An old forgotten sign from the Farm Equipment Association of Minnesota and South Dakota once said: “Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.” We must fully acknowledge that there is no human society without trees, rivers and air – just as there is no Earth without the sun. The web of one life lives along the lines woven by other lifeforms, so perfectly balanced, so perfectly clear as to be made invisible by what our eyes have thus far failed to see. No matter the pace or scale of humanity’s technological ingenuity, the Earth sets upon us planetary boundaries and immutable laws of its own ecology. But with DeathKult Capitalism’s insatiable drive to consume all that exists, our fragile planet is being plundered and bruised beyond repair. In this final episode of a trilogy of vision-sketches, Jesse & Matt imagine what the world might be like if the starting point for organizing society was The Golden Square: food, shelter, healthcare and education, all equally and universally provisioned. What would Earth look like if these four tenets were fully realized? Is there a role for the State to play? Or, as we look back upon the cruel banality of so many failed and failing republics, should the State be recalibrated in radically innovative ways toward the city-state? To survive beyond the catastrophes of the here and now, we must transcend the tired old ghost-roads of feudalism and the broken and breaking embankments of endtime capitalism. The structures and ecologies of a world of The Golden Square illuminate an urgent pathway, guiding us away from the continual climate catastrophe of our pre-apocalypse toward an emancipatory project of repair and restoration. Much has been made of the technological notion of the Singularity in science fiction circles; but might remaking the world according to The Golden Square bring about a kind of Social Singularity – where impossible-to-imagine forms of human consciousness are unleashed in a truly egalitarian and ecological society? And from that, might the constellations of the Utopian Sphere begin to flicker into one shared vision? Would our aching, tortured past bleed back as if it was words in a book that befuddles us in some utopian future? But before that circle can be drawn, we need to uncouple our minds and our world from colonization’s final form: climate collapse. We must continue to ring the bell for humanity’s right for food, shelter, healthcare and education – free to all, without request or restraint. This is the calling of our lives. We don’t have much time.
Mentioned In This Episode:
STRUCTURES
FOOD
George Monbiot in The Guardian: “With Our Food Systems on the Verge of Collapse, It’s the Plutocrats v Life on Earth”
Bob Henson and Doug Masters in Yale’s Climate Connections: “With Global Warming of Just 1.2°C, Why Has the Weather Gotten So Extreme?”
Willow Hallgreen in The Conversation: “What Greenland’s Record-Breaking Rain Means for the Planet”
Tom Philpott’s book, Perilous Bounty: The Looming Collapse of American Farming and How We Can Prevent It, argues for bringing back the mixed & medium-sized farms America used to have in the 1950s, before the rise of big ag gobbled up the present world.
Doug Henwood interviews Tom Philpott in Jacobin: “The US Agriculture System Is a Disaster for Farmworkers and the Planet”
Bernie Sanders 2020 Campaign Summit in Iowa: Climate Crisis Summit with Bernie and AOC (with an Introduction to Sanders by Naomi Klein on the ‘Three Fires’)
Aa grand total of 57 counties in Iowa were flooded in 2019: Kevin Hardy and Austin Cannon in the Des Moines Register: “Iowa Flooding: “Damage from Floodwaters Reaches $1.6B, Governor Kim Reynolds Estimates”
A Wikipedia breakdown: Democratic Confederalism
Abdullah Ocalan’s Democratic Confederalism. Published in 2011 by Transmedia Publishing.
Buckminster Fuller’s The World Game (1961) was envisioned to be a place where individuals or teams of people came to compete or cooperate in order to:
“Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”
Erin Hassanzadeh in CBS News: “As Climate Change Threatens Traditional Farming, Faribault Farm's Aeroponic Method May Prove Key”
Is Earth quite possibly turning into Mars? Bruce M. Jakosky’s essay in Physics Today: “How did Mars Lose Its Atmosphere and Water?”
Alex Zhavoronkov in Forbes Magazine: “Billionaires Secretly Terraforming Earth And Other Reasons To Read Termination Shock”
Neal Stephenson’s Termination Shock. Published in 2021 by William Morrow Press.
Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. Published in 2014 by Simon & Schuster.
Kiss the Ground (2020). Directed by Rebecca Harrell Tickell and Josh Tickell.
Laura Tenenbaum in Forbes Magazine: “Digging in the Dirt Really Does Make People Happier.”
U.S. Government Census Report for 2020: 80% of Americans Live in a City or Suburban Area
SHELTER
The once mighty $3.5T Infrastructure Bill: as explored by Emily Cochrane in The New York Times: “Senate Democrats Begin $3.5 Trillion Push for ‘Big, Bold’ Social Change”
Alana Abramson in Time Magazine: “Inside Bernie Sanders' Strategy to Get the Budget Bill Passed”
Mark Niquette in Bloomberg: “U.S. Infrastructure Gets Near Flunking Grade From Engineers”
Ilhan Omar’s Social Housing Bill through the years: As seen in Kriston Capps’ article in Bloomberg: “What a Trillion-Dollar Housing Pledge Looks Like” (2019), and more recently as explored in Sharon Zhang’s report for Truthout: “Ilhan Omar Introduces Bill to Guarantee Housing as a Human Right” (2022)
Steven Greenhut’s Op-Ed in OC Register: “Antiquated Zoning Laws only Worsen the Housing Crisis”
Grace Toohey in the Los Angeles Times: “How L.A. City Hall Became So Corrupt: A Recent History of Bribes, Kickbacks, Scandals, Leaks”
Hossam Elattar in Voice of OC: “Where’s The Anaheim City Council In Wake of Corruption Probe Fallout?”
George Chidi in The Intercept: “No One Believes in Cop City. So Why Did the Atlanta City Council Fund It?”
Ghizlen Ouasbaa, Albert Solé-Ollé and Elisabet Viladecans-Marsal (University of Barcelona): “The Power of Developers: Evidence from California”
ABC-7: “New Project Will Improve Traffic Flow at 71/91 Freeway Interchange in Corona”
The warehouse wasteland of Moreno Valley, California: as explored in Jessica Garrison’s report for BuzzFeed News: “Behind A Huge Bribe, A Tale Of Pollution, Profit, And Economic Transformation”
Solidarity housing through local action; as explored in Erik Forman, Elia Gran and Sixtine van Outryve’s article in Dissent Magazine: “The Municipalist Moment”
We can have reverse mortgages to decommodify housing via CLTs or we can let DeathKult Capitalism prey on elderly Americans who are in dire straits financially, as explored in Tom Fraser’s essay in Jacobin: “Capitalists Want Your Retirement to Be Miserable”
HEALTHCARE
Munira Z. Gunja, Evan D. Gumas and Reginald D. Williams’ report in The Commonwealth Fund on why the U.S. Spends 18% of GDP on Healthcare: “U.S. Health Care from a Global Perspective, 2022: Accelerating Spending, Worsening Outcomes”
Nina Totenberg on National Public Radio (NPR): “The Supreme Court for a Third Time Allows Texas to Bar Abortions after 6 Weeks”
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Isaiah Berlin’s Notion of Positive & Negative Liberty
Ben Hirschler in Reuters: “J&J Says Won't Enforce AIDS Drug Patent in Africa”
Joe Nocera in Bloomberg: “There’s a Precedent for Overriding Patents on Vital Medications”
Public Citizen on No IP Waivers for COVID Vaccines: “WTO Text Would Undermine Global Access to Medicines”
Amy Goodman interviews Fatima Hassan and Achal Prabhala on Democracy Now: “U.S. & Other Wealthy Nations Block Effort to Waive Vaccine Patent Rights in Blow to Global South”
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now interviews Lee Fang from The Intercept: “As Global Pandemic Worsens, U.S. Keeps Blocking Vaccine Patent Waivers Amid Big Pharma Lobbying”
Rural Health Information Hub’s study, “Healthcare Access in Rural Communities,” documents the longer distances people in rural areas have to go for adequate healthcare.
In Peru, most doctors come from Lima and are not rooted in local indigenous communities and often migrate away from the country entirely, as explored in Spenser Hart’s article for Ballard Brief: “Lack of Access to Quality Healthcare in Peru.”
Kirk Siegler on NPR’s All Things Considered: “The Struggle To Hire And Keep Doctors In Rural Areas Means Patients Go Without Care”
EDUCATION
World Population Review: Countries That Offer Free College
Sharon Zhang in Truthout: “US Spent $1.1 Trillion of Federal Discretionary Money on Militarism in Past Year”
Adam Cullen in The Diamondback: “Politicians Aren’t in Touch with the Student Experience. They Shouldn’t Run Colleges.”
Owen Dowling in Jacobin: “The Revolutions of 1848 Should Be a Historical Touchstone for Socialists Today”
James Robins in The New Republic: “The 1848 Revolutions Did Not Fail”
The Future Is A Mixtape: Episode #049: “Every Neighborhood A University”
Rishi Iyengar in CNN Business: “Here’s How Big Facebook’s Ad Business Really Is”
Trefis Team in Fortune: “Is Google Advertising Revenue 70%, 80%, or 90% of Alphabet’s Total Revenue?”
Nick Srnicek in The Guardian: “We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s Why”
On the Media from WNYC Studios: “The Failed Promise of the Internet”
Donna Lu in New Scientist: “The Internet Was Supposed to Be a Utopia. 50 Years on, What Happened?”
Werner Herzog’s sadly overlooked 2016 documentary that spoke to former promise and now peril of the World Wide Web: Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World.
ECOLOGIES
FOOD
A breezy (grimdark) list of recent documentaries about food systems, agriculture, & the petrol state: Food, Inc. (2008); Crude (2009); Gasland (2010); Cowspiracy: The Sustainable Secrecy (2014); Kiss the Ground (2020); and most recently, the docu-drama How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2022).
Isabella Fertel in USA Today: “Fact Check: Fossil Fuels Are The Largest Contributor To Climate Change, Not Animal Agriculture”
“The percentage of global emissions produced by animal agriculture is "much smaller" than the percentage produced by fossil fuels.” “Agriculture is about 1/5 of current emissions.”
Damian Carrington in The Guardian: “Vegan Diet Massively Cuts Environmental Damage, Study Shows”
“The research showed that vegan diets resulted in 75% less climate-heating emissions, water pollution and land use than diets in which more than 100g of meat a day was eaten. Vegan diets also cut the destruction of wildlife by 66% and water use by 54%, the study found.”
Zach Boren, Alice Ross and Drew Rooke in Greenpeace’s Unearthed: “Australian Beef Industry Linked to Destruction of Forests Home to Endangered Species.”
IAPWA’s Report: “The Environmental Cost of Animal Agriculture”
In HuffPost, Adam Rose explains: “How to Take Long Showers and Still Save the World From Drought”
“Federal standards cap sink faucets at 2.2 gallons per minute and shower heads at 2.5 gpm (with high efficiency standards at 1.5 gpm or less). These don't seem like our real problem. Cows, on the other hand, are thirsty. It can take over 1,200 gallons to produce a single 8-oz steak, the same amount of water as a 10-hour shower.”
Hannah Bird in Phys.org: “Acidifying Oceans Will Cause a Diversity and Survival Crisis for Microscopic Marine Organisms, Finds Research”
Mike Davis’ book, which explores the Ebola outbreak in Nigeria, among other disease vectors: The Monster Enters: COVID-19, Avian Flu and the Plagues of Capitalism. Published in 2022 by Verso Books.
Rewilding animal agriculture acreage as explored most radically in Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese’s manifesto: Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics. Published in 2022 by Verso Books.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: “Livestock And Landscapes”
“Twenty-six percent of the Planet’s ice-free land is used for livestock grazing and 33 percent of croplands are used for livestock feed production.”
Our World in Data: “Half of the World’s Habitable Land Is Used for Agriculture”
Diana Myers in Mossy Earth: “Marine Ecosystem Rewilding: The Missing Link to Our Climate Strategy”
Reductionarianism is also known as Flexitarianism.
Stray Dog Institute: “Individual and Collective Pathways to Meat Reduction”
Katie Pevereall in Live Kindly: “Is Reductionism Anti-Vegan? The Issue With Going ‘Meatless’”
Sean Mowbray in Discover Magazine: “How Much Trash Is in Our Oceans?”
Sabrina Marr in The Independent: “Musician Moby Has ‘Animal Rights’ Tattooed on His Arms to Mark 32 Years as a Vegan”
Tess Riley in The Guardian: “Just 100 companies Responsible for 71% of Global Emissions, Study Says”
Ruqaiyah Zarook in Mother Jones: “Why the Pentagon Is the World’s Biggest Single Greenhouse Gas Emitter”
SHELTER
David Graeber in Big Think: “To Save the World, We’re Going to Have to Stop Working”
David Graeber’s classic work, Bullshit Jobs. Published in 2018 by Simon & Schuster.
Renegade Inc. interviews David Graeber on YouTube: “Batsh*t Construction”
Mike Scott in Forbes: “Out Of Fashion - The Hidden Cost Of Clothing Is a Water Pollution Crisis”
Lena Milton in Sustainably Chic: “Squeezing Us Dry: How The Fashion Industry Pollutes Water”
Umair Irfan in Vox: “California’s Gas Car Ban Will Change How Everyone Drives”
Stan Cox and Priti Gulati Cox in The Nation: “Electric Vehicles Won’t Save Us”
“A national fleet of battery-powered cars is unlikely to prove sustainable and could have catastrophic consequences globally.”
Ivan Penn and Eric Lipton in The New York Times: “The Lithium Gold Rush: Inside the Race to Power Electric Vehicles”
“A race is on to produce lithium in the United States, but competing projects are taking very different approaches to extracting the vital raw material. Some might not be very green.”
Nicole Greenfield in Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC): “Lithium Mining Is Leaving Chile’s Indigenous Communities High and Dry (Literally)”
Keith Rushing in Earth Justice: “Lithium Mining Threatens Arizona Tribe’s Sacred Spring”
Ian Thomas in CNBC: “United Airlines Is aiming to Have Electric Planes Flying by 2030”
Caroline Delbert in Popular Mechanics: “This Viral Nuclear-Powered Flying Hotel Is Pure Science Fiction”
Bill Weir in CNN: “This Lab Achieved a Stunning Breakthrough on Fusion Energy”
Rebecca Harrington in Business Insider: “This Incredible Fact Should Get You Psyched About Solar Power”
“In a single hour, the amount of power from the sun that strikes the Earth is more than the entire world consumes in a year.”
Bill Nussey in Freeing Energy: “The Earth Gets More Solar Energy in One Hour Than the Entire World Uses In a Year”
Tom Standage in The Guardian: “The Lost History of the Electric Car – and What It Tells Us About the Future of Transport”
Chris Paine’s Who Killed the Electric Car (2006)
Jimmy Carter’s solar panels on the White House – only to be taken down by Reagan; as explored in John Wihbey’s article in Yale Climate Connections: “The Forgotten Story of Jimmy Carter’s White House Solar Panels”
David Biello in Scientific American: “Where Did the Carter White House's Solar Panels Go?”
Architect Magazine: “Making Net Positive Possible: How Insulated Concrete Forms Help Reduce Energy Consumption:”
Bryan Alexander on Medium: “Solarpunk as a Way of Redesigning Higher Education for the Climate Crisis”
Brad Plumer in The New York Times: “A Huge City Polluter? Buildings. Here’s a Surprising Fix.”
Kevin Fults in GB&D: “Why Reclaimed Wood is a Green Building Must-Have”
Alexander von Hoffman in Joint Center for Housing Studies: “Single Family Housing: Can History Be Reversed?”
Daniel Parolek in AARP: “12 Barriers to Missing Middle Housing”
Trees on buildings as imagined in Annalee Newitz’s short story, “Two Scenarios for the Future of Solar Energy,” Found in the Solarpunk Anthology, Hieroglyph: Stories and Visions for a Better Future (2014) and later in her most recent novel, The Terraformers (2023).
The city as forest: as explored in the solarpunk essay by Commando Jugendstil: “Solarpunk Cities: Notes for a Manifesto”
Stephen Menendian, Samir Gambhir and Chih-Wei Hsu in Othering & Belonging Institute: “Single-Family Zoning in Greater Los Angeles”
77.70 percent of residential land in Greater LA is exclusively reserved for single-family housing
HEALTHCARE
Rupa Marya and Raj Patel’s Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice. Published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Amy Goodman on Democracy Now: “‘Inflamed’: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness”
Jocelyn Timperley in The Guardian: “Why You Need to Worry About the ‘Wet-Bulb Temperature’”
Dr. Katie Spalding in IFLScience: “Southern US Reaches Dangerous "Wet Bulb Temperature." Here's What That Means.”
The increasing wet bulb (35°C) dangers for Japan; as explored in Gloria Dickie’s article for Japan Times: “How Is Climate Change Driving Dangerous 'Wet-Bulb' Temperatures?”
Damian Carrington in The Guardian: “Gulf Stream Could Collapse as Early as 2025, Study Suggests”
Mathew Barlow and Judah Cohen in The Conversation: “How Arctic Warming Can Trigger Extreme Cold Waves Like the Texas Freeze – a New Study Makes the Connection”
Patrick Svitek in The Texas Tribune: “Texas Puts Final Estimate of Winter Storm Death Toll at 246”
Sean Bellafiore in KWTX: “A Year Later: A Look at What Caused February 2021′s Arctic Blast, Waves of Wintry Weather”
Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism. Published in 2020 by Princeton University Press.
Rod Tweedy in The Hampton Institute: “A Mad World: Capitalism and the Rise of Mental Illness”
José Giovanni Luiggi-Hernández in Mad in America: Science, Psychiatry and Social Justice: “Capitalism is Destroying our Collective Mental Health”
Mark Fisher – one of the earliest thinkers on the direct – but-made-invisible connection between capitalism and depression - on how the externalization of capitalism affects the internalization of our mind and mental health: his brilliant, but deceptively dainty book on the subject: Capitalist Realism. Published in 2009 by Zero Books.
David Graeber’s reiteration on Bullshit Jobs or just jobs in general: 10% of US economy based on aiding people suffering from work exhaustion; as explored in this YouTube talk - RSA: “On Bullsh*t Jobs”
Ashwani Kumar, Muneer Ahmad Malla, and Anamika Dubey in Frontiers: “With Corona Outbreak: Nature Started Hitting the Reset Button Globally”
Jonathan Watts in The Guardian: “Climate Crisis: in Coronavirus Lockdown, Nature Bounces Back – but for How Long?”
Two years later (July 16th, 2022) → Emily Anthes in The New York Times: “Did Nature Heal During the Pandemic ‘Anthropause’?”
David Attenborough’s documentary on nature’s profound renaissance during COVID lockdowns: The Year Earth Changed (2021).
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): “The evidence is clear: the time for action is now. We can halve emissions by 2030.”
Danielle D. Tucker and Rob Jackson in Stanford Earth Matters Magazine: “A Roadmap to Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions 50 Percent by 2030”
Jaxx Artz in Global Citizen: “What Is 'Rewilding' and How Can It Help Restore Our Planet's Biodiversity?”
Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing: “Kim Stanley Robinson Says Elon Musk's Mars Plan is a ‘1920s Science-Fiction cliché’”
Eric Roston in Bloomberg: “Why Elon Musk's Mars Vision Needs 'Some Real Imagination'”
EDUCATION
Angie Miller in Education Week: “When Teachers Believe Their Work Is Never Enough”
Julie Sonnemann and Rebecca Joiner in The Conversation: “Teachers Don’t Have Enough Time to Prepare Well for Class. We Have a Solution.”
The Green New Deal for Education; as explored in Time Magazine by Akira Drake Rodriguez, Erika Kitzmiller and Daniel Aldana Cohen: “Now Is Our Chance to Rebuild U.S. Public Schools To Address Both Climate Change and Racial Inequality”
The Squad and Jamaal Bowman, along with 27 other congress members, were cosponsors for The Green New Deal for Public Education Act: “Rep. Jamaal Bowman Unveils Green New Deal for Public Schools”
Social Ecology and the Right to the City: Towards Ecological and Democratic Cities. Edited by Federico Venturini, Emet Değirmenci and Inés Morales. Published in 2019 by Black Rose Press.
Dan Chodorkoff in Transnational Institute of Social Ecology (TRISE): “Social Ecology: A Philosophy for the Future”
Murray Bookchin: “Every revolutionary project is an educational project.”
If we’re going to have reparations (ecological, indigenous, racial), we’re going to have to have an educational project; this is explored in a CalMatters article by Lil Kalish: “Reparations Could Include Tuition, Housing Grants, California Task Force Says”
Jacey Fortin in The New York Times: “Critical Race Theory: A Brief History”
How a Complicated and Expansive Academic Theory Developed During the 1980s Has Become a Hot-Button Political Issue 40 Years Later.
Serene Jones and Fred Davie in Time Magazine: “The Bible Talks About Slavery. So Why Are Conservative Christians So Afraid of Critical Race Theory?”
Octavia E. Butler’s classic and deeply prophetic novel, Parable of the Sower, where an imagined religion (called Earthseed) announces to the remnants of humanity that “God Is Change.” Originally published in 1993 by Four Walls Eight Windows.