Rick Steves: What Americans Can Learn From Europe’s People-Friendly Places
I live in a beautiful community, and it’s so clear to me that beautiful communities don’t just happen.
Society featured
Finding safe paths through suburbia
The post-WWII suburban settlement pattern assumes and reinforces car travel as the default transport choice for its residents. Do such settlements have a future when the temporary energy bonanza of the past 100 years falters? And can residents of suburbia begin to create that future today?
Context is King!
It amazes me how long an insight can take to fully develop, sometimes simmering for years while the pieces fall into place. I feel like this when it comes to the importance of context.
Primer for Paradigm Shift
Paradigm shift means creating uplifting alternatives to capitalism and the consumer culture in every way possible. Those individuals and groups who are leading the charge are called upon to share what they are learning. This is not a time to be shy.
Holding the Fire: Episode 5. The Delusion of Dominion with Celine Lim
One of the themes that has revealed itself on this podcast is that the problems besetting the planet today all stem from our disconnection from the Earth. Celine Lim, an Indigenous Kayan leader from Sarawak, a Malaysian state on the island of Borneo, knows this all too well.
Some Rough Sketch Notes on Disabstraction
To “disabstract” an account, a bit of history, a narrative or story, an image, idea or concept, an academic discipline or theory…, is to re-embed it in a world of history, concrete particulars, detailed situations, context, depth, richness, complexity, specificity, detail, situatedness, place… and so much more.
The miniaturization of death: How technology has tipped the balance away from state power
Violence is coming in smaller and smaller packages these days.
Climate Politics: The View from Washington
So, what does Johnson’s elevation to the speaker’s chair mean for US climate policy? It doesn’t bode particularly well, although hardly worse than what McCarthy meant for clean energy and the environment.
Welcome to Dark Mountain: Issue 24 – Eight Fires!
The firekeeping practice became a way to resist those forces, to access our deep-time knowledge and put us in sync with the Earth’s rhythms and metabolism, kin with the thousands of people who are holding fires and doing this regenerative culture making at the same time.
Turning a new leaf in suburbia
So zoning and land use changes, while necessary, are not sufficient to transform car-dependent suburbia into sustainable, walkable communities. Many changes to transportation policy and infrastructure are also needed.
Centering Indigenous Languages in India’s Schools
India is among the most linguistically diverse countries in the world, but its Indigenous languages have been marginalized—along with those who speak them.
Our Ugly Magnificence
Similarly, it is hard not to look at human supremacy as an abdication of context, wisdom, relationship, and the tangled, interconnected world as we find it in favor of a pretend world of parts, algorithms, abstractions, and tidy categories
