alyaza birze ΘΔ

in an attempt to balance out my non-fiction reading imbalance (currently, 78% of my reading is non-fiction) i've been working on my backlog of fiction books to read. this is easier said than done—i'm rather selective with my fiction reading—and today's entry, Femlandia seems worth singling out as a good example of what i don't care for in fiction. calling this novel consistently bad would potentially be an overstatement of the case, but i don't like it and i would not recommend you seek it out. in writing this post, i've actually bumped it down a half-star from where i initially had it, in fact.

the blurb for this novel—which i will quote verbatim below—might already tip my hand as to the sorts of criticisms that are going to be had for this novel:

Miranda Reynolds always thought she would rather die than live in Femlandia. But that was before the country sank into total economic collapse and her husband walked out in the harshest, most permanent way, leaving her and her sixteen-year-old daughter with nothing. The streets are full of looting, robbing, and killing, and Miranda and Emma no longer have much choice—either starve and risk getting murdered, or find safety. And so they set off to Femlandia, the women-only colony Miranda’s mother, Win Somers, established decades ago.

Although Win is no longer in the spotlight, her protégé Jen Jones has taken Femlandia to new heights: The off-grid colonies are secluded, self-sufficient, and thriving—and Emma is instantly enchanted by this idea of a safe haven. But something is not right. There are no men allowed in the colony, but babies are being born—and they’re all girls. Miranda discovers just how the all-women community is capable of enduring, and it leads her to question how far her mother went to create this perfect, thriving, horrifying society.

this is because if you've spent any time learning about second-wave feminism, your takeaway from this blurb will probably be something like "'Femlandia' is going to be radical feminism taken to a logical extreme"—and you'd be correct, because that is exactly what it is. in the novel the eponymous Femlandia is essentially a rehashed-take on a lesbian separatist or radical feminist commune from the 1970s. unfortunately, the novel does not compellingly grapple with any of the innumerable purposes, problems, and political theories these communes produced.

the most obvious example of this comes when, upon arriving in Femlandia, our protagonist Miranda is forced to undergo what amounts to a gynecology exam (to prove she was "always a woman") to gain entry to the commune. i'm sure you can see where this is going, and it is played as follows:

I’m flummoxed. “You need a half-assed gynecological exam to satisfy yourself I’m a woman? Really?”

Kate frowns at me, creating lines in a forehead that was, until a moment ago, smooth as a newborn’s. “I need to satisfy myself that you were always a woman.”[...]

“Sounds pretty exclusionary to me,” I say.

Kate shrugs. “Let me ask you something. You see how we are here, right?” She waves one hand over her bare breasts. “How free do you think we would be if we started letting in male residents?”

“If they identify as women, though—”

I’m cut off before I can finish. “They can identify as a fucking hedgehog for all I care. I’m talking about what they are. Not what they think they are or what they want to be. It’s a slippery slope. You let in one, you have to let in all. There’s a reason your mother called this place Femlandia. Get used to it.”

at face the trans-exclusionary positioning the novel takes here—which is used in the story to, in effect, violate every woman upon entry to Femlandia—is fine, and in fact would be a potentially interesting as a plot device, or alternatively as a commentary on the consequences of idealizing and essentializing womanhood. the problem is the novel does not do either of these things—in fact, it barely lingers on this detail; it barely considers the social and political consequences of such an essentialist policy (one that, again, victimizes women analogously to how the world outside Femlandia does); and it barely even addresses this detail in any real way after bringing it up. instead, Miranda does just kind of get over it despite her initial protestation, and the fact that this radical feminist commune is trans-exclusionary is taken for granted from then on because there are, as far as i can tell, no trans characters in the book. this is unfortunate. moreover, it's not very good writing, and it's a missed opportunity that directly leads to the novel's biggest problem: instead of, say, trans people being the mechanism through which the consequences of this type of feminism and separatism (and where they become misandry and bigotry) are explored, we instead get a frankly unconvincing and comically villainous level of man-hatred as a substitute.

Miranda's mom Win, for example, spends virtually the entire novel talking about men as if she is Valerie Solanas. i would call this exaggeratory but she literally kills her husband for being an annoying manchild and frames it as a suicide, and then flees when Miranda threatens to call the cops on her for this. she is rather obviously a beyond-the-pale evil character and unto itself that would not be a problem, but this is done in such an extremely silly and over-the-top way that it just cannot be taken seriously. it does not help that chapter after chapter of her rationale is anvil-blunt nonsense like this (directed in this case at Miranda for not being sufficiently misandrist)—

“I’ve known women like you. Some people call you deniers; some people call you other names. No reason to get into a name-calling match, though, so let’s just say it like it is. You’re the kind of woman who thinks that because a pile of shit didn’t fall on you, there was no pile of shit. It didn’t exist, right? It didn’t come crashing down out of the sky like a dump-truck load of manure and fall on anyone else. You didn’t get groped by an uncle or a priest or your own goddamned father, so no one else got groped. You didn’t wake up one morning and discover dried jism on your panties, so no one else woke up that way. You weren’t beaten because supper was late or cold or not what your wonderful Mr. Right had a craving for that evening, so no other woman took a beating.”

—that is simply not a compelling or convincing caricature of a radical feminist, or any coherent political belief besides blind misandry. it would not be convincing even if Win were just a husband-murderer and Femlandia an unusually misandrist women's commune, because the logic she uses wouldn't even justify that level of action on her part. but not content to just be a husband-murderer, Win's Femlandia is upheld by a grotesque, poor-man's-Omelas system—that Win signed off on, to be clear—wherein they abuse male children and young adults as a subhuman breeder class, fit only for their semen and otherwise treated as feral livestock, to perpetuate Femlandia in the absence of male residents. there is literally no logic that could justify this (or the evil it represents) and Win hardly even tries to do so narratively, instead upholding it through brainwashing and coercion.

the effect of this is that it collapses what could be a nuanced (or at least reasonably complex) story into a one-dimensional one—Win is just a monstrous person with no redeeming qualities and no understandable belief system. she is a frankly sociopathic character whose actions in the narrative amount to taking vulnerable women under her wing, secluding them, playing upon their worst traumas, and making them into her loyal subjects. making her into a narrative manifestation of feminism with these traits is, needless to say, something that must be executed with care—care that is not really taken here and which, as a result, makes it concerningly easy to read this novel as explicitly anti-feminist. i might even go so far as to say that, because Win is so explicitly misandrist and man-hating—an avatar of what "excessive" feminism might look like—that an anti-feminist reading is the default reading you would come away with here.

a friend of mine put it like this while i liveblogged this on Discord: "thinking generously this story has a place but i don't think the author has thought about it beyond a gross caricature of the ideology." in a lot of ways this novel's narrative is, at least in what it's trying to say, not much better than a 336-page Virgin vs. Chad meme. i do not like it when a novel reads this way.

i particularly do not like it here, because there is a lot to genuinely critique about radical feminism (especially modern radical feminism), political separatism, trans exclusion, and all the other things this novel tries to touch on with at-best mixed results. the lengthy article "On Wimmins Land" by Sasha Archibald comes to my mind here, with its voluminous paragraphs about the triumphs, but also the troubles, of separatist feminist communal life and the political theories upholding it:

Establishing rules was a quagmire. How best to collectivize labor when some participants had mobility issues? How to share childcare when not all women wanted to care for young children, and not all mothers wanted to cede control? Drug-use was central to some women’s spiritual practices, but a drug bust would bring policemen to the land. Some thought it wise to have guns — commonplace in this part of Oregon — while others were adamantly opposed. Zealous efforts to achieve fairness tended to sharpen the perception of unfairness, and anarchist-minded land-dykes never entirely agreed that rules were necessary. [...] Cabbage Lane started a monthly Singles Week, during which the names of lovers-to-be were drawn out of a hat. Residents at WomanShare used Tarot to decide who would sleep in what bed on a given night, while others maintained ménages à trois. Communal masturbation was not uncommon, and loud lovemaking declared one’s right to pleasure. [...] Men were unequivocally banned from women’s lands, but the question of when exactly a boy becomes a man constituted one of separatism’s great quandaries. Some collectives allowed male children under eleven years old, some none at all, some one male child but no more, and some drew the line at breastfeeding — after weaning, male infants had to go. [...] Trans women were perceived through the distortions of cis-gendered bias, and commonly characterized as men who were using disguises to penetrate women’s attempts at privacy. Some factions espoused outright transphobic violence.

and i think a better novel would grapple with these sorts of things instead of constantly lingering on a character's belief that "[...]men were animals. She would have called them pigs but found no reason to insult a perfectly good pig with the comparison. Hyenas, maybe. Jackals. Anything wild that ran in a pack and looked out for itself first. But not anything that could be considered cute, edible, or useful." or that character's hatred of dresses because they reinforce patriarchy or—to reiterate—that character's Omelas-like system that uses male children as breeders.

so it goes in fiction. there is necessarily a great deal of shlock and slop out there and to be a part of this mass is not the worst crime. as i said to start out, though, skip this one. or if you find my descriptions compelling enough to explore for yourself—and also want to read a novel i consider a trainwreck—go check it out of a library i guess. maybe Dalcher's other books are worth financially supporting her for; this one is not.

welcome back to Birzeblog, after a lengthy hiatus.

if you've followed my Bluesky over the past three months or so you've probably seen at least one of my posts about the discourse du jour in liberal spaces, which is Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson's new book Abundance. perhaps because Klein is framing it as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberalism (or perhaps because people just like drama and argumentation) this book and its prescriptions are among the latest in a post-2024 series of online liberal-leftist litmus tests. there's a truly fascinating amount of sectarianism over it between mainstream liberals and self-described "abundance" types (who usually seem to come from the ranks of online YIMBYism). from the left, meanwhile, the book has been subjected to a withering barrage of criticism against basically every premise it advances—this has become especially acute after the truly bizarre WelcomeFest, in which a large number of pro-abundance thinkers got very mad about Bluesky and people criticizing them there. from all the controversy you might therefore assume this book is actually interesting in some way.

unfortunately it really is not. it is clunky and pretty uncompelling, and it's bizarre to me that it has the reputation it already does. to the extent that the book arrives at correct conclusions, that's usually because the conclusions are self-evident to its audience. but in every other way the book is boring or a mess, and sometimes both. its broader argumentation is effectively libertarian despite coming from two ostensible social liberals. in a number of places—even to someone like myself, who does not specialize in much of what the book is about—the book is demonstrably falsifiable or outright bizarre in its argumentation (and, again, sometimes both). finally and on the whole, the framework of "abundance" is muddled and not coherent, largely coming off as a wishlist of loose demands with no central ideological core. i think you'll see what i mean as we go forward here.

the stuff Abundance gets correct

let's start with a few areas in which i think Abundance is, for the most part, correct in its analysis. you'll forgive me for only briefly explaining my thinking:

• onerous housing regulations: the existence of legitimately onerous regulations in the housing market is inarguable, and Abundance is correct to center this as a problem. from the issue of zoning (as M. Nolan Grey observes in Arbitrary Lines, "In a typical US city, at least three-quarters of the land zoned for residential uses will be zoned exclusively for single-family houses."), to parking minimums (parking spaces, according to Henry Grabar in Paved Paradise, often cost $30,000 or more per space and add hundreds of thousands to housing costs), to the design constraints created by multi-stair buildings (as lengthily recounted in Michael Eliason's Building for People), there are many things you could categorize as regulations which can be removed to ease the housing crisis and make new housing better for everyone.
• bizarre planning and design requirements: likewise, the process of planning and designing housing in the United States is usually a bad one across the board. the process takes far too long generally and is too easy to concern troll; when planning meetings are required, these are almost invariably a terrible and unrepresentative feedback mechanism. who we let build housing is often ridiculous. San Francisco's ordinance favoring construction by “Micro-Local Business Enterprises” is perhaps the primordial example in how it defines small business ("less than $12 million in average annual gross revenue"), and in so doing it discourages the use of proven contractors while consolidating business into a select few contracting companies. there are also no shortage of nonsensical bodies with power over the process they should not have. the book names the Art Commission and the Mayor’s Office on Disability as two examples in San Francisco; undoubtedly, most cities have formal or informal analogues, or just allow aforementioned planning meetings to disrupt the process. all of these are things we could streamline, and housing construction would assuredly not be worse off if we did so.
• weaponizing environmental protection laws: the weaponization of environmental protection laws (such as the infamous California Environmental Quality Act) is a constant issue that does need to be addressed in some form. (mercifully, in the time since i began drafting this, some of CEQA's worst excesses have finally been curbed!)
• homeownership cannot be a speculative asset and attainable to everyone in our current capitalist economy: this should be apparent to literally anybody who can understand supply and demand. for housing to be a useful speculative asset it must be scarce; and indeed, housing currently appreciates in value largely because of scarcity. but this is incongruent with affordable housing (or really housing people at all). it's also bad that for many people, their net worth is partially or wholly tied to the valuation of their home.

all of this is well and good. something you might be picking up on, though, is a pattern of things that are obvious. remember: this is marketed as a handbook for the Democratic Party and liberals more generally. everything i have just described has a correct side and an incorrect side, and there is effectively no controversy over which side is correct within the audience Klein and Thompson are targeting with this book. you will find very few people in the liberal-left hemisphere of politics who, for instance, actually believe the California Environmental Quality Act ought to apply to literally any development requiring government approval. every governor of California since Jerry Brown has railed against its undue expansion by a court for a reason. and leftism and liberalism aren't even really in tension on the fourth point, even if they disagree on almost everything else that follows from the statement.

somehow, though, Thompson and Klein cherrypick these problems into a full blown crisis to which the only supposed solution amounts to libertarian deregulation. the book jumps from "CEQA is bad and should be reformed" to "virtually all environmental regulations are onerous, and stand in the way of building housing" without seriously considering the psychotic downstream implications of the second statement.

what the hell are we doing here?

lest you think my characterization is exaggeratory, i offer the following vignette based on my initial experience reading the book. Abundance immediately gets to making the second argument in its introduction, saying

well-meaning laws to protect nature in the twentieth century now block the clean energy projects needed in the twenty-first. Laws meant to ensure that government considers the consequences of its actions have made it too difficult for government to act consequentially.

later on—in a section recounting the environmental history of the United States—it elaborates on the argument, positing that

Between 1966 and 1973, the US passed almost a dozen laws that required the government to be more responsive to local citizens and the environment. They were the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the Department of Transportation Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968, the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970, the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Policies Act, the Noise Control Act of 1972, the Clean Water Act, the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1973, and the Endangered Species Act. In seven years, America compiled an arsenal of regulation to slow or outright stop the era of big government building. [emphasis mine]

rather definitive of the book's alignment, i think. but just to quiet any ambiguity, the book picks up again later still by taking the side of a report by J. B. Ruhl and James Salzman, which concludes

the problem is really the profusion of different, overlapping policies and authorities. Beyond NEPA, Ruhl and Salman note the Endangered Species Act, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Coastal Zone Management Act, the Clean Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the National Forest Management Act.

to say this is goofy is putting it mildly. we don't have time to go through all of these, but it's not even clear to me how most of these regulations actually serve as the primary obstacles to housing construction—and the book does not really elaborate besides gesturing at regulatory and environmental groups and their litigious tradition that ostensibly began with Ralph Nader. i do not find this particularly convincing, nor do many reviewers. it also skips over the fact that many of these regulations are demonstrably some of the most valuable ever passed. the Clean Air Act is almost singularly responsible for the reduction of air pollution in the United States, preventing as many as 370,000 premature deaths and saving an estimated $2 trillion per year. laws such as the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act both seem pretty important, and successful at preventing large-scale extinctions, in what is otherwise the ongoing Holocene extinction event, wherein extinction rates are far higher than the estimated background rate. and even the most ambiguously beneficial regulations such as the Clean Water Act still seem advisable to keep around. despite the general improvement of water quality in the United States, many bodies of water continue to exhibit concerning—and dangerous—levels of pollution.

of course, the text also seems unintentionally revealing as to why Klein and Thompson are so willing to potentially throw out entire swathes of valuable environmental regulation: they seem to dismiss, or be ignorant of, how bad things still are because those things are not as visible as they used to be. according to them:

Human beings choked on smog in London in the nineteenth century and in New York and Los Angeles in the twentieth century. A few years ago, Beijing’s air quality was an international scandal, and now the same is true for Delhi. But notice: the problem passes. Los Angeles got richer and its residents now breathe clean air. The same is true in London, where air pollution in the eighteenth century was worse than Delhi is today. [emphasis mine]

almost none of this is correct. earlier this year—and for the 25th year in a row—Los Angeles was recognized by the American Lung Association as one of America's worst polluted cities. pollution has come down drastically, yes, but even current levels are known to cause excess mortality in the thousands every year in Southern California. and even when pollution doesn't kill, it has serious health effects: we know that Southern California pollution levels cause "reduced lung function growth, increased school absences, asthma exacerbation, and new-onset asthma" in children, for example. to call the problem "passed" is flatly ridiculous. similarly, Beijing's pollution problem—although massively improved—remains far above WHO guidelines and has an even higher annual body count than Los Angeles. nor have reductions been accomplished because Beijing nebulously "got richer;" they have been accomplished through a massive and multifaceted Chinese government program to address the causes of, sources of, and contributors to pollution.

another illuminating passage of the book in this vein decries "special air filtration systems for developments near freeways" which it poses as admirable, but symptomatic of too-strict green building requirements that increase homelessness through increasing the cost of construction. while i'm sure this does make it harder to build inexpensive housing, it seems rather straightforwardly bad to argue that—simply because the alternative is potential homelessness—people in affordable housing should not receive protections from car fumes and pollutants. arguably, air filtration has become necessary independent of freeways (and away from them too): the growing wildfire smoke problem in California is likely responsible for tens of thousands of premature deaths in the past decade. it is not going to get better as the climate continues to warm. should we simply not build with this in mind because it will be more expensive? this is a conclusion the book all but asks you to make in its one-dimensional advocacy for more housing.

what others are saying about the book

other deficiencies are, unsurprisingly, evident throughout other portions of the text—and in even defining the bounds of who supports abundance or what it means as a policy orientation. how, for example, can an agenda with little through-line besides deregulation keep itself from being weaponized by right-wingers who use deregulation to exact harm? already, such a "co-optation" (if you can even call it that) is evident. Hannah Story Brown, for instance, observes that "Donald Trump, at a surface level, is following an abundance agenda by removing the implementing regulations of the National Environmental Policy Act," yet is also doing so in a manner which advantages fossil-fuel interests. she adds that "Trump appointees like Doug Burgum and Chris Wright have cloaked their pro-polluter agenda in the rhetoric of “energy abundance.”"¹ the through-line of deregulation, too, is fraught. even writers more amenable to the abundance agenda such as Mike Konczal are rather hesitant to concur with the book's attempt to provide a one-size-fits-all solution to a disparate set of problems. Matt Bruenig, another of the writers more sympathetic to abundance, summarizes best that "bringing all these disparate things together causes unhelpful muddling." and it seems debatable at best, at least if you ask Liberal Currents, that abundance is capable of helping the Democratic Party electorally in the way Klein and Thompson want to believe. "Very few voters," write Isaiah Glick, "are actually going to notice the changes that Klein and Thompson suggest in their book."

in the ideological department, to call the book generally confused—outside of deregulatory libertarianism—is probably still generous. Malcolm Harris, in a lengthy piece, lingers on a number of questions that seem prudent such as "[...]why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget?" surely, in a book where the pair find time to pooh-pooh measures such as degrowth, advertisement reduction, or a shift away from meat and dairy consumption, there is space to linger on the defense budget—often maligned as the representation of government waste and inefficiency among the liberal-left hemisphere of politics? but they are conspicuously pretty silent here, and in many places where scrutiny of government waste and inefficiency is actually warranted. there's also the book's bizarre forays into non-liberal economics. when the book starts "cit[ing] Karl Marx in [its] argument for unleashing the capitalist forces of production from government standards," Harris understandably poses this as self-evidently stupid—not least because it is an absurdist usage of Marx in a book that, for the record, seldom even mentions class (much less class conflict).

returning to Bruenig (who to reiterate is otherwise reasonably sympathetic to abundance) he calls the book's narrativizing and historiography rather weak and scattershot, saying "Sometimes the blame [for obstruction] is put on environmentalists. Other times it is put on the individualistic cultural revolutions of the 1960s, including the New Left, and the consumer protection movement spearheaded by Ralph Nader." hardly an ideal review of one of Abundance's central themes. Bruenig's specialty is economic policy, though, and it is apparent that he is even more critical of the book's willingness to confidently assert things like "American liberalism has measured its successes in how near it could come to the social welfare system of Denmark." America is almost uniquely unwilling to implement Nordic-style measures, Bruenig notes, opting (largely at the behest of liberals like Klein and Thompson!) for means-testing over universality.

and more generally, to close out, the book seems to be irritatingly fast and loose with its facts and focus despite the wonkishness of both its writers. there are people who credibly contest Klein and Thompson's understanding of telecommunications or his characterization of the process for deploying rural broadband funding, the nuances of which he seems to have either missed or intentionally ignored because they undercut his thesis; and there are people who observe the oddity of the pair's hyperfocus on a handful of major U.S. cities as engines of creation and productivity in what is ostensibly intended to be a sweeping agenda for America. there are people who dispute the Abundance narrative of housing, its tendency to avoid having to address the impact of the Great Recession, and its dancing around inconvenient facts, such as

the Golden State [having] built plenty of housing in the mid-aughts. In fact, at times in 2004 and 2005, California even permitted more new housing units than Texas did. Since zoning restrictions didn’t suddenly get tighter in the second half of the 2000s, this building boom scrambles the thesis that public land-use controls are the root cause of today’s housing crisis.

to say nothing of those who raise their eyebrows at abundance and its willingness to sideline the very workers needed to carry out such a sweeping program of construction; or those who rightly point that infrastructural bottlenecks—from housing, to power, to transportation, and beyond—are often more a product of capital, corporate consolidation, and monopoly than regulation that needs cutting. for all the problems Klein and Thompson assign to regulation, there is above all very little engagement with what comes after (which is often less clear-cut than they would perhaps like), or even a fleshing out the intermediary between what we have now and what abundance looks like tomorrow. this is a bad way to do things.

in sum, it's not a particularly good or interesting book. it would be nice to talk less of it.

notes

¹ one is inclined to think, as an aside, that abundance would be less easy to "co-opt" if Derek Thompson could avoid paling around with conservatives like noted freak and probable white supremacist Richard Hanania. the organizational ties of abundance groups—rife with Silicon Valley capitalists, effective altruists, techno-libertarians, and all sorts of bizarre and reactionary monied interests—also leave quite a lot to be desired.

in today's edition of birzeblog i'd like to recap all of the books i read in 2024—i did not really do this on Cohost and i have been quite inconsistent in my blogging so far, so you all have missed a lot. in total i read 60 books. that was well over my goal of 40, so in 2025, i'll be upping my reading goal to 50. that's about one book a week—i think i can manage pretty well, assuming nothing bad happens. anyways, let's not waste too much time. this is a long post even confined to my brief blurbs on each book.

January

1. Full-Rip 9.0: The Next Big Earthquake in the Pacific Northwest (Sandi Doughton): an interesting look into the inevitable, next Pacific Northwest earthquake; there's quite a lot going on geologically in the Seattle metropolitan area and personally i found this book to be a pretty good introduction to it all. probably a worthwhile book if you're a paranoid Seattleite.
2. Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (Henry Grabar): the first of several urbanist and urban planning books that will make this list—and one i actually have to reread in 2025 because i forgot to mark it up on my first reading. this is an excellent book as an introduction to how badly we've fucked up American cities with parking, and what can be done to fix that. i would consider this one of the canonical must-reads for urban reformists.
3. Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It (M. Nolan Gray): the second of the urbanist books (and another i need to mark up), Arbitrary Lines is to zoning what Paved Paradise is to parking. i don't think you'll agree with literally everything M. Nolan Gray suggests here—he is against zoning entirely, and i do think there are at least some cases where a system of zoning is warranted—but after reading this i do think you will concur that substantial zoning reform is necessary as a baseline. one fun fact i learned from this book: zoning as we know it in America is only about 100 years old, and it was initially a controversial practice that was constitutionally challenged (obviously, it was held as constitutional) and required government incentivization to become widespread.
4. Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Jason Hickel): an interesting, introductory book to degrowth. i am not a degrowther—and found most of this book's argumentation unconvincing and at times revisionist of history—but many of the basic ideas of degrowth are not particularly objectionable and i would like to see those become commonplace in society. as we'll get into further down the list, i think Cuba provides a model for a lot of what degrowthers have in mind.
5. Aurora (David Koepp): the first fiction entry on this list, Aurora is a delightful post-apocalyptic book that contrasts two siblings—a wealthy prepper and an ordinary sister—and how their lives change when an extremely powerful geomagnetic storm destroys the power grid. i don't want to give very much away here because so much of the book rides on character development, but i found it enthralling enough to read it in just one day.
6. The Great Transition (Nick Fuller Googins): a frankly beautiful fiction book with a beautiful, interesting, climate-change informed setting. it's admittedly a small category but in terms of climate-influenced speculative fiction i consider this one of the best books of the category. consider this a wholehearted endorsement.
7. Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072 (Eman Abdelhadi and M.E. O'Brien): i talked about this one on Cohost extensively as moderately disappointing because of my frame of reference. from my post on the matter:

   if you have a world where 40% of people are now non-cis and body modification is so normalized that it can be done without actual surgery, it just strikes me as almost conservative that people would still find it remarkable to be trans—certainly enough so for it to be a social category worth distinguishing from being cis in the vast majority of cases. that's how this tends to go in furry spaces, where basically everyone is already non-cis and often times extremely transgender. ditto with queer identities and to a lesser extent sexuality. perhaps we would go full abolitionist with these descriptors if given a chance to start over in a revolution of this sort. or perhaps the inverse of what i describe is true: a kaleidoscope of new identities would form, and be given legitimized social meaning in a world where the gender binary has been completely broken. either seems more plausible, and more interesting. i would also consider it rather conservative that, in such an advanced society (where augmentation of reality is possible through body modification and AI is considered sentient) there would be no serious grappling with transhumanism or the possibility of identifying as non-human at all—or how that might relate to gender expression and society as a whole. i don't even mean therianthropy here necessarily, although if we're being serious therians would probably be the vanguard of questioning humanity and its imposition.

February

1. Streetfight: Handbook for an Urban Revolution (Janette Sadik-Khan): a very insightful book by New York City's former transportation commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan, who you—from pedestrianizing Times Square to the massive expansion of bike lanes in the city—could say kickstarted NYC's ongoing revolution in transportation infrastructure. this book goes over not only the benefits of all of this new infrastructure and the deprioritization of cars generally, but also how that was won and what it took to build the support for it. a welcome addition to any bookshelf, in my view.
2. Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion (Arnold August): if you don't mind a fairly uncritical treatment of Cuba, Cuba and Its Neighbors is one of the most insightful books on the system of government there. this book gave me a newfound appreciation for their system of government in specific and the extent to which i believe it can be credibly called democratic. for maximal effect i of course would recommend supplementing this book with People's Power by Peter Roman, which will appear downlist.
3. Extreme Cities: Climate Chaos and the Urban Future (Ashley Dawson): i don't actually have all that much to say about this book, which i found fine (if inevitably dating because it is now an eight year old book on climate change); i think i mostly just don't like Ashley Dawson's political prescriptions, which at times in this book come off as underinformed and bordering on NIMBY.
4. Autonomy Is in Our Hearts: Zapatista Autonomous Government through the Lens of the Tsotsil Language (John P. Clark and Dylan Eldredge Fitzwater): although the systems described herein were abolished by the Zapatistas in 2023 and have subsequently been reorganized and decentralized further, this book remains an invaluable asset to anyone seeking to understand the Zapatista governance and decisionmaking process, and the revolutionary culture of EZLN-held Chiapas. genuinely one of the most insightful and inspiring books i've ever read, with ideas and models that i hope can one day will be emulated everywhere and not merely in a few pockets of the world. if you are an anarchist: read this book.
5. People's Power: Cuba's Experience with Representative Government (Peter Roman): this book is a more balanced and critical examination of the Cuban system than Arnold August's, and it also fills in details and influences on the Cuban system that August's book does not. if you have to choose between the two, i'd recommend this one. but i think both are useful books to learn from in their own ways, and as i said i would encourage you to read both and synthesize your own conclusions from them.
6. The Mandibles: A Family, 2029–2047 (Lionel Shriver): easily the most wonkish fiction book i've ever read, i am definitely in the audience of ten or so for this one. steer clear of this one if you have no interest in a narrative which basically teaches you fiscal policy along the way—and it must sound very weird for me to say that if you have never heard of this book—but i found it a very unique book and quite enjoyable on that basis. it feels like a book that exists because someone was willing to entertain someone's passion project, and literature desperately needs more of that.

March

1. The Left Hand of Darkness (Ursula K. Le Guin): i don't know that you need me to sell you on this one. it's Ursula K. Le Guin, this is one of her classics, if you only read a few books from her this should be one of them. it's arguably better than The Dispossessed.
2. The Atlas of Disappearing Places: Our Coasts and Oceans in the Climate Crisis (Christina Conklin and Marina Psaros): truthfully, i don't remember all that much from this one—possibly because i didn't mark it up, possibly because i didn't mesh with its particular style. but if you find this blurb interesting, pick this one up at your next opportunity:

   Each chapter paints a portrait of an existential threat in a particular place, detailing what will be lost if we do not take bold action now. Weaving together contemporary stories and speculative “future histories” for each place, this work considers both the serious consequences if we continue to pursue business as usual, and what we can do—from government policies to grassroots activism—to write a different, more hopeful story.

3. Social Ecology and Communalism (Murray Bookchin): a very influential text for me, and a good and digestible introduction to the extensive thought of Murray Bookchin. also highly recommend as an introductory text to the anarchist-oriented side of left-wing politics, since much of Bookchin's theory was influenced by anarchist thought. (fun aside: optimistically this year i'll be going through all of Bookchin's major works, since i haven't done that yet.)
4. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Robin Wall Kimmerer): a must read for anyone, but especially for the leftist-minded. politically, i think your praxis is incomplete if it cannot accomodate this book. (incidentally: i have observed both on Cohost and in my notes that this book synthesizes well with social ecology and Bookchin's writings generally; one day i hope to make a full-fledged essay out of those notes.)
5. Ecology of Everyday Life: Rethinking the Desire for Nature (Chaia Heller): this theoretical text from Chaia Heller is joined at the hip to social ecology; Heller is a student of Bookchin and takes after him extensively. however, you don't need to be a social ecologist to find this a very interesting book, and i think this is a solid one for challenging and refining how you feel about the natural world. just one observation from Heller, for example, worth your time:

   More and more, the ‘nature’ we know is a romantic presentation of an exaggerated ‘hypernature’ marketing researchers believe we would be likely to buy. The less we know about rural life, for instance, the more we desire it. Ideas of ‘nature’, a blend of notions of exotic ‘wilderness’ and ‘country living’, form a repository for dreams of a desirable quality of life. So many of us long wistfully for a life we have never lived but hope to find someday on vacation at a Disneyfied ‘jungle safari’ or glittering sweetly inside a bottle of Vermont Made maple syrup.

April

1. Ecology or Catastrophe: The Life of Murray Bookchin (Janet Biehl): the definitive account of Murray Bookchin's life, and how his ideology changed throughout the years. accept no substitutes—Biehl was a close friend and confidante, and so knows her stuff.
2. Waco Rising: David Koresh, the FBI, and the Birth of America's Modern Militias (Kevin Cook): truthfully, i could not tell you the difference between this one and...
3. Waco: David Koresh, the Branch Davidians, and A Legacy of Rage (Jeff Guinn): ...this one. i am partial to Guinn's book over Cook's, but both are worthwhile volumes about the Branch Davidians and the fateful Waco siege for which they are so infamously known. this is also a good set of books for contextualizing the backlash and aftermath to Waco, which in many respects are the immediate cause of the American militia movement and fodder for anti-government objection generally. Alex Jones in particular got his "start" being a Waco conspiracist, and for a long time that was his bread and butter.
4. I Want to Believe: Posadism, UFOs and Apocalypse Communism (A.M. Gittlitz): a frankly delightful book on the obscure but often-memed Posadist ideology, an extremely unorthodox variant of Trotskyism named for its leading figure J. Posadas. Posadas, it turns out, was a very interesting guy who was rather influential (and bounced around a lot) in Argentine Trotskyism—and for most of his life, he was not particularly eclectic. most of the political positions for which he has become notorious came late in life, and during periods of infighting in his niche of Trotskyism. his children are also fascinating—one of them loves Donald Trump, apparently.
5. When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm (Michael Forsythe and Walt Bogdanich): if you have ever wanted to learn about the dark world of consulting and the unimaginable power it—and McKinsey in particular—has over the world then this is the book for you. the sheer amount of wrong McKinsey has been a part of is unbelievable. we should annihilate this company and all companies like it.
6. Alt-America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump (David Neiwert): an important book in peeling back all of the connections of the modern American far-right; there are so many figures who play off of and influence each other, and this book does an admirable job of weaving them into any sort of coherent narrative.

May

1. The Making of the President, 1960 (Theodore H. White): the first of a classic series of political books; i have yet to read the other ones, but hopefully that will occur this year.
2. A Dark Night in Aurora: Inside James Holmes and the Colorado Mass Shootings (William H. Reid): there's not much to say about this one. it's a niche topic but seems to be the definitive book if you're interested in an account of the Aurora mass shooting back in 2012.
3. Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town (John Staples Shockley): this book is a bit dated (having released in 1974), but it is the first comprehensive account of the development of La Raza Unida Party, and its control of Crystal City through 1974. if you're a third-party advocate looking for history, this is a fascinating book if you can get your hands on it. it is of course best supplemented by subsequent work, some of which i have read and will appear in the next month on this list.
4. Crossroads: My Story of Tragedy and Resilience as a Humboldt Bronco (Kaleb Dahlgren): not much to say about this one. for the other non-Canadians: see also the Humboldt Broncos bus crash Wikipedia page

June

1. Cristal Experiment: A Chicano Struggle for Community Control (Armando Navarro): this book builds on Shockley's Chicano Revolt in a Texas Town and is what i'd consider the definitive account of the La Raza Unida period of Crystal City. meticulous in its detail and an invaluable read for any person interested in this fascinating piece of Chicano history.
2. Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (David P. Chandler): a thorough examination of the infamous S-21 prison of Democratic Kampuchea; lots of details from this one that stand out, such as the extreme gender imbalance in prisoners (very few women were murdered in S-21) and the disparity in treatment of prisoners (although nearly all prisoners were executed, high-ranking prisoners were treated notably better so they could be coerced into lengthy confessions). also interesting how much supporting staff was necessitated for a prison that "only" held 1,500 prisoners at any given time and processed around 15,000 people across several years. Chandler figures something like 300 in total.
3. Island on Fire: The extraordinary story of Laki, the volcano that turned eighteenth-century Europe dark (Alexandra Witze and Jeff Kanipe): not worth your time, really.
4. Paris Under Water: How the City of Light Survived the Great Flood of 1910 (Jeffrey H. Jackson): this is as much an interesting study of the society and politics of Paris in 1910 as it is a study of its most calamitous flood; if you signed up for a narrative about the Seine, this book will also give you a crash course in the class dynamics and and social order of the period. i think that's neat, and somewhat enlightening. YMMV.

July

1. The Workingmen's Party of the United States: A History of the First Marxist Party in the Americas (Philip Sheldon Foner): if you've ever wondered what the first Marxist party in the United States was like and its history, Foner has you covered here. it was surprisingly successful given its status as a sort of Frankenstein-party between two competing and effectively mutually exclusive ideologies (Marxism and Lassalleanism), and quite a few significant figures in left-wing history were involved in the party. also, fun fact: because it ultimately reformed itself into the Socialist Labor Party (SLP), if you count the SLP as still existing we're at most one generation removed from WPUS right now.

August

1. Commune Or Nothing!: Venezuela's Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project (Chris Gilbert): Venezuela's communal project is another fascinating ongoing left-wing experiment, and Chris Gilbert does an excellent job in this book sketching out its nuances, its difficulties, its relation to the state, and the inevitable communal conflicts with the state. even if you are oppositional to the Venezuelan state, i think the communal project is a beacon of light and worth learning about as a potential model.
2. Killed by a Traffic Engineer (Wes Marshall): a shocking amount of traffic engineering is pseudoscientific, and this book systematically dismantles that pseudoscience in straightforward and easy to read detail. thank to its many short, to-the-point chapters, this is also a very easy book to pick up and put down. i highly recommend it as both an indispensable resource for many of the problems with trafic engineering (and how to make things better), and as catharsis that things are actually wrong.
3. Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk): just a broadly excellent book for any disability advocate or person interested in intersectionality; also an incredible source of information on the Black Panther Party and its work in this space, which i was unaware of before this point.
4. Red Vienna: Experiment in Working-Class Culture, 1919-1934 (Helmut Gruber): Vienna and its housing is often upheld in socialist spaces as an example of what is possible with a committed socialist movement even in a hostile capitalist country, and this book goes to great lengths and detail in describing the unique circumstances that made Red Vienna possible. it doesn't hold back on criticism and shortcomings of the Viennese experiment either, and in this respect i think it's quite a valuable book on this historical period and what might be possible today. it also goes into the extensive efforts of the Austrian SDAP to create a working-class culture out of Vienna's proletarians, to mixed but truly interesting results. one additional fun fact from this book: the SDAP experimented with state-built single-family housing but found it far too expensive to build at scale relative to apartments—thus, the communal social housing that so characterizes Vienna became the norm:

   Between 1919 and 1934 the municipality built 63,924 new domiciles in Vienna, 58,667 of which were in apartment dwellings and 5,257 in one-family houses. In practical terms this meant that every tenth dwelling was a new creation of the public authorities and that almost 200,000 Viennese were fortunate enough to reside in them. [...] After 1924 the municipality took over the building of one-family housing communities, but soon abandoned such efforts on the grounds that they were too costly in comparison to superblock apartment buildings.

5. Socialist States and the Environment: Lessons for Eco-Socialist Futures (Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro): an absolutely fascinating book on how past and present socialist states have related to the environment. this book introduced me to Cuba and its frankly awe-inspiring efforts to protect the environment, and its revolutionary efforts to create a sustainable agricultural system in the absence of large amounts of oil and chemical fertilizers (due to the ongoing blockade). while Cuba continues to have many problems—and it can be argued that its environmental successes are largely in spite of its desires, not because of them—i think Cuba is a model for a better future. particularly if you're a degrowther, you should look to Cuba and what it's doing and learn from it.
6. Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors (Grist): it's a good anthology, you should read it and make a day for it. the last piece is truly excellent.
7. The Displacements (Bruce Holsinger): i found this novel to be pretty entertaining; it is exceedingly politically unsubtle, however, and your mileage might vary on that one.

September

1. Power Lines: Building a Labor–Climate Justice Movement (Jeff Ordower): if you're a labor organizer or a climate organizer, or both, this seems like a pretty good book to have on your shelf. i learned some nifty stuff from this one, like the origin of the term just transition (coined by Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) leader Tony Mazzocchi); there are also some really cool under-the-radar initiatives this book profiles, like Familias Unidas por la Justicia, an independent farmworkers’ union based in Washington.
2. Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (John Vaillant): a gripping account of the Fort McMurray fire of 2016 intermixed with broader story threads about the nature of Canada as a country, Fort McMurray as a symptom of settler-colonial society, climate change as a phenomenon, and the oil industry that created Fort McMurray and its complicity in these aforementioned threads. somehow this book is both sweeping and narrow in scope, and manages to be good at both—it is probably a top five book of the 60 i read, and i would consider it obligatory reading especially if you are Canadian.
3. Future of Denial: The Ideologies of Climate Change (Tad Delay): this is a frankly devastating entry into this list on all counts, and is not for those inclined to doom about things. but i find it an important reality check and a good addition to the canon of climate-related books. Delay covers a wide range of subjects here with care, and makes a number of interesting points i did not consider before reading this book. you might find this to be one, for example—is it actually a market failure to end the world?:

   Accessible fossil fuel reserves are worth a couple of hundred trillion dollars. Total fossil fuel resources are worth $2.4 quadrillion. Incentives point in the wrong direction. Climate change isn’t a “market failure.” It’s a market success. [...] We will probably burn through most of our fossil fuel reserves. Capitalism will incentivize renewables inasmuch as they are profitable, not because the legal and political superstructure meets its unserious goals to stop the progress of this storm. In the meantime, the vulnerable suffer. Who has agency to switch algorithms? By the end of this book, you will need to decide whether even the revolutionary’s desire for agency is denial.

October

1. 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers (Kevin Flynn, Jim Dwyer): there is not much to be said about this one—i will observe for the record however that Rudy Giuliani is a fucking moron, and it is unbelievable how badly New York City's agencies work(ed) with each other.
2. Meet the Neighbors: Animal Minds and Life in a More-than-Human World (Brandon Keim): probably the most interesting and heartening book i read this year. this book will give you a lot of new perspective on animal intelligence and, if it's even possible, where we might draw a line that distinguishes humanity from all other things. for example: i wrote a bit about this book earlier this year in relation to voting, because it is not an inherently human concept. several animal species (bison, African wild dogs, and honeybees to name a few) make decisions through a voting process that can be clearly observed and explained.
3. Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Ruha Benjamin): this book should probably be mandatory reading for literally anyone trying to get a computer science degree. so many of my experiences and concerns about technology and especially the internet are reflected by this book, and i am very much hoping to get to Ruha Benjamin's other work this year because this made me an instant fan.

   [...]the hypervisibility of Black celebrities, athletes, and politicians can mask the widespread disenfranchisement of Black communities through de facto segregation and the punishment apparatus. How can a society filled with millions of people cheering for LeBron, singing along to Beyoncé, tuning in to Oprah, and pining for the presidency of Obama be … racist? But alas, “Black faces in high places” is not an aberration but a key feature of a society structured by White supremacy.

4. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Timothy Snyder): this book became topical down the stretch of the 2024 presidential campaign and, unfortunately, looks only to be more salient in its aftermath. i am very much not a fan of Snyder's other work and his apparent tendency to treat the Soviets as a comparable political evil to Nazi Germany, but there is probably a place for this book on your shelf. for the most part, i think this book also offers reasonable advice. for example: "When we repeat the same words and phrases that appear in the daily media, we accept the absence of a larger framework. To have such a framework requires more concepts, and having more concepts requires reading." is a good way to put a good piece of advice. you should make an effort to broaden your horizons, challenge your worldview, refine what you believe, and investigate the things on which you intend to speak. this is a big reason i read so many books on so many subjects.
5. Tyranny of the Minority (Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky): a timely book by Ziblatt and Levitsky, authors of another book i quite like that was ominously called How Democracies Die and was quite pessimistic about the future of the United States. this book continues that trend by exploring the issue of minoritarianism in democracies, and how things are uniquely bad in the United States thanks to our aging Constitution. they do provide some prescriptions for how we might make things better, though, so it's not all doom and gloom. also has a lot of fun details about how our system came to suck so badly—and how many of the systems that are so defended today by conservatives are compromises and not reflective of what the Founding Fathers really "wanted".
6. Our Biggest Experiment: An Epic History of the Climate Crisis (Alice Bell): as indicated by the title this is a book which is a rather detailed history of climate change; but simultaneously—and what makes this book a particularly interesting pick-up—is its lengthy discussion of the social and technological developments that have accompanied and facilitated climate change. kind of the perfect book if you're the sort of person who wants to go down rabbit holes on the subject.

November

1. I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs (Phil Ochs, Meegan Lee Ochs, and David Cohen): Phil Ochs is mostly known for his musical talent, but he did do a lot of writing in his spare time. this is the first (and only?) book to collect most of that writing; it ranges from his amateur journalism in high school and college to his album liner notes and private poetry. overall quite a niche book, but if you're a real Ochs-head like i am this is a fairly indispensable addition to the bookshelf.
2. Coyote Settles the South (John Lane): a delightful little book by someone whose encounter with a coyote inspired them to travel the landscape of the American South and get a sense for how this unfamiliar creature is being received. this book includes one chapter on noted coyote celebrity Scooter, if you need an additional selling point.
3. Abolish Rent (Leonardo Vilchis and Tracy Rosenthal): one of the best and most important books of the year in my view, and a book that makes an incredibly compelling case for the eventual abolition of rent. i wrote at some length about how i think this book should inform the left and its broader political strategy—in short, it underscores the importance of organizing tenant unions and winning new rights for renters. and given that homelessness increased by 18% in 2024, this book is likely to be even more salient this year.

December

1. The Deluge (Stephen Markley): an epic novel (clocking in at nearly 900 pages) of politics, climate change, and eco-terrorism that i can only really compare to The Mandibles in how i feel about it. i continue to think about it over a month after beginning my reading, which is unusual for a fiction book. i would frankly not recommend this book if you're angsty about climate change and our current political situation; it is in many respects photorealistic and disturbingly plausible in its speculation of what the future holds. needless to say i can only hope that our real-world future is not the future that this book entails.
2. How to Blow Up a Pipeline (Andreas Malm): even if you disagree with its political conclusions, i would probably read this book. Andreas Malm looks to be one of the influential thinkers in the climate philosophy space and it's easy to see why—this is a rather hard to argue with dismantling of the nonviolent status quo that prevails in environmentalism (see also Peter Gelderloos' How Nonviolence Protects the State).
3. The Palestine Laboratory: How Israel Exports the Technology of Occupation Around the World (Antony Loewenstein): this book seems pretty straightforward to pitch to you: your government (local, state, or federal) probably uses some sort of military or surveillance technology that was developed in Israel, and probably used on Palestinians. it's good business for Israeli companies to have a permanent, live warzone in which these kinds of hardware can be tested, and it's even better business to export that hardware to both sympathetic and unsympathetic governments for use on their civilian populations. consider this book a peek behind the curtain of what might await you at your next protest.
4. Nuclear War : A Scenario (Annie Jacobsen): perhaps contrived, but chilling in a way few books can be. nuclear proliferation is a nightmare and in an ideal world everyone would swiftly dismantle their nuclear stockpiles.
5. Roadside Picnic (Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky): i have very little to say of this book except that it is magisterial, and you can see why the STALKER series takes after it.
6. Thinking with Type (Ellen Lupton): i am skeptical you need my opinion on a book about typography, but i do endorse this one. the latest edition has a lot of neat additions.
7. Right of Way: Race, Class, and the Silent Epidemic of Pedestrian Deaths in America (Angie Schmitt): when you read this book, you'll really get a sense for why it is that U.S. cities (and to a lesser extent Canadian ones) are so bad at accomplishing Vision Zero. pedestrian (and alternative transit) infrastructure is a combination of nonexistent and disastrous, and pedestrians are mostly treated as a second class of citizens. luckily, this book isn't all doomerism. it rovides a lot of hope and optimism for how cities can fix their infrastructure—after all, some of the best cities for pedestrians in Europe today were previously some of the most car-brained—and how cities in the U.S. have begun to take up some of the changes to built infrastructure commonplace in European cities.
8. Carmageddon: How Cars Make Life Worse and What to Do about It (Daniel Knowles): finally, and rounding out the year, is Daniel Knowles' treatise on the harm done by cars and the necessity of a world far less reliant on it for transportation. this book should be in one sense cathartic, and in another sense infuriating—certainly in some ways it's quite a depressing book (such as in its descriptors of the developing world adopting car-centric urban infrastructure) but in others it is very hopeful (in explaining the many common-sense and easy changes we can make to incentivize alternative transportation and make things safer for pedestrians). and, for the road, one point in his conclusion that bears repeating:

   If we did not need [cars] as much, we could have a lot more left over to spend on whatever we want. And not needing as many cars is not some lofty, unrealistic goal. It is frankly bonkers to think that every family spending $5,000 to $10,000 a year on their own individual vehicle is the most efficient way of getting people around. We do not have to be so reliant on gasoline, cooking the planet to be able to live decent lifestyles. The important thing is not moving metal, it is moving people.

writing

if you follow me on social media you've probably already seen me mention the article i put out yesterday, For a ‘Bill of Rights’ package in every state, county, and city. for those of you who have not, though, that 4,300 word piece is my first post-election foray into how the electoral left should orient itself in the months to come.

as i see it: we know liberals do not have the answers and will capitulate to/co-opt the moment; we know that there is widespread political discontent with the existing political system and the capitalist duopoly to be harnessed; and we demonstrably have political power—however small that power is—to throw around. the time is now for socialists to try and set the agenda when it comes to resisting Trump, because we cannot count on there being another moment down the road.

what i've been reading (52/50)

Abolish Rent

The housing crisis is not a problem to be solved; it is a class struggle to be fought and won. The conclusion that Engels drew still applies now: “In order to make an end to this housing shortage there is only one means: to abolish altogether the exploitation and oppression of the working class by the ruling class.” Rent is a fundamental engine of inequality and injustice, a transfer of wealth from the poorest to the richest, the most vulnerable to the least, which drives millions into debt and despair and onto the streets. From the perspective of tenants, the answer to the housing crisis is as simple as it is revolutionary: a world without landlords and a world without rent. Our self-interest as tenants isn’t just fixing the leak in our shower; it’s dismantling the capitalist unhousing system.

Abolish Rent is a good book and, in my view, required reading for anyone interested in housing struggles in the US. you should go order it and learn from it; and while you're at it, maybe check out the Autonomous Tenants Union Network (ATUN-RSIA) and Tenant Federation.

the central argument for the abolition of rent is a pretty easy and correct one in my view, even if it's not really actionable as anything but a long-term demand. as the first chapter observes:

Rent isn’t the dispassionate outcome of supply meeting demand; it is the index of struggle between those who own or invest in housing and those who live in it. Rent is a power relation that produces inequality, traps us in poverty, and denies us the capacity to live as we choose. Rent is exploitation and domination. It separates us from our neighbors and alienates us from the places we live. It is the engine that turns a human need into a product to be exploited, bet on, and banked. [...] All human beings need shelter. All human beings need a home. If we don’t own property, we have to pay rent to meet these needs. Rent is a fine for having a human need.

there are still immediate-term takeaways, of course. one that i take from this book is we on the left need to get into the business of organizing tenant unions as much as we organize labor unions; these are a vital and overlooked area of struggle. we ought to do this soon, too: if the labor movement is fighting for its life, the tenant movement is totally moribund. even LA Tenants Union (LATU), the central union in Abolish Rent, has only organized 3,000 or so families—a fraction of Los Angeles's renter class. and undoubtedly the number of newly-christened tenants outstrips the number that organize each year.

as for how we can facilitate this organization? my specialty is legislation, and so i see a worthwhile legislative path here. socialist politicians should make it a protected, clear right to form tenant unions and oblige landlords to collectively bargain with their tenants. (Berkeley Measure BB, as i observed in the last Cohost Union News, passed this year and does this. as far as i'm aware it is the only place with an explicit, obvious, codified right to organize a tenant union as you would a labor union.) as is, this ability seems to exist only marginally and it can hardly be called a right. tenant rights should also be codified more explicitly, and no longer be derived from a framework of "if you are a landlord, you have to do the bare minimum provide an inhabitable place to live." there should be an affirmative right to dignity as a tenant.

politically, it will also be important to have strong tenant unions that enforce any existing or newly made protections on their own; certainly these cannot and should not not rely on cops. the existing regulatory regime is also barely enforced by social agencies—while much of that inability is a product of underfunding and atrophy and can be reversed, it ultimately strikes me as dubious to count on them either. strong tenant unions, moreover, are good and politically beneficial for the left. as Chapter 4 of the book notes:

A tenants union redistributes power down into our everyday lives to challenge power and property relations directly. It operates at the level of our concrete grievances, our broken pipes and busted appliances. Instead of relying on the law to act on our behalf, we promote disruptive, direct, collective action that concentrates on our immediate antagonist—our landlords—while cultivating grassroots leadership and capacity along the way.

we should do our best to not impede/constrain these new organizations from flexing and exercising their powers.

besides Abolish Rent i finished I'm Gonna Say It Now: The Writings of Phil Ochs and Coyote Settles the South; i'll be talking about these tomorrow though. also up on the docket this month and next month is The Palestine Laboratory; we'll see how interesting that one is.

Alyaza Birze (October 8)

busy once again, but here's a quick update

programming notes

my interesting links page is live; for the time being it's furnished with a bare minimum of interesting research and essays of importance to me, but eventually i'll be adding to it substantially. additional big updates to it should be noted in future posts.

what i'm reading (44/40)

i've finished Meet the Neighbors (Brandon Keim) and it's a very good book; lots to think about here, mostly for future posts. here are some quick ones and interesting points in the book that i want to break out right now, though

animal democracy

i suspect most people think of voting as a distinctly human concept because of the social significance we've constructed around the concept and democratic process generally―but: this is not true. voting (even as we understand it) seems quite common among non-human animals;¹ they in fact exhibit a wide array of procedures for arriving at decisions, just as we do. some of these processes are remarkably participatory and direct democratic. honeybees, for instance, use a weighted-additive strategy of decisionmaking (in which every alternative is evaluated "in light of all the relevant attributes, weight[ing] each attribute according to its importance, sum[ing] the weighted attributes for each alternative, and finally choos[ing] the alternative whose total valuation is the highest") to acheive consensus on nesting sites. some are strongly hierarchical, as with African wild dogs, who require different levels of quorum and agreement for certain individuals in the social hierarchy to direct collective decisions. and some are in the middle: both American and European bison generally require about half of their herds to agree to movement, but the process of movement can be influenced most strongly by older female bison.

this will probably be the subject of a future post; i'll definitely have some more thoughts on this when i get through several related books i've picked up.

the Wuikinuxv Nation and fish management

British Colombia's Wuikinuxv Nation ([ʔuwik'inuxʷ]) historically were the beneficiaries of a massive salmon run through their traditional lands; this changed with the arrival of colonial powers and commercial fishing on Rivers Inlet. gradual salmon population decline through the 1800s and 1900s due to overfishing culminated in a total collapse of the salmon population in the 1990s; in this decade, there were not enough salmon for the Wuikinuxv and fewer still for the bear population in their tradtional lands. a catastrophic (and emotionally wrenching) bear starvation event followed; in the Nation's retelling, "[Bears] wandered the streets of the village in search of food, fur hanging from their emaciated bodies, pressing themselves against windows and even breaking into homes. Mothers stopped defending their cubs." several had to be killed out of mercy or danger presented toward humans. the trauma of this event still lingers in the Nation due to the cultural significance bears have in this region.

one consequence of this event for the better, however, is a change in fish management practice from the Wuikinuxv Nation. as Meet the Neighbors recounts this change:
 

“The people who were living here at the time had seen so much of the suffering those bears had gone through,” [Jennifer Walkus] said. They started thinking about how to ensure that the bears had enough fish to survive. The Wuikinuxv have a term for this: n̓àn̓akila, to look ahead, to watch out for someone. That value would guide the scientific study of how to ensure that grizzlies had plenty to eat. And they would not be asking scientists from the government—the same government whose biologists supported the trophy hunting of their kin, who had allowed the fishing industry to decimate the salmon and the timber industry their habitat, who didn’t take their own expertise seriously—for help. “They’re the ones with the loudest voices,” said Walkus of the industries. “The only ones speaking for the bear and the fish and the eagles are us.”

Walkus went to Chris Darimont, science director at the Raincoast Foundation, who had worked on their collaboration with the Heiltsuk. He sent them Megan Adams, an idealistic young ecologist working toward her master’s degree. She would help take Walkus’s questions out onto the landscape. How many grizzly bears lived in their home? How much did they eat? How many salmon did they need, and how could their own salmon harvests include the needs of the bears?

a thorough study on the subject by Adams and the Wuikinuxv yielded results that now guide the Nation's practices―that of prioritizing the bears and their share of salmon first, then taking only what they need from the share that remains:

[...]If current salmon populations held steady—around 200,000 sockeye now return each year—and the Wuikinuxv caught no more than 45,000 fish, or roughly 10 percent below what had previously been calculated as their sustainable limit, grizzly populations would be about 10 percent smaller than if they caught none. This seemed like a fair balance.

The bears’ needs would also come first. Right now, said Walkus, talking to me in spring, not long after the salmonberries—named for their orange-pink coloration—had bloomed, the fishery remains closed until 100,000 sockeye have passed the counting station in the village. Only then is fishing opened to the Wuikinuxv Nation’s several hundred members. For now, they take a small fraction of their newly calculated limit, said Walkus; they stay well on the safe side of what the runs can support, though hopefully a day will come when that number rises. But even then the bears will be first in line, followed by the Wuikinuxv, and it’s unlikely that there will ever be enough fish to support a commercial fishery. “That’s the scientific argument that we’re going to use to keep the feds away from opening the fishery,” Walkus says. “There’s not even enough fish for the system to sustain itself. It’s barely enough fish for people and bears to share. But there’s enough. Leave it alone.”

in prioritizing the bears, the Wuikinuxv Nation also ensures the nutrients of the salmon proliferate through the environment. what salmon the bears don't eat or leave behind provide a banquet for scavengers to feast on; and beetles, flies, and other decomposers ensure the nutrients of salmon are passed further through the ecosystem to the pollination of plants and flowers. as a rule: where the salmon are abundant, biodiversity flourishes―something that obviously benefits the Wuikinuxv more than taking their share first and leaving what remains for the bears.

what might it look like to attempt this sort of prioritization everywhere? i'm not sure. but i hope there are more efforts like this in the future.

it's really hard to read when you're busy, and unfortunately the way i read best is through having minimal distractions and locking in. i don't recommend the manic burst approach to reading things, but it's the primary way i operate. the past week has made this nearly impossible to do on any meaningful level; thankfully with things calming down i've been able to actually dedicate some time to it. the "what i'm reading" section will likely become a more fleshed out fixture of these updates, since a lot of what i like to talk about in my posts is related to the stuff i get around to reading. lotta interesting stuff in the world, if only you can set your mind to the tomes people write about it.

incidentally:

what i'm reading

i hate carbon offsets

carbon offsets are completely fake bullshit that are just a way to launder PR for corporations and take the pressure off them to actually end their carbon emissions, but i feel like these two examples from Future of Denial really underscore how fake and nonsense they are. what the hell are we doing here?

A new company called YepYou stretched offsets to the absurd. Billing itself as the “World’s First Human Breath Carbon Offset,” YepYou offers fees starting at seventeen dollars annually to plant trees to offset exhaled breath. Offsetting your whole lifestyle costs sixty dollars. Customers may even pay for their pet’s breath.

Early in 2020 Delta Air Lines announced it would go carbon neutral by March. The company didn’t claim to end emissions but only to “mitigate all emissions,” leaving details to customers’ imagination: “Because we’ve committed to carbon neutrality from March 2020 forward, you can feel confident that when you choose to fly Delta, your flight will be carbon neutral.” Delta claims its flights are already carbon neutral long before alternatives to jet fuel exist.

and even if they weren't mostly fake (most of them are basically acts of fraud), carbon offsets are literally useless for most intents and purposes. the market prices them way too low; as physical entities to be meaningful they pretty much have to exist for the lifetime of the person they're intended to "offset"; and in a lot of cases the intended offsets just die or burn down. this happens routinely in California, for example, because the state is semi-permanently racked by massive fires (and—even ignoring the huge burn deficit that exists because of current firefighting doctrine and the desire to insulate/protect private properties—likely needs to be in perpetuity for the health of its forests). sometimes they also cause knock-on ecological problems because they're monoculture, or they lead to externalities of their own like "privatizing/enclosing indigenous land." all things equal, you might as well invest in carbon capture technology for all the good it does—at least we actually probably "need" carbon capture to eventually begin reversing climate change.

what does it mean to be self-aware?

self-awareness is an interesting concept. to the degree that we can meaningfully quantify it, it's probably true that humans have the most advanced form of it—while we can't really know this, it's just hard to imagine that other animals have the same ability to, say, "introspect and place ourselves in the context of everything" as we do given the gulf in our capabilities versus theirs. (i'm not sure how we'd test for this in any case. there's also the human tendency to analogize or pathologize animal behavior to behaviors of our own.) but a level of significant self-awareness is probably quite common among even the simplest non-human animals:

When one teases apart [self-awareness's] cognitive layers, they’re not so uncommon. Mental time travel is one of them. Another is metacognition, or the ability to reflect upon one’s knowledge: I know. I don’t know. Rats are also metacognitive, as demonstrated in setups that let them choose between getting a small, guaranteed snack now or taking a memory test in which correct answers earn big snacks and wrong answers nothing at all. When the passage of time has blurred their memories, they opt for the guaranteed reward.

Some might argue, though, that rats are uncommonly intelligent, and therefore not representative. Yet consider another component of self-awareness, episodic memory: the what, where, and when qualities that give shape to undifferentiated recollection. Episodic-like memory has been found in zebrafish, a tiny species used as a model organism for investigating the foundations of cognition. Minnows shoaling in the stormwater pond’s shallows almost certainly share this type of memory, with the topographies of their daily lives replacing the experimental setups—familiar and unfamiliar objects, familiar and unfamiliar settings—used to illuminate the memories of their aquarium-bound cousins. Researchers have also demonstrated this type of memory in hummingbirds, mice, and cuttlefish, the latter of whom last shared a common ancestor with vertebrates more than 500 million years ago. That such evolutionarily disparate creatures possess these memories suggests how common they are.