Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Ian Angus Climate change deniers often claim that carbon dioxide cannot be harmful because plants need it to grow. The same false argument can be made about nitrogen, and our reply is the same: too much of a good thing can be deadly. Organisms and ecosystems that evolved in a world where the supply of reactive nitrogen was strictly limited are now being disrupted, in many cases destroyed, by an unprecedented nitrogen glut.
Ideally, in the context of implementing a Green New Deal, the state would work with civil society and business and in partnership with other states to design, plan and activate the systemic transition to steady state sustainability. A culture and mindset that value sufficiency, limits, sharing, justice and care should be encouraged.
Of course we need to find a way that regenerative practice and careful restoration of healthy ecosystems functions spreads from community to community and bioregion to bioregion to reach global impact as quickly as possible. We need to reach scale, but not by scaling-up!
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?
