Days after the heart-stopping Notre-Dame Cathedral fire in April, Swedish schoolgirl Greta Thunberg trained her eyes on the United Kingdom’s parliament and chastised its meager response to climate change. “I want you to panic,” the baby-faced sixteen-year-old quietly instructed the adults in the room. “Avoiding climate breakdown will require cathedral thinking. We must lay the foundation while we may not know exactly how to build the ceiling.” For those who don’t get the reference, Notre-Dame’s … [Read more...]
Historian and journalist Catherine Tumber is a fellow with the MassINC’s Gateway Cities Innovation Institute, a Penn Institute for Urban Research scholar, and a contributing editor to The Baffler. She is the author of Small, Gritty, and Green: The Promise of Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World (MIT Press, 2012). Other writings by her can be found at https://catherinetumber.com