Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
David Bollier This book is dedicated to overcoming an epidemic of fear with a surge of reality-based hope. As long as we allow ourselves to be imprisoned by our fears, we will never find the solutions we need to help us build a new world. Of course, we have plenty of good reasons to be fearful — the loss of our jobs, authoritarian rule, corporate abuses, racial and ethnic hatred.
In the first episode of our second season, The Response travels to Mexico City and puts the focus on the 2017 Puebla Earthquake — a magnitude 7.1 quake that toppled over forty buildings and killed over 350 people. Specifically, we explore the significance of information flows by telling the story of a very unique initiative that arose in the wake of the earthquake.
The rise in the percentage of young Republicans that are concerned about the future of Earth’s climate and its populations is a critical bit of information. It speaks to a better future.
It will be interesting to see if the youth on the right and left are any better able to cooperate than the generation that has gone before.
Reimagining how the corporation operates requires us to go beyond the policy tools of a regulatory or redistributive state into rearranging the distribution and nature of property, governance and control rights that shape its behaviour.
The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) audit highlights what can go wrong when state and local regulators are unprepared for the arrival of a powerful industry, illustrating the pressures when once-unobtrusive offices suddenly take on outsized importance amid a push to promote rapid development.
“Managed retreat” is a controversial response to climate change. It’s the idea that communities and governments should be strategic about moving people away from areas that have become too waterlogged to live in safely.
Put bluntly: yes, Britain is mired in a democratic crisis. But it is one that is older, wider and deeper than this week’s debacle over Brexit and parliamentary sovereignty, and it features across our everyday lives.
Such an agrarian civilization will see no impending ecological doom but instead a future of steady processes and patterns with no need for faith in great technological inventions of salvation. Not a utopian world – surely grappling with problems of their own – but a wise culture; taking the lessons of a past society bent on ever-more for ever-more’s sake to heart and respecting limits.
When it comes to our own survival in changed circumstances, one of the most dysfunctional things we do as a culture is invest in things. Material things are nice, of course, and their existence and proliferation are one of the markers of civilization, but they have a down side.
The daily tasks may seem menial, but as Hannah puts it, “Being out there reinforces everything in life —having a hand in maintaining how things are.” The large plans and the small tasks are both a part of continuing the ranch’s legacy to see and treat the land as a whole.
Any gains in technological efficiency must be accompanied by an economy built not on growth, profit and self-interest, but care and responsibility if they are to be effective. This, not hipsterized eco-efficiency, is where we should channel our desires for sustainability—something that so many of us are so dearly committed to, and something that we all urgently need.
The Green New Deal pivots on a central lie of continued growth, promising this growth and employment whilst pretending it can magic away the environmental and humanitarian consequences. The result of this is that on all three counts – infinite growth, reliance on fossil fuels, and colonial resource extraction – the Green New Deal is unable to challenge the prevailing order.
