Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Enabled by rising debt, shale companies have been achieving record fracked oil and gas production, while promising investors a big future payoff. But over a decade into the “fracking miracle,” investors are showing signs they’re worried that payoff will never come — and as a result, loans are drying up.
A successful Saami-led, salmon rewilding project on the Näätämö river in Arctic Finland illustrates the success of partnership between Indigenous knowledge and western science on environmental questions, say the authors of a recent paper, but outdated perceptions and prejudices means these kinds of partnerships elsewhere still too often fail.
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
In both the commercial and health professional viewpoints, the social, emotional, environmental, economic and empowerment dimensions of food relationships are pushed aside.
I gave the name of “The Sower’s Strategy” or “The Sower’s Way” to the idea that we should use our remaining fossil resources to build the renewable energy infrastructure needed to replace them.
The big change since the days of Richard Douthwaite and the 2012 publication of Sharing for Survival is that we now have zero faith in an international order being able to bring this about. Hence my presentation was focused on the need for Scotland to enact Cap and Share and show the way, rather than wait for a global agreement.
Early indications are the plan has managed to thread the needle and get a lot of folks in the environmental movement on board — even those who might have been wary about what the proposal would entail.
In my case, I have been asking myself and my students whether direct democracy is the best political vehicle for advancing towards a radical socio-ecological transformation such as degrowth.
There is growing recognition of the value of Australia’s native produce and a need to capture what knowledge there still is of Indigenous land management practices and the cultivation and preparation of many of these foods, before it disappears entirely.
But the Green New Deal has a big blind spot: It doesn’t address the places Americans live. And our physical geography—where we sleep, work, shop, worship, and send our kids to play, and how we move between those places—is more foundational to a green, fair future than just about anything else.
Last week, I gave a five day workshop on “Managing Planetary Collapse” at a retreat center in northern Costa Rica. The participants came together to earnestly grapple with the converging crises that define these times — while learning how to be more hopeful and impactful with insights about how the current predicament came into being.
The now older, wiser, and even more motivated Juliana plaintiffs have already taken their case to the court of public opinion where it will continue to be joined by millions more climate defenders. The fight for climate justice has only just begun.
