Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In January, we launched a brand-new Marine Ecosystems Community of Practice – a collaborative initiative bringing together four Ecosystem Restoration Communities (ERCs) working at the frontlines of coastal and marine restoration.
The easiest and cheapest means of reducing warming is increasing vegetation in rural areas; eliminating bare soil, especially the millions of acres produced by industrial agriculture, addressing erosion and aridification, and restoring forests, which will also increase fire-resistance, reducing the need for the far-more complex and expensive changes required in suburban and urban areas.
Humans only fool themselves to believe they can do any better than ecology. We can’t expect to invent substitutes via cognitive processes: it’s never worked that way, and our attempt is proving to be a colossal flop in a mere 10,000 years.
In the end, proforestation offers us a choice about who we wish to become. We can continue to treat forests as instruments to repair a damaged atmosphere, pulling them into our orbit as another tool in a human-centred project. Or we can accept their invitation to live differently: to slow down, to restrain ourselves, to share space and time with other beings whose existence does not revolve around us.
Leslie Davenport’s new podcast, Burning Questions: Conversations About Our Living World, brings together thought leaders navigating the emotional, strategic, and relational dimensions of our planetary moment. In this episode, Leslie is joined by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin to explore something both timely and timeless: how do we find leverage for transformation when the crises keep compounding?
From rising GDP losses to ecosystem collapse, climate reports are stacking up fast. The problem is we have no language for the difference between a bad situation and a civilisational threshold.
Before plants and animals recolonize after a wildfire, fungi get to work.
We need a plan B. In case society starts to, erm, collapse… We need to be prepared…It won’t do to plan to WAIT til we win intellectual debates such as that around growth/degrowth before we get together to prepare…Theo Cox, Liam Kavanagh and Rupert Read outline their new OSF-funded report, just launched this week…
The lesson shown by the LA wildfires is clear. When misinformation turns experts into targets of distrust and attack and weakens their public speech, the public is ultimately pushed further away from life-saving information at the moment they are most vulnerable.
By moving from seeing nature as something we – a distinct group causing harm – need to protect, to understanding it as a system we are actively involved in, battling climate change becomes less a concept of preservation and more a question of how we can help to shape a world that allows many beings to thrive.
The hunter-gatherer knows instinctively in their bones that separating oneself from ancient ecology is bonkers. Listen to them.
The Darien is a hub of extraordinary terrestrial and aquatic diversity, a sanctuary of indigenous communities already devoted to protecting local wilderness, and habitat for endangered Apex predators, including the Harpy Eagle. It also, unfortunately, serves as an example of contemporary environmental and societal threats magnified by large-scale geopolitical changes.
