Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
My father likes to say that some people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. The same could be said of the neoliberals of the world, who–in case you missed my previous piece–are now transcendent in most policy circles across the world.
Samuel Alexander has written an excellent introduction to Thoreau’s works. Just Enough Is Plenty: Thoreau’s Alternative Economics not only summarises Thoreau’s ideas, it is also a pithy statement of Alexander’s work itself…
It’s a curious thing, this attempt of mine to make sense of the future by understanding what’s happened in the past. One of the most curious things about it, at least to me, is the passion with which so many people insist that this isn’t an option at all.
So, as one small effort to try to organize my thoughts about politics in the Trump era, let me see if I can make the case for why urbanism should, and usually does, comport with localism, and thus why urban-sympathetic conservatives and radical and democratic localists, as we all face 2017, have much in common.
Now that you have an understanding of your oil consumption, let’s say we don’t want to support the rather nasty activities that oil production necessitates or that oil profits make possible. What to do?
Nonviolent campaigns are often dramatic and catch the attention of millions—think of Standing Rock water protectors resolute in the face of a brutal police force. All the more puzzling that the concept of a “nonviolent campaign” is little known and often ignored when people talk about how to mobilize power, for example, to prevent Donald Trump from erasing gains made in addressing climate change.
If you care about sustainability, if you care about social stability, if you care about the poor, the power you are up against is the neoliberal ideology as expressed on both the right and the left. If you don’t understand that, then you will end up shadow boxing against a shadowy and ill-defined opponent.
The island state of Dominica (absolutely NOT the Dominican Republic!) is unique, constantly confounding my expectations. It is a tropical Caribbean island, but not a typical Caribbean island. It is hot and wet, mountainous, with small rocky beaches, few tourists, and a fiercely independent spirit in a part of the world dominated by their powerful neighbour to the North. I was invited by WEF, the Waitukubuli Ecological Foundation, to visit and help them explore Transition as a possible way for this island.
A vast and growing body of scientific literature is impressing upon us that human economic activity is degrading planetary ecosystems in ways that are unsustainable. Taken as a whole, we are overconsuming Earth’s resources, destabilising the climate, and decimating biodiversity…
Before there was indigenous resistance at Standing Rock, there was Black Lives Matter (and before that, Occupy, and before that the Zapatistas, and before that, May ‘68… and at the bottom of everything, there’s a turtle standing on an island).
The two statements – Ezra Silk of the Climate Mobilization’s 100-plus page Victory Plan and Bill McKibben’s essay “A World at War” – have led to a healthy and vigorous debate about these ideas and their potential to play a role in the US response to the greatest global challenge of the 21st century.
A few days from now, 2016 will have passed into the history books. I know a fair number of people who won’t mourn its departure, but it’s pretty much a given that the New Year celebrations here in the United States, at least, will demonstrate a marked shortage of enthusiasm for the arrival of 2017.
