Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This week’s Frankly unpacks humans’ current identification with the label “consumer.” Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate highlights the ways that it shows up across our whole lives – from basic needs and stability to status and mental escape.
The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided political liaisons of their elders.
Transmission lines are not benign structures. They have their own environmental impacts, both on-site and off, that are not trivial.
I can only imagine how wonderfully restorative it would be if I could always get home before dark… and be asleep through all the long hours of darkness. Then, by Imbolg, I would truly be ready for spring!
By rebuilding functional hydrological cycles, societies can enhance the effectiveness of existing infrastructure, reduce vulnerability to climatic extremes, and regenerate the ecological foundations upon which water security ultimately depends.
Unfortunately, the extremely simplistic narrative that plants are good and animals are bad has been given far too much prominence in the public debate. For sure, industrial livestock production has a number of serious flaws, but so does industrial crop production.
Today, Nate is joined by Balázs Matics, the author of the popular Substack blog The Honest Sorcerer, to explore the systemic reasons behind civilization’s potential collapse, the importance of energy security, and the growing effects of geopolitical instability.
If the United States were to abandon that trajectory and take the concrete actions that are needed to achieve equitable ecological renewal, what elements of life in the present-day Global North would we necessarily, and gladly, leave behind?
Data-driven models of self-organization and critical collective phenomena in the natural world and within traditional Indigenous sociocultural structures, along with adaptive context-based frameworks, can help guide the transboundary development of a decentralized and circular socio-bioeconomy for the Amazon.
Every time you plant a seed, you are declaring independence. Every time you repair a toaster, you are voting against disposable culture. Every time you generate a kilowatt-hour on your roof, you are disarming a dictator.
Thinking and preparing for a collapse (itself a byproduct of a system of waste, exploitation and domination) will require that people organize on a grassroots level, in order to open up spaces within which they can collectively forge a temporality that will allow for serious reflection, deliberation and long-term planning.
The most impressive thing we’ve ever designed—or even the collection of all such things—is absolute child’s play next to Life in evolved, ecological relationship. Humility serves us well.
