Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Grace Olmstead Seeds are the home of life, the promise of the future. They are the foundation of civilization and culture, the guarantor of full stomachs and secure governments. They are the quotidian miracle which prompt wonder in the writings of philosophers and theologians, essayists and poets.
The challenges of our altered, unpredictable Earth System cannot be met by technological tinkering within the very systems that pushed it over the edge in the first place. There’s nothing for it but to roll up our sleeves and begin the hard work of transforming our political and economic systems with the aims of decency and resilience.
Direct heat production thus offers the possibility to save three times more greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuels using the same number of windmills, which are also cheaper and more sustainable to build. Hopefully, direct heat production will be given the priority it deserves.
Life in the early phases of civilizational collapse is filled with absurdities that beg for artful satire. Where is Franz Kafka when we need him? Surely, he could offer a better metaphor than my hackneyed image of a house fire. But maybe it will do for now.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), air pollution poses the greatest environmental threat to global health in 2019, killing seven million people prematurely every year, which is around the number of deaths caused by cigarettes.
Can technological progress save us from ecological destruction? If some new clean form of energy was discovered tomorrow, could it be deployed quickly enough to decarbonize the world by 2050?
If multilateral institutions are going to adjust to the new world unleashed by distributed apps and digital technologies, they should begin by exploring the great promise of commons in meeting urgent needs, giving people some genuine control over their lives, and compensating for the inherent limits of bureaucratic state systems and markets.
Our imaginations are rooted in the natural world. They formed in the natural world. They took their metaphors and similes from the natural world. It’s from the natural world that we thought that something might be strong as an oak tree or as fragile as a reed.
For many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the “Mesquite Manifesto” addresses economic and climate problems by building up industry around the native tree.
In order to build a progressive international political economy that produces material dignity and freedom for all the world’s people, we need to engage three distinct yet interrelated projects.
Hydrogen produced using renewable electricity is “already cost competitive” in niche applications, a new paper says, adding that it is likely to match industrial-scale alternatives in about a decade.
Like the original New Deal, the GND is trying to do something that has never been done before; we will have to learn from experience and experiment and correct the mistakes we will inevitably make along the way. But with these strategies we can make a start in the right direction.
