Venezuela’s goo-in-the-ground isn’t usable oil at current prices (and may never be)
Venezuela’s supposedly vast reserves of crude oil aren’t what they seem to be.
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The center cannot hold…
And while the center burns itself to ash, life goes on. Pretty much as it always has. With bad and good, joy and grief, pain and beauty and such wonder. Give attention to that, to the reality of your life, because that’s the best medicine for bewilderment. And it’s also… just life…
A handbook for regenerative design
The Pattern Book for Regenerative Design is written for ‘engineers (and other humans)’ who want to “transform the built environment industry into a force for good.” Despite coming into the “other human” category here, I found its mental models and some of its thinking devices useful.
We are in a crisis – How to build communities that can respond
We have our greatest democratic possibilities in the communities where we live, and this is where we can begin to turn around the trend to concentrated oligarchic power that threatens democracy as a whole. We must build the future in place.
Ditching Dualism #8: Sentience
Authority, for materialist monists, issues from the universe as directly accessed, assuming matter is real (rather than imagined, as in idealism). Materialist monists do not presume that we know better: that the universe is incapable of producing all that we experience based on the constituents and interactions on full display.
We’re racing down the highway to a Mad Max world: But there’s a degrowth way out
We’d reap myriad benefits by deeply cutting resource use while ensuring that collective sufficiency and justice for all become the focus of our world.
Democracy Rising 34: On Ghosted Nature, Moloch, Alternate Futures, Shatter Zones, Elites, Power Laws, and [d]emocratic Crypto-Revolution
Perhaps our long experience of sitting around campfires together and talking about what’s going on in the world around us, and what we ought to do about it next, can be recovered and put to good use again.
Relationalized Finance: Bridging the Chasm
Moving forward effectively requires clarity about the limits of conventional finance – and the creation of new finance vehicles that honor the deep complexities of commoning and ecosystems at bioregional scales.
Nourishing the Bioregional Economy: Essential Resources
In a recent article I summarized arguments for reversing the trend toward globalization of economies and cultures, aiming instead for the flourishing of communities rooted in their bioregions (i.e., regions defined by characteristics of the natural environment rather than human-imposed borders). For readers receptive to those arguments, the fundamental follow-up question is, “How?”
How Breaking — and Repairing — the Water Cycle Shapes Our Climate Future
In arid and semi-arid regions, retaining rainfall where it falls is not an ecological luxury. It is a prerequisite for long-term water security, climate stability, and social resilience.
The Nature Embedded Mind: Excerpt
Conversely to Hansel and Gretel who left breadcrumbs to find their way out of the woods, we find ourselves now stranded in our civilized, industrialized, digitized cage and needing to find the trail back into our Wilderness.
The Things We Take for Granted
In this week’s Frankly, Nate shares reflections on what we take for granted in life at multiple scales: from personal health to meaningful work to relative ecological stability.
