Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
David Bollier 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.
It becomes clear where the way out of the crisis can be found – at least in principle: acceptance of our collective failure, humility on the part of the “experts”, and immediate action from the human side of the problem.
My book A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth is now hurtling on its final trajectory to land on Planet Earth mid-October.
The oil giant BP has used money from a “low carbon transition” fund to buy shares in companies developing new ways to find and use fossil fuels, Unearthed can reveal.
The reason that Wells and his troupe have gathered here is to organize a full day of events called ‘Milpa Mexico: Tradicion, Ciencia y Futuro’ (Mexican Cornfield: Tradition, Science and Future). The purpose of it all is to promote the defence of traditional corn farming threatened by agriculture industrialization, a topic of great importance and urgency to the farmers in Oaxaca.
Oil posted a small gain in July, boosted by a steadily weakening dollar and OPEC’s restraint. Deep output curbs by OPEC+ have helped futures rebound from their plunge below zero in April, yet the unprecedented cuts will ease this month.
JoinedUp is a scheme proposing to re-open our unused cultural institutions for the use of these ‘bubbles’ during the periods they aren’t at school, and create local programmes to alleviate the pressure on teachers, parents and the economy.
