Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This Black Friday we’re inviting everyone to join us and our friends at Adbusters in celebrating “Buy Nothing Day.” We’re not asking you to become a Grinch, or completely abstain from Christmas or Hanukkah or whatever form of gift giving ritual you and yours celebrate. But maybe take a pass on this most egregious day of consumeristic binging.
Imagine a group of people of different ages who meet in order to settle some matter important for a city, a country or for the European Union. This group was not selected through elections but by lot. They make decisions from the position of supreme authority which in democracy are ordinary people.
So. Do you want to live in a world in which artificial food is produced by intelligent robots and corporations that put profits before people? Or one where agroecological innovations ensure we can nourish ourselves and our communities in a fair, ecologically regenerative, and culturally rich way?
This was the birth of Extinction Rebellion, a movement that calls for mass economic disruption using non-violent direct action and civil disobedience to halt the destruction of the planet and its wildlife and prevent catastrophic climate change.
If such an implausible appointment were ever to be made by a Labour chancellor, I would regard it as a great honour. The Bank of England stands at the pinnacle of Britain’s monetary system, which I regard as one of Britain’s great public goods.
Drawdown was a major collaborative effort involving 70 research fellows from 40 countries. It’s not so much a cohesive plan as a list of partial solutions: 80 that are tested and in use at least somewhere in the world, and another 20 that are speculative.
20 years ago, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrere published an article on “Scientific American” that was to start the second cycle of interest on oil depletion (the first had been started by Hubbert in the 1950s). Their prediction turned out to be too pessimistic, at least in terms of the supply of combustible liquids, still growing today.
A murdered ranch employee. A vanished suspect. A stolen rodeo horse. A black helicopter. Angry environmentalists. Menacing oil-and-gas developers. A Sasquatch hunter gone astray. A mysterious billionaire. A missing can opener…
For those who actually care about the survival of the human race, the key questions now should be obvious: is there any reason to hope that we will retreat from “drill baby drill” and enact a sane set of climate policies? Or is our country – and, by extension, our species – just going to give up?
To live in harmony with nature, we too must become stewards of natural capital, acknowledging and nurturing vitally important species like bees, the original stewards of the land.
In this book, Derek Wall explores the work of the late Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom, on how humans can overcome this problem, and sustain the commons over the long term.
Here is as good as any spot to ask the question asked in the first two articles in the series. What does an appreciation of “inside the beltway” political maneuverings have to do with federal climate policy?
