Climate change and the hidden water cost of the Panama Canal
The critical importance of water transportation is coming into focus as lack of water cripples river and canal navigation.
My Brother Has Wheels
We are taught to judge one another based on what we contribute economically, but Ethan defies these expectations. I wonder if I manage to communicate to strangers how, in spite of his “profound disability”, Ethan is still a profoundly dynamic and important individual.
Plenitude
My garden is a plenum – a spatially continuous living community which includes me, its caretaker – and I intuitively experience it as such while simultaneously perceiving a visual panorama, an audible space filled with the music of cicadas, crickets and birds as well as an expanse of floral perfume.
Learning never ends
It is sad that we have pulled so far away from experiential learning that we think summer is for vacationing and autumn is when we go back to the grind… that school is a grind confined in a classroom… that learning is confined to childhood.
Towards Strategies for Social Change beyond Domination
In this sense, a post-capitalist and post-domination society will require its own set of institutions, whose creation must begin from today.
Degrowthers Gain Support as Planet Cooks. Can They Ally With Green New Dealers?
A world of radical democracy and equality — of “public luxury and private sufficiency,” with much less hierarchy and much more free time — would enable historic advances in the quality of life for the masses even if some consumer goods disappear from the menu.
Mining and Indigenous Rights: Legalities and Realities
Each situation is adjudicated according to whatever opposition has been mustered and whatever degree of engagement the state chooses as well as the anticipated value of the proposed project. Thus, in concept and practice, the original votes in the UN for Free, Prior and Informed Consent were toothless.
Graham Palmer: “Energy Storage and Civilization: A History”
On this episode, Nate is joined by Graham Palmer, a scholar and engineer in the field of energy. While this show frequently covers the importance of energy itself, this discussion focuses on how the ability to store and access energy has critically shaped societies.
40 years of organic agriculture
What the future holds for us is certainly not certain. As you embark on a journey, you don’t really need a goal, but you need a direction and the means to travel, even if it is just your feet.
Imagining a postgrowth world
Human and earthly limits, properly understood, wrote the conservationist Wendell Berry, are not confinements, but rather inducements to fullness of relationship and meaning.
Sustainability: It’s About More Than Climate Change
Rather than a people with a common dream and shared understanding of constitutional (federal and state) roots and values, American democracy is devolving into aggressive tribalist factions—where loyalty to the party supersedes that to the nation and, for one group, loyalty to a person trumps everything else—including the truth.
Married to an Axe Murderer
So here’s the thing: Modernity is an axe murderer, and we’re—unfortunately—married to it. It isn’t hard to see modernity’s fatal flaw of being constitutionally unsustainable, and that it’s on a violent rampage.
