Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
‘Kiss the Ground’, currently streaming on Netflix, has huge relevance for the massive environmental and health problems we face today. Although mostly looking at American agriculture, it includes inspiring examples from Africa, China and Haiti.
Claudine brings the themes of racial inequality, job development, politics and the environment to this conversation on “What Could Possibly Go Right?
Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save The World, a new book by London-based economic anthropologist Jason Hickel, confronts that rift, delineating the gulf between “green” growth strategies, on the one hand, and the transition to a post-capitalist economy, on the other.
Our plan (as they always are) was simple. We would open a bank, print our own money, sell it, raise enough money to buy up £1 million worth of debt on the secondary debt markets and then destroy it.
People of color and low-income communities have long gathered ingredients for meals, and foraging can help fill in the gaps in places where historic redlining has had lasting effects on supermarket options. In fact, some wild and feral foods can provide greater nutritional benefits than produce bought in stores.
If you’re a ‘Beaver Nut’ and realise earnestly just how critical these creatures are to the future well-being of the earth, with a pivotal role in the creation of abundant biodiversity, water provision, purification, flood and drought alleviation, you will pursue beaver advocacy with the kind of tedious zeal generally restricted to deluded members of obscure religious cults.
Even as communities begin picking themselves up after the devastation, West Coast climate activists are experimenting with what an effective response to such crises looks like.
In 2012, hardly anyone had heard of fossil fuel divestment. Today, more than a thousand institutions with more than $14 trillion between them have divested in one form or another. The impossible became conceivable, then inevitable. Change can and does happen, with sustained effort.
Across Africa, a network of Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners is accompanying traditional and indigenous communities in the revival and enhancement of their Earth-centred customary governance systems.
Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient.
The signals of transformation I talk about are not concepts, and they are not the fruits of a vivid imagination. They are happening now.
Jane Davidson is the author of #futuregen: Lessons from a Small Country, the story of why Wales was the first country in the world to introduce legislation to protect future generations. Jane shares her thoughts on “What could possibly go right?”
Twin brothers Irucka Ajani and Obiora Embry approach farming in an unconventional way. Instead of relying on the usual row crop methods or the use of pesticides to give plants a leg up, they instead look to ancient history and a loving, symbiotic relationship with the land that has been long forgotten in many parts of the world.
