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Our Bodies Are Made for Walking

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 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.

Puerto Rico: A Potential Experiment in Degrowth?

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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.

A Green Wave for a Better Quality of Life

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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.

Honoring the Past and the Lessons we Learned

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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.

Twin Earthquakes Expose Mexico’s Deep Inequality

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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.

Climate Change Mitigation, Adaptation & Suffering

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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.

No Elitist Farmers Markets Here—Free Healthy Food and Profits for Farmers

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“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.”

Cooperative Economics in African-American Communities

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n her engrossing TED Talk, business owner Niki Okuk explores three key themes: racism, economic oppression, and privilege, and how they relate to cooperate economics. Okuk, who runs tire recycling company Rco Tires, shares her personal story of starting the business, but puts it in larger, historical context.

Thermal Optimization: A Private Sector Program for Energy Efficiency in Existing Residential Buildings

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Global concern about escalating atmospheric carbon is closely connected to the continued dominance of carbon-based energy.  According to the International Energy Agency (2015), coal, oil and natural gas account for 82% of the world’s growing energy use, while renewable energy (geothermal, solar, and wind combined) provides only 1%.  “100% renewables” is very futuristic.

Factcheck: Climate Models have not ‘Exaggerated’ Global Warming

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A new study published in the Nature Geosciences journal this week by largely UK-based climate scientists has led to claims in the media that climate models are “wrong” and have significantly overestimated the observed warming of the planet. Here Carbon Brief shows why such claims are a misrepresentation of the paper’s main results.

Learning the Language of Plants with Local Dialect

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“I don’t create complicated fiber art. My pieces are simple, natural and classic. They’re wearable and not at all fussy. I want my customers to use and enjoy my clothing for a long time. For it to be part of their identity.” It’s slow fashion at its core.