The Inevitable Future

Welcome back.

And a big welcome to a few thousand new readers.

A quick primer: Each newsletter includes an original essay, Action Steps, and a news round-up.

On tone: I come from the Churchill school of “Give it to them straight, and then give them a reason to believe we can pull through.” You will discover I am measurably less eloquent than old Winny, and — be warned — you may encounter some occasional, strategically placed profanity. Don’t be shy: we’re on the precipice of a profoundly different future here. There’s no time to mince words.

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What We Can Do

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was donating to The Trevor Project.

⚡️ Our algorithms and technology are only as good as the people who make them. Empower future innovators to consider the social impact of their work with Tech Shift.

⚡️ Donate to the Urban Ocean Lab, a think tank working on solutions and policies to make coastal cities climate-ready.

⚡️ Electrifying school buses reduces air pollution, immediately improving the health of kids while ALSO reducing emissions. Tell your school board about Highland Fleets, an organization working to make electric fleets accessible for all.

⚡️ As climate change increases the frequency and intensity of extreme weather, emergency services are becoming overstretched. Climate Resilience Hubs prepare communities before, during, and after an emergency. Find yours with this interactive map from Climate Crew.

⚡️ The housing shortage is bad for people, equality, the environment, and the economy. Help your city develop, implement, and monitor local housing strategies with actionable tools and guidance from Local Housing Solutions.

This is the two-part tweet that has been pinned to the top of my timeline since January 20th, 2020:

I find it’s helpful for a few reasons:

• As a reminder of how far we have to go and the diligent work required to get there

• As a clarion call for how far we could possibly go in the years to come

• And as a measuring stick for the past

But how?

I spent most of my time this week recording conversations with Nicholas Dagen Bloom, author of The Great American Transit Disaster, and Marc Schulz, co-author of The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.

On the surface, these are two very different books and, as expected, were very different conversations.

The first book describes in “overwhelming detail” the myriad choices made from the late 1880’s to now to systematically starve public transit from the inside out, defunding a world-renowned system, city by city, in favor of white flight. It was a delightful, infuriating, rousing conversation.

The second book provides a similar cornucopia of data — this time harvested from not only Harvard’s only nearly-90 year study, but from others around the world. It is then complimented with data from MRI’s to blood tests to brains left posthumously in a jar for later study. All of it compiled, aggregated and analyzed to reveal the most human of scientific outcomes: that healthy relationships underpin everything we do.

This was a conversation that reminded me how incapable we are of anything big without paying diligent attention to the day-to-day small things that carry one another.

What both of these books provide — and I swear to god, I didn’t plan it this way — are a time machine into the past. Their timelines overlap for the most part, through wars and great depressions, cultural and technological revolutions.

Page after page, it’s real people telling us what they did and how they felt, then.

Quote by quote, year by year, each book’s subjects tell us who they are, what they ate, where and how they work — in one, minutes from a contentious 1920 city council meeting, in another, snippets from the journal of a World War II veteran recently returned home, suffering from back pain.

But with the long lens of history, we can see how the details add up to paint a deeper picture of the subjects — what they stand for and what they’ll fight for— and of the choices they made on those days and the days to follow that gradually, eventually not only changed the course of their own lives, but changed society.

That same city council voted to rip up their unprofitable streetcar tracks and build highways through neighborhoods, condemning the remaining, mostly Black transit riders to a second-class experience, and everyone else to a life in automobiles (mostly trucks — also not inevitable).

The result? Muscle cars, unnecessary pick-up trucks, infinite parking, and endless highways, the latter romanticized in everything from Tom Petty songs to The Hunt for Red October.

But it turns out we also got a whole hell of a lot of toxic pollution, and one-third of our current greenhouse gas emissions.

In the happiness book, that World War II vet (one of the few subjects whose identity has ever been revealed) got married, had back surgery, became a senator, and then a president.

Three years later, he was assassinated. Five years after that, his brother was assassinated.

Fifty-five years after that, the assassinated brother’s youngest son is running for president, too, mostly on his family name. His story? Well, he spent a lifetime as a lawyer fighting against regulatory capture and for the environment, suffered some serious addiction problems, his second wife committed suicide, and he eventually pivoted into full-scale conspiracy theories about wifi, 5G, and vaccines — a public health tool that has saved billions of lives and been definitively proven not to cause autism.

Does he have a shot? Who will he take votes away from, if he gets that far? What are the consequences? (you should obviously ask this question of anyone running to represent you)

Nothing is a given, nothing is inevitable, and as exhausting as it may seem, doing the work with eyes wide-open is how we keep this streetcar on the tracks.

In the half-century and more since…all that, we’ve had to make a hell of a lot of big-kid decisions.

Among those: 15 presidential elections, 30 Congressional elections, and god knows how many state and local ones. Our record is…decent.

Companies have come and gone, so have bull markets, stock market crashes, fashion styles, unions, regulations, devices, and my ability to stay up past 8:45 PM.

Even the smallest actions and decisions have consequences, intentional or not. Nothing is inevitable, even if it seems like it when we get there.

Not traffic — each of us in our own car, kind of pissed at each other, day after day, succumbing to lost time and raised blood pressure.

Nor drastically healthier relationships — the consistent choosing of one another through time spent, attention paid, interests considered, missions supported.

Victor E. Frankl wrote about what relationships came do for us — and what we must do for them — in Man’s Search for Meaning 77 years ago:

Action taken collectively — across relationships, populations, and time — is what I call Compound Action. And it’s how we build a future that is vastly better for more people, dammit.

We rarely have all the information we need, but we frequently have to act, anyways. Self-awareness, curiosity, a sense of justice and empathy are just requisite as the diligence to get up every day and pick a lane.

Again: our problems and successes are choices we’ve made, compounded over time.

Let’s take a tour of today’s landscape.

Pollution wasn’t inevitable. Neither was torching a hole in the o-zone layer. Once we realized how very bad these were, we reduced them, but while the o-zone turnaround was a serious win, we’ve still got a long way to go on pollution.

The good news? The second you stop producing pollution — from cars, factories, wood burning stoves, etc — the air gets easier to breathe. People get healthier. They can go to school, they can go to work, eight million people a year can not die from it.

So we’ve got that going for us.

Poverty wasn’t inevitable, either. We’ve drastically reduced it, but there are still billions who suffer on less than a couple bucks a day and — we know, because we’ve made so much damn progress — that it simply doesn’t have to be this way. The pressure is building to fix it.

Food waste isn’t inevitable. The bulk of it happens right at home. This is a choice we’re all making and it’s gotta to stop. But it won’t stop completely — some food will, yes, inevitably get lost in the back of your enormous fridge (America!) — so we need tools like Mill to chop it up into chicken feed.

Food waste is a stupid, self-defeating problem, and we just have to say it out loud so we can begin to fix it.

As Tim Kreider semi-famously wrote, “If you want to enjoy the rewards of being loved, you also have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.“

Fun story: you can substitute “being loved” with “having a nice future.” We have to take a good hard look at our little society we’ve got here, and then do the work to get to where we need and want to go.

So what have we got, and what do we need?

Well, COVID mRNA vaccines sure weren’t inevitable. It took decades of work from people like Katalin Kariko to make them safe enough for use, and then Kizzmekia Corbett and team had to design the one we needed ASAP. Future mRNA vaccines for the flu, malaria, or even cancer aren’t inevitable either, but we won’t know until we try.

Cleaner indoor air obviously isn’t inevitable, or COVID wouldn’t have been such a train wreck. We have to set new air quality standards (check!) and then do the actual work to open windows (because sometimes they’re designed not to), upgrade air filters, and — if we’re smart — subsidize air purifiers for schools.

Clean, accessible water isn’t inevitable, as Flint and Jackson and so many others have shown. Just ask the Supreme Court. We’ve got a lot of work to do.

Wealth inequality — or, the top 10% of US households owning 70% of the country’s wealth, while a typical Black family has about 1/10th the wealth of the typical white family — was not inevitable. How did we get here? Real estate, segregated schools, inheritance, redlining, the prison complex, marijuana arrests, voting rights, even COVID — these are choices, one way or another.

Can baby bonds, compounded over time, begin to fix it? Maybe! We almost found out, but then we stopped, so maybe let’s start again?

Historically cheap power from the sun — not inevitable. Batteries everywhere — not inevitable. Fusion: not inevitable. Networked geothermal: not inevitable. 75,000 new miles of transmission lines — clearly not inevitable. These take research, humans, resources, decisions, and lots and lots of money.

Forever chemicals in our clothing, food, and water? Not inevitable. Maybe they’ll start to be less so, now.

Psychedelics to deal PTSD? Not inevitable. Keep pushing. Low-cost, universal cancer screening? Not inevitable. Controversial, but life changing for many.

Maternal death rates four times other wealthy countries? Declining birth rates around the world? Chalk it up to those stellar maternal death rates, workism, abortion rights, and rising costs of education and living.

Insurance companies bailing on Florida, California, and more? Not inevitable, but also clearly the precursor to significantly more brittle real estate and mortgage market.

AI on your phone that can help identify a rash? Or your mental health? Or act as a personalized tutor? Not inevitable, but soon.

Running low on penicillin? (WTF!) Not inevitable. Electrifying our buildings? Not inevitable.

The Colorado River running low on water, mostly because of beef? Not inevitable. We know what we have to do here. But like reducing cars, how politically possible is reducing beef? Not much!

A billion people with type 2 diabetes by 2050? Not inevitable. Cars, sedentary lifestyles, and the western diet are just a part of a very complicated situation — but reducing cars, moving our bodies more, and switching out meat for lentils are multi-solving levers we can’t live without.

A possible link between shingles vaccination and reduced dementia risk? Not inevitableMaybe not even possible. We still have a ton of work to do to find out, and it’s sure as hell worth finding out.

For the vast majority of our problems, remember: it didn’t have to be this way.

But again, great news: Because of our ancestors, many potential or historic problems aren’t this way anymore. Let’s build on that.

I’m an wildly imperfect parent, but if there are two lessons I can pass on, they are to practice gratitude for what we have, and to adopt a growth mindset for everything else.

None of this incredible world was promised. Nothing was inevitable — not the aches and pains, or the wonders. And neither is a radically better future — for everyone.

Relationships with people, with nature, land, and water, are the foundation upon which we get there.

— Quinn

News From My Notebook

Health & medicine

• Half of US counties don’t have an OB-GYN. That’s fucking unacceptable, and abortion-bans are making it worse.

• Dirty air kills more people than smoking, car crashes or HIV/AIDS, cutting up to six years off the lives of billions of people. Coal (surprise!) is the worst culprit

• Endocrine disrupting chemicals could be the reason behind the decrease in global sperm counts

• A new report is highlighting how hospitals can address the nursing shortage by attracting and retaining more nurses (cough-pay them-cough)

Climate

• A coalition of environmental organizations have the solutions to scale up transmission infrastructure in an equitable way

• The US Treasury and IRS have the released the latest updates on IRAs clean energy incentives, in time for Rewiring America to determine the pace at which we need to electrify everything to meet climate goals

• Indigenous communities are leading the climate fight as usual, this time with the help of mapping tech to claim their land rights, and stop deforestation

• Climate-related start-ups in Africa have received $2.8 billion in funding since 2019

• Covering Climate Now has released the finalists for the 2023 CCN Journalism awards, honoring the best coverage of climate change and climate solutions around the world

Food & water

• Agrivoltaics get a boost in the Senate, a climate solution that benefits farmers, ecosystems and the climate

• Chickens in Europe are getting dose with antibiotics “critical to human health”, causing growing concerns about superbugs

• Sooo what happens if California’s dams fail?

Beep Boop

• ICE is using LexisNexis to track and gather information on people in order to make arrests for deportation

• What data does your car have on you?

• If misinformation actually is increasing, what can we do about it?

• An algorithm designed to reduce poverty is doing a bad job

COVID

• Researchers have established a link between Covid-19 and Alzheimer’s

• A common drug for diabetes may prevent Long COVID