Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Tom Whipple Oil prices continued to slide last week with Brent falling below $45 on Thursday and WTI falling below $43. Prices have now dropped by more than 20 percent since the start of the year, and Brent crude will likely post its worst first half since 1997.
Once we experience ourselves as inseparable part of the web of life we realize that true well-being for us can only happen in harmony with the whole and all of its parts. When other humans or living beings suffer, we cannot stay untouched. This is what Arne Naess meant when calling for an “ecological self”.
The first responsibility of a government is to safeguard the people and their future wellbeing. The ability to do so is increasingly threatened by human-induced climate change, the accelerating impacts of which are driving political instability and conflict globally. Climate change poses an existential risk to humanity which, unless addressed as an emergency, will have catastrophic consequences.
When we temporarily quiet the cognitive activity of the mind to allow these imaginative functions to be activated, it’s easier to recognize the living connections that exist between ourselves and all other forms of life. I call this felt-sense of connection our ‘ecological imagination,’ because it has the capacity to liberate distorted beliefs about our control over nature and our separation from the natural world.
The commons is an emerging paradigm in Europe embracing co-creation, stewardship, and social and ecological sustainability. Commons perspectives could help to reinvigorate Europe with constructive and concrete policy implications on many terrains.
This summer, get outside, roll up your sleeves, and take a stand for public lands. Here are 5 ways to do this. Use them or lose them!
Sustainable agriculture needs to be integrated throughout the entire learning system if all our future farmers are to embrace the sustainability agenda. Young people are a sponge for information and what they are told now will impact on how they farm in the future.
A new world based on community and collaboration is closer than you think. We can steward resources together, in fact, millions of people are doing just that. And not just in the history books. This week, from Kingston, NY, author and activist David Bollier, Co Founder of the Commons Strategy Group, explains what it means to Think Like A Commoner.
We now have to take into account that depletion means that, at well heads around the world, the energy to produce energy is increasing. It takes energy to prospect for oil and gas and if the wells are smaller and more difficult to tap because, for example, they are out at sea under a huge amount of rock. Then it will take more energy to get the oil out in the first place.
Our core assumptions about what it means to be human, how we relate to the universe and how it relates to us, are well past their pull date; they no longer yield useful insights into the problems that beset us today. It’s because of that failure that the paradigm itself is becoming visible to us at last. We could talk about that paradigm in a great many ways, but I’m going to suggest a deliberately edgy label for it: anthropolatry, the worship of humanity as a god.
Craftivism was coined in 2003 by Betsy Greer. I always say Craftivism is like punk music. Under that punk umbrella label you’ve got the Talking Heads, the Ramones, the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and they all sound completely different but they’re all under that banner. So you could say Craftivism is anything that links craft with activism.
In a sharing vision of a local renewable energy system, many households will generate their own renewable energy (as in solar photovoltaic or solar thermal systems on their rooftops), but many more, for whom this is not an option, will share in the ownership and operation of off-site renewable energy generation infrastructure such as wind turbines.
