Back to the Furnace
Plus a book on drugs, a booklet on drought, a friend's book review, and a mushroom bloom
As this newsletter goes out, we are (hopefully!) on our flight back to Arizona. It’s been a fascinating, fun, occasionally challenging half year in Sweden. Six months in is classically when people who move abroad find themselves out of the honeymoon phase and frustrated by their new surroundings, the clunkiness of their language skills, the limitations of their social life, etc. I’ve definitely been feeling a bit of that this summer, as the university has mostly been closed and midnight sun insomnia has made it hard to keep a schedule.
While I’m eager to get back to a place where I’m more comfortable and have more agency——I’m also leaving with a lot of melancholy. My colleagues here have been welcoming and excited about my left-field approach to research. Sweden and Luleå are just nice, functional places for the most part, and we lived within easy walking distance of most everything we needed. And we were insulated a bit from the turbulence that has come to define American society.
In particular, we are flying from probably some of the most mild weather in the northern hemisphere to some of the hottest. As people keep reminding me, Phoenix has had something like 30 days and counting of highs over 115F. It’s a dry heat, of course, and every place you go has AC, but it seems like we’ve missed a particularly brutal July and are headed back for what’s shaping up to be a rough August.
Luleå and Phoenix are kind of mirror opposites. Luleå has a long and frigid winter. While many Swedes do get out to ski and take walks on the ice road, for the most part outdoor spaces are abandoned. Stereotypically people spend the winter inside watching TV, dreaming of summer when they actually get to enjoy themselves. When the ice does thaw, they go a little wild, get sundrunk on the long days, and take extended vacations.
We’ve found our quiet street has turned rather noisy these last couple months, as teenagers will drive around after midnight blaring technopop from amped up speakers——a phenomenon C and I call “mandatory vibes.” It’s so loud that, even with ear plugs and our apartment closed up tight, the music will keep us up. But if you complain about this behavior to most Swedes, they will shrug and suggest that it’s understandable, even necessary, for young people to blow off steam like this during the summer. Because, well, winter is coming, and soon enough they’ll be cooped back up inside. (Loud music, they say, is better than turning to drink or drugs, though personally I think Sweden should join the civilized world and get over its surprisingly zealous cannabis prohibition.)
Phoenix, meanwhile, has one of the mildest winters on the planet, and so summer and winter kind of swap. You just don’t go outside hardly at all in the summer unless it’s to spend time in a pool, and even those get tepidly warm as the heat drags on. The air and sky are just too inconducive to human life. Stay outside too long without accommodation and you’ll suffer the elements, a term with ambiguity I enjoy, as though hostile mages were raining fire or ice down from the heavens.
But once it cools down, that’s it, that’s your penance, and you get to enjoy a winter that’s not so different than Luleå summer. I feel fortunate to have dodged both the worst of Sweden’s winter and the worst of Arizona’s summer. It will still be hot until mid-October, but July is always the most brutal part.
One thing I’ve noticed is that most Swedes feel relatively safe from climate chaos, particularly here in the north. The danger of the climate crisis for them, they assume, will come in the form of refugees that must be taken in and other geopolitical pressures. The atmospheric models that researchers have come up with to predict climate shifts just don’t show a lot of spikey, superstorm possibilities. Given how in Luleå we were completely unperturbed by this summer’s otherwise unprecedented European heatwave, maybe they’re right. But personally, I have my doubts that anywhere is “safe” anymore, and I suspect that being unprepared for more extreme weather is the most dangerous position to be in. If Luleå got the kind of heat central Europe has been getting, it’d be in big trouble.
Phoenix has a similar kind of confidence——at least based on the way people keep moving there. It’s already set up to deal with the kind of extremes global heating is likely to bring. There’s AC in every building, and everyone knows water is going to be a long term problem (though not every town and developer acts on that knowledge). If a polar vortex were to swerve our way, things could get dicey, but the super hot summers are a problem that can be managed, for now. The question becomes, how much longer does it become worth it to live in Phoenix when an ever increasing portion of the year is too hot to go outside.
The short run of adapting to the hot house is mostly sweltering, drowning, starving human misery. In the long run, though, maybe we all turn snowbirds. Throughout our long history, many humans have moved around with the seasons. Imagine if Luleå and Phoenix were one big city, with most of the population migrating to avoid the most extreme weather. Countless retirees already winter in Arizona, and I’m looking hard for opportunities to summer in Europe next year. Hit me up if you’ve got any.
And hit me up if you’d like to connect now that I’m back in the states. I’ve got a packed fall of teaching, writing, and coursework ahead, but I’m never too busy for the right project.
Thanks for coming with C and I on our adventure in Sweden. Keep reading for some projects by friends I’m pleased to share and some juicy pictures of mushrooms.
Out Now: Quick Fixes by Benjamin Y. Fong
This past month saw the release of a great nonfiction book by my comrade Ben Fong, Quick Fixes: Drugs in America from Prohibition to the 21st-Century Binge. I got to read and offer edits on an early draft of this book, so I’m excited to see it out in the world. Plus, it’s just a great, short text that quickly covers a lot of oft-forgotten but pretty wild political, cultural, and economic history.
From the capitalist excesses of the coffee trade to the racialized formation of the war on drugs, drugs don’t explain America, but you can’t explain America without drugs. And, as Ben likes to point out, Americans are world-historically psychoactive today. It’s worth asking how we got this way.
Quick Fixes is available from Verso Books here, or from other booksellers here. Below is the excellent table of contents:
Feeling Solarpunk: On Becky Chambers’s Monk and Robot Series
In other work-by-my-friends news, the other week I was delighted to see my friend Kurt Ostrow with a piece in the LA Review of Books about Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot novellas, A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Kurt talks eloquently about the books in context of solarpunk in general, pondering what role art and creative writing play in the broader polycrisis we find our planet in. Does a utopian book like this actually dampen and mollify the revolutionary spirit by feeding us escapist fantasies? Or does reading about a world of peace and sustainable plenty give us a beacon in the confusing future-dark, something to shoot for, to motivate our struggle?
Some nice insights and turns of phrase from Kurt:
As I glut myself on oil, electricity, and cobalt, I’m wary of solarpunk as my guiltiest pleasure, an escapism that papers over the violent inequities I profit off of uncountably, right now.
…
Though we don’t walk away with a blueprint for our Transition, we do glimpse how it might feel to live in its wake. Through Dex and their friendship with Mosscap, we get to experience truly radical freedom: to live in a society so splendid—where all beings, treated with indiscriminate dignity, want for nothing—and still be totally floundering. How delicious, and how human.
The Games That Got Us Through: Redux
This is a PSA that, due to mounting domain/hosting costs on a rather old website, I have moved one of the first solarpunk fiction projects I worked on, The Games That Got Us Through, from AppliedHistoryInstitute.com (where it lived for seven years) to a page on my own website.
The Games That Got Us Through imagines the new sports and games that arise out of a massive, drought-induced climate migration out of the American southwest. It’s about how scarcity and upheaval drive us toward moments that balance on a knife’s edge, and the constant effort it takes to choose empathy and play over fear and violence. We printed a booklet of three stories, two of which I wrote, and put together a museum-themed ‘visitation’ at the 2016 Emerge Festival. All of which I’m still immensely proud of.
If you follow this newsletter but have never checked out TGTGUT, I think it holds up. It was a wonderful project with some brilliant collaborators, back when folks were just starting to make “solarpunk” and “climate fiction” a thing. It’s hopeful but not utopian, grim but not doomerist, crusty and rough edged and reflective and thoughtful, feeling like the past and the future all at once. It steers readers toward good ideas without being didactic or polemical, which is a balance that I think has gotten harder to achieve in the years since 2016.
The main page includes a bunch of cool ephemera that had been on the Applied History Institute website, but the thrust of the content is in the 40-page booklet we put together, which you can download as a free pdf here.
Art Tour: Devouring Lovers
In early July, C and I went to Berlin for a long weekend, where we met up with a small group of friends, Americans who have all relocated to Germany in recent years. It was a great time, albeit quite hot out, and——it being Berlin——there was lots of art around to see. One of the funner pieces we saw was this installation at the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum of Contemporary Art by Eva Fàbregas. The piece like a bit like a gray goo takeover of a train station by AI generated sex toys. Inside the sleeves are what feels like inflatable exercise balls, but don’t touch it (they don’t like that). If you are interested in seeing more angles on this installation, it got written up recently in This Is Colossal.
Material Reality: Mushroom Bloom
While much of the rest of the planet roasts, it’s been a rainy last month on the here in Luleå. Gone was the sunny beach weather of June. For a solid week we were pretty much cooped up inside. But when the sky finally cleared, and we got back out on our walks around town, we noticed that the days of wetness has brought forth an amazing bloom of mushrooms and fungi all over.
Having spent much of the last some years in a desert, this moisture-driven explosion has been really fun to watch. It’s put me in mind of Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World, and the many threads that book tries to entangle and disentangle. Possibly it’s great foraging out, but we haven’t had the guts to try to identify edible varieties.
I was particularly charmed by lichens that have appeared on the wood of the wharf. Unfortunately we haven’t sighted any more of the wharf-shrooms I noted last month.
And there have been other small discoveries, like a family of hedgehogs living in the bushes of a construction site, one of which we found dead in the grass on the way back from the beach. Small as Luleå is, I’ll be sad to miss seeing the rest of the turning seasons here: the blackberries, the fall foliage, and the icing over of the bay.
If you like the this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent climate fiction novel Our Shared Storm, which Publisher’s Weekly called “deeply affecting” and “a thoughtful, rigorous exploration of climate action.”
