Looming Void: April 17, 2025
Messy project planning
10,000 minutes
Two and a half weeks in New Zealand was the existential boost I needed. The time—a tough remote-but-luxury hike (in a past era, the hike would have been trivial, now I struggle) plus scenic eye candy between Nelson and Christchurch—has reaffirmed the imperative of engaging in the world and with the world. A cantankerous creature, I grizzled inwardly but the rewards were immense.
I mean, this mushroom, right?
Now for the big push to finish the book. It’s worth confessing that it has taken two decades (interrupted by large gaps earning day job money) to get to this point—a big push to edit a huge book into something worth publishing—and that it covers only fifteen years, between 1942 and 1957, in the history of nuclear power reactors. I’ll talk in future newsletters about the reasons for this overlong writing time (and it’s not done yet!) and the implications (I’m nearly 70 years old), but you should note that this upcoming campaign to whip the book into shape (let me stress that the book’s “shape” is already there, we’re talking about beauty versus clunkiness) is vital.
If this next stage is vital, what needs to give in the rest of my life to make sure I surmount this phase and, as important, enjoy it? For a period of some six months, I’m going to tread lightly in social media and to renounce my love of book/movie culture. I’ll still duck in and out of Substack/X/Bluesky/Facebook/Insta, mostly as advanced book marketing, but I declare it verboten for the daylight hours. I’ll continue to read and watch after dinner (I’m in four book groups, two movie groups) but my consumption of culture shall plummet to the point of some grief.
In other words, the book is the focus and my focus is the book. Having tried all manner of project planning methods over decades, I’ve decided to be messy and stick a clumsy piece of butcher’s paper on my office/study/second bedroom wall each week and scribble on it and stick on it notes and planning exhortations. I don’t know how this makeshift weekly project board will end up being utilized, but I’m hopeful that the very act of rolling balls of Blutack to stick on the corners of the butcher’s paper will spur focus.
Alongside those major decisions comes a minor act that hurts. Seven years ago I initiated a writing project to travel and witness each of the world’s fifteen species of Crane birds. I put a load of effort into this assignment but had to choose which book to settle on. That 15 Cranes project has been parked for a few years now but I’ve kept handy fifteen photographs I printed, each one containing a Crane species’ geographical span (taken from the International Crane Foundation website). Now I bin them. Cue a plopping tear.
Monsters
Striving to ignore climate crisis news frees up time and allays some of the anxiety. (Or does it merely defer anxiousness? It hardly matters.)
I do keep in a separate email folder (labelled Buffered News) a few newsletters (mostly from Heatmap) pertaining to our climate future:
Susan Crawford points out that in Trump’s America, “FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) program will be dismantled … BRIC was hopelessly oversubscribed, a contest in which thousands of state and local applicants fought for partial grant funding of planned projects. But the more than $5 billion it gave out over the last four years accounted for most of the money the federal government has spent on adaptation.” Adaptation? We talk about it (mostly as an alternative to mitigation) but do nothing.
Zeke Hausfather writes that although the gloomiest of predictions a decade and a half ago, of +4C by 2100, has been quashed, a “Trump world” scenario labelled SSP3 now looms. He concludes that although SSP3 still seems unlikely, “the consistent move toward lower emissions futures over the past decade should not make us overconfident that this trend will necessarily continue. It is only through hard work – innovation, policy, deployment – that emissions will come down, and it is certainly possible to imagine a world worse than current policies would imply, even if it is not clear that we are headed toward that world quite yet. And, of course, current policies themselves lead to a world a bit below 3C warming, which is woefully insufficient to avoid potentially catastrophic impacts from climate change. In the critical time that we need to ramp up mitigation, we are starting to move in the wrong direction.”
Bill McKibben: “Mark Gongloff and Elaine He at Bloomberg produced a remarkable timeline the other day showing in enormous detail how the Trump administration had, in a matter of weeks, undone twenty years worth of efforts to do something about the climate crisis. It’s not like the U.S. had been providing sterling leadership, but ‘nothing could have prepared us for the breadth or intensity of the assault on climate action that Trump has unleashed during his first months back in office.”
March (peak ice time) Arctic ice cover is half a percent lower than the previous record. (Jessica Hullinger)
Mortality
A five-day hike trimmed some weight off my middle and upped my fitness a tad. I’m still not settled into a formal running regime to get me to my July 10-kilometer fun run but am more optimistic now. Otherwise … nothing to report.