Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Most of my students do not go on to become professional educators. But all, I hope, do see themselves as stewards of our educational systems, understood as powerfully entwined with environmental systems, underpinning all hopes of inclusive, sustainable prosperity.
The mess out there is because of a mess in here. Inner and outer talk to each other.
That’s the truth of things.
Let’s get to work.
Nearly 200 people were arrested on Monday, June 7, while protesting the Line 3 pipeline, a long-distance tar sands pipeline that runs across Indigenous land and threatens food and water resources, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
We have a chance to change the game when it comes to climate, conservation and jobs in rural America. These changes won’t solve every problem, but they can be an important step forward.
So until we fully understand ecosystems, the best approach is what Aldo Leopold suggested: Let’s just make sure we keep all the parts when we’re tinkering with them.
When we learn from the way nutrients are constantly broken down and repurposed in natural systems, we find opportunities for a circular economy everywhere.
How do we transition to a low carbon energy system when plentiful resources are no longer available? Our past Horn of Plenty has become a trap from which we in the developed nations increasingly find difficult to extract ourselves.
The Gila River Indian Community is ensuring that its members have long-term access to their own resources while helping solve broader water supply problems in the region.
Discounting models that posit representative world consumers, or even ‘globally impartial decision makers’ attentive to global inequalities, remain wedded to neoclassical understandings of economics that reduces human life to a matter of individual consumption choices, and reduces the nonhuman world to substitutable ‘natural capital’.
If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate.
Only time will tell, but a city built around 15-minute travel via nonmotorized transportation is one that can upend the way planners think about neighborhoods and mobility, and may ultimately render cars unnecessary in all aspects of personal transportation.
Since my book A Small Farm Future makes quite a play for local self-reliance, I thought I should at least temporarily try to put my money (or, more pertinently, my produce) where my mouth is by only eating food produced on my farm for a week.
