Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution poses the greatest environmental threat to global health in 2019, killing seven million people prematurely every year, which is around the number of deaths caused by cigarettes.
Can technological progress save us from ecological destruction? If some new clean form of energy was discovered tomorrow, could it be deployed quickly enough to decarbonize the world by 2050?
If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.
Our imaginations are rooted in the natural world. They formed in the natural world. They took their metaphors and similes from the natural world. It’s from the natural world that we thought that something might be strong as an oak tree or as fragile as a reed.
For many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the “Mesquite Manifesto” addresses economic and climate problems by building up industry around the native tree.
Hydrogen produced using renewable electricity is “already cost competitive” in niche applications, a new paper says, adding that it is likely to match industrial-scale alternatives in about a decade.
Like the original New Deal, the GND is trying to do something that has never been done before; we will have to learn from experience and experiment and correct the mistakes we will inevitably make along the way. But with these strategies we can make a start in the right direction.
The three R’s of Deep Adaptation are tasks, they demand we leave a lot of our identity and cleverness behind, our comfort zones, our egoic insults, the traumas we cling to like antiquated gas masks, long after the war is over.
Something new will arise, and in the evolution of what comes next, many may find what is often lacking in life today—the excitement of a profound challenge, meaning beyond the self, a deep sense of purpose, and commitment to place.
Let us make of this precious opportunity the catalyst for a convergence of social movements, community initiatives, and new political vehicles in a mighty blow for the world we want, the world we deserve, and the world we will make!
Conventional economics describes acts of human kindness in entirely pejorative terms. They are variously classed as unproductive labour or labour that is resistant to productivity gains. The criticism runs across the whole gamut of personal, educational and creative services.
The goal is thus not to repeat the tightly-knitted knot and inherited linear understanding of power, but to weave a new political geography, a new terrain of distributed power. No longer is this a challenge of an expansive fiefdom to be owned and controlled, but a series of humans whose relationships need to be collectively organized.
