From Local Roots to Global Vision: ARC2020 President Welcomes 2025
Having a dream helps against sleepwalking into a nightmare. Taking action makes the dream, however big, a reality.
Hannes Lorenzen
Four touchstones for dealing with a world careening into chaos
I can’t say I find these days easy to take. Some days I wake with a sense of dread, not sure what the day will bring. These four touchstones help me navigate, and find shards of sunlight in the dark skies. I hope they help you, my readers, as we ready ourselves for the days ahead.
Decolonizing California’s Wildfire Zone
Verbena Fields in Northern California is an emerging model of what decolonizing land via Traditional Ecological Knowledge can look like, supported by partnerships between Native and non-Native communities.
Equality as a Process: Reimagining Power, Justice, and Social Structure
If we place equality only as an aim for the distant future, then we have already lost the fight. Instead, let it be the foundational basis on which we begin building, from today, a more just and democratic society.
View from Washington (5)
The 119th Congress has opened for business. Once President-elect Trump is sworn into office on January 20th, the Republicans will control both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. Whether they have control over themselves is another matter.
Review: In the Drift by Michael Swanwick
Michael Swanwick’s 1985 novel In the Drift takes place in an alternate reality in which the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident—rather than remaining a partial meltdown with minimal environmental impact, as in reality—escalated into a full-scale disaster that rendered much of the United States uninhabitable.
The Arts Organization Helping Transform Appalachia’s Craft Economy
Creative entrepreneurs are getting needed support to grow and sustain their businesses after Hurricane Helene.
The urgent necessity of asset stranding
As Malm and Carton explain, if firm policies were put in place to “leave fossil fuels in the ground”, stranding the assets of fossil fuel companies, there would be “layer upon layer” of value destruction.
Rebuilding Food Security After a Wildfire
It’s an ironic twist that the climate crisis is fueled in part by the food system in the U.S.—namely the land use and emissions from concentrated livestock operations—and so many of the climate effects are felt first and worst by farmworkers and their communities.
How the Syrian Revolution Started Over 14 Years Ago – and Why It Isn’t Really Over Yet
Many argue that we are experiencing a global polycrisis right now, which not only makes revolutions more likely to arise as these stresses grow, but also more likely to spread to other regions when they do occur.
The ‘weather whiplash’ fueling the Los Angeles fires is becoming more common
The kind of weather whiplash that fueled the fires is only becoming more common, and not just in the United States. A new analysis in the peer-reviewed academic journal Nature Reviews Earth & Environment has found that rapid shifts between heavy rain and drought (and vice versa) are becoming more intense — and the trend is unfolding faster than climate models have projected.
University of Toronto students score a win for the climate — and campus protests more broadly
When the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment announced in October that it will no longer accept donations from the fossil fuel industry, the news sent waves through the growing movement to get coal, oil and gas companies off campuses. Among other things, that means banning fossil fuel corporations from financing academic research.
