Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
So what do you think? Do you think left and right, in some or all variations can work together? To what extent are political ends enough, and to what extent are the means and underlying enlightenment philosophies critical?
– Military thinkers: for a bright American future, look to sustainability and liberalism
– Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study
– Taboo Economics
– ‘The Ecological Rift’: a radical response to capitalism’s war on the planet (book review)
– Poet Wendell Berry on Mankind’s Ecological Imprint
A new youth climate movement lead by Alec Loorz, who is suing the US government on behalf of his generation over lack of action on climate, seeks to raise awareness and move the climate conversation to an actionable tipping point. While his iMatter movement inspires, and shows the best in youth, iMatter hasn’t included climate’s twin issue —peak oil— and it faults their parents and grandparents for causing the problem, rather than recognizing that youth today are the inheritors of the work of energy and environmental giants that came before them.
With the environmental crisis, we’re now in a situation where we can decide whether biologist Ernst Mayr was right or not. If nothing significant is done about it, and pretty quickly, then he will have been correct: human intelligence is indeed a lethal mutation. Maybe some humans will survive, but it will be scattered and nothing like a decent existence, and we’ll take a lot of the rest of the living world along with us.
– Wendell Berry, Tim DeChristopher, and Teri Blanton discuss principled activism
– Bristol burns once more in protests against new Tesco supermarket
– Watch out! You’re leading a movement!
What confidence should we now have in projections about China that assume more of the same? The ruling Communist Party threw the dice definitively for state capitalism and untrammeled growth decades ago and now sits atop a potential volcano. Only one thing may keep the present system safely in place: ever more growth. The minute China’s economy falters, the minute some bubble bursts, whether through an overheating economy or for other reasons, the country’s rulers have a problem on their hands that could potentially make the Arab Spring look mild by comparison.
– Eric Schlosser: Why Being a Foodie Isn’t ‘Elitist’
– Fava beans: Roasting pods simplifies preparation
– Are mushrooms the new plastic (video)
– Eliot Coleman: Organic agriculture: deeply rooted in science and ecology
– Radical plots: The politics of gardening
– Will China’s peak herald the “peak human”?
– Live long. Stay healthy. Join the immortals
– Immanuel Wallerstein: The world system after 1945
Since the crisis of industrial society is being driven by social and economic habits that foster the extravagant use of energy and other resources, it would seem to be obvious that using much less of these things ought to be the foundation of any reasonable response. The fact that so many proposed responses advocate doing almost anything imaginable but using less energy and other resources points straight toward the tangled heart of contemporary nihilism, and suggests a way out.
Local initiatives like the Oakland Energy and Climate Action Plan aren’t enough to tackle the climate crisis. We need national and international regulations requiring deep, scientifically grounded emission reductions, and we need strict systems of enforcement. But before that can happen, people need to see that getting off fossil fuels isn’t a dour punishment. Done right, it can be a kind of gift. Oakland, once again, is leading the way.
A new law expected to pass in Bolivia mandates a fundamental ecological reorientation of the nation’s economy and society.
“Very, very few people can ever say that they are in the single most important place they could possibly be, doing the single most important thing they could possibly be doing — that’s you, here, now. You are the movement that we need if we are going to win in the few years that we have.”
