Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Robert Jensen The definition of freedom and liberty is always contested (at any given moment, people within a society disagree); always changing (over time, societies’ understandings will shift); and always conflicted (we struggle because there are no simple policies to maximize liberty).
Prices rose for the fifth straight week with the global energy crunch set to boost demand for crude as stockpiles decline from the US to China.
We often talk about justice in terms of the harvest. There is a certain poetic fitness in this. The work that goes into creating a harvest, the sowing and cultivating, is balanced by a commensurate reward.
It is time for African governments to step back from the failing Green Revolution and chart a new food system that respects local cultures and communities by promoting low-cost, low-input ecological agriculture.
All paths out of overshoot (genuine solutions) involve a contraction of the species and a decline of material/energy throughput. There are no exceptions.
Even though I’ve written extensively on ecological economics and community resilience, I still feel all-too indoctrinated by our global throw-away economy. I have to remind myself to think first of local options and go the repair route whenever possible.
Will degrowth as a discourse and movement extend coloniality, by aiming to make just one world out of the many that form the earth’s pluriverse?
In order to write creatively about food cultivation, climate change, and social justice, we need to understand how they operate in the world we live in. Imagining a better future, therefore, requires keen and purposeful observations of the present. It requires science.
As NAFSN highlighted the implications of the viral outbreak for the region, it also considered the crisis to be an opportunity to create an alternative to the current unjust and precarious systems we are living under.
Rather than slogging along into the Era of Disasters with incorrect mechanistic assumptions underlying our policies and practices in modernized cultures worldwide, we can, instead, apply the new relational discoveries.
A downsizing economy will require a smaller and smaller energy supply; in time, energy demand will become modest enough that it can be fully satisfied with renewable sources, sustainably deployed.
This impulse toward activism is the sound of love when it roars–when it demands to be heard. The universal is deeply personal.
