Inspiration

Resilience

Resilience, the Global Challenge, and the Human Predicament

By Michael Lerner, Kosmos Journal

We face a perfect storm of environmental, social, technological, economic, geopolitical and other global stressors. These global stressors interact in unpredictable ways. The pace of future shocks is increasing. The prospect for civilizational collapse is real. We need to build meaningful resilience. There are four questions about how to build resilience: 1.  How do we prepare ourselves and those we love? 2. How do we prepare our communities, networks, tribes, and organizations? 3. How do we prepare our states, countries, and international communities? 4. How do we prepare at a global level? This human predicament goes by many names. The global challenge. The global problematique. Limits to growth. The end of the world as we know it. The prospect for civilizational collapse. All refer to the perfect storm of global biosphere and societal stressors interacting in complex and unpredictable ways. Environmental stressors include: – Climate change, sea-level rise, and changing...

  • March 25, 2019
Michigan creek

Gardening as a Political Act of Necessary Beauty

By Adrian Ayres Fisher, Ecological Gardening

"We are the children of our landscape; it dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it." (Lawrence Durrell) As I write, it’s the first day of spring. I’ve been busy with tasks ordained by the season: checking the gardens for winter damage, deciding what flats of sedges and flowers to order, starting seeds in the greenhouse and considering what vegetables to put in. The sap is finally rising; the tall maples have gone fuzzy at the tips of their branches, as they do when in bloom, and the bur oaks have developed the sort of knobbly look on their twigs that announces the swelling of buds. The trees are moving more limberly in response to the wind after prolonged winter stiffness. Still, everything remains, briefly, just barely, in abeyance before the sudden mad rush of April and May. Right now, I’m supposed to be...

  • March 25, 2019
eating at your desk

How do Economics and Food Determine Health Equalities?

By Wayne Roberts, Medium.com

If ever there was a pathway to disease, failure to protect the population from saturation advertising of massively adulterated food is one. Even though this abuse testifies to concentrated wealth and power, the authors fail to give such abuse of food functions the recognition it deserves.

  • March 26, 2019
Brexit

Truth and Reconciliation in Post-Brexit Britain

By Robin Richardson, Open Democracy

The discourse about Brexit at and around Westminster is thick with either/or thinking. Every action and every person is one thing or another. 

  • March 26, 2019
Port

Pulling the Plug on Fossil Fuel Production Subsidies

By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance

Ending subsidies to producers can play a key role in taking the fossil fuel economy off life support – or we can wait for the planet to take our civilization off life support.

  • March 25, 2019
Soul Fire Farm

By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves

By Leah Penniman, YES! magazine

The truth is that for thousands of years Black people have had a sacred relationship with soil that far surpasses our 246 years of enslavement and 75 years of sharecropping in the United States.

  • March 22, 2019
sisu

The Miraculous Hope of Climate Realists

By Erika Spangler-Siegfried, Union of Concerned Scientists

The fight we signed up for is now the fight for what's left and the people who get left with it. That's all, really. But it's also everything. And you, my weary friend, will never stop.

  • March 22, 2019
Coal miners

Coal Miners Deserve Better

By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion

This is a tale about the negative environmental and health effects of coal and obtaining justice for America’s coal miners. It is also a tale of how large contributors to the campaigns of both Trump and McConnell can appear to have been given dispensation to duck out of their obligations.

  • March 22, 2019
Down to earth

Bruno Latour on Politics in the New Climatic Regime

By David Bollier, David Bollier blog

By stepping outside of the conventional frames of discussion about climate change, Latour opens up a rich, grand structure for thinking about the future of politics in the Anthropocene. Now if only we can build out this new third attractor. Let us call it the Terrestrial Commons!

  • March 21, 2019
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