Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s going to be a rough year. The fatal combination of escalating climate breakdown and the capture of crucial governments by killer clowns provokes a horrible sense of inevitability. Just when we need determined action, we know that our governments, and the powerful people to whom they respond, will do everything they can to stymie it.
Fibersheds put it all together into a practical, natural, and hopeful whole. It’s based in the philosophy that nature still knows best, whether it involves the role of animals on the land, promoting life in the soil, keeping the ground covered with plants, building up soil carbon, generating local jobs, and using ingredients sourced from nature.
Unless the world begins to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement “will slip out of reach,” according to the latest UN Environment Programme (UNEP) emissions gap report.
Telling young Asian leaders that they’re basically on their own when it comes to defending against climate change because old people are not going to worry about this as much is not the message you should be sending.
Now is the time when the generations need to feed off each other’s strengths.
Stories play a powerful role in transmitting personal and collective experiences. They allow us to “feel” climate change in ways that can move us emotionally and open our imagination to new possibilities. They raise our awareness not only to what is happening in the world, but to how it may be experienced by others, both now and in the future.
Draft Agreement 1/CP.25, for instance, calls for all Parties to revise and enhance their Nationally Determined Commitments — their mitigation and adaptation intentions — by October 2020. Regrettably, the draft is not framed as a mandate, merely as advice.
The fires in the rainforest have finally been extinguished by the arrival of the rainy season, but threats and violence continue unabated against forest defenders. They need international support if the Amazon is to be at the centre of climate action rather than just another distant frontline in the war against nature.
Caring for nature means resisting the commodification of nature and standing up to environmental injustice. It also means getting to know the struggles and aspirations of environmental defenders and forest dwellers, who they fight and how you can help from where you are.
It is crucial to mobilize and get politically organized, to come together in solidarity for a long-haul struggle.
After increasing at the fastest rate for seven years in 2018, global CO2 emissions are set to rise much more slowly this year – but will, nevertheless, reach another record high.
Emissions from fossil fuel and industry (FF&I) are expected to reach 36.81bn tonnes of CO2 (GtCO2) in 2019, up by only 0.24GtCO2 (0.6%) from 2018 levels, according to the latest estimates from the Global Carbon Project (GCP).
I am in the middle of things here at #COP25Madrid where delegates from nearly 200 countries are gathered to dicker and dither about whether they will save the world, or just let it get hotter.
XR has tried to put itself ‘beyond politics’, steering clear of parliamentary machinations, in a bid to broaden its appeal and express the urgency and scale of the crisis to as many people as possible. But with the most important election of a generation looming in the UK, is it now time for XR to use its reach to grapple directly with the workings of this country?
We have only one rational choice: to choose to survive.
This demands all necessary actions – although they spell the end of existing systems of energy, food, water, money, defence, transport and politics – and their replacement with new ones, universally dedicated to a viable, just and sustainable human and planetary future.
