Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My question isn’t, “What should we do about the overt white supremacists who, emboldened by Trumpism’s success, have pushed their way back into mainstream politics?” I want to go beyond easy targets to ask, “When will U.S. society—not just neo-Nazis and the Klan, but the whole country—reject all aspects of white supremacist ideology and take serious steps toward rectifying the material inequality justified by that ideology?”
“How can the design of farms and farm buildings be beautiful, functional and express a sense of place?” This was the central question explored by Mark Hoare, Kim Wilkie and Stephanie Evans during their parallel session “Harmony Principles in Farm Architecture” at the Harmony in Food and Farming conference earlier in July.
Alnoor will help us understand the interplay between political organization, system thinking, storytelling, technology, and the decentralization of power. In a conversation spanning a wide range of topics including anarchism, collective organizing, local economies, psychedelics, and even spirituality, Ladha and Douglas Rushkoff underscore the multifaceted and necessary work of building a resilient and just society.
In this talk Nathan points out some flaws in the organising culture of the climate movement and suggests that the way to build better movements (because the idea of “winning” in the climate crisis is laughable) is to embrace contradictions and engage in a battle of the imagination.
Juan Parras gives one hell of a tour of Houston’s east side. He’s charming and funny. Wearing a beret, he strikes an old-world look, like he might lead you to a cafe on a plaza. He doesn’t charge a fee for his services. After all, you’re on a “toxic tour,” and Parras is on a mission.
What strikes me now in writing this, is just how extraordinarily privileged I am to have the peace and space for contemplation and dialogue. My clarity is the product of thousands of miles of travel, hundreds of conversations, days of writing. The major question I’m left with is how on earth can folks in the US find the peace to make sense of the present and dream of a future worth fighting for?
Peatlands are the superheroes of ecosystems: purifying water, sometimes mitigating flooding and providing a home for rare species. And they beat nearly every system when it comes to carbon storage. Known peatlands only cover about 3 percent of the world’s land surface, but store at least twice as much carbon as all of Earth’s standing forests. And at least one-third of the world’s organic soil carbon, which plays a vital role in mitigating climate change and stabilizing the carbon cycle, is in peatlands.
The dream of food without dirt. That is the best description of how we will get food in the future if we would believe the impressive number of food tech start-ups which will produce food without soil or animals. But few of them deliver on their exaggerated promises.
When we hear about the emissions scenarios used in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports, do we really understand what they’re assuming about future fossil fuel combustion? And what do these emissions scenarios imply about the steps needed to achieve climate policy goals and decarbonize our energy system?
In April 1947, Mont-Pèlerin was home to an ideological resurrection and, as with The Returned, what came back was critically different to the previous incarnation. The architects of neoliberalism favoured a faith in free markets to best meet peoples’ needs, drawing on the tradition of Adam Smith, but taken to a new, extreme level. They coupled this to an equally extreme libertarian individualism.
Spaces like the Concrete Garden or Les Grands Voisins are amazing in that they enable us to see that another society based on social harmony and a different understanding of work is possible. But let’s make these spaces permanent, let’s not confine them to small bubbles that can burst. We should demand that any piece of land unused for long period be permanently given to the community.
At a time when a primary mode of interaction between young people is through social media, this group may be especially vulnerable to the possibility of forgetting the value of public space around them. Why play chess in the park when you can play it on Facebook? Why walk along the riverside when you can send Tweets instead? Why have lunch from a kiosk in a public plaza when it’s easier to post Snapchats of your food from home?
