Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The disappearance of land from ruling economic theory may account for why the collapse of smaller heartland communities is greeted with a shrug by writers for the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also helps to explain its absence from the Green New Deal, for all its social-democratic, capitalist-critical leanings.
Presidential candidates should take a pledge: The middle class should not pay one dollar more in new taxes until the super-rich pay their fair share.
Why not genetically engineer honeybees to resist those things which are undermining their health?
In the last three decades since the climate movement has gotten active, the world’s economy has released more greenhouse pollution than in the years previously since the Industrial Revolution.
Clearly, whatever progress on public policy that the movement has made with governments and businesses, those governments and businesses have failed to take meaningful action.
Why?
For more than two years now, the small community of Whatcom County, in Northwest Washington State in the U.S. has been working with local leaders to take bold action that would restrict growth of dirty fossil fuel projects in their community — all while safeguarding industry workers, the climate, and the economy.
The definition of farmer is: “a person who cultivates land or crops or raises animals (such as livestock or fish).”[1] In use, however, the term isn’t that clear.
Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro isn’t the only culprit behind the fires currently raging across the Amazon at a rate of a football field per minute. With the high demand for meat, soy, and petroleum in developed countries, we are directly fuelling these fires in the Amazon basin. There is much that we can do to help turn this crisis around.
The date was Thursday, July 25th – the hottest day ever in Europe, part of a record-setting heat wave. Climate change, in other words. By the time we reached the airport the next morning for the long journey home, all the stories had melted in the heat and merged into just one story, one anguished question:
Where indeed, Mr. Gauguin, are we going exactly?
The age of Enlightenment ushered in progress and left it anchored in our political and economic consciousness. From that moment on, technology has emerged as the key, unique and universal solution to all of our problems. This, coupled with the unprecedented rate of acceleration we are experiencing in today’s world, means that industrial revolutions are occurring before we’ve even had time to assimilate their characteristics and consequences.
The paths to a bio-civilization are multiple – and the pluriverse is already visible in the cosmovisions and radical practices of many groups worldwide. The notion of a pluriverse questions the alleged universality of Euro-Americacentric modernity. As the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico, put it so wisely, the pluriverse constitutes “a world where many worlds fit”.
Rosario del Carmen Carrasco, a young campesina, serves as president of the “Xhuba Binii” group. She has cultivated more than 20 hectares of zapalote chico. Rosario inherited her love of the countryside from her father, and although she graduated as an engineer, she has practiced agriculture her whole life.
The very idea of re-imagining society so that people can have good lives as they use less energy has been consumed by visions of the infinite expansion of solar/wind power and the oxymoron, 100% “clean energy”.
