Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sam Illingworth Ultimately, The Serviceberry is a hopeful book. It offers a way out of what Kimmerer calls a “cannibal economy”, where endless consumption depletes the world around us. Instead, she imagines a system where resources circulate through communities, creating webs of independence that nourish both humans and nature.
All told, climate progress has been unfolding on so many fronts for so many years — often without enough support from the federal government — that it will persist regardless of who occupies the White House.
Founded by Nana Kwesi Osei Bonsu in response to land grabs and environmental degradation, Land Rights Defenders provides legal support, advocacy, and education to those most affected.
From 1999-2024, Dark Mountain’s Mark Watson taught and demonstrated the art of holding a dialogue with (mostly) wild plants. Part-manual, part-memoir, this small book is a distillation of his hands-on practice, ‘hanging out’ with twelve flowers and a tree over a year: from a conversation with burdock in a community garden, to lying alongside sea kale on the Suffolk shore, to foraging for mallow leaf fritters and flower teas.
In today’s Frankly, Nate describes some of the battles – or polarities – of our time: the tensions and dichotomies we face from the global macro level all the way down to the level of individual metacognition.
Jeremy Brecher’s new book, The Green New Deal from Below: How Ordinary People Are Building a Just and Climate-Safe Economy, is a timely and important contribution for organizers and anyone thinking about rebuilding the world from the bottom up.
Only by shifting decision-making power away from bureaucratic institutions (like parliaments) and mechanisms (like the profit-driven capitalist market) towards grassroots participatory organs (such as popular assemblies and councils of delegates) that a new, much more sustainable, ecological, and democratic future can emerge.
My belief is that the plants can save the people; my hope is that we’ll let them. And in reconnecting with our local landscapes, we can reconnect with each other, so that four years from now, the people will be able to save the people once again.
While the ruling on Shell’s appeal might undermine other lawsuits asking courts to set company-specific emission reduction targets, the affirmation by the appeals court of a general obligation for companies to reduce emissions offers plenty of room for further litigation against companies.
Anyway, as I’ve often said here, I don’t think renewal is going to come from the centre. So while I genuinely mourn the misery to come for people who, unlike me, are going to be in the frontline, I guess I’m finding it hard to get invested in the politics of the centre.
We need to act where we can most effectively act now, in our communities and bioregions, cities and states. We’re only going to make it working together, building the future in place.
The future of republicanism depends on the U.S. shaping its domestic agenda for the common good and using its influence on the global stage in line with democratic principles.
