Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
On July 27, 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux filed a lawsuit against the Army Corps of Engineers for authorizing the construction of the 1,172-mile Dakota Access pipeline. Just over a year later, the project has been completed and carries crude oil from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields to an export terminal in Illinois. The case is still pending, and continues to be the tribe’s last hope to protect its water and land.
We might be annihilating life on earth but this is not something about which we have no choice. In fact, each and every one of us has a choice: we can choose to do nothing, we can wait for (or even lobby) others to act, or we can take powerful action ourselves. But unless you search your heart and make a conscious and deliberate choice to commit yourself to act powerfully, your unconscious choice will effectively be the first one
I will present what may be the movement’s biggest task: crafting ways and means for it to actually take power across the world so that the desires of the vast majority of the world’s residents (including the non-human creatures among us) can be the benchmark against which we measure our chances for arriving in mid-century in a world characterized not by multiple crises…
If you want to understand how global economics killed British Columbia’s risky liquefied natural gas gamble and the government’s promised riches and jobs, then you might want to hear out Eoin Finn. The failure of B.C.’s LNG strategy, symbolized by last week’s death of the $11-billion Pacific NorthWest LNG terminal, is really a story about government deceit or ignorance.
Strategic climate communicators still don’t know what will be successful. The extent of our failure is of Biblical proportions and continuing. In the meantime, everyone should do everything, all the time, even if it means finding motivation by thinking about an uninhabitable world.
I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr’s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer “essay” was what I felt called to write. Orr’s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.
Owning a garden like London Glades would certainly be an education, but it would be a gentle, life-affirming way to engage with the land and the sustainable, low-maintenance approach would allow the client to develop their stewardship of their garden. I like this soft approach to learning and have followed similar lines in my own hidden allotment front garden which uses similar plants to my neighbours’ gardens and appears to follow traditional ornamental design, but incorporates many edibles which forest gardener Stephen Barstow would call edimentals.
Climate change is an existential risk that could abruptly end human civilisation because of a catastrophic “failure of imagination” by global leaders to understand and act on the science and evidence before them.
Humans are motivated by love, belonging, meaning, and mattering. People love good stories—even ones (or especially one) that have shame, fear, guilt, and anxiety. To understand such stories, one has to have a conscience and care about the world. There’s no need to sugarcoat the situation we’re in; let’s put a rest to that argument. What we need is heaps of fierce compassion and bravery.
The problem of legislative gridlock and failed governance is not going to be solved anytime soon by routinely voting the out’s in and the in’ s out over the course of an election cycle or two–then rinsing and repeating. The question we are left with is: what’s a practical alternative? Unfortunately, I don’t have a pat or complete answer I do, however, have a suggestion that the clean energy and climate defending communities might want to discuss amongst themselves.
Our framing and cognitive dissonance prevents us from moving forward with useful policies to restrain climate change. Solutions that protect growth are either destructive to the geobiosphere and/or intensive in energy use. But we have a conceptual scientific framework that explains our societal systemic behavior exists, the Maximum Power Principle.
The decision by President Trump to withdraw the USA – the world’s biggest per capita polluter – from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change is undoubtedly a set-back to a unified global response to climate change. However, the response by US cities, along with states, businesses and citizens has been truly inspiring. More than 300 American “Climate Mayors” have committed to “adopt, honor and uphold Paris Climate Agreement goals.”
