Man, it’s a hot one, or so says Rob Thomas in Santana’s song, “Smooth”. And this summer in the northern hemisphere that line rang true most days. Deadly heat waves tore through Europe, record highs were breached in the Arctic, and it was pretty hot everywhere else too. A third of Pakistan remains underwater in the deadliest floods in their history. While the ongoing climate crisis is affecting each place differently, making things hotter or colder, wetter or drier, previous weather extremes are becoming the norm. And unlike Rob Thomas in “Smooth” we can’t just “forget about it.”
Do we in the U.S. expect the EPA to save us? The news coming from a summer U.S. Supreme Court ruling that dramatically limits the power of the Environmental Protection Agency feels bleak. Even with the more recent legislation that grants the EPA more powers, the agency hardly seems fit to stand up to the challenges around us. More grim American news comes with the passage of the national infrastructure legislation, the so-called “climate bill”. Even with its environmental pretensions, this bill is a boost to the fossil fuel industry. According to the Wall Street Journal 1:
Under the bill, the Interior Department would be required to offer up at least two million acres of federal land and 60 million acres of offshore acreage every year for the next decade. If they fall short, they wouldn’t be able to advance some permitting aspects of the wind and solar projects on federal land. It would be the first-ever required minimum acreage for offshore oil and gas leasing and significantly increase the acreage requirements for onshore leasing.
With this news, and the general governmental disregard of warming seas, increasingly extreme weather, eroding arable soil, and prevalent material toxicity, what do we do? To us at The Last Straw, it seems more and more likely that we’ll have to rely on ourselves. Not as rugged individualists hoarding resources and hiding from the world, but as resilient communities where all are included. It seems like the only way out of this dying world is to usher in another one, to build the world we want to live in. To some this may seem utopian or unrealistic, but how realistic is it to keep on this same path? To go on maintaining every human system as if everything around us isn’t changing? Should we worry about making sweeping environmental reform palatable to the very people who’ve plunged the Earth into climate crisis? Or is this the time to find our allies and fight for a livable future?
These are tough questions with many possible answers, so let’s just get started where we are. In this issue of The Last Straw, we gather together to remember the successes and imagine the future of the natural and alternative building movement in California, Canada, and virtually at the CASBA, ONBC, and NOCMAT conferences; we catch up with Lloyd Kahn on what he’s been up to since the legendary book Shelter and check out his new book; we evaluate the real carbon impact of our buildings with the pay-what-you-can BEAM tool; we rethink it all and stir the pot with Resource-Conscious Construction, and a whole lot more! And if Santana’s song “Smooth” has taught us anything it’s to “make it real, or else forget about it.”
