The descent
Let’s continue our descent into collapse. First, let me be clear: “I don’t know” (credit to Nate Hagens). You don’t either. We can’t know or predict something as complex as a human society and its trajectories.
Society
The Trees at the Center of Our History
Recovering the meaning the white pines, and other trees had for past generations, and—like Mayer’s project with Charles Johnson’s oak—finding imaginative ways to add new meaning and propagate it forward can play a significant role in helping us to reorient the trajectory of the history we make going forward in a more respectful and sustainable direction for all.
Hacking Human Attachment: The Loneliness Crisis, Cognitive Atrophy, and Other Personal Dangers of AI
In this episode, Nate is joined by Nora Bateson and Zak Stein to explore the multifaceted ways that AI is designed to exploit our deepest social vulnerabilities, and the risks this poses to human relationships, cognition, and society.
What Is the Commons—And Why Does It Matter Today?
Once we recognise the principles of commoning, we start to see them everywhere: neighbours sharing childcare or tending a community garden. Local repair cafés and tool libraries. Digital communities building and maintaining open-source projects on the Internet.
The Future Requires a Politics of Relationality
Relationality is ultimately not a work of social science or politics, but a biologically and spiritually informed vision of life.
When Space Becomes Silly
The question, then, is: when will we collectively become comparably dismissive of proposals for humans in space?
What Futures Are Possible?
Community-scale and bioregional-scale responses to the Great Unraveling invite personal action and lead both to convivial social arrangements and to the discovery of ways to live more in cooperation with, less in domination of, the web of life.
Crazy Town: Episode 113. Searching for the Golden Toad with Kyle and Trevor Ritland
Frog and Toad Are Friends, at least according to a venerable children’s book. And so are Jason (Crazy Town’s resident biology nerd) and conservationist brothers, Kyle and Trevor Ritland, authors of The Golden Toad: An Ecological Mystery and the Search for a Lost Species.
How Sudanese women are building lifelines from the ashes of war
Across Sudan, women are resurrecting nafeer, an ancient practice of communal solidarity, adapting it into a decentralized network of survival that functions where the state has collapsed.
Beyond AI Futurism: A Socio-Ecological Vision for AI
We must engage in a deliberate act of political imagination: to recognise that AI’s path is not predetermined by Big Tech, but is contested terrain – a technology that can either concentrate power or strengthen democracy, accelerate ecological collapse or support sustainability.
Climate Justice at the University: Integrating Struggles for Liberation
With universities being highly enmeshed with corporate money that comes from fossil fuel industries, does it even make sense to have universities? And how exactly do we move from profit-seeking science research that advances weapon technology to liberation?
Beyond crisis
We don’t have simple answers where we can just say, right, ‘That’s what we need to do’. So we need to do things locally, individually, in community from the grassroots.
