Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Bill McKibben We must use this moment as crucial leverage to push the planet in a new direction. Let us try. If we succeed, then we have risen to the greatest crisis humans have ever faced and shown that the big brain was a useful evolutionary adaptation. If we fail—well, we better to go down trying.
The efforts made by the environmental offices of the municipalities or departments to remedy a situation which in some places verges on the catastrophic can clearly be noticed. The fact remains that a lot of work remains to be done and the internationalist Commune of Rojava is aware that it will have to explore many more fields of activity.
Since this is a blog whose aim is to speak of community and connectedness, albeit from a very imperfect practitioner, here are my areas of concern with the rise of social media, Facebook in particular: It is not some commons of a communal resource. It is a global business posing as community forum.
After a week of rampant speculation about what could happen at the G20 summit that would affect oil prices, the announcement on Saturday that the US and China have agreed to keep the current tariffs in place for now and would resume trade negotiations left the situation about where it has been for months.
But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.
The recent Supreme Court decision in Gundy v US may portend a significant change in the way Congress drafts environmental legislation—indeed how it drafts all legislation—in the future.
For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. When – electricity producing – wind turbines appeared in the 1880s, the materials didn’t change.It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills.
It’s an amazing experiment to leave a lawn alone for a couple months and to watch what happens. Nature comes back fast. Trees, flowers, and all the critters return.
If policymakers continue to drag their feet, the impetus for real change in the way we conduct global trade will have to come from peoples’ movements working together to make their voices heard.
Due to editorial holiday, there will be very light posting from Monday 24th June to Friday 28th June. Normal posting will resume on Monday lst July.
In other words, making business cases for better behavior around climate change won’t evoke the amount of change needed; but engaging people’s sacred values first – and then showing that there might be resulting economic benefits – will.
More than half of the world could see new temperature records set in every single year by the end of the century if global warming is not curbed, a study finds.
