Who knew? There are limits to growth in the American West
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Limits to growth in the American West were always there. Now residents are having to face them.
LATEST ARTICLES
Travels in my Time Machine Part Three: visiting the Cornish beavers of 2030
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
What would it sound like to live in a future in which beavers were now considered an essential part of our now rapidly-rewilding landscapes?
Yes, Britain is corrupt. But it’s a lot worse than you think
By Adam Ramsay, Open Democracy
But once we understand that kleptocracy is a process at the heart of the modern global economy, we see that Britain is a lot worse than it seems at first.
Amazon’s least-deforested areas are due to ‘vital role’ of Indigenous peoples
By Yanine Quiroz, Carbon Brief
Only 5% of net forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon occurs in Indigenous territories and protected areas – even though these areas contain more than half of the region’s forest.
Agriculture productivity – Food and agriculture number crunching, part 4
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
In total some 850 million people are working in agriculture globally of which more than half in lower-middle income countries (e.g. India, Indonesia, Kenya) and just 16 million in high income countries.
Sisyphus, Science & Carbon Removal
By Sofia Greaves, Sofia Greaves blog
The choice to back CDR is conditioned by a desire in society at large to meet net-zero whilst maintaining an economic paradigm and way of life.
Binna Choi of the Casco Art Institute: Curating Art through Commoning
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
Choi has brought the ethic and practices of commoning to the creation of art and its exhibition. She and her colleagues have embraced commoning as an organizing principle for how a diverse team of artists can make art and work together.
Food and agriculture number crunching, part 3
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
Almost 3,000 kcal per person per day is made available for consumers, who "need" in the range of 2,100 kcal per person per day.
David Sloan Wilson: “Chickens, Cooperation and a Pro-social World”
By Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification
On this episode, evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson joins Nate to unpack how evolution can be used to explain and understand modern human behavior, particularly with respect to cooperation and pro-social behavior.
Fusion Energy: A Different Take
By Gary Gardner, Center for the Advancement of a Steady State Economy
Indeed, one thing seems indisputable: Unleashing fusion in an unbounded, growth-driven economy would be a wholesale disaster.
Sustainability can (and must) be beautiful
By Sandra Lubarsky, Resilience.org
To fulfill the vision that sets the practice of sustainability in motion—the vision of life coordinating with life in ways that ensure the flourishing of life—ethics and aesthetics must be reintegrated.
Is “Polycrisis” the Right Word for Our Times?
By Asher Miller, Resilience.org
But as the American anthropologist and historian Joseph Tainter documents in his seminal book, The Collapse of Complex Societies, this is what "advanced," hierarchical human societies do—they respond to challenges created by their complexity with ever more complexity. This may work in the short-term but usually leads to the underlying crises worsening in the long term.
Are we seeing the collapse of the dollar-dominated global economy?
By James Meadway, Open Democracy
The near future is one of grave uncertainty and instability as the new global monetary regime takes shape.
EDITOR’S PICKS
January: Planting an Idea.
By Zia Gallina, La Bella Terra
Once we understood the intrinsic value of the natural world, not just what it contributes to our well-being, our economy and the local ecology, there was no going back.
The Enemy’s Ring and Our Ethical Quandary
By Alice Loyd, Food is the Key
But I like a scenario in which the heroic masses reach the end of their tolerance before that happens. They—we—rebel, withdraw, dismantle, and replace the evil practices with more ethical ones while the planet is still livable.
ONLINE COURSE
FEATURED RESOURCES
The Living Soil Handbook
By Jesse Frost, Chelsea Green Publishing
Farmer Jesse Frost shares all he has learned through experience and experimentation with no-till practices on his home farm in Kentucky.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
By Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Princeton University Press
What a rare mushroom can teach us about sustaining life on a fragile planet.
MORE ARTICLES
Why Biodiversity?
By Ian Pfingsten, ZNet
Ultimately, the Earth will survive after the sixth mass extinction event, but it will do so without us unless we care enough to change.
Towards cooperative commonwealth: Transition in a perilous century
By Michael Lewis, Shareable
Changing the priorities, policies, and rules to preserve the commonwealth of all beings of the earth rather than the private wealth of the few is possible, but it is not guaranteed.
”We shouldn’t be afraid of involving businesses”: Doughnut Economics in Brussels
By Barbara Trachte, Benjamin Joyeux, Green European Journal
Major European cities such as Amsterdam, Geneva and Brussels, have adopted the doughnut model to guide their green transitions.
A review of One Hundred Years of Insanity, by Bob Lloyd
By Murray Grimwood, Resilience.org
This book – and others it references, particularly Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems’ - should be a standard read for university students, but I suspect it will only be read by those who are already-there, or at least already well-on-the-way.
What’s Wrong with Investing Your Environmental Values?
By Joel Stronberg, Medium
IRA projects and those climate-related provisions attributable to the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs and the CHIPS and Science Acts are evidence of the economic and environmental benefits of a transition to a low-carbon economy.
Where ‘levelling up’ funds go doesn’t matter. They aren’t supposed to work
By Adam Ramsay, Open Democracy
One centralised Parliament is much easier for the likes of Rupert Murdoch to influence than a plethora of local authorities at a scale small enough for people to actually meet up and discuss their needs in person.