Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The end of 2017 saw a rapid escalation of big divestment announcements, including from global insurer Axa. 2018 brings more opportunity – so long as campaigning prioritises the voices of those most impacted by climate change.
The Eagle Creek Fire was one point in a fire season defined by disastrous, fast-moving fires, from the deadly fires that tore through Northern California in October to the fire that decimated thousands of acres of Glacier National Park in Montana this fall. Taken together, however, these fires seemed to prove what scientists have been warning for years — that climate change will tilt the scales of probability in favor of bigger, more destructive wildfires, and that everyone, not just the most isolated rural communities, will start to pay the price.
What I am learning is that by seeing how the false starts, blind spots, transformative research tools, and foundational discoveries that made the complexity of biology accessible to scientific inquiry are replicated in the struggles to make sense of the human relationship to our natural world today.
Sustainable and long-term change includes ongoing education. It also requires a strong mindset, one that not only asks and answers important questions, such as, “How did we get here?” and “Where are we going?” but also envisions a new path and future of what is possible. What would it mean if nearly 100% of your home waste was turned into soil that grew most of your food? And what if this became true for you and for more than half your neighbors? I am humbly optimistic that this is what is next for urban farming.
Last week, at a New Orleans conference center that once doubled as a storm shelter for thousands during Hurricane Katrina, a group of polar scientists made a startling declaration: The Arctic as we once knew it is no more. The region is now definitively trending toward an ice-free state, the scientists said, with wide-ranging ramifications for ecosystems, national security, and the stability of the global climate system.
I invite you to see with new eyes. Ultimately Guha’s definition of environmentalism is not wrong. It just doesn’t fit mine and many others’ reality of what environmentalism is: holistic; long rooted in time and space; for something and not only against; alive and based in the land, lives, work and bodies of those around me, African in and of their environments.
Fifteen thousand scientists have issued a dire warning to humanity about impending collapse but virtually no-one takes notice. Ultimately, our global systems, which are designed for perpetual growth, need to be fundamentally restructured to avoid the worst-case outcome.
For those who see worker cooperatives and other forms of economic democracy as the alternative to capitalist enterprises and the seeds of an alternative, egalitarian society, there are at least three paths one might envision to that egalitarian society.
I had high expectations on the report Grazed and confused, developed under the lead of Tara Garnett from the Food Climate Research Network. I have been impressed by her previous research on many aspects of the food system and her capacity to go further than using lifecycle analyses to provide the Truth. Unfortunately this report doesn’t live up to my expectations. At all.
On December 16 anti-pipeline activists calling themselves water protectors gathered in Rayne, Louisiana, on land located along the proposed route of the Bayou Bridge pipeline. The gathering occurred two days after the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality granted Energy Transfer Partners (ETP) the last permit needed to build the pipeline.
What matters is the effort to move beyond mere resistance and onto a more substantive engagement with rebuilding – to ask what comes next, and to harness the current disenchantment and loss of faith in a more productive manner. It is said that moments of crisis are also moments of opportunity. There is little doubt that we face a crisis of governance at the moment; this is also a chance to design a new and improved government.
Is continued growth and an industrial economy actually desirable and, a separate and different question, is this growth sustainable? Can growth continue? In the 1970s growing uneasiness about the ecologically destructive effects of the growth economy led a few economists and scientists who were sceptical that growth could continue for ever to look into this matter in more depth.
