NEW YORK PROPOSAL 1, ENVIRONMENTAL BOND MEASURE OF 2022

“I had heard such predictions all my life from Malcolm and all his posthumous followers who hollered that the Dreamers must reap what they sow. I saw the same prediction in the words of Marcus Garvey who promised to return in a whirlwind of vengeful ancestors, an army of Middle Passage undead. No. I left The Mecca knowing that this was all too pat, knowing that should the Dreamers reap what they had sown, we would reap it right with them. Plunder has matured into habit and addiction; the people who could author the mechanized death of our ghettos, the mass rape of private prisons, then engineer their own forgetting, must inevitably plunder much more. This is not a belief in prophecy but in the seductiveness of cheap gasoline.

“Once, the Dream's parameters were caged by technology and by the limits of horsepower and wind. But the Dreamers have improved themselves, and the damming of seas for voltage, the extraction of coal, the transmuting of oil into food, have enabled an expansion in plunder with no known precedent. And this revolution has freed the Dreamers to plunder not just the bodies of humans but the body of the Earth itself. The Earth is not our creation. It has no respect for us. It has no use for us. And its vengeance is not the fire in the cities but the fire in the sky. Something more fierce than Marcus Garvey is riding on the whirlwind. Something more awful than all our African ancestors is rising with the seas. The two phenomena are known to each other. It was the cotton that passed through our chained hands that inaugurated this age. It is the flight from us that sent them sprawling into the subdivided woods. And the methods of transport through these new subdivisions, across the sprawl, is the automobile, the noose around the neck of the earth, and ultimately, the Dreamers themselves.

“I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not believe that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones' home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the mark of these ghettos - the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling housing - and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.”

—Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

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"We have two pandemics, a war in Ukraine causing geopolitical shocks, exacerbating existing global famine, and a recession exacerbating existing national and global poverty not merely for the Global South, but for the Global North as well. In the background lurks climate, causing fire and flood in alternating regions of the world. Ukraine begged for NATO to close the sky against the constant shelling that beat down on that country from Russia. The world needs scientists from around the globe to close the sky with reflective material that will mitigate the effects of a porous ozone layer..."

On November 8th, New York Proposal 1, the Environmental Bond Measure of 2022 (also known as the Clean Water, Clean Air, and Green Jobs Environmental Bond Act) will let the people of the Empire State choose to allocate over 4 billion dollars in funds towards projects that protect drinking water & expand sewer infrastructure, conserve wetlands, open spaces & family farms, mitigate flooding & climate change, thereby doing their part towards America's Intended Nationally Determined Contribution. In addition to bipartisan support, Proposal 1 has support from unions and the private sector as well as the environmental conservation community.

Much like pandemic response, albeit on a tighter timeline of little more than a decade, climate change mitigation requires the effort of every nation, not merely those identified as emitting the most carbon into the atmosphere. China, for example, may balk at climate mandates that appear to curtail it's peaceful rise development, and despite statistics and geo-science perceive such policy mandates as hostile political maneuvers, yet all the while, South Africa, a BRICS country, is struggling under "load-shedding," rolling blackouts, and is eager for a power grid befitting a nation of people living in 2022 rather than 1922. Will the South Africans receive further aid from the BRICS & OPEC side, growing more quickly, polluting more along the way, perhaps in a Faustian bargain amounting to little more than a process resembling a second Berlin Conference, or will they receive greener aid from the NATO & USA side, including all necessary patents and means of production & deployment of a new, environmentally friendly power grid?

In answering this question, I suspect that we will begin to reveal the landmarks of "polluter capitalism," environmental racism and racial capitalism. If we do not face these issues squarely and resolutely then not even a hundred-year deadline will be enough time to save us from our own folly, greed and fear. Nature will heal the globe once we are extinct, and so long as Sol continues, Terra will continue on, revolving, devoid of human life.