Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Everyone wants to make a difference and have a good time. But it’s not always easy to do either one, let alone find ways to do both at the same time. But I’ve found a way! Have a funny films festival for your friends. Sure this sounds fun, but how does it make a difference? Studies have found that social relations are one of the biggest boosters for happiness and health and that they have a profound affect on people’s involvement in community.
This essay this isn’t about bitterness. It’s about the decisions we make in light of an ambiguous future. One of the costs of making moral choices is breaking the strong emotional ties to a prior life. My own future, if I have one, is necessarily rooted in the past. For the better part of a decade, I was the model professor, if only from the standpoint of university administrators.
Non-profits have suffered in the financial crisis no less than their counterparts in the private and public sectors. But could this be a ‘Greenpeace moment’: might philanthropic foundations support the creation of a civil society conscience for international finance?
Drive across southern Minnesota near the city of Luverne, and you’ll see clusters of wind turbines poking up through the cornfields. Climb into one of these sleek, gleaming, white towers, and you’ll find sophisticated computer controls monitoring dozens of factors every moment (wind speed, pressure on the blades, and so on). Yet the way the turbines are funded and owned is just as innovative as the technology that runs them.
This week, Crop To Cuisine steps into the field of urban farming. Food Safety Expert, Bill Marler, addresses the right to eat whatever you want. And Crop To Cuisine continues its series on the new generation of american farmers, From The Ground Up. All that and more.
While political forces have conspired to make the Zapatistas largely invisible both inside Mexico and internationally, their challenge has always been to propose a paradigm of development that is both just and self-sustaining. It seems fair, then, to see if Zapatismo can shed any light on the muddle of politics around the climate crisis.
When Aaron Newton and I conceived _A Nation of Farmers_ we began each chapter with a framing image from World War political posters about food, energy and gardening. We wanted to bring home the point I make in writing in _Depletion and Abundance_ – that at critical moments in our history, including times of war or great economic strain – ordinary daily acts are transferred from the private sphere into the public one.
Coal mining has dominated the economy of Appalachia for more than a century and has drastically altered much of the regional ecology. Among the primary impacts of coal mining are degraded soils, slurry impoundments, contaminated streams, polluted air, human health effects, and a reduction in biodiversity. We address the broad issue of Appalachia’s future by proposing an alternative to the devastating large-scale practice of surface mining in central Appalachia, including mountaintop removal and valley fill surface coal mining.
With great regularity and often a touch of subterfuge, a certain message crops up in the offerings of the mainstream media. Like a powerful riptide to an unsuspecting swimmer at the beach, the message tries to grab our attention and pull it out to dangerous seas. And that message is, “Consume!” Let’s examine for a moment an ironic example.
I don’t think I’ve ever met a collapsitarian. At least if I have, they’ve never admitted it to me. It’s possible that some of my best friends may be collapsitarians in the privacy of their own homes, just as they may also be, in their own time and strictly in confidence, devotees of bestial porn or the novels of Jeffrey Archer. But it’s never come out in public.
Most people have been brought up to believe that the competitive, grow-or-die, absentee-shareholder-owned, “free”-trade “market” economy is the only one that works, the only alternative to a socialist, government-run economy. This myth is perpetrated in business and other schools, by the media, by accountants and lawyers and bankers and, of course, in the business world.
What kind of life do you want, and what are you willing to do to get it? Keith Farnish, author of Time’s Up! An Uncivilized Solution to a Global Crisis, sees industrial civilization as the most destructive way of living yet devised by humans. And it’s over: environmental degradation and depletion tell us it can’t continue. The system has myriad ways to make us believe we can’t live without it. But Keith believes we can – there are countless ways to move forward into contented, happy, and full lives. We can “disengage” and reconnect with the natural world, ourselves, and others.
