Society featured

Being Salmon, Being Human: Preface

by

We inhabitants of industrial civilization still live inside a human-centered story. The story articulates itself in the ways we speak, what we think, how we listen, what we hear. It expresses itself in the physical forms of our life-worlds, in our legal, political, and economic institutions. It gives structure to the way we conceive of and inhabit both space and time. It shapes our encounters with other-than-human living creatures, as well as with the larger planetary presence. This is the story of the human as a separate self.

Monbiot: ‘We Need that New Political Narrative’

by

Prompted by the sense that we are living through a moment of transition, George’s latest book, ‘Out Of The Wreckage: A New Politics for an Age of Crisis’, attempts to sketch a way forward. Most important to this project, he argues, is a political ‘narrative’ that can gain traction as the new ‘common sense’, carrying within it our values and the society that we want live in. But the book is also full of practical proposals, from land value taxes and community land trusts, to democratic reforms and ‘Big Organizing’.

A Field Guide to Thoughtstoppers

by

The question is why a species with the tolerably impressive intellectual capacities we’ve got has done such a bad job of applying those capacities in the face of civilization-ending threats. From this perspective, our problem can be phrased very precisely: the vast majority of people in today’s industrial world have never learned how to think.

Smoke from California’s Raging Wildfires Spreads a Public Health Emergency across the Bay

by

As you might have heard, those of us who live in the Bay Area are breathing air this week that rivals Beijing’s, thanks to the fires raging across Northern California. West Oakland deals with bad air quality all the time, so I reached out to some folks there seeking perspective.

Lessons from the Front Lines of Anti-Colonial Pipeline Resistance

by

The Standing Rock standoff over the Dakota Access Pipeline was a reminder that colonization, and resistance to it, both exist in the present tense. Fossil fuel pipelines that despoil indigenous lands and waters have become key flashpoints in long-standing anti-colonial resistance. An important precursor and inspiration for the Standing Rock camp is an indigenous occupation in northern British Columbia, Canada.

Review of Merigan Tales (short story collection edited by John Michael Greer)

by

The stories that fill this extraordinary volume depict a far-future world that defies most people’s expectations about the future. In it, America and the other developed nations have reverted to a preindustrial state of existence as a consequence of having exhausted the Earth’s economically recoverable fossil fuels as well as rendered immense regions of the planet humanly uninhabitable in the process.

BFM Podcast with Richard Heinberg: There’s No App for That

by

It has become something of a mantra within the sustainability movement that innovations in technology will save the world and all of us in it, but we tend to forget that technology played a big part in getting ourselves into this mess in the first place. In a manifesto released back in August, author Richard Heinberg, who is also the Senior Fellow-in-Residence of the US-Based Post Carbon Institute, explains why technology, which is widely heralded as our saviour, is not the secret sauce to solve all our environmental troubles.

Team Human Podcast: There’s No App for That, with Richard Heinberg

by

Playing for Team Human today is Post Carbon Institute fellow Richard Heinberg. Richard is the co-author of Our Renewable Future and most recently, the manifesto, There’s No App For That. On today’s show Richard and Douglas challenge the idea that technological “progress” is a panacea for solving systems-level crises like climate change.

Brazil’s National Indigenous Movement: Resolute in Times of Crisis

by

When Brazilian indigenous leader Sônia Guajajara gave a fiery speech on environmentalism and human rights at the Rock in Rio music festival in September 2017, alongside Alicia Keys, she captured the power and authority of Brazil’s National Indigenous Movement (Mobilização Nacional Indígena, MNI). “This is the mother of all struggles, the struggle for Mother Earth!” exclaimed Sônia to a massive, cheering audience.

How Poverty Impacts our Brain, Health and Imagination

by

[Jamies’] paper suggested that growing up in poverty can result in decrements in attentional processes, working memory, and a measurably smaller hippocampus.  In an exploration as to the reasons why, as a culture, we might be less able to constructively imagine the future, Jamie felt like an important person to talk to.