Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This week, Nate invites colleague Tom Murphy, professor of physics at the University of California, San Diego and writer of famed blog ‘Do the Math’, to unpack his recent essay The Simple Story of Civilization
We are called to awaken each other and collectively author our common future. What could be more meaningful than that?
Now Indigenous people are joining forces and forming a movement of movements that is inspiring people and movements the world over.
The Imazighen’s more recent anti mining struggle began on August 20, 2011, when activists from Imider — a municipality with more than seven villages — climbed Mount Alebban in the High Atlas Mountains and shut down a pipeline diverting water from the reservoir to a silver mine that has been operational for nearly four decades.
John Thackara is one of the brilliant irregulars exploring how humankind can make the transition to a climate-friendly, relocalized, post-capitalist world.
The challenges presented by climate chaos and the Covid-19 pandemic have both elicited cultural responses that superficially appear to be opposed to one another, but that end up working hand-in-hand to bolster a status quo that’s intrinsically harmful to everyone. Both succeed by appealing to wishful thinking.
The exercise of grassroots democracy, however, need not focus on the state and its formal institutions. The role of the state is not intrinsic to the practice of grassroots democracy.
Cascadia has a new bioregional journal, Cascadia Spoke. The journal is a revival of that good old medium that has graced the world with so many great journals, bioregional and other. Paper and print.
I still fundamentally believe in the emergent human response to collective challenges – but to do that, more people need to see the systems synthesis of what we face – which was the initial thrust of this platform.
Permacrisis is the joining of the prefix perma- (which means a fixed state) and crisis, resulting in a word that means ‘a state of permanent crisis’ (or according to Collins Dictionary “an extended period of instability and insecurity, especially one resulting from a series of catastrophic events.”)
The COVID pandemic hasn’t ended. We’ve become tired of it and moved on. But nature doesn’t move on just because we do and I’ve been wondering about whether we are in denial because the global system we’ve built simply isn’t compatible with pandemics.
The reality is our existing politics compromises that future and, like carbon and capitalism, needs to be dismantled, transcended and replaced so that more radical forms of democracy can take root.
