Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Yet if the value of the commons remains always partly mysterious to systems which can only deal with the legible, so too does their capacity for endurance and the strength which they give to those who live and work with them, and the process of enclosure is never quite as total as its promoters would like us to believe.
How can we discuss and respond to our culture’s biggest challenges if we don’t even have the words to describe them?
The elements are handy symbols that our symbolical languages can latch on to and use to word the world, to translate reality into abstract thinking, so that we can talk about our practical experiences.
Let us build communities where the silence of exhaustion is not celebrated, but heard. Where emotional resilience is not individual, but collective. Let us make space — for tears as well as for treaties. We are not broken. Just tired. And still standing.
We’re awkwardly caught between being too intelligent to work as well as turtles and mushrooms, but not intelligent enough to be like angels or gods. The flaw, then, is intelligence, which gives us enough power to screw up the world. It’s a special curse. Yet, we need not invoke interstellar travel to find people who have lived sustainably and without difficulty.
How do we slow down and reject the “hustle culture” that prioritizes gains in efficiency, wealth and consumption over all else? How do we maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative effects we have on the environment around us? What should we do today to plant the seeds of a future we’d like to see, or would like generations beyond us to see?
Adaptation is a chance to gather almost everybody around the table. The hard facts can be laid out on that table for all to see and, around it, the possibility of a future can be negotiated. Please let’s invite everybody who is operating in good faith to sit at it.
Endgame 2050 delivers lots of good information, but it’s hampered by poor structure, repetition and lack of focus.
For some time we Americans have been living through the country’s second Gilded Age, one that will not likely end the way the first one did.
A new book offers offers a welcome, up-to-date examination of social ecology as a living tradition.
Fear of death pervades our culture: many among us cringe at its mention, and indeed structure whole lives around elaborate stories of denial: we can’t really ever be dead, surely!
Several decades after the Cold War, Russia and the U.S. found themselves on eerily parallel oligarchic paths. In this episode, we trace how the world drifted from dreams of liberation to authoritarian control—and how a new generation began planting the seeds of liberty and equality once again.
