Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Víctor Villalobos 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.
So yes, whether we do the right things or keep doing the wrong things, whether our current systems collapse or are carefully dismantled and rebuilt, even young Hoosiers leading modest lives in a small town in western Indiana will be personally affected by climate change. I am sorry, guys. And you still have to turn in your homework.
A year ago, there was no debate in Congress about climate change. Now conservative Republicans are being forced into a dialogue they had hoped to avoid about a problem they’ve been unwilling to admit even exists. The Democrats, for their part, have embraced climate change as a central theme of their 2020 political campaign. What’s changed is the entrance of the youth climate movement onto the scene.
Cooperation Jackson is a long term vision. “We’re going to ultimately have to create our own network of supply and value chain,” says Akuno. “If we exist in a bubble, we won’t survive. It’s a big experiment in democracy. Talk to us in ten years, and see where we’re going.”
Renewable sources of electricity are set for rapid growth over the next five years, which could see them match the output of the world’s coal-fired power stations for the first time ever.
If we’re to survive in the far-less-hospitable world that two centuries of institutionalised greed, selfishness and short-sightedness have bequeathed us, it will only be together. It will only be by using the coming years to cultivate resilient, cohesive, cooperative, equitable communities, embedded in the natural world.
Are there rural Americans who will embrace neighbors who do not look like them, go beyond tribalism and fear, and welcome diverse allies in the struggle for common goals? Will rural whites come to see that their future is tied to racial, environmental, and economic justice for all? I believe the answers to these questions will determine whether our national drive to form a “more perfect union” can survive. Everything America stands for is riding on this.
As I’ve shown in my latest book, creating the car-free city is possible, and urgently necessary, right now. We have all the technical and policy know-how. But we lack a vision of how it could be different, and the recognition that far from a sacrifice, it will bring mainly improvements, rather than constraints, to our lives. Such visions are necessary.
These days I am immersed in rage, pain and despair. The Amazon is in flames, the Chiquitanía region is gravely wounded and beneath the fires, many of our hopes for Bolivia and the world are turned to ashes.
We have a way in the modern world of rediscovering things that humans have always done but branding them as something trendy and a little alien. So it goes with the explosion of interest in “tiny houses” as an answer to what ails cities struggling to house and attract people.
The ironic thing about tiny houses is that they’re nothing new; it’s just that, in surprisingly recent memory, our culture had a different name for them. We called them “houses.”
