By Guy Dauncey, The Practical Utopian
Our history would be simple if we could classify it neatly into dominating alpha-males versus cooperative hunter-gatherers, but the experience of agency gives us not one but two fundamental impulses. As well as the desire not to be dominated it gives us the impulse to explore our individuality
By Justine Calma, Grist
By Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian
By Saki Bailey, Shareable
These three commons legal institutions exemplifies, in different ways, a central feature of the commons as described in the previous piece: namely, decommodifying access to a common good by taking homes permanently off of the speculative market
By Emma Orlow, Food Tank
Today, Honey Fingers, the Melbourne-based apiary run by architect Nic Dowse, carries the torch for artists interested in honey with a space for this growing community.
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
Typical five-day heat waves in the U.S. will be 12°F warmer by mid-century alone, according to the U.S. National Climate Assessment (NCA), which the White House itself reviewed and approved last November.
By Victoria Balfour, Sustainable Food Trust
A group of 5 year old children wearing ear muffs and biting into pears may sound like a bizarre way to tackle obesity, but the founders of the new sensory food education initiative Flavour School would disagree. There is a growing body of evidence suggesting that taste preferences in adulthood are closely linked to what we eat in childhood.
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, ASPO - USA
Oil prices dropped suddenly last Wednesday on the news that yet another dispute in Libya had been settled so that the traditional Libyan National Oil company was back in business exporting oil from its major terminals.
By James Dyke, Tim Lenton, The Conversation
Gaian self-regulation may be very effective. But there is no evidence that it prefers one form of life over another. Countless species have emerged and then disappeared from the Earth over the past 3.7 billion years. We have no reason to think that Homo sapiens are any different in that respect.
By Celia Bottger, Foreign Policy In Focus
A just recovery for Puerto Rico not only means rebuilding what Maria destroyed, but reclaiming the political and economic agency stifled by American colonialism.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
Transnational corporations have become the dominant force directing our world. Humanity is accelerating toward a precipice of overconsumption, and the large transnationals are the primary agents driving us there.
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
So much of modern culture insists that constant stimulation is the essence of living. In truth, constant stimulation is merely a tactic of advertisers, app makers, websites and myriad media outlets to hook you on their messages and their products. Leisure requires withdrawal from all that and—this is the key point—learning to derive pleasure from solitude, quiet observation of the world around us and introspection.
By Sarah Lillegard, Fibershed
Arriving at Flying Mule Farm on the cusp of lambing season and on the heels of a snowstorm in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, the fields are damp with recent rain. Ewes and lambs call to each other and in the morning light. It’s easy to get sentimental about spaces like this where the animals match the rhythms of the land.
By Lornet Turnbull, YES! magazine
Grannies Respond/Abuelas Responden is a movement of grandmothers and their allies who have been similarly spurred to action by the humanitarian crisis unfolding on the southern border. Over six days, beginning July 31, their caravan will journey more than 2,000 miles, onboarding other “grannies” along the way.
By Basav Sen, Foreign Policy In Focus
This was no mere “natural” disaster. The impacts of Hurricane Maria were to a large extent attributable to inequalities of race, income and — critically — access to political power.
By Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine
Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live. Therefore, it may be more useful to question the system that requires many of us to travel and consume energy as we do.
By John Foran, Resilience.org
No single thing, and quite possibly nothing at all, can get us out of the epic mess we’ve made this time. Let’s stipulate that at the outset. It’s pretty obvious that situations like “the Anthropocene” and “climate crisis” are here to stay. Yet try we must, and try we do. Let’s stipulate that too, at least for some of us.
By Rob Hopkins, ManagEnergy
For its first edition, the ManagEnergy Talk chose to invite serial storyteller Rob Hopkins (UK). Founder of the Transition movement, Hopkins gave insights to how bottom-up actions can have very real impacts through imagination.
By David Holmgren, Meliodora Publishing
This 592 page manual shows how Australians can downshift and retrofit their homes, gardens, communities and, above all, themselves to be more self-organised, sustainable and resilient into an uncertain future.
By Tim Koechlin, Common Dreams
Those who benefit most from the status quo spend a lot of money to persuade the rest of us that this – an economy that serves the top 1% — is good for us and, in fact, the best we can do.
By Tim Jackson, APPG on Limits to Growth
This first in our series of briefing papers on building An Economy That Works explores the underlying phenomenon of ‘secular stagnation’ – a long-term decline in the rate of growth of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Comparative advantage is still routinely invoked as a justification for free trade today, so it remains sadly necessary to explain why it’s a poor foundation for contemporary economies.
By Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead, Occupy.com
Controversy over Britain's plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport in London, already the second busiest airport in the world, escalated last month with MPs backing the airport expansion.
By Andrew Curry, thenextwave
I argue here that these fault-lines originate in real and deep differences that have emerged in Britain over decades rather than in the few years since the financial crisis.
By Mathew Lawrence, Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Red Pepper
It seems that the short lived cycles of electoral politics means that politicians chase short-term goals, rather than tackling problems such as climate change which require long-term, global thinking. The test of a capable politician in 2018 is whether they take a stand against cavalier resource extraction.
