Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The eclipse, then, is an invitation. Not a warning or a demand, but a quiet reminder that clarity is possible. Justice has not abandoned us. We stepped out of alignment with it, and we can step back. The shadow will stay as long as we remain in it, but it will fade the moment we stop standing in it.
While The Population Bomb is the book with which Ehrlich is most closely identified, he wrote dozens of others, including important and fascinating works on birds, human ecology, and conservation biology. He was as insightful as he was prolific, and his work deserves continued attention.
The news hasn’t improved since I started working on this article. Still, while doing so, I’ve found myself in the company of others — and that’s reminded me of something. When you make yourself go out into the world, however scary it might seem, and act to make it better, the world does sometimes shift. The atoms really do move.
This week’s Frankly marks the second installment of Nate’s recurring series, Uncomfortable Questions in Unsettled Times, where he poses questions about our shared future…Today’s episode is prompted by the Iran situation and what happens when geopolitics stops feeling distant and starts arriving as supply chain disruptions, rising prices, fear, and renewed stories about enemies and allies.
Justice is neither owned nor taken away. It is a state of being, a condition that arises whenever life is allowed to exist in its own way. When that truth is remembered, the language of rights will fall silent, and what remains will be the only thing that ever mattered: the unbroken relationship among all that exists.
At the time, I was learning engineering methods for controlling systems and optimizing outcomes, powerful techniques that I thought could alone solve society’s mounting problems. But I quickly realized my team with Fathom was a system that belied ambitions of control.
All we can do now is stop being dumb enough to think our brains are capable of outsmarting ecology, and aim for lifestyles that are less obviously catastrophic—relying heavily on proven examples from the distant past.
We believe that more historians and archaeologists can step into a public, reflective role, helping societies explore narratives beyond either progress and growth fetishism on the one hand, or nostalgic and fortress mentalities on the other.
In this episode, we run a special fantasy-football style draft to take a look at immortality projects, some horrendous, but some with positive effects.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate begins a new series called “Staying Human,” which focuses on what he sees as a precondition for everything else: recovering a sense of personal agency.
A lot of nonsense is being communicated about the war with Iran.
Legendary activist Joanna Macy called this moment the Great Unraveling—a time when our ecological, political, economic, and social systems crumble. And yet, she also insisted that we stand on the threshold of a Great Turning: a profound transition toward a more just and sustainable world.
