Indigenous knowledge and the myth of ‘wilderness’
Aboriginal ideas of ‘wilderness’ are in contrast to romantic views of a ‘pristine’ environment. But it actively excludes Indigenous and local people from conservation.
Michael-Shawn Fletcher
What Could Possibly Go Right?: Episode 60 Vicki Robin
In another solo episode, our host Vicki Robin shares her recent reflections on themes emerging from the “What Could Possibly Go Right?” inquiry.
Fighting for food justice in a Texas food desert
The Dallas Food Justice Coalition provides a simple but powerful model. By bringing together community advocates from different areas of food justice, they’ve begun cultivating a grassroots solution to our broken food system that focuses on empowering and educating the community rather than simply providing aid.
The Energy Bulletin Weekly 8 November 2021
The OPEC+ group of major producers agreed on Thursday to stick to their plan to raise oil output by 400,000 b/d from December, ignoring calls from President Biden for extra output to cool rising prices.
The Coin of Power; or Another Case of May Be
Never can it be ok, let alone sustainable, for 26 individuals to hold more wealth than 3.6 billion people. It is our responsibility to fight that, as few billionaires, or others, can resist the dulcet whispers of the precious coin of power.
Democracy Rising 2: Nine Short Arguments for Deliberative Democracy
Our belief and focus in this series is that the dysfunction at the top of our system is both a cause and a consequence of what’s broken at the bottom, and that the power of deliberative democracy is fundamental to fixing that.
Negotiating Climate Policy: My “Eureka” Moment
The magnitude and complexity of climate change mean it has to be addressed steadily over time. It’s too big a problem to solve with one bite of the apple.
But… Cities?
A very typical response to my writing can be summarized as: “But… cities?!?” How are we going to fit cities into this future world? My feeling is that we can’t. Mostly.
Our Self-Imposed Scarcity of Nice Places
Where we’ve allowed cheaper-to-build, cheaper-to-maintain, quality-of-life-enhancing things to become luxuries, that is on us. That is our failure, and it’s a failure brought about to a large extent by bad policy that tells us we can’t have nice things, because nice things are for the rich.
Property ownership in a small farm future
And so we come to the thorny issue of landownership and property rights in a small farm future, which I discuss in Chapter 13 of my book.
‘Zero crashes, zero congestion, zero emissions’ – the perennial myths of autonomous vehicles
For a hundred years the auto industry has held out visions of a trouble-free future for drive-everywhere society – and that future is always about 20 years away. Peter Norton urges us to see the current hype about automated vehicles in the cold light of the failed promises of the past.
The Problem With Calling Fracked Gas ‘Responsibly Sourced’
The industry has begun a new wave of branding around “Responsibly Sourced Natural Gas,” or RSG. But what does RSG really mean?
