Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Alongside a new vocational education law that consolidates dual training, the government’s new plan seeks to modernise the training offer and create 28 new degrees linked to emerging industries including green sectors…
The book “Public Water and Covid-19: Dark Clouds and Silver Linings”, discusses how the Covid19 outbreak underlined once again the importance of water and other basic services for human life, and re-opened the debate on the role of the state in managing such services.
I’d argue, too, that there’s no particular virtue in boycotting existing climate protest movements from the conviction that you personally have access to some higher-level political consciousness, though there may be good reasons for boycotting them in practice.
In Teaching History for the Common Good, Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik recognize that the past can be used “in a variety of ways, and for a variety of purposes.” One of these is to use history’s “potential to prepare students for participation in a pluralist democracy.”
By forming citizens’ assemblies people can proceed to develop a vision of how they want their world to be, at the center of which are people actively engaged as citizens.
Margaret Klein Salamon, PhD, is Executive Director of Climate Emergency Fund. She is a clinical psychologist turned climate activist whose work helps people to face the truth of the climate emergency and transform their despair into effective action. She addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
A chat about the Irish elders I’ve talked to, and how their close communities and traditional culture allowed them to survive crises like the bank strikes of the 1960s and 70s.
Scientists thought they could make hamsters more cooperative by editing out a gene … But just the opposite happened. Both male and female hamsters with the altered gene became more aggressive—much more aggressive.
Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.
Ultimately, reframing and revaluing social (and ecological) reproduction, and reducing ecologically destructive production and consumption in the process, could lead to an abundance of time and leisure rather than austerity and overwork.
Great outcomes can come even when people have very different values and politics if they work together in a principled and collaborative way—not one side trying to educate or change the other but co-designing what change looks like and how they will each play their part to deliver it.
Take a tour through the history of advertising, and explore the escalation of mind games and marketing mania that has fueled consumerism and the capitalist conflagration, leaving us on the brink of a climate meltdown. B
