Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
John Michael Greer The philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, which we’ve been discussing for the last two weeks, has a feature that reliably irritates most people when they encounter it for the first time: it doesn’t divide up the world the way people in modern western societies habitually do.
This is a three-part series based on an idea I recently had around the subjects of farming, black swans, and creating a product that can help insure against risk.
With Donald Trump’s election and the rising perils of war, climate upheaval, accelerating inequality, and civil unrest, some of the richest people in the United States are making escape plans.
Scott Pruitt has now been sworn in as the new Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Agency. It is likely the dismantling of the Clean Power Plan (CPP), and ultimately much of the Agency itself, will begin in short order.
Although food spoils much faster in a tropical climate, the Vietnamese will often store it without refrigeration, and instead take advantage of controlled decay. Vietnam’s decentralised food system has low energy inputs and reduced food waste, giving us a glimpse of what an alternative food system might look like.
According to the Repair Café Foundation, there are now more than 950 repair cafés worldwide with 18 in the UK. Repair cafés offer individuals with ‘fixing’ expertise to come together to perform a useful service for their community, while enjoying the camaraderie of friends and neighbors.
As the Trump administration and Republicans in power in Congress set to work destroying environmental regulations, scientists have added urgency to the resistance with a simple new equation that shows the staggering effect human activity has had on the climate. Their findings? Humans have altered the climate 170 times faster than natural forces.
Public, media and corporate awareness of the need to tackle food waste appears to be higher than ever, but evidence suggests that despite this growing awareness, efforts to cut household food waste in the UK seem to have stalled.
Debates about the so-called rebound effect go back to William Stanley Jevons’ work in the 19th century, although they had been forgotten for too long. Rebound effects occur if a reduction of inputs per unit of output (efficiency) generates an absolute increase in output (growth).
Dramatic cost reductions mean wind and solar can now compete on price with conventional sources of energy in many parts of the world, including the UK. This turns the spotlight onto the so-called “whole system costs” of integrating renewables into the electricity system, which include backing up intermittent generation and strengthening grids.
Co-operatives have been described as freshwater fish in a saltwater environment. In the 1930s, the co-operative sector in many countries was very powerful but it was destroyed by fascist and communist regimes. What was it that the authoritarians found so threatening in co-operation?
True, economic growth does provide some short-term benefits and gains, and recessions are legitimately painful and destructive. But economic growth is nevertheless the greatest threat to humanity today, and those most devoted to economic growth will, as its consistent performance begins to wane in the future, perhaps be the greatest political threat to ordinary people of the world.
