Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Climate scientist and activist Peter Kalmus sits for an interview with Post Carbon Institute’s program director, Rob Dietz. Peter covers how his scientific understanding has changed his life, explores the difference between climate anxiety and climate grief, discusses the ins and outs of civil disobedience and getting arrested, and describes a hopeful pathway for responding to the climate emergency.
With the biggest election year in history underway — and threats to democracy facing the United States and many other countries — I decided to ask Ivan about the many practical lessons he learned from Otpor’s success. Here, in Ivan’s own words, is the story of bringing down a dictator.
So, what would an eco-socialist education agenda look like? Broadly, it would claw back education from the capitalists and expand the public realm while aligning education with ecology.
So to put today in human context… tonight will be a short summer night, one of many that feel more or less the same to my human body. Tomorrow the sun will rise very early and I will rise to greet the new day and savor the unfolding of time. These are the scales of a human life. And that, too, is good.
Music has been an integral part of the human experience for thousands of years, and continues to embody a unique aspect of culture across the world today – yet most people hold only a preliminary understanding of the full range of benefits that sound, resonance, and harmonics can provide. Today, Nate is joined by ethnomusicologist Alexandre Tannous for a deep dive on the evolution of the human relationship with sound and how music could be used as a tool to facilitate personal resilience and healing.
Now that I have a demographic tool, I can ask questions relating to when we might hit peak power as a civilization. I use power (rate of energy use) as a proxy for all manner of resource dependencies, as energy usage correlates strongly with materials use and ecological impact. Plus, it is a readily-available measure.
After a full season of trying to escape more than a dozen evil -isms (fun things like capitalism, industrialism, extremism, and otherism), Rob, Jason, and Asher come to one conclusion: there is no true escape — at least not for those of us who want to help their communities collapse and re-emerge gracefully.
Of all the pivotal technologies discovered by humans, fire making was the one that gifted our species with power beyond all others.
As violent militias rampage across the country, activists in the DRC are urgently calling for an end to Rwanda’s aggression and for a green transition that puts justice first, dismantling colonial exploitation once and for all. François Kamate, a young Congolese activist, shares his experience and offers pathways to solidarity.
Resilience is the weak point of the economic-social-political system we have come to know as the “West”.
And I think that’s how community should be built, right? We should be interacting with people that don’t look like us, that don’t think like us. And that’s the beauty of constructing community, creating those connections.
Most people never sing aloud anymore, except meekly in church, and snicker at those who do. Older people, though, can remember people whistling as they swept the streets, everyone singing at the pub, neighbours gathering at each other’s homes in the evenings to sing, or people gathering around a deathbed to caoin.
