Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
As a whole, the American fracking experiment has been a financial disaster for many of its investors, who have been plagued by the industry’s heavy borrowing, low returns, and bankruptcies, and the path to becoming profitable is lined with significant potential hurdles.
One such organisation is OpenSourceSeeds (OSS). By equipping plant breeders and propagators with a free, open-source licence for the seeds they breed, they provide the necessary legal protection to prevent the patenting of the seed by other parties.
As pipeline protests continue to delay and, sometimes, stop energy projects in their tracks, the fossil fuel industry and Republican lawmakers are looking for new ways to clamp down on environmental protest.
In this article I connect the fall in the growth rate, with its roots in the rising costs of energy extraction and generation, to declining resilience in the economic system. These are in turn related to a more conflict ridden geo-politics.
The record-breaking marine heatwave in 2016 across the Great Barrier Reef has left much of the coral ecosystem at an “unprecedented” risk of collapse, research shows. A new study published in Nature finds that the surge in sea temperatures during the 2016 bleaching event led to an immediate and long-lasting die-off of coral.
The Bayou Bridge pipeline will carry oil across southern Louisiana from Lake Charles, near the Texas border, to St. James along the Mississippi River. Rosinski’s home in Arcadia Parish is west of the Atchafalaya Basin, an environmentally sensitive National Heritage Area. Construction there continues despite an ongoing legal challenge against building the pipeline through the basin.
Over the last few years, with the rise in awareness of food waste and its environmental implications as well as emerging discourses around a “sharing economy”, there has been renewed interest in food sharing practices and particularly the role that information and communication technologies (ICT) can play in extending the spaces and sites in which food sharing can take place.
The ‘circular economy’ is, in my opinion, a ruse to make affluent consumers feel that they can keep consuming without the need to change their habits. Nothing could be further from the truth, and the central reason for that is the necessity for energy to power economic activity.
We are living in a time of extreme and extraordinary inequality. There is now a genre of research looking at different dimensions of the income and wealth gap. This body of work chronicles the shapes and facets of inequality and its adverse impact on everything we care about.
Mobility, after all, is generally less important to people than accessibility. When we go somewhere it’s not the movement that’s valuable, it’s the access to something – a school, shopping, a workplace, a friend’s house or a park – that really counts.
The term regenerative development, on the other hand, carries within it a clear aim of regenerating the health and vitality of the nested, scale-linking systems we participate in. At a basic level regeneration also communicates not to use resources that cannot be regenerated, nor to use any resources faster than they can be regenerated.
The Sustainable Economies Law Center is an organization based out of Oakland, California, that puts economic democracy front and center in its mission to support community resilience and grassroots economic empowerment.
