Letter From The Farm | Restoring Nature, Improving Productivity
For millennia, farmers in the Burren have played a central role in supporting the rich biodiversity and cultural heritage of the region.
For millennia, farmers in the Burren have played a central role in supporting the rich biodiversity and cultural heritage of the region.
For the era of coal to come to an end, all financial taps must be shut off – and alternative energy systems must be ready to meet demand in coal’s place.
If the conspicuous consumption of the one percent helped lead us to the brink, perhaps their conscribed consumption can help edge us back.
While surely a poor shadow of really being up on the ISS, it was still humbling and beautiful and a way for a far larger number of people to experience the Overview Effect.
Growing food is just like every other exercise – no one learns to rock climb, knit, box, embroider, run, dance, make art, build things, etc… without a LOT of time being less productive than they’d like to be to get the skill set.
The role and success of governance and institutions in facing and meeting the challenges of the past unlock a treasure trove of information that just may guide us toward better futures.
I’ve come to think that, unfortunately, small farm societies emerging contingently in some of the margins of a collapsing urban-industrial world system and shining a light to the future is about as good a prospect as we can realistically now hope for.
The framework of our civilization is premised on the destruction of the planet.
I had a letter from a young reader last week, asking what I thought about concrete steps that we might be taking in place of what passes for activism in our present culture.
On this segment of Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by William Rees, Nora Bateson, and Rex Weyler to discuss the purpose of ecology and what it might look like to have a civilization centered around it.
There’s a wider point here—that in general the private sector would never be profitable if it had to pay for the environmental capital it gets through—but it’s rare to see such a clear cut example.
A lot can be learned from the impressive legal work of Thomas Linzey, a fiercely creative attorney who has not only pioneered the rights of nature, but developed legal doctrines for “community rights” and more recently, “self-owned land.”