Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Julia Conley With hundreds of thousands of people displaced, more than four million crops destroyed, and nearly a million homes demolished or severely damaged, Pakistani officials and rights campaigners on Monday called for a major international aid push….
Why is the financial community so complacent about peak oil and the relationship between increasing energy scale and growth? Can we make predictions about the future by looking back at history?
In the short term, we’re staring at an economic and humanitarian catastrophe, and to fix this in the few months we have we have to work with the system we have.
The question asked by serious political economy now is not ‘how do we perpetuate growth’, but rather, if it will be degrowth by design, or by disaster.
A Missouri State University study identified the main citizen concerns voiced: health effects of radioactivity released by uranium, underground water contamination, land and environmental destruction due to mining, lack of Native American consultation, and cultural rights to water based on historic treaties.
Environmentalists like to say that oil can be easily replaced with electric and fuel cell vehicles in the transportation sector. But how realistic is that assertion?
It would be folly to continue building bulky, heavy, massively overpowered vehicles to move one or two passengers along roads, and therefore devoting a huge share of our still scarce clean power supplies to building and/or operating that oversized vehicle fleet.
It certainly feels as though some new ideas are needed to overcome the ecological, political and socioeconomic troubles of present times. There is a way to address these troubles, not so much through an old book as through an old political movement, namely distributism.
The goal of An Inconvenient Apocalypse isn’t to try to convince people of the reality of humankind’s environmental and societal crises. The book’s authors know that’s a fool’s errand…
But with time, our lives as consumers in the capitalist economy will appear frail when compared to a life in the home economy. And eventually, we’ll come to understand that this is about more than making cupcakes. A lot more.
Brooks and other organizers don’t plan to let up on their demands that the federal government cancel all student debt, make college free or affordable, and address the predatory practices that continue to perpetuate the crisis.
What today’s abolitionists share is a concern with how we can care for one another, in the most expansive sense.
