Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Charlotte Du Cann This is a medicine story. And if I could tell you all the medicine stories I heard in my travelling days I would. Because those stories are about how life turns around just as you think it’s about to end. We need more than anything now these stories of restoration and regeneration because they hold an opportunity. If there is one theme that unites them all it is this: the transformation moment comes when you realise it’s not just about you.
Let’s get one thing straight: ecological microeconomics — deriving the value of ecosystem services — does have an important role to play in the quest for sustainability. But performed out of its macroeconomic context, all the talk of ecosystem service values is like the din of drums without the melody of a guitar. You can’t really get the point of it (and you’re likely to get very bored).
The failure of economic democracy has led to the atrophy of political democracy, as corporations buy politicians: we are ‘citizens in politics but subjects in the marketplace’. While we enjoy voting rights in our political systems, ‘our economic systems are still stuck in the 18th century’. Challenging the ideology of free markets, he asks how can we claim to have free markets when firms are still stuck in the ideology of command and control?
(Article based on the keynote speech at the Buckminster Fuller Challenge awards in New York on 8 June.)
We will not transition successfully to a restorative economy until systems thinking becomes as natural, for millions of people, as riding a bike. That’s a big ask. How do we get from here, to there? …
Outside the business-as-usual tent, gradualism is on the retreat. A new kind of economy – a restorative economy – is emerging in a million grassroots projects all over the world. The better-known examples have names like Post-Carbon Cities, or Transition Towns. But examples also include dam removers, seed bankers, and iPhone doctors.
A restorative economy is emerging wherever people are growing food in cities, or turning school backyards into edible gardens. The movement includes people who are restoring ecosystems and watersheds; their number includes dam removers, wetland restorers, and rainwater rescuers. Many people in this movement are recycling buildings in downtowns and suburbs, favelas and slums.
On June 6 and 7, I attended Opal Financial’s Clean and Green Investment Forum. I was invited to take part in a panel on “Green Energy in Emerging and Frontier Markets”. The forum brought together clean tech entrepreneurs and investors as well as a few academics and analysts and proved very stimulating. The overall vibe was one of optimism and opportunity — we’re talking entrepreneurs and investors here.
Yale Environment 360 asked industry officials, scientists, and conservationists to answer the following two-part question: “Can hydraulic fracturing of gas and oil reserves in shale formations be done on a large scale without significant negative impacts on water supplies, air quality, and local communities? As fracking continues to expand rapidly, do you believe more stringent federal and state regulations are needed and, if so, what should they be?” Among the wide range of views, one theme emerged: Shale gas fracking in the U.S., which to date has been less strictly regulated than other sectors of the oil and gas industry, is almost certainly headed for a period of tougher federal and state environmental controls.
A weekly roundup of peak oil news, including:
-Oil and the global economy
-Iraq
-The IEA’s reports
-China
-Quote of the week
-Briefs
In this interview with Voice of America, Nourishing the Planet project director, Danielle Nierenberg, discusses her journey to sub-Saharan Africa, where she unearthed agricultural innovations that can help cope with environmental challenges, while also reducing poverty.
This timeless book from Christopher Alexander was released back in the seventies, and it’s just as much a book on philosophy as on architecture. Still, the main purpose of the book is as an introduction to A Pattern Language. Alexander’s architectural writings at the same time develop a philosophy of nature and life. He proposes a more profound connection between nature and the human mind than is presently allowed either in science, or in architecture.
Almost anyone who has a backyard or garden would do well to plant fruit trees for the years ahead. Most fruit trees, though, take more years to mature than most of us have to prepare, and take up more space than most of us have in cities or suburbs. Luckily, only a few centuries ago master gardeners developed a way to cultivate fruit in narrow spaces – one that yields more fruit, more quickly, and perhaps with a longer growing season.
We have arrived at a point in our infinitesimally short life on our 4.5 billion-year-old planet at which no part of the natural world remains untouched by human hand. So it might seem perverse that, at this time of peak human interference with natural biological systems, we are now discovering the benefits of getting closer to nature.
Media reports often fail to connect recurring demonstrations in Greece and Spain with those in the Middle East and North Africa (Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Bahrain). After all, the MENA demonstrations are ostensibly about democracy, while European countries already have functioning electoral systems. Protestors in Greece and Spain are instead decrying austerity programs resulting from governmental efforts to rein in deficits and debt burdens.
