Burke's Law

"An 18th-century Irish conservative foretold the new Cold War" 

 

Edmund Burke was not, by temperament, a pessimist. When he watched the French Revolution tear down every institution, tradition, and accumulated arrangement of French civilization in the name of abstract Reason, he did not cheer along with the intellectuals. He wrote a very long, very irritated letter which became Reflections on the Revolution in France, explaining exactly why he believed this was going to end badly.

It ended badly.

What infuriated him about the French Revolution was not the general public’s desire to improve things. It was the catastrophic confidence that you could tear everything down first and then build utopia from the rubble. On nothing more than pure philosophical reasoning. The Jacobins—the tech broligarchs of 18th-century France—were people who had read a great deal of Rousseau, developed strong opinions about abstract rights, and decided the most efficient path to a just society was to behead anyone who disagreed and call it the Dawn of a New Age. Burke, the Irish iconoclast, found this unconvincing.

Burke’s more profound argument was about what civilization actually is. Society, he wrote, is not a simple contract for “pepper and coffee, calico or tobacco”—some low commercial arrangement to be dissolved whenever the parties feel like it. It is a partnership in all science, all art, every virtue and all perfection. And crucially: it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are still to be born. Far centuries ahead.

Burke would have recognized the broligarchs immediately. He’d seen them before. They wore different clothes in the 1790s—powdered wigs rather than hoodies—but the intellectual structure was identical: a class of theorists, intoxicated by abstract principles and their own cleverness, convinced that the accumulated arrangements of civilization were obstacles rather than load-bearing walls.

For a long time, both the Jacobins and the Tech Bros appeared to be winning the argument. Their apps worked. The platforms scaled. The chips got cheaper. The guillotine severed royal bloodlines. The supply chains—those long, fragile, globally distributed supply chains, optimized to the millimeter for cost efficiency with zero tolerance for redundancy—hummed along beautifully, delivering everything on time, everywhere, all at once, like a conjuring trick performed by ten thousand cargo ships, or by the hegemony of interwoven genetic lines among the crowns of Europe.

What the trick required, of course, was that nothing go wrong.

The lesson the Strait of Epstein conflict delivered was, at its core, a Burkean one, administered with the bluntness of a cheap drone. Civilization, it transpired, was not floating above geography on a cloud of clever code. Burke had a specific phrase for what the Jacobins produced when they tried to build utopia from scratch: a ruin instead of a habitation. They did not create freedom. They created a vacuum, which filled with the Terror, and then Napoleon. Moscow in ashes. Waterloo. Longwood House on St. Helena. The lesson was that you cannot reason your way to a functioning civilization. You have to inherit one, maintain it, reform it carefully, and hand it, improved but recognizable, to those who come after you.

Silicon Valley did not only inherit the helium coolant it depended on but has now lost. It inherited the postwar liberal order—the shipping lanes, the trade agreements, the semiconductor supply chains, the undersea cables, the Obama-negotiated accord with Iran.

But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated, is lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors, or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters; that they should not think it amongst their rights to cut off the entail, or commit waste on the inheritance, by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society; hazarding to leave to those who come after them, a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances, as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers. By this unprincipled facility of changing the state as often, and as much, and in as many ways as there are floating fancies or fashions, the whole chain and continuity of the commonwealth would be broken. No one generation could link with the other. Men would become little better than the flies of summer.

—Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

This is what Burke meant by a ruin instead of a habitation. The Jacobins left France in ruins because they had no theory of maintenance, no respect for what was already there, and no understanding that the institutions they were destroying had taken centuries to build and could not be replaced by a good manifesto.

Burke’s concept of a better revolution was not cinematic. It did not have a launch event. It did not disrupt anything. It was the work of trustees, caretakers, curators—people who understood that they had inherited a civilization, that it required maintenance, and that the people who came after them would need to inherit something that still functioned.

People will not look forward to posterity, Burke wrote, who never look backward to their ancestors. Silicon Valley spent thirty years looking only forward, at the next quarter, the next product cycle, the next disruption. The Strait of Epstein was geography looking back at them.

The ruin arrives now as an impasse rather than a guillotine. We should probably count ourselves fortunate, and adjust accordingly—before the tutor arrives with a buzzing sound from overhead and charges full tuition for our next lesson.

The way through this is not glamorous, and it will not trend on social media. Decentralize. Take supply chains seriously before they stop working. Stop pretending that civilization can float frictionlessly above geography, weather, and the basic human tropism to disagree.

The Strait has reminded us that water still governs. The shipping delay notification in your inbox is, if you squint at it, a dispatch from that front.

Foggy Bottom

Speaking of ruining things, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is, by design, shallow enough to warm, and thus under the barrage of a supercharged sun it is heating like a bonfire. The result is not mystery but arithmetic: Desmodesmus, Scenedesmus, and companions breed, the water turns pea-green, and the nation’s capital acquires the stench of an overripe egg. Claiming an “emergency,” Cobblepot ordered a no-bid, multimillion-dollar makeover by his favorite Miami Pool Guy, demanding a dark “American flag blue” that absorbs more heat, making the water even warmer and friendlier to algae growth.

The king orders his puddle swept with a broom while excavating the hedge and its roots. Because hydrogen peroxide, liberally dispensed to kill the algae, doubles as a paint stripper, the newly painted blue lining begins to blister and peel, leaving floating flakes alongside green algae. Cobblepot’s response is to arrest an Olympian kayaker who stopped by on his bike ride to “feel” the water.

And yet there may hide, in this damp little tragedy, a more benign ending. We know that biochar can arrest eutrophication by capturing excess nutrients, binding nitrogen and phosphorus through cation exchange, adsorption, and flocculation; in practice, it has been used in forms as humble as a biochar-filled sock in a jerrycan and as ambitious as the roadside media that cleaned the Chesapeake Bay. Some biochars, especially those made from crop residues or modified with minerals, outperform the plain sort and can also remove antibiotics, PAHs, forever chemicals, heavy metals, and other Frankenstein progeny. What was learned in the Chesapeake was that if nutrients and contaminants enter at the intake, the remedy belongs at the intake, not in the water body after it becomes a photo op for slimy selfies.

Biochar has strong cation exchange, which you can think of as a kind of surface magnetism that allows it to collect nitrogen and other ions, the way a magnet draws iron filings.

A few weeks or months ago, that black powder in your hand was carbon in the atmosphere, heating the planet. Now it’s taking 1000-year time-out so the planet can cool.

The Biochar Solution

In Uganda, they put a sock filled with biochar into a 20-liter jerrycan and tossed that into a spring-fed pond. In other places, they just broadcast raw biochar powder onto the algae bloom. According to Tom Miles, founder of the US Biochar Initiative,

Biochars from crop residues like rice straw and maize stalks generally capture algae and dissolved nutrients more effectively than many wood-derived biochars because they have higher mineral ash (especially Ca, Mg, K, P, Si), higher pH and cation exchange capacity (CEC), and more surface functional groups that promote flocculation, precipitation, and adsorption of algal cells and nutrient ions.

[…]American Biochar Institute has a forthcoming guidebook on the use of biochars for stormwater which will appear at Scaling Up Biochar, a project we did to reduce pollution in the Chesapeake Bay.

More efficient projects operating at large scale add minerals to the biochar during pyrolysis, according to a recent paper sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China by Wang et al.:

These modified biochars outperformed pristine biochar at high hydraulic loading rates due to strong surface complexation and phosphate precipitation, forming akaganeite and dicalcium phosphate (Dalahmeh et al. 2020). Huang et al. (2022) used AlCl3-soaked bamboo biomass to fabricate Al oxide biochar composites, which effectively removed antibiotics such as sulfamethoxazole and sulfapyridine. Furthermore, Jia et al. (2020) found that Fe-loaded biochar improved nitrogen removal in constructed wetlands by enhancing microbial activity and increasing genes associated with nitrogen cycling (e.g., amx, nirS, nosZ) (Jia et al. 2020).

There is another ingredient that algal blooms require, one that is particularly relevant to reflecting pools. Bill McKibben reminds us:

Global ocean heat uptake jumped by a staggering 23 zettajoules (ZJ) in 2025 alone. For context, 23 ZJ is roughly 200 times the total annual electricity generation of the entire human race. The 2025 ocean heat uptake represents an eight-fold increase over the 1958–1985 annual mean baseline. 

The degree to which we’ve been storing global warming in the oceans can’t be overstated, and now the door to that sauna is being flung open. You may recall the shock a few years ago when global temperatures started occasionally breaching the 1.5 Celsius mark; Harris cites predictions that we could see months in 2027 when we go past the two-degree mark. Jim Hansen and his team just published a new paper predicting that the El Niño is coming fast enough that 2026 will likely set a new record for global temperature. …And as Hansen notes, if his predictions are correct, it will go some way towards rejiggering scientific assumptions about just how sensitive the climate is to our emissions—that is, recent celebrations in some quarters that the worst climate outcomes were off the table may well have been premature. 

Biochar does not just clean water features of algae by pore filling, hydrogen bonding, precipitation, and electrostatic interactions (Wang), it attacks the deeper source problem—catastrophic climate heating.

This is easy to visualize. Hold the black cinders in your outstretched hand. A few weeks or months ago, that powder was carbon in the atmosphere, heating the planet.

After doing its work at Lincoln’s feet, it will drain into the Potomac estuary. There it will nourish the roots of water reeds, pulling still more carbon from the atmosphere. Because it was pyrolyzed, it will not return to the atmosphere as it might have wanted to when it was a dying plant. It will instead remain in a mineral molecule for centuries, or millennia—as terra preta. That dead plant will have removed a tiny fraction of the 3 trillion tons of excess carbon still in the atmosphere that we must remove if we are to return to the comfortable Holocene from which we evolved.

The algae are not an accident but a verdict. A reflecting pool in an urban heat island is a mirror only in the literal sense; politically, it reflects the old lesson that reality is not persuaded by press releases and midnight tweets. Burke would have recognized the folly at once—to architecturally despise the inherited wisdom of water, shade, circulation, and restraint, and then to call the resulting fetid swamp progress.

As for the biochar solution, Burke also said, “the truly sublime is always easy, and always natural.” 

References

Burke, Edmund. Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. Macmillan and Company, 1890.

NPR Morning Edition, Jun 21, 2026. Algae clouded Trump’s vision for the Reflecting Pool. But scientists aren’t surprised.

Wang, et al., 2026. Engineered biochar composite with minerals: organo‑mineral interactions, physicochemical changes, and implications for practical application. Biochar (2026) 8:53. 

 

Lebanon, 2026. (Ibrahim AMRO / AFP via Getty Images)

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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Thanks for reading! Everything expressed in this article is my opinion.