By John Foran, Resilience.org
This final part of the series presents a vision of new type of university, exemplified in the world-spanning Ecoversities Alliance, and dreamed of in Transition U and Eco Vista U, two prototypes that I am involved in co-creating with students, staff, faculty, and community members in Santa Barbara, California, and in the Transition US movement.
By Silke Helfrich, Heinrich Boell Stiftung
By Kavita Byrd, Resilience.org
By Sian Sullivan, Sian Sullivan blog
In the famous 12-steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and associated programmes, the first step is to recognise that you are indeed addicted. That you are bound to a substance over which you do not have control, such that this substance has become your ‘higher power’, its material qualities and structures of access determining one’s activities and choices in the world.
By Andy Letcher, Schumacher College
But a college that finds spiritual expression in service to the others with whom we live (human or other-than-human) and to the land beneath our feet, that scrutinises and decolonises itself without fragility, that privileges listening before speaking, and that acts mindfully and soulfully in the world, would be a college that meets the needs of the time.
By Bristol Food Producers Staff, Bristol Food Producers
In the UK, farming is the least diverse profession, with 98.6% of farm managers and holders being white British. The events of the last few months have brought these conversations to the forefront and we have realised we need to act now if this is going to change.
By Million Belay, Common Dreams
A cohort of actors including philanthrocapitalists, aid agencies, governments, academic institutions, and embassies are all working to make this narrative a reality. They talk about transforming African agriculture but what they are doing is creating a market for themselves cleverly couched in a nice sounding language.
By Diana Vela Almeida, Uneven Earth
Today’s extractive industries such as gas, oil, and mining have an egregious reputation of violating human and environmental rights and supporting highly controversial political and economic reforms in poor countries.
By Pablo Servigne, Raphaël Stevens, Gauthier Chapelle, Daniel Rodary, Open Democracy
As Rob Hopkins and Joanna Macy say, we must lead with our heads, hearts and hands: understanding what is happening (collapso-logy), imagining and believing in other worlds, and finding courage (collapso-sophy) as well as gathering living forces to build alternatives and lead the fight against destructive powers (collapso-praxis).
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
This piece is a gust of fresh air – a much-needed, long-overdue challenge to the corporate and university powers that control academic publishing. Through inertia, ignorance, and sometimes complicity, universities are not challenging the distinct limits of corporate-controlled “openness" and defending the ideals of academic scholarship.
By Sharon Kelly, DeSmog Blog
Today, the shale boom of the 2010’s is officially bust, battered not only by the ’s outsized failure to control COVID-19 outbreaks and an oil price war in which foreign producers proved their ability to steer oil prices, but also a wave of multi-billion dollar write-downs by oil giants
By Richard Eckersley, Resilience.org
With the COVID-19 pandemic laying waste to the country, and President Trump’s chances of re-election fading, America is at last beginning to look more deeply into the country’s problems.
By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
Also, if we cannot expand our perspective to transcend White supremacy, how are we going to transcend “human supremacy,” that is, the delusional belief that we are outside of nature, that we don’t have to obey the same laws as every other species on the planet?
By Ffion Storer Jones, Sustainable Food Trust
Who produces our food and what they are paid should be much higher on the agenda of discussions about resilience in food systems, for the sake of society and the environment.
By Chuck Collins, The Guardian blog
We should reorient the rules governing taxes and charity to discourage the concentration of power and decision-making. Taxpayers should not subsidize private fortresses of wealth and power that will exist for generations, controlled by the same families and their professional advisers.
By Ashley Gripper, Environmental Health News
For more than 150 years, from the rural South to northern cities, Black people have used farming to build self-determined communities and resist oppressive structures that tear them down.
By Asher Miller, Sherri Mitchell, Resilience.org
The recent surge in Black Lives Matter protests following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, along with growing evidence that COVID-19 is disproportionately hitting communities of color, have raised urgent questions about structural racism and white privilege in the U.S.
By Gary Paul Nabhan, Chelsea Green Publishing
In his latest book, Mesquite, Gary Paul Nabhan employs humor and contemplative reflection to convince readers that they have never really glimpsed the essence of what he calls “arboreality.”
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 Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
As eviction moratoriums around the United States come to an end, it is expected that landlords will begin evicting nonpaying tenants en masse. Barring new moratoriums on eviction, one estimate suggests 23 million people will be subject to eviction by the end of September ... I believe that there is yet great turmoil ahead. We are unlikely to return to the system of finance capitalism which is crumbling before our eyes.
By Julian Agyeman, Kofi Boone, The Conversation
Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in wealth, land and power that has circumscribed black lives since the end of slavery in the U.S.
By Kavita Byrd, Resilience.org
We need to come together and pool our wisdom, strength and resources to build a whole new system, a world where all are privileged, to live in bounty, beauty on this wonderful Earth we’ve been given.
By Richenda Wilson, Oxford Real Farming Conference
Richenda Wilson of the East London community-led food enterprise Growing Communities (GC) describes how dealing with the rollercoaster of COVID-19 – aside from being ridiculously hard work – has inspired thoughts about the future of UK food and farming, about change, closeness and resilience.
By Amy Buringrud, Vicki Robin, Resilience.org
Today, our series host Vicki Robin answers the question herself of “What Could Possibly Go Right?” In interview with Amy Buringrud of Post Carbon Institute, Vicki shares what she’s learned from the series’ guests so far.
By Rob Dietz, Resilience.org
Trade ought to be a simple thing. I give you something, you give me something else in return, and we’re both better off. But our capitalism-on-steroids society has converted the simple idea of exchange into an overly exploitative monster