Tom Lord has died

> speaking the truth about the climate emergency and treating it as an actual emergency.

Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels,[1] and opposing changes that would help move things in the right direction climate-wise, such as building more in-fill housing in Berkeley, because some other action (say, convincing people to massively reduce their energy usage) was an even better strategy in his eyes. Tom was not convinced for example that Berkeley needed any more housing.

The source of this post is a good clue; Berkeley Daily Planet mostly publishes posts from NIMBY's who don't care about the climate and don't want anything that could possibly increase the number of people who live in Berkeley (Zelda Bronstein and Toni Mester are good examples).

Having interacted with Tom on Twitter, and reading through the comments here, I'm surprised to learn that he was a valued member of an open source community and published software that people used at one point.

[1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior

I like the allegory of the Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZYNADOHhVY

. [1] source - personal conversations with those officials and employees about Tom's behavior

That is not a source. That is a personal opinion reported. Politics. Bullshit. Together forever

I'll try to justify that it's more sad to us than the death of the great minds past because we shared this beautiful world with a contemporary, and now we don't anymore. The most obvious possibility for direct contact is now gone.

As for the necessity of death... Plenty of sibling and nephew/niece comments say it's essentially unavoidable and necessary, others say some set of human beings could do something brilliant that would pull us out of it one day. I'd actually say both perspectives capture something important. The pragmatic knowledge of our unavoidable expiration is worth living with, and the hope to overturn death and despair is worth living for.

One metaphor for how this life feels might be that we find ourselves in a testing chamber, being asked questions about the test we're writing, for which we could not study. The good news is, it's an open book test, and we've got many years to write our answers! ...But, then the textbooks contradict each other almost as often as they agree on some important point. Every once in a while it seems as if an invigilator calls someone off, and invites another person into their seat. Also, occasionally, fistfights break out over which textbook you ought to be reading from.

> Unfortunately this advocacy frequently took unproductive directions, being abusive to elected officials and staff at the local and state levels

Coddling the egos of these "authorities" should be low priority considering the dire nature of the situation. If they drive us off a cliff because the constituents weren't "nice", it's still their fault.