Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this article we’d like to offer some new thinking: a policy proposal that we feel has the potential to be transformative. At its simplest, our proposal involves providing self-selecting unemployed public housing residents with a basic, living wage.
The UK’s CO2 emissions fell by 2.9% in 2019, according to Carbon Brief analysis. This brings the total reduction to 29% over the past decade since 2010, even as the economy grew by a fifth.
The polarisation of the meat debate is driving a dangerous divide between people united by the same aim: saving the planet. We need to stop demonising and start collaborating. Whether we choose to eat animal protein or not, the thing that really matters is that we think about our food choices. Forget omnivore, flexitarian, vegetarian, vegan – we should all be united as thoughtful eaters.
Moral judgments in lieu of causal understanding—that phrase should be inscribed over the entrance of every department of environmental ethics.
However, if we see healing Gaia as the overarching meaning of our lives—a journey that can be completed in countless ways—that might enable us to use this frustration to assess specific paths we can take on that journey.
It’s time to make the profit-maximising, shareholder-controlled corporation obsolete. In the perilous moment we face, with the crises of the climate emergency and spiralling inequality, the time is up on corporations acting as though serving financial shareholders is their highest duty.
Brazil has long had agribusiness-friendly policies, thanks in part to its powerful congressional farming lobby, known as the Bancada Ruralista, and in part to a decades-long push to leverage its vast natural resources into global influence.
Today’s high court judgment is a vindication of everything climate activists have been saying for more than a decade: Britain cannot honour its national commitment to tackle climate change at the same time as building a new runway at one of the busiest airports in the world.
The Creature from the Black Lagoon loomed over the offices of the Interior Department last week as non-profit consumer advocate Public Citizen joined the chorus of voices condemning the proposed rollback of the bedrock National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA.
In 1969, the late Professor Albert Bartlett famously delivered a lecture, entitled “Arithmetic, Population and Energy”, which begins with the observation that, “The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.” The truth of this is profound and irrefutable…
However, for the Green New Deal to accomplish its climate goals, it must spur two large-scale transitions: the transition away from fossil fuel use toward renewable energy, and the transition away from industrial agriculture, a huge polluter and greenhouse gas emitter in its own right, toward organic regenerative practices that draw down and sequester carbon.
The Simpler Way is an ‘eco-anarchist’ vision of a world where self-governing communities live materially simple but sufficient lives, in harmony with ecological limits. Central themes discussed in the following pages include a radical critique of consumer capitalism; the need for fundamental system change; and a transition theory based on building a new society from the grassroots up.
