Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
People in public life tend to fall into one of two broad categories – those motivated by principle, and those motivated by power.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday night at the age of 87, exemplified the first.
David Graeber was a cruel loss in these already-difficult times. Graeber was only 59….he clearly had many more dazzling books ahead of him….and those of us questing for system-change as multiple crises converge, took great inspiration from his thinking.
I’m thinking of these present two posts more as a kind of position statement on the politics underlying my forthcoming book, A Small Farm Future, and its arguments for renewable agrarianism, using the debate about XR as my foil.
There remains a hope that once we get past the economic and social effects of the pandemic, all of us will be able to return to something resembling normal life before the pandemic—even if it is a “new normal” marked by heightened vigilance and protection against infectious disease … But the date for this recovery to a new normal seems to keep getting postponed.
A small group of new farmers have seeded a movement to change the local food industry. Will COVID-19’s impact on the local economy set them back? Or will it — and the growing push for social justice — help?
Retrosuburbia provides the patterns and models that need to be replicated across our residential heartlands to achieve a scale of impact.
Rob Dietz: Steady-state economics is a sustainable alternative to mainstream or neoclassical economics, which assumes perpetual growth of production and consumption. Such an economy keeps material and energy use within ecological limits, and the unsustainable (and unrealistic) goal of continuously increasing income and consumption is replaced by the goal of improving quality of life for all. In short, the focus is enough rather than more.
A city near Beijing is being designed with rooftop farms, 3-D printing facilities and ample space to work from home – to protect residents against future pandemics. Vicente Guallart, whose Barcelona-based firm of architects won a contest to design the community, said: “We cannot continue designing cities and buildings as if nothing had happened.”
The Plurinational State, which prior to the coup in Bolivia had begun to be erected (with the defects inevitable in any pioneering trial), is a mirror in which our countries must look at themselves… The Abya Yala [the Americas] is then to be lived as a Great Homeland, open to supportive and ecological cooperation with all the peoples of the world.
With the COVID-19 pandemic shuttering many food businesses temporarily or permanently, FoodLab Detroit has refocused on supporting surviving businesses that want to break the cycles of racist, exploitative, profit-first practices — such as tipping — that have long been taken for granted.
What should be the message from the climate scientist, the environmental activist, the conscientious politician, the ardent planner – those daunted but committed to pulling out all the stops? It is the single most important issue facing the community of climate-concerned Earthlings.
Civilisation is a way of talking about human history on the largest scale. From the cave paintings of Lascaux to the latest MoMA exhibition, it binds human history together.
