Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Kavita Byrd High and low, rich and poor, black and white, left and right – it is time for us to end our divisions, and create a world, not of unlimited growth for the few, but the well-being of the many — a level playing field where all of us, and all of life, can flourish.
If we focus only on keeping distance but not at the same time on closeness – on taking care of the many relationships that support us – then we lose sight of important courses of action as well as the people needed to undertake them.
This final part of the series presents a vision of new type of university, exemplified in the world-spanning Ecoversities Alliance, and dreamed of in Transition U and Eco Vista U, two prototypes that I am involved in co-creating with students, staff, faculty, and community members in Santa Barbara, California, and in the Transition US movement.
A cohort of actors including philanthrocapitalists, aid agencies, governments, academic institutions, and embassies are all working to make this narrative a reality. They talk about transforming African agriculture but what they are doing is creating a market for themselves cleverly couched in a nice sounding language.
Today’s extractive industries such as gas, oil, and mining have an egregious reputation of violating human and environmental rights and supporting highly controversial political and economic reforms in poor countries.
As Rob Hopkins and Joanna Macy say, we must lead with our heads, hearts and hands: understanding what is happening (collapso-logy), imagining and believing in other worlds, and finding courage (collapso-sophy) as well as gathering living forces to build alternatives and lead the fight against destructive powers (collapso-praxis).
This piece is a gust of fresh air – a much-needed, long-overdue challenge to the corporate and university powers that control academic publishing. Through inertia, ignorance, and sometimes complicity, universities are not challenging the distinct limits of corporate-controlled “openness” and defending the ideals of academic scholarship.
Today, the shale boom of the 2010’s is officially bust, battered not only by the ’s outsized failure to control COVID-19 outbreaks and an oil price war in which foreign producers proved their ability to steer oil prices, but also a wave of multi-billion dollar write-downs by oil giants
With the COVID-19 pandemic laying waste to the country, and President Trump’s chances of re-election fading, America is at last beginning to look more deeply into the country’s problems.
Also, if we cannot expand our perspective to transcend White supremacy, how are we going to transcend “human supremacy,” that is, the delusional belief that we are outside of nature, that we don’t have to obey the same laws as every other species on the planet?
Who produces our food and what they are paid should be much higher on the agenda of discussions about resilience in food systems, for the sake of society and the environment.
We should reorient the rules governing taxes and charity to discourage the concentration of power and decision-making. Taxpayers should not subsidize private fortresses of wealth and power that will exist for generations, controlled by the same families and their professional advisers.
