Tiny Houses Alone Can’t Solve the Housing Crisis. But Here’s What Can
By Chris Winters, YES! magazine
In choosing to live in community—sharing not just a house, but their lives with each other—they’ve defined a new American Dream. They hope others will follow their model, if not by making the same choice, then by being willing to look beyond traditional boundaries.
Western Grid Regionalization
By Chris Nelder, Energy Transition Show
California and 12 other US states, plus parts of Canada and Mexico, are considering whether to expand the California wholesale grid and balancing area to include the entire region, in order to increase the flow of reliable, affordable, and renewable power across the West.
Paris is Building the Eco-Community of the Future Right Now. Here’s How.
By Susannah Shmurak, Ensia
With the development of Clichy-Batignolles, the city of Paris has created a groundbreaking eco-village filled with such buildings. Begun in 2002, the massive redevelopment project is about 30 percent complete and is slated to be finished in 2020.
Relocalising the Food Chain: Why it Matters and How to Do it
By Jane Powell, Sustainable Food Trust
One of the greatest benefits of local food is that it enables the public to form a new relationship with the people who grow and process their food. We can meet the producers and ask questions. What chemicals are they using? Do their animals look well cared for? Are they a good employer? Do they contribute to their community?
Dreaming of the School Birthed in Flames
By Joe Brewer, Medium.com
I am dreaming of the school birthed in flames. The work that I do has no place in current universities. It is too holistic, too integrative, and too practically oriented toward the real world.
Kings of the Yukon: a Travel Story as Deep and Wide as the Great River
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
As a travel tale the book is first-rate. But Weymouth’s keen interest in the Chinook – aka King – Salmon, and his listening skills when he meets dozens of river-dwellers whose cultures have been shaped by the migrations of this fish, combine to fascinating, awe-inspiring, and often heart-breaking effect.
Grains of Truth and Falsehood About Grain, Bean, and Veggie Storage
By Wayne Roberts, Medium.com
New disaster planning standards for a newly urbanized, wired, hyper-complex and vulnerable world mean that food storage needs to be reevaluated and re-appreciated in light of global considerations that were not considered back in the 1990s, when the need for public control of food storage was poo-poohed.
The Choice of a Canon
By John Michael Greer, Ecosophia
Having a list of books that everyone more or less agrees that young people should read in school doesn’t just provide a common ground of ideas that fosters communication; it doesn’t just help budding readers find really good books to read; it also teaches them how to think.
P2P: A New Cycle of Post-Civilisational Development
By Michel Bauwens, Rajani Kanth, Commons Transition
Peer to peer is a relational dynamic which allows every individual to connect ‘permissionlessly’ to any other individual. You could call it ‘networking freedom’ if you like.
A 100% Renewable Grid isn’t just Feasible, it’s Already Happening
By Joe Romm, Climate Progress
The ongoing debate around whether it’s feasible to have an electric grid running on 100 percent renewable power in the coming decades often misses a key point: many countries and regions are already at or close to 100 percent now.
Environmental Law Cases: Ruling the Far-Right Out of Order
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Today I am writing about an organization—the Government Accountability and Oversight (GAO) group—determined to diminish the public’s confidence in the overwhelming consensus of the science community about the causes and consequences of climate change and the rule of law.
Systems Thinking, Critical Thinking, and Personal Resilience
By Richard Heinberg, Resilience.org
In discussing climate change and all our other eco-social predicaments, how does one distinguish accurate information from statements intended to elicit either false hope or needless capitulation to immediate and utter doom? And, in cases where pessimistic outlooks do seem securely rooted in evidence, how does one psychologically come to terms with the information?
Fight Hunger and Grow Food with America’s Grow-a-Row
By Alaina Spencer, Food Tank
America’s Grow-a-Row works to positively improve the lives of people in the Northeast United States by planting, harvesting, rescuing, and delivering fresh produce to those in need, free of charge.
Reordering The Anthropocene
By Matt Hern, Am Johal, Red Pepper
Reaching past narrow definitions of exploitation to consider the other-than-human world allows us to speak of domination more broadly. It opens us up to what nonexploitative, nondominating relationships might require politically, but it also demands alternatives.
Literacy, Women Empowerment and Sustainable Development
By Alka Srivastava, Alternative Perspectives
A transformative approach to the empowerment of women needs to be developed, particularly in relation to the social equality paradigm.
The Moral Revolution America Needs
By Jessicah Pierre, Inequality.org
Thousands of civil rights advocates, low-wage workers, and religious leaders kicked off massive protests on May 14, launching a 40-day campaign across the nation in an effort to revive Martin Luther King’s Poor People’s Campaign.
These Community Groups are Transforming Rio de Janeiro into a Sharing City
By Shanna Hanbury, Shareable
Rio de Janeiro is a city of extremes. Inequality is rampant, and while a small elite enjoy the "luxury" of housing, high quality education, and concentrated public funding, the majority of its citizens share the rest. The best examples of sharing are born not out of excess but from scarcity and collective problem solving.
Sustainability is not Enough: We Need Regenerative Cultures
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Insurge Intelligence
A regenerative human culture is healthy, resilient and adaptable; it cares for the planet and it cares for life in the awareness that this is the most effective way to create a thriving future for all of humanity.
Analysis: How ‘Natural Climate Solutions’ Can Reduce the Need for BECCS
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
Criticism of model reliance on BECCS has led researchers to examine the potential of “natural climate solutions” (NCS) to remove CO2 in the atmosphere through reforestation, land-use change and other ecosystem-based approaches.
This Federal Policy Enabled the Fracking Industry’s $280 Billion Loss
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
Most people probably aren’t familiar with the acronym ZIRP. It stands for zero interest rate policy and is the policy that unintentionally created the American fracking bubble — just one of its many consequences. And while most people may not know much (if anything) about ZIRP or the Federal Reserve (Fed), it is likely that they are aware of the impact this policy has on their own lives.
Maggie Jackson on ‘Distracted’ and the Fragmentation of Attention
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
To understand the problems of our day, I realized that I needed to understand how our attention was being fragmented, pulled and pushed by technology’s forces. Attention became the lens through which I began to understand technology.
Community-Supported Agriculture
By Brian Kaller, Restoring Mayberry
We think of innovations in cars or computers, but rarely of innovations in farming and food. Yet a new type of farm has caught on rapidly in recent years, in both America and Europe – Community-Supported Agriculture, or CSA.
Medusa’s Curse: The Necessity of Art in the Climate Struggle
By Kathleen Dean Moore, Resilience.org
Because I am a literary writer, writing about climate justice, people often ask me, What is the importance of the arts in the climate struggle? I turn to Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth century German philosopher. “We have art in order not to die of the truth,” he wrote.
A Jobless Economy
By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab
Despite the legitimate concerns surrounding a guaranteed income, there is at least one self-evident ethical reason a guaranteed, non-labor income of no less than equivalent to a living wage (today about $15 per hour) should pay every American: most today suffer a state of forced labor.
The Efficiency Myth
By Nick Dowson, New Internationalist
The private sector is held up as better, more efficient, the way to modernize… Yet worldwide, hundreds of services are being brought back into public ownership, which suggests that people aren’t buying the hype around greater private sector efficiency.
Talkin’ bout a Revolution: a Response to the Breakthrough Institute
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
The Breakthrough Institute have published a response to my critical commentary on a recent post of theirs. Here I continue the debate, because I think it might clarify some worthwhile issues. I
Peak Oil Review 21 May 2018
By Tom Whipple, ASPO - USA
Brent crude traded briefly at $80.18 a barrel on Thursday before slipping back to close the week at $78.51. This was the highest that London oil futures have traded since November 2014. New York futures closed the week at $71.28 which is more than $7 a barrel lower than London giving another push to US crude exports.
Bitcoin’s Energy Use got Studied, and you Libertarian Nerds look even Worse than Usual
By Eric Holthaus, Grist
It’s a telling social phenomenon of late capitalism that we are willing to construct elaborate computer networks to conduct secure transactions with each other — and in the process torpedoing our hopes at a clean energy future.
Smoking by any other Name
By Sean Di Lizio, Resilience.org
In the face of ever-worsening climate change[1], constant updates from the media on how quickly the Arctic is melting[2], and an utter failure of our society to mitigate greenhouse-gas emissions (rather, we’re still increasing them[3), why do we continue to fly when few other activities in our lives create more emissions?
Climate Justice and the Kinder Morgan Pipeline: Is this the next Standing Rock?
By Theo LeQuesne, Climate Justice Project
The next Standing Rock probably won’t look like Standing Rock, it will have learned and adapted from Standing Rock successes and failures and will be contextualized in a different political landscape. If May 31st does not resolve the conflict, I think that’s what we might be about to see here in Coast Salish Territory.
Genes, synecdoche and the possibility of editing ourselves
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Writers have previously imagined the dangers of such a moment, but now the democratization of genetic engineering is at hand. The dangers stem in part from our not understanding that we are mistaking a part for the whole. Humans are not just their genes.
Down the Memory Hole: Trump’s Strategic Assault on Democracy, Word by Word
By Karen Greenberg, TomDispatch
Perhaps instead of hurling insults at President Trump’s incompetence and the seeming disarray of his presidency, it might be worth taking a step back and asking ourselves whether there is indeed a larger goal in mind: namely, a slow, patient, incremental dismantling of democracy, beginning with its most precious words.
Yes, Neoliberalism is a Thing. Don’t Let Economists Tell you Otherwise
By Christine Berry, Open Democracy
Just as Thatcher asserted there was ‘no such thing as society’, it’s common to find economics commentators asserting that there is ‘no such thing as neoliberalism’ – that it’s simply a meaningless insult bandied about by the left, devoid of analytical content.
Interdisciplinarity and Social Ecological Systems
By Sanchayan Nath, Solutions Journal
If we are to understand how social-ecological resource systems can be better governed, we need to come out of our narrow academic cubicles and interact with other scholars who may themselves be confined in equally narrow academic cubicles.
This Island Life
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
Ours is a particular kind of small farm. It’s been called diverse, traditional, insignificant, wonderful, productive, inefficient, and a subdivision waiting to happen. We call it home, of course.
Ditch the Batteries: Off-Grid Compressed Air Energy Storage
By Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine
Going off-grid? Think twice before you invest in a battery system. Compressed air energy storage is the sustainable and resilient alternative to batteries, with much longer life expectancy, lower life cycle costs, technical simplicity, and low maintenance.
Steven Pinker’s Ideas About Progress Are Fatally Flawed. These Eight Graphs Show Why.
By Jeremy Lent, Patterns of Meaning
It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.
Do the Global Poor Care about Climate Change?
By Tegan Tallulah, The Climate Lemon
Looking into this has made me even more convinced that tackling global poverty has to be done in tandem with tackling climate change. They are intricately connected. I think it’s important that we remember climate change is a historical injustice: the poorest countries suffer the worst impacts yet have done least to cause it and have the least capacity to address it.
Rail Lines, not Pipelines: The Past, Present, and Future of Canadian Passenger Rail
By Darrin Qualman, Darrin Qualman blog
Maybe we can build thousands of kms of passenger rail lines and thousands of kms of pipelines. But given the gravity and menace of the climate crisis and given the rapidly approaching deadlines to meet our emission-reduction commitments, it isn’t hard to see which should be our priority.
Farming and Food for the Soul
By Trina Moyles, YES! magazine
I feel very blessed to be a Cuban woman, a farmer, and a teacher. I wake up early, I spend all day on the farm, working hard, managing the workers, planting, harvesting, selling, teaching—I do all of this out of love for my work. My work is my life.
The Pitfalls of Generational Thinking
By Jonathan White, Open Democracy
Generationalism risks obscuring the diversity of experiences, ideas and interests that characterise human society at any given moment. By locating the lines of conflict and solidarity on a cross-temporal plane, some important divisions—between rich and poor countries, different class groups, and rival views of the market, state and the economics of growth—are rendered less visible in the present.
The Taste of Another’s Thoughts
By John Michael Greer, Ecosophia
We need unapproved thoughts just now. The approved thoughts, the right answers, the canned responses and parroted arguments are the things that have landed us in our present predicament.