Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As Australians grapple with the consequences of the fires in upcoming months and embark on the necessary journey of regenerating themselves and their land, I hope they will look to nature – and farmers like Colin, Eric and others – for inspiration.
Low-carbon electricity output from wind, solar, nuclear, hydro and biomass rose by just 1 terawatt hour (TWh, less than 1%) in 2019. It represents the smallest annual increase in a decade, where annual growth averaged 9TWh. This growth will need to double in the 2020s to meet UK climate targets while replacing old nuclear plants as they retire.
The biosphere and econosphere are deeply interlinked and both are in crisis. Industrial, fossil-fuel based capitalism delivered major increases in living standards from the mid-18th through late-20th centuries, but at the cost of widespread ecosystem destruction, planetary climate change, and a variety of economic injustices.
While there are more women in agriculture than ever before, that doesn’t mean they don’t face discrimination. To this day, the industry is very much a boys’ club. This is a central contribution as to why women haven’t pursued careers in agriculture in the past.
To cross this threshold is to become vulnerable: one way or another, you can be changed by what you come to know, and that change may come in the form of loss. Perhaps the loss of who you thought you were, the stories you liked to tell about yourself.
Having acknowledged these connections, what steps can we take, as scholars, activists, and humans, to cultivate those connections in ways that empower more-than-human beings and ourselves in our collective struggle for Climate X? What does it look/sound/feel like to build climate solidarity beyond the boundaries of the human species? It’s time to find out.
As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers — as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind — I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.
Two groups on the West Coast, Chico Flax in the Sacramento Valley of California and Fibrevolution in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, are now leading the revitalization of the flax textile industry in the region. Groups in other regions of North America, such as the Cleveland Flax Project in the Rust Belt Fibershed, are also doing this work.
This essay reflects on these questions, firstly by considering how fossil fuel use has grown to unsustainable levels through history; then, by highlighting the disastrous failure of the international climate talks process; and, finally, by arguing that a transition away from fossil fuels means changing not only the technological systems that use them, but also the social and economic systems in which they are embedded.
Representatives of the British Columbia, Alberta and federal governments are making the global rounds these days to sell the notion that liquefied natural gas exports can help the climate crisis.
It’s always worth dipping into the vast archive of Zinn scholarship, but as the United States flirts with another war in the Middle East, as the presidential campaign raises fundamental questions about the kind of country we will become, and as the world confronts a potentially catastrophic environmental crisis, now is an especially good time to remember some of Howard Zinn’s wisdom.
Twenty years of gridlock have squandered the time that would have been better used for steady—dare I say progressive—enactment of federal policies and programs to effectuate the transition to a just, low-carbon, and sustainable economy.
