Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Shaun Hill is the founder and CEO of Hill Farmstead in Vermont, who are, for me, one of the most imaginative breweries in the world. Based on the farm that has been home to his family for over 230 years, Hill Farmstead’s mission statement is “to hand craft succinct, elegant beers of distinction and to revive and diversify the farmscape of the Hill Farmstead in Greensboro”.
Each day, Catherine Caldwell hauls three gallons of bottled water to her bathroom and two to her kitchen. She and her family use the water for flushing the toilet, washing hands, and— after heating it on the stove—cleaning dishes and cooking. For bathing, they head to her mother-in-law’s house a few blocks away.
“How can we reconcile our desire to save the planet from the worst effects of climate change with our dependence on the systems that cause it? How can we demand that industry and governments reduce their pollution, when ultimately we are the ones buying the polluting products and contributing to the emissions that harm our shared biosphere?”
Design schools all over the world are failing their students by ignoring the most important challenges they will face as they live through a time of unprecedented disruption and ecological collapse. Let me state plainly — we need a Design School for Planetary Collapse.
Administrative incompetence and an unwillingness to operate within established practices may not be impeachable offenses. I can guarantee it is likely to turn out to be political suicide. For climate defenders and supporters of a more moderate national agenda, that may not be such a bad outcome.
There are plenty of troubling things about the Anthropocene. But to my mind, one of its most troubling dimensions is the sheer number of people it fails to trouble.
We demand egalitarian treatment of others, and for others. Yet, do our own daily actions indicate that we value each other’s humanity equally? How does the Transition movement square with egalitarian, non-hierarchical practice?
In history, we see the widespread attempt to place a single human being – that is, a single brain – in charge of the activity of the state. That sometimes leads to attempts of planning for the future of the whole colony, but it often backfires creating disasters. A single human brain cannot manage the immense complexity of a human state.
Our global civilization is facing the threat of its own Big One in the form of climate change, resource depletion, and species extinction. If our worldview is built on shaky foundations, we need to know about it: we need to find the cracks and repair them before it’s too late.
So how can we define a Liberal? I would start with John Stewart Mill’s definition in On Liberty. Accordingly, a Liberal is someone who believes the following: people are and should be free to do whatever they like up to the point at which it keeps others from doing as they like.
For me, resilience is much more complicated than the capacity to ‘bounce back’ from or respond to changes or ‘disturbances’ or other similar definitions. To be useful, resilience must be about what people are doing with the idea, how they know it and apply it, and what happens when they do.
If social movements are to continue to be a “means for ordinary people to act on their deepest values,” as Moyer thought they did, then we need to ask questions about our current culture and the dynamics that are creating more walls than ever before. Are there, in fact, universal values that are widely held today?
