Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I am not surprised that the government neglects these subsistence farmers, their contribution to the GDP and to the grand plans of the President is small. I am surprised, however, that they seem to be neglected also by the organic association. It seems to me to be a key group for the development of local, resilient and small scale organic farming.
Today sees the launch of ExtinctionRebellion, which describes itself as an international movement using mass civil disobedience to force governments to enter World War Two-level mobilisation mode, in response to climate breakdown and ecological crisis.
As DeSmog’s series on the finances of fracking has documented, there is no doubt fracking can lead to production of large volumes of light oil, but it comes at the cost of approximately a quarter trillion dollars more than the industry has made since 2007.
“Designing Regenerative Cultures” by Daniel Wahl is an essential guidebook for our time that everyone should read, young and old. Through this book we come to realise deeply that there is a way out of the madness of our current societal systems in which so many people and non-human species have become trapped.
North Carolina has committed to upholding the landmark Paris climate agreement by slashing greenhouse gas emissions, a move that comes a little over a month after Hurricane Florence devastated the state.
I hope you’ll stick with me as we explore the campaigns that have inspired hundreds of thousands of people around the globe to believe that, in the words of Arundhati Roy, “another world is not only possible, she is on her way.”
We need to exercise our remarkable gift of reading with a thorough workout each day. Otherwise, we get the politicians that we have today, left or right.
Driven by zero-sum thinking, the rigid, inflexible, ideological thinking and obsessive need of our collective human ego to be absolutely and imperatively “right”, is rapidly driving our Nation and our American democracy toward collapse.
I reject the fetishization of GDP as an objective in the existing economy, so it would make little sense for me to focus on GDP as the objective of a degrowth economy. Wanting to cut GDP is as senseless as wanting to grow it.
Many people think hunger is about too many people and too little food, but that is not the case. At Oxfam, we know that hunger is about power. Its roots lie in inequalities in access to resources and opportunities.
Quite suddenly, in the wake of the recent IPCC report, it’s become commonplace to talk about a global climate emergency. Al Gore told PBS on 12 October: “We have a global emergency. You use a phrase like that and some people immediately say, ‘okay calm down, it can’t be that bad.’ But it it is.”
So what really interests me is whether we may be entering another ‘Machiavellian moment’ when smallholder republicanism may, at least in some places, arise as a response to new times and challenges.
