Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Outside the confines of the current multilateral system, a plurality of knowledge is thriving. It is knowledge that will swell and flow through all the lands and rivers it can reach until it can no longer be ignored.
The U.S. Department of Defense is the largest institutional user of fossil fuels in the world and, consequently, the world’s largest institutional producer of greenhouse gas emissions.
Around the 17th century, the Dutch started reinforcing their dykes and harbours with sturdy mats the size of football pitches – hand-woven from thousands of twigs grown on nearby coppice plantations. These “fascine mattresses” were weighted with rocks and sunk into canals, estuaries, and rivers.
Io, Saturnalia! Today we cast off the orders imposed on us from our parasitic overlords and do as we will. Well, we would if our overlords would allow it.
We have entered the age of global energy disruptions, and the “energy transition” that we are inevitably headed for is unlikely to be the one we expect.
Thoreau’s masterpiece Walden, in fact, can be read as a manual for post-traumatic growth (i.e., personal growth in the wake of traumatic experiences).
In a recent study, myself and fellow researchers compared tropical deforestation rates and found that less deforestation occurs on Indigenous lands than in non-protected areas across the tropics.
By replacing multilateralism with multi-stakeholderism, the UN Food Systems Summit (UNFSS) is advancing a vision of food systems governance that sets the foundation for stronger corporate influence both of the UN and food systems at large.
Citizen-led retrofitting, long the poor relation of climate policy, could now be its secret weapon in accelerating rapid transition.
Plugging in to a wider network of other groups also developing grassroots climate responses can help our local ideas and projects to flourish, help us learn and share with others that have the vision of more sustainable and equal communities where we have control over our day to day lives.
The truth is that bugs are exquisite in their evolutionary design and they should be able to exists for their own sake, not just for the value in service they give us. But they should be revered for all the vital roles they do play in keeping our only and shared home inhabitable.
The social order that capital’s apologists defend as inevitable and eternal is “the product of many economic revolutions, of the extinction of a whole series of older formations of social production.” Acceptance of the wages-system as a natural way to live and work did not happen easily.
