Rivers of the ‘Dammed,’ Rising from the Grave
By Megan Ewald, NOAA Office of Response and Restoration
Oil spills, hazardous waste, and ship groundings hex America’s oceans and rivers every year. Pollution drives people away from beaches, leaving them silent as a boneyard. NOAA looks for ways to bring waterways back to life. To do this, NOAA and our partners often look for opportunities to remove or bypass barriers for fish passage such as dams, faulty culverts, or grates. This is the sordid tale of six dammed rivers, where pollution settlements provided the opportunity for waters across America to rise from the grave.
In Zambia, a People’s Budget Campaign Demands a Budget that Works for Women
By Daisy Lutangu Mwilima, Open Democracy
The national budget in any country is one of the key instruments a government can use to fight inequality and bridge the gap between the rich and the poor. For this reason, Fight Inequality Alliance Zambia has been carrying out a People’s Budget campaign in the last couple of months to advocate for a more equal budget that represents the needs of the majority poor and not the elite.
Techno-Fix Futures will only Accelerate Climate Chaos – Don’t Believe the Hype
By Joanna Boehnert, Simon Mair, The Conversation
But nothing other than dramatic societal transformation will be sufficient to avoid catastrophic climate change for the vast majority of the world’s population – and eventually, everyone. It may sound daunting, but rejecting the ecologically harmful assumptions on which our culture is currently built offers us a unique chance to build a healthier and fairer world.
The Flawed Social Science Behind Extinction Rebellion’s Change Strategy
By Nafeez Ahmed, Insurge Intelligence
Given that XR’s recent Autumn action did not produce the same level of success and change as the previous actions, we now have fairly clear empirical evidence that XR’s present strategy may be reaching its ‘peak’. If it is to continue to scale as a movement, this needs to be confronted head-on. XR now has the opportunity to review and enhance its strategy, and I offer this critical appraisal in that spirit as a humble contribution to augment such efforts.
The Response Podcast Episode 5: Inequality, Structural Racism, and the Fight for Justice after the Grenfell Tower Fire
By Tom Llewellyn, Shareable
In this episode of The Response, we examine the events that led up to the Grenfell Tower fire and learn how the community has responded through the voices of survivors, their families, and others who were impacted.
Lino’s Dream
By Alan Adams, Esperanza Project
But Lino did foresee the resilience, the determination, and the imagination of the Kañari people. He knew that, given the opportunity, they could solve the problems. That is what they are doing through TUCAYTA, the bilingual/bicultural education, the Savings and Loan Cooperative, the community cooperatives, and through Mushuk Yuyay, the association of seed and nutritious food producers.
Has the Climate Crisis made California too Dangerous to Live In?
By Bill McKibben, The Guardian blog
Three years in a row feels like – well, it starts to feel like the new, and impossible, normal. That’s what the local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, implied this morning when, in the middle of its account of the inferno, it included the following sentence: the fires had “intensified fears that parts of California had become almost too dangerous to inhabit”.
Talking Play and Imagination with Peter Gray
By Rob Hopkins, Rob Hopkins blog
What I’ve learned is in these band hunter gatherer cultures, children play. They are free to play all day long. There’s no such thing as anything like school. There’s no sense that it’s the adults job to educate children. Children learn on their own and they learn in play. They learn by watching, observing, and incorporating what they see in to their play. That’s how children are designed to grow up.
What is Greta Doing Next?
By Mark Heley, Esperanza Project
Greta Thunberg’s tour of North America continues this week with a visit to Los Angeles to participate in the Youth Climate Los Angeles event at City Hall on Friday, Nov. 1. If you’re wondering why her attention has come to California, which has an image as being one of the most progressive and greenest states in the US, you might be surprised to learn that Los Angeles actually has the largest urban oil field in the nation.
Drones, Algae and Fish Ears: What We’re Learning Before the World’s Largest Dam-removal Project — and What We Could Miss
By Tara Lohan, The Revelator
The Klamath is a river in peril, plagued by dangerously poor water quality and collapsing salmon populations. That could start to change as early as 2022, when four dams are likely come down on the river — the biggest dam-removal and river-restoration project in history. Dam removal is expected to help solve many, but not all, of the river’s challenges, and understanding the change that does happen is crucial to planning the next steps for improving the river’s health.
“Every Time a Civilization is in Crisis, There is a Return of the Commons”
By Michel Bauwens, Solène Manouvrier, OuiShare
The commons are nothing new. Historically citizens always came together to pool resources and manage them collectively and autonomously. It is the responsibility of cities and states to identify, connect and support them. Today the commons appear as a choice of society in a world at the end of its lifespan.
Thinking Outside the Grid
By Steven Gorelick, Integrity of Life
Ultimately, a greater reliance on local power would eliminate one of the most destructive side-effects of the grid: the implicit notion that energy is limitless. The expectation is that our homes and workplaces should have as much power as we’re willing to pay for, 24/7, year in and year out.
Disaster Localization: A Constructive Response to Climate Chaos
By Kristen Steele, Local Futures
Disaster localization could help us avoid “each new disaster leading to a more entrenched global capitalist system, with its social impacts as well as its hefty contribution to increasing carbon emissions”. Rupert and I draw on inspiration from a variety of sources, especially Helena Norberg-Hodge’s vision of localization, Charles Fritz’s research on disasters and mental health, and Rebecca Solnit’s writings about post-traumatic growth in the aftermath of crises.
Colonization, Fire Suppression, and Indigenous Resurgence in the Face of Climate Change
By Kari Marie Norgaard , YES! magazine
One of the key tools the Karuk have long used to maintain this natural wealth is fire, something I’ve learned about in my time as a research collaborator and consultant working for the Karuk Tribe. Indeed, fire records obtained from studies in California clearly indicate that Native land management has shaped the evolutionary trajectory of the region for at least 12,000 years.
The Masque of Gaia
By Rachel Kohler, Resilience.org
You’re here because you see the danger clear. That’s great, but now where do we go from here? I don’t know! There’s a lot of things to factor, And I don’t have the answers; I’m an actor. But yet our voices join with yours this hour For even silly words speak truth to power.
Extinction Rebellion: We Need To Talk About The Future
By Sam J. Knights, Medium.com
This is a love letter to Extinction Rebellion. It is also a letter addressed to those who have criticised us. An apology. A response. And, ultimately, an invitation.
Peak Oil Review 28 October 2019
By Tom Whipple, Steve Andrews, Peak-Oil.org
Prices were up about $2 last week on an unexpected drawdown in US crude stocks and rumors that OPEC+ is considering another production cut. Forecasters see a supply glut continuing in 2020 due to slowing economies and growth in US shale oil production.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light (36)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pledge to release comprehensive climate legislation by the end of the year that would transition the United States to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Farming in the Fog
By Brian Miller, South Roane Agrarian
The small farm that grows and provides quality products needs more than simply market access. It also needs a base of buyers who truly value its existence. Who see the small farmer as more than just a commodity choice or an archetype (Let’s buy from the hip chick, support the old man in overalls, go multicultural this week). Who instead see the small farmer as an essential part of the community.
Extinction Rebellion: Four Criticisms (and Why They’re Unconvincing)
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
So below I bring you a sceptic’s guide to XR scepticism, in a two-part post that’ll be continued next time. In this first one I focus on issues that strike me as requiring a genuine, substantive response and/or that I wrestled with myself in embracing the movement.
Chasing Coral (Documentary Film Review)
By Frank Kaminski, Mud City Press
By raising sea temperatures, climate change is eradicating the world’s coral. Because coral reefs provide sustenance and protection to vast numbers of humans and marine organisms, it would be a big deal for them to go extinct. The El Niño that lasted from 2014 to 2017 caused a global-scale mass coral bleaching event of unprecedented severity, which damaged a majority of coral reefs around the world. The makers of Chasing Coral managed to document this calamity.
The troubled Saudi Aramco IPO: It’s what you can’t see that counts
By Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
It's what you can't see—the oil beneath the Arabian sands—that potential investors in Saudi Aramco's on-again, off-again initial public offering (IPO) ought to focus on. The truth about the remaining oil resources beneath the Saudi desert continues to be a state secret.
Paradise Lost
By Rachel Ramirez, Grist
Super Typhoon Yutu made history as the worst storm to hit United States soil since 1935. The Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 180 mph, wreaked havoc on the islands of Saipan and Tinian, which are part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The storm left thousands of residents without homes.
Finding our Common Ground and Common Purpose
By Sue Pritchard, Sustainable Food Trust
We often talk about how important it is to see the ‘whole system’ – to understand more fully the relationships and interdependencies in the world. Our own work – across food, farming and countryside, public health and wellbeing, economics and rural development – seeks to illuminate the links.
Megadam: ‘Obsolete Technology’ Wreaks Havoc across the Americas
By Víctor Villalobos, Esperanza Project
In Mexico, according to the 2012 report, Dams, Rights of the Peoples and Impunity, more than 4,200 dam projects have been built in Mexico alone, causing the displacement and forced eviction of more than 185,000 people from all over the country.
A Green New Deal for an Ecological Economy
By Leah Temper, Sam Bliss, Uneven Earth
In their textbook Ecological Economics, Herman Daly and Josh Farley list sustainability and justice as the field’s first two goals. If the GND’s goal is to facilitate, through policy, the transition to a socially equitable low-carbon economy, then ecological economics basically bills itself as the science of the Green New Deal.
Climate Politics/Capitol Light (35)
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado have introduced a resolution calling for a national conservation goal of protecting at least 30% of the country's lands and waters by 2030.
Climate Change Goes Local
By Damaris Zehner, Integrity of Life
So yes, whether we do the right things or keep doing the wrong things, whether our current systems collapse or are carefully dismantled and rebuilt, even young Hoosiers leading modest lives in a small town in western Indiana will be personally affected by climate change. I am sorry, guys. And you still have to turn in your homework.
How the Youth Movement Turns Political Words into Political Will
By Joel Stronberg, Civil Notion
A year ago, there was no debate in Congress about climate change. Now conservative Republicans are being forced into a dialogue they had hoped to avoid about a problem they've been unwilling to admit even exists. The Democrats, for their part, have embraced climate change as a central theme of their 2020 political campaign. What’s changed is the entrance of the youth climate movement onto the scene.
Building a Solidarity Economy in Jackson, Mississippi
By Staff, Transformative Cities, Cooperation Jackson
Cooperation Jackson is a long term vision. “We’re going to ultimately have to create our own network of supply and value chain,” says Akuno. “If we exist in a bubble, we won’t survive. It’s a big experiment in democracy. Talk to us in ten years, and see where we’re going.”
Renewables Could Match Coal Power within 5 Years, IEA Reveals
By Simon Evans, Carbon Brief
Renewable sources of electricity are set for rapid growth over the next five years, which could see them match the output of the world’s coal-fired power stations for the first time ever.
As the Climate Collapses, We can Either Stand Together – or Perish Alone
By Tim Hollo, The Guardian blog
If we’re to survive in the far-less-hospitable world that two centuries of institutionalised greed, selfishness and short-sightedness have bequeathed us, it will only be together. It will only be by using the coming years to cultivate resilient, cohesive, cooperative, equitable communities, embedded in the natural world.
Going Over Home: Excerpt
By Charles D. Thompson, Resilience.org
Are there rural Americans who will embrace neighbors who do not look like them, go beyond tribalism and fear, and welcome diverse allies in the struggle for common goals? Will rural whites come to see that their future is tied to racial, environmental, and economic justice for all? I believe the answers to these questions will determine whether our national drive to form a “more perfect union” can survive. Everything America stands for is riding on this.
Extinction Rebellion’s Car-Free Streets Showcase the Possibility of a Beautiful, Safe and Green Future
By Paul Chatterton, The Conversation
As I’ve shown in my latest book, creating the car-free city is possible, and urgently necessary, right now. We have all the technical and policy know-how. But we lack a vision of how it could be different, and the recognition that far from a sacrifice, it will bring mainly improvements, rather than constraints, to our lives. Such visions are necessary.
Life in Flames
By Elizabeth Peredo Beltrán, Uneven Earth
These days I am immersed in rage, pain and despair. The Amazon is in flames, the Chiquitanía region is gravely wounded and beneath the fires, many of our hopes for Bolivia and the world are turned to ashes.
We Used to Just Call These “Houses”
By Daniel Herriges, Strong Towns
We have a way in the modern world of rediscovering things that humans have always done but branding them as something trendy and a little alien. So it goes with the explosion of interest in "tiny houses" as an answer to what ails cities struggling to house and attract people. The ironic thing about tiny houses is that they're nothing new; it's just that, in surprisingly recent memory, our culture had a different name for them. We called them "houses."
Scheer Folly: Promised Coast-to-Coast Energy Corridor Makes No Sense
By Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee
Real conservatives know that energy corridors don’t make jobs or support freedom. When China built a pipeline to access natural gas in western Burma, there were reports of forced labour, relocated villages and corruption. Those kinds of things are inherent in energy corridors, which enrich the powerful at the expense of the weak.
Surveying Archaeologists Across the Globe Reveals Deeper and More Widespread Roots of the Human Age, the Anthropocene
By Ben Marwick, Erle C. Ellis, Lucas Stephens, Nicole Boivin, The Conversation
Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch. Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.
California Cotton Fields: Scaling Carbon Farming Practices with Bowles Farming Company
By Esha Chhabra, Fibershed
Farmers are interested in how they can be a part of this carbon economy, Michael says. “But it’s a risky thing to experiment with given all the other pressures they have to deal with. So we need to flesh out in greater detail how carbon sequestration would work, and what would be the incentives to do so. We’re getting closer.”
Make Room for the Bus: Review
By Bart Hawkins Kreps, An Outside Chance
While new light-rail systems, subways, inter-urban commuter trains all have their place, simply giving buses preference on existing roads could improve urban quality of life while bringing carbon emissions down – long before the planning and approval process for new train lines is complete.
Is a Techno-linguistic Transition Inevitable?
By Erik Assadourian, Gaianism
So get outside every day. Somewhere. Walk barefoot through a park, collect some wild edibles, do some yoga in your yard, some breathing exercises in the forest, or simply sit under a tree somewhere, whatever you can. This will help heal you, and keep you happy in the unplugged world and tethered to the real world.
Basic Income, Not Tied Benefits, for Australia’s First Nations
By Elise Klein, Open Democracy
A lot of Australia’s welfare programmes primarily target First Nations people. Australia is a settler colonial society. Sovereignty was never ceded and has never been given back. This is an ongoing struggle, and welfare is now being used as a weapon in neo-assimilationist attempts by the settler state.