Vicki Robin

Is God a 4-Lettered Word?

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What animates you? What is the spiritual or religious impulse underneath the work you do to save those parts of our world that you want to protect and nurture? Is there a spiritual or religious teacher or movement that inspires you to do the uncomfortable work of politics or social change? What role, if any, does faith play in whatever you do that brings you out of your private life and into the public square? How do you “keep the faith” as commentator Tavis Smiley often says in signing off?

Review: Fragment by Craig Russell

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Craig Russell’s Fragment succeeds on multiple fronts. On one level, it’s a fascinating work of idea-fiction that tells a tale of first contact between humans and whales. It also spins an absorbing thriller yarn in which a motley group of humans and a lone, heroic whale join forces to face an unprecedented threat. On a third level, the book offers important insights into the gravest ecological reality of our time, climate change, without ever coming across as didactic or preachy.

How Innovative Funding Models Could Usher in a New Era of Worker-Owned Platform Cooperatives

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To counter poor labor practices, gig workers and entrepreneurs are now taking matters into their own hands by launching their own digital platforms for various services. Called “platform cooperatives,” these businesses bring the structure of traditional cooperatives, including worker ownership and governance, to the digital world.

“There’s No App for That” Interview — Richard Heinberg

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Join James Howard Kunstler as he interviews Post Carbon Institute Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg for the Kunstlercast. Richard talks both about his book Our Renewable Future, coauthored with PCI Fellow David Fridley, and his latest essay There’s No App for That: Technology and Morality in the Age of Climate Change, Overpopulation, and Biodiversity Loss.

The Return of the Peasant: Or the History of the World in 10½ Blog Posts. 1. Origins

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In the beginning, there was a Miocene ape – the common ancestor of our genus Homo and our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas. It bequeathed to us its descendants, so the primatologists suggest, a tendency towards (particularly male, but also female) status ranking. Do we need to go that far back into our evolutionary past in order to understand the nature of status competition in contemporary societies? Perhaps it’s a sociological heresy to say so, but I think the answer is quite possibly yes.

Climate Change’s Twin Towers: Eiffel and Babel

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Climate change is not the biggest problem facing the nation; talking about it is. Until we learn to do the one, the other may never be sufficiently solved to stave off the worst of its potential impact. The greatest of these may be a functioning federal government. Actually, talking about anything in today’s partisan charged atmosphere appears to be the problem of paramount prominence. I will focus here only on climate change.

Walking on Lava

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What can writing do about this? What problems can art solve? In one sense, the answers are: nothing, and none. But in another sense, these are the wrong questions. ‘All civilisations’, we wrote in the manifesto, ‘are built on stories.’ When the stories fail, we need to know how to tell different ones. We need to have the perspective to understand the failure, and the imagination to offer up new ways of seeing.

Hellfire or High Water: This is our World at 1°C warming, August 2017. (Part 1 of 3)

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While U.S. centrism is a sad, frustrating reality of the world we live in, and something this very bulletin aims to counteract, we must also guard against false dichotomies and be wary of crocodile tears from people who would rather we remain isolated in our suffering than express true solidarity with each other as victims of a system hell bent on exploiting us and the nature around us. It is precisely at times like this that we must fall back on simple but profound notions like compassion, like camaraderie and solidarity, for we are all connected.

How Community-Led Rights of Nature Initiatives Are Protecting Ecosystems

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Mari Margil says there are many communities across the U.S. that are pressing the issue of rights of nature through law making, community mobilization, and within the court system. The communities are building a movement and advancing a new paradigm for protecting the environment. “It’s a movement that in the past 10 years has accelerated rapidly,” she said.