By Jeremy Lent, Patterns Of Meaning blog
As civilization faces an existential crisis, our leaders demonstrate their inability to respond. Theory of change shows that now is the time for radically new ideas to transform society before it’s too late.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
By Erik Curren, Transition Voice
By Chuck Collins, Common Dreams
Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.
By Stand.earth Staff, Rapid Transition Alliance
For more than two years now, the small community of Whatcom County, in Northwest Washington State in the U.S. has been working with local leaders to take bold action that would restrict growth of dirty fossil fuel projects in their community — all while safeguarding industry workers, the climate, and the economy.
By Laura Grace Weldon, Center for Humans and Nature
The definition of farmer is: “a person who cultivates land or crops or raises animals (such as livestock or fish).”[1] In use, however, the term isn’t that clear.
By Kayla Mi-Kyung Vandervort, Esperanza Project
Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro isn’t the only culprit behind the fires currently raging across the Amazon at a rate of a football field per minute. With the high demand for meat, soy, and petroleum in developed countries, we are directly fuelling these fires in the Amazon basin. There is much that we can do to help turn this crisis around.
By Courtney White, The Grass Canoe
The date was Thursday, July 25th – the hottest day ever in Europe, part of a record-setting heat wave. Climate change, in other words. By the time we reached the airport the next morning for the long journey home, all the stories had melted in the heat and merged into just one story, one anguished question: Where indeed, Mr. Gauguin, are we going exactly?
By Paz Serra Portilla, Green European Journal
The age of Enlightenment ushered in progress and left it anchored in our political and economic consciousness. From that moment on, technology has emerged as the key, unique and universal solution to all of our problems. This, coupled with the unprecedented rate of acceleration we are experiencing in today’s world, means that industrial revolutions are occurring before we’ve even had time to assimilate their characteristics and consequences.
By Alf Hornberg, The Conversation
The current blind faith in technology will not save us. For the planet to stand any chance, the global economy must be redesigned. The problem is more fundamental than capitalism or the emphasis on growth: it is money itself, and how money is related to technology.
By Arturo Escobar, Ashish Kothari, Ariel Salleh, Federico Demaria, Alberto Acosta, Open Democracy
The paths to a bio-civilization are multiple - and the pluriverse is already visible in the cosmovisions and radical practices of many groups worldwide. The notion of a pluriverse questions the alleged universality of Euro-Americacentric modernity. As the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, put it so wisely, the pluriverse constitutes “a world where many worlds fit”.
By Diana Manzo, Intercontinental Cry
Rosario del Carmen Carrasco, a young campesina, serves as president of the “Xhuba Binii” group. She has cultivated more than 20 hectares of zapalote chico. Rosario inherited her love of the countryside from her father, and although she graduated as an engineer, she has practiced agriculture her whole life.
By Don Fitz, Resilience.org
The very idea of re-imagining society so that people can have good lives as they use less energy has been consumed by visions of the infinite expansion of solar/wind power and the oxymoron, 100% "clean energy".
By Daniel Christian Wahl, P2P Foundation Blog
On the one hand I believe it is vital to accept uncertainty, not-knowing, and unpredictability fully to the point of deep humility. On the other hand, I also believe that we need to choose to act from the conviction that we can design for positive emergence in complex systems even if it is not an exact science and we cannot know with certainty how our efforts will turn out to affect transformative change.
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
Vaclav Smil's latest book explores growth in nature and society. It examines the rules and patterns of growth in four key domains, those of the living world; human energy consumption; human artifacts; and human populations, societies and economies.
By Chad Hellwinckel, Resilience.org
Such an agrarian civilization will see no impending ecological doom but instead a future of steady processes and patterns with no need for faith in great technological inventions of salvation. Not a utopian world - surely grappling with problems of their own - but a wise culture; taking the lessons of a past society bent on ever-more for ever-more’s sake to heart and respecting limits.
By Charlotte Du Cann, Charlotte Du Cann blog
What if we started again here, by the sea, where the memory of our physical happiness comes to us on a summer’s day? I always thought ground state meant you needed to have your feet planted on terra firma – but what if it means being at home in another state entirely? Something more shifting and fluid. A state where we can remember our creaturehood, our place in the pod, the feeling we are beloved by the life that surrounds and holds us, its beauty and complexity?
By Timothy A. Wise, The New Press
A major new book that shows the world already has the tools to feed itself, without expanding industrial agriculture or adopting genetically modified seeds, from the Small Planet Institute expert
By Ben Raskin, The Soil Association
Written for farmers and advisors this book will help you assess the potential business benefits of agroforestry for your farm or client and to understand the possible benefits to the wider environment.
By David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive
The discourse around commons and commoning helps us see that individuals working together can bring forth more humane, ethical, and ecologically responsible societies. It is plausible to imagine a stable, supportive post-capitalist order. The very act of commoning, as it expands and registers on the larger culture, catalyzes new political and economic possibilities.
By Miranda Cady Hallett, The Conversation
In the absence of coordinated action on the part of the global community to mitigate ecological instability and recognize the plight of displaced people, there’s a risk of what some have called “climate apartheid.” In this scenario – climate change combined with closed borders and few migration pathways – millions of people would be forced to choose between increasingly insecure livelihoods and the perils of unauthorized migration.
By John Foran, Resilience.org
As the school year beckons, I would like to invite teachers to join me in co-creating an on-line knowledge action network – Transition U – as a space to share our thoughts, materials, best practices, syllabi, and any other resources we have for engaging our students both inside and outside the classroom in learning about the climate crisis, climate justice, and building resilient communities wherever we are.
By John R. Platt, The Revelator
With that in mind, this month sees the publication of an amazing array of books on a wide range of environmental issues, covering everything from climate change to burning rainforests to protecting our water.
By David Bollier, Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive
This book is dedicated to overcoming an epidemic of fear with a surge of reality-based hope. As long as we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by our fears, we will never find the solutions we need to help us build a new world. Of course, we have plenty of good reasons to be fearful — the loss of our jobs, authoritarian rule, corporate abuses, racial and ethnic hatred.
By Mathew Lawrence, Open Democracy
Reimagining how the corporation operates requires us to go beyond the policy tools of a regulatory or redistributive state into rearranging the distribution and nature of property, governance and control rights that shape its behaviour.