Josh Berson - The Human Scaffold: How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis

Preface

LIVING EPIPHYTICALLY

What do you do? Where do you live?

Common questions, questions, I imagine, most readers of this book have had cause to ask and answer, perhaps more often than they can recall. For me they pose a challenge. This book is, obliquely, about why I find it so difficult to say what I do and where I live. Partly for this reason, it has been remarkably difficult to write. This is not something I understood at the time. As I wrote the chapters that follow, I ascribed the distinctly effortful quality of my writing days to the cumulative fatigue of having written, depending on how you count, three, or four, or five books back-to-back, to an unfamiliar rhythm of professional responsibilities that obtruded into my working week, to the strain of writing and managing these new responsibilities while at the same time setting up a house in an unfamiliar cityLos Angelesafter ten years living outside the United States, and to my shockcommon, I discovered, among the newly returnedat how the country had changed in those years. These all played a role. But mainly, I have come to see, it was how the themes of this book touched a distinctly personal nerve that made writing it so difficult. Even now, this morning, writing what should be the easy part, I feel an awkwardness, I find myself straining to hear the music, as if from a neighboring room with a closed door between and a kettle coming to a boil at my elbowtestament, no doubt, to how awkward I find writing about myself.