By John Foran, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Tim Crownshaw, Economics for the Anthropocene
Insisting on more and shaping the world to suit our designs is a Faustian bargain. What we face is not so much a problem to be solved, but a crisis of culture stemming from the hidden conflict between Lotka’s principle and the boundaries of a finite world.
By Rajiv Khanna, Open Democracy
Buen vivir comes from Indigenous movements in Latin America and implies “right living” or life in balance with communities, natural systems and future generations. Our grassroots partners, financial investors, and adviser allies—all leaders in alternative economic practices—had joined the gathering because of relationships built up over time with my organization, Thousand Currents.