Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Joel Stronberg In the melee that marks the 2024 election year, it is easy to lose focus on down-ballot candidates that have as much—perhaps more—influence over US climate policy as the presidential contenders. Who are these influencers? Naturally, they’re the lawyers!
Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an unexpected historical pattern.
In a farmhouse attic turned podcast studio in Corvallis, Oregon, I joined Crazy Town podcast hosts Jason Bradford, Rob Dietz, and Asher Miller to discuss whether it’s possible to escape our modern civilization and its various components (industrialism, imperialism, capitalism) or whether we’re completely trapped.
It is ironic that technological fundamentalists believe we can do anything we set our minds to, except limit the voraciousness of the human enterprise. It will be tragic if this fundamentalism continues to determine our course and the scariest dystopian scenarios become our future.
This week, Nate is joined by Daniel Christian Wahl, a leader and activist in regenerative living, for an exploration into what our lifestyles and communities could look like if we aligned human systems—like agriculture, economy, and community planning—with the natural ecosystems of a specific bioregion to create more sustainable and harmonious ways of living.
Richard Heinberg explores questions about democracy and political polarization in the context of profound changes in environmental, economic, and technological conditions, including whether democracies or autocracies are better able to respond to crises.
Richard Heinberg explores why societies become polarized and traces the causes and history of polarization in the U.S. He unpacks the dangers of polarization and the ways it tears societies apart, before seeing what can be done to reverse polarization.
This live online discussion event features Trisha Dehrone, a PhD candidate and NSF Fellow at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. Trisha has designed and analyzed interventions that bridge group differences in divided societies and has evaluated interventions in the U.S., Rwanda, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Journalist and podcaster Rachel Donald interviews Nichole Argo, co-director of the Needham Resilience Network, a coalition of community leaders working together to establish relationships across silos, support belonging (rather than othering), and co-create solutions to community problems. Rachel and Johanna discuss toxic polarization, why people get stuck in absolutism, and how to encourage belonging to achieve wellbeing for all. A mini-documentary on the Needham Resilience Network follows the interview.
This list of resources is meant to give Resilience+ members a collection of ideas, tools, and organizations that can help them better understand and respond to political polarization.
It was the cows themselves who had impressed on me so deeply this alignment with rhythms borne not of the mind but some deeper undercurrent, a trust that the quietness brings all into its own order.
We are stretching the material and labor limits of this planet to capacity merely to increase the complexity of our production methods, not to increase production, not to better meet our needs, not to create abundance or well-being for any body.
