Welcome back, Shit Givers.

I’m back! Huge thanks to Willow for stepping in last week. Check out her Basic Shit series — it’s so helpful and there’s delightful easter eggs throughout.

Members received an exclusive Top of Mind post about climate migration this week. Don’t miss out on the next one.

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News Without Motives.

1440 is the daily newsletter I love that helps 2M+ Americans stay informed — it’s news without motives, edited to be unbiased as humanly possible.

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What We Can Do

⚡️ Last week’s most popular Action Step was checking to see whether your state and/or city’s got an e-bike rebate program!

⚡️ Floods or not, fire season’s (probably) right around the corner. Get up to the minute air quality reports with a Purple Air monitor (and nifty map, too)

⚡️ Your community may need to replace toxic lead water service lines. Check out Beyond Plastic’s report on the pros and cons of PVC pipes.

⚡️ Sure, the economy and market are completely unpredictable at this point, but there’s no better time to put your retirement fund to work fighting climate change. Do it with Carbon Collective.

⚡️ Speaking of lead pipes — will microplastics and PFAS (“forever chemicals”) be our version? Check out PFAS Central’s PFAS-free brands and consumer products.

It’s a strange thing to be alive and aware in 2023.

I struggle to find the right word to describe what I feel most days. “Surreal” didn’t work when I dropped it in here. To be honest, “strange” doesn’t actually really work, either — typically defined as being “unusual or surprising in a way that is unsettling or hard to understand.“

Yes, the pace and scope of change is unsettling. But no, it’s not really hard to understand why we’re not ready for it.

For now, I’ll go with “perplexing”.

Still not perfect, but I’m going to use it, because that’s what GPT-4 suggested, and AI is a big part of this story — even if it’s just another red herring or distraction from what we need to do.

Or maybe, on the other hand, it’s just another signal: get your shit together, humanity.

GPT isn’t far off: knowing the solutions but bearing witness to inaction is a big part of the reason why I do this. But not for the reasons you think.

I sure as shit don’t know all the solutions. But I do my best every day to gather as much information as I can about what works and what’s bullshit from the people who actually know what they’re talking about, and who’ve actually been doing the work, so I can point you all towards something measurable.

Bearing witness to inaction is less about watching a city burn or drown (or both), or transmission lines not get built or buried and wondering, “Why the hell aren’t we doing anything about this?”

Inaction is usually the result of some combination of legacy power structures and banging our heads against the same wall over and over.

So to be alive and aware in 2023 is to understand the surface area of a given problem, to identify the roadblocks, to establish a clear outcome, and then to throw the kitchen sink (you) at all of the obstacles, figuring out how to go through, around, over, and under them, all at once.

This is the way*.

*as frustrating as it may be to me at times, and to so many readers and listeners, and in offline conversations.

Our desired outcomes may seem simple and obvious but getting there is not — otherwise we’d be there already.

So my work is to not only identify and define an exciting, measurable outcome (“No new emissions”), but also to understand and illustrate the fullest picture of how we get there, what stands in our way, and to most transparently determine what we can control, and what we can’t.

On the surface, this is actually easier than it’s ever been. We have more accumulated and real-time knowledge of ourselves and the world around us than ever before.

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