Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Climate cooling activities increase water storage to support green plant growth, and draw carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis to form deep, rich soils under forests, marshes, and grasslands. The result is known as Drawdown, carbon banking, or when coupled with agriculture, carbon farming.
While it may sound old-fashioned, home milling could have the potential to redefine one of the world’s oldest processed foods—bread.
What does this downgrading of likely carbon emissions mean for climate change modelers, climate activists, policy makers, and concerned citizens? According to Ritchie, the implication is clearly not as simple as “don’t worry, fossil fuel depletion will solve climate change for us.”
The issue is not only to allow people to remove fossil fuels from camp cooking. The idea is that cooking on a small stick fire requires a far closer relationship to the land – and thus can be transformational for people’s lifestyle generally. Their emphasis on the self-build/DIY element of the stick-fire grate is part of that greater aim, allowing people to “gain the confidence to ‘make’ rather than ‘buy’ the things you need”.
In the current employment system, work organizations are rarely adjusted to human needs, such as self-fulfillment and meaning. In the article on Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber (2013) observes that the more a job is useful for society and able to provide a sense of meaning, the less it is rewarded in monetary terms.
Here’s what the Trudeau government definitely knows about the science of methane. The gas accounts for more than one-quarter of all global warming, and reliable data from satellite and airplane surveys show that emissions are increasing, largely from the oil and gas industry.
Today people are constantly bombarded by new diet trends and information on what is healthy and what is not, much of it contradictory. Within this debate, meat consumption is one of the current topics under scrutiny, with increasing calls for people to eat less.
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change has sparked a global uproar. Yet America’s reluctance to reduce its use of fossil fuels is, in fact, logical. Not only because of the U.S. president’s overt denial of man-made climate change, but also and more fundamentally because it reflects America’s historical essence and trajectory.
I included neighbor-cultivating in the inaugural Ask Umbra civic action guide for a very simple reason: Experts told me that it’s impossible to improve your community without being a part of it. But reader disdain for the idea resurrected a haunting suspicion I first felt when reporting on the tiny, off-the-grid house obsession a few years ago: that the pursuit of a sustainable life has become an exercise in looking inward.
The new Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership provides in-person training opportunities in activism.
Though the community currency failed to materialize in Barcelona, the city immediately to its northeast, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, created a local currency this year. This currency — the grama — was designed to be an innovative way of enabling the city’s residents to protect their livelihoods from external economic threats
The word that was in my mind the most as I walked Venice’s narrow streets was ‘curiosity’. No conversation about imagination can happen without an exploration of curiosity, as it is the precursor to imagination. I had travelled to Venice reading Ian Leslie’s book ‘Curiosity: the desire to know and why your future depends on it’, and it turned out to be the perfect reading material, better than any Venice guidebook.
