Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Denise Fairchild The new normal requires new strategies, new technologies and new partnerships with America’s caregivers to ensure the sick, the elderly and the most vulnerable are climate and energy resilient. Let’s be clear: power shutoffs without energy resilience strategies is still playing with fire.
Regeneration is the foundation of hope, in my opinion, and it extends well beyond agriculture. That’s because life is a force that can’t be denied, not if we give it a chance. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my career it is this: nature still has the best ideas. This will be a major theme of Terra Firma.
We are fortunate to have Michael Wara as our guest in this episode—a bona fide expert on the subject who is a member of the state-appointed wildfire commission in California—to help us think through this complex web of issues and understand how to start plotting a new path into the future.
‘The food that you buy will all be grown locally,’ says policy director at New Consensus, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, in a Vox video. This is stated simply, as an aspect of what it will be like to live in the time of a Green New Deal (GND). Yet it represents a fundamental challenge to international trade governance in ways that must be addressed if the GND is to be successful.
Climate change is not about short-term changes in the weather but long-term systemic environmental shifts in response to warming temperatures. Scenario planning is about the efforts of an organization to stay relevant in relation to a host of external factors beyond climate including the enactment of government policies and shifts in population.
In 1989, she brought naturally colored cotton back to the market. The iconic image of a white cotton ball had become pervasive. Yet Sally Fox had been looking at ancient, pest-resistant (by nature) varieties that came in shades of the Earth like greens and browns.
This autumn, builders will start work on Oakfield Road in Anfield. Many houses in this part of Liverpool have remained empty since the government’s failed ‘housing market renewal’ policy shipped people out, then stalled in 2008. Seven years ago, a group of residents formed a community land trust to bring nine terraces on Oakfield Road into community ownership. Now, instead of being demolished, they have been reimagined as cosy, energy-efficient homes, with space for local businesses, winter gardens, a market and a cafe.
“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?
My forthcoming book, entitled Another Now: Dispatches from an Alternative Present, asks the following questions: Could the world be non-capitalist or post-capitalist? Could we see humanism in action? What would it look like? What would socialist corporations look like? How would they function? How would democracy function?
It’s not as hard as you might think. If you have the right action for a couple of seasons — the Earth actually wants to be full of life. That’s it’s nature. We actually have to work to get it to not do that. So if we just get behind her and breathe life into what she’s already doing, it can change pretty fast. But we need the tools and we need the skills and we need the knowledge and most of all the wisdom that supports all of these things.
The dramatic decision by the British government to ban the disruptive technology of hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) is just one of two volatile storms now shaking the industry.
And both have ramifications for the governments of British Columbia and Alberta, which actively subsidize the uneconomic industry with tax breaks, royalty credits, free water and taxpayer-funded seismic research and monitoring.
This chapter is about how we can start asking different questions – specifically questions that begin with ‘What if . . .’ and that help us unlock the imagination in service to the big challenges we face. It’s about more than the question per se, however.
