Pioneering Spirit

Introduction: A Fire on the HillsideThis past spring, the Eaton Fire swept through the foothills above Los Angeles, forcing the evacuation of my family and consuming the homes of friends. The flames were swift and merciless — but more than the forest burned. The fire made visible what we often forget: that the climate crisis is not a future to prepare for. It is a present we are already living. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projects up to 200 million climate refugees by 2050 —...

Marginal Revolution, a frequent stopping ground in my internet tendency, linked to a David Brooks article on the "most rejected generation." I am a bit further removed from the college application and early career establish-yourself-in-the-world hustle though do remember that grind very well. I remember reading William Deresiewicz's works on how elite highly selective culture trains "excellent sheep" and wrote a piece for my college newspaper on "the temptations of gamespace" which seems to h...

I write to you as one heading north into this emergent city, this edge of Esmeralda, from the land of water—California's first technology. The beating heart whose hydraulics powered the gold rush, fed the citrus groves and the Central Valley fields, cooled the silicon foundries, and still, to this day, sustains twenty-first-century cities with the same elemental lifeblood. It is from that ancient yet ever-adaptive infrastructure of flow and force that I make this journey, drawn by the glint o...

Tonight I was walking my dogs with my daughter and wife. There was a light drizzle and cars flashed by, an absurd level of risk to pedestrians that I'm confident future generations will look askance at. I was reflecting about how many teens in the foothills where I live take e-bikes everywhere and how E-VTOL "flying taxis" (basically giant drones capable to taking people places) are rapidly becoming a thing. Those twin emergent realities offer a glimpse of the near future. I asked one of my b...

If we want to make real progress on climate action, we have to be honest with ourselves: asking people to sacrifice in the name of a better future only gets us so far. Sure, there are moments of altruistic inspiration. But enduring systems change? That happens when we make the sustainable path the easy, obvious, and self-interested one—when it works better, faster, cheaper. In other words, we need to design climate action that doesn’t just appeal to our better angels, but to our everyday ince...

As the climate crisis escalates, the old ways of managing city infrastructure—siloed departments, static plans, and reactive maintenance—simply won’t cut it. The wildfires, floods, and heatwaves hitting Southern California are not isolated incidents; they’re symptoms of deeper systemic fragility. If we’re going to build true resilience, we need to look at our cities as whole systems—where housing, mobility, land use, water, and energy are deeply interconnected. The future of infrastructure is...