By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
My take-away: the energy transition is an enormous job, and people who look at it just in terms of politics and policy have little understanding of what is actually required.
By John Biewen, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Scene on Radio
By Sara Venn, Going for Gold
By Jan Juffermans, Resilience.org
We are still so far from Rights for All. We urgently need to stop further degradation of our planet now and to realize Fair Earth Shares. Maybe we need to pursue legal action again, like the case for climate action won by the Dutch foundation Urgenda (although being appealed) and the other lawsuits around the world.
By Carlotta Byrne, Schumacher College
Inspired by indigenous cosmologies and customary laws – which are derived from the laws of Nature – Earth Jurisprudence recognises that Nature’s laws are primary and non-negotiable and that humans are interdependent with all other life forms and accountable to the wider Earth community.
By Olivia Rosane, EcoWatch
Russian President Vladimir Putin declared an emergency after 20,000 tons of diesel fuel spilled into a river in the Arctic Circle. The accident is the second largest oil spill in terms of volume in modern Russian history, the Word Wildlife Fund (WWF) told AFP, as BBC News reported.
By Marina Martinez, Waging Nonviolence
Permaculture — a fusion of indigenous knowledge with modern science and technology — offers ways for people to meet their essential needs for food, water, sanitation and other non-material needs, with autonomy and harmony with nature.
By Dana Drugmand, DeSmog Blog
A coalition of 23 states plus the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit on Wednesday in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, challenging the Trump Administration’s rollback of the Obama-era clean car standards.
By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog
Established power in this country is surrounded by a series of defensive rings. As soon as you begin to name them, you see that the UK is a democracy only in the weakest and shallowest sense.
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
After the random normlessness of this pandemic, I don’t want to go back to normal either. Or its idiotic child, “the new normal.” Sharon Wilson says we can leave normal for better this way: “Do all things with love, and be damn fierce about it.” Amen to that.
By Stephanie Woodard, YES! magazine
Today, danger confronts all of us on this Earth. “We were already facing climate change, and now there is the pandemic,” Skye says. The seeds will always be there, to provide both food and a spiritual connection to the Earth, he says. “They are how we will survive.”
By Eliza Spellman, Agrarian Trust
The Woodland Community Land Trust was incorporated in 1979, making it one of the oldest Community Land Trusts (CLTs) established in the United States. Located in the Clearfork Valley of northeastern Tennessee, a low-income Appalachian community dominated by extractive industry and concentrated land holding, economic, and political power, Woodland recently marked its 40th year in operation.
By John Biewen, Chenjerai Kumanyika, Asher Miller, Scene on Radio
We should know better, and do better. For those of us who are white in America, that includes grappling with our own identity—particularly the fact that white privilege is as much a part of the scaffolding of our society as fossil fuels, environmental destruction, and unsustainable consumption and growth.
By Sustainable Food Trust Staff, Sustainable Food Trust
Six River Farm is a diverse organic vegetable farm located on the shores of Merrymeeting Bay in Bowdoinham, Maine. Nate and Gabrielle both have roots in New England. They work with a small crew of employees, to grow a wide range of produce which they sell seasonally at local farmers markets, restaurants and natural food stores.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So to the question ‘how will humanity’s collective household pay for Covid-19?’ my answer is neither to squeeze the poor, nor to squeeze the future by closing your eyes and believing in the magic of the money tree. Instead, I’d suggest you look out your old spade and hoe from the back of the garden shed. There’s work to be done.
By Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine
During the first half of the twentieth century, citrus fruits came to be grown a good distance from the (sub)tropical regions they usually thrive in. The Russians managed to grow citrus outdoors, where temperatures drop as low as minus 30 degrees Celsius, and without the use of glass or fossil fuels.
By Olga Chepelianskaia, Resilience.org
Natural disasters, economic crises and viral outbreaks have greatly impacted our cities in the past. Today, we witness this effect with the COVID-19 viral outbreak. It has heavily impacted food, accommodation, livelihoods, public transport, economy, and other public amenities available to cities globally.
By Stan Cox, City Lights
The prospect of a Green New Deal is providing millions of people with a sense of hope. If the legislation passes into law, enacting its plan will begin a national mobilization on a scale not seen in the U.S. since World War II. But will it be enough to prevent climate disaster?
By Doug Fine, Chelsea Green
In American Hemp Farmer, maverick journalist and solar-powered goat herder Doug Fine gets his hands dirty with healthy soil and sticky with terpenes growing his own crop and creating his own hemp products.
By Nesrine Malik, The Guardian blog
As the beginning of the end of lockdown comes into view in England, a new fear should be taking shape. We entered the pandemic a grossly unequal society; we will leave it with those inequalities sharpened and multiplied.
By CIVICUS Staff, CIVICUS
Water is in the hands of large producers who have dried out our territory and compromised the lives of our communities. Ours is an extreme case: Chile has entirely privatised water, which means that theft is institutionalised. Chile has clearly prioritised extractive industries over the rights of communities to water.
By Russell Arben Fox, Strong Towns
Note that “neighborhoods” are not necessarily “communities.” Community feeling and friendships can obviously exist among neighbors, but they don’t have to: what really matters to a neighborhood is proximity.
By Degrowth.de Staff, Degrowth.de
Last month a group of academics working in the fields of development and environmental sciences in the Netherlands wrote a manifesto for post-corona recovery based on degrowth principles. This initiative gained widespread attention, pushing the degrowth agenda into (Dutch) mainstream consciousness and the traditional corridors of power.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Fortune-telling remains a mainstay among the financial elite and the lowliest retail investor on the planet alike. The U.S. Federal Reserve Bank has a sort of running fortune-telling tool called GDPNow that takes up-to-date indicators and plugs them into its formula for projecting the current direction of U.S. GDP.
By Stephanie Hiller, YES! magazine
Food is fundamental. While farmers have yet to face the full economic impact of this pandemic, their collaborative efforts, along with local grassroots networks, could mark the beginning of a new economy laboring to be born.