Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ecologists, this is a call to emerge from your niche occasionally, enough to acknowledge the root cause of the issues you study. You don’t need to start a new movement. There’s an existing movement of academics and activists establishing the need for degrowth to a steady state economy and raising awareness of this need.
On this episode, Nate is joined by environmental journalist, Oliver Milman, to discuss the alarming decline in insect populations in the past few decades and the far-reaching consequences this has for ecosystem stability, human well-being, and the overall health of the biosphere.
In this episode we travel in time to the year 2125, to visit the Crazy Town museum, which showcases today’s world of wanton consumption and profligate waste. How will humans in 2125 – if there are any of us left – judge the things everyone sees as normal today?
Humanity soon will be returning to low-power ways of organizing itself. And in our new age of tariff wars, the tide is already turning from global to regional in trade, investment, and politics. What has seemed impossible may soon become obviously necessary to larger numbers of people.
From here I can return to my old country, neither prodigal nor victorious, but someone unexpected, without history, without illusion, appearing beside a silvery bush whose bitterness frees the spirits of this haunted earth and colours everything green.
Some of the littlest organisms in the ocean wield incredible influence, both on their ecosystems and on the planet. Like plants do on land, phytoplankton absorb sunlight and carbon dioxide and expel oxygen.
These communities are not just surviving, they are innovating within their means. But without structural support, resilience has its limits.
So what’s a solution we can live with, as farmers? Here on the Roussière Farm, we have chosen to feed the people around us. For a little over seven years now, we’ve been taking our animals to the slaughterhouse ourselves, preparing our own meat boxes, and selling the meat we produce within 20 kilometers of our pastures.
For too long, discussions about energy have been confined to the realms of technicians and engineers. The energy we consume and the infrastructures sustaining its seemingly endless supply—whether fossil fuels or electricity—have largely remained out of sight and out of mind for much of modern history.
How is freedom, a polysemantic term, understood by the majority today? What is the relationship between modern freedom and the perpetual growth system? And what kind of freedom would post-growth have to put forward?
In this week’s Frankly, Nate unpacks some key blindspots of “the walrus movement”—a placeholder label that’s a gentle nod to those championing bold social and ecological ideals. While mostly well-intentioned, this “movement” can miss the stark limits of our planet’s unfolding biophysical reality.
…I think I would do better for myself and for the planet if I bought my food from local farmers, those that I know are using the least harmful methods of growing food.
