Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nicole Williams Emily Donovan has a mission: “Make the polluters pay.” The mother of twins took on the role of activist when she started fighting for her North Carolina community in 2017. Her main target: PFAS “forever chemicals,” which do not degrade and at even low levels have been linked to a wide range of human health risks, including fertility issues, immune interactions, cancer, liver damage, thyroid disease, asthma, and more.
I think that GDP as a measure has many flaws. I still believe, however, that the GDP as a measure of economic activity has some relevance and as I am exploring the link between the economy, the human ecology and the resource throughput, I find it interesting to get a grip on it.
Before I begin let me say that I think much of the global livestock industry is a horror show, and it’d be great to bring the curtain down on a lot of it. Also that cutting down wild forests or ploughing up wild grasslands are terrible ideas. And that there are a lot of good reasons to opt for veganism. That’s not what this is about.
Guerra has done a great job of describing the recipe for overbuilding. But the recipe for converting an overbuilt network into a safe, sustainable transportation system is still being worked out in countries and cities around the world.
To make the energy system resilient requires identifying all potential risks and their impacts, maintaining flexibility and redundancy in the system, and ensuring a wide range of stakeholders are involved in decision making.
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on a moment of unexpected insight during a morning bike ride, which catalyzed a larger meditation on the modern human predicament.
Thus, Philomela escapes and acquires a new voice with which to recount her sad history. Perhaps her lament, where it could still be heard in Hertfordshire, took on a new resonance for listeners at the beginning of the twentieth century if they recalled the abundance of past decades.
The real question is whether all future modes of human living are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability, and I very much doubt we can make such a strongly definitive statement.
Yet if the value of the commons remains always partly mysterious to systems which can only deal with the legible, so too does their capacity for endurance and the strength which they give to those who live and work with them, and the process of enclosure is never quite as total as its promoters would like us to believe.
How can we discuss and respond to our culture’s biggest challenges if we don’t even have the words to describe them?
The elements are handy symbols that our symbolical languages can latch on to and use to word the world, to translate reality into abstract thinking, so that we can talk about our practical experiences.
Let us build communities where the silence of exhaustion is not celebrated, but heard. Where emotional resilience is not individual, but collective. Let us make space — for tears as well as for treaties. We are not broken. Just tired. And still standing.
