Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Environmental laws are evolving from prioritizing human benefits to recognizing nature’s intrinsic rights; this is reflected in the small but growing number of countries that grant legal personhood to natural entities.
The Clean Air Act gave California the authority to issue tough pollution standards for vehicles, spurring the development of the catalytic converter and cleaning up America’s air.
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.
In January, we launched a brand-new Marine Ecosystems Community of Practice – a collaborative initiative bringing together four Ecosystem Restoration Communities (ERCs) working at the frontlines of coastal and marine restoration.
The easiest and cheapest means of reducing warming is increasing vegetation in rural areas; eliminating bare soil, especially the millions of acres produced by industrial agriculture, addressing erosion and aridification, and restoring forests, which will also increase fire-resistance, reducing the need for the far-more complex and expensive changes required in suburban and urban areas.
Humans only fool themselves to believe they can do any better than ecology. We can’t expect to invent substitutes via cognitive processes: it’s never worked that way, and our attempt is proving to be a colossal flop in a mere 10,000 years.
In the end, proforestation offers us a choice about who we wish to become. We can continue to treat forests as instruments to repair a damaged atmosphere, pulling them into our orbit as another tool in a human-centred project. Or we can accept their invitation to live differently: to slow down, to restrain ourselves, to share space and time with other beings whose existence does not revolve around us.
Leslie Davenport’s new podcast, Burning Questions: Conversations About Our Living World, brings together thought leaders navigating the emotional, strategic, and relational dimensions of our planetary moment. In this episode, Leslie is joined by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin to explore something both timely and timeless: how do we find leverage for transformation when the crises keep compounding?
From rising GDP losses to ecosystem collapse, climate reports are stacking up fast. The problem is we have no language for the difference between a bad situation and a civilisational threshold.
Before plants and animals recolonize after a wildfire, fungi get to work.
We need a plan B. In case society starts to, erm, collapse… We need to be prepared…It won’t do to plan to WAIT til we win intellectual debates such as that around growth/degrowth before we get together to prepare…Theo Cox, Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read outline their new OSF-funded report, just launched this week…
The lesson shown by the LA wildfires is clear. When misinformation turns experts into targets of distrust and attack and weakens their public speech, the public is ultimately pushed further away from life-saving information at the moment they are most vulnerable.
