Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Joel Stronberg More than four years ago, 21 youthful plaintiffs asked a federal court to rule a habitable environment a protected right under the US Constitution. On January 17, 2020, a divided three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals told them they didn’t have standing to pursue their case and that there was nothing the court could do to redress the legitimate harms they had suffered…
Now the title to this week’s reflection may sound a bit alarmist. Intentionally so. It’s right out of a thousand disaster movies where people scream this wildly as their ship is sinking, their plane is crashing, or the tsunami is heading for them.
All species are embedded in complex networks of interactions where they are directly and indirectly dependent on each other. A food web is a good example of such networks. The simultaneous loss of such large numbers of plants and animals could have cascading impacts on the ways species interact – and hence the ability of ecosystems to bounce back and properly function following high-severity wildfires.
In these times of economic, climate and political challenges, how do we move forward toward the world we collectively long for? Undaunted by language and cultural differences, this is a story of community collaboration, with the important ingredient of persistent insistence on the goal of ecosystem restoration.
So during these seven days, we will be unveiling our Seven Generations New Deal, which is a seven point program for climate action. And we’d love for you to come and listen to see what we’re thinking and give your input, because we really want this policy to be built from the ground up. We fully expect that the first draft that we are releasing on Monday will look nothing like the final draft that we have by the end of this campaign.
The British sociologist Raymond Williams once wrote, “Culture is ordinary.” We could say much the same about commoning. It is terribly ordinary. Commoning is what common people decide for themselves in their specific circumstances if they want to get along with each other and produce as much wealth for everyone as possible.
Is there a way to imagine a different GND, a global Green New Deal? I think so. But it might have to start by recognizing the ecological laws of limits and a social ethic of redistribution of wealth and resources, and equality. It would argue for developmental convergence, including in energy use, between wealth and poor, within and between countries.
Even though economics played a role in halting the project, Dean Baker, a Kanab resident and opponent of the project, believes community efforts were important, too.
Oil prices inched up a bit last week with Brent closing just below $65 a barrel after the US and Iran thought better of going to war. Attention then shifted to the signing of the first phase of a US-China trade deal and the slowing Chinese economy.
At this crucial moment for Australia and the world, it is pertinent to take a step back from reactions to the ongoing flames and proactively revisit what happened in the Amazon—and why—before fires reignite in the dry season.
As the UK Climate Assembly is about to launch in Birmingham on January 24th, on the other side of the Channel, the French Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat has got a head start. On January 10th, 150 French citizens met for the fourth time to look at how to address the climate crisis.
Planning scholars have for years studied and criticized the mechanisms of urban land transformation that drive national economic growth. Urbanization is not the consequence of economic growth but the actual driver of it. The enlargement of cities, their number of jobs, estates and infrastructures, is a driving force behind growth.
