Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Rachel Kohler You’re here because you see the danger clear.
That’s great, but now where do we go from here?
I don’t know! There’s a lot of things to factor,
And I don’t have the answers; I’m an actor.
But yet our voices join with yours this hour
For even silly words speak truth to power.
This is a love letter to Extinction Rebellion. It is also a letter addressed to those who have criticised us. An apology. A response. And, ultimately, an invitation.
Prices were up about $2 last week on an unexpected drawdown in US crude stocks and rumors that OPEC+ is considering another production cut. Forecasters see a supply glut continuing in 2020 due to slowing economies and growth in US shale oil production.
Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee pledge to release comprehensive climate legislation by the end of the year that would transition the United States to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
The small farm that grows and provides quality products needs more than simply market access. It also needs a base of buyers who truly value its existence. Who see the small farmer as more than just a commodity choice or an archetype (Let’s buy from the hip chick, support the old man in overalls, go multicultural this week). Who instead see the small farmer as an essential part of the community.
So below I bring you a sceptic’s guide to XR scepticism, in a two-part post that’ll be continued next time. In this first one I focus on issues that strike me as requiring a genuine, substantive response and/or that I wrestled with myself in embracing the movement.
By raising sea temperatures, climate change is eradicating the world’s coral. Because coral reefs provide sustenance and protection to vast numbers of humans and marine organisms, it would be a big deal for them to go extinct. The El Niño that lasted from 2014 to 2017 caused a global-scale mass coral bleaching event of unprecedented severity, which damaged a majority of coral reefs around the world. The makers of Chasing Coral managed to document this calamity.
Super Typhoon Yutu made history as the worst storm to hit United States soil since 1935. The Category 5 storm, with sustained winds of 180 mph, wreaked havoc on the islands of Saipan and Tinian, which are part of the U.S. Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands. The storm left thousands of residents without homes.
We often talk about how important it is to see the ‘whole system’ – to understand more fully the relationships and interdependencies in the world. Our own work – across food, farming and countryside, public health and wellbeing, economics and rural development – seeks to illuminate the links.
In Mexico, according to the 2012 report, Dams, Rights of the Peoples and Impunity, more than 4,200 dam projects have been built in Mexico alone, causing the displacement and forced eviction of more than 185,000 people from all over the country.
In their textbook Ecological Economics, Herman Daly and Josh Farley list sustainability and justice as the field’s first two goals. If the GND’s goal is to facilitate, through policy, the transition to a socially equitable low-carbon economy, then ecological economics basically bills itself as the science of the Green New Deal.
Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado have introduced a resolution calling for a national conservation goal of protecting at least 30% of the country’s lands and waters by 2030.
