Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Charity May The story of The Industrial Commons offers a powerful blueprint for rural communities seeking to reshape their regional economies in a way that honors local culture, relationships, skills, and knowledge.
The recent rapid decline in population growth—even pre-COVID—suggests that a population peak prior to 2050 is not outlandish, provided that current drivers continue to apply. Recent declines in fertility rates, together with a flattening age distribution of young folks, combine to set the stage for population peak and decline.
When we speak of saving the climate, it’s really the Holocene climate we are trying to save, and the biological richness holding it up.
The forces of media, technology, and even the wiring of our own brains seem aligned to draw people toward extremism. But never fear: Asher, Jason, and Rob unpack why we’re so susceptible to wackadoodle viewpoints and offer ways to tamp down extremist thinking and behavior in ourselves, our communities, and across society.
Constitutions offer no meaningful political role for ordinary people in democratic governance, and so oligarchic institutions take root that privilege the domination of the few over the many.
Organizers looking ahead greatly benefit from pausing for a look back. The value of a good debrief surpasses the time it sacrifices. What can we each understand about the last 15 years that could inform the next — personally, as community and as a movement?
Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes.
Promulgating the steady state economy via federal legislation has long been a primary goal at CASSE. However, even a primary goal isn’t necessarily pursued from the get-go.
As carbon credits try to answer the impossible question of how to value nature, we find ourselves back at the beginning, asking what our forests need to continue to protect us. But nature has always been there, waiting to uncover the answers to our deepest questions.
In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.
One day, when a new world rises from the ashes of this chemically-infused and churned and oil-burned wasteland, the basement of history, we may all work together to rebuild, to try again, and, most importantly, to love and to have better memories.
In this episode, Nate is joined by educator and indigenous researcher Vanessa Andreotti to discuss what she calls “hospicing modernity” in order to move beyond the world we’ve come to know and the failed promises that “modernity” has made to our current culture.
