Missing Words
How can we discuss and respond to our culture’s biggest challenges if we don’t even have the words to describe them?
Featured
The real meaning of the “elements”
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.
The Hidden Cost of Integrity: Environmental Commitment in the Global South
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.
My Ishmael
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.
Towards Individual Wisdom and Restraint
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?
Depolarisation and adaptation create serious change together
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.
Review: “Endgame 2050” documentary
Endgame 2050 delivers lots of good information, but it’s hampered by poor structure, repetition and lack of focus.
Living through the second Gilded Age
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.
An Important New Book on the Praxis of Social Ecology
A new book offers offers a welcome, up-to-date examination of social ecology as a living tradition.
Death as a Nothing-Burger
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!
Human Nature Odyssey: Episode 14. The King Is Dead, Now What? The 250-Year Struggle for Democracy (Part 3)
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.
Transformer bottleneck: Can the U.S. maintain and expand its electric grid?
Electrical transformers are becoming a key chokepoint for maintenance and expansion of the electrical grid in the U.S. and worldwide.
