Review of New Maps, the latest deindustrial fiction quarterly
As its name alludes, this visionary new fiction quarterly seeks to challenge our current mental maps of the future.
Society
The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog 02.24.2021
The Pandemic Armchair Philosophy Blog welcomes the beginning of the end of the COVID-19 crisis, but a “return to normal” should refocus us on a long list of global climate emergencies, social injustices, and tottering democratic institutions.
‘The New Systems Reader’: Strategies for System-Change
Today I’d like to call attention to a fantastic collection of 29 original essays, The New Systems Reader: Alternatives to a Failed Economy, edited by James Gustave Speth and Kathleen Courrier and published by Routledge.
Five Surprising Benefits of Shopping Less Often
Nearly a year ago when cases of Covid-19 started rising in my area, one of the first things I did was alter my shopping routine.
What Does An Ecological Civilization Look Like?
In short, we need to change the basis of our global civilization. We must move from a civilization based on wealth accumulation to one that is life-affirming: an ecological civilization.
What’s in a Name?
This is the pathway forward: cultivating nature in ways that heal both the landscape and provide for people. Gaian Guilds can mimic those holistic interactions to cultivate a restorative community: working to heal social ills in ways that also heal the Earth.
The power of the Alternative
As we navigate contradictions collectively, we produce a surplus possibility that we must cherish, nourish and expand. The idea of ‘defeat’ prevents us from capturing this incredible dimension of the art of organising hope.
Mass Education and the Climate Crisis: Lessons from the Pandemic (Part 1)
The trillion-dollar pandemic relief bills demonstrate the federal government’s power to create money, upending the question that often stymies progressive policies: how will you pay for it? However, there are still limits to money creation that activists aiming to create a sustainable economy should consider.
Things (nearly) fall apart: The year so far in electricity, finance and computer chips
The news is full of stories about a system whose rivets are about to pop en masse. Disparate calamities are arising out of a system that applies certain “principles” across sectors of society. Those principles have their origin in rigid economic ideology. Let us take Texas utility customers who shivered through rolling electricity blackouts last week.
The Early Roots of a Modern Crisis
The transition from hunting and gathering to grain agriculture was a monumental change in our social/economic evolution where the structure and dynamic of economic life became something distinctively different.
Remembering The Weather of the Future
But my feeling is that we do need to hear more declarative statements like “Sell the beach house now!” from science and modeling.
The case for abandoning GDP – an intersectional perspective Pt. 1
In order to overcome social and environmental injustices, we have no choice but to abandon the naturalized and structuralized notions that equate GDP growth with social progress and sincerely aim to conceive of alternatives.
