Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kim Fortun Most of my students do not go on to become professional educators. But all, I hope, do see themselves as stewards of our educational systems, understood as powerfully entwined with environmental systems, underpinning all hopes of inclusive, sustainable prosperity.
The mess out there is because of a mess in here. Inner and outer talk to each other.
That’s the truth of things.
Let’s get to work.
As our civilization careens toward a precipice of climate breakdown, ecological destruction, and gaping inequality, people are losing their existential moorings. Our dominant worldview has passed its expiration date: it’s based on a series of flawed assumptions that have been superseded by modern scientific findings.
Nearly 200 people were arrested on Monday, June 7, while protesting the Line 3 pipeline, a long-distance tar sands pipeline that runs across Indigenous land and threatens food and water resources, including the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
We have a chance to change the game when it comes to climate, conservation and jobs in rural America. These changes won’t solve every problem, but they can be an important step forward.
So until we fully understand ecosystems, the best approach is what Aldo Leopold suggested: Let’s just make sure we keep all the parts when we’re tinkering with them.
When we learn from the way nutrients are constantly broken down and repurposed in natural systems, we find opportunities for a circular economy everywhere.
How do we transition to a low carbon energy system when plentiful resources are no longer available? Our past Horn of Plenty has become a trap from which we in the developed nations increasingly find difficult to extract ourselves.
Christabel Rose Reed is a yoga teacher, yoga therapist and activist. She is on a mission to link inner transformation with social change and empower people to embark on the entwined journey of inner and outer healing. Christabel addresses the question of “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
The Gila River Indian Community is ensuring that its members have long-term access to their own resources while helping solve broader water supply problems in the region.
Discounting models that posit representative world consumers, or even ‘globally impartial decision makers’ attentive to global inequalities, remain wedded to neoclassical understandings of economics that reduces human life to a matter of individual consumption choices, and reduces the nonhuman world to substitutable ‘natural capital’.
If future historians wish to find some silver lining in COVID-19, the rise in mutualism in response to the shut-downs and dislocations it made necessary may be a good candidate.
