Finding Courage in Anxious Times
Courageous cultures are created by centering ourselves on our strengths, our achievements and encouraging members to take chances with the support of the group.
George Lakey
The World at 1℃— April ‘17
For many of us, the facts and figures of climate change mean very little by way of tangible threat. Yet, as this bulletin attests to, the changes to the earth’s climate are resulting in unimaginable loss and trauma for real human beings — people like you — around the world, today.
Breaking New Ground in Economic Theory
Professor Steve Keen may be the first mainstream economist to address a fatal flaw in economic theory: omitting or minimizing the role of energy. Keen has developed a production formula incorporating energy, not as one factor of production along with capital and labor, but as the indispensable flow activating both.
The Problem of Mexico’s Oil and Trump’s Wall
What do you do if you are running out of oil, and your neighbour’s President, who has plenty of oil, seems to hate you? The answer is that you develop a renewable-powered economy as fast as you can.
Parts of a Whole: Mapping a Global Agriculture
Simply put, agroecology is a whole-system approach to agricultural production that melds the gravity of cultural and social impacts within a productive model of environmental sustainability.
The Paris Climate Agreement: Should We Stay or Should We Go? Update
Predictably there’s been a lot written over the last few weeks about the Paris Climate Agreement and whether the Trump administration will continue to sit with other nations. Driving the coverage is the on-again off-again meeting between Trump and a pack of senior advisors. The ultimate decision will remain for The Donald to make–purportedly after the G-7 summit at the end of May.
3 Things We Learned About the Sustainability Movement at Future Earth
Future Earth is an open, international network of academic research projects focused on transition to a sustainable world. It’s an umbrella organization formed in 2015 to support these projects, foster collaboration between them, and serve as a bridge between the research community and the outside world for 10 years.
Brexit and Complexity
The historian and archeologist Joseph Tainter made a name for himself with his book The Collapse of Complex Societies. At a certain point civilisations collapse because they become more and more complex
Rooting the Fashion Revolution in the Soil
This year’s Fashion Revolution Week just wrapped up but the movement for transparency, accountability, and shifting the norms of a harmful and wasteful industry is gaining more traction and momentum than ever.
Clothesline at the End of the World
Apocalyptic stories are sexy in their drama. The end of the world as we know it will be big and dramatic and everything will change, and we will be living in some mythical landscape where we’ll be freed from all the boring conventional aspects of our daily lives.
Martin Shaw on Imagination: “I would describe it as ‘ripe for invasion’”
When we look at some of the big political moves on either side of the Atlantic in the last few years, actually one of the things we’re seeing is a yearning for story. When we are really impoverished, we will take a big lie with a little bit of truth in it, rather than nothing at all.
Population and Development: More on Malthus
I agree that there are many ways of staving off the dark fairy tale of an impending Malthusian crisis, of which labour intensification is a key one usefully highlighted by Boserup. But that scarcely refutes the basic Malthusian problems I discussed in my last post of resource pressures creating generalised stress which may be ‘referred’ elsewhere – onto other people, or onto other organisms.
