Welcome 2021! How can we keep talking to each other? Back to Work. And one nation under a duvet – HiberNation!

Gru?zi! I’m Adrian Monck and welcome to this World Economic Forum newsletter.

Also this week... light relief from binge watching bleak TV, re-wilding the highlands and how to crack zero emissions.

Newsletters make great gifts – so please gift this one!

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1?? Back to Work

Here’s how the pandemic has changed that.

And even as vaccinations start, there’s a chilling account of what back to work means for a doctor on one of Britain’s hard-pressed hospital wards:

• “One of the patients won’t put on his mask and his oxygen levels are dropping. It takes me a few moments to get on my PPE before I can get to him. I try to talk to the man, but it’s difficult for him to hear me through my mask and the noise of all of the CPAP oxygen machines. He tells me that he’s tired of fighting, and that he wants to be left alone.
• Through my mask I try to explain that he has been getting better, and that we wouldn’t have a place for him on the high dependency unit (HDU) unless we thought he had a good chance of survival. He tells me that I don’t understand what it’s like, desperately struggling to breathe, which is true... Eventually, I have to take his request seriously. Perhaps it isn’t illogical for him to want to die peacefully...
• I ask him to explain to me what he expects will happen if he takes off his mask and doesn’t put it back on. He says he doesn’t know. I tell him that he has to understand that he will die and that he needs to say those words to me if that is what he really wants. Eventually we compromise; he will put his mask on for another hour, then phone his wife and tell me his decision. This man is 61.
• My patients are mostly men, ranging from their early 30s to their 60s. This is younger than normal on HDU because — as I explained to the man — we only have beds for people with a fighting chance.”

? How COVID-19 has impacted workers’ lives around the world.

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2??  Conspiracy Theories vs. Cancel Culture

How do we keep talking to each other? And listening...

Academic Hugh Breakey has sensible thoughts on where to start:

• We will never all agree on exactly what the law should be — particularly in pluralistic societies. However, we can all agree that democratic decision-making is an appropriate way to make laws.

On cancel culture:

• Stifling and shutting down controversial voices ... presents two challenges to political legitimacy.
• First, it prevents inclusive dialogue. Those in the minority on any issue can no longer console themselves with the fact that at least they had the opportunity to say their piece and have their views considered. Instead, they are silenced and excluded.
• Second, the idea that voters on the right have not just wrong, but harmful views poses a further threat to legitimacy.

On conspiracies:

• [A] stubborn lack of respect for evidence undermines public deliberative practices. It is impossible to find points of agreement when large-scale conspiracies throw so much into question.
• Conspiracies about election results also threaten democratic legitimacy. If everything is controlled by a sinister cabal, then elections are a farce.

Let’s all keep making an effort to keep channels open in 2021.

? Dialogue is important. We are holding our big meeting soon.

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3?? The Crazy History of Peanut Butter

The surreptitiously smooth spread of a nut-demic.

Peanut butter was first championed by healthy eating cereal inventor Doctor Kellogg, the original health nut (sorry...).

It was given a boost by wartime meat rationing – it’s the original food fad gone mainstream:

• ‘By WWI, U.S. consumers ... turned to peanuts as a result of meat rationing. Government pamphlets promoted “meatless Mondays,” with peanuts high on the menu.

Americans “soon may be eating peanut bread, spread with peanut butter, and using peanut oil for our salad,” the Daily Missourian reported in 1917, citing “the exigencies of war.”

• The ubiquity of this aromatic spread has even figured in the nation’s response to Covid-19. As evidence emerged last spring that many Covid patients were losing their sense of smell and taste, Yale University’s Dana Small, a psychologist and neuroscientist, devised a smell test to identify asymptomatic carriers. “What food do most people in the U.S. have in their cupboards that provides a strong, familiar odour?” Small asks. “... [P]eanut butter.”’

? Work off that nut butter on a new, 6,000 km bike path.

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4??  Happier Hibernating?

Maybe like bears, we’re programmed for winters just dozing.

Archaeologists think it’s what our ancient ancestors did:

[E]arly humans found themselves “in metabolic states that helped them to survive for long periods of time in frigid conditions with limited supplies of food and enough stores of body fat”. They hibernated and this is recorded as disruptions in bone development.

And we hibernated even more recently, according to Graham Robb’s magical Discovery of France:

• “There was the season of labour when even the longest days were too short, and the season of inactivity when time slowed to a crawl and seemed in danger of stopping altogether.The tradition of seasonal sloth was ancient and pervasive...
• According to a geographer writing in 1909, ‘the inhabitants re-emerge in spring, dishevelled and anaemic’. But hibernation was not peculiar to high altitudes. More temperate regions, too, retreated into a fortress of sleep...
• An official report on the Nièvre in 1844 described the strange mutation of the Burgundian day-labourer once the harvest was in and the vine stocks had been burned: ‘After making the necessary repairs to their tools, these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.’
• Human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity. Lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies. In the Nièvre, according to the diary of Jules Renard, ‘the peasant at home moves little more than the sloth’ (1889); ‘in winter, they pass their lives asleep, corked up like snails’ (1908)... These season-long siestas dismayed economists and bureaucrats who looked enviously at the industrial power-house of Britain.”

? But awake, they were busy: the evolution of working hours.

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5?? How the U.S. can reach net-zero emissions by 2050

It’s do-able.

? Scale-ups: trailblazers for a more circular economy

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6?? Scotland: More Wild at Heart than Braveheart

Haggis and heart-warming news for the planet from the Scottish Highlands.

? Dropping in Europe and the US but rising in Asia: coal use worldwide

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7??  Did You Binge Too Much Bleak TV Over the Holidays?

This quick plot summary may feel familiar...

? No Scandinavian detective work is needed to listen to Robin and the team’s podcast series – House on Fire. Check it out!

For audio mavens, our Podcast Club is on *whispers* Facebook.

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If you enjoy this newsletter – please share it with friends, family, co-workers and pets!

Happy holidays,

Adrian

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With thanks to all those folks without whose encouragement and critical feedback this newsletter would never get written.