Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tracking forwards now over the later middle ages in Europe, one story to be told is the slow erosion of the peasant autonomy that had characterised the ‘Dark Ages’ – not only by the growing power of local lords, but also of royal houses which increasingly brought aristocrats to heel under the aegis of centralised, proto-modern royal absolutist states.
Without further enlightenment, we know that we must stop burning both fossilised biomass and living biomass. Further accumulation of knowledge does not help with the question, what should I do? We know that our fossil fuelled way of life is impossible. We cannot improve, or green it. It must be abandoned.
This three-story, six-apartment residence is one of three buildings in Chicago that provides affordable, intergenerational housing to 90 elders and the young people and families who live with them. Housing Opportunities and Maintenance for the Elderly – H.O.M.E. – has been rooted in the city for 35 years, and as their executive director Bruce Otto told the Chicago Tribune, “We haven’t been able to find anybody that does exactly what we’re doing.”
These days I’m focused on the true cost of food. We have the cheapest food in the world. Food purchases make up something like 8% of our GDP. But when you start to factor in all the chronic diseases and environmental impacts—the health footprint of food—then all of a sudden we have the most expensive food in the world. Not 8% but 25% or higher. How is it we have something that is so cheap but so expensive?
I tell this story now because one of the results of that experience, one of the things I have learned, is that it is time now for me to step back from my work with the Dark Mountain Project, which I helped to found. It’s time for me to come down off of this mountain and see what I can do with what I found up on the slopes. It’s been a long, strange journey.
Incipient anti-fascist coalitions hold the potential to call a new politics into existence in the United States. Socialist municipalism could be a means for both resisting the far right as well as articulating a libertarian socialist alternative. While there is much to critique in Bookchin — even from a municipalist angle — the basic guiding principles hold.
Could declining world energy result in a turn toward authoritarianism by governments around the world? As we will see, there is no simple answer that applies to all countries. However, pursuing the question leads us on an illuminating journey through the labyrinth of relations between energy, economics, and politics.
It’s the two-year anniversary of the Energy Transition Show, so we thought we’d take a break from the deep dives and just have a little fun skiing around on the surface for a change. Dr. Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for a freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting questions and debates swirling around the energy transition today, and hopefully help us glue together many of the themes that have emerged from our first 51 shows.
Called phyto-remediation, this process has become one of the newest and most promising fields of biology. Similar methods use mushrooms in what is called myco-remediation, or use bacteria and have unfortunate names like bio-sparging, bio-slurping and bio-venting, but we’ll restrict ourselves here to plants.
Graham takes heart that experts are “starting to piece together data showing that regenerative agriculture is the solution,” pointing to research out of Iowa State University in particular. But Graham and his friends are well-aware that convincing studies and inspiring success stories like Del’s aren’t enough—not with Big Ag’s stranglehold on the market, and the death of local infrastructure (independent grocery stores, small butcher shops, community institutions) that once allowed small farmers to thrive. We need to revolutionize food production and distribution from the ground up.
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.
