Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In the end, something is making these trends go down beyond the model’s awareness, and that something is more likely to still be with us than to suddenly vanish. Perhaps the youth of the world are reacting in a “mature” fashion to the uncertainties of the future, and the justifiable sense that things are broken.
Capitalism is not broken, the environmental, automobile and social mayhem we experience every day are just what it does. Humans deserve better and humans are capable of better. The Primer is here to help.
In August, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador signed a decree to protect sacred indigenous sites, but for the Wixárika community, the struggle isn’t over.
In this episode, Nate welcomes back Daniel Schmachtenberger to unpack a new paper, which he co-authored, entitled Development in Progress, an analysis on the history of progress and the consequences of ‘advancement’.
So perhaps the narrative of Transition over these 18 years (yes it really has been that long…!) has moved from being about creating catalysts for local resilience to being Time Travel Agencies, who through the work they do, and how they tell stories about what they’ve already done and the potential futures it makes more credible, more within touching distance.
The recent rapid decline in population growth—even pre-COVID—suggests that a population peak prior to 2050 is not outlandish, provided that current drivers continue to apply. Recent declines in fertility rates, together with a flattening age distribution of young folks, combine to set the stage for population peak and decline.
In the cellar of my parent’s house sit a series of tools that have served my father and grandfather and great-grandfather, for they were created before the throwaway world was conceived. … They were made for a nation of craftsmen, of people who bore in themselves the power that all humans once had, to reshape wood and hide and stone into a human landscape.
One day, when a new world rises from the ashes of this chemically-infused and churned and oil-burned wasteland, the basement of history, we may all work together to rebuild, to try again, and, most importantly, to love and to have better memories.
In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and indigenous researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture.
As population bombs, perhaps there’s no explosion, but a whimper of modernity as the larger living world finds its voice again, accented by human song.
A just resolution to the Israel/Palestine conflict requires acknowledging and honoring truths that are seemingly contradictory. Examples from other domains show how this can be accomplished and offer a potential pathway to an enduring, long-term peace.
There’s a bridge between people’s experiences with these more-than-human “living cultures” and the work of regrowing our ways of being human together. They offer images that reflect, backwards and forwards, helping us give words to the work that is called for.
