Connecting Climates 6
Movement, and being moved
Welcome back to another edition of Connecting Climates. As the U.S. administration continues to inflict pain on people at home and abroad, I felt the need to examine No Kings this newsletter. There’s plenty by way of local manifestations of global movements packed in here.
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Climate 1: On the move
IYKYK
The act of moving — a multi-act drama, hopefully a comedy — feels never-ending, despite clear and obvious mile(km?)stones marking legitimate progress. The long packed-for ‘big day’ arrives: a bulky mass evacuation swiftly uproots all large saran-wrapped furniture, accompanied by prayers that important items emerge unscathed (to no deity in particular) going unanswered.
Our most recent move, nearly three years ago, nearly murdered all involved: four friends who got way more than they signed up for, my knee flirting with a torn ACL, and relatives who I see roughly once a presidential term emerging with bandages from an emergency mission to the pharmacy. We were determined not to repeat unnecessary suffering, outsourcing physical agony to four men racing against the three-hour clock (a bit too much racing, with 40 minutes to spare at the end).
We were ready by virtue of moving boxes, a couple of friends waiting in the wings, logistics sorted, cooperative clouds keeping rain at bay. But, for a moment, I forgot I was an American abroad, always needing to be prepared for the two unsolicited political discussions a day: one with strangers, another with friends.
I was responsible for getting everything set in our new apartment, directing the movers to plop our possessions into pre-determined, yet somewhat indiscriminate and spontaneous coordinates. This led to plenty of downtime with the head mover, who was Lebanese and, as I learned, 30 years old with 3 boys at home, somewhat mystified we were practically the same age yet in completely different life stages. The circumstances of our being in Germany were quite different, yet we were united, momentarily, by the shared immigration bullshit and communicating via this strange tongue.
Some strangers like to feel things out with me a bit first before uncorking their political Molotovs at the United States; others, perhaps more out of curiosity, ask from the get-go. The mover, I sense, needed me to pass a few tests – some basics of Lebanon’s political situation and economic catastrophe, plus other character observations in openness and friendliness – before actually sharing his full-throated disgust for the American military-industrial complex and support of Netanyahu.
He saved one final salvo (perhaps a request for further contemplation) for our last ride down the elevator, after all the work was finished and his team needn’t lift another finger for us. We were joined by another member of his team, with whom I interacted politely all day via many a heartfelt ‘shokran’, our language barrier disqualifying any further conversation.
The skin on his arms was severely disfigured with permanent bubbles and scars, something I had noticed but certainly would never have commented on. The mover prompted me to stare at his worker’s ailments, making sure to take them in.
“You see his arms? Look! Bombs, in Syria. Bombs! America makes all those bombs… It’s just America and Russia blowing things up.”
I’ve yet to find any suitable path through an interaction where the American state, as protagonist, is directly responsible for the suffering of the person right in front of me. The gulf between our circumstances could not be any more apparent than in that moment, my practical nakedness after his bringing a truckload of our possessions into a beautiful home.
What’s one to say to another, as fellow human, yet at total opposite ends of the empire? Where the suffering done unto one was framed, in some way, as in service of the other?
In these moments, I struggle to find words beyond the political context – “It’s just a playground for these leaders (Trump, Putin, Obama, Biden, etc.), not a people, with families and homes and communities” – that express sufficient understanding. It’s almost certainly impossible; it’s apparent I’m approaching this insufficiently and ignorantly.
The mover succeeded in moving me. Even as I write this one week later, the same nausea returns, this reminder that I – the collective ‘we’ beneficiaries of the American empire to which I belong – are complicit in this man’s scarring, his dislocation from home, pain, continued suffering, his journey to a land where he will never truly be welcome, where the notion of home will likely remain distant and unattainable, yet where I’ve been able to carve out my own little utopia.
[Since this section’s writing, the United States has declared war on Iran. The following example pales in concern to other implications of Trump’s non-chalant gamble.
My most recent new haircut was the day after Israel’s airstrikes on Iran. My barber, who’s Persian, was understandably very concerned. In my interval between haircuts, I can only hope his family back in Iran is safe, and that things do not continue to spiral out of control.
In the meantime, the State Department has issued a worldwide caution for all U.S. citizens abroad due to potential demonstrations. As if the ones who’ve left the country need a heads up.]
Climate 2: A Local ‘No Kings’ Movement?
Full disclosure: in the interest of publishing this prior to New York’s Democratic Mayoral primary, I’ve recycled an editorial pitch, lest the hard work from a sunny Sunday go unused. In the interim, Grace Blakeley published former White House staffer Evelyn Quartz’s guest essay ‘The Myth of “No Kings” in America’, which encourages us to reexamine power and American values. She asks many of the same questions about America that I ask about New Yorkers below.
I begin my European lunchtime email binge with City & State’s First Read, the New York political newsletter mandatory for all government staffers and political wonks. June 10th’s editorial pages featured an excerpt from Andrew Cuomo’s pitch to NYC Mayor Democratic primary voters in the Daily News:
“New York City is at a crossroads. We are in a state of crisis. And in crisis, experience matters – a record of delivering real results matters. It is not the time for on the job training: You need a mayor who is ready on Day One.”
Immediately, these set off my Cuomo alarm bells, trained after writing two crisis governance theses and many an op-ed about his tendencies. It shocks me that Cuomo both continues to rely on this messaging and get away with it.
Regardless of whether you’re voting in the NYC Mayoral Democratic Primary on June 24th or are sitting halfway across the world, like I am in Berlin, we need to examine this crisis-as-default narrative a bit more closely, especially if we’re going to be honest about meeting our American political drift into what The Atlantic calls ‘competitive authoritarianism’. What kind of values do we want to promote in 2025? Who are we capable of electing?
For starters, Cuomo fancies himself to be a perma-Roman emperor, the lone savior New Yorkers can turn to in ‘crisis’ (what’s that word crisis mean, exactly?). I’ve already written about times when Cuomo overplayed that hand: Cuomo’s manufactured LIRR crisis turned ‘Summer of Hell’ subway breakdown in 2017, and, of course, COVID in 2020, when he eschewed meaningful cooperation with New York City in favor of emergency declarations, outright propaganda, and cover-up, only to resign in disgrace a year later.
Cuomo’s clear intent is to find crisis leader pedestals on which to place himself. The playbook isn’t that complicated: use a preexisting crisis (or create one in Los Angeles) as pretext for greater control. If that sounds familiar, there were a plethora of Cuomo-Trump comparisons made while they were both in office.
It hit me while I was at Berlin’s meager ‘No Kings’ protest: if ‘No Kings’ also applies to city and state politics, then the Roman emperor Andrew Cuomo is simply unelectable. He is asking voters to reenter the Faustian bargain he forced upon New York State in 2017 and in 2020: let me be your protector, at democracy’s expense.
Of course, the NYC government’s limited jurisdiction (not to mention relatively intact checks and balances) makes this a less dangerous proposition than in Albany or in Washington. For concerned onlookers, perhaps that’s some silver lining as to the scope of Cuomo’s intention.
Cuomo also won’t admit that things could actually run less effectively if he were unilaterally in charge; he’s banking on Democrats sleepwalking into a narrative that dominance equals competence. The narrative of Cuomo as super-manager doesn’t always hold up; for one, his campaign hasn’t bothered coming up with a transit plan.
For the NYC voters who are either unconcerned or not concerned enough to reconsider their ranked choice vote for Andrew Cuomo, I plead with you to remember what we’ve learned about his time in the Governor’s office.
Cuomo’s crisis governance pitch relies on collective, selective amnesia. What do people want to remember from Cuomo’s COVID reign? Those Cuomosexual tees, the ‘New York Tough’ posturing, and ringing bells for first responders? Is it somehow less convenient, or legitimately too traumatizing, to take another look at the rest: our dead loved ones in senior care facilities, repeated (and repeatedly denied) sexual harassment, ‘getting things done’ while cutting corners on infrastructure projects in the name of premature ribbon cutting?
Why are New Yorkers comfortable with electing someone like this locally when they seemingly won’t tolerate it federally? Are we really that allergic to ‘kings’ in a city whose history is poisoned with them (Boss Tweed, Robert Moses), remains overly reliant on older white knights to save the day (Giuliani, Bloomberg, even ‘Train Daddy’), and willing to look past scandals (Eric Adams is still Mayor, Anthony Weiner is making a comeback?)
Maybe, as Politico alluded to this week, a lot of people in New York like it when an authoritative, old, white man takes the reins. It’s dark, it’s undemocratic, it’s predatory (on our collective fears, and women within harassing distance), but it clings to a nativist interpretation of history that offers some certainty in facing the unknown. Cuomo’s offer plays on the same psychological impulses as those of far-right leaders across the world, as those nasty undercurrents questioning whether a woman can really be in charge, as wanting some return to an imaginary normal. Unlike the challenges facing the Democratic electorate in 2024 – as Ross Barkan terms it, a choice between fascism and genocide – picking someone other than a strongman shouldn’t be as complicated.
We’re apparently unsure about electing an immigrant socialist Mayor. Maybe Italians back home, for example, have forgotten when they weren’t considered white, when the locals were more comfortable reelecting an Irish political machine, when the federal government instituted immigration quotas. Then Fiorello La Guardia – a socialist-leaning Republican – showed up for election in… 1933. That worked out well for what NYC needed at the time: infrastructure, unemployment, wrestling power from the financial sector, anti-corruption, even anti-Nazi activism (La Guardia led rallies and boycotts, plus spoke Yiddish!).
It’s not a perfect comparison, but Zohran Mamdani is an extension of La Guardia’s political legacy. Mamdani, and fellow candidates Brad Lander (arrested, then released, by ICE this week), Adrienne Adams, and Zellnor Myrie, invite us to tell a positive story and to D.R.E.A.M. once more: that we’re better than this political moment; that we can try making transit fareless, and that there’s more to our history than the strongmen who won’t go away. Especially the ones who look for NYC Democratic Primary voters in the Daily News.
Somewhere I’ve traveled to recently + A nod to collective brilliance
For work, I make the occasional cross-country voyage to the former West German capital of Bonn, a city known for Beethoven’s Haus, climate diplomacy, and very little in between.
It was fascinating to see the Bundesdorf (federal village) in full form during the annual Bonn Climate Talks, which began during my visit. Bonn’s annual apex is seemingly tied to international negotiations, as if two frenzied weeks of global recognition were to justify its inherent value as a place where people, you know, do their groceries. When the world schleps to a U.N. city of 320,000, there’s a whole host of indicators: no hotel rooms available during school nights; non-locals subtly brandishing their accreditation badges in public; a slightly-fuller-than-usual Straßenbahn.
Yet there was something unmistakingly different in the air, perhaps fueled by collective travel fatigue and intercultural curiosity. This visit, I was lucky to have joined our organization’s side event, Daring Cities, which brought together the local governments ICLEI serves and a myriad of partners (including GIZ, who was kind enough to host) in the global sustainability space, for discussions on the importance of subnational governments in climate negotiations.
Historically, my activities have been limited to our office (I have been sent TikToks of when the remote employee comes to visit), so the conference was certainly a welcome change of pace, albeit an exhausting one. By virtue of greater exposure to global NGO meetings and events, I can now be in town on short notice, entirely dependent on my friends’ generosity (muchisimas dankias, Olea y Ruben) and Deutsche Bahn’s whims (more on that later).
It was a treat to meet many colleagues from across the world in-person and fully participate in the dialogues, especially alongside local government representatives from the U.S. doing their best to “stay aggressive” in pursuing climate targets. Events where we tap into collective brilliance (like the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, which I also attended in between CC5 and CC6) really energize me. Hence, we combine two sections.
My favorite stretch was during a data-driven decision-making roundtable discussion led by ClimateView, which included a presentation by Scotland’s Climate Intelligence Service on encouraging each of their 32 unitary authorities to report on ClimateView’s sustainability indicators tracking their transitions to climate neutrality.
As I remarked during the session, there’s something remarkable about how SCIS created a community of care among their small team and the staffers across all of Scotland’s municipal governments. While it wasn’t necessarily their intention, SCIS does an abundance of little things that keeps them in regular contact with their unitary government focal points; they’ll follow up if someone hasn’t updated their data in too long a time span, curious if something’s wrong or if they need help.
What struck me (in line with my takeaway from the North America morning roundtable) was the local-regional scale at which pride, care, and responsibility operate. Really knowing a place and caring about it in a way only locals can inspire a deeper collective action. Care can be seen as infrastructure just as bridges and data centers can; Dark Matter Labs mission steward Indy Johar described care infrastructure recently as part of ‘building the planetary local’.
Like others in sustainability, I often return to governance: what scales and arrangements would be better for the ‘multisolving’ required in the 21st century? (Look at populations of some subnational governments, and try telling me we don’t need to get more local!) Should regions (particularly cross-boundary ones) have greater autonomy? (I’m sure that’s clear for Scotland and Quebec, but what about the Greater NY Metropolitan Area that’s spread across three states without any official government entity?) There’s even models to support bioregional governance, thereby linking cities and regions according to their shared ecosystems, versus historical or otherwise arbitrary administrative boundaries.
I left both Daring Cities (and the Creative Bureaucracy Festival) with these questions at the front of my mind. They evaporated when, after a 10-hour workday, I got a push notification that due a delay on the first train, my connection in Dortmund would be impossible, a touch problematic as that was the day’s last scheduled train to Berlin.
So, I did what any New Yorker desperate to get back home would do: hustle to make a regional train by 2 minutes, sprint to catch another high-speed train to Dortmund by 4 minutes, and pray to make the final high-speed train to Berlin (which, despite being to no deity in particular, were answered). My immediate reward was dropping €25 on a lentil soup, candy bar, and two half liter water bottles, which bought me the privilege of temporary refuge in the dining car.
Astonished by Deutsche Bahn’s decay, I heard from one distinguished visitor that “this wasn’t the Germany she remembered” from previous trips. If it’s any consolation, the Deutsche Bahn Linseneintopf recipe won’t be changing anytime soon.
What I’ve been reading
The Secret Life of Groceries, by Benjamin Lorr, is an admirable pursuit through many, many depressing rabbit holes. Lorr collects grocery horror stories deliberately obfuscated by the ‘don’t look here’ supply chain that renders the whole invisible, and weaves them together brilliantly through the people who make this chaotic bundle of systems tick: Trader Joe, the Brüder Aldi, an Aldi truck driver, and a Burmese shrimp slave. When you read Benjamin Lorr, you can’t unsee it.
The world of groceries is designed to make consumers at once all-powerful and helpless against the powers that be. My futile attempts at inspiring change in our habits via bringing up this book in conversation have been (nearly) universally met with apathy and nihilism, even among Buddhists!
Yet it’s precisely this indifference that empowers grocery chains’ exploitation in the relentless pursuit of unsustainable efficiency. While it’s been public knowledge for a decade, I was unaware that Burmese slaves are what make shrimp from Thailand affordable in supermarkets.until having read Secret Life. Equally disturbing from the climate perspective is that the newfound Thai shrimp industry requires environmental destruction to sustain itself: shrimp ponds unpredictably go extinct and render swaths of the Thai countryside as fruitful as Chernobyl.
Besides my dad, who recommended this book and lent it to me during my trip home, the only person willing to engage with this book’s contents was a fellow urbanist, Charlotte, who may have a Substack of her own for you all to read soon. A couple points to ponder:
Food supply chains are capable of extraordinary destruction (nothing like the Chinese fishing fleet!), yet we came back to the simple question: to what end? What’s the point of having frozen shrimp available 24/7, or unending choices among out-of-season fruits from faraway lands?
We were similarly at a loss trying to own our consumption choices in the industrialized world. Are we in a particular historical moment of hyper-industrialized food production and material waste, where nothing we do can truly be considered sustainable? How much longer will this abundant waste -- infinitely producing washing machines to fall into eventual disrepair, “thrown away” to West African landfills -- last?
Kids, don’t read this book before trying to sleep.
Pennies for your thoughts
Berlin’s Karneval der Kulturen (Credit: Ich!)
This edition’s batshit crazy headline
“ICE agent or just some person?”
Random notes
Berlin’s summer is in full swing. We took in the Karnival der Kulturen, Berlin’s celebration of multiculturalism mooching off the Christian long weekend of Pfingsten (Pentecost/Whitsunday), several weekends ago. Of any experience, nothing beat the communal drums in Blücherpark, smiling and dancing among strangers as daylight nautily crept past 9:00. What is it about percussion?
Oddly enough, it was difficult finding good music during the Fête de la Musique, which accompanies the summer solstice. We did manage to find a sundial mural, though, and were very satisfied to see that it actually worked!
Also on the bright side: Mahmoud Khalil finally got to go home after 100 days in immigration detention.
I got some great recommendations from fellow Americans back home for keeping up with the news, including Tangle, by Isaac Saul, and Letters from an American, by Heather Cox Richardson. They’re already helping me make sense of the last few weeks. What publications do all you turn to?
Something great I’ve eaten
Definitely, definitely not the Linseneintopf. I was famished and still felt instant regret.
The easy winner, as it has been in previous editions, goes to my girlfriend’s most recent loaf of sourdough bread. It’s starting to get ridiculous. Watching her experiment is almost as much of a delight as eating a fresh slice out of the oven (eh, maybe I’m getting carried away). And we’re only three months in…
Credit: I take none
An ode to the penny
Pennies are certainly a theme after moving apartments and a work trip on short notice. Let’s get back to ancient coinage though, shall we.
During my monthlong Workaway in a Budapest hostel, I was surprised to learn the name of Hungary’s currency: the florint. Hungarian currency has a pretty insane history to begin with, but the name might top the list. I leave you to Wikipedia, where you may start a binge of your own!
Thanks for the mention, Tim! Really enjoyed reading this post - feeling very inspired to get writing, and also hungry after seeing the amazing sourdough loaf :)