How Academics Are Pushing Back on the For-Profit Academic Publishing Industry
These scholars are fighting the rampant exploitation and high article processing charges in traditional academic publishing.
Society
The Summer Solstice 2025
Most of us are not very good gardeners. We think we are making all that life happen when life happens of itself — and these days, often despite us.
The Great Power Shift: Decentralization, Reparations, and the Fight for Energy Justice
True resilience isn’t about making the grid bigger. It’s about making systems smarter, accessible, and locally adaptable.
The turbulent globe: Resources and climate change in the background
The conflicts we see today may have many causes, but the fight over resources and the consequences of climate change are ever more relevant.
How Inclusionary Social Movements Succeed
Social movements are powerful engines for change, and they coalesce around a vast range of issues, causes, and communities. But they fall into two basic categories: inclusionary and exclusionary.
Rod Schoonover — The National Security Risks We’re Not Prepared For: Adapting In an Age of Actorless Threats
In this episode, Nate is joined by Rod Schoonover, an expert at the intersection of Earth systems stress and national security, where they discuss the need for the evolution of national defense to address the systemic (and diffuse) threats of the 21st century.
The project is to reclaim the commons. The place to start is in our communities.
Truly, we need to reclaim the commons, including our most fundamental common realm, the atmosphere. Saito has illuminated the critical path, starting by organizing and building power in the communities where we live. Indeed, we must build the future in place.
June 21 – World Localization Day
Ever since 2020, a global organization called Local Futures has been organizing events in dozens of countries on June 21, when the planet’s northern hemisphere enters the summer solstice. There are films, webinars, and local events happening everywhere around the globe. And it’s a moment when all of us who feel isolated in our localist views can bond with thousands of colleagues worldwide.
How Much for One Protein?
The goal, here, is deep humility, a form of awe, and a sense of universal connectedness. As stupendously breathtaking as Life is, everything uses the same stuff and the same rules. We share a deep kinship with all matter, then. We are as dirt, and if that’s not grounding, I’m not sure what would be.
Inside the Indigenous ‘land back’ movement in Colombia
Sharing a border with Ecuador and Peru, the southern Colombian department of Putumayo takes its name from the Quechua term for “gushing river.” For some, its landscapes are a sacred doorway to the Amazon rainforest, a world unfathomably greater than the human. For others, however, this land looks more like oilfields and military bases, optimized waterflood assets and strategic trafficking corridors.
More than the global North, communities from Global South know what democracy is
As the Kurdish activist and ideologue Abdullah Ocalan, Mahatma Gandhi, many strands of the feminist and ecological movements, and Indigenous peoples have articulated in different forms, the nation-state disables (rather than enabling) true freedom – one in which every person and community is empowered to take decisions, in tune with nature.
10 Qualities That Could Change the Future: The Seeds of New Cultural Mitochondria
In this week’s Frankly, Nate addresses how we, as humans, might adapt and take on characteristics that will allow us to face the coming challenges of our world head-on. Through a framework of “cultural mitochondria,” Nate explores 10 traits that will help to shape the way we move through and address the human predicament.
