World’s Richest Must Radically Change Lifestyles to Prevent Global Catastrophe
By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
We speak with Kevin Anderson, professor in climate change leadership at Uppsala University’s Centre for Environment and Development Studies, and 15-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg about the drastic action needed to fight climate change and the impact of President Trump on climate change activism.
Building Post-Capitalist Futures
By Paige Shipman, Nick Buxton, Transnational Institute
Over several sunny days in June 2018, a diverse group of 60 activists and researchers from 30 countries convened for a multi-day meeting to discuss the collective building of post-capitalist futures. The meeting provided the opportunity for a rich exchange of perspectives and experiences, as well as deep discussion and debate.
Indigenous Gardens Boost Food Sovereignty in Canada
By Julie Mollins, Food Tank
Indigenous communities in the remote northern portion of Canada’s province of Ontario are expanding efforts to mitigate the impact of high food costs and a general lack of available nutritious fruit and vegetables in supermarkets by increasing crop production.
The Demise of the Official Future
By Richard Eckersley, Resilience.org
I have long argued that people’s concerns about modern life and the future have been poorly reflected in politics, and it is this that lies behind the unease and disenchantment in the electorate, not just the conduct of politicians and the merits of specific policies.
Keeping Some of the Lights On: Redefining Energy Security
By Kris De Decker, Low-tech Magazine
What does it mean for a society to have “energy security”? Although there are more than forty different definitions of the concept, they all share the fundamental idea that energy supply should always meet energy demand.
The Sequel: Life after Economic Growth
By Shaun Chamberlin, Tikkun
Our globalised world finds itself caught on the horns of a seemingly impossible dilemma – either cease growing, and so collapse the economy on which we all depend, or continue to grow until we overwhelm and destroy the ecosystems on which we all depend.
Carbon Civilisation and the Energy Descent Future
By Samuel Alexander, Joshua Floyd, Resilience.org
Our goal presently is to broaden the discourse on energy futures. If we cannot always provide comprehensive answers in the space available, we hope at least to provoke thought about new questions, with the aim of unsettling some assumptions about energy futures presently held with undue confidence.
Feeding the Melting Pot: Inclusive Sustainable Diets in the Multi-Ethnic City
What could inclusiveness look like in providing sustainable diets to a multicultural population? This question drives my current research, in which I study Syrian migrants in the Netherlands.
A Price Tag on the American Dream
By Gracy Olmstead, The American Conservative
This is a book about what it means to be poor. It is a book about what it means to be rural. And it is a book about what it means to be a woman. All three of those things, together, could have meant a very different life for Smarsh.
Trump – the Climate’s Secret Champion?
By Kevin Anderson, Kevin Anderson blog
Cut away the economic niceties and the social cost of carbon is little more than an attempt by a particular hue of economists to put a price on the global scale impacts of climate change from now, throughout this century, and on across centuries to come.
Can China Save the Planet?: Review
By Craig K. Comstock, Resilience.org
A current book asks Will China Save the Plamet? The author, Barbara Finamore, served as the China representative of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Her story gives first-hand material less for answering this question than for showing how a big country can move from defensive nationalism to global leadership in starting the transition to a green economy.
The Clean Green Pipeline Machine – a Free-Market Fairy Tale
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
Fossil fuel interests and their allied governments attend international climate conferences singing of a glorious future of clean growth – but behind the scenes they work to ensure that no binding commitments are made to reduce carbon emissions. According to Donald Gutstein’s new book The Big Stall, the corporate takeover of international climate negotiations goes back nearly 30 years.
Brexit: Stage One in Europe’s Slow-Burn Energy Collapse
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
The energy turning point is unequivocal. In the years preceding the historic Brexit referendum, and the marked resurgence of nationalist, populist and far-right movements across Europe, the entire continent has faced a quietly brewing energy crisis.
Legacies Crucial for the Commons
By Ashish Kothari, The Hindu
And so we must turn for hope to the many movements of sangharsh (resistance) and nirman (construction) throughout the world. These movements realise that the injustices they are facing, and the choices they must make, are not bound by the divides that ideologues play games with.
Strengthening a Transformative Agroecology Learning Approach in Europe: Four Pillars
By Colin Anderson, Agroecology Now!
Is there something distinctive about an agroecological approach to training and learning? How is learning a part of the struggle for food sovereignty, or other social movements for social justice and sustainability? What examples are there of this in Europe? And how can these projects be supported and developed?
Regenerative Hubs in Costa Rica
By Joe Brewer, Medium.com
The world’s first bioregional-scale regenerative hubs were launched in July of this year. A gathering of experts from more than 20 organizations gathered at the eco-tourism retreat center of Rancho Margot in the high mountain rainforests of northern Costa Rica.
Regina Lopez-Whiteskunk — Native land, Native Sovereignty
By Alan Wartes, Think Radio
Regina is council-woman of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. She and host Alan Wartes spoke about her work with the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition fighting for the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah — and why it means so much for her tribe and for her personally.
Big Oil and Gas Nations Sideline the Science at Katowice, Even as Emissions Rise and Warming Accelerates
By David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Just as four big oil and gas producers block the UN climate policymaking conference in Katowice, Poland from welcoming a report on the science of the 1.5 degree Celsius (°C) target which it had commissioned three years earlier in Paris, new evidence has emerged of the striking contradiction between word and deed at COP24.
Agriculture as Wrong Turn
By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, Macska Moksha Press
But wasn’t life before farming miserable? Notoriously “nasty, brutish and short?” Weren’t hunters and gatherers always on the edge of starvation, constantly focused on survival, and never able to enjoy free time? According to experts who study history: No.
Introduction to the Economic Design Dimension of Gaia Education’s Online Course in ‘Design for Sustainability’
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium.com
This is an online course on living well within our means. The pun here is intentional. For, what we are exploring in this course is not just ways of reducing our consumption to levels that enable natural systems to self-regenerate, but that we do so in ways that permit a high quality of life — that we live within our means and that we live well.
Peak Oil Review: 10 December 2018
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Oil prices surged briefly on Friday after the announcement of a 1.2 million b/d OPEC+ production cut; however, by the close NY futures were up only $1.61 to close at $52.61, and London was up about the same to close at $61.67.
War of Words
By Kate Yoder, Grist
Coming from a pacifist background, and obsessed with linguistics, I’ve grown uneasy with the way war shapes our words. The thought struck me earlier this year: By pitting one group against another, do war metaphors undermine our ability to address the complex problem of climate change, the biggest global crisis we face?
Unwinding Democracy: What It Means for Climate Change
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Democracy survives by the consent of the governed. It requires rules that are fair, just and followed—by everyone. Should the three branches ever become one, democracy will be lost.
Uber, Moore’s Law and the limits of the technofix
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Uber is being hailed as a revolutionary tech company that is modernizing city transport. In fact, the failure of Uber to generate profits shows that it is not a tech company at all and that, notwithstanding our worship of all that is tech, some problems are not amenable to a technofix.
Yet Another Benefit of Renewable Energy: It Uses Practically No Water Compared to Fossil Fuels
By Justin Mikulka, DeSmog Blog
The Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently highlighted a little-discussed benefit of using renewables like wind and solar to produce electricity: Unlike most power sources, they require “almost no water.”
Green New Deal: A Bold Vision for America’s Future
By Tegan Tallulah, The Climate Lemon
On Tuesday 13th November 2018, a group of young climate activists descended on the office of Nancy Palosi, expected to lead the Democrats in the US Congress. They were demanding that she set up a special committee to create a proper climate action plan for the country – a Green New Deal.
‘Fearless’ Amsterdam Government: Digital City goes Social
By Socrates Schouten, WAAG
Firstly, the city’s digital plans begin with instating a Digital City Agenda, setting out Amsterdam’s vision on cyber security, data sovereignty, digital participation and digital services, complex topics that cannot be solved overnight.
Gandhi is Still Relevant – and Can Inspire a New Form of Politics Today
By Tom Shillam, The Conversation
Seventy years after Gandhi’s assassination on the streets of New Delhi, Ramachandra Guha’s new book, Gandhi: The Years That Changed the World, 1914-48, reopens a familiar debate around his legacy. What was Gandhi’s message? What were his politics? What can we learn from him today? And is he still relevant?
Bringing Agroecology into the UK Agriculture Bill
By Colin Anderson, Iain MacKinnon, Agroecology Now!
Agroecological approaches to agriculture improve rural livelihoods, regenerate ecologies and increase the resiliency of communities, while providing healthy and sustainable food.
Ruth Sapsed on Cambridge Curiosity and Imagination
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
We’ll talk about children leading. That doesn’t mean that we don’t do anything. That means that we’re trying to listen to what they are interested in and come alongside them with those interests.
Protest in Paris: End of the World versus End of the Month
By Danica Jorden, Open Democracy
Automobile exhaust is an important contributor to air pollution, but this fuel tax inordinately hits people of moderate to low income who are already using as little gas as possible, cannot afford to live closer to where they need to go or buy a new, fuel-efficient car.
Money: the Silent Killer
By Caroline Whyte, Feasta
An obvious solution to this quandary is to replace electronic private-bank-issued money with something else. Despite a long historical connection between money and private debt, private-debt-free money is eminently possible.
Unlike a Globalized Food System, Local Food Won’t Destroy the Environment
By Helena Norberg-Hodge, Local Futures
The solution to these problems involves more than a commitment to ecological models of food production: it also requires a commitment to local food economies.
Analysis: Fossil-fuel Emissions in 2018 Increasing at Fastest Rate for Seven Years
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
Hopes that global CO2 emissions might be nearing a peak have been dashed by preliminary data showing that output from fossil fuels and industry will grow by around 2.7% in 2018, the largest increase in seven years.
COP24: Climate Protesters Must Get Radical and Challenge Economic Growth
By Christine Corlet Walker, The Conversation
At COP24 environmental movements have an opportunity to use their platform to highlight the relationship between economic growth and environmental impact, and even to discuss radical alternative futures that are not dependent on a growth-based economy.
10 Stories of Transition in the US: Justice and Diversity in Transition
By Steve McAllister, Transition US
Instead, we must learn to check our privilege, reach out beyond the usual suspects, and build more diverse coalitions, based on trust, mutual benefit, and common cause. In this way, our Transition Movement will become, more and more, a “just transition.”
Waste Not, Want Not
By Jonathan Bloom, Grist
As the only school employee in the country whose sole responsibility is fighting food waste, Deming has transformed the Oakland Unified School District — and somewhat reluctantly herself — into a national leader.
Ocasio-Cortez Wants to Unite Generations of Climate Action Efforts under the Green New Deal
By Mark Hand, Climate Progress
From the election of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) to the rise of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, young Americans are injecting a strong dose of energy into the climate and environmental movements.
Thoughts on the Future of World Oil Production
By Jean Laherrère, Resilience.org
Nature is complex and human behavior is irrational; only the past explains the future. Matthieu Auzanneau’s book Oil, Power, and War: A Dark History, helps us understand the oil industry’s past, which in turn helps us envision the future of not only petroleum, but also the global industrial economy.
Stability without Growth: Keynes in an Age of Climate Breakdown
By Jason Hickel, Center for Economic and Policy Research
People realize that our growth-addicted economy is driving us into disaster, and they are eager for an alternative. Whatever political movement can speak truthfully to that deep-felt concern and offer real hope — not just green-growth fantasies — will be able to command incredible popular support.
Society As Platform — A New Frontier in Complexity Science
By Joe Brewer, Medium
Our evolved history as a species has not prepared us for what is happening now. It is time to start seeing culture as a complex system that evolves according to Darwinian principles.
Human and Planetary Health: Ecosystem Restoration at the Dawn of the Century of Regeneration
By Daniel Christian Wahl, Medium
We are facing a knife’s edge, between a future that is abundant of collaboration with [more than human] nature, or decades of decline and unspeakable, unthinkable situations that we want to avoid. The way to start navigating the path towards the positive is to be in love with life and each other every day a little bit more.