By Rob Dietz, Post Carbon Institute
Enough is Enough: Building a Sustainable Economy in a World of Finite Resources presented by Rob Dietz. This is the first in a new lecture series sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences.
By Lili Fuhr, P2P Foundation
Limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial is feasible, and it is our best hope of achieving environmental and social justice, of containing the impacts of a global crisis that was born out of historical injustice and highly unequal responsibility.
By Kevin Carson, P2P Foundation Blog
As Michel Bauwens puts it, the commons paradigm replaces the traditional Social Democratic paradigm in which value is created in the “private” (i.e. corporate) sector through commodity labor, and a portion of this value is redistributed by the state and by labor unions, to one in which value is co-created within the social commons outside the framework of wage labor and the cash nexus, and the process of value creation is governed by the co-creators themselves.
By Alex Wise, Sea Change Radio
This week on Sea Change Radio, we speak with Brendan O’Connor, a reporter for Gizmodo Media who has recently written an extensive piece chronicling the evangelical community and the elements behind the movement’s embrace of climate change denialism – and the politicians, oil companies and think tanks connected to it all
By Margaret Klein Salamon, Ezra Silk, Anya Grenier, University of California, Santa Barbara
Three leaders of The Climate Mobilization discuss the recent controversy around the New York Magazine piece, “The Uninhabitable Earth” and the role of fear and other emotions in the climate movement. Should we tell the whole, frightening truth? Can they handle it? We argue that, when combined with a potential solution—WWII scale climate mobilization—the truth can be intensely motivating.
By Anna Laycock, STIR to Action
Using a mixture of theory, practice, storytelling and visuals, Raworth offers a picture of an economy which could genuinely sustain people and planet. For those of us working on details of the picture, Doughnut Economics offers a sense of coherence and a sense of hope.
By David Bollier, David Bollier blog
In a world that is falling apart (no further elaboration needed), how shall we understand the dynamics of survival and collaboration? How does life persist and flourish in a world that is hellbent on commodifying and privatizing every aspect of human relations and the natural world? For anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, the answer is to study the strange life of the humble matsutake mushroom...
By Gene Marshall, Resilience.org
I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.
By Ian Dunlop, David Spratt, Climate Code Red
Climate change is an existential risk that could abruptly end human civilisation because of a catastrophic “failure of imagination” by global leaders to understand and act on the science and evidence before them.
By Kevin Stark, Shareable
There's really no shortage of ways that people can pool resources. But there's a huge difference in the goals between for-profit sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb and nonprofit groups like tool libraries, time banks, and makerspaces. Juliet Schor, professor at the sociology department at Boston College, explores this tension between for-profit and nonprofit sharing groups.
By Chris Smaje, Small Farm Future
Ach, I’m a peasant populist at heart, and peasants have a canny sense of when a commons is a good idea and when it isn’t. Anyway, I’m not going to summarise exactly what Raworth says about commons, I’m just going to offer you the following six postulates about them prompted by my reading of her book.
By Danny Dorling, New Internationalist
The most important benefit of the equality effect may be that it leads us to behave in ways that are less environmentally damaging. The evidence for this is only emerging now. We can track the effect across a range of indicators by looking at the 25 richest countries in the world, which have varying levels of inequality.