Inspiration

By Jen Moore, Foreign Policy In Focus

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.— Arundhati Roy, April 2020 Just over two years ago when lockdowns were being declared like dominoes around the world, there was a brief moment when the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to hold the potential for much-needed reflection. Could it lead to a reversal away from the profit-driven ecological and socio-economic dead end we’ve been propelling toward? Arundhati Roy’s call to critical reflection was published in early April 2020. At...

May 26, 2022

Building a regenerative future

By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium

Why the potential of people, and the places that communities inhabit, is the key to addressing the climate crisis [First published in the RSA Journal — link here — this is the pre-final draft without the edits by the journal editors.] Our times call for “stubborn optimism”, as Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac suggest in their 2020 book The Future We Choose. We all owe them gratitude for their very personal effort in making the 2015 Paris Agreement possible. Since then, they have continued to stimulate action towards a transformative response to climate change. Together with the outstanding strategic work of Nigel Topping as the UK’s High Level Climate Action Champion in the run up to COP26, there is a basis for hope that we will see more bold and coordinated action within and across sectors after the Glasgow conference. Pathways towards a regenerative future The capacity building work that Bill Sharpe and...

May 26, 2022

Radical Conservation: Misdirections, New Directions

By Bram Büscher, Robert Fletcher, Great Transition Initiative

Imagining conservation outside the capitalist box is a liberating exercise, countering eco-anxieties and catastrophic nightmares, while releasing positive collective energy. A movement united around a convivial conservation vision would be a powerful change agent in the Great Transition.

May 26, 2022

Welcome to Selsey, a community that welcomed back the marsh.

By Erica Gies, Hakai Magazine

In letting go, in providing space for coastal ecosystems, we acknowledge the power of waterlands—to hold water, to hold carbon, to hold life, including us.

May 26, 2022

Home Soil

By Eliza Daley, By my solitary hearth

Soil is not dirt. It is not a pile of fine-ground rock and biological detritus. It is not even a home for mycelium and microorganisms, annelids and insects, roots and burrowing chordates. It is the sum of all those things living together.

May 25, 2022

The Whole World is an Ecovillage

By Ryan Luckey, Leticia Rigatti, Grassoles

If we see the whole world as an EcoVillage, we have a new lens through which to perceive our challenges, and new possibilities to consider.

May 25, 2022

A shorter workweek may increase worker productivity — but that’s not why we need one

By Robert Raymond, Shareable

Studies show that a shorter workweek is healthier for people and the planet — but much of the conversation is focused on its impact on worker productivity or efficiency. This is a big mistake.

May 25, 2022

It takes an ecovillage…: some thoughts on ‘Going to Seed’

By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future

In this brief review, I’ve just picked out a few strands from Simon’s rich and informative narrative – I’d warmly commend anyone interested enough to have read this far to get themselves a copy of the book, where they’ll find much more to entertain and inspire them.

May 25, 2022

A local food renaissance in Wales

By Carwyn Graves, Resilience.org

The re-establishment in public discourse of a Welsh food culture, with its long history, its ingredients and methods, provides the possibility of a rooted baseline for the future of food in this country; open to change, but aware of its provenance.

May 24, 2022

Once You Know (documentary film review)

By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press

What does it mean to truly understand the reality of humankind’s ecological predicament, and what should you do with that understanding once you possess it?

May 24, 2022

Why the UN must rely more on indigenous wisdom and less on fossil fuels

By Jeremy Jiménez, Resilience.org

It is time for the United Nations and its various agencies to recognize that its top-down organizational structure is not suited to address our myriad ecological crises, and rather use its influence to advocate for, and allocate its resources to support, land custodianship for the millions of indigenous communities keeping alive the knowledge of how to live within the bounty of what our mother Earth provides.