Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It is important to make the connection between beauty and nature obvious and to name beauty as the quality in nature we so desire. If we don’t, we continue allegiance to the very paradigm that has been so destructive of the human-nature relations, the paradigm that erased value from the natural world and made beauty nothing more than a subjective opinion.
The Social and Solidarity Economy is based on individuals and communities arising from social initiatives. Material benefits are not the essential building block of its identity. Rather, it defines itself by the quality of life and well-being of its members and the whole of society as a global system.
And yet the climate movement can and must grow stronger. In my view, the movement has yet to develop the full analysis of the problem it hopes to solve, and consequently its full, autonomous identity. I lay out what I believe to be the full analysis in my essay on the next steps of the climate movement, but I’ll recount some main points here.
There are two ways of addressing rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon; reduce the amount of carbon emissions or increase the amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Most of our efforts have been focused on reducing emissions. I’d like to shift the conversation to drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
Seven years ago, two sustainable horticulture students took a field trip to an organic farm in the U.K. and were shocked to see cauliflowers left in the field due to their irregular shape or size. In reaction, they founded Food in Community, which aims to tackle food waste, food poverty, and social isolation in Totnes, England, by connecting producers with food banks and other distributors.
A public space is only as community-driven as its process. It follows that public spaces can only exist for everyone if the conversations in which they are envisioned include everyone.
All around us is Greensong—the sounds, vibrations, smells, and tastes of a living planet. Can you sense it? Are you listening? What does it tell you?
We all need to transform our lifestyles as well.I believe any transformation process will consist of a “patchwork of solutions”; some will evolve in parallel, some mutually enhancing and some may also turn out not to be successful.
If we don’t transition away from growth economics and embrace our Arrival and the agenda of making ourselves at home, the world’s richer countries risk destroying what they already have, while shutting out development in poorer countries.
While both the acolytes of Adam Smith and Karl Marx worshipped the fossil-fueled industrial revolution as the driver toward the paradise that the invisible hand of the market or the golden age of communism would create, Eunice Foote’s experiments reveal the fatal flaw on which these dreams were made and that would one day turn into the nightmare we are just beginning to wake.
This report introduces a new institutional framework for a transformative socialist politics: the Public-Common Partnership (PCP).Whilst the era of new public-privat
