Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Melissa Gaskill Each of us individually can help reduce single-use plastic waste. For example, we can advocate for adoption of reusable services in the places we work and play and take advantage of services like To Go Green where available.
This week’s Frankly is another edition of Nate’s Wide Boundary News series, where he invites listeners to view the constant churn of headlines through a wider-boundary lens. Today’s edition features reflections on a new peak in crude oil production, the growth of non-dispatchable electricity, and a report recently released by the World Economic Forum assessing global risks.
We’re in a period where relational patterns are shaping how people cope and also how they relate to power. Naming these patterns matters because they are often carried privately, interpreted as personal failure rather than understood as responses to shared conditions.
I’m not suggesting that nothing has changed, nor that religion has faded into the background. Religious themes remain highly pronounced today, especially in American culture. At the same time, these theological structures have been secularized in ways that now shape experience far beyond formal belief.
This week’s Frankly unpacks humans’ current identification with the label “consumer.” Consumption is something much deeper and more nuanced than shopping or spending. Nate highlights the ways that it shows up across our whole lives – from basic needs and stability to status and mental escape.
The stakes are only getting higher for those of us coming of age at a moment when this country is changing from something like a democracy to Donald Trump’s chilling autocratic version of America. Yet if we know anything from decades of antipoverty organizing, it’s that the unfettered imaginations, moral clarity, and capacity for decisive action of young Americans can always triumph over the misguided political liaisons of their elders.
Transmission lines are not benign structures. They have their own environmental impacts, both on-site and off, that are not trivial.
I can only imagine how wonderfully restorative it would be if I could always get home before dark… and be asleep through all the long hours of darkness. Then, by Imbolg, I would truly be ready for spring!
By rebuilding functional hydrological cycles, societies can enhance the effectiveness of existing infrastructure, reduce vulnerability to climatic extremes, and regenerate the ecological foundations upon which water security ultimately depends.
Unfortunately, the extremely simplistic narrative that plants are good and animals are bad has been given far too much prominence in the public debate. For sure, industrial livestock production has a number of serious flaws, but so does industrial crop production.
Today, Nate is joined by Balázs Matics, the author of the popular Substack blog The Honest Sorcerer, to explore the systemic reasons behind civilization’s potential collapse, the importance of energy security, and the growing effects of geopolitical instability.
If the United States were to abandon that trajectory and take the concrete actions that are needed to achieve equitable ecological renewal, what elements of life in the present-day Global North would we necessarily, and gladly, leave behind?
