Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In today’s episode, Nate sits down with Dutch historian and author Rutger Bregman to discuss the concept of moral ambition, which he defines as the desire to be one of the best, measured by different standards of success: not by big payouts or fancy honorifics, but by the ability to tackle the world’s biggest problems.
The ultimate answer to the whiplash problem — whether clean energy or healthcare programs — is bipartisanship, which seems a long way off. But it starts with better messaging.
What matters above all is that people get occupancy rights that give them the long-term residential security to address their livelihood needs, and it’s entirely possible that these will sometimes be obtained in urban or suburban situations.
Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.
There are mass-produced ciders on the market, usually packed full of added sugar and additives, but we were only interested in the artisanal drink — made with love and care, a great deal of back-breaking work and no small amount of skill.
A lesson for me is that these people pay too much attention to their brain chatter and not enough to the actual universe full of sunsets and stars. We could all learn from this: consult the actual universe, not what you would wish to be true.
In the age of the Limits to Growth report, Illich challenged audiences to look beyond the quantitative account of limits which presses the case for technocracy, and to engage in a reflection on the desirability of chosen limits, the ways in which they serve to create the conditions of possibility for lives worth living and worlds worth living for.
Electricity demand on the island of Great Britain has been fully covered by the output of clean-energy sources for a record 87 hours in 2025 to date, new Carbon Brief analysis shows.
So, it is not the case that the market’s functioning is a reflection on who we are and how we choose to behave, how we meet our needs. We do not need to be homo economicus for the market to thrive.
Bringing the “inanimate brute matter” (in Isaac Newton’s phrase) ‘back to life’ may plunge us into unknown legislative and imaginative territory. But it feels like an essential reconceptualisation, to resurrect our rivers through old and new ideas, bubbling up through the cracks.
Last month, I had the honor and privilege of being invited to participate in the launch of Transition Town Warri. While the explicit purpose of my trip to Nigeria was simply to co-facilitate an introductory Transition Launch Training, as I’ve done many times before, it ended up being much more than that.
The assumptions that sit behind this are that: consumption drives growth; that cheaper food is good for growth; that markets are the best way to provide cheaper food; that changing diets is not the job of government; and that food safety nets are not needed—or need only to be minimal.
