Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Chris Smaje openly admits that there are too many contingent variables to predict the future; many scenarios are plausible. That said, Finding Lights in a Dark Age offers some thoughtful, erudite speculation about what a healthy, post-capitalist world might look like and the choices we may need to make.
Chuck Collins returns to Crazy Town to offer insights from his new book, Burned by Billionaires: How Concentrated Wealth and Power Are Ruining Our Lives and Planet.
Anyone proposing to offer a master class on changing the world for the better, without becoming negative, cynical, angry or narrow-minded in the process, could model their advice on the life and work of pioneering animal behavior scholar Jane Goodall.
If 99% of human history was spent as hunter-gatherers, what can that way of life teach us about equality, freedom, and hierarchy today? We connect our foraging past to modern politics—and ask if industrial civilization is all it’s cracked up to be.
Peak oil calls on us to imagine a lower-energy future and to start adapting now. It’s a game-changer, and a life-changer.
When we begin to act with deep time in mind, perhaps future generations will remember us not for what we took, but for what we tended, protected, and passed on.
Maximize profits, exploit nature, hoard money, and, like Buzz Lightyear, grow the economy to infinity and beyond! That’s the modern economic playbook. But for decades, one renegade country has taken a contrarian stance that actually cares about people’s wellbeing and environmental health: the Himalayan nation of Bhutan.
If you are on the permaculture train, I applaud you, it’s a great ride, but I also invite you to look around and ask: where is it really going? Is it fostering collective care and ecological reciprocity, or is it just another form of “green” entrepreneurship? Has it challenged the dominant system or capitalist materialism? Or has it merely carved out a comfortable niche within it?
Yes, you can grow a lot of tomatoes in a relatively small space inside these plastic hot-houses, but did any of the Icarus-minded engineers and plastic-film aficionados ever stop to ask some simple questions? What are the long-term prospects for this practice? And what will eventually happen to all that plastic?
New York Times bestselling author Christopher Ryan joins the odyssey to discuss human nature. What’s universal, what’s cultural, and what’s personal? Can we really change the culture we live in? And are some societies better suited to human well-being than others?
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.
