Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rachel Berger 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.
We’re awkwardly caught between being too intelligent to work as well as turtles and mushrooms, but not intelligent enough to be like angels or gods. The flaw, then, is intelligence, which gives us enough power to screw up the world. It’s a special curse. Yet, we need not invoke interstellar travel to find people who have lived sustainably and without difficulty.
How do we slow down and reject the “hustle culture” that prioritizes gains in efficiency, wealth and consumption over all else? How do we maximize the positive impacts and minimize the negative effects we have on the environment around us? What should we do today to plant the seeds of a future we’d like to see, or would like generations beyond us to see?
Adaptation is a chance to gather almost everybody around the table. The hard facts can be laid out on that table for all to see and, around it, the possibility of a future can be negotiated. Please let’s invite everybody who is operating in good faith to sit at it.
Investing in science, policy, and conservation isn’t just prudent, it’s urgent. For now, the study serves as a powerful reminder: the Earth is speaking. It’s up to us to listen and respond.
