Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In this short intervention, we bring a critical social science perspective to the Planetary Boundaries framework through the notion of societal boundaries and aim to provide a more nuanced understanding of the social nature of thresholds, one that it has the potential to offer guidelines for a just, social-ecological transformation.
This is one of the greatest challenges for rapid transition in our warming world: as temperatures rise, and extreme heat events become more frequent and severe, how can we keep cool without costing the Earth?
In the foothills of western North Carolina, the small town of Morganton is home to a growing co-op movement that’s reinvigorating the region’s once-struggling textile and furniture manufacturing industries, and refashioning them around egalitarianism and localism.
The 1970s surge in ecological awareness saw many books published on our relationship with the natural world. ‘Food for Free’, by Richard Mabey, was published fifty years ago in 1972.
In Bookchin’s view, freedom wasn’t about doing whatever the heck we want and letting others clean up the mess. Real freedom was the freedom to collectively determine how to satisfy our needs in a precious and finite world.
Instead of focusing so many human resources on ensuring that the well-off do not receive benefits, the universal character of UBI guarantees that no one who needs help is left out.
Militarised adaptation to climate breakdown is akin, as US journalist Christian Parenti argues, to the politics of the ‘armed lifeboat’ that seeks to secure the wealth of the few while training guns on everyone else.
Conservation, restoration, and participatory management of ecosystems (i.e., from the inside-out) are not only hands-on forms of “engagement with nature,” but also reciprocally restorative practices: restorative for the people involved as well as for the ecosystems undergoing restorative actions.
We are ultimately telling children and teachers to slow down, to consume information more deliberately. Share more sparingly and stop and think before you do.
The good news is that when place-based wisdom informs local solutions, the solutions are all the more sustainable.
Once we see that we are the economy, we realize we can change it — and when we change it, we change the world.
Understanding how opponents of climate action employ these discourses of delay is essential to recognizing climate disinformation and misinformation, Arena said, and ultimately to disrupting it.
