Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Jeremiah Castelo By collaborating with our community members and fellow growers, and sharing a variety of crops throughout the landscape, the diversity of food will expand beyond what we’d be able to manage singlehandedly.
It is apparent that our focus should not only be on solving climate change, but should also address other planetary boundaries, and perhaps even democratic renewal, but in every case, we need the means of transitioning from an unsatisfactory system to a better one that focuses on our strengths, and mitigates against our psychological shortcomings.
Politics is the art of the possible, and politics also is the pursuit of goals that are impossible. We can pursue reforms today, knowing them to be inadequate, with revolutionary aims for tomorrow, knowing that the transformation needed will likely come too late.
While capitalism has taught us to identify the first with money-making and the second with life-making – a necessary but nevertheless subordinated, dependent and qualitatively inferior activity – climate justice movements are claiming the progressive, i.e. egalitarian, emancipatory, and wealth-producing agency of reproductive forces.
With all the guff going on in Washington these days, it’s rather remarkable that Republicans and Democrats have managed—on occasion—actually to accomplish something positive. Standouts over the last twelve months include the pandemic relief bills and the bipartisan infrastructure framework.
Our wants will never be satisfied in a capitalist economy, and the demand for work will never cease. They are both prerequisites for and results of the expansion of capital.
I’ve not often been called an optimist, but I am strangely hopeful that this time we will found our communities in the solid grounding of this planet, in the reality of shared experience, and in the truth of who we are.
Paul Hawken is an environmentalist, entrepreneur, bestselling author, and a renowned lecturer who has keynoted conferences and led workshops on the impact of commerce upon the environment. He addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
This is the introduction to the Ecological Civilisation series, written and presented by Dr Samuel Alexander, co-director of the Simplicity Institute.
Community gardens like Harambee are becoming increasingly popular, with more than 29,000 garden plots in city parks in the 100 largest U.S. cities.
Overall, our research suggests that with appropriate policy and regulatory controls, we can continue to pursue the crucial climate intervention of transitioning our ailing energy systems while also protecting areas that are rich in biodiversity.
The desire that Túmin be used to help build a social fabric that favours barter and interest-free loans, especially in the face of the growth of electronic banking that came with the pandemic, is central to its creators.
