Robert Jensen

With age, I’ve become more aware of the world’s complexity but also better equipped to come to simple, albeit painful, conclusions: We need to replace fantasies of endless growth with ideas about managing the contraction.

Nandita Bajaj, executive director of Population Balance, defies stereotypes. She chose not to have children and has dedicated her life to research and advocacy on how pronatalism, overpopulation, and human supremacy fuel social inequality and ecological overshoot, and to confronting tough questions about humanity’s outsized footprint on Earth.

Architect and farmer Caitlin Taylor says communities need regional infrastructure for food security. As global agribusiness corporations contribute to ecological degradation and threaten the viability of local farms, she’s working to build a different system.

A childhood moment on a Canadian farm shaped Bill Rees’s understanding of ecological limits, leading to the development of ecological footprint analysis and decades of warnings about global overshoot.

A new documentary, Prairie Prophecy, explores the life and work of ecologist Wes Jackson, offering a compelling vision for the future of agriculture, sustainability, and our relationship with the land.

Our choices are clear: We can drill more, which will simply get us to a cruel end game even sooner. We can pretend that technology will save us, which might delay that reckoning. If we can abandon the delusions and diversions, there’s no guarantee of a happy future. But there’s a chance of a future.