Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
While we understand the necessity – and some argue, the inevitability – of degrowth, the public relations work of degrowth remains lacking, in spite of the efforts of many learned scholars and activists.
As you can imagine, I don’t have much time for much of anything besides the garden under the Hay Moon. But this is sort of what we humans live for. Certainly I do. Making food! Making tasty and nutritious food, food that has no unpronounceable ingredients and much less embedded carbon than what is found in grocery stores — even my food co-op.
If some degree of warming is inevitable, then it is incredibly important we reach it later, rather than sooner. If we cannot yet fully avoid them, then we must decelerate our climate impacts.
I want to encourage you to try a little bit of awe for early, microbial life. Try some respect; try seeing yourselves from a position of humility, and extend admiration for the genius that we take for granted, but that is absolutely crucial to being who we are.
Thomas Jefferson died 198 years ago on the 4th of July, but we really shouldn’t wait two more years to notice, and take to heart, an important argument in political/economic philosophy that Jefferson made in a letter to James Madison dated 6 September 1789.
In 1989, the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre developed a new model of democratic participation, which has become known internationally as participatory budgeting (PB). Through this process, community members directly decide how to spend a portion of a public budget. In other words, the people who pay taxes (all of us) decide how they get spent.
An Alberta study recently published in Environmental Science & Technology Letters highlights the transport of toxic coal dust downwind over the Rocky Mountains into southern Alberta’s watersheds and communities.
This is the second in the Metastatic Modernity video series of about 17 installments (see launch announcement), putting the meta-crisis in perspective as a cancerous episode afflicting humanity and the greater community of life on Earth. This episode provides a cosmological perspective on our insignificance.
The six conservative justices on the US Supreme Court (SCOTUS) have once again chosen to ignore decades of precedence—this time in the cases of Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo and Relentless Inc. v. US Department of Commerce.
There’ve been two seismic events in British public life in the last couple of weeks. One was the general election. The other, of course, was the publication anniversary of my book Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future.
If nothing else, I hope these few indulgent personal reflections on communicative resilience and creative resilience will have encouraged you to find and/or express your own voice in this world-in-crisis, and in whatever way(s) you feel most compelled and/or comfortable to do so.
If we were to demand our fair share, if we were to refuse to give away our lives and bodies and freedom to choose, if we were to abandon this class to a real and true independence with nothing taken from us, then this culture would end. It is that fragile. It is that unreal. It is a sham.
