Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Timothée Parrique Given the gravity of the present situation, we should be very careful about what we think we know about growth. if I’m wrong about degrowth, then you can kick-start the economy back again to continue growing business-as-usual. If Daniel Susskind is wrong, on the other hand, it will cost us the biosphere.
Who needs to read this book? Mostly, anyone who sees the dark age coming and is worried about it but interested in discussion about how we might have a hand in guiding the trajectory, in our own locales so that the future is, as Nate Hagens likes to say, “better than the default.”
The book invites us to imagine ways we can strengthen all our community partnerships and offers skills to create a new world through the art of Radical Listening.
Bill Gates made news last week by challenging climate advocates to accept the ‘hard truth’ that temperature rises will not cause enough deaths to justify the priority placed on them. Perhaps the real story is Gates’ use of a very old tactic to dismiss new targets – Gates implied that the grave concerns of even global institutions and science are doomsday fantasies.
But what phytomining could do is produce some metal while also remediating degraded land, sequestering carbon, and serving as the fuel for energy production or the raw material for biochar fertilizer, syngas, and other chemical creations.
Hopes are high. Expectations are low. Change is happening, it is just painfully slow. We need this to be the ‘delivery COP’. One thing is for sure, COP30 will be make or break for people, our precious flora and fauna, and our planet as a whole.
The call of ‘The Food You Eat Is Poisoned’ brings us to realize that we are all touched by the same industrial system — and healing must be collective.
Common sense is contested terrain.
Let’s continue our descent into collapse. First, let me be clear: “I don’t know” (credit to Nate Hagens). You don’t either. We can’t know or predict something as complex as a human society and its trajectories.
Recovering the meaning the white pines, and other trees had for past generations, and—like Mayer’s project with Charles Johnson’s oak—finding imaginative ways to add new meaning and propagate it forward can play a significant role in helping us to reorient the trajectory of the history we make going forward in a more respectful and sustainable direction for all.
Fressoz’s book deals primarily with the creation of myths about energy futures; Becker’s with the creation of myths about futures in space. They overlap in their consideration of why such myths are created. Who pays for them to be created; who benefits from their creation?
And so, as I dig into my bowl of cereal every morning, I’m thinking about a whole lot more than just the fiber in my diet. I’m thinking about how it’s time to bring Gaia back into focus, at the center of our thoughts and conversations and practices, every day.
