Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This short-term thinking is what the child in each of us wants. This unevolved part of us just wants our reward, would rather not share any of the rewards, would really rather not be responsible, and would rather not make the effort to responsibly deal with other people (or other beings like animals). Although we don’t like to admit it, there really is a child within each of us.
Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA), a nonprofit, multi-issue, grassroots organization has earned international acclaim for giving parents leadership roles in schools since 1995. Their Parent Mentors start out assisting in the classroom, and go on to design full-service community schools, offering adult education, childcare, and afterschool classes, reviving a simple principle that we too often forget: schools belong to families.
San Francisco and Oakland are suing Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shell—the five biggest investor-owned fossil fuel producers in the world—over the costs of climate change. The two Californian cities join the counties of Marin, San Mateo and San Diego and the city of Imperial Beach that have taken similar legal action in recent months, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.
Farming is the most significant human management system of the planet; the future of humans on the planet largely rests upon how we manage our farmscapes. If we accept this then it has profound implications for agricultural policy for it means that ‘managing the planet’ is almost as an important task of the farming system as supplying food.
The first-ever report card on walking and walkable communities was announced at the Summit, underscoring the importance of the emerging walking movement. The United States as a whole gets a failing grade in the following subjects: 1) pedestrian safety; 2) pedestrian infrastructure; 3) walking opportunities for children; 4) business and non-profit sector policies; and 5) public transportation, which is a key factor in walkable communities. We earned a D for public policies promoting walking, and a C in walking opportunities for adults.
I’m sure that some will criticize the insensitivity of the timing of this essay. How can you talk about Puerto Rico, climate change, and degrowth at this tragic time? But what time is better than now? There are only going to be more disasters and more tragic times ahead. And if after each one we spend billions on rebuilding costly infrastructure, the resulting carbon emissions are going to contribute to disasters elsewhere in the future.
Is it wise to assume uninterrupted access to critical goods from faraway places? The recent decision by the U.S. International Trade Commission regarding imports of solar panels raises the question.
What can be done to protect this forest and improve the life of this community that is so marginalized by public power? With this question in mind, the ecologist Hélio Vanderlei founded the socio-environmental NGO Onda Verde (“Green Wave”) in 1994. “When I started the NGO, I thought: I have to go to Tinguá to protect the rainforest. There are 25,000 hectares there that produce 170 million liters of water per day,” he says.
Humans haven’t always been ignorant of how our world and our civilization worked. I was intrigued by this image of a church in Houston Texas recently flooded during Hurricane Harvey. The picture above is of the old First Baptist Church of Orange, Texas completed and dedicated on September 14, 1915. What I found striking about this picture was the main floor was well above the flooding from Hurricane Harvey because it was built well above flood levels.
Unequal development in Mexico is an ongoing challenge. A recent report from the Bank of Mexico showed that during the second trimester of 2017, the Mexican economy grew in north (0.9 percent), center-north (1.2 percent) and central zones (0.7 percent). If there’s a silver lining to these twin earthquakes, it’s that the post-disaster recovery analyses have finally shed some light on the historical neglect of Chiapas and Oaxaca, together home to around nine million Mexicans.
We were pretty daunted by that conversation, but one of the things that also came out of it was that a lot of these efforts that it would take to sustain a strike were things like a local food system, things like alternative currency systems, whether that’s a literal currency or whether that’s something like a time bank or a sharing economy, things that make our communities more resilient anyway, things that we know we have to do in order to replace the capitalist system, things that we know we have to do in order to respond to the climate crisis and make our communities less vulnerable.
“Farmers markets have the reputation of being somewhat elitist, not open to all,” she says. “That is the opposite of here. The intent was not to be a poor person’s market, but to be a market for everyone. There are folks with money who come, but our market board has said if rich folks want this to be an experience for them, they may have to go somewhere else for that.”
