A personal note 🕯️🎄🧸

& Giving Tuesday 💛 ✨

Dec 04, 2024

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A personal note

Working from home on April 5th, the morning of the 4.8 magnitude earthquake in New York City, I was jostled by shaking. Through the mirror hung on the opposite wall, I watched my bedroom’s window panes flex, twist, and distort, like something out of a funhouse. The shaking was violent enough, I attempted to evaluate what to do — was it better to evacuate or to stay put?

After 15 long seconds, though, the shaking finally subsided, and everything seemingly returned to how it was. Yet, over the ensuing weeks, my health began to deteriorate.

The primary symptom was extreme insomnia. At night in bed, I would feel an intermittent sensation of a rocking boat as I lay waiting for sleep to come. During the day, waves of nausea would randomly wash over me. Soon, I was inexplicably struggling to stay hydrated, let alone nourished.

The sleep deprivation and lack of clarity in thought left me struggling to meet fact-checking deadlines, let alone with the capacity to figure out what was happening to me.

This would go on for six weeks before I finally figured it out.

Walking down the street next to my apartment one morning, I noticed fresh, fine cracks spider webbing across all three visible sides of the apartment’s foundation, including two deep horizontal cracks directly below my bedroom.

Back in my room, I conducted a simple experiment: I set a glass of water on my desk. The contents of the glass ever so gently — but constantly — rippled, confirming my hypothesis: the earthquake had compromised the structural integrity of the building's foundation. Every passing car on the heavily trafficked street below triggered vibrations that reverberated through the apartment complex.

As things would work out, to my dismay, the city’s only response was to fine my landlord and order him to patch and paint over the cracks that had newly appeared in the building’s facade. The city’s mandate managed to be simultaneously both unnecessarily punitive and merely cosmetic; I was still left completely out of a home.

An opportunity to come together

It’s no secret climate change will make the earth under our feet increasingly unsteady. Whether it’s a slow burn that erodes our health or a biblical-level flood that wipes away our homes, as happened in North Carolina, at precisely the moment our own lives are thrown into the most chaos, we will need to be able to depend on one another.

Yet this experience left me with the distinct impression that we have little sense and are ill-prepared for what’s coming down the pike.

By now, we’re all familiar with the idea that climate change will increase the severity and frequency of natural disasters, including earthquakes. But I don’t think we’re ready for what that actually means. When I multiply the health effects and lost productivity and income that I alone experienced this last half a year and multiply them by the billion people anticipated to be impacted by natural disasters by 2050, I’m almost paralyzed. I am overwhelmed to imagine that our own needs will grow at the same time that the systems in place to support us are stressed and possibly pushed past their capabilities.

I’m beginning to suspect that the under-acknowledged effects of extreme weather events are more widespread and longer lasting than we can imagine, even while many of us still grapple with accepting whether or not climate change will directly impact us at all.

As Michael Coren, formerly of this newsletter, wrote in the Washington Post this September, “Most people think climate change is happening. Relatively few think it is happening to them. Just 42 percent of Americans believe global warming will personally impact their lives, according to a 2023 survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.”

Many of us still imagine these things happening on a shore far away. But was I not a privileged individual living in one of the most prosperous cities in the Western Hemisphere? And I’m not alone. A recent Gallup poll research suggests more than half of Americans have been touched by an extreme weather event in the last five years.

In my own life, the aftermath of the earthquake touched the climate problem in more ways than can be described in a single takeaway or thread. The experience has been yet another reminder of just how crucial family, friends, and community will be in the years to come in minimizing the long-term personal effects of natural disasters, from the privilege I had of so many friends to couch surf and sublet from so I could regain some small sense of normalcy to the importance of redundancy — the ability to lean on someone skilled, like Tekendra Parmar (more on him in a moment), to keep things running at Hothouse while I put myself back together.

The good

Luckily for the lovely readers of this newsletter, I had hired Tekendra Parmar as a features editor not long before the earthquake. So, over the summer, while I tended to alternate housing and building my health back up, Tekendra effectively onboarded himself and has been working with writers to cook up some new editorial content for all of you.

I want this note to offer a little glimpse into operations over the last couple of months and thank you all for your patience.

I would also like to take this moment to more thoroughly introduce Tekendra, the name you’ve been seeing pop up in your inbox in my absence.

Tekendra and I worked together in 2021; I contributed reporting to an investigative piece for him during his tenure at Business Insider.

Tekendra is an investigative editor and reporter with a record of producing high-impact journalism. Most recently Business Insider’s Tech Features Editor, investigations commissioned by Tekendra have triggered state and federal labor investigations, class-action lawsuits against major edtech companies, and six-figure fines by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. His reporting on Meta’s content moderation policy failures in Ethiopia was key evidence in a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Meta in Kenya.

Before Business Insider, Tekendra helped launch the technology publication Rest of World, where he investigated free speech issues in India. I’m excited to have Tekendra’s enthusiasm, talent, and professionalism on board!

And, in other good news, after months of short-term housing solutions, I’ve found myself safe and sound in a rent-stabilized apartment in the lively East Village. It’s so good to call somewhere home again!

With my basic hierarchy of needs met once again, Tekendra and I are ready to tackle the new year, to learn about which climate solutions are most on your mind, and eager to have your support as we ratchet things back up a notch.

Looking forward

While the last few months feel as though they’ve slipped away from me as though in a dream, it is now early December, and, dear readers, as you are well aware, we find ourselves on the other side of a consequential Presidential election and a changing climate solutions landscape.

The administration has vowed to roll back regulations, back out of more environmental policies and international treaties, and ramp up fossil fuel drilling — all while showing contempt for transparency. The election results make our work more critical than ever.

This Giving Tuesday is a good opportunity to remind you that Hothouse is participating in NewsMatch again this year, and any donations received through December 31st will be doubled through the Institute for Nonprofit News. And yes! That includes any subscription made to Hothouse made through Substack itself. With some of your generous support, Hothouse generated $19,182 through NewsMatch last year.

While this year has been a whirlwind, I'm grateful for your continued support. Your contributions, no matter how small, make a significant difference in our ability to continue delivering quality journalism, driving climate action, and overcoming whatever challenges or setbacks, big or small, that come our way. By supporting Hothouse, you're not just supporting us; you're supporting a future where we can all thrive.

🎄🕯️🧸❄️

If you haven’t yet, take a moment to look at some of our favorite stories from this year. If you can, share them with a friend:

A taste of Hawaii’s regenerative travel movement by yours truly and Michele Bigley.
How to literally fight fire with fire by Colleen Hagerty.
On preparing for the next disaster by Angely Mercado.
Planning a climate-friendly holiday menu with Caroline Saunders.
And some really excellent syndications exploring the climate cost of AI and offering a bit of hope in the dark.

And, as always, we couldn’t have done it without you.

Wishing you all very happy holidays,

Donate here

Cadence Bambenek

Editor-in-Chief

My mom and I hiked New Hampshire’s White Mountains this fall.

P.S. For the more old-school among you, you are also welcome to mail physical checks to Hothouse’s fiscal sponsor, Independent Arts & Media:

Attn: Hothouse
Independent Arts & Media
2830 20th St
San Francisco, CA 94110

Just be sure to mention Hothouse in the memo. :)

Correction: An earlier version of this article inaccurately cited Cadence Bambenek as the sole author of the Hawaii Regenerative travel series. While Bambenek contributed significant editing and reporting to the Regenerative travel series, the original writing and reporting of the Hawaii Regenerative travel series was Michele Bigley’s.