Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Samuel Alexander This is an original book only in the sense that it weaves together other people’s ideas and perspectives in novel ways. I believe the result is something new, but more importantly, I think it offers a necessary counter-narrative to the disenchanted materialism that defines modernity.
The pathway that will be followed and the future that will emerge are of course inherently unknowable, being subject to the chaotic dynamics of complex systems. Put another way, for some possible pathways, there be dragons of the type that Sankofa part one described, whilst down other pathways much more hopeful visions beckon.
The question isn’t “is a river alive?” It is why do we not recognize that a river is alive?
It took the Anthropocene to create an aesthetic of the environmental crisis and self-reflection in the cultural canon. And it sparked a long process of going back over famous works that had been taken for granted as artworks devoid of environmental violence.
Increasing self-provisioning by communities take chunks of our lives out of the market and will at the same time lead to less consumption and less emissions as self-provisioning reduces the time available for salaried work and thereby shrinks the economy and human demands on ecosystems.
Across the world, grounded practices of radical democracy and autonomy demonstrate alternative models of politics, economy, and society—rooted in solidarity, reciprocity, and mutual aid among humans and the more-than-human world.
At the moment Agrihouse’s focus is on building small, cost-effective ponds to capture and store water, creating a replicable model that other small farms can adopt. In doing so, the farm aims to become a hub for sustainable development in Italy, supporting farmers ready to transition toward regenerative and agroecological practices, while providing a real-world example of what ecosystem restoration can look like.
I hope this tour through science and economics and politics has been helpful in some way—you can see why I sometimes despair, not just of the future but even of my own ability to get across what’s happening in the present. I think I’ve been at this so long that I have a better sense than most of how all those moving pieces interact, but there are so many pieces and they’re now moving so fast.
In this episode, Nate is joined by Artificial Intelligence developer and researcher, Connor Leahy, to discuss the rapid advancements in AI, the potential risks associated with its development, and the challenges of controlling these technologies as they evolve.
Plants, like music and food, feed our culture. They create our community; they are our community, and this book offers a model for how to build both plant and human communities.
What the social contract will look like in the future will to a large degree be determined by what happens to the gig workers who are at the forefront of technological change today.
Given how absolutely fun it is to make clothes that you wear, and wear clothes that you make, I expect this equation to come out better than what people might think. And I expect that to be the same for every beautiful handcrafted item we create and use at Care Home Farm. But either way, it will be real, and that’s relaxing.
