Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We cannot avoid having to walk through the ruins of our present civilization. But we can walk together to a living future, where our well-being and the well-being of the Earth are not in conflict, but part of a shared journey. This we can do.
We transform the very meaning of public and private by daring to proclaim the communal sphere as existing, real, and growing, evolving, and necessary.
French philosopher Bruno Latour died earlier this month at age 75. Of the many insights I absorbed from his work I mention four here:
1. Nature and culture are not two things; they are one.
2. Facts require champions
3. Nature sits in the middle of our politics.
4. There are no “objects” just networks.
This book provides a fairly short but detailed critical discussion of the nature of our basically capitalist economic system, its faults, why it is not just unsatisfactory but is leading to global breakdown, the alternative we must work for, and how to achieve it.
“But we desperately need climate investments that are part of a safety net for farmers, so they can continue stewarding the land when a disaster strikes.”
This action is designed to be destabilizing. It is meant to hit us and to challenge us: What are we ready to do, what are we eager to give up, or even to sacrifice to try to save what can still be saved?
A recent rural resilience gathering in the Loire-Atlantique, France saw farmers, cooks, elected officials, analysts, rural activists, volunteers and others drawn from the local and European agroecology and rural resilience movements, meet to work on the future of the socio-ecological transition.
Trans Mountain, just like the Site C dam, celebrates the Iron Law of megaprojects. This law states that these crazy engineering schemes go over budget, take longer than planned and deliver fewer benefits than promised over and over again.
A Republican House majority is not simply about gross numbers. It is also about individual political philosophies and loyalties. In an age of very slim majorities, a relatively small group of members can have an outsized impact on what does and doesn’t get passed into law.
If you consider yourself to be environmentally-conscious as well as privileged enough to have stepped foot on a commercial airliner (80% of humans never have), you may feel (as I do) an emerging sense of dismay about the state of aviation.
That is why they are called non-renewable resources, for example. Because Mother Earth doesn’t have the ability to renew those resources at the same speed at which we’re taking them.
On this episode, Nate is joined by Marty Kearns, a civic organizer and networking specialist. He and Marty discuss why both networks and communities will be critical to the coming challenges we face.
