Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our obsession with economic growth is making our task much more difficult than it needs to be. It’s like we’ve chosen to fight this battle facing uphill, with one hand tied behind our back.
We’re up against the huge power of the fossil fuel industry; the extraordinary ideological opposition to the federal government doing anything important; money going into disinformation campaigns that people readily bought into. And it’s still going on.
A recent report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) confirms that the current food system isn’t sustainable neither for the environment nor for our health. Organic agriculture, conservation farming and agro-ecology are key technologies for a transition to a sustainable food system, which also has to shun artificial nitrogen fertilizers.
Traveling to Europe in the summer of 2016 to research my book, I discovered flourishing new osprey populations. Artificial nest sites – supports built mostly in trees to stabilize existing nests and encourage new ones – were plentiful and packed with young ospreys ready to fledge.
Squashes and pumpkins are great because they’re easy to grow, are a low input/ high output crop with very low maintenance and watering, and most importantly because they provide a good winter survival food.
Perhaps in the years and decades to come the meaning of what is happening will dawn on those whose world is collapsing and conditions will mature sufficiently for sweeping political changes. In the meantime permacultural designs of local cultivation space and residential areas, ways to create soils, grow trees that absorb carbon, re-discover new forms of living and organising may become possible providing an example to those who have otherwise lost just about everything and who are seeking to find a way to start again…..
Black leaders have long been pioneers in protecting communities and the environment — from Harriet Tubman, who in the mid-1800s used her knowledge of the natural world to guide escaped slaves north, to landfill protesters in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982 who galvanized the modern environmental justice movement.
If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.
For many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the “Mesquite Manifesto” addresses economic and climate problems by building up industry around the native tree.
In order to build a progressive international political economy that produces material dignity and freedom for all the world’s people, we need to engage three distinct yet interrelated projects.
Like the original New Deal, the GND is trying to do something that has never been done before; we will have to learn from experience and experiment and correct the mistakes we will inevitably make along the way. But with these strategies we can make a start in the right direction.
The three R’s of Deep Adaptation are tasks, they demand we leave a lot of our identity and cleverness behind, our comfort zones, our egoic insults, the traumas we cling to like antiquated gas masks, long after the war is over.
