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How to Help Solve Farmer-Environmentalist Conflicts: Talk, Don’t Point Fingers

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In response to the discovery of nitrogen contamination, a group of city officials, staff from the local conservation district, farmers, members of the agribusiness community, concerned citizens and the Minnesota Department of Agriculture decided to go beyond finger pointing. Instead, they held a series of meetings in the early 2000s that focused on both securing clean drinking water and ensuring a strong agricultural economy, and that were rooted in the context of local conditions.

Grazed and Confused – An Initial Response from the Sustainable Food Trust

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The only practical way to produce human-edible food from grassland without releasing large amounts of carbon to the atmosphere is to graze it with ruminants, and with the increasing global population it would be highly irresponsible to stop producing meat, milk and animal fats from grassland, since this would cause even more rainforest to be destroyed to produce soyabean oil and meal, as well as palm oil.

Do Energy Industry Activities Threaten Dams? BC Hydro Now Says Yes

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A 2013 technical memo on seismic considerations at Site C dismissed fracking as a potential threat to public safety. But since then a wave of industry-triggered earthquakes — and BC Hydro’s concerns about the waste water disposal well near the Peace Canyon Dam — suggest that fracking and dams are simply incompatible land uses.

The History of the World in 10½ Blog Posts. 5. Capitalism I – Lords, Peasants & Merchants

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The stage is now set for the next scene in our whistle-stop tour – the emergence of capitalism. But first a quick aside. Enmeshed in a contemporary global capitalist economy as we are, it’s easy to read it back into history as some kind of inevitable culmination of past processes. But there’s no reason to think that our present was foreordained.

This Isn’t Just Another Urban Farm—It’s a Food Bank

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Partnerships between food banks and local agriculture are on the rise. Food banks are farming produce, recovering (or “gleaning”) agricultural surplus straight from the fields, building urban demonstration gardens and seed libraries, and teaching classes in underserved neighborhoods for those who want to grow food in their backyards or in balcony bucket gardens.

Team Human Podcast: There’s No App for That, with Richard Heinberg

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Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That. On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change.

Interpreting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5C Temperature Limit

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In a commentary paper for the journal Geophysical Research Letters, we show that the temperature limits in the Paris Agreement should be understood as changes in long-term global averages attributed to human activity, which exclude natural variability. This means 1.5C might be breached in individual years well before the global long-term 1.5C temperature limit has definitively been crossed.

What Happened when Degrowth was Discussed in the Catalan Parliament?

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The MP Sergi Saladié (a university professor when not in parliament) presented an “interpelation1” on degrowth to the vice-president and minister for the economy in Catalonia, Sr. Oriol Junqueras, currently president of The Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya). It is the first time that a motion of this type has been discussed in a national parliament in Spain, and this makes it an event of great importance.

Brazil’s National Indigenous Movement: Resolute in Times of Crisis

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When Brazilian indigenous leader Sônia Guajajara gave a fiery speech on environmentalism and human rights at the Rock in Rio music festival in September 2017, alongside Alicia Keys, she captured the power and authority of Brazil’s National Indigenous Movement (Mobilização Nacional Indígena, MNI). “This is the mother of all struggles, the struggle for Mother Earth!” exclaimed Sônia to a massive, cheering audience.

The Gordon Goodman Memorial Lecture 2017 – Kevin Anderson

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This annual memorial lecture is in honour of Gordon Goodman, founding director of the Beijer Institute at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences from 1977–1989 and the Stockholm Environment Institute from 1989–1991. This year’s speaker is Dr. Kevin Anderson from the University of Manchester.