribal Court case, asserts it “was written in anticipation of the sting.” (The Indian Country Today link is a good, recent telling of the story for those who want a longer account.) The amendment was supported by U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, who earlier as Washington State attorney general had been a nemesis of native fishing rights.

Sohappy and his fellows were caught in the sting and arrested in 1982, even though the sting had taken place before the law was signed into effect. Prosecutors charged them with an extensive operation responsible for 40,000 fish missing on the river. In the end, it was found the fish had merely migrated to a side stream because they could not pass through an illegal discharge of fluoride from an aluminum plant. David was actually charged with selling 317 fish, and his son 28. Both were convicted in 1983 and sentenced to 5 years. Three others received lesser sentences.

In 1986, when the salmon return ceremony took place, they were awaiting word on whether the Supreme Court would take up their appeal. It did not. In the companion case in Yakama Tribal Court, the five convicted in federal court were found not guilty in 1987.

But that didn’t matter to the feds. David and his compatriots were forced to report to federal prison, where they would serve terms mostly thousands of miles away from their families. After a healthy diet of salmon and a life in the outdoors, prison wrecked David’s health, leaving him impaired with a stroke. U.S. Senator Daniel Inouye, who chaired the Senate Special Committee on Indian Affairs, took up David’s cause, and asserted the sentences did not fit the crime. He and his son were released in 1988 after 20 months. He would die three years later at 65.

Who are we?

The absurdity of blaming native people for declining salmon runs when the fish have to fight dams, road culverts, deforestation, polluted runoff and commercial fisheries was always clear to the defenders of David Sohappy and his companions. It is the predominant civilization that is responsible for shredding the great circle of life David called out when he said, “We are the salmon.” Replacing an enduring culture that existed in balance with its lifeplace for millennia with one that reputable analysts consider at high odds to collapse in decades.

In my later musings on David’s words, I wondered what we could say that would represent the equivalent. We are the oil, the gas, the coal, the uranium? We are the soil being eroded to grow our food? What enduring sustenance can we call out, when our civilization is exhausting the very roots of sustenance?

In our civilized world we are separated from those roots by myriads of abstraction, having nothing like the sense of connection possessed by an indigenous culture that has lasted for thousands of years, and still persists. That separation is why those four words seemed so strange to me on first hearing. The way they bring that separation to the foreground is what has made them such a profound memory over the lifetime since. I am not sure how we get back to such a connection, as far as we are from it in our modern world. But I know long-term human existence on this planet depends on us finding ways to rejoin the circle of life. We can learn from the people who were here before.

Other good links to dig in further are this 30-year retrospective from the Yakima Herald, this 50-year perspective from Cascadia Magazine, and this pictorial essay from the Seattle Times.

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9 minute read

Taking a little break over the holidays, I will return in the new year with scenarios for how we can rebuild community by reclaiming the commons, how this could grow out of coming crises. Meanwhile, I am reaching back to some of the best of The Raven. I published this piece back in 2023, but I originally wrote it in 1993. It is about the Columbia Gorge and how it stirred my visions for a better world in a place called Cascadia. I wrote much of it perched above the Gorge at Crown Point, depicted above. Wherever you live, I hope you find such a place, and let it stir your own.

700 feet of water

cutting through

ancient lava flows,

what water emptied

forms this beauty.

Never forget power,

ancient power of

earth

lives here today

We see it calm

quiet peaceful

forgetting

it was born in watery rage.

Without rage,

no beauty.

Without beauty,

no rage.

Sunday afternoon. First sunny spring Sunday after interminable winter rains, so Crown Point is crowded. Tourists. Locals. People in antique cars. Bikers. Cascadians seeking to fulfill long pangs and hungers for sunshine, taking in the rays like a wanderer might lap down the first water they’ve seen after days lost in the desert.

Crown Point is hundreds of feet above the Columbia River. Bonneville Dam is visible 20 miles up the Columbia Gorge on this clear and sunny day. Its orange high tension towers are framed by steep forested slopes that line the Gorge. Nearly to the dam, the remnant of an ancient volcano juts high into the air. Beacon Rock is one of the planet’s ranking rock outcroppings.

The visioning starts here, at Crown Point, with its panoramic overview of the Columbia Gorge. This vista reveals the two defining landforms of the Northwest - the Columbia River and the Cascade Mountains - come together as one. The span of the Gorge embodies the region’s climatic contrast. The eastern end, golden brown and nearly treeless, is the start of the arid inland Northwest. The western end manifests the very soul of Pacific Cascadia, lush, magical forests dressed in mist and moss.

From the Gorge the land rises toward three great Cascadian stratovolcanoes, Mts. Hood, St. Helens and Adams, though their native names so more fully express the music of their soaring visages, Wyeast, Loowit and Klickitat. I prefer and use these names over the blasé Anglo names of one-time admirals, ambassadors and presidents. The Gorge is the child of the tempestuous marriage of the volcanic earth, the big river and the Noachian floods it has channeled. Always melting mountain snows spurt out into a large family of Gorge waterfalls, while the mountains’ eruptions can be expected to occasionally layer in new landscapes.

The juxtaposition of mountains and water is the source of the Cascade Range’s name. Explorer David Douglas, climbing a cliff in the Gorge near present day Bonneville, viewed the waterfall-rich Gorge and the stunning volcanic peaks towering above. He called them the “Mountains by the Cascades.” “Cascadia is a land of falling waters,” wrote David McCloskey, a true visionary of this place, and creator of the most commonly used maps. If falling waters define the region, then the dense gathering of waterfalls in the Gorge makes it the spiritual heart of Cascadia.

In the same way the region’s most significant natural features come together in the Gorge, the major stress fractures dividing the human and natural worlds are also summed in this landscape: dams, salmon and the competing uses of water; forests and logging; the impingement of the cities on the countryside. The Gorge stirs musings on both the conflict between humans and nature, and how the two might discover a more harmonious flow.

The Gorge channels the central artery of circulation for an almost unimaginable region. Rolling by here are waters drained from the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, from the interior mountains of British Columbia, from the Continental Divide at the top of the Montana Rockies some 500 miles to the east. The waters wend down through inland mountain ranges, the Columbia Basin, the Cascade rainshadow deserts -- draining Idaho, Eastern Washington and much of Oregon.

Beyond Crown Point the Columbia swells as it joins rivers emptying some of the wettest places on earth. Nearing the Pacific Coast it becomes a long and wide estuary, then one of the wildest, most dangerous joinings of a river and ocean on the planet. The largest river on the west coast of the Americas, the Columbia influences the ocean for hundreds of miles west, north and south.

Later channels of human activity piggybacked on the Columbia’s route render my perch at Crown Point far from a place of quiet meditation. Interstate 84’s river of steel, glass and concrete incessantly rumbles down the Gorge floor. Every semi pushes its own sonic wave through this deep trough. Multiple engines pulling a mile-long train punch through with a bass-rhythmic drone, putting a backbeat to this symphony of transportation. A hefty tug with 3,000 horsepower in its gut lets off a whir somehow both smooth and grinding as it pushes a river barge toward the Bonneville locks. Smaller pleasure craft dot the river but steer clear.

The river was Lewis and Clark’s route, and the highway that began the Euro-American settlement of the Northwest. Before railroad moguls Hill and Harriman laid their competing tracks on the river’s north and south banks, Oregon Trail pioneers came down the river on rafts. Then steamships plodded up and down the river, creating a historic current of relation between Portland and the lands east of the mountains. Old Portland’s merchants once dominated inland Cascadia.

The steel and asphalt channels that grew like symbiotic parasites off the path made by the river carry a lot more traffic now. Maybe someday the river will wash them away the same way it carved this Gorge. In some of the greatest floods known, which took place a mere 12,000 to 15,000 years or so ago, the massive Ice Age lake in the Northern Rockies created by glacial ice dams repeatedly floated them and cut loose with enough water to drown land to the Pacific Coast. Terrestrial tsunamis hundreds of feet tall scoured the landscape. Glacial Lake Missoula broke out over 100 times, transforming a narrow, V-shaped river valley through the Cascades into a wide gorge marked with sharp outcroppings of rock. The magical waterfalls fly from ancient creekbeds shaved in midcourse by the floods.

Now modern humanity has created its own controlled flood behind the many huge hydroelectric dams in the Columbia’s watershed. Some believe this has re-created the conditions for a new great inundation. A failure at one large upstream dam could send a wall of water causing a chain reaction snapping dams all the way to Bonneville, they speculate. Another ironic possibility opened by the white settlement of this land, by our Euro-American hubris.

I check out an Oregon Trail commemoration at Crown Point’s Vista House. Parked across from the historic stone-and-glass, Alpine-style lookout, a wagon and tipi commemorate the 150th anniversary of the trail (1993 as I write these words). The wagon is a lot narrower than I expected. Must’ve been a tough ride. Older folks in authentic pioneer garb toast marshmallows at a fire outside a pioneer tent. Some are probably descendants of people who crammed into those tight little wagons, but I doubt they had marshmallows on the trail.

I cannot help but empathize with the courage of trekking months across two-thirds of a continent on the strength of a dream. A humble little pile of rocks similar to a grave the pioneers left on the trail props up a wooden marker noting between “18-35,000 RIP” along the way. Though that doesn’t count the natives they shot, including a lot of friendly ones - the least sympathetic aspect of their journey.

The Gorge remains a route for wanderers infused with varied dreams. California always has beckoned as a western Shangri-La. But the Oregon Country, what we know now as the Northwest or Cascadia, was the original paradise of the far west. Utopians and dreamers of many strains were streaming to Oregon even before the U.S. stole California from the Mexicans. California and the modern Northwest still draw people seeking some or another kind of golden vista, and share in common a large percentage of population born elsewhere. This is a place to make a new start, in some eyes maybe even start a new world.

Yet if any truly new world is to rise here, it will be the diametric opposite of older new worlds, which were always new worlds to conquer. The exploration in Cascadia is rather a search for a harmony that lived here before us raging, hungry Europeans first came down the trail, down this river. We seek a new land of the mind and spirit that gives life a sense of reason and purpose. Now that an age of ruthless exploitation has driven material dreams against the wall, we look for an inner wealth of comity and connection, with the land and each other. We attempt to discover whether any new world can be called forth from this landscape, whether bleak, ravenous Western man will soon exhaust this seeming last paradise, or whether the paradisiacal can be rediscovered in the context we have created here.

It is the belief, the faith, that even in the mundane worlds of this political economy a new world can be born, that carries my Cascadian muse.

Can a scene, by its very magic and symmetry, birth a vision? If any one can, this one can. Today, clouds wreath the Gorge, caress the points, fill the top two-thirds of the scene with intricate, flowing shades from near snow-white patches to black-gray etchings, all kinds of gradings and variations. Living in Cascadia, one learns to appreciate the details in clouds as a substitute for sunshine. It is the days of undifferentiated gray that depress, not today.

Something in this scene is so full, so intimate, I can nearly break my heart reaching for it, trying to grab it. Yet it cannot be caught, only let in. I have often come to the Gorge in lonely, empty times, but this vista fills me. This scene is a mirror in which I seek my reflection, my place in this life. Over a long passage of years it has become a familiar friend. I feel this place as solace, company from which I learn and see lessons to take back to the human community.

It’s a tourist’s paradise at Crown Point, cameras out. And still I come here to practice the ancient craft of symbol-making, scrivening. Only language can carry my inner vision.

I walk below the Columbia Gorge Highway, which curls around Vista House, to more private perches beyond. I can’t imagine that these were not Native vision questing places. Now the elaborately folded clouds have gone further upriver, blown by a gentle wind. The sky is white-gray, gradually shading darker. In gentle flux this evening, the Gorge is always a weather generator spun by the climatic extremes on either end. This is one of the world’s dynamic places.

Here in this space of vision I see the place to which my life has come. It’s a human-scaled place. Cascadia is my macrocosm in the microcosm, my holographic piece of Earth that embodies the whole. And a place to express my joined practices of ecology and journalism, using story to understand how human and natural communities flow across the landscape, open a comprehensive vista.

The place I come to is, of necessity, visionary. For the answers and systems of the present do not satisfy, are no answers at all, just a train about to derail. Some better vision is called for.

I have seen the ecological society, have seen humans regain an understanding of themselves and their place in life, for ecology is the science of community.

I have seen our stupid and suicidal economy turn to human fulfillment and creativity, to a dynamic interplay nourishing human nature and all of nature alike, for ecology is the study of energy flows.

Somewhere, in my mind, my imagination, my vision space, I have seen these things.

Ecology is my way of seeing. The ecological view is also the way the human story will come out, I think, as the general systems language upon which a functional new world will be built.

For an ecosystem sense of the world, from the peaks of the mountains and high-country forests to the valleys, rivers and cities. From the top of the mountain to the inner-city neighborhood. Here is my seer’s peak, my high place from which to observe the world, standing here overlooking the Gorge.

Pay attention to context, sight tells me. Design our society, lives and communities within the ecological framework, and we will prosper, maybe even find some genuinely founded happiness in this life. Message from this core of reality, here at Crown Point.

Sometime well into the evening of a long summer day, inside the lengthening light, musing in my temple Earth. The cloud ceiling makes this an intimate, yet wide and large room, this Columbia River Gorge. Mosquitoes attack the “higher” life form. I squirm but don’t stop writing for a second. I am too busy biting larger bugs of social-ecological blindness.

Now comes thick rain, its mist catching the light to make this all feel so much more like a dream. The wall between exterior and interior dissolves. I feel myself inside this scene and this scene inside me. Rain increases, as if to acknowledge my receptivity. This landscape can make the world. Empty inside fills. Empties. Fills. Empties. Always goes like this, like this river.

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4 minute read

It is hard to recall a time when uncertainties have been so great or come from so many directions.

In the U.S., the sense of having a stable, reliable political system seems gone. Trump has breached so many boundaries, upset the balance of the three branches of government. He has openly flouted court orders, and assumed to himself powers reserved to Congress. Notably, by refusing to spend money Congress has allocated. The Supreme Court just seems to go along with an unprecedented expansion of executive power.

In the economy in general, jobs are being cut while people wonder if AI is coming for theirs. At the same time, AI is driving what looks like an unsustainable investment bubble. Responsible for most economic growth and increased stock market valuations, a popped bubble could set off a deep recession, or even worse. It’s not the only bubble. Several real estate sectors also look sketchy.

But the greatest uncertainty, and the one from which the world seems to be turning its attention, is the increasing heating of the climate. Temperatures are at or near record levels, while climate pollution concentrations in the atmosphere have never been greater. Scientists are having a lively debate over whether temperature increases are accelerating. German scientists recently made a terrifying statement lining out the possibility of an absolutely catastrophic 3 deg. C rise by 2050. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration is doing all it can to gut climate action, while Europe and many corporations are staging retreats on net zero commitments. Meanwhile, severe flooding is hitting all over the world, including record river levels in my own wet state of Washington.

It is hard to live through such times, though most of us in the U.S. have it easy compared to people living in war torn regions such as Gaza, Sudan and Congo. Nonetheless, the voices of those who say we are headed for some kind of collapse here are on the rise. A new depression, a second civil war, these seem like more real possibilities than they have in a long time.

How do we make it through these times? A key is to understand the common thread running through the uncertainties that confront us. It is a loss of a sense of the common good, of community, of the commons themselves, in the face of rising corporate and oligarchic power.

In the U.S., long efforts by the oligarchic elite to divide and rule have set people and regions against it other and made it almost impossible to address critical issues, which is the intended result. So people’s lives become more difficult and unaffordable while those same oligarchic interests accumulate money and power. Unaffordable housing, grocery bills that amount to what rent used to cost, a health care system that delivers poor results for high costs, all while corporate profits in these sectors explode.

The AI bubble is driven by promises of increased “productivity,” though so far that doesn’t seem to be panning out. But “productivity” is really a codeword for automating out jobs. Again, corporate and oligarchic interests are serving their own ends without reference to the common good.

Towering over all this is the climate crisis, fueled by the insatiable greed of the fossil fuel industry and its allies. In no area is the ravaging of the global commons for private interests more stark, or the need to reclaim the commons more crucial.

We don’t know what is going to happen. We have no way of knowing how these uncertainties will work out. But one path stands as the way through whatever we must face. It is to rebuild community by reclaiming the common good, to reclaim the commons themselves. We instinctively understand this, and are pursuing this along multiple routes. Recent triumphs of municipal election candidates promising to address the affordable crisis through city action are a prominent example. So are efforts to create public banking, to institute single-payer health plans in states, to build social housing, and to drive forward clean energy and climate action at local and state levels. The revival of the bioregional movement over recent years is another example of people seeking to reclaim the commons in its most basic sense, the common natural places in which we live. Each of these efforts exhibits a unifying thread, an assertion of the common good over private interests, a strengthening of community by creating new common spaces.

In my next post I plan to lay out several scenarios for how events might unfold, with an emphasis on the U.S., and how a movement unified around the principle of rebuilding community by reclaiming the commons works through each one. We don’t have any certainty about the future, but we can be certain the way to address anything that is coming is through community. And the natural place to start, the one that is most available, is the communities where we live. We must build the future in place.

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5 minute read

By Marco Rosaire Rossi

Editor’s note: Public banking is an idea whose time has come. Instead of putting our money into private banks driven by their own bottom line considerations, public banking gives us the opportunity to keep our money in public institutions driven by community concerns. Especially our local and state government funds. So far, the only public bank in the U.S is the Bank of North Dakota, a product of the populist era. But now, as Washingtonians for Public Banking Executive Director Marco Rosaire Rossi details in this guest article from the group’s substack, the idea is taking off all over the U.S. Even as the national political scene is deadlocked in conflict, we can make progress in our cities and states. Creating public banks is one of the most important steps.

After years of being considered a niche concept, relegated to a few academic articles and zealous activists, the idea of public banking is about to hit the mainstream. From coast to coast, 2025 witnessed a blossoming of support for public banking, especially on the local level. Not only did several activist groups hold conferences to drum up support for public banking, but numerous municipalities took concrete actions to inch closer to creating their own public banks, and politicians who supported public banking achieved historic victories during the most recent election.

Arguably, the state with the strongest public banking movement is California. In 2025, the public banking movement experienced growth across the state, especially for local and city-owned public banks.

For years, activists in Los Angeles have been fighting to create a public bank for the city. In 2018, organizers were successful in getting a measure on the ballot to amend the city charter to allow for the creation of a city-owned public bank. Unfortunately, the measure was defeated. Undeterred, a year later public banking advocates convinced California’s state legislature to pass AB-857, which granted local governments the power to create their own public banks.

Since then, municipalities and counties throughout California have been exploring the option.

On May 30^th of this year, members of the Los Angeles City Council introduced a motion to fund a feasibility study for a Los Angeles public bank. In 2023, the council voted 12-0 to approve $460,000 for a public banking feasibility study, but the funding was eventually diverted. Refusing to give up, supporters continued to press their council on the issue, and on June 23^rd, the city council unanimously passed the motion and reallocated funds to the study.

Inspired by Los Angeles, organizers in Fresno are pressuring their city to also commission a feasibility study. In late September, public banking advocates organized an educational event through the Fresno City College to push local leaders on the concept of public banking. Eric Payne, the executive director of the Central Valley Urban Institute, told the nonprofit news outlet Fresnoland, that Fresno residents “know that Wall Street isn’t going to give us the pass that we need… It’s going to have to come from us.”

Meanwhile, on November 1^st, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a nonbinding resolution requesting that the mayor and city departments explore the creation of a public “green” bank to provide low interest loans to clean energy and other environmentally related projects. In 2023, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors had already passed a plan to create a public bank using funding from the Inflation Reduction Act. However, despite the plan’s unanimous approval, the project awaits implementation from the city’s executive. Still, public banking advocates in the city do not appear to be waiting. A recent poll showed that 67% of the city’s voters support the creation of a public bank, and activists are considering a ballot measure in 2026 to force the city’s hand.

On the east coast, New York state’s public banking movements also experienced significant gains.

On August 5, in Rochester, New York, community leaders and activists gathered at an event called the Community Outreach Forum to address the city’s poverty, including the creation of a public bank. For years, advocates have been working with local leaders to get the city council to create a public bank. Included among their ranks is the Genesee Co-op Federal Credit Union, which sees public banking as a means to support community banks and credit unions through lending partnerships.

Most noteworthy, public banking advocates cheered when one of their champions, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani, was elected mayor of New York City on November 4^th. As a member of the New York State Assembly, mayor-elect Mamdani cosponsored Assembly Bill A3352. Modeled off California’s AB-857, New York’s A3352 would have empowered local governments to create their own public banks. As a candidate for mayor, Mamdani emphasized his support for public banking. Prior to his election, the editors of Money on the Left, an online journal and podcast, published a document calling for New York City to adopt a new financial paradigm that the authors referred to as Democratic Public Finance, which included public banking, in addition to other strategies to bring the financial sector under popular control.

In Washington’s elections, public banking advocates scored two victories, with the mayor-elects of two of Washington’s largest cities—Tacoma and Seattle—being supporters of public banking.

In Tacoma, mayor-elect Anders Ibsen has been interested in public banking for years. At a mayoral campaign forum organized by Tacoma for All—a coalition fighting for worker and tenant rights—he explicitly mentioned his willingness to explore public banking as a means of leveraging the city’s assets to deal with the Tacoma’s housing shortage.

In Seattle, political outsider Katie Wilson—who also identifies as a democratic socialist—narrowly defeated incumbent mayor Bruce Harrell with just over 2,000 votes. Recently, Wilson has appointed Tiffani McCoy, the president of Washingtonians for Public Banking and the co-executive director for House Our Neighbors, as part of her transition team. In addition to being a champion for public banking, McCoy was instrumental in winning the ballot initiative and tax increase to create Seattle’s social housing developer.

All this momentum means that it is only a matter of time before a city breaks free from the grip of the nation’s megabanks and establishes the first public bank within a state in the United States since North Dakota took the visionary step in creating the Bank of North Dakota in 1919. Considering that affordability, and with it the frustration over the high cost of essentials such as housing, utilities, and groceries, has become the new central focus of American politics, it is not surprising that public banking as seen a recent surge in support.

As Victor Hugo once wrote, “No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come.”

For more on the Bank of North Dakota, and how it beats Wall Street, read this piece from public banking advocate Ellen Brown.

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5 minute read

The subversive power of imagination

In my last post I recalled the vision of historian William Appleman Williams seeking an American future beyond “empire as a way of life,” as he called and documented it through his career as one of the leading radical historians of the 20^th century. Williams proposed reconstituting the United States as a confederation of regional commonwealths, each building social ecological economies geared to the needs of people and nature.

I quoted Williams from an earlier series I did on his thinking : “’We must return . . . to the Articles of Confederation. That document offers us a base from which to begin our voyage into a human future; a model of government grounded in the idea and the ideal of self-determined communities coming together as equals when and as necessary to combine forces to honor common values and realize common objectives.’ We must ‘create an American commonwealth of regional communities.’”

Obviously this is far from our current situation, where the Constitutional order is breaking down under an out-of-control president, a feckless Congress and a Supreme Court tilted far to the right. But this very breakdown opens the door to consider dramatically different alternatives. A system that brought us to this point obviously needs to change.

I posed Williams’ vision in the spirit of science fiction writer Ursula Leguin’s writings on the subversive power of imagination, which she demonstrated in her many books dreaming different worlds.

“The exercise of imagination is dangerous to those who profit from the way things are because it has the power to show that the way things are is not permanent, not universal, not necessary,” Leguin wrote. ”Having that real though limited power to put established institutions into question, imaginative literature has also the responsibility of power. The storyteller is the truthteller.”

We need imagination. We need vision to see beyond our current morass and point the way to a better world. Facing the darkness of our current situation, we have never needed it more. As much as we need to put up resistance to the depredations of the current administration, we also need to understand how we have fallen into this hole and how we can build our way out of it.

Two events show the way

Of course, when posing a bold dream, such as Williams’ vision of a new continental confederation, questions of practicality naturally rise. What are the paths forward? How do we get there from here? In the weeks since I wrote that earlier post, two events have occurred which point the way, the election of Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor, and the apparent election of Katie Wilson as Seattle mayor. The latest vote count put her ahead by an apparently unassailable margin, though it may go to a recount.

In both cities, common people are being crushed under the exploding costs of housing, food and other basic human needs. Both Mamdani and Wilson ran on practical platforms for municipal action where the market is failing to provide reasonable alternatives. They promised efforts to create affordable housing, rein in landlords and improve transit, among other elements. Each called for progressive taxation. Wilson’s platform is here. Mamdani’s is here. In each city, they beat long-term machine politicians in bed with business interests. They relied heavily on grassroots mobilization, being significantly outspent in their campaigns.

Each campaign demonstrates the beginnings of a path to the future. I say the beginning, because ultimately the level of political change that will be needed will require a vastly stronger and more widespread social movement than is present today. It will have to spread out from progressive urban cores, and will need to embody an agenda that moves beyond reform to deep transformation.

In terms of movement, we need to make ways to bring together a range of current movements around a common agenda. Among them, and this is by no means and exhaustive list, are municipalists, bioregionalists, democratic socialists and progressive populists, human rights advocates, labor activists, and people who are working for specific changes such as social housing, public banking and single-payer health care. A vehicle that can draw varied groups together is the community assembly. These are democratic forums that exist parallel to elected bodies which can develop a common platform and push for enactment. They can make democracy a continual process rather than just an exercise on election day.

In terms of ambition, it is clear that we are on shaky ground economically, socially and ecologically. The current economic system is concentrating power and wealth in too few hands. It is operating in a way that is causing social disintegration and ecological overshoot, particularly evident in climate heating. We need to build a new social ecological economic system that spreads wealth and power more broadly while operating within planetary boundaries. We need to begin building it in our cities and states, communities and bioregions.

The need for continued mobilization

None of this is to in any way downplay the stunning accomplishments of Mamdani and Wilson. They both ran steep uphill races against high odds, proposing changes that will improve life for most people. To achieve those changes they will have to continue the popular mobilizations that won them their new offices. The forces stacked against them will be huge. In this continued process, new coalitions can be drawn together and successes achieved that build toward greater ambition.

Ultimately, we can look to a deeply transformed political and economic system that really will turn around the crises facing our country and world. We need dreams and visions of what is possible to move us there. On the way, we can take practical steps in the places we live to move toward broader changes. The tasks facing us are monumental, but we can begin with steps we take in our own communities. We must build the future in place.

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5 minute read

The problem of centralized power

The United States is broken, and it’s time to think about what comes next.

Images of the White House East Wing demolition that have filled our eyes in recent days are a visual expression of a broader reality. The constitutional order of the U.S. is shattered. A lawless president backed by a feckless Congress and a Supreme Court tipped far to the right has upset what balance of powers remained under the constitutional system. That he could order the destruction of a national landmark with no public notice or review to build his ballroom signals his dictatorial intent.

But the roots of this run far deeper, to the Constitution itself. The U.S. started as a loose alliance of states under the Articles of Confederation. They had significant autonomy. But the financial classes centered in the large Northeast cities had a big problem with that. They were owed war debts and demanded payment in gold and silver. But states, where a measure of democracy existed, wanted to use paper money. When farmers in western Massachusetts staged Shay’s Rebellion against taxes needed to pay the debts, the ruling classes were alarmed. Led by Alexander Hamilton, they convened the Constitutional Convention to create a powerful federal government that could control the states and further expansion on the western frontier.

Over the century to come, the federal government mounted military campaigns to conquer the natives, and subsidized railroad construction. These were crucial to build a continental empire. Once that was filled out, the U.S. moved out into the world to build the greatest global empire in history, sustained by the centralized federal power created by the Constitution.

Power has been centralizing in the U.S. for its entire history, to the point we have reached today where a president has seemingly breached all limits, as exhibited by the East Wing demolition in violation of law and custom. What is going to pull us back from this?

A vision for a continental confederation

Historian William Appleman Williams well knew the course toward increasingly centralized power. Emerging in the 1950s, he led a school known as the revisionists who debunked the idea the U.S. was exceptional. Instead, argued the revisionists, the U.S. was an empire much as any other, dedicated to its own expansion. The Constitution was the instrument that made it possible.

In the latter stages of his career, Williams proposed a way beyond empire. He suggested that the U.S. to return to its decentralized roots and re-create itself as a confederation of regional commonwealths. They would build self-sustaining economies devoted to serving social needs. I wrote an extensive series on his vision several years back. It starts here.

In light of what has occurred since, I share this extended quote from the first part.

“While the centralization of power created by the Constitution may have been necessary for the early survival of the United States, it came, wrote Williams, ‘at the price of institutionalizing domestic and global empire, and internalizing empire as a way of thought and life (italics Williams) . . . ‘ To move away from this and back to a future grounded in democracy, Williams had a modest proposal, lined out in his 1976 book, America Confronts a Revolutionary World.

“’We must return . . . to the Articles of Confederation. That document offers us a base from which to begin our voyage into a human future; a model of government grounded in the idea and the ideal of self-determined communities coming together as equals when and as necessary to combine forces to honor common values and realize common objectives.’ We must ‘create an American commonwealth of regional communities.’

“At a time when democracy, to whatever extent we have it in the U.S., is under threat of succumbing to an authoritarian tide enshrining minority rule through vote suppression, gerrymandering, a majority right-wing Supreme Court, and a consolidation of hard right forces in the Republican Party, Williams’ vision for restoring democracy from the regional ground up has particular cogency. It is likely that in the next several years all three branches of the federal government will be taken over by a rightist, authoritarian government that will do everything it can to seal permanent rule. We will need a ground on which to consolidate our own progressive forces, and offer a different vision of how we might live here. That is the places we live, the regional ground.”

Focusing our efforts on states and cities

I wrote those words in 2021. Now we are here. The thrust for consolidation of authoritarian power is well under way. It is indeed seeking “to seal permanent rule.” This gives fresh relevance to the vision put forward by Williams for a decentralized order in which power is more widely distributed.

The degree to which power is distributed is all that is stemming the authoritarian tide. States such as California, Oregon and Illinois are resisting deployment of federalized troops in their cities. Many state attorney generals have filed suit against administration policies that clearly violate the law. We can be thankful we still have something of a federal system. But Trump is threatening to override the states with the Insurrection Act. And we still have not seen most state lawsuits reach the Supreme Court. Rulings in Trump’s favor are likely to increase the centrifugal tendencies in the U.S., perhaps spurring outright state denial of federal authority.

Something like 7 million people came out for No Kings Day last weekend. The question is where all that energy is going to go. Of course, simply to restore some balance of power, returning one or two houses of Congress to the Democrats is important. But that won’t address the deeper structural problems of overcentralized power that have brought us to this point.

The logical course, as I wrote back in 2021 and often since, is to concentrate forces on taking power in cities and states, to build progressive power and agendas. The hard work of organizing at on a grassroots level, and developing agendas to meet people’s needs, must be undertaken. Without abandoning efforts to restore some balance at the federal level, we must build new power in cities and states, communities and bioregions.

The vision put forward by Williams for a continental confederation of regional commonwealths may seem far from the reality we face. But we need vision to carry us forward, even if we only reach part of the way. The United States is broken. We should consider a more decentralized democratic order as what comes next.

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4 minute read

History is catching up with the United States. The center of the most globe-spanning empire in history, empire is now coming home to its own shores.

The scenes of troops in the streets, with people being seized and hauled off to camps, ordered by a would-be strongman who acts as a law unto himself, have been witnessed in many countries. We have seen it all too often. Some notable examples have been Chile, Brazil, Guatemala, Iran and Indonesia, spurred by U.S. covert actions to preserve the power of domestic oligarchies beholden to U.S. economic interests. Now we see the same brute assertions of absolute power coming to the U.S., for much the same reasons.

Empires can pursue the most dictatorial policies in their colonial reaches while preserving liberal democracy in their domestic metropoles. In fact, the wealth provided by empire allows this. But when things tighten up, and competition for limited resources increases, liberal democracy fades and the velvet glove comes off the iron fist.

The U.S. now faces such a situation. China has now replaced the U.S. as the preeminent industrial and trading power in the world with leadership in many technological fields. Within the U.S., corporations pressed to make profits in a time of economic stagnation are increasingly squeezing most people. This is enabled by the concentration of power into oligopolies in which most major industries are concentrated into a handful of mega-corporations. Behind the corporations are the billionaires, insistently accumulating more and more wealth unto themselves while most people fall behind, sinking deeper in debt.

Corporations and billionaires have used their power to radically cut their taxes, shifting the burden onto the rest of us. The result is deep federal deficits financed by borrowing, leading to interest payments now exceeding military expenditures. It is clear this is a ponzi scheme that cannot continue, as proven by the growing reluctance of investors to buy U.S. debt.

Meanwhile, concentrated economic power has come to own the national government. When potent interests collide with popular sentiment, the former almost always wins. Otherwise, we would have universal health care, free college education, a sharp jump in the minimum wage, and serious action to reduce climate-destroying pollution. Weapons would not be flowing to Israel. Of course, the reality is as we see it.

The U.S. has been in a slow glide toward oligarchic fascism for decades. Wealthy interests have increasingly seized power and cut off routes of democratic engagement. They have been empowered by a right-wing Supreme Court that has effectively removed all limits to campaign donations, while giving a pass to measures that enable voter suppression. Meanwhile, an imperial presidency has grown in power throughout the 20^th and 21^st centuries, waging overt and covert wars without Congressional approval.

Today many calls are coming to save our democracy and stop fascism. But the question is how much democracy have we really had, and to what extent has a form of soft fascism already emerged. After all, one definition of fascism is the merger of corporations and the state. This is not to say we have no democracy, but it is strongest in localities and some states. And as stated, it is weakest at the federal level where corporations are strongest.

What makes the present moment different is the blatant pursuit of absolute power by Trump and his people. Ignoring court orders. Threatening to arrest public officials. Federalizing National Guard units. Sending troops from a compliant state such as Texas to one where the governor has resisted such as Illinois. While we have been drifting away from democracy for a long time under the cover of democratic norms, Trump is ripping away the veil. If there is daylight in this dark sky, it is that this is a moment of clarity, when the potentials for a dictatorial state that have been building for a long time come into full view.

The point is these potentials have been there. They are inherent in the role of the U.S. as the center of an empire. Militarism, a vast intelligence-surveillance state, control of domestic politics by global corporations, and above all, the increasing power of the presidency, the great engine of empire. We should not be shocked that what has been seen in so many counties controlled by the U.S. is coming home to haunt us.

Thus, to save what democracy we have and stem the tide of fascism, we need to dig deep into the roots of our current situation and envision a post-imperial future. As empire is all about concentrated power, we will need to find ways to spread it out to our cities and states, communities and bioregions, to create genuine democracy. To that I will turn in coming posts.

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