Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
After now working in the planning and urban design realm for more than a couple of decades, I’ve come to believe that those “substandard” parcels referenced in countless planning and market studies are actually the key to successful cities and neighborhoods. I believe we should savor them, embrace them, and seek to create more wherever we can.
A worldwide wave of school climate strikes, begun by the remarkable Greta Thunberg, has reached the UK. Some critics claim these activist-pupils are simply playing truant, but I disagree. Speaking as both a climate campaigner and an academic philosopher, I believe school walkouts are morally and politically justifiable.
With borders hardening around the world, more people than ever are taking on the slippery, often tortuous challenge of proving their relationships to the authorities, which often boils down to having their love recognised as legitimate by the state. I’m one of them, or fear I soon will be.
For centuries, ordinary Brits have enjoyed a legal “right to ramble” throughout the countryside even when they might cross someone’s private property. In England and Wales alone, there are an estimated 140,000 miles of footpaths and bridlepaths that are considered public rights of way. Now, as reported by the website Boing Boing, the full scope of this right — and access to a vast network of paths — is in question.
Today the monarchs are all but gone. That sad fact hit home this week as I read of the 97 percent collapse of the Western monarch population. No number of inspired “Ten Things You Can Do” articles, no amount of milkweed replanting, will revive a species once it falls into the past.
Last week, I gave a five day workshop on “Managing Planetary Collapse” at a retreat center in northern Costa Rica. The participants came together to earnestly grapple with the converging crises that define these times — while learning how to be more hopeful and impactful with insights about how the current predicament came into being.
The Indigenous Peoples March in Washington, D.C. went viral online after a group of high school students from Kentucky mocked an indigenous Vietnam War veteran, Nathan Phillips, outside the Lincoln Memorial on Jan. 18.
Chris Martenson’s recent article about collapse and the plummeting of biodiversity made me think about what it feels like to be left behind. Few people living in affluent countries or communities understand what this means.
We are a proud people, in Scotland. To what extent varies from person to person, but it’s a common Scottish characteristic and one that, at times, is a hindrance when addressing political issues.
Whenever you design and create anything, you deploy one or another conceptual framework. One or another way of framing and making sense of both what you start with, how to go about developing or changing it, where you are heading, and why you are even bothering. No matter if you’re aware of your conceptual framework. It is there.
So you want to escape climate change. That’s a reasonable impulse — climate change rivals nuclear war for the greatest threat to human life in the history of our species’ existence.
Old black-and-white movies set an example for people to follow. In an era when we interact more with screens than with people, and when few people remember how to work together or build a better society, examples are what we need more of.
