Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Andrea F. Schuman Surely emphasis on increasing well-being should prevail over creation of investment opportunities that bring negative externalities and few benefits to the municipality. Other worlds are possible, and responsive policy making would be a chance to shape those possibilities.
It has been almost a month since Maria devastated Puerto Rico. Since then, most of the island’s 3.4 million residents have been without electricity or running water. The power grid was effectively destroyed, with only 7 percent back online to date. This means that the entire system, from generation to distribution, will need to be rebuilt. The question now is: how?
As much as I see imagination coming through in the beers that people are making, I see it coming through in the business models and the experiences that they’re offering. To me this is still somewhat of a golden age in what’s possible from an imaginative standpoint in craft beer.
The basic point is that despite our contemporary post-socialist tendency to counterpose ‘the market’ of the capitalist economy with ‘the state’, capitalist development has always been a state project, albeit in partnership with private actors. Without the state, there’d certainly be no capitalism, and probably not even all that much of a ‘market’ in the sense of places where people come together to buy and sell goods.
Two days ago, on October 27th, Lancaster Against Pipelines in central Pa. organized their third action in the last two weeks at the site where the Williams Partners company is laying pipe for the Atlantic Sunrise pipeline. At the previous two actions a total of 29 people were arrested in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience.
Perhaps the saddest accolade of our modern faith is this: “Our world is more interconnected than ever before.” It’s a statement as bold on the first read as it is meaningless on the second, and one that is not only sad but also somewhat horrifying upon further examination. So, exactly what is “more” interconnected, and why are we celebrating?
By many accounts, Vermont has developed the most comprehensive food system plan in the United States. How did Vermonters do it? We harnessed the power of networks to build trust, pursue new opportunities, and tackle long-standing problems across the state and have developed a comprehensive data collection, analysis, and visualization system for tracking progress and telling stories.
London futures closed above $60 a barrel last week for the first time since 2015. New York futures are now about $6 a barrel lower than London, increasing the incentive for foreign refiners to buy and export more US oil.
My point in writing this article wasn’t that I don’t use appliances or am against technology, but rather, that we need to use our hands more. Or as another person wrote “Many of us have one foot in the modern world and another in the world we think is likely to come”. Exactly!
How do you envision yourself at age eighty? Do you want to be active, mobile, and of sound mind and body? Or do you think you’ll be lucky just to be alive? Good health is not luck.
If such an effort is truly needed, why hasn’t it taken form yet? Why hasn’t the field of culture design already been born? The answers are many and I will only focus on a few of them here to give a feel for what the process may look like as intentional efforts bring it into being (or not) in the next decade.
Jerry Brown, California’s governor, signed into law the Buy Clean California Act. The act requires that the state set a maximum “acceptable lifecycle global warming potential” for different building materials, specifying that only materials with embodied emissions below that level can be purchased by the state.
