Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Growing food is just like every other exercise – no one learns to rock climb, knit, box, embroider, run, dance, make art, build things, etc… without a LOT of time being less productive than they’d like to be to get the skill set.
The role and success of governance and institutions in facing and meeting the challenges of the past unlock a treasure trove of information that just may guide us toward better futures.
I’ve come to think that, unfortunately, small farm societies emerging contingently in some of the margins of a collapsing urban-industrial world system and shining a light to the future is about as good a prospect as we can realistically now hope for.
The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.
I had a letter from a young reader last week, asking what I thought about concrete steps that we might be taking in place of what passes for activism in our present culture.
On this segment of Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by William Rees, Nora Bateson, and Rex Weyler to discuss the purpose of ecology and what it might look like to have a civilization centered around it.
There’s a wider point here—that in general the private sector would never be profitable if it had to pay for the environmental capital it gets through—but it’s rare to see such a clear cut example.
A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for “community rights” and more recently, “self-owned land.”
A temperature higher on average across the globe than any previously recorded since instrument readings began in the 1850s was measured on July 3. That record was broken again on July 4, and then again on July 5. We designed our infrastructure and agricultural practices for a pre-climate change Earth. We are unprepared for what is coming.
The Cuban experience now looks to me like an even more impressive success story, showing purely human intelligence coping with a seriously life-threatening situation at nation-state scale.
There will be no food factories on a dead planet, and there will be no low-carbon manufactured food in a fossil-fuelled energy system.
As I noted in 2012, 2014 and 2015, nothing will change in Alberta’s petrostate until its citizens embrace representative taxation (and pay their own way), shut down the oil revenue roller coaster and save for a rainy day. Or months of wildfires.
