Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Johnny Sanphillipo Instead, we’re going to continue to do more of what we’ve been doing. And it’s going to fail. Not tomorrow. Not next year. But eventually the whole big pile of overly leveraged 12,000 mile supply chain debt-soaked tech extravaganza is going to break down and crash of its own dead weight. When we finally get back up and dust ourselves off, we’ll have no choice but to reinvent things.
We sometimes refer to the emissions while a building is functioning as the operational carbon, and all the other emissions across its life cycle as the embodied carbon. Focusing on one and not the other is puzzling to say the least – we’re effectively trying to take the carbon out of our energy bills while paying no attention to the carbon in the buildings themselves.
To escape this “capitalocentrism,” we need to broaden the definition of economy beyond capitalism. What if, instead, economy is all the ways that we meet our material needs and care for each other? And what if it’s not a singular thing? Then we would see that beneath the official capitalist economy are all sorts of thriving non-capitalist economies, where there may not be a profit motive or market exchange.
I think the only way to be optimistic is to believe that people can take things into their own hands and transform their lives. It is happening, but it is not happening enough. Setting these targets and figuring out how to accomplish them without working together with citizen initiatives, they will never succeed. I am here to promote repopulation of Europe’s rural areas with ecovillages.
Based on the concept “From Plate to Plate,” the Guandu Institute offers environmental solutions for large restaurants and seeks to inspire restoring the planet’s health. How? By composting organic trash, food preparation excess and leftovers, which go to landfills. Composting doesn’t only help to diminish the volume in landfills but it also produces fertilizer, such a fundamental resource for food production.
As global temperatures climb higher, Earth is approaching tipping points that threaten human security, warn scientists in a new statement to national representatives meeting in Bonn for the annual climate talks. Their warning comes as global emissions are projected to rise after three stable years.
Within recent weeks several reports have been released each painting a picture of a time not too distant when the worst becomes commonplace. The good news is these are warnings not predictions of inevitability.
In this episode Dan Palmer from Making Permaculture Stronger enjoys a wide-ranging conversation with Darren J. Doherty from Regrarians.org.
Britain’s housing crisis is complicated mess. Fixing it requires a long-term plan and a bold new approach to policy. But in the meantime let’s start calling it what it really is: the largest transfer of wealth in living memory.
The evidence is overwhelming that natural gas has no net climate benefit in any timescale that matters to humanity. In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.
Safely tucked into the San Miguel mountains northeast of San Luis Obispo, down a long ambling road that leads far away from cities, highways and all of civilization, warm late afternoon light falls and fills the golden hills surrounding Blue Oak Canyon Ranch. The two humble stewards of Blue Oak are Lynn and Jim Moody, who tell me that just a week prior, the grass was still green.
The difficulty, I think, is that the conditions in which it’s feasible to build plausible ‘bottom-up’ anarchist-communist societies are unusual, and their chances of longevity are slight – either because they’re annihilated by the stronger forces of the centralised state (as happened with the Paris Commune), or because they succumb to the internal contradictions of their own somewhat hidden power dynamics. Still, Ross’s analysis raises a lot of interesting questions concerning the course that a free, egalitarian peasant society of the future might take.
