Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The challenges presented by climate chaos and the Covid-19 pandemic have both elicited cultural responses that superficially appear to be opposed to one another, but that end up working hand-in-hand to bolster a status quo that’s intrinsically harmful to everyone. Both succeed by appealing to wishful thinking.
There are many little examples of hope in the world: wetlands revived, trees regrowing, laws changing in radical and important ways to protect instead of destroy nature.
The exercise of grassroots democracy, however, need not focus on the state and its formal institutions. The role of the state is not intrinsic to the practice of grassroots democracy.
Perhaps, the larger purpose of degrowth scholarship (and conversations like these) is to act as Overton Windows – to help people imagine and actualize behaviors and networks that will help us adjust in a post-growth world.
So as I was already grousing about the pantry, I decided to review my garden plan for next year… and found it woefully inadequate.
Welcome to the modern world. Just at the point in history when we needed to manage our consumption, we had installed all the conditions for a fossil-fuel driven boom in consumerism.
Cascadia has a new bioregional journal, Cascadia Spoke. The journal is a revival of that good old medium that has graced the world with so many great journals, bioregional and other. Paper and print.
I still fundamentally believe in the emergent human response to collective challenges – but to do that, more people need to see the systems synthesis of what we face – which was the initial thrust of this platform.
So why all this attention toward the imagined potential for fusion energy? It is yet another attempt by those who believe that only a mega-scaled, technology-intensive approach can be a viable alternative to our current fossil fuel-dependent energy infrastructure.
In short, keeping animals teaches you how to respect life. You respect it when you raise it, and you respect it if you take it, and you certainly do not look at food in the same way.
If the research is correct and we did suffer a total breakdown of the microlayer, even massive carbon emissions mitigation would do little to staunch the earth’s climate unraveling.
Permacrisis is the joining of the prefix perma- (which means a fixed state) and crisis, resulting in a word that means ‘a state of permanent crisis’ (or according to Collins Dictionary “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.”)
