Author: Susan Feathers

As a novelist who writes climate change stories, I try to show characters who are experiencing the impacts of climate disturbance. The forces that impact people are multifaceted, ranging from emotional to economic to physical. I feel it my duty as a writer to also suggest solutions and to empower characters who represent communities that traditionally are affected disproportionately. See my 2016 novel, Threshold.

High Country News conducted an interesting project in 2019 from the premise that speculative journalism could potentially accomplish more than strict fact-based journalism has not been able to accomplish. Read this article below included here with permission from High Country News.

The case for speculative journalism
Climate fiction can help us imagine the impacts of climate change in a way
that science journalism can’t. Brian Calvert | Aug. 19, 2019 | From the print edition of High Country News

In June 1988, James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space
Studies, testified before a congressional committee, where he announced,
with 99% certainty, that human-caused global warming was real. A year later, the Global Climate Coalition, an industry group formed by fossil fuel
companies, began a determined effort to stymie climate action. Hansen, being a scientist, based his testimony on scientific fact. The GCC lobbyists, being slimeballs, based their efforts on telling stories — including, incredibly, the 1992 release of a video claiming that adding CO2
to the atmosphere would boost crop yields and end world hunger.

Thirty years later, we are still fighting stories with facts, and the results have
been underwhelming. While it is easy to get frustrated by this state of affairs, it is also easy to understand why it’s happening. Global warming is a human-caused phenomenon that exceeds the human capacity for understanding. The typical institutions that we rely on to guide government policy — science and journalism — have not been fully up to the task. We know this at HCN because we cover, over and again, a changing climate. The facts are there, and the problem is still there — and getting worse. So last December, when the U.S. government issued a damning, detailed assessment on the climate, even we were at a loss with what to do with it. How, we wondered, can we help people understand the importance of all these facts, if the facts aren’t enough to speak for themselves?

One possible answer is this issue, a departure from our usual rigorous, fact-based journalism, and a foray into the world of imagination. Call it science fiction, or, if you prefer, speculative journalism. We took the projections of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, interviewed scientists, pored over studies — then imagined what the West would look like 50 years from the release of the report.

The result is a multiverse of future Wests, all set in the year 2068. No two stories take place in the same reality, but each is a reflection of possibilities presented in the climate assessment. In some, the West verges on satirical catastrophe. In others, technology steps up as reality melts away. Some of us imagined a better world; others imagined how much worse things might get. Readers weighed in, too. Taken together, we hope these stories inspire further exploration of the national climate assessment, which is available online and is an impressive body of work. For our hardcore readers, we’ve provided a citations page, where more information on the relevant science and studies can be found.

None of these stories are true, but any of them could be. The fact is, we don’t really know what climate chaos will bring … but we do know that enormous challenges — and opportunities — lie ahead. Our chance to change the future is now, but we’ll need a better story first.

Poring through all of this peer-reviewed scientific literature wasn’t easy. Luckily, the writers in this issue were aided by countless experts, including climate scientists, rangeland ecologists, hydrologists and others, who helped us interpret climate models and clearly imagine these many possible future Wests. See references to scientific research each piece was based on at the end of the story.

Brian Calvert is the editor-in-chief of High Country News. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. Follow @brcalvert

On June 1, 100 scholars of democracy issued a Statement of Concern.

Onpoint, NPR, broadcast and interviewed three scholars to discuss the state of American democracy. Go here to listen. It is worth listening more than once. During the discussion, Americans contributed their thoughts to the discussion. These are very insightful and encouraging in terms of action and belief in our democratic way of life.

On the Onpoint site there are other resources to continue reading and listening to scholars who have deep understanding of what comprises a democracy, our current situation. Let’s start a discussion here. Please post your thoughts.

All he wanted was to learn to fly. He was a teenager in rural Tennessee, inspired by the heroic flights of the Wright Brothers and then Lindbergh, Dad worked in a little village of Watauga and saved to take flying lessons in near by Johnson City. Soaring over the green hills, he then was seized with a huge desire to leave the poverty and inward directed community of his youth to see the world, to break free.

He had a wonderful mind for math and science, eventually graduating with a degree in physics from East Tennessee State College (his mother walked the graduation stage for him as the US colleges awarded a full degree to all the men and women serving in the military in WWII in their last year of college but not able to finish due to the war).

Dad joined the Army Air Corps when Pearl Harbor was bombed. All the country kids who had not made entry into the military were now able to join up as the USA took everyone willing. Most of the rural kids did not have the best of health, having suffered as children through the Depression, a time my Dad recalled as being hungry all the time. America’s poor citizens comprised a good half of the country back then. Farmers all.

He became a bomber pilot, Captain of a B-29 crew, which he ably led through terrible, death defying excursions in the Pacific, flying over Saipan and Tokyo on bombing raids. His crew included men as young as 19. Dad told many stories from this period of his life, naturally, as it remained the most dramatic of the remaining 75 years (he lived to 95 in reasonably good health to the end).

I think of him every Memorial Day since he passed in 2012 on Pearl Harbor Day ironically. To the end, he worried he’d not be forgiven for killing people on those low level bombing raids. “We could smell flesh burning, Susan!” he recalled often.

The men and women who serve in the nation’s military carry the burden of killing, of maiming in the name of us. We must always remember that what we ask them to do in defense of our way of life is very serious and has life long consequences for them. Honor your war heroes, and let us never forget them and their devotion to the cause of America.

Go Here for the video of Biden’s Global Climate Summit.

Home Link to COP 26 in Glasgow, UK.

Children in All Policies CAP 2030 – Climate Change Planning with Children in Mind

I’ve been reaching outside the U.S. for models of policing in countries with long-standing troubles related to justice and peace. Troubles related to putting one group above another. One source which I have featured on this blog for the past several posts is Ireland’s Peace and Reconciliation movement. I’ve posted about the Corrymella Community which is the oldest Peace and Reconciliation movement in Ireland. See precious recent posts, video and audio links on the sidebars and in posts.

Today I am summarizing the wisdom of Peter Sheridan whose leadership on policing is particularly relevant to the U.S. police brutality against the African American community. Groups have called for a whole new approach to police culture in the U.S. Sheridan’s approach is important.

Two Central Ideas First: 1) The lens of justice is too narrow because you can never adjudicate the atrocities of the past adequately. There is a subtlety to the notion of justice, Sheridan advises. What justice looks like is not straight forward. Acknowledgement of the other’s view and experience, no matter how much we might disagree with it, is essential in a peace process. 2) You can bow to the past but not be bound by it. This latter idea is essential when dealing with centuries of injustice and violence. The statement was actually made by Queen Elizabeth II when she visited Ireland during a reconciliation visit.

Sheridan is a man of deep faith. Love your neighbor as yourself is a teaching that is a core part of his leadership. He states that the majority of people are decent and essentially want the same things that he does. He bases his policies on getting to know each other’s families. Relationship building is essential in peace-building. He sees policing that way: improving people’s lives. There is no homogeneous viewpoint, Sheridan states.

Police Service of Northern Ireland – PSNI is an independent board that evaluates policing in NI. *This might help communities and the USA in general. However, Sheridan’s view is that “everyone is responsible for policing their neighborhood and community.”

Regarding attempts to make sure police are represented by commensurate percentages of gender identity and ethnicity he disagrees. “Selection should be based on skills and abilities.” He referred to the past attempts to artificially balance the force with percent representation. It did not result in peace. Note to the wise: this is based on his considerable experience. He began at age 16 as a junior volunteer in the police force, and rose in the ranks as an effective leader during the atrocities of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. When he could have been made the Chief of the police forces in Ireland he chose to accept leadership of Co-Operation Ireland – NI’s Peace and Reconciliation organization. A 36-year veteran in the police force and graduate of Cambridge, Peter’s voice is a powerful one for the USA police justice movement, Black Lives Matter.

As many black activists and leaders in Louisville and Minneapolis have recently called for, policing needs to be community-based and part of true relationship-building, not the violent policies that characterize American policing today. Listen to the interview with Peter Sheridan by Padriag O’Tuama on the Corrymella Podcast below.

https://www.publictheologyireland.com/podcast/the-corrymeela-podcast-season-1-episode-9-peter-sheridan

I woke to a dense fog hovering over Dream Meadows Farm. Sun filtered through the mist. A little later when I stood on my porch breathing in the fresh cool air, I noticed how the lawns and the farmland had turned emerald. Distant dogwoods are in their glory. Redbuds in full flower. Skies blue.

Everyday is a wonder.

The world’s problems and threats are still there but viewed from my porch this morning each seems possible to overcome or at least, prepare to face. When I remember to just stand in my own feet and be right here, right now, the world opens up to everything I have always yearned for. Right here all the time.

Grateful for this moment, this day. Be well my friends!