Park-ing

Did you know the verb parking originally meant setting up strips of park, often with trees, in the center or the edges of roads? Then those trees along the road were roped into being used to tie up horses. The meaning of parking thus changed: it became what you did to your horse. From there it was a short and fateful jump to the urban hellscape of cars, including cutting down the original trees to make room for more “parking.”

I’m sorry to ruin your day. So here’s a Black-crowned Night Heron standing on a flooded patch of tarmac that was formerly a runway. Not much consolation, but some.

 

Have you gotten to that long NYT Magazine piece blaming “human nature” for the radical disruptions of global climate transformation? Say what? What about, you know, politics, or the way political power is distributed, or who actually runs things? Not to mention which humans have used up all those carbon-releasing resources. Hello?

There are other critical reminders out there in the way of this publishing event, but these two are particularly good:Kate Aronoff and Naomi Klein both cut to the quick.

(Rich does provide a perfect illustration of ideological blindness, though. He, and his paper, simply can’t see the neoliberalism for the fire.)

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