Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
David Bollier As I have learned about the social life of trees and the intimate bonds that indigenous peoples have with various lifeforms and rivers — as I pore through recent ecophilosophy that explains aliveness to the western mind — I’ve concluded: We really ought to be talking more about animism and commoning.
Two groups on the West Coast, Chico Flax in the Sacramento Valley of California and Fibrevolution in the Willamette Valley of Oregon, are now leading the revitalization of the flax textile industry in the region. Groups in other regions of North America, such as the Cleveland Flax Project in the Rust Belt Fibershed, are also doing this work.
This essay reflects on these questions, firstly by considering how fossil fuel use has grown to unsustainable levels through history; then, by highlighting the disastrous failure of the international climate talks process; and, finally, by arguing that a transition away from fossil fuels means changing not only the technological systems that use them, but also the social and economic systems in which they are embedded.
Representatives of the British Columbia, Alberta and federal governments are making the global rounds these days to sell the notion that liquefied natural gas exports can help the climate crisis.
It’s always worth dipping into the vast archive of Zinn scholarship, but as the United States flirts with another war in the Middle East, as the presidential campaign raises fundamental questions about the kind of country we will become, and as the world confronts a potentially catastrophic environmental crisis, now is an especially good time to remember some of Howard Zinn’s wisdom.
Twenty years of gridlock have squandered the time that would have been better used for steady—dare I say progressive—enactment of federal policies and programs to effectuate the transition to a just, low-carbon, and sustainable economy.
We live in fire country as taught through fire lore, this is how I understand what is happening across country. These times are hard for us first peoples, so often we are ignored.
Chickens in a small-scale food production system, whether that’s a suburban backyard or a bit of acreage, are valuable first for the services they provide. In nature, scavenging omnivorous birds form a symbiosis with large mammals.
Over the past decade, as the climate crisis worsened, hundreds of drilling rigs dotted both the Permian Basin’s desert expanses in Texas and the Marcellus Shale’s Appalachian hills, grinding through rock to reach oil and gas trapped in brittle shale deep underground. In that time, the U.S. smashed global records for the production of oil and gas — two of the three fossil fuels most responsible for the ongoing climate crisis.
We want to break down the barriers that prevent us from working together for causes that are bigger than all of us. We want to build a new narrative of solidarity, kindness and care. And we want to reset political boundaries – to say with courage that the increasing tendency towards inequality, racism and sexism that we are witnessing in this and other countries cannot continue.
Finally, reparations demands that we release the frontier mentality that plagues progressive spaces. The frontier mentality is the erroneous idea that the way to solve existing problems is to create or grow an initiative led by white people, rather than support existing projects led by front-line communities.
The British government is ramping up its policy to divert taxpayers’ money into private hands – and away from the world’s poorest people, warns Labour’s Dan Carden.
The UK-Africa Investment Summit will send a clear signal. The UK government’s aid policy will not be driven by evidence about how to best fight global poverty, but instead by naked free market ideology and the interests of British business.
