Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
George Monbiot Through his incompetence, callousness and greed for power, Johnson has done us two favours: exposing the shallowness of our theatrical democracy, and creating a potential coalition ranging from hospital porters to supreme court judges. Now we must decide how to mobilise it.
Unless you read a book like The Case for Degrowth it is not obvious that some people are using the word to propose a radical policy package – qualitative, structural changes in ecological, social and economic relations as a necessary alternative to the economy growing quantitatively bigger.
Ocean deoxygenation is the 3rd but less-reported member of an evil climate change trinity, along with global warming and ocean acidification.
Dawn Sherman and her colleagues are committed to growing the Tanka brand against all odds, as part of their community service, she noted. “We’re more than a brand. It’s who we are,” she said. “We’re like the buffalo. We face the storm. Eventually the storm’s going to end.”
It all happened so fast. The temptation was to shut down and succumb to the shock. Instead, a group formed in neighboring Ashland and started to figure out how to help.
People in public life tend to fall into one of two broad categories – those motivated by principle, and those motivated by power.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on Friday night at the age of 87, exemplified the first.
Prices climbed $4 a barrel last week, closing at about $43 in London and $41 in New York. They were lifted by hurricane Sally in the Gulf of Mexico, which took more than 500,000 b/d offline and left production 30 percent below normal by week’s end.
Rights of Nature is a movement that has been fortifying itself around the world as an antithesis to the dominant paradigm of limitless growth and extractivism. Firmly grounded in holistic Indigenous worldviews, this ecocentric paradigm could be a global game changer if a coordinated and adaptable effort — based on shared knowledge systems and accountability — is established.
David Graeber was a cruel loss in these already-difficult times. Graeber was only 59….he clearly had many more dazzling books ahead of him….and those of us questing for system-change as multiple crises converge, took great inspiration from his thinking.
I’m thinking of these present two posts more as a kind of position statement on the politics underlying my forthcoming book, A Small Farm Future, and its arguments for renewable agrarianism, using the debate about XR as my foil.
COVID-19 has reminded us, perhaps as never before, that we need an overhaul, not only of our health care system, but our food system as well. [1] As a steady stream of studies and articles point out, a priority of future food system policy should be to support the emergence of local and regional, diversified, healthy food and farming systems, derived from fertile, carbon-rich soils.
A small group of new farmers have seeded a movement to change the local food industry. Will COVID-19’s impact on the local economy set them back? Or will it — and the growing push for social justice — help?
