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These 7 neighborhoods are competing visions of a more sustainable future.
I’m a serial cheater, emotionally, on New York City. As much as Queens is my home, one of my favorite ways to lose track of time is by going down the Zillow rabbit hole and imagining all the other lives I could live somewhere else. If I had $2 million, would I move into a houseboat to live out my Sleepless in Seattle dreams? (You laugh, but at least a floating home is floodproof!). Or maybe I’d go to California to be closer to my extended family? (Never mind — I’d never be able to afford the fire insurance).
Recently I’ve become especially captivated by “intentional communities,” of which there are thousands worldwide and hundreds in the United States alone. These are experimental master-planned neighborhoods that revolve around shared values that often pertain to things like sustainability, communal living, green spaces, and minimizing individual impact — things that might be necessary to adopt in some form on a wider scale in the coming years.
Some of these communal neighborhoods are pretty out there (think aquaponics that runs off a “VillageOS”). Others are so alluring that without even realizing it, I found myself browsing their availability pages. Oops — don’t tell New York.
Here are a few of the innovative neighborhoods that caught my eye:
Location: Utrecht, Netherlands
Courtesy MVSA Architects
You’ve joked about running away to go live in the woods, but what if you didn’t have to make the choice?
Designed by Stefano Boeri of Verticle Forest fame and Roberto Meyer of the Dutch firm MVSA Architects, Wonderwoods is a 200-apartment, two-tower project in Utrecht, the fourth-biggest city in the Netherlands. The pair of structures, set to open in 2024, look in the renderings like something nature has reclaimed. But the 10,000 plants and 300 trees that will eventually cover the buildings’ balconies, roofs, and facades aren’t just there to look cool.
By decking out Wonderwoods in the equivalent of one hectare of forest, the designers aim to maximize the known benefits of urban tree planting: Plants suck up CO2, help filter out environmental pollutants, and can even generate microclimates that will be important in a warming world (the cooling effects of plants will also help reduce the energy demand of air conditioners).
Wonderwoods’ co-designer, Boeri, has been called “perhaps the most famous name in green architecture,” and he is both prolific and influential: The Dutch project is just one of the dozens of plant-coated buildings that have been, or are being, constructed around the world.
Not all of these experiments have been successful — rumor has it the Qiyi City Forest in Chengdu is overgrown and bug infested — and some scientists have downplayed the greenhouse gas-mitigating effects of so-called biophilic design. Still, if we’re to survive in a hotter, more concrete-covered world, we’ll need to bring plants along with us.
Would I live here?: I’ve always been jealous of people who junglefy their living spaces with lots and lots of plants (Hilton Carter, please decorate my home!). Tragically, I don’t always have the greenest thumb — I’m an overenthusiastic waterer — but the good news is, Wonderwoods has a team of rappelling gardeners who will maintain the exterior vegetation for you. Getting to enjoy the lushness of a rural forest in the heart of urban Europe without having to do any of the work? Count me in — I’d live here for sure.
Live, Work & Play at Wonderwoodswww.youtube.com
Location: Tempe, Arizona
Courtesy Culdesac
Forget electric vehicles: Residents of Culdesac, a rental community just across the river from Phoenix in Tempe, Arizona, are “contractually forbidden from parking a vehicle within a quarter-mile radius of the site.”
While that might sound practically un-American to some, it’s a paradise for others. The 17-acre, $170-million project includes 761 apartments, a light rail stop (which is free with residency), communal courtyards, a coffee shop, restaurant, gym, grocery store, soon-to-open coworking space, car-share pick-up and drop-off, and, yes, visitor parking.
Culdesac isn’t the only car-free community in America, as Jalopnik reports. But while the communities tend to be popular, especially with young professionals (40% of the people on Culdesac’s opening waitlist were from outside of Arizona), “these kinds of developments often aren’t legal to build in large parts of the country due to mandatory parking minimums,” Jalopnik adds.
That doesn’t deter its founders. The long-term “vision of Culdesac,” Ryan Johnson, Culdesac’s chief executive, told The New York Times, is to eventually “build the first car-free city in the U.S.”
Would I live here?: One of the biggest deterrents against leaving New York City is being saddled with car payments — not to mention that my husband doesn’t drive. Despite being located in the heart of the Phoenix sprawl, Culdesac seems genuinely committed to making a car-free lifestyle work for its residents, offering benefits like free rides on the metro, bike parking, $5-an-hour car-sharing, complimentary Lyft Pink, and rentable Bird scooters on site. Coming from the New York real estate market, its prices also seem reasonable — available one-bedroom units start at $1,390 a month. I know because I was tempted enough to look. If only I liked the heat a little more …
Culdesac Tempe: The First Car-free Community Built From Scratch in the USwww.youtube.com
Location: Vienna, Austria
Anja Pfeifer/Getty Images
Vienna is one of the fastest-growing cities in Europe, which has created a massive demand for housing. In order to meet the demand, Vienna is building a city within a city — and taking it as an opportunity to do things right.
With over 11,000 new homes (including the world’s second-tallest timber building), the neighborhood of Aspern Seestadt is nearly net-zero, relying on technology and cutting-edge construction techniques to lower its footprint. Excess heat and electricity in one building can be sent to another, for example, while 80% of its residents reportedly travel by bike, foot, or public transit.
But what sets Aspern Seestadt apart from other green, pedestrian-friendly communities around the globe is its emphasis on centering women’s and families’ needs. For one thing, all of the streets and public spaces in the neighborhood are named after women, but the attention goes beyond the symbolic — the pavement is also wide to accommodate strollers, and ramps are included alongside staircases; parks and other gathering spaces have plentiful public toilets; pram parking and storage are readily accessible. There are also extra safety measures, like more lights in dark spaces, abundant alarms and assistance buttons, and extra guards during nighttime hours.
Buildings in Aspern Seestadt also mix housing with nurseries, shops, and coworking spaces so “women, as well as men, can … better reconcile professional and personal life,” Germany’s Gettotext.com reports. It’s a model more intentional communities should take note of.
Would I live here?: Vienna has repeatedly been cited as the city with the highest quality of life in the world although the picture might not be as rosy if you aren’t Austrian. The expat resource website InterNations lists Vienna as the “worst-rated city” in the world when it comes to the “ease of settling in” due in large part to it also being in last place for “local friendliness.” As amazing as it’d be to be integrated into a community like Aspern Seestadt — especially, eventually, as a mother — it’d probably be terribly isolating to get the cold shoulder from my new neighbors. For the “new girl in the high school” vibes this is giving me, I’d potentially pass.
Vienna is Building a $6BN "City Within a City"www.youtube.com
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Pol Albarran/Getty Images
One of the major criticisms of intentional communities is that they’re not actually all that “green” since they require new construction, which in turn uses up resources and adds to emissions. Additionally, many of the neighborhoods featured in this article simply aren’t scaleable to the necessary degree; 4.4 billion people live in cities and moving all of them into net-zero villages or buildings would be next to impossible.
But what if existing neighborhoods could retroactively be made greener and more habitable? That’s the radical idea behind Barcelona’s superilles, or superblocks, which began reclaiming city streets for pedestrians back in 2013. The basic idea involves cordoning off 3x3 city blocks, diverting thru-traffic around the “islands,” and limiting the roads within the blocks to six-mile-per-hour residential traffic. This transforms the interiors of the superblocks into safe places for pedestrians to walk and kids to play; the new green spaces help eliminate the urban heat island effect and boost mental health; and the walkability encourages increased foot traffic, in turn reducing emissions.
The experiment has been an enormous success: NO2 pollution has dropped 33%; noise in superblocks dipped by 9 decibels, and local businesses have seen increased sales as residents opt to shop within walking distance, a positive illustration of the urban planning concept known as the 15-minute city.
Today, there are only six superblocks in the capital of Catalonia, but the goal is to expand the concept city-wide to potentially as many as 500. In the next decade, it aims for every resident to have a public square and a green street within 650 feet of their home.
Would I live here?: Psst, New York City, can’t you take a hint? The COVID-19 pandemic gave New Yorkers a taste of what it might be like if our city prioritized the needs of pedestrians over drivers with its “open streets” program, although most of that progress has been rolled back. Barcelona is proving we could be better if only we had our priorities in the right place. Sure, it’s a sí from me when it comes to moving to Spain, but it’d be even neater if we could bring the superblock experiment back home.
Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from carswww.youtube.com
Location: Near Amsterdam, Netherlands
Courtesy ReGen
“The Tesla of Eco-Villages” might not sound quite as appealing as it once did. But if you want to live minimally but aren’t quite ready to give up your Apple Watch, then ReGen Villages might be for you.
While other projects I've highlighted reimagine urban living, ReGen Villages wants to reinvent the “neighborhood development outside of cities.” The 50-acre community of 300 homes is planned for a rural region about a half-hour drive outside of Amsterdam and aims to combine vertical farming, aquaponics, renewable energy, and waste-to-resource systems to form an almost entirely self-sustaining, closed-loop community.
But this isn’t your hippie aunt’s crunchy, off-the-grid living. Conducting the complicated system will be the “Village OS” software, which eventually will use AI to “optimize living conditions, energy use, and overall efficiency,” and even potentially communicate with other future ReGen Villages around the planet, Insider reports.
ReGen Village has run into a number of roadblocks since it was first announced — construction on the complex was originally slated to begin in 2017 but it has encountered zoning, permitting, and funding problems and its website says the company is “in [the] process of raising a Series-A round of investment” to build out the operating system to test in “pilot communities.” But if the Amsterdam location doesn’t work out, stay tuned; ReGen is a California-based company and it reports interest in the concept is high in the U.S., particularly the Northeast.
Would I live here?: I’m all for off-the-grid living but something about ReGen Villages feels a little … cult-y? Maybe it’s the all-seeing AI, or the active discouragement of owning a car while living in a rural area, but something about this whole scheme sounds like the starting premise of an Ari Aster film. I’ll keep my cell reception, thanks.
ReGen Villages - Index Award 2017 Finalistwww.youtube.com
Location: Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Screenshot/YouTube
A desert oil state might seem like an unlikely place for a sustainable city; in 2003, the United Arab Emirates had the highest ecological footprint per person of any nation (and it’s not much better now). But as part of a region-wide effort to convince the rest of the world that climate objectives are compatible with fossil fuels, the UAE is hosting COP28 and touting lofty goals like making Dubai the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050.
The 120-acre, $354 million Sustainable City is one of the crown jewels of that ongoing effort. Constructed 18 miles in the desert outside of Dubai by Diamond Developers, which built the city’s famous marina, the Sustainable City is intended as a model net-zero neighborhood, complete with self-sufficient greenhouses and biodomes, recycled water, solar panels, and intelligent design (the villas, home to some 2,500 residents, all face north, which the developers claim cuts air conditioning usage by 40%). Cars are banned inside the compound and a shopping plaza, complete with a mosque, serves all the residents’ needs.
Critics are highly skeptical of the Sustainable City, arguing the project is an “‘island’ of specialized consumption and lifestyle … that does not actually take on the challenge of sustainability.” Supporters, on the other hand, describe it as a “living laboratory” where developers are learning in real-time how to make habitable one of the most climate-threatened places on Earth. True, the Sustainable City might not be the solution to Dubai’s problems — at worst, it might represent another instance of the UAE’s greenwashing. But if its experiment is successful, the solutions it discovers could help inform better-living for everyone.
Would I live here?: There is a reason most of the homes on this list are variations on high-density living; dense urban housing tends to be far more energy efficient. While having your own villa in the Sustainable City would be pretty sweet, it does give the impression that this is just another gated community surrounded by all the other gated communities also touting their green bona fides in Dubai. On top of the human rights violations I’d have to turn a blind eye to in order to live in the United Arab Emirates, I’m not sure the Sustainable City would be right for me.
Sustainable City | Fully Chargedwww.youtube.comSc
Location: Austin, Texas
Screenshot/YouTube
Bringing people in closer harmony with the Earth is the goal of many sustainable communities. Whisper Valley, a 2,000-acre development in Austin, just takes it a little more literally.
At first, Whisper Valley looks like many innovative developments popping up across America: The 7,700 homes come with solar panels, Google Nest thermostats, nearby community centers, and ample public green spaces (in this case, a massive 600-acre park that doubles as flood control). But what sets the community apart is what you can’t see: Whisper Valley sits on the largest geothermal grid in the world.
Drawing on the steady temperature of the deep Earth, geothermal is gaining popularity as a means of slashing energy costs and emissions associated with heating and cooling homes. In combination with solar panels, monthly energy bills in Whisper Valley run residents only about one dollar.
But the low energy impact and savings are not the only things that make Whisper Valley a model neighborhood for the future. Because of its reliance on geothermal energy, the community had no problem staying warm when a 2021 energy surge during the deadly Texas Snowpocalypse left millions of people without heat for days. “As extreme weather gets more destructive,” Fast Company writes, geothermal solutions like that in Whisper Valley may be “a way for communities to withstand their own version of Snowpocalypse.”
Would I live here?: The suburbanite in me loves a lot about Whisper Valley — the stand-alone energy-efficient homes, the communal gathering spaces, the emphasis on healthy outdoor-oriented lifestyles, and the charging stations that come already installed in the garages. For most Americans, the development likely represents a feasible way to lower the family footprint while not compromising on many of the things we’ve come to take for granted, such as having our own space and the freedom that comes with owning a car. As far as daydreams go, Whisper Valley is perhaps a little underwhelming compared to living in a sky-forest or a luxury villa. But in terms of places that real Americans might actually be convinced to live, Whisper Valley is as exciting as it gets.
Whisper Valley - East Austin's New Zero-Energy Capable Communitywww.youtube.com
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It’s already conquered solar, batteries, and EVs. With a $2 billion new turbine factory in Scotland, it may have set its next target.
Batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles. The story of renewable energy deployment globally is increasingly one of China’s fiercely competitive domestic industries and deep supply chains exporting their immense capacity globally. Now, it may be wind’s turn.
The Chinese turbine manufacturer Ming Yang announced last week that it plans to invest $2 billion in a factory in Scotland. The facility is scheduled to start production in late 2028, churning out offshore wind equipment for use in the United Kingdom, which has over 15 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity, as well as for export, likely in Europe.
The deal comes as China finds itself at a kind of domestic clean energy crossroads, in terms of both supply and demand. On the former, the country has launched a campaign aimed at softening the cutthroat domestic competition, overproduction, and price wars that have defined many of its green industries, especially electric vehicles.
At the same time, China is setting out to alter its electricity markets to put renewable energy on a more market-based footing, while also paying coal-fired power plants to stay on the grid, as University of California, San Diego researcher Michael Davidson explained on a recent episode of Shift Key. These changes in electricity markets will reduce payments to solar and wind producers, making foreign markets potentially more attractive.
“We anticipate Chinese original equipment manufacturers will intensify their push toward international expansion, with Mingyang’s planned investment a signal of this trend,” Morningstar analyst Tancrede Fulop wrote in a note to clients. “This poses a challenge for Western incumbents, as Chinese players can capitalize on their cost advantages in a market driven by price.”
Ironically, Fulop said, the market changes will make the Chinese market more like Europe’s, which has become more price conscious as the market has matured and reductions in cost have slowed or outright stopped. “The transition is expected to make renewable developers increasingly price-sensitive as they seek to preserve project returns, ultimately weighing on wind turbine manufacturers’ profitability,” he wrote.
There’s a “cliff” coming in Chinese renewable energy deployment, Kyle Chan, a postdoctoral researcher at Princeton University, told me. “Overall, the net effect is expected to be a pretty sharp drop, and we’re already starting to see some of the effects of that.”
And turbine manufacturers would not be the first Chinese renewable industry to show up in Europe.
“There’s already an existing model” for Chinese manufacturers to set up shop in Western countries, Chan said. Chinese companies are already planning to manufacture solar modules in France, while Chinese EV maker BYD’s is planning factories in Hungary, Turkey, and potentially Spain.
China as a whole is responsible for over half of all new offshore wind capacity added in 2024, according to Global Energy Monitor, and has been growing at a 41% annual rate for the past five years. The energy intelligence firm Rystad estimates that China will make up 45% of all offshore wind capacity by 2030. Ming Yang itself claims to be behind almost a third of new offshore wind capacity built last year.
Meanwhile, offshore wind projects in the West — especially the United States — have faced the omnicrisis of high interest rates, backed-up supply chains, and Donald Trump. News of Ming Yang’s Scotland factory sent yet another shock through the ailing Western offshore wind market, with shares in the Danish company Vestas down 4% when the market opened Monday.
But with Chinese products and Chinese investment comes controversy and nerves among European political leaders. “There’re questions about tech transfer and job creation,” Chan said. “They also face some security issues and potential political backlash.”
In August, the German asset manager Luxcara announced that it would use Siemens Gamesa turbines for a planned offshore wind project instead of Ming Yang ones after backlash from German defense officials. “We see this as further evidence that a Chinese entry into the European wind market remains challenging,” analysts at Jefferies wrote to clients in August.
They were right to be skeptical — Chinese turbines’ entry into the European market has been long predicted and yet remains unrealized. “China’s increasingly cheap wind turbines could open new markets,” S&P Global Insights wrote in 2022, citing the same cost advantages as Morningstar did in reference to the Ming Yang factory announcement.
“China was already trying to angle into the European market,” Chan told me, seeing it as comparable to the U.S. in size and potentially more open to Chinese investment. “If they were kind of thinking about it before, now it’s gotten a greater sense of commercial urgency because I think the expectation is that their profit margins are really going to get squeezed.”
While China leads the world in building out renewable energy capacity domestically and exporting technology abroad, it has “decided not to decide” on pursuing a rapid, near-term decarbonization, Johns Hopkins University China scholar Jeremy Wallace recently argued in Heatmap.
While that means that the Paris Agreement goals are even farther out of reach, it may be fine for Chinese industries, including wind, as they look to sell abroad.
“Chinese firms have lots of reasons to want to build things abroad: Diversification away from the Chinese market, the zero or negative profits from selling domestically, and geopolitical balancing,” Wallace told me.
“If Brits want to have their citizens making the turbines that will power the country,” Wallace said, “this seems like a reasonable opportunity.”
Current conditions: A major Pacific storm is drenching California and bringing several inches of snow to Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming • A tropical storm in the Atlantic dumped nearly a foot of water on South Carolina over three days • Algeria is roasting in temperatures of more than 105 degrees Fahrenheit.
The Department of Energy notified workers in multiple offices Friday that they were likely to be fired or reassigned to another part of the agency, E&E News reported Tuesday. Staffers at the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations and the Office of State and Community Energy Programs received notices stating that the offices would “be undergoing a major reorganization and your position may be reassigned to another organization, transferred to another function or abolished.” Still, the notice said “no determination has been made concerning your specific position” just yet.
At least five offices received “general reduction in force notices,” as opposed to official notification of a reduction in force, according to a Latitude Media report. These included the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the Office of State and Community Energy Plans, and the Office of Fossil Energy. Nearly 200 Energy Department employees received direct layoff notices.
Catastrophic floods brought on by the remnants of a typhoon devastated the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk on Sunday. Five months ago, the Trump administration canceled a $20 million grant intended to protect the community against exactly this kind of extreme flooding, The New York Times reported Tuesday. The grant from the Environmental Protection Agency was meant to stabilize the riverbank on which Kipnuk is built. But in May, the agency yanked back the Biden-era grant, which EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said was “no longer consistent” with the government’s priorities. In a post on X, Zeldin said the award was part of "wasteful DEI and Environmental Justice grants,” suggesting the funding was part of an ideological push for diversity, equity, and inclusion rather than a practical infrastructure boost to an Indigenous community facing serious challenges.
Zealan Hoover, a Biden-era senior adviser at the EPA, accused Zeldin of using “inflammatory rhetoric” that misrepresented the efforts in places like Kipnuk. “For decades, E.P.A. has been a partner to local communities,” Hoover said. “For the first time under this administration, E.P.A. has taken an aggressively adversarial posture toward the very people and communities that it is intended to protect.”
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Late last Thursday, Heatmap’s Jael Holzman observed that the status of the 6.2-gigawatt Esmeralda 7, the nation’s largest solar project, had changed on the Bureau of Land Management’s website to “canceled.” The news sent shockwaves nationwide and drew blowback even from Republicans, including Utah Governor Spencer Cox, as I reported in this newsletter. Now, however, the bureau’s parent agency is denying that it made the call to cancel the project. “During routine discussions prior to the lapse in appropriations, the proponents and BLM agreed to change their approach for the Esmeralda 7 Solar Project in Nevada,” a spokesperson for the Department of the Interior told Utility Dive. “Instead of pursuing a programmatic level environmental analysis, the applicants will now have the option to submit individual project proposals to the BLM to more effectively analyze potential impacts.”
That means the project could still move forward with a piecemeal approach to permitting rather than one overarching approval, which aligns with what one of the developers involved told Jael last week. A representative for NextEra said that it is “in the early stage of development” with its portion of the Esmeralda 7 mega-project, and that the company is “committed to pursuing our project’s comprehensive environmental analysis by working closely with the Bureau of Land Management.” Still, the move represents a devastating setback for the solar installation, which may never fully materialize.
Ethane exports are rising as export capacity soars.EIA
U.S. exports of ethane, a key petrochemical feedstock extracted from raw natural gas during processing, are on track for “significant growth” through 2026, according to new analysis from the Energy Information Administration. Overseas sales are projected to grow 14% this year compared to the previous year, and another 16% next year. Ethane is mostly used as a feedstock for ethylene, a key ingredient in plastics, resins, and synthetic rubber. China has been the fastest growing source of demand for American ethane in recent years, rising to the largest single destination with 47% of exports last year.
Spain’s electricity-grid operator shrugged off concerns of another major blackout after detecting two sharp voltage variations in recent weeks. Red Electrica, which operates Spain’s grid, said that what The Wall Street Journal described as “recent voltage swings” didn’t threaten to knock out the grid because they stayed within acceptable limits. But the operator warned that variations could jeopardize the electricity supply if the grid didn’t overhaul its approach to managing a system that increasingly relies on intermittent, inverter-based generating sources such as solar panels. Red, which is 20% owned by the Spanish government, acknowledged that the high penetration of renewables was responsible for the recent fluctuations. Among the changes needed to improve the grid: real-time monitoring, which Heatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin noted in April “is necessary because traditionally, grid inertia is just thought of as an inherent quality of the system, not something that has to be actively ensured and bolstered.”
It’s not just Spain facing blackouts. New York City will have a power deficiency equivalent to the energy needed to power between 410,000 and 650,000 homes next summer — and that number could double by 2050, the state’s grid operator warned this week in its latest five-year report. “The grid is at a significant inflection point,” Zach Smith, senior vice president of system and resource planning for NYISO, said in a statement to Gothamist. “Depending on future demand growth and generator retirements, the system may need several thousand megawatts of new dispatchable generation within the next 10 years.”
Sodium-ion batteries are all the rage, as Heatmap’s Katie Brigham reported yesterday about the commercial breakthrough by the startup Alsym. But a major challenge facing sodium-ion batteries compared to lithium-ion rivals is the stability of the cathode material in air and water, which can degrade the battery’s performance and lifespan. A new study by researchers at Tokyo University of Science found that one ingredient can solve the problem: Calcium. By discovering the protective effects of calcium doping in the batteries, “this study could pave the way for the widespread adoption” of sodium-ion batteries.
Rob talks with the author and activist about his new book, We Survived the Night.
Julian Brave NoiseCat is a writer, Oscar-nominated filmmaker, champion powwow dancer, and student of Salish art and history. His first book, We Survived the Night, was released this week — it uses memoir, reporting, and literary anthology to tell the story of Native families across North America, including his own.
NoiseCat was previously an environmental and climate activist at groups including 350.org and Data for Progress. On this week’s episode of Shift Key, Rob talks with Julian about Native American nations and politics, the complexity and reality of Native life in 2025, and the “trickster” as a recurring political archetype.
Shift Key is hosted by Robinson Meyer, the founding executive editor of Heatmap, and Jesse Jenkins, a professor of energy systems engineering at Princeton University. Jesse is off this week.
Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can also add the show’s RSS feed to your podcast app to follow us directly.
Here is an excerpt from our conversation:
Robinson Meyer: What were lessons that you took away from the writing of the book, or from the reporting of the book, that changed how you thought about climate or the environment in some way that maybe wasn’t the case when you were working on these issues full time?
Julian Brave NoiseCat: I would say that while I was working on climate issues, I was actually, myself, really changing a lot in terms of my thoughts on how politics worked and did not work. I think I came into my period of my life as a climate activist really believing in the power of direct action, and protest, and, you know, if you get enough people in the streets and you get enough politicians on your side, you eventually can change the laws. And I think that there is some truth to that view.
But I think being in DC for four years, being really involved in this movement, conversation — however you want to put that — around the Green New Deal, around eventually a Biden administration and how that would be shaped around how they might go about actually taking on climate change for the first time in U.S. history in a significant way, really transformed my understanding of how change happens. I got a greater appreciation, for example, for the importance of persuading people to your view, particularly elites in decision-making positions. And I also started to understand a little bit more of the true gamesmanship of politics — that there is a bit of tricks and trickery, and all kinds of other things that are going on in our political system that are really fundamental to how it all works.
And I bring that last piece up because while I was writing the book, I was also thinking really purposefully about my own people’s narrative traditions, and how they get at transformations and how they happen in the world. And it just so happens that probably the most significant oral historical tradition of my own people is a story called a coyote story, which is about a trickster figure who makes change in the world through cunning and subterfuge and tricks, and also who gets tricked himself a fair amount.
And I think that in that worldview, I actually found a lot of resonance with my own observations on how political change happened when I was in Washington, D.C., and so that insight did really deeply shape the book.
Mentioned:
We Survived the Night, by Julian Brave NoiseCat
How Deb Haaland Became the First Native American Cabinet Secretary
This episode of Shift Key is sponsored by …
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A warmer world is here. Now what? Listen to Shocked, from the University of Chicago’s Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth, and hear journalist Amy Harder and economist Michael Greenstone share new ways of thinking about climate change and cutting-edge solutions. Find it here.
Music for Shift Key is by Adam Kromelow.