Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Phoebe Barnard is an environmental and societal futures analyst, sustainability strategist, global change ecologist, biodiversity conservation biologist, climate risk and resilience specialist, policy wonk, and film co-producer. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
When we begin to prioritize the needs of the most vulnerable among us is when we will see the most healing—the type of mitigation we need for our changing climate.
The Netherlands is close to closing one of the world’s largest natural gas fields even as Europe faces acute energy shortages. Will the country be able to resist calls for continuing production that will mean sacrificing the homes and businesses of Dutch citizens?
Besides strengthening the call for degrowth in the global North, MMT can serve as a powerful tool to achieve full decolonization of the global South.
With the Inflation Reduction Act, the federal government is illogically encouraging the increasing use of fossil fuels—in order to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Already it is starting to make economic as well as social sense to produce more food and other essentials locally, and exchange them outside existing industrial consumption systems. In other words, to live bioregionally now!
We have the technology, the resources, the imagination and the political measures to achieve this goal, but will it be possible with our business as usual painted green?
Vegetable gardens in this country are largely seen as a “summer thing”, and I believe this is because the crops people associate with vegetable gardens are mainly summer growing.
We are living in a context today in which the physical limits, natural resource constraints, and conditions of overshoot associated with the expansion of the dominant system of production and consumption are becoming increasingly clear.
What would it mean if we created a safe space to express our tensions and concerns about value in all of these social and economic relationships? Let us overthrow the tyranny of valuelessness and discover what we might learn about ourselves on the other side.
The plights of these two species shed invaluable light on the real-life situation we humans now face as a result of our shortsighted impacts on Earth’s ecology—but do so without hitting us over the proverbial head the way scenarios in a lesser novel might.
In the face of multiple cascading crises, we have to tell as much of the truth as one can bear, then a little more, and then all the rest of the truth, whether one can bear it or not.
