Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My skepticism aside, my goal here is not to convince the passionate supporters of endless federal money printing that this is a bad idea – you’ve got your thing and you really believe it and I don’t want to quarrel over it in this piece – but to point out to you, and especially those sympathetic to the ends if not the means of what you advocate for, that Modern Monetary Theory is not going to solve the problems we are trying to address at Strong Towns.
In short, the climate futures they describe obscure the fact that the impact of climate change will ultimately not be determined by levels of CO2, but by structures of power. In other words, the exact impact of a climate disaster will depend on political decisions, economic wealth and social systems.
The NAACP is launching a major environmental justice campaign on Jan. 13 to mark the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service. The “Solar Equity Initiative” aims to provide solar job skills training to 100 individuals, install solar panels on more than 30 homes and community centers in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, and strengthen equity in solar access policies in at least five states.
Many of us would like to shop ethically and in line with our values when it comes to buying meat. But while this might sound like a simple thing to do, in practice it can be a complicated web of labels, terminology and increasing confusion.
Leaders from the frontlines of mining struggles in the Philippines, Colombia and Uganda travelled to the UK this November to expose the true costs of the UK’s extensive ties to the global mining industry and oppose the Mines and Money Conference in London- a global hub of mining finance and power.
We can’t all be Noam Chomsky or Ayn Rand or Wendell Berry or Bingo Pajama, but that doesn’t mean each and every one of us can’t get the hint. We need a new story. Maybe even a new myth. We need to rediscover imagination. Imagination that enables us to reckon our whereabouts in a world that is heating up and speeding up.
If climate policymaking is to be soundly based, a re-framing of scientific research within an existential risk-management framework is now urgently required. This must be taken up not just in the work of the IPCC, but also in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change negotiations if we are to address the real climate challenge.
The city of Pueblo wants to go all-in on renewables. Low-income residents want affordable rates. Can they work together? The first things you see driving down from the Rocky Mountains into Pueblo, Colorado, are smoke stacks. Three big ones sprout from the Comanche coal plant at the edge of town, and then a stubble of shorter towers rises from the steel mill, which once provided good paying jobs to anyone who wanted one.
We may be meeting our schools’ curriculum targets, but in many cases we are still missing the larger aims of environmental awareness, our essential inter-connectedness and inter-being with the planet we live on, and thus many teachers, and their students, are not acting out of deep ecological understanding or deep ecological commitment.
When a young person talks to me about his dreams for a good life, my first instinct is to interrupt, to tell him the planet has determined that our good life is no longer viable, dreams or not. Instead, I tell him about lambs. The promise of birth and death and birth again. I believe in both narratives, and I don’t want to burst his bubble, so I tell only the one story.
You are not likely to encounter a more welcoming set of texts and infographics to introduce the commons and peer production than the Commons Transition Primer website. The new site features four types of materials suited different levels of interest: short Q&A-style articles with illustrations; longer, in-depth articles for the more serious reader; a library of downloaded PDF versions of research publications by the P2P Foundation; and a collection of videos, audio interviews and links to other content.
Spirituality came easy for me, being “normal” was hard. As a child I was allowed to wander alone in the woods, old farm buildings, pasture, and along the creek. We lived in the small house on my grandparent’s farm, while my grandmother and uncle lived in the big house. I would tell my mother I was going over to Grandma’s house and head off exploring.
