Inspiration

Carbon Gardening: A Natural Climate Solution that Can Help Reduce CO2 Emissions While Restoring Biodiversity

By Adrian Ayres Fisher, Ecological Gardening

In summer, the native plant gardens at the UW Arboretum sequester carbon while adding beauty and habitat. Designed by Darrel Morrison. Gardeners new to the concept of carbon gardening often ask these two questions: What good soil management strategies will help maximize carbon sequestration? And, what would be a good plant palette to help accomplish this? Good questions both, to which I wish I could give detailed, specific answers. Carbon gardening in northern Illinois, where I live, differs from carbon gardening in other regions; each will require region-specific strategies and plant palettes. Everything depends on where the gardener lives and the conditions in which they are gardening. Thus, what follows is more in the way of a general discussion that might help point in the right direction than a series of rigid prescriptions. Organic carbon sequestration is one of the oldest tricks in nature’s ancient playbook for global ecosystem...

January 27, 2020

Indigikitchen Is Bringing Native Food Sovereignty Online

By Katharine Walla, Food Tank

The online cooking show Indigikitchen is providing a platform to help disseminate Indigenous food recipes—while helping eaters recognize their impact on the planet and Native communities. “Not only do Indigenous diets provide us with nutritionally balanced, seasonal local food, but they help us recognize the connection to our physical place in the world, as well as the wisdom of those who have come before,” says Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet, Cherokee), founder of Indigikitchen. “This helps us care for ourselves, the land, and each other.” Indigikitchen gives viewers in Native communities the tools and guidance they may need to prepare nutritious food on their own reservations with familiar and innovative recipes—even including crosses with cuisines from other cultures, like Thai and Italian meals. Recent recipes include elderberry barbeque sauce, bison sweet potato poblano stew, wild rice omelets, Idigikitchen pad thai, and peanut butter cookies. Indigikitchen also offers educational programs for in-school learning. Gladstone notes that taking...

January 24, 2020

What’s in a Name?

By Courtney White, Resilience.org

Words matter. Here’s what various dictionaries say about the word regenerate: to be formed or created again; to be renewed to a better, higher, or more worthy state; to be spiritually reborn; to generate or produce anew, especially after an injury; to restore to original strength or properties; to revive, reform, rekindle, rejuvenate, reconstruct, redeem, reawaken, or reanimate.

January 24, 2020

Manifesto for the Future

By Sam J. Knights, Monkey Wrench

I do not look forward to the future like I used to. I do not sit and dream about the life I will lead or the things I will do. In fact, these days, I have to force myself to think about it. Dreaming is effort. Imagination is work. Hope is complicated.

January 23, 2020

Weaving Hemp into the Northern California Fibershed

By Nicholas Wenner, Fibershed

Encouraged by the Federal legalization of hemp in 2018, Fibershed has continued research into the versatile crop this year, deepening understanding of the plant and the fiber, prototyping hemp textile production in Northern California, supporting agroecological trials, and charting a path forward for weaving hemp into the region.

January 22, 2020

How We Reduced the Environmental Impact of (Almost) Everything We Buy

By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life

The stuff we humans buy is a disaster for the planet we love. Livestock intended for human food now make up 60% of the total weight of mammals on Earth, while wild mammals make up only 4% (the rest is humans and pets). The global clothing industry is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the emissions from entire European Union. Single-use plastics are choking the oceans. Transportation (including the cars we drive, but the semis that cart our products to stores) accounts for almost a third of U.S. emissions.

January 22, 2020

Our Time Balm

By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog

Humanity and the earth is suffering from a worldview disease leading to a voracious self-destruction. It is a set of values or qualities, held with religious conviction that transforms all novelty into itself: economic growth, control over circumstances, progress, individualism, exploitation of nature, domination of strong over weak, and freedom-as-entitlement.

January 22, 2020

The Yupaichani Network: Regenerative Practices in Action

By Zia Parker, Cara H. Cadwallader, Esperanza Project

In these times of economic, climate and political challenges, how do we move forward toward the world we collectively long for? Undaunted by language and cultural differences, this is a story of community collaboration, with the important ingredient of persistent insistence on the goal of ecosystem restoration.

January 21, 2020

Fast for the Future

By Lyla June Johnston, Esperanza Project

So during these seven days, we will be unveiling our Seven Generations New Deal, which is a seven point program for climate action. And we’d love for you to come and listen to see what we’re thinking and give your input, because we really want this policy to be built from the ground up. We fully expect that the first draft that we are releasing on Monday will look nothing like the final draft that we have by the end of this campaign.

January 20, 2020

The Social Life of Commoning

By Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive

The British sociologist Raymond Williams once wrote, “Culture is ordinary.” We could say much the same about commoning. It is terribly ordinary. Commoning is what common people decide for themselves in their specific circumstances if they want to get along with each other and produce as much wealth for everyone as possible.

January 20, 2020

How One Utah Community Fought the Fracking Industry — and Won

By Tara Lohan, The Revelator

Even though economics played a role in halting the project, Dean Baker, a Kanab resident and opponent of the project, believes community efforts were important, too.