Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Pull Einstein out of his artificial context and plop him (with colleagues, sure) into a wild place and you’ll quickly find out who the real geniuses are. Humans are certainly capable of such genius survival, but only if loaded with the appropriate cultural software—as vanishingly few are today. Not genius.
With cities across the world on the frontlines of escalating wildfires, floods, and political instability, driven by a global economy still hooked on fossil fuels, GDP growth, and failed neoliberal dogma, Daly’s work provides the moral and intellectual grounds for a new economic direction that is rooted in sustainability, justice, and ecological balance.
Renewable energy will overtake coal to become the world’s top source of electricity “by 2026 at the latest”, according to new forecasts from the International Energy Agency (IEA).
In this conversation, Nate is joined by Stephen Jenkinson, a cultural activist and author on the topic of grief, loss, and dying, to discuss his extensive work on grief literacy and the shortcomings of the dominant cultural attitudes towards death.
Emily Donovan has a mission: “Make the polluters pay.” The mother of twins took on the role of activist when she started fighting for her North Carolina community in 2017. Her main target: PFAS “forever chemicals,” which do not degrade and at even low levels have been linked to a wide range of human health risks, including fertility issues, immune interactions, cancer, liver damage, thyroid disease, asthma, and more.
I think that GDP as a measure has many flaws. I still believe, however, that the GDP as a measure of economic activity has some relevance and as I am exploring the link between the economy, the human ecology and the resource throughput, I find it interesting to get a grip on it.
Before I begin let me say that I think much of the global livestock industry is a horror show, and it’d be great to bring the curtain down on a lot of it. Also that cutting down wild forests or ploughing up wild grasslands are terrible ideas. And that there are a lot of good reasons to opt for veganism. That’s not what this is about.
Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.
To make the energy system resilient requires identifying all potential risks and their impacts, maintaining flexibility and redundancy in the system, and ensuring a wide range of stakeholders are involved in decision making.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on a moment of unexpected insight during a morning bike ride, which catalyzed a larger meditation on the modern human predicament.
Thus, Philomela escapes and acquires a new voice with which to recount her sad history. Perhaps her lament, where it could still be heard in Hertfordshire, took on a new resonance for listeners at the beginning of the twentieth century if they recalled the abundance of past decades.
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.
