Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
WWF is a big, diverse organization. But what drives me are the places — Cameroon, Brazil, the Coral Triangle in Asia. And in those places, the communities are the best conservation leaders.
We must adapt to the reality of climate breakdown so that we are ready for disasters. Because if we are not ready, they will be much worse.
What was once habitat can become habitat again. Habitat that helps sustain pollinators (and therefore a host of other species) can be created — or restored — just beyond the front porch.
We may be very smart creatures, but we are still fundamentally animals in a landscape. If modernism ever de-complexifies, as many think it will, like all civilizations in the past, we would be smart to set in place now the infrastructure, skills and knowledge we’ll need to thrive – together.
In a move that threatens to undermine years of progress toward environmental transparency, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has recently decided to withdraw the much-anticipated Green Claims Directive. This directive, which aimed to hold corporations accountable for misleading sustainability claims, was an essential step toward ensuring that companies align their actions with the urgent need to protect our planet.
The archetypal, self-governing citizen in SMPLCTY is the poet-farmer (or poet-carpenter, etc.), who lives simply in a material and energetic sense, contributes to necessary economic production and community governance in non-hierarchical conditions, and who otherwise explores the good life through creative activity and aesthetic experience.
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.
