Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It was downright thrilling to see David uncovering, literally dusting off, and sharing the initial sequence of Melliodora design diagrams. David was putting design process on the table, when in my opinion it has been far too long hidden away in the cupboard (or in some cases swept under the rug!).
Today the theater state is shown in high definition and 3-D, and it resembles in its own way the grand Berlin pageants of Albert Speer as much as the scenes from Apocalypto. Mad-Men have refined the manufacture of consent, to use Chomsky’s phrase, to a fine science, and as in Classic Maya times, military recruitment is viewed as a fortunate outlet for the unemployed.
The EPA proposed yesterday (July 11) to remove restrictions for the planned Pebble Mine Project near Bristol Bay, Alaska. Alaska Native communities, along with fishermen, fought hard to establish protections for the proposed site, which holds valuable copper and mine but sits dangerously close to the watershed that is home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery—a resource on which many groups of Native people rely for their culture and subsistence lifestyle.
It seems clear to me now what SolarAid should do in the next year. We should try to work with enough of those companies and organisations, in clever enough ways, that we play a useful role – maybe a catalytic role, if we can – in ensuring that civilisation passes The Test.
Climate science can seem distant and inhuman, particularly when it’s foretelling the parched doom of humans. Wallace-Wells’ reliance on that doom and flourish has elicited the objection of some scientists. Telling the human race exactly what kind of threats await our home is sensitive business, a fact of which scientists are sharply aware.
As I argue in The Transformative Power of Climate Truth, it’s the job of those of us trying to protect humanity and restore a safe climate to tell the truth about the climate crisis and help people process and channel their own feelings — not to preemptively try to manage and constrain those feelings.
My argument is that a healthy democratic society is inherently participative and if it is not then the institutions of democracy will wither away as a smaller group take all the decisions, in their own interest, shutting out everyone else.
Standing at the window of the third floor, in isolation and sadness and cowardice, I think, we chase our lives across the decades seeking a sense of purpose. Yet our gaze is averted from the possibilities and the wisdom gained from living slowly, at five to eight miles an hour.
Science studies scholar Bruno Latour is fond of the film “Life of Pi” for the metaphor it provides for our current predicament. The main character of the film, Pi, ends up in a lifeboat with a tiger, and not a friendly one. Though Pi builds a raft to give himself distance from the tiger, he must still tie the raft to the lifeboat which holds all the supplies–food, fresh water, and, as we see later, flares. Ultimately, the destruction of his raft forces him to return to the lifeboat and find a way to live with the tiger.
Masonry heaters are space heating devices which work on the principle of burning wood rapidly and storing the resulting heat in a large mass (usually at least 500 kg).
A newer garment construction project is being birthed using Community Supported Cloth (CSC), a new Climate Beneficial Wool cloth supply chain lofted by Fibershed.
The process by which capitalist investment seeks to reengineer and privatize nature, government, social life and even genes and physical matter is at once breathtakingly ambitious, subtle and insidious. The great contribution of Dr Peter Doran’s A Political Economy of Attention, Mindfulness and Consumerism is to show how this process is also aimed, with systemic zeal, at human consciousness itself.
