Bumps on the road to a bright, green future – 17 Nov 2019
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?
Society featured
Nurturing Vital Diversity & Resilience: Scaling Out, Rather than Scaling-Up!
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!
Are Community Land Trusts a Way Out of the System?
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.
Finding Home after Paradise Burned
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.
Beyond November, Indigenous Communities Honor Culture and Heritage Year-Round
“[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.”
Shrink the Military, Shrink Injustice
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.
This Life Is Not Yours
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.”
‘Coyote’ Alberto Ruz on the Rights of Nature
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.
In its Insatiable Pursuit of Power, Silicon Valley is Fuelling the Climate Crisis
Human beings are at their worst when they are consumers, locked into the miserable pursuit of satisfaction through the isolation of individual consumption – particularly when that shopping and consuming is done online (and when, as with Instagram, we learn to turn ourselves into commodities). T
The Stories We Need: Pan-African Social Ecology
Kadalie’s book is one more testament that a collective awakening is taking place to jettison the state and redefine global history from the bottom up.
For all this, direct democracy by itself can hardly promise social and ecological restoration. Democracy is not a matter of implementing formulaic procedures and structures; it is a matter of fostering bonds of mutual support and the sharing of communal power.
Mind the Climate Literacy Gap
Climate literacy, which should by now be universal, lags out of all proportion to the crisis — and yet it promises large returns for a relatively small investment. If every student was climate literate, we could begin to effect change on a large scale. If every person was truly climate literate, imagine the change we could make.
The Response Podcast Episode 5: Inequality, Structural Racism, and the Fight for Justice after the Grenfell Tower Fire
In this episode of The Response, we examine the events that led up to the Grenfell Tower fire and learn how the community has responded through the voices of survivors, their families, and others who were impacted.
