Interesting Excerpts
2025 Additions
From 365 Tao by Deng Ming Dao, 1992
#39 February 8th, Northern Hemisphere
Worry
Direct Link: https://savetheoxygen.org/excerpts.html#worryAll emphasis, bracket text, and superscripts mine.
Worry is a problem that seems to be rampant [Initial Publication Date: 1992]. Perhaps it is due to the nature of our overly [?] advanced civilization; perhaps it is a measure of our own spiritual degeneracy [also ?]. Whatever the source, it is clear that worry is not useful.[True] It is a cancer of the emotions—concern gone compulsive. It eats away at body and mind.
It does no good to say, "Don't think about it." You'll only worry more. It is far better to keep walking your path, changing what you can. The rest must be dissolved in compassion. In this world of infants with immune deficiencies, racial injustice, economic imbalance, personal violence, and international conflict, it is impossible to address everyone's concerns.[True] Taking care of yourself and doing something good for those who you meet is enough.note 1 That is compassion, and we must exercise it in even in the face of overwhelming odds.
Whenever you meet a problem, help if it is in your power to do so. After you have acted, withdraw and be unconcerned about it. Walk on without ever mentioning it to anybody.note 2 Then there is no worry, because there has been action.
citation: #39, Worry, from 365 Tao by Deng Ming Dao, https://dengmingdao.com/books/365-tao-daily-meditationsnote 1 – Seems impractical to apply this universally in every case. ... Draw your own conclusions, I'll not dive into an essay on that here.
note 2 – I don't believe we should never talk about what we have done to help things. It may often be instructive or demonstrative, useful and helpful to do so sometimes. See above about not diving into an essay. I would say, I may as well have said nothing about my postcard project and this website for all the interest and engagement that reflects back to me. Not that people are uninterested or think I'm wasting time. Just that they tend very rarely to offer any kind of feedback, praise, or funding (or criticism for that matter) back to me directly.
The Economist, February 13th 2025
Obituary | Aparkalypse Now
Donald Shoup knew how to get cities going
Direct Link: #costs-of-non-smart-parking
[...]
[...] because traffic policy was far from unimportant. How to cope with cars was the biggest issue cities faced, not only in America but worldwide. The most valuable asset cities had was land, and cars took up too much of it. They did not merely congest and pollute the inner streets; motor vehicles had made cities sprawl ever outwards, creating oceans of unproductive asphalt wherever people gathered to shop, learn, work or have fun.
In America in the mid-20th century most city councils, meaning well, had brought in parking minimums. The number was calculated, originally, from haphazard surveys by the Institute of Transportation Engineers, and later on even more randomly by cities just copying each other. For every 300 square feet (28 square metres) of retail or commercial space, there had to be one parking space. [.. etcetera ..] until, in Los Angeles County for one, 14% of the land area was given over to parking. Such schemes, Professor Shoup thought, were clearly a product of the reptilian cortex, the most primitive part of the brain, [...].
The brains of motorists, though, frustrated him just as much. They now saw free parking as an entitlement, even a human right. But it was not a right, he reminded them, and it was not free, except for the person driving. In all other aspects of their lives, “free” parking imposed a cost—first on developers and businesses, then on everyone else. “Free parking” pushed up user fees, rents and prices in the places that offered it, including for the poor, who might well not have cars. It was hugely unfair. Besides, as a keen Georgist—a disciple of Henry George, who had advocated a land tax in the 19th century—Professor Shoup believed that land should be taxed to ensure it was put to its best use. What he himself wanted to see, instead of unneeded lots, were more affordable houses for the poor and more public gardens. He was out to save the world, one space at a time.
So the first task was to banish parking minimums. His idea caught on: they vanished from 35 American cities, including Austin, Raleigh and Seattle. Mexico City abandoned them, too. His attention then turned to another realm of free parking, curb space. Other people’s research had shown that in any line of slowly moving traffic, at least 8% of drivers (rising to 74% in some places) were simply circling, and polluting, in hopes of finding a spot. In his own 15-block neighbourhood of Westwood Village, next to UCLA, it usually took no more than three minutes to nab a free space; but if everyone in the village did this over a year it would add up to about 1m vehicle miles, or four trips to the moon.
His answer was parking meters: smart ones, varying their charges according to the peaks and valleys of the working day and week. They would charge the lowest price possible to achieve a vacancy rate on any street of 15% (or an occupancy rate of 85%) at all times: about two curb spaces per block. Drivers would then feel sure they could find a space, but they would have to pay more the closer they got to a popular destination. He called this the Goldilocks effect. Charges were not set too high, nor too low; there were neither too many spaces, nor too few. Just enough.
The realist in him knew this would be tricky to achieve. [...] However, he persevered. The great virtue of parking meters was that they brought money into city coffers. He kept before him the shining model of Pasadena, once a dump of shuttered shops, now transformed by meters into a vibrant city again. If that money simply went into the general fund, people might not properly see the effect of it. So he proposed Parking Benefit Districts, in which money from local meters would go specifically to local public services: [...].
His ideas, in summary, were to put cars in their place. And that place was not necessarily the garage, either. Many suburb-dwellers with garages used them for all manner of bulky and unsightly household stuff, from ladders to paint to home-brewing kits, but not the car. That sat in the driveway, and Professor Shoup thought that was where it should belong. Garages could then become micro-apartments for people without cars, who would ride by e-scooter, bike or bus towards a new urban world. And he, smiling broadly, would lead the way.
The Economist global newspaper: Donald Shoup Knew How to Get Cities GoingA plan for making synthetic fuel at the site of modular solar generators
[...] "And what is the cheapest, most scalable source of energy humanity has ever known? Solar photovoltaics. Carbon-free, zero moving parts, no uranium enrichment, and no specialised labor required. Solar cells are panes of glass that print wealth. We should deploy them accordingly" [ excerpts sequential ]
"It turns out that converting between chemical and electrical energy is about 35% efficient in either direction. Conventionally, burning fuel to make electricity has been the natural economic flow. But once solar energy costs less than 10% of the price of grid power, the economics favour the conversion of electricity into carbon-neutral chemical fuel. This is just a few years away. solar is getting 15-20% cheaper every year as manufacturingbecomes more efficient. Solar synthetic fuel will soon be cheaper than conventional fuel in some markets, and by about 2040 it will be cheaper everywhere." [...]
From The Economist global newspaper's 'The World Ahead in 2025': "Casey Handmer says solar power is changing the economics of energy: Large-scale production of synthetic fuel is now feasible, argues the founder of Terraform Industries"
Four factors coalescing to manifest an explosion in grid scale energy storage
To Add:
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/20/grid-scale-storage-is-the-fastest-growing-energy-technologyWhether global emissions have peaked depends on the next set of data from China
To Add:
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/18/have-global-emissions-peakedWar is extraordinarily wasteful, so peace is important for mitigating climate change
To Add:
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/18/have-global-emissions-peakedclick to expand
2020-2023 Additions
Underestimating Success
Success can be subtle; it sometimes masquerades as ordinary life.
By not settling for “good enough,” by following desire and applying will and intention to practice, by observing ourselves and our habits over time, we know ourselves better. Shifts occur. All of a sudden, we are not lost for days in emotional cycles or mental arguments. We may say we will do something and we follow through. More changes happen. We notice more. In this noticing, sometimes we fail to notice the biggest thing of all: we have had many successes. What we wished to ignite within ourselves now burns with a steady fire [ … ] We are living more integrated lives.
Sure, there is always another challenge around the corner. Certainly, there are still personality parts we have to live with, for good or for ill. But I like to remind myself that this is how we learn. We once struggled to learn to read and write the simplest things. Now we most often take this incredible skill for granted. It is the same with spiritual practice and other life successes. Everything follows patterns of growth, plateau and decay. We can pick up something new as some other thing loses energy. We can keep revitalizing our relationship with every facet of our lives. The opportunity here is endless—particularly for those privileged enough to have basic needs met.
Fortune is found where grace meets effort. In the power To Manifest, we combine knowing, willing, daring, and the fertile space of silence. [ … ] Something stirs in sex, belly, heart, or mind. This becomes a warmth, a heat, a passion that radiates out from our core, infusing the rest of our being. It even illuminates our fear. Fear teaches us. Fear shows us our resistance. Fear can protect us, and fear can hold us back. We can look at our current conversations with fear and with inspiration. We do need inspiration—that is food for our desire. Most mornings over tea and oatmeal, I do some spiritual or inspirational reading. Whereas meditation and exercise build a container for my work, this reading is one of the things that refill the water skin. It quenches my thirst, enabling me to move again, activating my vision and my will—and sometimes it reminds me why I’m on this quest in the first place.
Book: Make Magic of Your Life (2013) by T. Thorn Coyle(Excessive highlighting mine.)
[...] In these dreams, there was always a wall coming—a wall of fire or a wall of smoke—and it moved with terrifying impartial finality, like the playhead on a video timeline.
The fire dreams began to mix with dreams of my own death, which had increased during the pandemic. I wrote in my journal:
The future has disappeared—I want to say over a horizon, but there is no horizon, just this smoke-fog. I have never felt more distinctly that every year will be a worse year, that every minute is a minute closer to catastrophe and unrecoverable losses. Just like how you feel about your own aging body, but applied to everythingin the world, and you don't even have the comfort of knowingthat it will flourish after you are gone, like it's actually ending.
I keep thinking about my childhood and how I grew up not even knowing about wildfires, and how I thought of myself as living in a "normal time," and now everything in my past feels like it was traveling along the surface of a folded piece of paper. And just now, we're going over the fold, and everything after this is just about survival. Everything will be different in ways I can't imagine, and there is much reason to believe it will be far worse, and the deep terror involved in that is the terror, I think, that is driving my dreams. Not just of dying, but of suffering.
reading this in the midst of another nightmare fire season—one that started much earlier than usual—I recognize and sympathize with my own sentiment. Yet I've also begun to see such nightmares as my internalization of declinism, the belief that a once-stable society is headed for inevitable and irreversible doom. As distinct from a clearheaded (and heartbroken) assessment of our situation, declinism is probably one of the more dangerous forms of linear, deterministic time reckoning there is. After all, it is one thing to acknowledge the past and future losses that follow from what has occurred; it is another to truly see history and the future proceeding with the same grim amorality as the video playhead, where nothing is driving it except itself. In failing to recognize the agency of both human and nonhuman actors, such a view makes struggle and contingency invisible and produces nihilism, nostalgia, and ultimately paralysis.
Declinism is a close relative of nostalgia, and objects of nostalgia are often atemporal, lacking aliveness. An example: say you break up with someone and many years later find yourself nostalgic for the relationship. Who is it that appears in this melancholic yearning? Assuming they're still around, it is surely not your ex-partner as they currently are, the one who has continued to age and evolve. Instead, it is a frozen, idealized version of them, like a hologram that survives within and despite the present. What's more, some relationships arguably end in the first place because the partners have stopped seeing each other in time, one partner having replaced the living, changing other with a static image that can impart no surprises, only a comforting presence. As we learned with the moss, [site owner: see pg 140-143] to think you love and appreciate something or someone is, unfortunately, not a guarantee that you can assign them their own reality or that you know them at all.
That's how it's been with me and "the environment" for much of my life. When I was a kid, my family took a few road trips up north, past the seemingly impenetrable Santa Rosa and Klamath mountain ranges. From the backseat of our car as we drove up Highway 101, I saw hundreds of miles of redwoods and Douglas fir. Admiring their unbroken density, I thought I was looking at forests immemorial. (Children can be nostalgic, too.) Even entering my thirties, I hadn't made much progress past "trees = good; fires = bad." I had yet to learn that California and, indeed, much of the world was actually in the midst of a fire deficit. I was not aware of how closely the local ecology had co-evolved with periodic fire, nor the extent to which indigenous people worldwide had used fire, nor how or when such practices were banned. In other words, I thought I was looking at natural history, not political or cultural history—as if the two could ever be separated.
Book: "an attempt to see time as something other than money" Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) by Jenny Odell, pages 156-158I am citing these perspectives not in order to shame those, like me, whose worlds only now seem to be ending. Rather, to the nihilist who cannot imagine the future, I am highlighting a perspective that has survived, and continues to survive, the long-ago end of the world. There are many people and places that could accept neither Enlightenment Man's march of progress nor the billiard ball declinism of the Anthropocene—because that narrative was inherently premised upon their destruction, commodification, and relegation to a state of nonbeing. For those people and places, the historical past can never be an object of nostalgia, and the future has always been in jeopardy. If you don't want to kick the can down the road, look to those who never recognized the road in the first place.
Book: "an attempt to see time as something other than money" Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (2023) by Jenny Odell, pages 179-180If we think about what it means to "concentrate" or "pay attention" at an individual level, it implies alignment: different parts of the mind and even the body acting in concert and oriented toward the same thing. To pay attention to one thing is to resist paying attention to other things; it means constantly denying and thwarting provocations outside the sphere of one's attention. We contrast this with distraction, in which the mind is disassembled, pointing in may different directions at once and preventing meaningful action. It seems the same is true on a collective level. Just as it takes alignment for someone to concentrate and act with intention, it requires alignement for a "movement" to move. Importantly, this is not a top-down formation, but rather a mutual agreement among individuals who pay intense attention to the same things and to each other.
I draw the connection between individual and collective concentration because it makes the stakes of attention clear. It's not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant or that a life without willful thought or action is an impoverished one. If it's true that collective agency both mirros and relies on the individual capacity to "pay attention," then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can't concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can't think and act. In Chapter I, I mentioned Berardi's distinction between connectivity and sensitivity in After the Future. It's here that we see why this difference matters. For Berardi, the replacement of sensitivity with connectivity leads to a "social brain" that "appears unable to recompose, to find common strategies of behavior, incapable of common narration and of solidarity."
This "schizoid" collective brain cannot act, only react blindly and in misaligned ways to a barrage of stimuli, mostly out of fear and anger. That's bad news for sustained refusal. While it may seem at first like refusal is a reaction, the decision to actually refuse--not once, not twice, but perpetually until things have changed--means the development of and adherence to individual and collective commitments from which our actions proceed. In the history of activism, even things that seemed like reactions were often planned actions. For example, as William T. Martin Riches reminds us in his accounting of the Montgomery bus boycott, Rosa Parks was "acting, not reacting" when she refused to get up from her seat. She was already involved with activist organizations, having been trained at the Highlander Folk School, which produced many important figures in the movement.40 The actual play-by-play of the bus boycott is a reminder that meaningful acts of refusal have come not directly from fear, anger, and hysteria, but rather from the clarity and attention that makes organizing possible.
Book: How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy (2019) by Jenny Odell, page 81-82click to expand
2018-2019 Additions
Earle: The ocean is the foundation of life itself — the living ocean. It isn’t just rocks and water; it’s this amazing collection of life. We had nothing to do with making it, but we are having a lot to do with destroying it. We are cutting great swaths through the fish populations, extracting 100 million tons a year or more.
The ocean is the circulatory system of the planet, and we are the beneficiaries of it. We think that all the ocean is good for is being a dump site and a place to extract minerals, or oil, or gas, or fish, or shrimp — you name it. Or we use the ocean for transportation or to wage war. But with every breath you take, the ocean assists you, wherever you are, even if you never see it. You never see your heart either, but I’ll bet you’re glad it exists.
[ excerpts non-sequential ]
The ocean really needs us to take care of it, which means we have to make choices. I wish we could have made these choices fifty years ago, but we didn’t know then what we know today. Fifty years from now, we likely won’t have the same choices. Think about the doors that are closing, the species that are being eliminated, the chemistry that is changing, the planet that is warming, the ice that is melting. We haven’t responded fast enough to hold the planet steady. Now is the time to act.
Sunken Treasures: Sylvia Earle On Why We Need To Protect The Oceans by Michael Shapiro, The Sun Magazine Interview, July 2018The extra heat that we trap near the planet every day is equivalent to the heat from four hundred thousand bombs the size of the one that was dropped on Hiroshima.
Life on a Shrinking Planet by Bill McKibben, The New Yorker, November 26th, 2018DeMocker: You have talked about "climate victory speakers." What are they?
Wood: Back in World War II citizens known as victory speakers helped mobilize the nation rapidly. They were average people who would give five-minute talks at bridge clubs, movie theaters, PTA meetings — anywhere. My mother and grandmother were both victory speakers and gave four to five speeches a day, telling people how to garden and can vegetables to conserve resources for the war effort.
People listen to trusted members of the community more than they listen to scientists or academics. Victory speakers can wake Americans up to our new reality and tell them what they can do about it. Neighborhood associations are tremendous for this. Churches are already organized through their committees and membership lists. I also see a role for the Internet and social media. A league of concerned citizens has to step up and say, "This will be my purpose. I can't solve all the problems. I can't plant all the gardens. But I'm going to take on the task of waking people up."
Let there be no mistake, our government's energy policies are a threat to our collective survival. But we've faced tyrannical threats before and overcome them — by uniting in solidarity. This is an "all hands on deck" moment for planetary defense. If we come together to present this unprecedented peril, with everyone stepping up to contribute, we just might transform our present political divisiveness into a unified effort to preserve our country.
The Sun Interview Before It's Too Late Mary Christina Wood on Avoiding Climate Disaster, interview by Mary DeMocker. February 2019.