Ruminations on losing power and what is appropriate technology
We can’t depend on tech at all if we want to see the future. We depend on this Earth. And no tool is ever going to end that interdependency.
Society
Seattle and the global: A center of empire
Even as the global continues to powerfully exist here, we can break beyond its mental confines to make a home place rooted in bioregional nature. It requires acts of revolutionary imagination to make that place.
Always Coming Home: Review
Always Coming Home must stand as a landmark of deindustrial literature, from years before the genre was ever named.
First There Must Be An End
It matters which world we think is ending, and it matters what we tell each other is worth doing in such a time.
Olivia Lazard: “Peace and Power in the Mineral Age”
On this episode, environmental peacemaker and mediator Olivia Lazard joins Nate to unpack the relationship between mineral deposits, conflict-vulnerable zones, and high biodiversity areas to create interlocking risks to geopolitical and climate stability.
Atoms, Bits and Wits: The Economic Case for Cooperation
Atoms, bits and wits show why a horizonal view will open an economic case for cooperation and learning in media, education, politics and ecology.
Fusion Futures
How likely is it that the threads of thought and action attempting to reclaim cultures of restraint, restoration of nature and finding humanity’s place in that order, both at the local and the global level, over the last 100 years or so, would spread, let alone become dominant during any new pulse of free energy, so close on the heels of the frenzy of consumption of millions of years’ worth of stored sunlight (in fossil fuels)?
The Parable of the Humane Philanthropist
Healing the ocean and keeping it healthy—i.e. focusing on the root causes of environmental and social injustices—so as to prevent sea animals from washing up on the shores in the first place is where we all need to focus. But what does that even mean?
Fossil Fragility
We’re all worshippers of fossil fuels to some degree. It’s not as if all of us willfully have a choice in the matter, but in virtually every product we buy and service we use, somewhere or everywhere along the supply chain there are inputs born of suffering, ecological and human.
At Work in the Ruins: Review
And what I take from this is that we don’t get to choose whether or not there is an ending. We only get to choose what kind of ending we have, and therefore what we have left to build from.
Giant Leap, or Too Little Too Late
Going back to the alternative futures, Collapse is collapse, and both Growth and Discipline also lead to collapse, sooner or later. The only one that provides a route to sustainability is Transformation, and only then if it is not dependent on a technology transformation.
Winter Reflections: Engaging our Children
It wasn’t enough to observe and have a front row seat at issues I felt were important. The students had to care about what they were studying. It had to be relevant to their lives.
