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December 23, 2012 Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, 2013 as Year Zero for Us -- and Our Planet
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: It’s
that time again. Another year-ending moment for this website, which
began as a no-name listserv in October 2001 and went online as
TomDispatch in December 2002, thanks to Ham Fish of the Nation
Institute. It's been plugging away ever since as a “regular antidote to
the mainstream media,” doing its best to connect the unconnected dots
in our world. (Click here
to check out a little piece I wrote for the Moyers & Company
website this week about what I call “isolation journalism” in the
mainstream media where connections are seldom made.)
With today’s post, we’re closing down for 2012, but expect us back on January 3rd renewed and ready for a new year full of surprises. In the meantime, profuse thanks are due to the stalwart crew who keep TD going: Managing Editor Nick Turse, who will continue to follow the U.S. military as it garrisons the planet in 2013 and will have a remarkable new book on the Vietnam War published as well; Associate Editor Andy Kroll, who will again be on the economic beat for us; Dimitri Siavelis and Joe Duax, who keep the site miraculously shipshape and ready to roll; Christopher Holmes, proofer-extraordinaire who holds error eternally at bay (or at least to a surprising minimum) in our dispatches; and Erika Eichelberger, our maestro of social media, who has brought TD Facebook page and Twitter feed alive this year. (Check us out there if you haven’t yet!) Special thanks are due as well to Andy Breslau, Taya Kitman, and the rest of the staff of the Nation Institute, who continue to stick with us through thick and thin, and finally to Lannan Foundation, which may be last in this list but is certainly first in what it’s done for TomDispatch. Surrounded by such a crowd, life couldn’t be better. Finally, of course, my deepest thanks to TomDispatch readers all over this country and around the world, whose readership and support make all the difference. Your emails to this site offer tips, catch errors, offer criticism, and reveal unknown worlds to me. They are always read (even when, hard as I try, I’m too busy to answer). What more could I ask? Have a good holiday. See you all in 2013! Tom] In weather terms, 2012 in New York City began for me with crocuses. On an early February day in a week in which the temperature hit 60 degrees, I spotted their green shoots pushing up through the bare ground of a local park on a morning walk -- just as if it were spring. The year was ending last weekend as I wandered with a friend past a communal garden in the same park and noticed that, in a December week in which the temperatures were in the mid-50s, the last few roses were still in bloom. In between, in that park on a dark night in late October I watched a white-capped Hudson River roiling like some enraged beast, preparing for a storm surge that would flood lower Manhattan, plunging it into darkness and so turning it into “little North Korea,” briefly making true islanders out of New Yorkers and flooding out whole communities. That, of course, was Hurricane Sandy, the Frankenstorm surprise of New York’s year (though anything but a worst case scenario). And then, there was the American 2012 in which heat eternally set records and we experienced something close to an “endless summer.” If climate change had a personality in this year of so many grim records -- wildfires, drought, heat, carbon dioxide emissions -- it would definitely be saying: “I’m not the thing your grandchildren will have to deal with, I’m yours!” In such a new world of upheaval, tradition matters. And there is one inviolable tradition at TomDispatch: Rebecca Solnit has the last word -- as she has for years, peering into the future, sizing up the past, weighing alternatives to what is, and last year considering a season of being Occupied. Now, for the first time in a long while, weather and climate change are a growing American preoccupation. Of course, climate change is an area long occupied by the giant energy companies whose compassion extends no further than their bottom lines (which, like the heat, continue to set historical records). Solnit in her year-ending, TomDispatch-closing piece suggests that it’s time for us to occupy the topic ourselves, and do our best to ensure that this planet, 2013 and beyond, remains a habitable place for us, our children, and our grandchildren. There could be no more powerful New Year’s wish. Tom The Sky’s the Limit |
