Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We sometimes refer to the emissions while a building is functioning as the operational carbon, and all the other emissions across its life cycle as the embodied carbon. Focusing on one and not the other is puzzling to say the least – we’re effectively trying to take the carbon out of our energy bills while paying no attention to the carbon in the buildings themselves.
To escape this “capitalocentrism,” we need to broaden the definition of economy beyond capitalism. What if, instead, economy is all the ways that we meet our material needs and care for each other? And what if it’s not a singular thing? Then we would see that beneath the official capitalist economy are all sorts of thriving non-capitalist economies, where there may not be a profit motive or market exchange.
I think the only way to be optimistic is to believe that people can take things into their own hands and transform their lives. It is happening, but it is not happening enough. Setting these targets and figuring out how to accomplish them without working together with citizen initiatives, they will never succeed. I am here to promote repopulation of Europe’s rural areas with ecovillages.
Based on the concept “From Plate to Plate,” the Guandu Institute offers environmental solutions for large restaurants and seeks to inspire restoring the planet’s health. How? By composting organic trash, food preparation excess and leftovers, which go to landfills. Composting doesn’t only help to diminish the volume in landfills but it also produces fertilizer, such a fundamental resource for food production.
As global temperatures climb higher, Earth is approaching tipping points that threaten human security, warn scientists in a new statement to national representatives meeting in Bonn for the annual climate talks. Their warning comes as global emissions are projected to rise after three stable years.
In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a wide-ranging conversation with Darren J. Doherty from Regrarians.org.
Britain’s housing crisis is complicated mess. Fixing it requires a long-term plan and a bold new approach to policy. But in the meantime let’s start calling it what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory.
The evidence is overwhelming that natural gas has no net climate benefit in any timescale that matters to humanity. In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.
Safely tucked into the San Miguel mountains northeast of San Luis Obispo, down a long ambling road that leads far away from cities, highways and all of civilization, warm late afternoon light falls and fills the golden hills surrounding Blue Oak Canyon Ranch. The two humble stewards of Blue Oak are Lynn and Jim Moody, who tell me that just a week prior, the grass was still green.
The difficulty, I think, is that the conditions in which it’s feasible to build plausible ‘bottom-up’ anarchist-communist societies are unusual, and their chances of longevity are slight – either because they’re annihilated by the stronger forces of the centralised state (as happened with the Paris Commune), or because they succumb to the internal contradictions of their own somewhat hidden power dynamics. Still, Ross’s analysis raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the course that a free, egalitarian peasant society of the future might take.
It Takes Roots is a coalition of people of color from groups such as the Indigenous Environmental Network and Cooperation Jackson. They went to COP 23 to pressure officials and government representatives like Jerry Brown — who are there to work on specific goals to reduce carbon emissions — as well as to highlight the damage caused to frontline groups, such as indigenous people.
When I talk to my elderly neighbours, or read interviews with people from earlier eras, one of the things that most comes through about their childhoods, and seems dramatically different than the way children are raised today, is how far and freely they roamed. Unlike most modern children, they did not spend most of their time indoors watching television or playing video games, or following one adult-led activity after another.
