Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re taught that without rigid legal systems society would collapse into chaos. But for most of human history, people relied on communal norms, not codified law, while the rise of written rules, hierarchy, and possessions cleared the way for today’s sixth mass extinction.
As Japan coins a new term for “cruelly hot days,” its linguistic and institutional adaptation to extreme heat starkly contrasts with growing climate denial among U.S. political elites, revealing an emerging global split between fossil-fuel holdouts and nations pushing for a rapid energy transition.
Expanding reliance on fossil fuels contains the signature of a system that prioritises profits for the perpetrators of planetary distress, over ensuring our collective well-being.
Investigative journalist and podcaster Amy Westervelt talks with Asher about the cultural roots of the climate crisis.
If human ingenuity were a story, one of its main motifs would be transportation. Creatures of land by birth, we have transcended our limitations, reaching across air and water, beyond our own biosphere.
We can’t know for sure, of course, whether the climate cataclysm will destroy scientific knowledge. But what we can see is that we are on a so-far unwavering path to climate catastrophe…
The popular discourse around the climate emergency all too often highlights fringe voices that predict the end of the world or suggest that there is little to worry about. But as the climatologist Steven Schneider presciently remarked a decade ago, when it comes to the climate “the end of the world” and “good for us” are probably the two least likely outcomes.
You may have read that there are just eight, or 10, or 12 years to save the world from the climate crisis. There are not. It is already here, gaining strength every day as carbon emissions pour into the atmosphere. It is a slow-motion disaster. Action to avert the worst should have started last week, last year, last decade.
A future climate disaster, or “green swan” event, could bring down the global financial system, according to a new report from the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an international financial organization that serves as a bank for central banks around the world.
It’s not the melting of the ice-caps or the burning of the forests that seem to me to be the real apocalyptic scenario, but rather the slow atrophying of our moral imaginations; not the inferno itself, but the indifference of those of us who are not yet on fire. In this sense above all we are in danger, and we need to act immediately to survive.
It is in the other English tradition – a tradition starting with the Charter of the Forest, later championed by the Levellers, later by the Chartists and the Co-operatives, the trade unions and the original Labour Movement that brought us the Welfare State – a tradition of resistance to autocracy and privilege – and a tradition that one that can be championed without being compromised by imperialism and militarism. Secondly his new Charter would be a set of principles which, if implemented, would block the politics of Singapore on Thames
