Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Every placemaking project is also a transportation project. Whether you’re improving a park, a plaza, a waterfront, or a public building, odds are that there is a street on one or more sides of your site—and that street can make or break your placemaking ambitions.
No longer should our survival be an afterthought. If we are to withstand the climate crisis, every decision should begin with the question of what the planet can endure. This means that any discussion about new infrastructure should begin with ecological constraints. The figures are stark.
In this article we’d like to offer some new thinking: a policy proposal that we feel has the potential to be transformative. At its simplest, our proposal involves providing self-selecting unemployed public housing residents with a basic, living wage.
However, if we see healing Gaia as the overarching meaning of our lives—a journey that can be completed in countless ways—that might enable us to use this frustration to assess specific paths we can take on that journey.
It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete. In the perilous moment we face, with the crises of the climate emergency and spiralling inequality, the time is up on corporations acting as though serving financial shareholders is their highest duty.
Today’s high court judgment is a vindication of everything climate activists have been saying for more than a decade: Britain cannot honour its national commitment to tackle climate change at the same time as building a new runway at one of the busiest airports in the world.
However, for the Green New Deal to accomplish its climate goals, it must spur two large-scale transitions: the transition away from fossil fuel use toward renewable energy, and the transition away from industrial agriculture, a huge polluter and greenhouse gas emitter in its own right, toward organic regenerative practices that draw down and sequester carbon.
Enter the Vancouver Tool Library, which loans out more than 2,000 items. It is part of a movement of Libraries of Things (LoT), which are taking the classic “reduce, reuse, recycle” mantra to new heights. These social enterprises share with the public everything from backpacks to boomboxes, baby carriers, and beer-brewing equipment. Some even rent ties and suit jackets for job seekers.
Preventing food waste and shortening the food chain from farmer to consumer is the driving force behind a sustainable Crowdfarming project in Valencia. The brainchild of Gonzalo and Gabriel Úrculo, who found themselves with a semi-abandoned orange farm just outside Valencia, has been so successful, they are now at the forefront of an agricultural revolution in rural Spain.
With this free fertilizer scheme I can still garden successfully if I don’t have extra cash to spend on fertilizer. I can still garden if my local hardware store goes out of business and I lose easy access to purchased inputs. I can still garden if something goes really wrong with the world, supply chains fail and it’s no longer possible to buy fertilizer.
In Active Hope, Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone argue that there are three dimensions of our ‘Great Turning’—the transition to a sustainable future, rather than just accepting collapse or the ‘Great Unraveling,’ or denying that we’re in a transition at all (the three possible stories we can tell ourselves about the future).
My call for enabling the Earth Charter to speak directly to critical contemporary events and policy issues and for continuing the global ethics dialogue that led to the Earth Charter is not alone: many persons who have played significant roles in the Earth Charter movement since its inception in the 1990s have likewise argued for its importance.
