Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I remember the birth of antipolitics. I was a young woman when dissidents in the communist world began to associate official political activity with support for an immoral order. Voting, they believed, was an empty gesture if the ruling party won 99% of the ballots cast.
The bus turning circle just off Tooting High Street is not a place that would usually inspire carnival, creativity and dancing in the street. As I say, not a place that would usually inspire great creativity, but that was until members of Transition Town Tooting started to look at it through their ‘Transition glasses’.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
Science studies scholar Bruno Latour is fond of the film “Life of Pi” for the metaphor it provides for our current predicament. The main character of the film, Pi, ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, and not a friendly one. Though Pi builds a raft to give himself distance from the tiger, he must still tie the raft to the lifeboat which holds all the supplies–food, fresh water, and, as we see later, flares. Ultimately, the destruction of his raft forces him to return to the lifeboat and find a way to live with the tiger.
Imagination to me is about expanding our range of values and saying, “What really matters? Why does it matter? What kind of people can we be? And how can we start to translate that into the spaces that we live in, and not just keep it in the private sphere, which is about beliefs or our hobbies, or our campaigns?”
Mayors across the country have vowed to deliver on the goals of the Paris climate accord in defiance of President Trump’s decision to back out. But how can they, realistically, when the national government is questioning climate science and promoting coal, fracking, and pipelines? Simply put: Make energy public.
The possibility that artificial creatures, products of human hands, might achieve sentience and take on an active role in society is an age-old conception in world cultures, the subject of myths, stories, moral fables, and philosophical speculation.
In central Pennsylvania Ellen Gerhart’s property lies about midway along the length of the Mariner East 2 pipeline that reaches from west to east across the state. It is slated to carry a variety of natural-gas liquids under high pressure to the coast and then exported onto the international markets. This project is not without opposition, however. The Gerhart family are one of a number of private property owners across the state who object to their land being confiscated using eminent domain laws and used to further global climate destabilization.
American farm radicals from the American West of the 1880s and ’90s called themselves Populists. They blamed Eastern elites and the “moneyed power” — the one per cent of the Gilded Age — for their problems. Today’s media pundits tag angry but conservative farmers and blue collar workers as populists. This name-calling discredits people who pioneered the language and methods of grassroots democracy.
I’m grateful for how everyone rode out this session, which as you’d expect had a tentative and exploratory feel. It also broke with any expectation the course was going to be about David and I simply sharing stuff we’d already worked out in the past, and was a direct taste of actually exploring new territory together. However I knew then and know now that this session was a first step for a way of integrating design principles and design process that I feel in time will have great potential to help strengthen permaculture’s design process weak link.
New research suggests that the super-rich are hiding their money at alarming rates. A study by economists Annette Alstadsaeter, Niels Johannesen, and Gabriel Zucman reports that households with wealth over $40 million evade 25 to 30 percent of personal income and wealth taxes.
To a person alive today it is hard to fathom that the ancient Greeks regarded themselves as living in an age of decline. These are the people who gave us the philosophers Socrates and Plato, the playwrights Sophocles and Euripides, the mathematician Pythagoras, the scientist and polymath Archimedes, and the first person to formulate atomic theory, Democritus.
