Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
“We really need to on the one hand be aware that it’s something we need to respond to as a collective,” she says. “Riding your bike is great, but we need to also be engaged in collective political action and solutions. That’s part of what helps people to do something proactive that’s real.”
In only a few months, a small encampment of a few Lakota people dedicated to protecting the Missouri River from the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) became the center of international attention, swelled to house up to 14,000 people at its peak in early December 2016, and was supported entirely by volunteers and countless donations of both money and goods.
Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Insitute senior fellow, will deliver a keynote address on “Transition in the Age of Denial” at the Transition US National Gathering this July 28th.
For some years now, we have been witnessing the emergence of relational, cross-over, participative power. This is the territory that gives technopolitics its meaning and prominence, the basis on which a new vision of democracy – more open, more direct, more interactive – is being developed and embraced.
In this episode we spoke with Peter Macfadyen, one of the architects behind Flatpack Democracy, a do-it-yourself guide to creating independent politics.
Imagination to me is about expanding our range of values and saying, “What really matters? Why does it matter? What kind of people can we be? And how can we start to translate that into the spaces that we live in, and not just keep it in the private sphere, which is about beliefs or our hobbies, or our campaigns?”
“I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.” Perhaps Walt Whitman had this week’s guests on Sea Change Radio in mind when he wrote those words, as we talk to two entrepreneurs who, in very different ways, are using nature’s bounty for innovative purposes.
Mayors across the country have vowed to deliver on the goals of the Paris climate accord in defiance of President Trump’s decision to back out. But how can they, realistically, when the national government is questioning climate science and promoting coal, fracking, and pipelines? Simply put: Make energy public.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently added to the string of struck federal executive actions when it overruled an attempt by the Environmental Protection Agency to delay Obama-era methane regulations, rejecting claims by the EPA that the oil and gas industry wasn’t allowed to comment on the rules.
The possibility that artificial creatures, products of human hands, might achieve sentience and take on an active role in society is an age-old conception in world cultures, the subject of myths, stories, moral fables, and philosophical speculation.
Ultimately the direction of history is decided by values. The years I spent working on my book The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning, taught me that each unique culture shapes its values, and those values shape history. By the same token, the predominant values of our civilization are what will shape the future.
Syfy channel’s political/military thriller “The Expanse,” set hundreds of years in the future, seems eerily resonant with our own era. The two major powers of the solar system, Earth and Mars, have been locked in a cold war for decades. Exploited populations working and living in the asteroid belt–an area that supplies crucial raw materials to both empires–become the flashpoint for what could turn out to be a civilization-destroying hot war between the two imperial powers.
