Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In considering the Sun Hive alongside my personal experiences of distress, I do not mean to use the bees as a metaphor, to plunder nature for her poetry. Instead I wish to suggest that our reductive attitudes towards both bees and human health may be symptomatic of a prevailing mindset of exploitation and control.
In this episode, we have a wide-ranging talk with Dr. Benjamin Sovacool of the University of Sussex about a tiny fraction of his voluminous research on energy transition topics, with a focus on the speed of energy transitions; the ways that the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland are going about their transitions; his outlook for CCS technology and nuclear power; and the potentials and pitfalls of nuclear power and the potential for distributed energy resources to displace nuclear…
Critiquing problems is far easier than imagining credible alternative futures. That seems to be the biggest problem in our political culture today: a colossal failure of imagination. I was therefore pleased when a new friend introduced me to the writings of David Fleming, an iconoclastic British thinker about economics, the environment, and culture…
My guess is that traditional mixed farming strategies will come into their own again if, as seems likely, we move towards a more energy and phosphate constrained future.
His erasing the nation’s signature from the Paris Accord was nothing more than pandering to his core supporters on the back of an issue The Donald considers inconsequential to his legacy. It was intended to offset growing criticism of his performance to-date.
You are too important to squander your energy being miserable. Indeed, even if you don’t have hope, you owe it to yourself to lead a contented, useful life. Let me explain.
Happy City’s aim is to “reclaim happiness from commercial triviality and make it a guiding, radical principle for society.” The organization invites individuals to explore what truly brings lasting happiness and gives communities the tools to measure and be attentive to what really matters.
A (social) permacultural view of the world begins with Zone 00 (the Self), ends with Zone 5 (the wild and natural world), and encompasses everything in between. What excites me most about this approach is that with incredibly simple tools it makes ideas accessible. Ideas which we can find difficult to grasp, in a society that teaches us to focus on individual ‘nodes’ (people, plants, animals, things), rather than the relationships between them.
“Our people survived genocide in part because of [traditional] foods and medicines,” Beck says. “And because our elders are passing away and global warming is changing how our environment functions, now is a significant time to capture elders’ knowledge and our own community’s history.”
In a fast-changing world, it is no longer possible to automatically assume that what one is used to will endure. People want stability and predictability, but, as they say, good luck with that. We are witnessing out-of-control evolution of a rapid, uncertain sort.
A federal judge has ruled that the Trump administration’s approval of the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline violated federal law in certain critical respects and has ordered the Army Corps of Engineers to reconsider parts of its environmental analysis. The decision marks the first legal victory of the Trump presidency for the Standing Rock Sioux, which have been fighting the pipeline for nearly a year.
So how might the commons help instigate a new political discussion? The Commons Network report makes clear that the challenge is not about policy tweaks. A new worldview is needed. A holistic systems perspective is needed.
