Friday Faves - Your Weekly Strong Towns Roundup
Each week, the Strong Towns team shares their favorite links—the things that made us think in new ways, delve deeper into the Strong Towns mission, or even just smile.
This week The New York Times posted a quiz asking readers if they could tell a Trump supporter’s fridge from a Biden supporter’s fridge. After many of us took the quiz, we shared photos of our own refrigerators.
First, in case you missed it, last week we released a new podcast show, The Bottom-Up Revolution, and we also brought back the Strong Towns Podcast after a summer-long hiatus. Get the latest on all our podcasts here.
Also, a little plug to let you know that Chuck Marohn has been sharing weekly videos in our private Strong Towns Facebook Community group. Every Monday at around 11am Central, he does a short chat about one of his recent articles or podcasts. Check it out and request to join the group here.
Finally we, like all of you, are gearing up for the election. Whatever happens next week, we hope your commitments to local action and bottom-up change don’t waver. We can do so much in our own neighborhoods, and that’s truly the best place to begin building a strong town. We’re with you on that journey, no matter who’s in charge in Washington.
Here’s what Strong Towns staff were reading this week:
Daniel: I’ve long found Hannah Arendt one of the most insightful and important 20th century thinkers for her efforts to explain the sudden and horrific descent of whole societies into totalitarianism. This reflection in Aeon by her latest biographer, though, struck me for its relevance even in far more mundane political circumstances. Samantha Rose Hill writes of how Arendt pinpointed loneliness—disconnection from human companionship—as an essential factor that makes people susceptible to the grip of ideology. This can, of course, lead to the worst sorts of totalitarianism. However, it can also lead to many of the ills we see in America today: extreme polarization, a lack of common reference points or ability to even agree on basic facts, and a politics driven by narratives unmoored from reality. It reinforces a key tenet of the Strong Towns approach, for me: that community and connectedness are a basic prerequisite for us to work together to solve real problems, and that no ideology or top-down program can provide those things for us.
Rachel: Unless you’ve had your head in the sand for the last six months, you’ve probably been hearing about the particular toll the pandemic has placed on women, especially mothers. This NPR article gives a comprehensive look at the many layers of struggle this pandemic has created for women, and the dramatic impacts it may have on women for the next several decades. For those who have had to cut back on their jobs or quit work altogether, it’s not just a loss of income in 2020—it may mean a career and pay setback for years to come.
Michelle: Earlier this month Chuck participated in the Smart and Healthy Cities Forum 2020, hosted by Thomas Jefferson University and AARP. Chuck gave his two-cents on how to evolve cities in a smart and healthy way. Find both sessions at this link.
John: On Wednesday, The New York Times ran an article about the surge of interest, money, and research around artificially cooling the planet—sometimes called solar geoengineering—“in the hopes of buying humanity more time to cut greenhouse gas emissions.” Some of the climate interventions being studied include injecting sunlight-reflecting aerosols into the atmosphere and spraying saltwater into the air. Reading the article I was reminded of an essay by Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer. In “Solving for Pattern,” Berry lays out the differences between bad solutions and good ones. Here are a few indicators: Bad solutions make the problems they’re trying to solve worse, or they create new problems. Bad solutions solve only for a single purpose or goal. In contrast, good solutions accept limits, solve more than one problem (and don’t create new ones), and have wide margins, “so that the failure of one solution does not imply the impossibility of another.”
Cards on the table: I believe man-made climate change is real. I believe humans have been sowing the wind for many decades, and now we are reaping the whirlwind. But I’m skeptical that solar geoengineering meets Berry’s criteria for a good solution, not least because it doesn’t address the larger underlying problems, including (but not limited to) a way of building cities that is resource-intensive and auto-dependent. It strikes me as an #OrderlyButDumb response to a complex problem. Scientists are getting grant money to determine whether we can artificially cool the atmosphere—is there grant money to study whether we should?
Linda: I discovered a new Podcast this week called Brave New Planet, hosted by Dr. Eric Lander, scientist, professor, president and founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Lander and his guests explore how new technologies have the potential to solve our problems and improve our world, or, if not applied wisely, cause more harm than good. The most recent episode I listened to was “A Radical Approach to Climate Change,” which explores the potential effects of the solar geoengineering strategies described in the article John linked to above. Dr. Lander is fond of the phrase “What could possibly go wrong?” In this episode, he and other scientists offer a compelling case that solar geoengineering not only fails to address the root causes of climate change, but has the potential to cause real harm.
Chuck: I voted a couple of weeks ago and have taken the intervening period of time to disconnect almost entirely from politics. Even so, this week I saw this video that was shared by the current Minnesota Governor, Tim Walz (D). It’s a get out the vote message done in the perfect way, with the past four governors—two Democrats, one Republican, and an Independent—sharing a common point of pride in how we, as Minnesotans, do elections. It made me proud to be from this state and proud to have voted, which is the point of appealing to a common cultural virtue in this way. Very effective way of moving people to take action.
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Finally, from all of us, a warm welcome to the newest members of the Strong Towns movement: Ellen Russell Beatty, Jonathan Faasse, and Matthew Parker
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What stories got you thinking this week? Please share them in the comments.