From Shanghai with energy
Can China face the challenges awaiting humankind in the near future?
Can China face the challenges awaiting humankind in the near future?
If we truly seek to create relations of accountability and peace with our larger environment(s), jurisprudence needs to evolve beyond our current anthropocentric lens, and we can make it so by encouraging environmental movements to collaborate in developing ecocentric governance approaches.
Without urgent and equitable action to fund adaptation, the next decade will not only test our infrastructure; it will test our humanity. Adaptation is not charity; it is climate justice. And justice delayed will only deepen the loss.
COP30 is underway. It’s being called the ‘Adaptation COP’—the moment when the world finally faces the need to live within a changed climate. But let’s be honest: humanity isn’t preparing for crisis anymore. We’re already living through it.
The book invites us to imagine ways we can strengthen all our community partnerships and offers skills to create a new world through the art of Radical Listening.
Bill Gates made news last week by challenging climate advocates to accept the ‘hard truth’ that temperature rises will not cause enough deaths to justify the priority placed on them. Perhaps the real story is Gates’ use of a very old tactic to dismiss new targets – Gates implied that the grave concerns of even global institutions and science are doomsday fantasies.
But what phytomining could do is produce some metal while also remediating degraded land, sequestering carbon, and serving as the fuel for energy production or the raw material for biochar fertilizer, syngas, and other chemical creations.
Hopes are high. Expectations are low. Change is happening, it is just painfully slow. We need this to be the ‘delivery COP’. One thing is for sure, COP30 will be make or break for people, our precious flora and fauna, and our planet as a whole.
Recovering the meaning the white pines, and other trees had for past generations, and—like Mayer’s project with Charles Johnson’s oak—finding imaginative ways to add new meaning and propagate it forward can play a significant role in helping us to reorient the trajectory of the history we make going forward in a more respectful and sustainable direction for all.
The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.
With universities being highly enmeshed with corporate money that comes from fossil fuel industries, does it even make sense to have universities? And how exactly do we move from profit-seeking science research that advances weapon technology to liberation?