Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Scientists thought they could make hamsters more cooperative by editing out a gene … But just the opposite happened. Both male and female hamsters with the altered gene became more aggressive—much more aggressive.
While Washington struggles over job and climate programs, unions around the country are making their own climate-protecting, justice-promoting jobs programs.
World-leading economists have blown a hole right through the middle of the main tool used to produce the net-zero scenarios embraced by climate policymakers.
Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.
Ultimately, reframing and revaluing social (and ecological) reproduction, and reducing ecologically destructive production and consumption in the process, could lead to an abundance of time and leisure rather than austerity and overwork.
So the truth is this: Civilization largely has used fossil fuels to destroy robust natural ecosystems and to replace them with artificial and fragile ones.
In the US Pacific Northwest, tribal hatcheries uphold Indigenous communities’ treaty rights to salmon, while buying time to rehabilitate lost habitat.
Great outcomes can come even when people have very different values and politics if they work together in a principled and collaborative way—not one side trying to educate or change the other but co-designing what change looks like and how they will each play their part to deliver it.
Rural areas are wholesome spaces and only policies which take this wholesomeness into account will be supportive to rural areas where thriving societies live, work and evolve. We have gathered examples of how it works. The moment to start a new integrated rural policy is now.
Humanity as a whole must accept its sin in order to seek to overcome it through mechanisms to stop the imbalance that, as we have seen in previous essays, is the result of industrial civilization…
It’s time for some bold thinking on how to fairly protect those in work from the worst of its impact. A £15 an hour minimum wage by 2024 should be the target.
If we accepted this as our single, solitary chance to live, then we might do better at living. We might focus on life, on the here and now, on being.
