Extra

Lately, for obvious reasons, I’ve been thinking more and more about the collapse of great civilizations. I’ve become interested in how quickly it happens and in how this is reflected in the lives of the people.

A common theme seems to be that civilizations grow and grow, and bring relative prosperity, heightened trade over long distances, and considerable peace. They say that at the height of its powers, in the Mongol empire,“a maiden bearing a nugget of gold on her head could wander safely throughout the realm”

And as this prosperity and peace grows, a new normality arises. The civilization becomes more and more specialized. The bureaucracies, the technologies, the social practices, even the military ventures and brutal oppression adapt to the empire’s sweet niche in the history of humans with ever more Roman roads and aqueducts, new Silk Road trade, railroads, and telegraphs, and transoceanic fiber optics. After their births in violence and enslavement, for a time, it almost looks like the great civilizations are making things a bit better for most people.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre…” (W. B. Yeats)

But then comes some event for which the specialization is not prepared. The bubonic plague seems to be a popular one. Throw in a mini-ice age for the Roman empire. The industrial revolution, foundation of the British empire, unprovoked, coughed up back to back World Wars. 

Chaos ensues. 

“… The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; …” 

It’s my theory that in this chaos, because the civilization was so specialized for a different world, the personal experience is for many the experience of a world that no longer makes sense. The legislators, the bureaucrats, tax collectors, soldiers are all experts in roles that no longer have any meaning. 

“… Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; …” 

Madness, I think, might be a condition in which changes in the world remove meaning from one’s thoughts, even one’s identity. When that happens, people tend to act in ways that, from a slight remove, we call madness. 

The taxman knows collecting taxes for an order that no longer exists. The legislator writes elegant but impotent legislation to try to patch the holes in the sky. Madness, in this interregnum, is a kind of clinging to a meaning of ones own self and what one knows how to do but that is no longer meaningful in the world as it has become. 

Sanity, in contrast, must mean the acceptance of what has become. 

“… The best lack all conviction, while the worst
”Are full of passionate intensity." 

Council Meeting 11/5: Taplin’s “Affordable Housing Overlay”

On the Consent Calendar (item 9) is an upzoning proposed by Council Member Taplin, joined by Hahn, Robinson, and Bartlett. Notably, the measure would give developers a free pass to a project approval for tall buildings of nothing but housing priced for people enjoying 120% median income along the Adeline corridor. Developers who rent a tiny fraction of those units at very low prices will be rewarded with an additional one or two stories of those expensive units. 

The item is a real kick in the teeth to those from the red-lined area abutting that street who have petitioned their local government for over a decade for 100% truly affordable housing on that corridor. It puts the nail in the coffin of the Council’s conceit it makes decisions in consultation with the public, through a public process. 

They have their excuse all lined up, of course. It was only a couple of years ago that the usual YIMBY suspects help to form a nearly all white, nearly all rather wealthy appearing group to, well, tout for “affordable” housing for people in their own well-off-already situation. I’ve long said that when council holds a “public process seeking community input” they are really just holding a contest to see who can guess what they already plan to do. This overlay proposal is no different. 

The ugly racial politics behind turning the city’s back to the pressured and shrinking incumbent community in the red-lined area is nothing new from YIMBYland. Neither is my main point in bringing this up: YIMBY madness regarding the climate emergency. 

In his memo, Taplin repeats two Big Lies about the climate emergency. 

To understand why these lies are Big Lies you must notice that they are part of the YIMBY drum beating, and that they are utterly insane in present reality. Madness. 

The climate emergency, as any attentive adult must know by now, imposes the following imperative on human civilization: the amount of fossil fuel burned must fall far and fast in the course of the next few years, starting even before the 2022 elections. By 2030, it must become very difficult for people to obtain petrol, heating oil, and natural gas. Such a cutting off of fossil fuel is a major catastrophe that requires an all out scramble of adaptation (which isn’t happening). But that catastrophe is preferable to the alternative. The center cannot hold. 

To this predicament, the eloquent Mr. Taplin replies with two Big Lies, dressed in his usual pronounced fondness for “bold” and “equitable” actions: 

1. “Research from UC Berkeley scholars and the CoolClimate Network finds that urban infill offers one of the greatest potential policy levers for municipalities to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.”

Well, no. Any careful reader (even a non-specialist) can see that the CoolClimate project did not make any attempt to make any promise at all of lowering the amount of fossil fuel burning from today’s levels. That wasn’t even its purpose. Rather, the project aimed to explore the legislative implications of making an esoteric change to the official way conformance with anachronistic climate mandates in state law are implemented locally. Under certain idealized assumptions, including booming economic and population growth, the research group’s very simplistic models show that a highly coordinated regional planning process along these lines might slow the rate of emissions growth. Slow, not reverse. Madness. 

There are resources – accessible via U.N. IPCC reports – that discuss how our city might rush to adapt to a rapid reduction in fossil fuel burning, but Taplin and other council members have stiff-armed that news for years now. 

And that other lie. Note the weasel word: 

2. “Incentives for affordable housing, such as density bonuses, also offer potential to reduce per capita VMT by increasing housing options in Berkeley and shortening commute times for a greater share of the local workforce.”

Oh, so there is a hand-wave “potential” just at the moment in world history when decisive and successful action is need, and when tinkering around with zoning to boost the real estate, construction, and finance industries is far too little, too late. 

Once again, there is nothing on Tuesday’s city council agenda, but a reckless denial that the climate emergency is real. 

“… Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”