Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For the US to have any chance of transitioning to a low-carbon economy in anything approximating the next 25 years, it will need to be lifted from the trenches of the culture wars. The US cannot continue to spend equal time at the extremes, believing it will all balance out in the end. It doesn’t.
In the next few decades, climate change is likely to have a counterintuitive effect on the North Atlantic and northern Europe when a major ocean current which brings heat from the tropics is projected to shut down.
My big hope is for progressives to leave behind their issue silos, come together, and forge a mighty political force, both for immediate action and for deep, transformative change.
You can recognize that modernity does not pursue appropriate goals, and look forward to a changed world. That attitude shift alone will make you a driving force for a changing world. And that doesn’t sound too hard, does it? You can start today!
And though this remains true for farmers and shepherds in areas like the Carneddau today, this need-to-know and name-your-environment according to its natural features and function within the rural economy held much more broadly across pre-industrial Wales.
For decades, fossil fuel propagandists have tried to weasel out of responsibility for climate change by blaming their customers, ordinary people like Debbie and Ernesto. The hurricane names reinforce that narrative. Let’s change it.
If we expect the next generation to do better than the present one at protecting our precious blue marble, however, we have an obligation to help them as much as possible.
Wetland restoration and conservation, in combination with agricultural stakeholder best management practices, is a promising model for success.
You see, as we foolishly escaped our ecological context, we recklessly re-fashioned the world so that we are destroying the ecological context crucial to millions of other species—including ourselves, eventually.
For all its bleakness, The Burning World offers a more hopeful outlook on humanity’s future than does The Drowned World. While the latter leaves no room for hope that human extinction can be averted, the former hints at the possibility of recovery and renewal for humanity.
Living machines are essentially intensive, indoor artificial wetlands. Technical names for living machines include “advanced ecologically engineered systems” and “fixed-film ecology wastewater treatment systems.” What they entail is mimicking natural processes of biological decomposition in a constructed aquatic environment.
The discovery of oxygen production in the deep ocean without light (and therefore without photosynthesis) is upending ideas about the evolution of life and origins of oxygen in the atmosphere.
