Poor polar bear. The long-time poster child for a warming world, it’s dying despite scientists’ direst warnings — and, lately, it’s become a symbol of how bear-hugging big green groups for too long ignored the humans living on the frontlines of climate change.

But the polar bear is also staging a surprising comeback: This time, as co-star in the upcoming second season of The North Pole, a justice-focused YouTube series set in North Oakland and produced by actress-slash-activist Rosario Dawson and writer-slash-producer Josh Healey, who was named a Grist 50 Fixer in 2018.

The polar bear mostly comes in as a metaphor for people of color, who are being gentrified out of their neighborhoods, just as the bear has been forced from its melting habitat. But there’s also a dude in a bear costume, voiced by Boots Riley, who serves as the main character’s conscience as she and her pals fight gentrification, tech-industry greed, and other forces of evil (including, yes, climate change).

A little strange, for sure, Dawson told us the other day, but that’s kinda the point. The series “shows how everyday people grapple with really serious issues,” Dawson said. “It helps us … look at these things with humor and love and light, so that we’re not so overwhelmed, and so that we can actually make the impacts we want to see.”

Read on for more tales of resilience and resistance, and tips for turning lemons into lemonade. As always, feedback about Shift Happens is welcome, and please encourage your friends to sign up.

— Chip, Grist Founder

1. Your new heroes

Eli Goldstein & Aaswath Raman

 

What better way to beat the heat than curling up next to the air conditioner? The number of room air conditioners is expected to skyrocket from 1.2 billion units worldwide today to 4.5 billion units by 2050, representing about 15% of our global carbon emissions, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute.

That’s why Silicon Valley startup SkyCool Systems is trying to drag AC technology into the space age. Literally. The company is cooling office buildings — and freezing ice cream — using the cold of space.

SkyCool’s chief science officer, Aaswath Raman, explains that the company has created a material that’s so effective at reflecting the heat of the sun that it can take advantage of a natural phenomenon called sky cooling, which was previously only possible at night. “Some of the heat is effectively escaping the Earth itself, because what’s outside our atmosphere is space” — and space, Raman says, is “really cold.”

We talked to Raman and his co-founder, CEO Eli Goldstein, about their new technology, why it could be a game changer for a warming world, and even what kind of ice cream they like best. Check out the Q&A here.

Photos: Hector Garcia-Molina, Rich Polk / Getty Images for Environmental Media Association

2. Your reading list

Polar bears aren’t the only old-school environmental symbol that’s recently taken on new life. In Richard Powers’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Overstory, trees inspire a range of unlikely environmental activists to rise up against a timber company, but more important, they are featured as complex, interconnected characters themselves.

Writing The Overstory changed Powers’ own relationship with trees. Over the course of writing the novel, he moved from Palo Alto, the center of Silicon Valley, to the wild of Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountains. But he hopes the book changes readers’ perception of nature’s nonhuman characters, wherever they are.

“My absolute favorite letters are like the one I received from a man in a Midwestern city who wrote, ‘I’ve been living on this street for 23 years, and I never bothered to look at who I was sharing it with,’” Powers said earlier this year. “That, more than anything, is what I’d like to bring to a reader: the feeling that we are not here alone, that it’s worth meeting the neighbors.”

3. Your pick-me-up

4. Your next move