Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Brian Miller For all intents and purposes, we are the beneficiaries of a slave economy. We may have exchanged human chattel for the energy slaves contained in a barrel of oil and the machines that consume it, but the economics work out the same and we can’t walk away without giving up status and wealth.
This is not a fable from a galaxy far, far away. It’s from a study by researchers at Lund University in Sweden. Jedek is spoken by a small community of people in the Malaysian highlands, and the language features described above are not uncommon among cultures not yet swept aside in the civilizational deluge. They are part of our human heritage.
Times have been hard of late for us leftists. Despite the fact that a good deal of our tradition’s criticisms of capitalism and modernity have proved accurate, the expected solutions haven’t really come – and when leftist governments have assumed power, they’ve often compounded the problems.
Oil prices fell sharply last week ending up at $61.25 in New York and $64.37 in London. A higher than expected increase in crude stocks and gasoline was the impetus for the decline.
The editorial team is taking a short break over lst-2nd March. Normal posting should resume next week.
Why does tending a sourdough starter seem so annoying? Pondering this question, I realized it had little to do with the ritual itself—which only takes five minutes—and everything to do with that lingering, underlying sense that it was inconvenient and that there were “other (more important) things I should be doing.”
I find there is something visceral about Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming”, his words and phrases reach into my gut, grab hold, and demand my attention. His poem has been often quoted when people write about social change. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold… The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” These lines seem to perfectly describe events unfolding today.
The gift from the stranger arrived thanks to a new online map, the Black-Indigenous Farmers Reparations Map, a project to promote “people-to-people” reparations.
The preliminary injunction against construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline — which would stretch 162 miles across Louisiana — was cheered as a major victory by environmental groups, who challenged the Army Corps of Engineers’ initial approval of the project.
Nearly all, if not all, possible solutions to rising sea levels along all the coasts in the world are listed below, along with their challenges. In the San Francisco Bay Area, the Rockefeller foundation will award $4.6 million dollars to the ten best ideas for how the Bay Area could adapt to sea level rise in May. I am eager to see their solutions given the challenges below, and whether they come up with alternatives.
Recently I’ve learned to see some good in the approximately 40 million acres of lawn that engulf the residential landscape in the US. Caveats remain, serious ones, which I’ll get to in a bit; but the truth is, your lawn, my lawn, that of the business down the street or the corporate campus in a nearby suburb, serves as a carbon sink of modestly robust proportions.
Mann’s story-telling skills shine when he’s narrating the life and times of Borlaug, Vogt and the colourful characters they worked with. When The Wizard and the Prophet embarks on a 200-page tour of today’s many global ecology challenges, Mann’s discursions are fascinating but the quality is uneven.
