Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
McKenna Hayes Hillery founded Harlem Grown to address the health and academic challenges facing public elementary school students in Harlem. In 2011, he began volunteering at a local elementary school and witnessed first-hand the lack of resources allocated to the schools and the poor nutrition of students. He transformed an abandoned garden, essentially a junkyard, into a thriving community garden.
ExxonMobil’s deliberate attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change and their donations to front groups to disseminate false information about climate change have been public knowledge for a long time. Reports in 2015 revealed that Exxon had its own scientists doing its own climate modeling as far back as the 1970s: science and modeling that was not only accurate, but that was being used to plan for the company’s future.
A professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former political adviser, Nichols argues that the country has shifted from a healthy skepticism of accepted knowledge to a proud, self-satisfied ignorance and active hostility to the very idea of expertise. Across American society, intellectual authority is resented, resisted and disregarded, with every opinion ostensibly holding equal weight.
A comic novel about climate change? Anymore, it’s either laughter or tears. The comedy here works as a sweetener to help the reader swallow a harsher message. That climate change threatens not only our external Mother Earth, but also our internal planets. Thus, the main character, Gil Moss, a psychologist, proposes a new category of DSM diagnoses: Eco-Mood Disorders. One symptom being the loss of any ability to feel ‘at home’.
So sometimes you meet people who say, “Oh, I’m involved in a local cooperative and we’re developing open source software,” or “we’re setting up a complementary currency in our neighbor.” It can all sound a bit small and marginal and kind of niche activity. I often think it gets dismissed as that, hooky stuff around the edges of the economy. What I wanted to do with that quote is say, actually, this is the creation space of a new future.
Weather and climate don’t cause disasters—vulnerability does. Perhaps counter-intuitively, this means that the widespread discussion as to whether the Hurricane Harvey disaster was caused by climate change becomes a dangerous distraction.
The evidence is mounting that we have entered a new regime of prolonged record-smashing extreme weather events thanks to our as-yet unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas. But, as Francis, told ThinkProgress, that doesn’t mean we can attribute the stalling of Harvey to climate change and “near-record-low ice conditions in the Arctic’s Pacific sector” with certainty.
Of course, effective climate mitigation is not assured even if the use of solar and wind power rise. In the absence of solid measures to remove coal, gas and oil from the energy system, fossil fuels could co-exist in an infelicitous equilibrium with renewable energies for decades to come. Pricing out polluting coal through carbon taxation would complement policy designed to boost solar’s share of the global electricity mix.
What took place here is an example of what I call “Fig Nation,” an informal farm economy and community based on producing, sharing, and enjoying. The concept of Fig Nation is simple: A few weeks back, my nephew and I harvested five pounds of elderberries. We cleaned, bagged, and tossed them in the freezer. Yesterday I pulled them out and combined them with water and honey to make an elderberry mead. Come winter, I’ll enjoy the mead with guests. Welcome to Fig Nation, where sharing brings pleasure and automatic membership.
We are living in a world where holistic, systemic crises threaten the future of humanity. And yet, there has been an historic pattern of fragmentation in the physical and social sciences needed to tackle them. I have taken on the life mission to guide the evolution of cultural sciences so that they become fully integrated with the dynamics 0f our changing Earth.
The magazine “Piseagrama” injects criticism and creativity into the debate about public space in Brazilian cities, resulting in concrete action by citizens and exchange with initiatives from other places. One could say that the last few years, in Brazil, have been marked by the emergence of movements that seek, besides understanding the city as a web of flows and functions, also to rethink the role of architecture nowadays.
Earlier this month, I gathered at the village of Cloughjordan, County Tipperary to learn how to do just that. There the organisation Cultivate held an intensive course in permaculture, drawing more than two dozen people from eight countries. Permaculture, strictly speaking, is a system of designing gardens, buildings and landscapes to re-use as much energy as possible and waste as little as possible.
