Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and indigenous researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture.
As population bombs, perhaps there’s no explosion, but a whimper of modernity as the larger living world finds its voice again, accented by human song.
A just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict requires acknowledging and honoring truths that are seemingly contradictory. Examples from other domains show how this can be accomplished and offer a potential pathway to an enduring, long-term peace.
A more than hundred year old focus on easily available nutrients has led farming astray. Instead, nutrient availability is to a large extent an emergent property of healthy soils.
Energy systems are being pushed to the brink by wind storms and heatwaves, compounded by gas shortages and price rises caused by the war in Ukraine.
The myth of human dominion and exceptionalism is as old as the Bible and as unquestioned as gravity, at least in “modern” society. Rob, Asher, and Jason explore the ways that humanocentrism has come to dominate the planet and our minds, while pointing to ancient and newly emerging ways that the more-than-human world is respected and protected, even the dung beetle.
People have all sorts of different interpretations on what’s happening with climate change. While some are practicing denial or willful ignorance, even those following the science can be confused. After all, Earth’s climate system is complex. In Part 2, Richard Heinberg unpacks some recent research on the likely consequences of global warming this century and beyond and recommends practical things we can do to both mitigate and adapt to the consequences. (See part 1, in case you missed it.)
There’s a bridge between people’s experiences with these more-than-human “living cultures” and the work of regrowing our ways of being human together. They offer images that reflect, backwards and forwards, helping us give words to the work that is called for.
The value of the arts is as a natural, communal expression of meaning that is inseparable from our everyday lives, impulses and needs, existing in spite of the desires of capitalism and the hegemonic structures that enforce it.
Humans can slow and, perhaps, reverse the ecological harms that they have caused, but Earth will never return to some past pristine state. Nonetheless, I believe that history can help humans save Earth’s remaining wild, natural places that, along with cultural icons like Notre Dame, tell the stories of who we are.
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
People have all sorts of different interpretations on what’s happening with climate change. While some are practicing denial or willful ignorance, even those following the science can be confused. After all, Earth’s climate system is complex. In Part 1 of this two-part article, Richard Heinberg cuts through this complexity by putting climate change into the context of humanity’s energy history.
