Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
I have much time for Wendell Berry’s writings and reflections; but so much of what they take for granted as environmental backdrop simply does not apply here in Wales. What does apply is a narrative that recognizes first of all a long history of being settled…
More than 223 micro-forests led by and primarily benefiting resource poor households with small landholdings adjacent to their home, where families can easily work together, have already been established, with a goal of creating another 400 by 2030.
As official efforts faltered, amid aging equipment and crumbling infrastructure, Syrian civil society moved quickly to support the afflicted farmers, forming emergency networks that sent hundreds of volunteers into the fire zones to deliver supplies and support where government services could not reach.
Recalling the sea, the desert, and the steppe, we recognize the traces of their vastness and depth in our hearts and consciousness. This vastness and depth is what we need to remember: that the wealth and well-being we long for are not in the race for infinite growth, but in the sufficiency of the inhabited present.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society.
And so now I’m home again, back to the farm, back to the book publication, back to a million things to do, back to trying to grow some produce and grow some politics that’s not far-left or far-right but equal to the present moment by dispensing with those figments of modernism and doing my bit to articulate more vital political traditions like Romanticism and distributism.
