Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Does the environmental movement launched a half-century ago reflect the vibrant diversity of the American people? Does that movement address environmental justice issues that disproportionately affect people of color?
If ever there were a time to reassess the genuine threats to our security and separate them from the self-interested aims of the weapons industry, this is it.
Yet our governments’ primary effort is to enhance their power at the expense of other countries. In failing to address our real and common threats, we are our own adversaries.
To return to the pre-coronavirus assumptions about the world is to return to a way of thinking and living that cannot be sustained and that will destroy the planet. We need to reinvent modern civilization and we need colleges and universities to take on a leadership role in this great task.
In the midst of a global pandemic, the Trump administration continues to disregard science by sharply cutting the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards negotiated by the Obama administration. The rollback is both the most impactful and heedless environmental deregulation of Trump’s presidency.
The novel Coronavirus disease Covid-19 is amplifying both the ways that our cultural and economic lives are durable and resilient, and the many, many ways in which we are utterly vulnerable and precarious.
We are the forgotten ones, the canaries in the coal mines, the disenfranchised and the disposable. We are communities of color, lower-wealth communities and Indigenous peoples.
We are black, brown, yellow, red and yes, even sometimes white. We are gay and straight. We are atheist and theist.
What we know and what we have good grounds to fear about climate change calls our way of living into question. To take this evidence seriously leads to difficult questions about the stories we have been telling about the shape of history, the nature of the world in which we find ourselves and the virtue of achievements in which we have taken pride.
In a year where biblical calamities have rained down upon the world – as floods, bush fires and locust storms– this fracture has not emerged in the highly stressed natural world but from within a globalised human society. After ignoring the cries of Cassandra for decades, the horse has finally entered the gates of the cities, releasing billions of tiny invisible lifeforms that are no respecters of age, gender, wealth, position or race.
Hard planetary boundaries and fraught ecosystem requirements do exist. Yet love exists too, and everywhere, amidst the imperatives of risk and survival.
Climate action plans (CAPs) are an integral component of efforts to address climate change. CAPs are a series of policy measures, regulations and public-private sector initiatives with the intended goal of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and addressing climate change impacts.
Let’s listen to the voices of the original, indigenous caretakers of the lands we now inhabit. This body of wisdom and practical, replicable models is readily available for us to learn and activate in our own communities. Let’s take this time to see how we can do that.
I invite each of you to share your own sources of inspiration, solutions and hands-on practical knowledge that we can use as we forge ahead with a new way of being.
The UK has just three decades to reach net-zero emissions and tree planting has emerged as a prominent part of the government’s plan to get there.
With technological solutions in their infancy, trees are for now the only scalable “negative emissions” strategy and can come with additional benefits for wildlife, flood management and health.
