By Don Hall, Transition US
But even as our own physical and economic health are being threatened like never before, the health of our planet and our society as a whole have been declining rapidly for decades now. So we need everyone who can to join the fight. This applies equally during this crisis as it will long after it has receded.
By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog
By Brian Davey, Feasta
By Bill McKibben, The Guardian blog
The oil industry knew about and lied about climate change for 30 years: they’ve prevented us from flattening the carbon curve, and set up a tragedy far greater even than coronavirus and one which will play out for decades to come.
By Ben Reynolds, Sustain
The short term gains from this system that have been made on prices may come back to haunt us sooner rather than later. The best remedy right now is to help keep smaller food businesses afloat and markets, if run safely, are a vital part of this medicine.
By Cylvia Hayes, 3E Strategies
Right now, while factories have slowed or shut down in China, Europe, the U.S. and other places, would be a perfect time to put a lot of people to work upgrading and improving energy efficiency and pollution control measures, and installing renewable energy options in the furloughed factories around the world.
By Rapid Transition Alliance Staff, Rapid Transition Alliance
It is worth noting that globally, some 11 million people are already employed in the low carbon and renewables sector, but the numbers of people and resources currently focused on fossil fuel industries and their dependent products and services remain vast.
By Patrick Holden, Sustainable Food Trust
The key point is this: at a time when there is an unparalleled threat to the future health and wellbeing of citizens throughout the world, we must turn this potential catastrophe into an opportunity manifesting as a renaissance in the production, distribution and consumption of healthy, seasonal and local food.
By Marcus Ford, Resilience.org
To return to the pre-coronavirus assumptions about the world is to return to a way of thinking and living that cannot be sustained and that will destroy the planet. We need to reinvent modern civilization and we need colleges and universities to take on a leadership role in this great task.
By Inez Aponte, P2P Foundation Blog
This crisis must be an opportunity to challenge what we have allowed corporations around the world to do with the natural environment (conveniently referred to as resources) and people (labour) in the name of economic growth. Thatcher was wrong: there are alternatives.
By Michael Shuman, Michael Shuman blog
We need a different way forward, what we might call the Theory of Comparative Resilience. My basic proposition is simple: Those communities that are best able to withstand future crises—whether pandemics, climate disruptions, or financial meltdowns—will be the ones that thrive economically.
By William E. Rees, The Tyee
Surely it is within our collective imagination to socially construct a system of globally networked but self-reliant national economies that better serve the needs of a smaller human family. The ultimate goal of economic planning everywhere must now turn to ensuring that humanity can thrive indefinitely and more equitably within the biophysical means of nature.
By Ameya Pawar, Charna R. Epstein, Resilience.org
This national crisis calls for a new model for economic disaster recovery. We propose a new strategy ‘resettlement in place’ – it is based on best practices in refugee resettlement and social intelligence, a model to harness local data and lessons learned from previous disasters, including Chicago’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
In the midst of a global pandemic, the Trump administration continues to disregard science by sharply cutting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards negotiated by the Obama administration. The rollback is both the most impactful and heedless environmental deregulation of Trump's presidency.
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, The Energy Bulletin
Last week saw one of the biggest price leaps in the history of the oil industry, with US futures surging from around $20 a barrel at mid-week to a close of $28.34 on Friday.
By Rebecca Burgess, Fibershed
The novel Coronavirus disease Covid-19 is amplifying both the ways that our cultural and economic lives are durable and resilient, and the many, many ways in which we are utterly vulnerable and precarious.
By William Vitek, Resilience.org
It’s hard to take much comfort in our collective cultural and institutional experience with thinking through the kind of pandemic we now confront. Nor do we seem to have anything as valuable and practical as a paddle with which to leverage our movement out of the hole we’ve fallen into.
By Rob Hopkins, Transition US
In this webinar, co-hosted with the international Transition Network and Post Carbon…
By Ronnie Cummins, Chelsea Green
Grassroots Rising is a passionate call to action for the global body politic, providing practical solutions for how to survive—and thrive—in catastrophic times. Author Ronnie Cummins aims to educate and inspire citizens worldwide to organize and become active participants in preventing ecological collapse.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
In a recent post I questioned the well-known formula: Human Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology. But I don’t question that humans now have a severe impact on earth systems. So if not PAT, then what? Here I’m going to lay out some other factors that I suggest underlie our impact and our present predicament in a more fundamental sense than the PAT variables.
By David Holmgren
A home-based lifestyle of self-reliance, minimal and slow travel does not provide protection against getting a virus as infectious as COVID-19, but it provides a base for social distancing and isolation that is stimulating and healthy rather than a place of detention.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Whether the world returns to some semblance of normal by summer or whether the horror of COVID-19 continues into the fall and winter, the problem is that confidence has already been shattered.
By Stefan Cristoff, Uneven Earth
Highlighting the term careful is important here: we can view the response of the state to this pandemic with care, we can be careful to see the gaps and address the ways that the state response is lacking. Careful in this context also means taking care and directly engaging with the crisis on a community based level in a safe way.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns Of Meaning blog
We are all inside the crucible right now, and the choices we make over the weeks and months to come will, collectively, determine the shape and defining characteristics of the next era. However big we’re thinking about the future effects of this pandemic, we can think bigger.
By Asher Miller, Rob Dietz, Jason Bradford, Resilience.org
Here at Crazy Town headquarters, we’ve been calling for pretty drastic changes to the economy to make it fair, resilient, and sustainable. But changes don’t materialize just because you want them--usually you need a crisis to get people thinking and acting differently.