Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For almost 50 years, Beth Mount has worked towards the ideal that every person with a disability can be a valued member of community life, promoting the positive futures and potentials of people with disabilities throughout the world who are together working to create more inclusive communities.
First published in 2011, the late David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years was transformative in understanding what debt is and why we should push for debt cancellation.
Reintegrating humans into their ecosystems (so they are directly dependent on them and understand that dependence and thus actively steward them) is what will be required to help humans shift from their predominantly invasive form to a naturalized and even beneficial one. Like the common plantain.
Although weather disasters of many kinds can increase public concern about climate change, they can also help to whip up an oppressively violent sociopolitical climate that may prove ever more hostile to the very idea of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions — especially in large, affluent, high-emission societies.
Given the ubiquitous nature of this animistic intuition among the diverse indigenous peoples of this planet – given its commonality among so many exceedingly diverse and divergent cultures – it would seem that this is our birthright as humans.
And I would submit that it is the idea behind the plow — the idea that humans are so specially superior that they are allowed to cause widespread death and destruction in the name of satisfying their wants — that is the actual root of all our culture’s problems.
The oilsands have accumulated vast volumes of toxic mining fluids (1.4 billion litres or more than 540,000 Olympic sized pools) in the world’s third largest watershed under the watch of a captive regulator and an industry-dominated oilsands monitoring program.
This is why degrowth advocates such as Richard Heinberg tell us we need to consider fundamental economic assumptions. It isn’t just the climate, but the unraveling of ecosystems around the world.
If Bangladesh sinks – when Bangladesh sinks – it won’t be an abstract environmental loss, but the last breath of a people that started dying the minute the British landed on Indian soil.
My book is a polemical critique of George Monbiot’s book, Regenesis. In it, I make the case for agrarian localism in the face of his derision for the same.
Both Trump and Johnson are notorious narcissists, and I am wondering what it is about our current politics that means that the qualities of narcissism are so rewarded by the electorate.
We humans are beings grounded in the earth, or ‘humus’; when we move a herd across ground, it’s described as ‘transhumance’.
