The Right-Wing Steamroller: First Trump in the US, then Bolsonaro in Brazil, now Salvini in Italy….. No, wait! Salvini was Defeated!!
By Ugo Bardi, Cassandra's legacy
Even if you don't follow Italian politics, the recent upset in the elections is significant. Italy's Berlusconi was the first of the right populists to win power, and now Italy seems to have developed an immunity toward their propaganda strategy: "The idea is to target the lowest cultural level of the population. Use scare tactics, find enemies of all sorts, demonize them, then promise safety in the hands of a right-wing government."
For-Profit Investments Are not ‘Development’
By Dan Carden, New Internationalist
The British government is ramping up its policy to divert taxpayers’ money into private hands – and away from the world’s poorest people, warns Labour’s Dan Carden. The UK-Africa Investment Summit will send a clear signal. The UK government’s aid policy will not be driven by evidence about how to best fight global poverty, but instead by naked free market ideology and the interests of British business.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light (41)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
The Trump administration has gone to great pains to purge Obama-era science advisers from federal advisory boards and replace them with their own. Trump’s scientists seem to have the integrity many of his administrative appointees, e.g., EPA Administrator Wheeler lack.
Peak Oil Review: 27th January 2020
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Brent crude closed at $60.56 on Friday, its biggest weekly decline in more than a year as concerns that the coronavirus will spread farther in China, curbing oil demand.
Apocalypse Fatigue, Selective Inattention, and Fatalism: The Psychology of Climate Change
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
Connie Barlow, a climate activist, writer, and film maker, dislikes the word “apathy” used to describe people’s response to climate change. She says, “I now bristle at that word. In my view, what looks like apathy, especially when it comes to climate disruption, is actually a variety of psychological protections.”
Carbon Gardening: A Natural Climate Solution that Can Help Reduce CO2 Emissions While Restoring Biodiversity
By Adrian Ayres Fisher, Ecological Gardening
Gardeners new to the concept of carbon gardening often ask these two questions: What good soil management strategies will help maximize carbon sequestration? And, what would be a good plant palette to help accomplish this? Good questions both, to which I wish I could give detailed, specific answers.
Owning your own information: How about a Constitutional Amendment?
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Everywhere the key to controlling others has become controlling information related to them, and that information now includes your movements, your purchases, your habits (at work and at home), your current whereabouts, and anything and everything you put on the internet about yourself. In addition, anything you choose to monitor using "smart" technology will have the providers of such technology looking over your shoulder as you do.
Dethroning King Coal – How a Once Dominant Fuel Source is Falling Rapidly from Favour
By Rapid Transition Alliance Staff, Rapid Transition Alliance
Electricity fuelled by coal is experiencing a record decline. 2019 is expected to show the biggest fall yet, after decades of increases. An accelerated move away from coal is imperative to achieve the goals of the Paris agreement. Coal currently accounts for 38.5% of the global power mix and generates 46% of global CO2 emissions.
To Feed or to Profit? To Eat or to Consume?
By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth
We can no longer let the distribution method - the market - dictate how we farm and how we eat. We need to develop new tools and institutions in order to cater for the many functions of food and farming. A process of decommodification should be at the core of the alternative food movement.
State of the Climate: How the World Warmed in 2019
By Zeke Hausfather, Carbon Brief
All of the official climate data for 2019 is now in. In this article, Carbon Brief explains why last year proved to be so remarkable across the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, cryosphere and surface temperature. A number of records for the Earth’s climate were set in 2019
Indigikitchen Is Bringing Native Food Sovereignty Online
By Katharine Walla, Food Tank
“Not only do Indigenous diets provide us with nutritionally balanced, seasonal local food, but they help us recognize the connection to our physical place in the world, as well as the wisdom of those who have come before,” says Mariah Gladstone (Blackfeet, Cherokee), founder of Indigikitchen. “This helps us care for ourselves, the land, and each other.”
Lending and Community Building at The Thingery
By Casey O'Brien, Shareable
Diplock sees a distinction between The Thingery and much of the recently monetized sharing economy, however, especially rental services. “The big line in the sand is, is accessibility and inclusivity a key part of the social purpose? Is that present in the business charter?”
What’s in a Name?
By Courtney White, Resilience.org
Words matter. Here’s what various dictionaries say about the word regenerate: to be formed or created again; to be renewed to a better, higher, or more worthy state; to be spiritually reborn; to generate or produce anew, especially after an injury; to restore to original strength or properties; to revive, reform, rekindle, rejuvenate, reconstruct, redeem, reawaken, or reanimate.
Can Reparations Help us to Re-envision International Development?
By Priya Lukka, Open Democracy
Reparations are important because they provide an alternative vision of what international development could be if these issues were properly taken into account. Although originally defined in terms of active amends to repair a wrong, debates around reparations have grown to include new ways of understanding contemporary problems.
Manifesto for the Future
By Sam J. Knights, Monkey Wrench
I do not look forward to the future like I used to. I do not sit and dream about the life I will lead or the things I will do. In fact, these days, I have to force myself to think about it. Dreaming is effort. Imagination is work. Hope is complicated.
Loss of a Small Abattoir and a Small Farm Future
By Chris Smaje, Sustainable Food Trust
To me, the more telling vandalism is in the gutting of local economies, wrought by the huge industrial abattoirs, markets, feedlots and all the other paraphernalia of modern large-scale farming which has been removed from public view. In the past, towns and cities usually grew up around working functions, as commercial or industrial centres.
Interview with Mark Burton of Steady State Manchester
By Marc Hudson, Mark H. Burton, Climate Emergency Manchester
For us, it is good to know what we are against, but if we are to fight for something better, then we really need an alternative vision. Our idea is to work with those that come on that. What comes out of it will depend on the level of interest, enthusiasm, creativity and commitment to do further work.
Too Much Combustion, Too Little Fire
By Kris De Decker, Low-Tech Magazine
The fire – which we have used in our homes for over 400,000 years – remains the most versatile and sustainable household technology that humanity has ever known. The fire alone provided what we now get through a combination of modern appliances such as the oven and cooking hob, heating system, lights, refrigerator, freezer, hot water boiler, tumble dryer, and television.
Quality not Quantity
By Simon Fairlie, The Land Magazine
Quality not quantity is what is needed: good husbandry, not the willy-nilly broadcasting of trees on random hectares. Good husbandry will come naturally when fossil fuels are eliminated, and artificial fertilisers a thing of the past, for it is then that people will fully appreciate the true value of land.
Letter from the Fire (well Smoke) Front
By Peter Bridgewater, Relational Thinking
We still have time to learn the lessons and get this right, but many strongly held beliefs (yes they are beliefs, not science) have to go out of the window, and we need much more science focus on this issue, rather than the ever burgeoning clamour for “saving” threatened species, which takes oxygen and energy for the real questions that need answers at landscape scale.
If Defending Life on Earth is Extremist, We must Own that Label
By George Monbiot, The Guardian blog
Police say climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion are a ‘threat’. They’d have done the same for the suffragettes and Martin Luther King It’s not an “error” or an “accident”, as the police now claim. It’s a pattern.
Weaving Hemp into the Northern California Fibershed
By Nicholas Wenner, Fibershed
Encouraged by the Federal legalization of hemp in 2018, Fibershed has continued research into the versatile crop this year, deepening understanding of the plant and the fiber, prototyping hemp textile production in Northern California, supporting agroecological trials, and charting a path forward for weaving hemp into the region.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light (40)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Impeachment continues to dominate the news in Washington. The Senate is in session and is currently debating the rules of engagement in the trial phase of Trump’s impeachment. It will be a while yet before the actual trial begins.
How We Reduced the Environmental Impact of (Almost) Everything We Buy
By Kara Stiff, Low-Carbon Life
The stuff we humans buy is a disaster for the planet we love. Livestock intended for human food now make up 60% of the total weight of mammals on Earth, while wild mammals make up only 4% (the rest is humans and pets). The global clothing industry is responsible for 10% of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the emissions from entire European Union. Single-use plastics are choking the oceans. Transportation (including the cars we drive, but the semis that cart our products to stores) accounts for almost a third of U.S. emissions.
Our Time Balm
By Vicki Robin, Vicki Robin blog
Humanity and the earth is suffering from a worldview disease leading to a voracious self-destruction. It is a set of values or qualities, held with religious conviction that transforms all novelty into itself: economic growth, control over circumstances, progress, individualism, exploitation of nature, domination of strong over weak, and freedom-as-entitlement.
Could Pre-Figurative Politics Provide a Way Forward for the Left?
By Sofa Saio Gradin, Open Democracy
Prefigurative politics is the contemporary name for revolutionary strategies that take this insight seriously. It’s about shaping our cultures, norms and social relations, as well as our formal rules and policies, in the image of the society we desire.
10 Critical Water Scarcity Facts We Must Not Ignore
By Jeremiah Castelo, World Water Reserve
Water scarcity is real. To ignore it, or to assume that it is only a problem of the developing world is to be blind to the errors our egos have cause. We in the Western world waste more water in a day than some families around the world would see in months. Much of what we use water for is to sustain a lifestyle that we largely take for granted.
Juliana v. US: Hardly Child’s Play
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
More than four years ago, 21 youthful plaintiffs asked a federal court to rule a habitable environment a protected right under the US Constitution. On January 17, 2020, a divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told them they didn’t have standing to pursue their case and that there was nothing the court could do to redress the legitimate harms they had suffered...
We’re All Gonna Die!
By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
Now the title to this week’s reflection may sound a bit alarmist. Intentionally so. It’s right out of a thousand disaster movies where people scream this wildly as their ship is sinking, their plane is crashing, or the tsunami is heading for them.
Bushfires: Can Ecosystems Recover from Such Dramatic Losses of Biodiversity?
By Darren Evans, The Conversation
All species are embedded in complex networks of interactions where they are directly and indirectly dependent on each other. A food web is a good example of such networks. The simultaneous loss of such large numbers of plants and animals could have cascading impacts on the ways species interact – and hence the ability of ecosystems to bounce back and properly function following high-severity wildfires.
The Yupaichani Network: Regenerative Practices in Action
By Zia Parker, Cara H. Cadwallader, Esperanza Project
In these times of economic, climate and political challenges, how do we move forward toward the world we collectively long for? Undaunted by language and cultural differences, this is a story of community collaboration, with the important ingredient of persistent insistence on the goal of ecosystem restoration.
Fast for the Future
By Lyla June Johnston, Esperanza Project
So during these seven days, we will be unveiling our Seven Generations New Deal, which is a seven point program for climate action. And we’d love for you to come and listen to see what we’re thinking and give your input, because we really want this policy to be built from the ground up. We fully expect that the first draft that we are releasing on Monday will look nothing like the final draft that we have by the end of this campaign.
The Social Life of Commoning
By Silke Helfrich, Free, Fair, and Alive
The British sociologist Raymond Williams once wrote, “Culture is ordinary.” We could say much the same about commoning. It is terribly ordinary. Commoning is what common people decide for themselves in their specific circumstances if they want to get along with each other and produce as much wealth for everyone as possible.
Clean Tech Versus a People’s Green New Deal
By Max Ajl, Earth Island Journal
Is there a way to imagine a different GND, a global Green New Deal? I think so. But it might have to start by recognizing the ecological laws of limits and a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality. It would argue for developmental convergence, including in energy use, between wealth and poor, within and between countries.
How One Utah Community Fought the Fracking Industry — and Won
By Tara Lohan, The Revelator
Even though economics played a role in halting the project, Dean Baker, a Kanab resident and opponent of the project, believes community efforts were important, too.
Peak Oil Review 20 January 2020
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Oil prices inched up a bit last week with Brent closing just below $65 a barrel after the US and Iran thought better of going to war. Attention then shifted to the signing of the first phase of a US-China trade deal and the slowing Chinese economy.
Here’s Who Got Paid for the Amazon to Burn
By Alaine Johnson, Resilience.org
At this crucial moment for Australia and the world, it is pertinent to take a step back from reactions to the ongoing flames and proactively revisit what happened in the Amazon—and why—before fires reignite in the dry season.
Convention Citoyenne Pour Le Climat: What Can We Learn From the French Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change?
By Claire Mellier-Wilson, Involve
As the UK Climate Assembly is about to launch in Birmingham on January 24th, on the other side of the Channel, the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat has got a head start. On January 10th, 150 French citizens met for the fourth time to look at how to address the climate crisis.
The Urban Drivers of Economic Growth
By Federico Savini, Degrowth.de
Planning scholars have for years studied and criticized the mechanisms of urban land transformation that drive national economic growth. Urbanization is not the consequence of economic growth but the actual driver of it. The enlargement of cities, their number of jobs, estates and infrastructures, is a driving force behind growth.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light 39
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Impeachment and the pending Senate trial are understandably sucking most of the oxygen out of Capital City. Senate committee chairs are still deciding if hearings are feasible once the trial starts. Rules are that Senators must sit in their seats for the entire time.
We All Need to Be Tree Huggers Now
By Kollibri terre Sonnenblume, Macska Moksha
Nearly everything about contemporary human life needs to change if we are to seriously address the multiple environmental crises that are facing the planet, but today I will focus on just one topic: trees. Trees are amazing creatures.
The JX Ranch
By Courtney White, Resilience.org
In 2004, cattle ranchers Tom and Mimi Sidwell bought the 7,000-acre JX Ranch, south of Tucumcari, New Mexico, and set about doing what they know best: earning a profit by restoring the land to health and stewarding it sustainably.