Julia Steinberger

This story is on borrowed time. And it’s just a part of a story, a piece of human and living patchwork. Maybe you can borrow it, and make it part of your story too?

I recently had an extraordinary and rare experience, as an academic, activist and citizen: I participated in a victorious movement.

Rather than believe in the fake embrace of predatory capitalism, where vast crimes are supposed to benefit humanity, we should believe in each other and ourselves, our capacity to work for each other, and ultimately win against this predation.

Let’s start by some human and planetary timescales. I don’t know why we don’t learn them in grade school (I never learned them at all). But they matter. And let’s represent them visually, in a stark, plain way.

This fundamental question is the one I ask myself in my research, as an ecological economist. What are the physical things (like energy, materials, infrastructure and so on) we need to live well? To answer it, we must understand what we truly need, and how satisfying our needs connects to well-being.

Raising the spectre of sacrifice is the all the vogue in current climate denier and delayer circles: it is representative of our current moment in time. Having comprehensively been routed on the denial of science, the minions of fossil fuel lobbies have moved on to delay the onset and diminish the scope of action.