Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sanchayan Nath If we are to understand how social-ecological resource systems can be better governed, we need to come out of our narrow academic cubicles and interact with other scholars who may themselves be confined in equally narrow academic cubicles.
Ours is a particular kind of small farm. It’s been called diverse, traditional, insignificant, wonderful, productive, inefficient, and a subdivision waiting to happen. We call it home, of course.
Going off-grid? Think twice before you invest in a battery system. Compressed air energy storage is the sustainable and resilient alternative to batteries, with much longer life expectancy, lower life cycle costs, technical simplicity, and low maintenance.
It’s time to reclaim the mantle of “Progress” for progressives. By falsely tethering the concept of progress to free market economics and centrist values, Steven Pinker has tried to appropriate a great idea for which he has no rightful claim.
Looking into this has made me even more convinced that tackling global poverty has to be done in tandem with tackling climate change. They are intricately connected. I think it’s important that we remember climate change is a historical injustice: the poorest countries suffer the worst impacts yet have done least to cause it and have the least capacity to address it.
Maybe we can build thousands of kms of passenger rail lines and thousands of kms of pipelines. But given the gravity and menace of the climate crisis and given the rapidly approaching deadlines to meet our emission-reduction commitments, it isn’t hard to see which should be our priority.
I feel very blessed to be a Cuban woman, a farmer, and a teacher. I wake up early, I spend all day on the farm, working hard, managing the workers, planting, harvesting, selling, teaching—I do all of this out of love for my work. My work is my life.
Generationalism risks obscuring the diversity of experiences, ideas and interests that characterise human society at any given moment. By locating the lines of conflict and solidarity on a cross-temporal plane, some important divisions—between rich and poor countries, different class groups, and rival views of the market, state and the economics of growth—are rendered less visible in the present.
We need unapproved thoughts just now. The approved thoughts, the right answers, the canned responses and parroted arguments are the things that have landed us in our present predicament.
Insisting on more and shaping the world to suit our designs is a Faustian bargain. What we face is not so much a problem to be solved, but a crisis of culture stemming from the hidden conflict between Lotka’s principle and the boundaries of a finite world.
Buen vivir comes from Indigenous movements in Latin America and implies “right living” or life in balance with communities, natural systems and future generations. Our grassroots partners, financial investors, and adviser allies—all leaders in alternative economic practices—had joined the gathering because of relationships built up over time with my organization, Thousand Currents.
Worldwide tourism accounted for 8% of global greenhouse gas emissions from 2009 to 2013, new research finds, making the sector a bigger polluter than the construction industry. The study, which looks at the spending habits of travellers in 160 countries, shows that the impact of tourism on global emissions could be four times larger than previously thought.
