Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The collective project of remaking the world needs to be approached with care for—and active consent from—everyone, because everyone is working together on a project that will be better than anything that currently exists.
This century’s pandemic, COVID-19, is history repeating itself and part of a process that has never ended. If mentioning colonialism as an unfinished process bothers those who claim all the technological advances of our space-time, for indigenous peoples it is a concrete reality.
In the case of integrative climate-related policies that seek to redress injustices, as well as to address Earth’s warming, it is essential to have a clear understanding of the terms environmental, energy, and climate justice. Although sharing some core characteristics, e.g., limiting access to the policymaking process, the terms are not interchangeable.
For the foreseeable future, we will have our hands full getting past the ugliness of cultural disintegration. We’ll need whatever morsels of beauty we can preserve or produce just to keep ourselves sane.
Restoring tropical forests through tree planting and selective plant removal can rapidly increase the speed at which they recover from logging, a new study says.
Worldwide, there are now over a thousand coastal areas where fish can’t breathe. The nitrogen that makes crops grow is also destroying offshore ecosystems.
If lesson one of coronavirus is that things can change, and lesson two is that they easily slip back again, then lesson three must be about the importance of presenting images of the future that motivate people to imagine change.
When it comes to the key decisions that will shape human lives in the post-pandemic world, this new generation of activists will continue to pressure decision-makers into giving them a future worth fighting for.
The popular discourse around the climate emergency all too often highlights fringe voices that predict the end of the world or suggest that there is little to worry about. But as the climatologist Steven Schneider presciently remarked a decade ago, when it comes to the climate “the end of the world” and “good for us” are probably the two least likely outcomes.
But a college that finds spiritual expression in service to the others with whom we live (human or other-than-human) and to the land beneath our feet, that scrutinises and decolonises itself without fragility, that privileges listening before speaking, and that acts mindfully and soulfully in the world, would be a college that meets the needs of the time.
Today’s extractive industries such as gas, oil, and mining have an egregious reputation of violating human and environmental rights and supporting highly controversial political and economic reforms in poor countries.
It becomes clear where the way out of the crisis can be found – at least in principle: acceptance of our collective failure, humility on the part of the “experts”, and immediate action from the human side of the problem.
