Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Katarzyna Gajewska In the current employment system, work organizations are rarely adjusted to human needs, such as self-fulfillment and meaning. In the article on Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber (2013) observes that the more a job is useful for society and able to provide a sense of meaning, the less it is rewarded in monetary terms.
Here’s what the Trudeau government definitely knows about the science of methane. The gas accounts for more than one-quarter of all global warming, and reliable data from satellite and airplane surveys show that emissions are increasing, largely from the oil and gas industry.
Today people are constantly bombarded by new diet trends and information on what is healthy and what is not, much of it contradictory. Within this debate, meat consumption is one of the current topics under scrutiny, with increasing calls for people to eat less.
Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement on climate change has sparked a global uproar. Yet America’s reluctance to reduce its use of fossil fuels is, in fact, logical. Not only because of the U.S. president’s overt denial of man-made climate change, but also and more fundamentally because it reflects America’s historical essence and trajectory.
I included neighbor-cultivating in the inaugural Ask Umbra civic action guide for a very simple reason: Experts told me that it’s impossible to improve your community without being a part of it. But reader disdain for the idea resurrected a haunting suspicion I first felt when reporting on the tiny, off-the-grid house obsession a few years ago: that the pursuit of a sustainable life has become an exercise in looking inward.
The new Sojourner Truth School for Social Change Leadership provides in-person training opportunities in activism.
Though the community currency failed to materialize in Barcelona, the city immediately to its northeast, Santa Coloma de Gramanet, created a local currency this year. This currency — the grama — was designed to be an innovative way of enabling the city’s residents to protect their livelihoods from external economic threats
The word that was in my mind the most as I walked Venice’s narrow streets was ‘curiosity’. No conversation about imagination can happen without an exploration of curiosity, as it is the precursor to imagination. I had travelled to Venice reading Ian Leslie’s book ‘Curiosity: the desire to know and why your future depends on it’, and it turned out to be the perfect reading material, better than any Venice guidebook.
Persistent inequalities and decades of discrimination mean a code of ethics isn’t going to cut it. We need an actual politics of placemaking. Our naiveté borders on negligence if we don’t explicitly address how the very presence of certain bodies in public has been criminalized and the color of your skin can render you automatically “out of place.”
Carbon Brief takes an in-depth look at the ways fossil fuel subsidies are measured – and why semantic arguments over definitions may be missing the point.
A bioregion, in this sense, is literally and etymologically a ‘life-place’, in Robert Thayer’s words, that is definable by natural rather than political or economic boundaries. Its geographic, climatic, hydrological, and ecological qualities – its metabolism – can be the basis for meaning and identity because they are unique.
Standing in the shade of some blossom filled apple trees, conversation turns to the wonders of fungi. “I got really intrigued by them, and the more I’ve read and learnt, the more I realise how critically important they are to the entire ecosystem,” Patrick muses. “They’re the ones doing all the recycling, they create soil, they live inside plants…. They’re very very weird and slightly magical things!” he points out with a grin.
