Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There is enough land, more than enough land, throughout the Midwest (and beyond) to support monarchs and still grow more corn and soy than we need. There is enough land, along the highways, in the grassy green circles and triangles of interchanges, in yards and parks, on campuses, in vacant lots—anywhere, really—to grow a patch of three-season-blooming wildflowers, including milkweed.
Protecting the children is a formidable responsibility. But it is our responsibility, and we bring to the task a formidable set of powers, honed, sharpened, and passed down mother-to-daughter over generations.
Can a “never-seen-before ” weather event that happens every few years really be called “never-seen-before”? Does a “1 in a 1,000 year” event that happens twice in two years become a warning of something different happening?
I realize now that the path to social transformation is not a binary choice between personal or political change. We must live our political values within the daily routines of our personal lives and grow a new kind of politics that’s grounded in a higher quality of human relationships—unafraid of asking much more of us than our votes.
Bob Sampayan believes in the transformational power of beauty. Now in his sixties, Sampayan is the mayor of Vallejo, California, a primarily working-class city at the north end of San Francisco Bay.
I believe what is emerging is a planetary nonviolence at the intersection of social justice-based, faith-based, and Earth-based activism. And that’s what makes this a wonderful historical moment to be alive in.
In this context, degrowth is the proposal to intentionally shrink the physical size of wealthy economies, whereas decoupling is the hope that growing economies will at last break free from growing resource use and environmental damage.
The central, overarching question on which all sides apparently agree is this: To avoid disastrous climate change and environmental destruction, how are we humans to manage our land such that the land regenerates, biodiversity increases, and carbon is sequestered?
Could we use predator-prey relationships among widely divergent species in nature as a metaphor to help in understanding the behavior of people in complex human societies, in which some people gain at the expense of others?
Although certainly embraced more frequently and ardently by liberals than by what passes for a conservative today, Wendell Berry is clearly a religious rather than Liberal thinker, praising the unified and relentless in his criticism of the fragmented.
Our history would be simple if we could classify it neatly into dominating alpha-males versus cooperative hunter-gatherers, but the experience of agency gives us not one but two fundamental impulses. As well as the desire not to be dominated it gives us the impulse to explore our individuality
Individuals do make choices, but these are facilitated and constrained by the society in which they live. Therefore, it may be more useful to question the system that requires many of us to travel and consume energy as we do.
