Transition as Wildfire Adaptation in California
By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
We are fortunate to have Michael Wara as our guest in this episode—a bona fide expert on the subject who is a member of the state-appointed wildfire commission in California—to help us think through this complex web of issues and understand how to start plotting a new path into the future.
“It Begins with Respect”
By Jeff Conant, Miguel Sánchez Álvarez, Pedro Hernàndez Luna, Intercontinental Cry
As sumak causay was brought to the awareness of the non-indigenous by Andean social movements a few years ago, now in Chiapas a generation of Indigenous scholars is bringing to light – theorizing, they would say – the local understanding of buen vivir: a concept articulated in Tseltal and Tsotsil as el lek’il kuxlejal.
What County Farms Can Do For Us
By Victoria Balfour, Sustainable Food Trust
“If people are serious about producing good, sustainable and healthy food with high animal welfare and environmental standards, whilst looking after rural communities, county farms have an important role to play.”
Studying Capitalist Dystopias, and Avenues for Change
By David Bailey, Angela Wigger, Open Democracy
We live in dystopian times. The crisis of global capitalism is revealing itself in the most uncompromising fashion. Quantitative easing – the one ‘solution’ to the last crisis – has only re-inflated the global financial bubble, and created the prospect for the next impending crisis to be greater than witnessed heretofore.
What We Can Learn from the Labor Movement
By Aaron Vansintjan, Great Transition Initiative
In general, the power of the elite cannot be confronted by timidly asking or jumping to compromises. It can only be confronted by hampering the source of their power in the first place: the ability to make a profit.
The Amazon Is Dying and Bolsonaro Is Fanning the Flames
By Dahr Jamail, TruthOut
And now, the Amazon is on fire. Wildfires are incinerating the rainforest at a record pace, according to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE as it is commonly referenced). INPE recently stated that there has been an 80 percent increase in wildfires in the Amazon, compared to the same period from last year.
Why was the Blackout Used to Attack Renewables? Because Some Media Still Have an Anti-Climate Action Agenda
By Mike Small, DeSmog Blog
England recently experienced its most severe blackout in more than a decade, leading to a cacophony of calls from the usual suspects to scrap windfarms and abandon plans to turn the country’s electricity supply from brown to green.
TyT Field Dispatches: ‘I Remember When All This was Bare Earth’
By Chris Maughan, People's Knowledge
One standout issue this time was how much joy I felt (and others appeared to feel) on being in the field, gathering on the farm, and (especially) being in the field that had greater diversity. All this is missing from our results. The conventional measures we use aren’t particularly good at reflecting the process of research, which – in citizen science at least – is arguably so much more important than ‘results’.
Resist Locally, Renew Globally
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Great Transition Initiative
As the fault lines in the global economy continue to grow, and the desire for genuine human connection becomes ever more keenly felt, these existing initiatives will provide direction as well as inspiration, and stand as a compelling alternative to the faux-localist path of violence, fear, and hate.
Living in Two Worlds: Capitalism Pretends All Is Well While the World Is Burning
By Dahr Jamail, Barbara Cecil, TruthOut
Those of us who are lucky enough to be living somewhere in the world where there is enough food to eat, water to drink, and security for us and our loved ones, are living in a bubble.
Access to Land is a Barrier to Simpler, Sustainable Living. Public Housing could Offer a Way Forward
By Alex Bauman, Samuel Alexander, The Conversation
There is a very powerful reason we are currently unable to move toward a simpler and sustainable society: the costs of securing access to land for housing often mean only the relatively affluent can afford such “green lifestyles”. In response to this problem, we offer some ideas to show how public land could be used for sustainable forms of community-led development.
Sea Change
By Charlotte Du Cann, Charlotte Du Cann blog
What if we started again here, by the sea, where the memory of our physical happiness comes to us on a summer’s day? I always thought ground state meant you needed to have your feet planted on terra firma – but what if it means being at home in another state entirely? Something more shifting and fluid. A state where we can remember our creaturehood, our place in the pod, the feeling we are beloved by the life that surrounds and holds us, its beauty and complexity?
Small Farms don’t Produce Most the of the Worlds’ Food – But they Could Produce All
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
The key message is that the potential of small farms for global food production is determined by economic conditions rather than biological, ecological or agronomic limitations.
Tools for the Awakening
By Aimee Lewis-Reau, LaUra Schmidt, Resilience.org
Take this leap. You are not alone. We are all in this together. Garnish support from and hold space for others. Let’s process, dream, and grow together. We need you now. There is no more time to waste.
As Climate Crisis Grows, Temperatures Set Global Records
By Ian Angus, Climate & Capitalism
The global land and ocean surface temperature departure from average for July 2019 was the highest for the month of July, making it the warmest month overall in the 140-year NOAA global temperature dataset record, which dates back to 1880.
Reclaiming the Commons through State Ownership? Maybe Not
By Milan Babic, Open Democracy
But how close is this form of transnational state capital to an idea of public or common ownership? Is state ownership really a viable alternative for a post-neoliberal, more inclusive and emancipatory global economy?
One Word—Plastics: Why the World Will be Slow to Abandon Natural Gas
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Petrochemicals are the 800-pound gorilla that many fail to account for in their climate defense plans. Termed a blind spot of the global energy system by the International Energy Agency (IEA) petrochemicals are a driving force behind the increasing demand for fossil fuels.
Two Arguments for Localism
By Richard Heinberg, Great Transition Initiative
Our current global society appears to be in the conservation phase of its adaptive cycle: it is at a peak of scale and integration. If the cyclical behavior of past societies is repeated in ours, recent trends toward globalization and urbanization will reach natural limits and be reversed.
In the Land of the Rising Sun, Climate Efforts are Falling Behind
By Imogen Malpus, Uneven Earth
Posing a defiant alternative to the Abe government and corporate sustainability, these protesters point to the only possible path forward: Japan must take responsibility for its historical emissions, and use its enormous wealth to help pull the planet back from the brink.
Time has Come to Nationalize the US Fossil Fuel Industry
By Carla Santos Skandier, ROAR Magazine
There are many ways in which such a nationalization effort could be implemented. It could follow the path adopted during World War II, when Congress enacted laws authorizing federal takeovers. But it could also take other pathways as seen in recent nationalization attempts, including the ones implemented in response to the Great Financial Recession.
An Everyday Tale of the Rural Economy
By Catherine Broomfield, Sustainable Food Trust
What we must not forget amid the reams of policy briefings and papers, is that rural economies are not an abstract concept, but a mosaic of real people, places and passions that drive creativity and entrepreneurship. Here are two such stories of the many remarkable everyday tales of rural economy folk.
Why I Say that this Civilisation is Finished
By Rupert Read, Extinction Rebellion
The stakes of course are very, very high, here, because the climate crisis and the broader ecological emergency of which it is only the most urgent part puts the whole of what we know as civilisation at risk. By ‘this civilisation’ I mean the hegemonic civilisation of globalised industrial growth capitalism— sometimes called ‘Empire’—which today governs the vast majority of human life on Earth.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light (23)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Although Trump is not single-handedly responsible for today’s pejorative politics, his reliance on invectives instead of facts has set a tone that others are willing to follow to the detriment of the nation.
Think Globally, Act Locally?
By Brian Tokar, Great Transition Initiative
The odds may be diminishing with each passing year of climate inaction, but it is more necessary than ever to sustain a hope that humanity can unite to reject authoritarian false solutions to the climate crisis and social inequities, embrace the potential for an enhanced quality of life beyond fossil-fueled capitalism, and begin to realize the dream of a liberated and truly interdependent global community of communities.
How Plans for New Coal are Changing Around the World
By Christine Shearer, Carbon Brief
Around the world, 12.7 gigawatts (GW) of new coal capacity has been proposed so far in 2019 – less than 3GW above the amount that has retired (10GW). These trends mean the global coal fleet will soon decline, because only a third of proposed capacity has actually been developed since 2010.
California Cotton Fields: a Renewed Opportunity for Rebuilding Soil
By Esha Chhabra, Fibershed
There is ample evidence that some level of cotton production could fit into an ecologically sensitive farming system, yet the future of this crop in our climate relies on re-building organic matter, carbon levels, and dynamic microbial communities in the soil where the cotton is grown.
Walk Agroecological Paths Toward Food Security
By Steven McFadden, Mother Earth News
Among the range of intelligent and possible responses to impending conditions is to take direct action to increase your household and community food security. There are hundreds of ways to do that, including directly supporting your local farms, farmers markets, food coops, food hubs, community gardens, and so forth.
How the ICDE is Working to Advance Platform Cooperativism: Q&A with Trebor Scholz
By Nithin Coca, Shareable
New entities are creating toolkits and models for start-up platform cooperatives to more easily tackle the existing legal, financial and technical barriers to entry in the digital economy.
What is Earth For?
By Courtney White, The Grass Canoe
How do we build resilience economically and ecologically for a rapidly changing world? How do we scale-up hopeful solutions to serious problems? How could we work together more collaboratively despite significant cultural and political differences? How were we going to confront a warming globe and slow down climate change?
Outsourcing Our Brains
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
There are many signs that in our use of electronic technology we’ve reached the point of damage in the physical realm. I contend that we are reaching that point in the intellectual realm, too – when to know something means to be able to type, click, skim, and forget.
Plastic, plastic everywhere
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
When we discard a plastic bag, an electronic device encased in plastic, a plastic pen emptied of its ink or any of the myriad plastic objects which populate our lives, we usually say we are throwing the object “away.” I put “away” in quotes because if there were ever any piece of evidence to convince us that there is no “away,” it is the discovery of tiny particles of plastic in the Arctic ice, deep oceans and high mountains.
22 States Sue the Trump Administration over its Climate ‘Plan’
By Rachel Ramirez, Grist
Twenty-two states and seven cities sued the Trump administration on Tuesday over the Environmental Protection Agency’s new plan for power plants. The lawsuit alleges that the so-called Affordable Clean Energy rule would accelerate the impacts of the climate crisis and impose health and safety risks on Americans.
Local Socialism and Civil Society
By Russell Arben Fox, In media res
Democratic socialism is, I think, at least potentially compatible with, and perhaps even capable of drawing strength from, the small towns and churches of U.S. society.
Iceland – Independent Economic Policy, Holding Finance Accountable and Experimenting with Local Democracy
By Rapid Transition Alliance Staff, Rapid Transition Alliance
Iceland’s economy had thrived on speculative finance but, after the meltdown, rather than making the public pay for the crisis, as the Nobel economist Paul Krugman points out, Iceland ‘let the banks go bust and actually expanded its social safety net’ and instead of placating financial markets, ‘imposed temporary controls on the movement of capital to give itself room to manoeuvre.’
Restoring Soil can Help Address Climate Change
By David R. Montgomery, The Conversation
I believe it’s time now for a global “soilshot” to heal the land. Rebuilding healthy fertile soil on the world’s agricultural lands would require fundamental changes to agriculture, and a new agricultural philosophy.
On Sacrifice
By Julia Steinberger, Open Democracy
Raising the spectre of sacrifice is the all the vogue in current climate denier and delayer circles: it is representative of our current moment in time. Having comprehensively been routed on the denial of science, the minions of fossil fuel lobbies have moved on to delay the onset and diminish the scope of action.
Practices for Eco-Grief
By Laura Johnson, Resilience.org
While the common tendency with ecological grief, as with most forms of pain, is to turn away in an effort to protect ourselves, if we understand grief and love as interwoven, then to turn away from grief is to turn away from love, to close and harden our hearts.
Mindfulness and Social Change
By Luke Wreford, Paula Haddock, Open Democracy
We don’t view mindfulness as a panacea that will cure the world’s ills. But socially-engaged mindfulness and mindful social action can contribute to addressing our individual and collective challenges.
Campesino Past, Biodynamic Future
By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanza Project
Our objective is that, for whatever reason, biodynamics can really become the new agriculture. The objective is to gradually permeate the fields, the soils and the minds of the farmers.
Teaching Energy Transition
By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
For our 100th episode, we thought we’d do a little something special: Interview professors from four US universities who are using the Energy Transition Show as coursework, and make the full show available to everyone, including non-subscribers.
Reforesting, Rewilding, and Re-thinking Civilization
By Marcus Ford, Resilience.org
The most hopeful and inspiring project of our time is rethinking civilization, reforesting the earth, and rewilding the planet. It is a single project and the most important one we can undertake.
Brexit and Long Wave Thinkings
By Andrew Curry, thenextwave
Although Turchin's piece is full of comparisons between the UK and the US, which he sees as fellow travellers, certainly when compared to France, there are significant differences between Trumpism and Brexit.