Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Steve McAllister “For three or four hours, you have an amazing operating system that runs on very little money, but just people who sincerely want to help each other. This is where I have heard many people say, ‘This is the kind of world I want to live in.'”
Last week my newly adopted home of Washington, D.C. had two back-to-back days of summer in the middle of winter. But the long walk I took on day one was not a particularly happy one. As most of the rest of the Washingtonians I encountered were experiencing the feel-good part of the feel-good catastrophe called climate change, I was experiencing the catastrophe part.
The most curious natural gas story of the year so far comes out of Boston and seems to have echoes of a deepening Russia-related scandal in Washington. A liquefied natural gas (LNG) tanker bearing natural gas produced in part in Russia delivered its cargo to the Boston area for insertion into the natural gas pipeline system there. Apparently, the Russian company that supplied some of the gas may fall under U.S. sanctions against the financing and importation of Russian goods.
Whenever we seek to reduce volatility in our lives, we should ask whether the result will be volatility transferred elsewhere. And, we should ask whether we are merely postponing volatility that will occur later and more violently in ways that could disable us.
Our actions have planet-wide consequences that we don’t fully understand.
The current water shortage in Cape Town suggests that the effects of climate change can and will continue to surprise us with their suddenness and severity.
[Despite reservations], I find one aspect of the blockchain technology behind the explosion in digital currencies to be promising. This technology offers a possible path for decentralizing banking and finance and myriad other Internet-related services we’ve come to rely on from big corporations.
This is a remarkable and inspiring movement in Spain, now involving hundreds of people in what I regard as an example of The Simpler Way transition strategy … which is primarily about going underneath the conventional economy to build our own new collective economy to meet community needs, turning our backs on and deliberately undermining and eventually replacing both the capitalist system and control by the state.
It is not surprising that humans look to themselves as arbiters of what’s important in the life and processes of the biosphere. Humans, like every other species, seek their own survival and well-being first. But our overreliance on humans as the measure of all things is the very posture which has put us on the road to potentially catastrophic changes in climate and other planetary systems, changes that threaten our very survival.
Global trade has brought about unparalleled specialization. As a result many countries and jurisdictions are currently unable to grow the food they need to feed their populations. While some like Hawaii still prosper, others face growing food insecurity. By gradually abandoning agriculture, have Hawaiians entered into a Faustian bargain that they will come to regret?
The recently passed federal tax cut seems perilous for the United States government and economy. But even as some financial commentators have for years predicted chaos in the U.S. financial system resulting from soaring federal deficits, the government and the economy move forward with little disturbance. Washington, it appears, has adopted a new set of financial assumptions and they seem to be working.
Are we wrong to believe that competitiveness must and always will be the central animating principle of human action? Media studies scholar Michael Karlberg thinks so. In fact, he believes that another animating principle, mutualism, is both central to human interaction and necessary to aid human society in meeting the myriad challenges it faces regarding climate change, inequality, governance, education and many other issues.
