Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Through the food gathering and pollination accidents of bees and other pollinators, the world’s most nutritious, tastiest fruits and vegetables are brought to the tables of the world’s 7.9 billion people. Indirectly, bees keep us well-fed.
Can we mature our understanding of wealth before it’s too late? Could we create regenerative cultures which transmute income back into wealth? And can we collectively recognize that true wealth cannot be found in our pockets but rather in the natural world we inhabit?
The pain of this moment offers a profound invitation: to re-educate ourselves, transmute our settler ignorance, and rise together in loving solidarity.
A self-sustaining forest ecosystem includes not just a mix of trees but the understory of smaller trees, shrubs and groundcover plants, the animals, the soil and its biota, and all the dead matter lying on the forest floor.
We do not all have to be working in the same way to confront urgent challenges of Trump 2.0. But if we foster a robust ecology of change, we may yet see the movement resurgence that we need.
The climate crisis is not only an extreme case of a collective challenge, but also an extremely complex one. Conventional notions of expertise and specialisation are therefore failing. The essence of radical honesty is to recognise this failure of our conventional ideas and to draw lessons from it.
The old bromide goes: If you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. In today’s Washington, the joke would be to buy a DOGE.
Rather than retreating into the world of brains and their fancy constructs—responsible for initiating a sixth mass extinction that would wipe us out, too—we ought to break free of their grip.
As both China and the U.S. go hurtling ever faster toward Armageddon in the race to dominate in AI, they have both bought into techno-utopian ideologies, lock, stock and barrel. We should all take a deep breath and ask the question: Is accessible, open-source AI really a good thing for anyone?
In my 2021 book, Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival, I traced how social power arose among humans and how it has been used in societies large and small, ancient and modern. Whatever insights that book contains, now is a good time to put them to the test.
One conceptualisation of this new narrative is as a ‘Thrutopia’. This is the middle passage between utopia and dystopia. The hour is too late to avoid reaping the destruction we have sown, but neither is complex human civilisation beyond hope.
Personal computers and the internet were supposed to democratize information and the power to analyze and use it. Instead, they are contributing to the increasing concentration of wealth and power and putting us on the road to authoritarian rule.
