Ask (Not) What You Can Do for Your Planet

If we can’t get to YIMBY and make fair decisions about near-term sacrifices, the end game is clear. When the planet goes into a carbon-induced death spiral, we’ll all, rich and poor alike, be forced to make the ultimate sacrifice.

The Illusion of Sustainability

There is nowhere in the industrialised world where food is produced sustainably. The only place where that happens is the non-industrialised world where the main 2 energy inputs are forms of renewable energy – human and animal muscle power.

Telling another story

The Enlightenment, modernity, technology, fossil fuels and capitalism were mutually reinforcing and permeated daily practices, which in turn galvanized the system; earlier greed was bad, then it became ok and then good and now, finally, it is an essential virtue. This insight has implications for how we instill change.

Fiddling while the world teeters on the brink

In my 2012 essay in The Futurist, I concluded that we might no longer be able to get out of the mess we were creating for ourselves, but we could get through it. There was still plenty to dream of, and to strive for. Today, hope remains, unreasonable, hanging by a thread.

The Homegrown National Park

What if we could bring the natural world to our own yards? What if we could connect our yards in such a way that we create a kind of continuation of our national parks, where nature is restored and we can be right in the middle of it all?

The ways out

The ways out are small and silent and obscure. And they do not come with publishing contracts… The ways out are doing the work and being an embodied life. The ways out do not need leaders or mass action or public law. They do not require expert opinion or explication. The ways out are just that… out. No more of this…

The Environment is the Economy, Stupid.

Even if Helene and Milton and hurricanes, forest fires, and droughts of the past haven’t cost all Americans—the next ones will. The clean energy and environmental communities need to make economics the dominant theme of their arguments.

Life Expectations

A while back, I came across a fascinating paper from 2007 by Gurven and Kaplan on longevity among hunter-gatherers that helped me understand aspects of what life was (and is) like outside of modernity. My interest is both a matter of pure curiosity, and to gain perspective on how desperate life feels—or doesn’t—to members of pre-agricultural (ecological) cultures.