William Cobbett’s ‘Cottage Economy’: the future is material
Cottage Economy is not, however, just a nineteenth-century DIY manual. It is also a fiercely polemical defence of smallholding as a way of life.
materialism
Material: Excerpt
I write this book to help me understand the relationship that we all have fashioning our lives within the material structure of this planet. Looking back to see how a word has changed meanings over time, what its roots are, helps me in this process.
Plato’s dream and our modern nightmare
We humans will always seek reductive explanations for “why” things happen in the world around us and try to use those explanations to gain advantage for ourselves and our fellow humans in the fight for survival within our biosphere. But if we see the limits of such explanations and therefore their dangers, we might move more humbly among the vast array of creatures and Earth systems with whom we live and upon whom we depend for our very survival.
The High Cost of an Easy-Care, Low-Maintenance World
By abandoning the duty of maintenance we owe to the objects in our lives, we are distancing ourselves from the physical world and essentially sending the entropy elsewhere for someone else to deal with, whether human or non-human.
The New Materialism: Inviting people to fall in love with stuff in a good way
What’s wrong with materialism Ruth? Surely people only buy iPads because they need them? Rob Hopkins interviews Ruth Potts on the idea of a new materialism.
The high price of materialism
A war on climate change is a war on materialism, plain and simple.