Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Is there a way to imagine a different GND, a global Green New Deal? I think so. But it might have to start by recognizing the ecological laws of limits and a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality. It would argue for developmental convergence, including in energy use, between wealth and poor, within and between countries.
As the UK Climate Assembly is about to launch in Birmingham on January 24th, on the other side of the Channel, the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat has got a head start. On January 10th, 150 French citizens met for the fourth time to look at how to address the climate crisis.
After more than two centuries of applauding industrialization and the growthism that has gone with it, it’s no news that we’ve currently surpassed human and planetary boundaries. And these, in turn, are calling into question the well-established mind-maps that have enabled us to get where we are at today.
Allegedly designed to overcome old harms, one of such mind-maps is found in the now-famous Creating Shared Value (CSV) paradigm and its different variants.
Collapse can’t happen soon enough, as far as I’m concerned. By collapse, I mean the breakdown of the complexities of our current society. It’s not that I long for the feral world, red in tooth and claw, portrayed in collapse fiction, although I know there are those who fantasize about mastering a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
Extinction Rebellion was once criticised by other activists for “love bombing the cops”, but now it has found itself labelled a terror threat. In a guide sent to teachers by counter-terrorism police, the non-violent group’s logo and activities were described to help them spot students who may be involved.
For her part, Zavala is determined to do all she can to ensure that in this camp where she operates, everything possible is being done to assure these traumatized families a measure of dignity and a fair shot at a new life. She says, “In a time where asylum-seekers are being denied the fundamental right to humane and dignified treatment and access to the services they urgently need, we have pledged a strong commitment to fighting for them.”
Over several decades Euskadi has transformed itself into one of the most internationally competitive, socially inclusive, environmentally progressive economies in the world. It is a polity that welcomes economic globalization as an opportunity, while reaffirming local community and cultural identity.
Indonesia’s sinking capital of Jakarta and the surrounding areas have been inundated with rain, triggering landslides and floods that have killed dozens of people.
Tensions have been high in the area since a Dec. 31 B.C. Supreme Court decision that granted Coastal GasLink an injunction barring land defenders from blocking access to the pipeline work sites.
Movement is a privilege viewed a right. Modern infrastructure in its many forms, from planes to trucking, one-day Amazon to instant Snapchat, is almost entirely built and run on uninterrupted flows of energy—which, for the past century-and-a-half or so, have been almost entirely fossil-fuel-based. In a way, it’s quite simple: throw fuel of unmatched power on the fire, the fire’s going to grow to unprecedented strength.
Suppose you want to make a reservation at The Restaurant at the End of the Ecosphere, one of the most exclusive destinations in the entire universe. This is not an undertaking for the faint-hearted. To have a chance of booking your place to witness the mass extinction to end all mass extinctions — an event that will exterminate at least 10 million species of complex multicellular life-forms — you’ll need perseverance on a truly superhuman scale.
It’s not the melting of the ice-caps or the burning of the forests that seem to me to be the real apocalyptic scenario, but rather the slow atrophying of our moral imaginations; not the inferno itself, but the indifference of those of us who are not yet on fire. In this sense above all we are in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive.
