Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Courtney White Fibersheds put it all together into a practical, natural, and hopeful whole. It’s based in the philosophy that nature still knows best, whether it involves the role of animals on the land, promoting life in the soil, keeping the ground covered with plants, building up soil carbon, generating local jobs, and using ingredients sourced from nature.
The revelation Monday that a blowout last year at an Ohio natural gas well owned by an ExxonMobil subsidiary was one of the country’s largest-ever leaks of the potent greenhouse gas methane provoked impassioned calls for a rapid, just transition to 100% renewable energy nationwide.
While defeating the right at the ballot box remains vital, our long-term work involves keeping alternatives to the present alive in society’s imagination. In the face of an unthinking insistence that neoliberal inequality and bigotry are unavoidable, we need to become difficult dissidents and uncooperative naysayers who speak up.
Members of Earthseed describe themselves as a group of “black and brown parents, activists, artists, educators, business owners, farmers, and researchers, who came together to remember our relationships to land, to livelihood and to each other,” and to cultivate a “transformational response to oppression and collective heartbreak: A model of community resilience through cooperative ownership of land and resources.”
Unless the world begins to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions the 1.5C goal of the Paris Agreement “will slip out of reach,” according to the latest UN Environment Programme (UNEP) emissions gap report.
When patterns are expressed in a succinct form — as in “Ritualize Togetherness” and “Practice Gentle Reciprocity” — the phrase sounds like a principle. But patterns and principles are not the same. Each points to a different way of understanding the world and bringing about social change.
Campaigns are perfect for turning away from defensive fights and moving back into what works: Going on the offensive by framing an issue into a demand, choosing a decider, planning a series of actions then escalating and growing. The issue can be local, regional, national, highly ambitious in its demand or less so. We get to choose — it’s an existential move of empowerment.
It’s often said that the economic system is rigged. The truth, however, is that the system is working exactly as it was designed to. Those in power, whether they hold public office or whether they sit in the boardroom of a multi-billion dollar international corporation, have taken great lengths to set up a system of rules that benefit them and maintain the status quo.
More than 40 per cent of the oil and gas wells in the province are not pumping hydrocarbons or generating revenue. Many are leaking methane, CO2, radon or hydrogen sulphide into the air, ground or water table.
The cost of cleaning up the sites and decommissioning the wells can range from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands, depending on their age and type.
The Green New Deal requires a LOT of money, amounts that now look politically impossible. Why is money so scarce? Why is there never enough to meet our needs?
As Trevino highlights, the struggle to transform industrial grain is no small battle. If All Purpose Flour is a symptom of a sociopolitical logic determined to concentrate power and quash difference, then fixing the problem starts with reasserting the distinctive ecological and social fabric of diverse communities.
If there is a formula for the new demagoguery, there must also be a formula for confronting and overturning it. I don’t yet have a complete answer, but I believe there are some strands we can draw together.
