Ultimate Success
By Tom Murphy, Do the Math
Is the 10,000-year-old human civilization in its infancy, or nearer its end than its beginning?
LATEST ARTICLES
Cities beyond bureaucracy: Exploring commons-based strategies
By Yavor Tarinski, Towards Autonomy
I think these are the two conflicting urban visions today: the one is about a top-down enforced homogenization and zoning of the city, and then there is the possibility for the citizens themselves to engage autonomously in morphing their urban environment.
Young Indigenous organizers are taking the fight against oil pipelines to Biden
By Nick Engelfried, Waging Nonviolence
Hundreds of people rallied in front of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers headquarters in Washington, D.C. on April 1 to deliver 400,000 petition signatures calling on the Biden administration to stop a pair of major oil pipelines threatening Indigenous nations’ land and water.
The story of Adélaïde Merle: My journey to systemic thinking
By Adélaïde Merle, Gaia Education
The Design Studio course and Ecovillage Design Education programme are empowering courses that helped me learn how to think in a systemic holistic way and become aware of privileges and biases along the process.
Methane Emissions Spiked in 2020. Scientists Fear Feedback Loops
By Nick Cunningham, DeSmog Blog
Preliminary data shows that methane emissions jumped in 2020 by the largest amount since systematic record-keeping began decades ago.
The greatest debt crisis in history is upon us
By John Smith, Open Democracy
We must engage with the just struggle to write off the uncollectible foreign debt which, aggravated by the social and economic effects of the pandemic, is threatening the survival of the peoples of the South.
What if we read more books?
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
When was the last time you read a book cover to cover? And if you are still able to do this, do you feel you read in the same way you did, say, 20 years ago?
How Resource Depletion Leads to Collapse. The Story of a Lost Kingdom
By Ugo Bardi, The Seneca Effect
The idea that a civilization may collapse because of resource depletion is often hard to believe for historians.
Agriculture’s Greatest Myth
By Jonathan Latham, Independent Science News
It is agribusiness that most aggressively alleges that all other forms of agriculture are inadequate. This Malthusian spectre is a good story, it’s had a tremendous run, but it’s just not true.
Climate Policy in the Manchin Era: Say It Ain’t so Joe!
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
With the Senate evenly divided, the loss of one Democratic vote with no Republican replacement changes the balance of power.
How a Seattle Neighborhood Confronted Food Insecurity in the Pandemic
By Lornet Turnbull, YES! magazine
Over the past year, more than 20 food supply organizations have contributed in one form or another to providing hot meals to residents through the community center.
Defibrillating democracy
By Rich Wilson, Claire Mellier , New Internationalist
In case you’ve not come across citizens’ assemblies, they are gatherings of people (usually 100-150), selected to be a true snapshot of the place in question (say, a country or city) based on demographic criteria such as gender, age, income and education level.
Reclaiming the forest: The Indigenous struggle for land rights in Kenya
By Lucia Monje-Jelfs, Sustainable Food Trust
The Sengwer have lived in the Embobut Forest for centuries, but they lost a vast proportion of their territories to British colonial administration in the early 1900s. Since, their land rights have been limited and precarious...
EDITOR’S PICKS
The Needful Garden
By Eliza Daley, By my solitary hearth
Our systems do not meet our needs. None of them are designed to do so. It is time to make new systems.
The Paradoxes of Localism
By Stone Age Herbalist, Resilience.org
I want my grandchildren to visit other places and countries and see different, unknown foods. I want them to feel like the world isn't one giant airport lounge with sourdough and avocado toast on every menu.
ONLINE COURSE
FEATURED RESOURCES
Enabling sustainable food systems. Innovators’ handbook
By FAO, FAO
This handbook is written for “sustainable food systems innovators” by a group of innovators from Asia, Africa, the Americas and Europe who are leading initiatives to grow, share, sell and consume more sustainable foods in their local contexts.
The Perennial Turn: Contemporary Essays from the Field
By New Perennials Publishing
This anthology is the first project in the New Perennials Publishing venture. Our goal is to provide thoughtful analyses on crucial social/ecological questions, all at no cost to readers.
MORE ARTICLES
The commons
By Sergio Ruiz Cayuela, Uneven Earth
Autonomy refers to the capacity of a given system to self-manage. In other words, the more autonomy that a commons has, the less dependent it will be on external inputs.
Book Review: Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador
By Sibo Chen, London School of Economics and Social Policy
In Resource Radicals: From Petro-Nationalism to Post-Extractivism in Ecuador, Thea Riofrancos examines how conflicting visions of resource extraction have divided the Ecuadorian Left, focusing particularly on the struggles between the Ecuadorian government and grassroots anti-extractivism activists during the era of Rafael Correa’s governance.
Facing the Eye of the Needle
By Otto Scharmer, Medium.com
The image of the Ever Given — needing to unload its cargo in order to get unstuck — represents in a microcosm the collective impediment that rich countries and Western civilization embody today: holding on to stuff and refusing to share with those who are on the other side of the social divide.
A Manchester Boldly United for a More Equal Metropolis
By Sam Pizzigati, Inequality.org
Manchester’s new strategic gameplan comes from a special commission that metro area’s top governing body created last October “to survey the damage done and the inequalities exposed” over the past year and recommend what Manchester can do to transcend those inequalities.
5 ways to achieve circular development on the local level
By Elizabeth Carr, Shareable
Put simply: the circular economy means understanding that everything is a resource to be kept in circulation. There is no garbage or waste.
Earth’s Real Treasure
By Tom Murphy, Do the Math
Which do you think is more valuable: the web of living animals on this planet, or all the gold accessible in the ground? If given a choice to eliminate one and preserve the other, which would you choose?
