Talking Points on the AOC-Markey Green New Deal Resolution
By IEN Staff, Indigenous Environmental Network
We demand that fossil fuels be kept underground and that the subsidies and tax breaks that keep the fossil fuel industry viable be shifted towards a clear, grassroots-based Just Transition.
The Green New Deal: Wishers’ Remorse?
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
The principal catalyst for this sudden turn-around in climate chatter is the Green New Deal (GND) that was proposed by Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) in her successful Congressional bid.
Peak Oil Review 19 February 2019
By Tom Whipple, Peak-Oil.org
Prices moved higher last week as the markets perceived that production problems in Venezuela and elsewhere might outweigh any decline in demand that could take place if global economic growth slows.
Before It’s Too Late
By Mary DeMocker, The Sun
I look at the land as being part of a sacred covenant with our children and the coming generations. If we live for ourselves only, our lives are bereft of true legacy. But when we live in the presence of our ancestors, we also live for our descendants. To feel concern for the future is to bring a piece of eternity into the present and let it guide us.
“Which species are we sure we can survive without?” Revisited
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
We have eliminated the species around us with reckless abandon and without concern for whether we can survive without them. An alarming new study suggests a rapidly accelerating decline in worldwide insect populations. Can we survive without the insects of the world?
The world-changing potential of hot composting
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
As long as there have been humans, we have taken the parts of plants we don’t eat and thrown them back onto the soil again, knowing it would turn back into soil to create more plants. Until we modern people came along, that is.
Adding Balance to the Meat Debate
By Richard Young, Sustainable Food Trust
While few people yet realise it, we actually need to encourage increased production of grass-fed meat, since the most effective way to restore our degraded arable soils and wild pollinators is to re-introduce grass and grazing animals into cropland rotations.
Social and Environmental Justice
By Rich Pancost, TheBristolMayor.com
But if climate action is a question of social justice, then those marginalised groups must be part of the movement. They must set the agenda of that movement.
Savor your Small Parcels, and Create More of Them
By Kevin Klinkenberg, Strong Towns blog
After now working in the planning and urban design realm for more than a couple of decades, I’ve come to believe that those “substandard” parcels referenced in countless planning and market studies are actually the key to successful cities and neighborhoods. I believe we should savor them, embrace them, and seek to create more wherever we can.
School Climate Strikes: Why Adults no Longer Have the Right to Object to their Children Taking Radical Action
By Rupert Read, The Conversation
A worldwide wave of school climate strikes, begun by the remarkable Greta Thunberg, has reached the UK. Some critics claim these activist-pupils are simply playing truant, but I disagree. Speaking as both a climate campaigner and an academic philosopher, I believe school walkouts are morally and politically justifiable.
Climate Change Is Scary—Not the Green New Deal
By Bill McKibben, YES! magazine
It’s very clear that conservatives have one plan for dealing with the popularity of the Green New Deal: scaring the hell out of people. And it’s very clear that they have one big problem: The hell they’re building through inaction is a lot scarier than “upgrading all existing buildings.”
The Meaning of the Green New Deal
By Philippe Gauthier, Resilience.org
Before discussing the content of the Green New Deal, and in particular the environmental measures it proposes, it is important to understand the aims of the document, which is primarily a political manifesto.
Q&A with Erin Gautsche of West Philly Tool Library
By Paige Wolf, Shareable
The West Philly Tool Library was founded in 2007 to help make home repairs and maintenance more accessible and affordable for local residents. The library offers more than 4,000 tools to its more than 2,600 members, who pay for membership on a sliding scale.
Dreams of Sheep at Shepherd’s Dream
By Heather Fordham, Fibershed
A few miles south and across the California border, I had just seen raw, local wool being carded and made into batting at Woolgatherer Carding Mill, then stuffed and hand sewn into mattresses, toppers and pillows to be sold by Shepherd’s Dream.
Foods from the Holy Land
By Megan Perry, Sustainable Food Trust
From the back streets of Jerusalem to the markets of Nablus we take a journey through some of the most iconic foods, learning how they connect people, offering comfort and community and making tangible years of culture and history.
Love Beyond Borders
By Niki Seth-Smith, openDemocracy
With borders hardening around the world, more people than ever are taking on the slippery, often tortuous challenge of proving their relationships to the authorities, which often boils down to having their love recognised as legitimate by the state. I’m one of them, or fear I soon will be.
Succeeding Generations of Green— The Dean and AOC
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
John Dingell has had a hand—a hugely constructive hand—in nearly every major advance in social policy over the past five-plus decades, including civil and voting rights, health, and the environment.
Clodagh Harris on How Citizens’ Assemblies Rekindle the Imagination
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
Citizens Assemblies are a powerful tool for hearing the thoughts of a population without the filter of political interference, lack of understanding, and the polarity that has been driven by social media and surveillance capitalism. But what are they, and how might Citizens Assemblies be a vital tool for creating the spaces that allow imagination back into our public life?
A Looming Deadline for the Right to Ramble
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
For centuries, ordinary Brits have enjoyed a legal “right to ramble” throughout the countryside even when they might cross someone’s private property. In England and Wales alone, there are an estimated 140,000 miles of footpaths and bridlepaths that are considered public rights of way. Now, as reported by the website Boing Boing, the full scope of this right -- and access to a vast network of paths -- is in question.
Offshore Finance: How Capital Rules the World
By Reijer Hendrikse, Rodrigo Fernandez, Transnational Institute
This essay focuses on the murky financial realm known as offshore finance. It shows that offshore finance is not solely about capital moving beyond the reach of states, but involves the rampant unbundling and commercialisation of state sovereignty itself.
The Win to Stop the Rocky Hill Coalmine Happened in the Right Place and Just in Time
By Elaine Johnson, The Guardian blog
The chief judge of an Australian court of superior jurisdiction has, for the first time, found that a coalmine ought to be refused for its impact on climate change. And the decision comes just in time.
Joel Salatin — The “Lunatic” Farmer
By Alan Wartes, Think Radio
Joel Salatin is an internationally known author, farmer and advocate for what he calls “emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture.”
Juliana v. US: Plaintiffs Ask the Appeals Court to Enjoin the Federal Government
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
In lay terms, the plaintiffs are pushing back on the government’s continued efforts to prevent the case from going to trial. The Administration’s strategy these days is to go around trial and appellate court rulings by directly seeking relief from an increasingly conservative Supreme Court.
Growing a Green New Deal: Agriculture’s Role in Economic Justice and Ecological Sustainability
By Fred Iutzi, Robert Jensen, Resilience.org
We focus here on two proposals for a Green New Deal that are politically viable today but also point us toward the deeper long-term change needed: (1) job training that could help repopulate the countryside and change how farmers work, and (2) research on perennial grain crops that could change how we farm.
A Green New Deal Is the First Step Toward an Eco-Revolution
By John Bellamy Foster, Vaios Triantafyllou, TruthOut
Capitalism is not just a system, it is a system of social relations and socio-metabolic processes, and we have to change many of those relations and processes radically from within and very quickly in order to deal with the current ecological emergency.
Climate Change is Killing off Earth’s Little Creatures
By Bill Laurance, The Conversation
The bottom line is: we’re changing our world in many different ways at once. And the myriad little creatures that play so many critical roles in the fabric of life are struggling to survive the onslaught.
Are Investors Finally Waking up to North America’s Fracked Gas Crisis?
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
Enabled by rising debt, shale companies have been achieving record fracked oil and gas production, while promising investors a big future payoff. But over a decade into the “fracking miracle,” investors are showing signs they're worried that payoff will never come — and as a result, loans are drying up.
What a Saami-Led Project in Arctic Finland can Teach us about Indigenous Science
By Ellis Quinn, Eyes on the Arctic
A successful Saami-led, salmon rewilding project on the Näätämö river in Arctic Finland illustrates the success of partnership between Indigenous knowledge and western science on environmental questions, say the authors of a recent paper, but outdated perceptions and prejudices means these kinds of partnerships elsewhere still too often fail.
I’m Sorry for Your Loss
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
Finance, Fossil Fuels, and Climate Change
By Mark Hudson, Katelyn Friesen, Transnational Institute
In order to understand power, we have to look not just to the fields of extraction and their ruined landscapes, nor only at the immediate effects on water, air, wildlife, and the nearby communities that rely on all three. We also have to look up and down the commodity chain. Attention is currently fixed downstream, at the politics and power manifesting in decisions about who and what is expendable in order to get the bitumen to market.
Green New Deal — An Ecosocialist Study Guide
By Ted Franklin, System Change not Climate Change
I prepared this study guide for the Ecosocialist Reading Group of East Bay Democratic Socialists of America. These are some of the key readings for anyone who wants to understand the ecoleft's take on the Green New Deal.
Food Liberation Inspires People-Centered Food Policy
By Wayne Roberts, Medium
In both the commercial and health professional viewpoints, the social, emotional, environmental, economic and empowerment dimensions of food relationships are pushed aside.
Peak Oil Review 11 February 2019
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Oil prices have moved very little in the past month closing on Friday at $52.72 in NY and $62.10 in London or about where they were in the first week of January.
The Sower’s Strategy: Norway Leads the Way Toward the Energy Transition
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
I gave the name of "The Sower's Strategy" or "The Sower's Way" to the idea that we should use our remaining fossil resources to build the renewable energy infrastructure needed to replace them.
Presenting Cap and Share to a Citizens’ Assembly in the Scottish Parliament
By Justin Kenrick, Feasta
The big change since the days of Richard Douthwaite and the 2012 publication of Sharing for Survival is that we now have zero faith in an international order being able to bring this about. Hence my presentation was focused on the need for Scotland to enact Cap and Share and show the way, rather than wait for a global agreement.
The Green New Deal is Here, and Everyone has Something to Say About it
By Justine Calma, Grist
Early indications are the plan has managed to thread the needle and get a lot of folks in the environmental movement on board — even those who might have been wary about what the proposal would entail.
Is a key ingredient humans need to live about to run short?
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Phosphorus is a key ingredient in modern fertilizers and essential for all living organisms. Will we have enough to feed the world in the decades to come?
Degrowth and Transformation: a Reflection
By Christos Zografos, Degrowth.de
In my case, I have been asking myself and my students whether direct democracy is the best political vehicle for advancing towards a radical socio-ecological transformation such as degrowth.
Aboriginal Foodways: Towards a Return of Native Food in Australia
By Anne-Marie Szabo, Sustainable Food Trust
There is growing recognition of the value of Australia’s native produce and a need to capture what knowledge there still is of Indigenous land management practices and the cultivation and preparation of many of these foods, before it disappears entirely.
What’s Missing from the Green New Deal
By Daniel Herriges, Strong Towns
But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography—where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places—is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else.
Managing Planetary Collapse
By Joe Brewer, Medium
Last week, I gave a five day workshop on “Managing Planetary Collapse” at a retreat center in northern Costa Rica. The participants came together to earnestly grapple with the converging crises that define these times — while learning how to be more hopeful and impactful with insights about how the current predicament came into being.
Juliana v. US: For Children of All Ages-The Last Hurrah?
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
The now older, wiser, and even more motivated Juliana plaintiffs have already taken their case to the court of public opinion where it will continue to be joined by millions more climate defenders. The fight for climate justice has only just begun.