Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The “vehicular cycling” approach promoted by John Forester can be a great help to all of us who have to ride on busy streets dominated by cars. Yet I think there are good reasons why this approach has always had limited appeal. In this second installment of a two-part essay I compare the vehicular cycling approach to what is arguably a much stronger social force – the Slow Bicycling movement.
This column, like others in the Canaries in the Coal Mine series, is intended to raise early warnings of dangers that might be lurking beyond the immediate attention of clean energy advocates and climate defenders. Today’s cautionary tale is about the 2018 midterm elections and what they could mean for federal clean energy and climate policies and programs.
Maybe faith in God and faith in my elders are two sides of the same coin. Both ways of deflecting responsibility and deferring to others. And maybe the loss of faith in both God and the wisdom of age are part of the newly minted “quarter-life crisis” — growing up, finding yourself, and claiming your role in the world.
Authoritarian populism is on the rise. Whether in Brazil, Hungary, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, South Africa, Turkey, France, the US and many other countries. Regressive, nationalist, sometimes with religious inflections, it is a diverse, global phenomenon.
When I’m at work I’m staring at a screen. When I’m not at work I’m staring at screens. Checking social media. Scrolling through updates. Scrolling through friends. Scrolling through products. Scrolling through #instagram. Scrolling through #amazon. The customer is always right. Make sure that what you’re selling is something that people want to buy.
The fact that few Americans–including the likes of Bacevich or nearly any other liberal commentator who bemoans the end of the American dream, the death of the liberal class (or its triumph), or the gutting of the middle class—notice or make mention of our privilege is symptomatic of what we don’t want to see, and provides a good and needed starting place for me.
Bertha Zúñiga Cáceres talks about how her mother’s example and a belief that ancestors continue to accompany our struggles helps her and the indigenous movement in Honduras to continue to mobilize against injustice, state violence and corporate abuses.
The rise of far-right globalization criticism requires a new role for the Degrowth movement. ‘Progressive De-Globalization‘ could be the counter-project that is urgently needed.
Millbrook is located 15 miles northeast of Poughkeepsie in upstate New York. As of 2016, the population stood at 1,413. It’s a small village, but offers some big ideas when it comes to building a great community. Here are three important, scalable lessons offered by the small community…
The Mietshäuser Syndikat was launched to support self-organized, social housing projects. It connects successful, established projects with emerging ones to provide help, while at the same time reducing re-commercialization by ensuring all inhabitants co-own all real estate assets of all cohousing projects.
In last week’s blog, I looked at how the most constructive starting point from which to discuss climate change and energy issues is with what people value, and understanding and affirming this. In this week’s blog I want to share with you more on how to identify shared values that resonate between us – between the big, broad us.
But there is hope. It is (as it has always been) in living the good life. Though such a course may fail, until it does so, it remains a source of happiness. It is now the only productive course we have to mitigate the worst of climate change. By all means speak to the powers – you never know – and this writer is frequently wrong – but without rapid and then hopefully fashionable personal change, there’s not a realistic hope in hell…
