What We Should Really Do for the Climate

By Samuel Miller McDonald, The Trouble

The fact is, there is no “best thing” and there are no easy little tweaks that will amount to mitigating climate change. We each have to do a lot.

Climate Change Ain’t the First Existential Threat

By Mary Annaïse Heglar, System Change not Climate Change

I’m with you when you say that climate change is the most important issue facing humankind. I’ll even go so far as to say it’s the most important one ever. But, when I hear folks say—and I have heard it—that the environmental movement is the first in history to stare down an existential threat, I have to get off the train.

Finance, Fossil Fuels, and Climate Change

By Mark Hudson, Katelyn Friesen, Transnational Institute

In order to understand power, we have to look not just to the fields of extraction and their ruined landscapes, nor only at the immediate effects on water, air, wildlife, and the nearby communities that rely on all three. We also have to look up and down the commodity chain. Attention is currently fixed downstream, at the politics and power manifesting in decisions about who and what is expendable in order to get the bitumen to market.

You Say You Love your Children Above All Else

By Gunnar Rundgren, Garden Earth

Sometimes, one event or action can trigger a cascade of events which will bring down even the mightiest empire. The school strike of 15-year old Greta Thunberg can be such an event, even if we will not know until later.

Why We Won’t Quit the Climate Fight

By Kathleen Dean Moore, Earth Island Journal

We are old climate veterans who have tried to do our part, in every way we know how, to keep our fossil-fuel addicted civilization from driving off a cliff. Are we tired? Sure. Discouraged? Absolutely. Pissed off? Yep. Sad? Call it broken-hearted. Quitting? Nah.

The Flight from Nature

By John Michael Greer, Ecosophia

Thus one of the things that I want to explore in posts to come is how we got into ways of thought that treat modern industrial lifestyles as normal and desirable—how people in the industrial world, that is, got caught up in a self-defeating attempt to escape from nature, when human beings are at once inescapably dependent on nature and inescapably part of nature—and how that frankly bizarre habit might be swapped out for something saner.

A Pyrrhic Climate

By Samuel Miller McDonald, Activist Lab

A recent debate in twitter’s climate community illuminated a schism between those arguing that mitigating climate change is impossible and those exhorting others to continue to “fight” climate change.

Rage Gap

By Samuel Miller McDonald, Resilience.org

The fact is, Millennials do not have the capital or political power sufficient to undertake the massive infrastructural transition necessary for mitigating climate change in the narrow window of time we have—that is, between zero and a few years.

Unprecedented Crime: Review

By Howard Breen, Resilience.org

Seldom are missed books truly missed opportunities -- but nothing could possibly be worse than missing an opportunity that could have saved your life, and those of your family and friends.

Time Is Running Out for the Planet

By Bill Moyers, Bill McKibben, Common Dreams

I’ve spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They’re quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It’s important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That’s rooted in the town meeting.