Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It strikes me that we are now at a crucial tipping point where a large number of people have been activated to the dire state of things when it comes to our many crises and challenges but whose behaviours are not commensurate with their understanding.
Let’s not take these self-proclaimed heroes and warriors too seriously. People who don’t know the first thing about how to take care of themselves materially and are dependent on others to provide for their needs aren’t heroes. They’re helpless children.
If there is one lesson history teaches us, it is that those who acknowledge limits survive. Those who ignore them do not. The choice before us is simple: adapt to reality, or continue chasing a fantasy until it all falls apart.
It’s not that human carbon emissions don’t matter; they matter hugely. It’s that they aren’t the only matter, and are intimately coupled with the land and our treatment of it.
In summer 2024 the original plan for our agroecological farm was fully realised. We have two agroforestry systems producing every year shiitake mushrooms, aromatic herbs, annual vegetables and fruits without the use of any fertilisers or pesticides. The farm food lab is running where we transform most of our fresh products into artisanal jars and bottles. We have an online shop and last summer we opened the farm shop.
We’re going to need quick wits, courage, incredibly hard work, and some real luck to put out this moronic inferno—but that’s the job of being a citizen in 2025.
Just as gravity keeps the Earth, solar system, and galaxy together/organized, so too does the Law of Life keep the community of life together.
Insurers should, through their disclosure and lobbying power, play a key role in achieving a safer and more resilient world. Through disclosure, they can share their vast knowledge about the financial risks of a climate changed world. Through lobbying, they can advocate for a suite of laws and policies that make the world more insurable in the face of the ever-mounting risks.
So yeah, let us rewild half (or I’d say almost all) the Earth, with people integrated into ecologically functional landscapes. There is much to be anxious about in the future, but I hope the prospect of people becoming Indigenous to a place again motivates us to work on this more gracious possibility.
We have a golden opportunity for finding multiple functions for land: generating clean energy while restoring biodiversity at the same time.
Spring is making its way here in Mni Sota Makoce (the Land of Cloudy Waters), and Waziya (Old Man Winter) is finally heading north. It is during this transitional time we can gather the sweet sap that the maples so willingly give up.
I’ve been digesting tariff chat for the past few days, like everyone is, and trying to make sense of the political economy of it. ‘Make sense’ as in trying to piece together the MAGA mindset and then think it through, beyond the economics of it.
