What Science Fiction Ought to Be
If you think there is hope for a decent future — and I do — then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: that it shows a realistic future, and that it be fun.
If you think there is hope for a decent future — and I do — then make that future come alive for your family and friends. I ask only two things: that it shows a realistic future, and that it be fun.
With enormous changes going on worldwide, with the ecosystem collapsing, with natural resources dwindling, with the human population still expanding, we may be rather facing a Seneca Collapse that will make short work of the European nation-states, just as the current crisis is destroying the American Empire.
Carbon Brief runs through the 2018 BP Statistical Review of World Energy, which, for the first time, covers all sources of electricity and the key materials needed for electric vehicles.
Culture is what people do. It decays when people stop culturing. Changing a culture means changing what we do. Often, that will need a step by step transition as we negotiate obstacles.
A recent review of Malaysia’s “stone, sand and gravel” exports to Singapore and Singapore’s purchases of those resources over two decades suggests that Mahathir’s sand ban, initiated to protect a fragile Malaysian environment, was seemingly ignored, including by his own government.
What are the unhealthy stories that we tell now? The story of unlimited growth. The story that we are separate. Any number of stories about who we are and our place in the world, and what it means to be alive.
The diverse founders of the First Ecosocialist International explicitly adopted a pluricosmovisionary perspective which establishes the conuco, or small farm, as the base unit for an emergent, future society founded upon the recovery of historical memory, territorial organization by bio-region, the rights of Mother Earth, the decolonization of the mind, and the reconfiguration of indigenous nations.
I believe economic localization is the most strategic solution to addressing the woes of the disenfranchized. The localized path would involve a 180-degree turn-around in economic policy, so that business and finance become place-based and accountable to democratic processes.
It has become one of the fastest growing political campaigns in human history, surpassing similar battles against the tobacco industry and the fight against apartheid in South Africa. Its logic is simple: the only way to avoid climate change and dangerous levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is for most fossil fuel reserves to stay in the ground.
Whatever they are called—vouchers, scrip, credits, certificates or coupons—sound private and community currencies can be spent into circulation by any trusted producer or reseller who is ready, willing, and able to reciprocate by redeeming the equivalent amount as payment for real value.
To love the farming in a global economic context that writes its economic bottom line in diesel is not only a hard thing, but a conflicted thing. I can’t claim to have extracted myself from those dismal economics but my good fortune is that, on the ground and on the page, at least I’ve found some opportunities to try.
Progressives reference the ‘new economy’ in order to describe a system that is based on social and environmental justice. Yet type these words into any search engine and you’ll find that we don’t own it, neoliberals do.