Doomwatch

 

(Doomwatch was a  British TV series from the early 70s).

One of the new aspects of living in today's world is deciding whether we should be alarmed and how to act accordingly. The US has often been accused of kicking the can down the road as a way of squelching cognitive dissonance. It's an easy way to turn down the volume. Then you don't have to do anything.

In terms of what is happening with persistent drought around the globe, we're not in extremis yet. There are ways we can move water around and I'm sure people are thinking about other ways to adapt to drier climates. But everywhere you look on social media it is this "doomwatch" thing--the "disaster movie" theme I keep revisiting. I think it's related to our image-based culture.

More than a century since the advent of photography and cinema, it's probably changed or brains in fundamental ways. Now YouTube watches the images you're watching and feeds you more of those images. Anything watched on screens these days is an exercise in image gluttony. But there is interesting and enriching content nonetheless, be even that isn't conclusive. It can be a moral hazard--geoengineering for example. There might be a well-produced documentary about it that can be convincing but you have to consider whether the eye candy is fooling you.

6/20/2021

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1/12/2025

When I went to LA on business in April 1995, after having not gone there since several childhood vacations, the first thing I noticed on the trip from the Ontario airport to downtown LA was that it looked like a movie set. Disaster can be all around you, but in retrospect it's kind of ironic that you go to a place where disasters are like seasons, and another historic one happens there, and it's all the same disaster movie that's always playing somewhere.

LA exists in its current state (or psychological state--or psychogeography) because of Hollywood, TV, and Disneyland, so it stands to reason that it would have a mirroring effect.

One of the most interesting books about the LA psychogeography is The Ecology of Fear, by Mike Davis, published in 1998, right around the time when climate change was getting more media attention, perhaps (partially) because of Al Gore. Perhaps if Gore never had a role in government, we might not have had the awareness we already have, and it takes those governmental roles to keep it in the public consciousness. But 1998 was also pre-internet, when free speech exploded, and anyone could call themselves a climate expert just because they have an opinion.

"Paranoia about nature, of course, distracts attention from the obvious fact that Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way. For generations, market-driven urbanization has transgressed environmental common sense. Historic wildfire corridors have been turned into view-lot suburbs, wetland liquefaction zones into marinas, and floodplains into industrial districts and housing tracts. Monolithic public works have been substituted for regional planning and a responsible land ethic. As a result, Southern California has reaped flood, fire, and earthquake tragedies that were as avoidable, as unnatural, as the beating of Rodney King and the ensuing explosion in the streets. In failing to conserve natural ecosystems it has also squandered much of its charm and beauty."