Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We can create conditions of emergence for a democratic, cooperative, commons-based, ecological clothing culture. To achieve this, international knowledge exchange will be sought alongside local experimentation. With determination, cooperation, and careful planning, new fibre systems will be possible.
Every so often when reading an obituary of someone, or an awards citation, you realise that you have internalised their work into your thinking without having read it directly. So it was with Donald Shoup, the California transport academic who spent his life working on the problem of urban parking, and who died in February.
It took the Anthropocene to create an aesthetic of the environmental crisis and self-reflection in the cultural canon. And it sparked a long process of going back over famous works that had been taken for granted as artworks devoid of environmental violence.
Plants, like music and food, feed our culture. They create our community; they are our community, and this book offers a model for how to build both plant and human communities.
In Sea of Grass: The Conquest, Ruin, and Redemption of Nature on the American Prairie, longtime Minnesota journalists Dave Hage and Josephine Marcotty trace this staggering transformation. “The Europeans who colonized North America in the 19th century transformed the continent’s hydrology as thoroughly as the glaciers,” they write. “But, remarkably, they did it in less than 100 years instead of tens of thousands.”
Any Government seriously planning ahead would put adaptation to climate change at the centre of their plans, because without that, planning for anything else just isn’t going to work.
Most of us are not very good gardeners. We think we are making all that life happen when life happens of itself — and these days, often despite us.
The conflicts we see today may have many causes, but the fight over resources and the consequences of climate change are ever more relevant.
Will the Government’s new spending and planning priorities, as seen in the Infrastructure Strategy coupled with the recent spending review, actually help make British citizens and communities more resilient in the difficult times we are moving into?
As profit-driven exploitation imperils Indonesia’s Leuser Ecosystem, some unique conservation strategies are working to save it.
Algeria has everything it needs to become a great nurturing nation again: sunlight, water (rare but sufficient), vast lands, available hands, powerful knowledge, and deep faith. What it needs now is a shift in perspective, a coalition for life, a regenerative national strategy.
Sharing a border with Ecuador and Peru, the southern Colombian department of Putumayo takes its name from the Quechua term for “gushing river.” For some, its landscapes are a sacred doorway to the Amazon rainforest, a world unfathomably greater than the human. For others, however, this land looks more like oilfields and military bases, optimized waterflood assets and strategic trafficking corridors.
