Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Students need to make a real connection between natural resources, the infrastructure we live in, the things we buy, the tools we use, and the energy it all demands. For that, we need to connect education to the Earth System for students to understand why it is so essential to change the way we live in a time of climate crisis.
In fact, Strong Towns is one of those rare books (Wendell Berry’s classic The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture is another) whose argument itself exemplifies what it advocates for: it builds towards a challenge to the whole way we conceive of its chosen focus by beginning with the most local and particular relevant matters possible.
Welcome to this “rough guide” blog series on the climate emergency and climate emergency campaigning. This series looks at some of the questions frequently asked about the topic: what does the science say, what is an emergency, does the climate crisis fit the bill, what can councils do, how can we talk about it, what needs to be done, what about business, can the political system deal with an issue this big? And many more.
Why are we failing at something that comes so naturally to us as children? Could it be that at this most critical point in our planet’s history, when all our resources and senses are required, that we are not well equipped at all? We’re so busy that there’s no time for our imaginative lives. Our imagination is actually shot to bits.
Bolivia and Climate Change’s Great Lithium Problem / Apple co-founder: ‘I’ve really given up’ on self-driving cars / Regenerative businesses in a degenerative economic system?
Of course we need to find a way that regenerative practice and careful restoration of healthy ecosystems functions spreads from community to community and bioregion to bioregion to reach global impact as quickly as possible. We need to reach scale, but not by scaling-up!
This autumn, builders will start work on Oakfield Road in Anfield. Many houses in this part of Liverpool have remained empty since the government’s failed ‘housing market renewal’ policy shipped people out, then stalled in 2008. Seven years ago, a group of residents formed a community land trust to bring nine terraces on Oakfield Road into community ownership. Now, instead of being demolished, they have been reimagined as cosy, energy-efficient homes, with space for local businesses, winter gardens, a market and a cafe.
Carol’s experience a year on from the Paradise fires speaks to the challenges of rebuilding and recovering in a time of climate change. It also attests to the profound difference between house and home. Rebuilding a house is hard enough – especially if you aren’t wealthy or aren’t insured – but it is far more challenging to rebuild a sense of home, given how homes are tied to memories, to a community, to a time and place.
“[Native American Heritage Month] allows for us to remind [non-Natives] that we are still here, living here, despite their attempts to make us like them,” says Redner, the Phoenix Indian Center CEO. “We will continue to survive, but it’s our time to thrive now; it’s time for the seventh generation to use our knowledge.”
United States House Resolution 109, the document that proposes a Green New Deal, focuses narrowly on the US. It threatens to create Green New Colonialism through increased extraction abroad. It also gives no mention of the US military’s environmental impact or its ability to maintain global injustice by force.
But then he dropped a big rock, the ripples of which reached all the way to me standing a bit removed on the shore. He said, “This life is not yours.”
Every time a group of people starts to make others understand that there’s a need to take action for a given problem, they can start to undertake initiatives to adopt this law, as we are doing. The abolition of slavery in America and of apartheid in Africa started with small groups which engaged themselves in the recognition of specific rights.
